Rebound

Rebound

I want to tell you I was an emancipated minor, but that’s not true. I’d like to describe how I went to court at age 12, my blond hair held high in a walking-horse ponytail by a

newspaper rubber band, and declared myself free and clear of the couple who called themselves my parents. I want to say I never saw those people again, but that would be a lie, too.

The truth of the matter is, my parents became emancipated majors, freeing themselves of me by severing that familial bond with their marital strife, simmering bad tempers, and daily arguments.

Dinner, for example, was to be served at the NATO-negotiated hour of 6:30 p.m. At exactly 6:31, Dad would walk his wingtips into the kitchen and shout. “I’m hungry! Where’s dinner?”

Mom would blow a long stream of cigarette smoke at the kitchen ceiling, then carefully lay her smoldering Kool Menthol in the glass ashtray by the stove. Only then would she turn toward Dad and yell. “It’s not ready yet!”

“This is all you’ve had to do all day . . .” Dad would start, and the argument would go on from there, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes culminating with Mom beating the kitchen cabinets with her wooden stirring spoon like Buddy Rich, and Dad grabbing his car keys and roaring down the driveway, not to be seen until the next dinner.

My parents’ chronic dissension emotionally dissected our family—her from him, him from her, and me from them. After all this time, I’m not even sure why it happened. Not the emancipation, of course. I’m totally aware of how that occurred, how many years it took, and why I was finally flung out the speeding family car like a dirty diaper. What I am uncertain of is why I was the offspring of those two odd people and what I was to them. I want to tell you, 40 years later, I understand, but I’m afraid that might also be a lie.

In between then and now, I moved thousands of miles across the country to get away from my parents. I pretended they didn’t exist. I pretended they weren’t fighting about who would change the empty toilet paper roll. I did that for a long period of time until my so-called father tracked me down with news of his terminal illness, begging for help.

Here, I want to tell you that I ignored him. I want to tell you his wife, who used to be my mother, took care of him, but that didn’t happen either. My so-called mother divorced him. My so-called father refused treatment. Cancer ate through his back. I know, and how do I know? Because I was there. I moved back across the country to take care of that man because I suspected no one else would. And then, he died. I sat at his bedside while he gasped and choked. I would like to say I had an epiphany then about life, his life, my life, but I didn’t. I would like to tell you my so-called mother and I rediscovered each other, but that didn’t happen either. What did happen was I loaded my futon and my 12-inch black-and-white TV into a U-Haul and moved back across the country to a place I called home that neither of my so-called parents had ever seen.

And then, eight years after my so-called father died, my so-called mother dragged a 40-pound bag of fertilizer across her lawn mid-summer. She said it hurt her arm, and upset her stomach, and the next day she lay comatose in cardiac ICU with machines breathing for her and controlling her heartbeat. I took the red-eye into town, signed the papers to halt the machines. She shrugged her shoulders, and I watched as cold crept across her body. I buried her four days later.

“Get over it,” says my friend, Lorraine. “That’s how everyone was raised back then. Your parents were still your parents.” But I feel no loss, remorse, or regret. Instead, I feel like a serviceman, the angel of death, sent to a foreign land to dispatch those responsible for my existence. Was that why I was their offspring, hatched to dispatch? No, it’s nobler than that: I didn’t want them to die alone. But of all the people they would want to be with in their final moments on this earth, I was certainly in last place.

I dwell on the angst of my angst, year after year. The psychic, the chain-smoking one living in the countryside with the goats, tells me, “Your parents didn’t choose you. You chose them.” Her statements ring true to my ears in a painful, tuning fork sort of way. Somehow, somewhere, in another place where chocolate Jell-O pudding isn’t readily available in your grocer’s dairy case, and no one cares about the advantages of Pergo over linoleum, I picked my parents. They didn’t pick me.

My brain churns what the psychic has said, skimming the bad and propagating the good, like hot summer days on the farm with homemade ice cream, and warm brown chicken eggs. I worry about my picks, like an inveterate gambler, as if my parents were the favored Daily Double racehorses that should have paid but didn’t because one pulled up lame and the other fell at the gate.

And then years later, it starts. My parents materialize, walking through my dreams, real and tactile, her repairing a mockingbird’s wing and him watering an overgrown ginkgo planted in a wagon wheel. They are young, dressed in dungarees. They are happy, and happy to see me. And now, I want to tell you that’s not real either, but I think that might be a lie.

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Wichita Sims is the pseudonym of a writer living in Oakland with her husband and two ancient dogs. When she’s not writing or picking up litter, she spends her time searching for camo shorts, wondering if they will match her flip-flops, would the ensemble be age-appropriate, and does anyone care?

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