Building a Home with My Husband by Rachel Simon

lake—my mother’s insecurities and loneliness have led her through a succession of testy boyfriends, each more kid-allergic than the last. As she drifted more fully into their arms, we four kids spun our aches into sarcasm, our longings into contentiousness. My father moved back to Pennsylvania, where he’d begun living with Theresa, though the animosity between him and our mother became so severe that we saw him only every few months. Even today, as we are leaving her house, he will not step inside.
    Four weeks ago, my mother met an ex-con in a roadside bar. A drinker and smoker of Dionysian proportions, as flinty-eyed as Rasputin, he sweet-talked her into believing that he was a secret agent leading a life of excitement, and that, if she ditched her children, he’d give her the adventure of a lifetime. Astoundingly, my mother, a non-drinking, nonsmoking librarian, bought into this. Two weeks later, he moved into our house. Two weeks after that, on this very morning, Laura, Max, and I were told to leave. Beth can stay—my mother still feels affection for her. Laura quickly departed for a rented room, though she will soon resettle at our father’s, which is where Max is going tonight and where Ringo will end up, too. I’m being placed in a boarding school—right now. Yesterday, we were just an excessively messed-up family. Now, as Max and I get in the car and look through the cascading sleet to the front door and see Beth holding Ringo and waving good-bye, we are a family in ruins. Whatever family means.
    The next morning, I sit down in a phone booth at the boarding school and call my mother collect. I want to tell her I’m all right, but she refuses the charges. I go cold with disbelief, which only gets worse when, two weeks later, my mother marries the ex-con, takes Beth on her honeymoon, and disappears. Our grandmother sells the house, as well as whatever belongings hadn’t made it into my father’s car. My insides are a blizzard. For the first time I taste hatred.
    Even when Beth is returned to us four months later, my hatred remains. Because then we find out that my mother has been living a life on the run, and that her new husband, who’s violent, paranoid, and heedless of social conventions, had them living in hotels, riding buses across the Southwest, squandering my mother’s savings, running from skipped bills. The whole last night before my mother put Beth on a plane to my father, Rasputin held a gun on my sister.
    Drunk on my hatred, I tell friends that I don’t care about my mother, I don’t believe in maternal instinct, I loathe every schoolbook and TV show and charming suburb that perpetuates the propaganda we call family. What in the blazes is family? A bunch of fractured selves yoked together by blood. I’m not going to think about family again. Each person, sure, I’ll think about Laura and Beth and Max and my father and Theresa, but only one at a time, as I try my best to get along with each. But don’t you dare call them my family. In the deep freeze that has become my soul, family is the most piercing word there is.
     
    Could I have imagined myself now, thirty years later? Calmly driving through a city in Delaware on a moving day? Being so ordinary that I’m about to start a home renovation? Savoring marriage to a man who can easily say “I love you”—yet who understands why, even when I’m feeling a rush of romance so great it alchemizes distress into merriment, I cannot?
    This is what happened a few minutes ago, when Hal came upstairs and found me at the window, watching the movers. Seeing no value in my standing there, beset, as he knew, by memories, he suggested that I go on to the new house, have lunch, and wait for him and the movers to show up. Then, with the trucks blocking our street, and my never having mastered driving in reverse, he backed my car out to the adjacent block. “I love you,” he said, kissing me when he rose out of the driver’s seat, then ran back to