The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  Jeff shifted his weight, tracking the play.

  “Daddy!” Louder and more aggrieved.

  “If you don’t go in there, he’ll get himself out of bed.”

  Jeff reached for his drink, took a big smacking gulp of it, got out of the chair and headed off down the hallway. Anita could hear his hearty, retreating voice: “Hey sport, why aren’t you asleep?”

  She sat down in the La-Z-Boy. The leather was still warm from him, a sensation she wasn’t certain she liked. She wriggled her shoulder blades into the padded seat back, lifted first one, then the other leg onto the footrest.

  Her eyes were closed when Jeff came back. She heard his footsteps approach, then stop. “Hmm. Who’s been sitting in my chair?”

  She kept her eyes closed. “Is he asleep?”

  “Yeah.” He seemed to be waiting for her to get up. When she didn’t, he crossed behind her to pick up his drink. “What’s the score now?”

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t even know who was playing. It was just football, and it was always on.

  She must have slept. Matthew was calling her. She never dreamed anymore. Her dreams were Mommy Mommy Mommy. “What?” she said, buying time until she was really awake.

  He was saying something she couldn’t make out in his urgent peeping child’s voice. “All right, honey, just a minute.”

  “Your turn,” Jeff said. As if it wasn’t always her turn, as if there were a joke in there somewhere.

  Matthew had thrashed his way out of the blankets. His face was a furious pink and his hair looked like he’d used both hands to tie it in knots. Anita checked the nursery clock. She’d put him to bed fifteen minutes ago. “What’s the matter, baby?” she said in her heavily patient voice.

  “No sleepy.”

  “Sure you are. But you need to lie still and close your eyes and think about how tired you are.” With the back of her hand she checked his forehead. Warm but not feverish.

  “Go potty.”

  “All right, let’s go.” They were trying to make potty training as carefree and natural as possible, because otherwise you risked shaming and confusing your child. So people said. She couldn’t remember its being such a big deal herself.

  He wanted to be helped out of bed and then he wanted to be carried to the bathroom. He still wore a diaper at night and that had to be managed, but finally he was unwrapped and installed on the potty-chair.

  She waited while he explored the different sound effects available to anyone persistent and inquisitive enough to drag one hand, then the other, around the circumference of the plastic seat.

  After a time Anita said, “Did you go pee yet?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have to go poop?”

  He shook his head.

  “I thought you had to go potty.”

  Again he shook his head. He was a chubby boy with a head of fine, snarled white curls. Aside from the hair, she could see nothing of herself in him. He had Jeff’s square face and wide-set eyes. “Why don’t you pee, since you’re already here.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. A tiny spatter.

  “Good boy, I knew you could do it.”

  “Pee!”

  “That’s right. Matthew peed in the potty like a big boy.” You were supposed to praise them. He was pleased with himself now, one fond hand massaging the bud of his penis. Was she meant to encourage this as well?

  She dumped the potty, flushed, got him back into his diaper and pajamas, washed his hands, filled a paper cup for a drink of water. She carried him back to bed, the warm weight of him, putting her face against his neck because his smell was still a baby’s smell, not that of a boy already preparing for a lifetime of dick handling.

  She was a bad, foul, unnatural mother.

  There were further negotiations once he was back in bed, and a night-night story and a night-night song and a kiss on the tummy, and chin chucker chin chucker chin chin chin, and the bedroom door left open just so. She’d only gone a few steps when he called her back. “Mommy!”

  “Matthew, you have to go to sleep now.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “The dog?” He was pointing to the curtains, to one particular dog, a beagle type with a comical black eye patch, just discernible in the red-yellow glow. “He doesn’t have a name.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Close your eyes.”

  “What’s his name?” An Airedale who looked to be stomping on the brakes.

  They don’t have names, they are dogs driving cars on curtains. But you couldn’t say that because after all, Big Bird had a name, Kermit had a name, Mickey Mouse had a name, and so on.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, pointed to the Airedale. “His name is, ah, Arnold.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just his name. This one”—she indicated the beagle—“is Bobby. Bobby Beagle.”

  He was entranced. Calvin Collie. Wally Wienerdog. Charlie Chihuahua. The dogs were all boys, the boys were all happy, driving cars. Matthew giggled. Some of the breeds she had to guess or just give up. Pete the Puppy. Mike the Mutt. Matthew yawned. Larry Labrador. Sammy Shepherd.

  He was asleep. She smoothed his hair, felt the solid warmth rising from him. There were these moments. You came on them in the middle of something else, anger or fatigue or both.

  In the den, Jeff had reclaimed the La-Z-Boy. “He asleep?”

  “Yes. Turn that down some.”

  His hand hovered over the remote, the game distracting him.

  “Jeff.”

  “These guys suck.” He clicked the volume button and looked at her. “You shouldn’t let him drag this bedtime thing out so long.”

  “It takes him a while to wind down, you know that.”

  “Once he’s down he should stay down.”

  “Fine, you get up and change him when he’s wet.”

  “He can learn to hold it.” Jeff’s drink was gone. He raised the glass, jiggled the remaining ice cubes and tried to get the last taste of it. “Treat him like a baby and he’ll act like one.”

  “You’re so full of it,” she said, but his attention had turned back to the television.

  She went into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. Everywhere she put her hands, she felt something sticky. A yellow triangle of breakfast egg she’d missed before. The residues of milk, juice, Cheerios, the chicken and rice and peas left over from Matthew’s largely unsuccessful dinner. Why did children need to be coaxed and threatened to eat, sleep, eliminate, anything that was supposed to come naturally? How stupid were human beings anyway?

  It was a big, admirable kitchen, filled with all the things you were meant to admire. The appliances hummed and gleamed and clicked. The house was only three years old and they’d chosen the floor plan themselves, as well as all the fixtures and finishes. She’d liked it best before they’d moved in, when it had been bare and clean and empty. It felt as if they’d soiled it with their living, with their shedding skins and hair and carelessness and anger.

  When she was finished in the kitchen, she checked on Matthew, who was asleep on his back with both arms outflung, like a runner breaking the tape at the end of a race. On the curtains, the ecstatic dogs chased each other round and round.

  In the den she said, “You need to switch the car seat so I can take your car tomorrow.”

  “Hm?” He’d opened a bag of Cheetos and his fingers were stained with fake orange cheese.

  “You heard me.”

  “Yeah, but I forgot why you need my car.”

  “I’m taking my mom to see Aunt Martha and the station wagon makes her carsick.” She waited. “Why don’t you do it now?”

  “Minute.” He was eating the Cheetos in big handfuls, crunching them down to a deflated paste.

  “You’re getting fat.”

  He did look up then. “Hey,” he said, injured.

  Although she hadn’t meant to sit down, she lowered herself to the couch. A beer commercial
was playing, one of those with pals horsing around, pals throwing softballs, kidding each other, impressing cutie-pie girls. “That’s what you all want. Life as a beer commerical.”

  “What who wants?”

  “Matthew,” she said, “is going to be different.”

  “Different from what?”

  “From you.”

  “Nice attitude.” He shifted around in the La-Z-Boy to look at her. The leather made a fleshy, squealing noise. “You spoil him, you know.”

  “When you spend any time taking care of him, then you’ll be entitled to an opinion.”

  He gave her an unpleasant look, his nostrils seeming to enlarge. “You aren’t still having him sit down to pee, are you? Man, that is really going to screw him up. You don’t want him thinking he’s a girl, wanting to play with dolls, crap like that.”

  She reached down, grabbed the remote and shut the television off.

  “Hey!”

  Remote still in hand, she started up the stairs. She heard Jeff peel himself loose from the La-Z-Boy, curse, fumble around on the television console until he found the ON button. “Bring that back here,” he called. She knew he wouldn’t come up after her until the game was over.

  Now that she had the remote, there was the problem of what to do with it, what follow-up was possible. She would have liked to make a speech, something full of wit and scorn, but she was too tired to stay awake that long and keep the fight going. In the end she put the thing under her side of the bed, changed into her pajamas, and wrapped herself in sleep.

  Jeff was trying to wake her up without looking like he was trying. He turned on the light in the closet, sat heavily on the end of the bed, took off his shoes and threw them, clunk, into a corner. She said, “Whatsa?”

  “Nice stunt. That was really childish of you.”

  She couldn’t tell how long she’d been asleep. Her pillow was damp where her open mouth had been. “Huh,” she said. “Huh.”

  “You turning into one of those crazy women? Nothing makes you happy?”

  She didn’t answer. She heard him in the bathroom, then he got into bed next to her, tugging and rearranging the sheets. He turned off the lights and rolled from one side to the other. He spoke out of the darkness. “Just tell me what you did with the remote.”

  “Flushed it down the toilet.”

  “You did not.” He was exasperated. Some other tone in his voice also, as if he was afraid it was true, she might be capable of such a thing. And maybe she was. By now she was fully awake. Maybe there were ways by which crazy women got revenge for all the things that drove them crazy.

  She said, “First I peed on it. Standing up.”

  • • •

  “Do you like Daddy’s car?”

  “Daddy car!”

  “Yes, Daddy has a big fat important car. Because Daddy is that kind of guy.”

  Matthew, buckled into the car seat, was still able to reach the backseat window with one hand, leaving a trail of smears. She was going to have to clean that up or else listen to Jeff carry on about it.

  She didn’t drive his car that often and she was cautious about the way it handled. It was a Buick Electra as big as a boat, the interior all cream leather and burnished wood. The wheel glided beneath her hands, the brake and accelerator registered the slightest touch, like a kiss with the foot. The highway floated beneath you. She decided she could get used to driving this kind of car. You rode high, high up. You had all this taxable horsepower at your command. You could muscle your way through traffic, flatten pedestrians. “I am a big, big dog,” she said. “Who’s been driving my car?”

  Matthew was asleep. Car rides always put him to sleep. He’d been drinking from his sippy cup—it had fallen onto the seat, she hoped it wouldn’t spill—and a bubble of milk formed between his lips, blew in and out as he breathed, then thinned and burst. It made her slightly queasy. As so much about the necessary work of child care did, the diaper stink and spit-up and rashes and other excreted crud. You couldn’t admit this to anyone, you couldn’t even think the thought to yourself. You didn’t read about it in any of the magazines. The magazines all had pictures of happy moms radiating baby bliss.

  On the floor of the backseat was the loaf of pumpkin bread she’d made for Aunt Martha. It was from a box mix and wouldn’t impress Martha or anybody else, but she couldn’t show up empty-handed. Anyway, her mother would most likely be bringing a week’s worth of casseroles. It was what you were supposed to do to people in any difficult circumstance. Clobber them with food. She guessed this was a good thing, a helpful thing, but Martha hardly ate anything these days. The food would be consumed by Martha’s daughter, Pat, and Pat’s kids and anybody else who took a turn staying at the old farmhouse.

  Norm had died last winter, a heart attack that the doctor said had probably meant about two seconds difference between being alive and dead. He’d gone out to the barn to break the ice on the cows’ water trough—Norm, being a Peerson, saw no reason to spend good money on electric immersion heaters—and that’s where the neighbor found him, collapsed in the sawdust and manure of the barn aisle, the rubber mallet he’d been using on the ice wedged beneath him, the untroubled cows stamping and shuffling around him.

  Now Martha lived out the frail end of her life in the big bare farmhouse with the sloping floors and the bathrooms that smelled of Lysol and drains. For years she’d had breathing problems, balance problems, attacks of dizziness. Then she’d developed cancer in her female parts, had all the surgeries and treatments. So much inside her had already been burnt, cut, or poisoned, none of which had prevented the cancer from coming back, attaching itself to whatever was left. The doctors were vague about what came next, but no one expected anything good. A row of pill bottles was set out on her bedroom dresser like the row of spice bottles in the kitchen cabinet. Martha, who hadn’t even liked taking aspirin for a headache.

  If you had to die, and after all you did, Anita decided it would be better to go fast, like Norm. Then you wouldn’t have to think about it. She didn’t like thinking about Martha; it was horrible, really, how she suffered, how her body found new, complicated, queasy-making ways to fail her. Nor did Anita especially want to go see Martha, keep a cheery face on when everybody, including Martha, knew the only reason you were there was because things were really, really bad. That was a crummy, selfish way to feel and you weren’t exactly proud of yourself. She couldn’t help it. Some things bothered her more than they did other people.

  Almost to Grenada. It was a gray day with a hurrying wind that reminded you winter wasn’t that far away. She passed grain trucks and combines trundling along the road, and here and there corn had spilled like candy onto the shoulder. Their house in Ames was in a development on the edge of town, and sometimes ribbons of corn husks blew in across the yards. Everything around here was about farming: the weather forecasts, the TV commercials for hybrids and soybean cyst nematodes, or whatever it was that killed soybean cyst nematodes. She was just glad that she wasn’t a farm kid, glad that she hadn’t grown up ten miles out of town and spent her summers showing heifers at the county fair. She’d always felt sorry for the country girls. Even in a place as small as Grenada, there had been those distinctions. She hadn’t missed it by much. Her mother had lived on a farm when she was a little girl, and the farm had been lost in the Depression. They’d moved into town and started over from nothing. It was all kind of lucky, in a way, a complicated sort of luck that had mostly benefited herself.

  There weren’t supposed to be Depressions anymore because they’d fixed all that. Still, everybody agreed that the economy was terrible right now. Not that she had any time to listen to the news! She just heard Jeff going on and on about the Arabs, Arabs causing all the trouble. Well what did he expect? That was what they always did.

  Jeff’s bank made a lot of farm loans, and now farmers had to pay more to dry grain and run equipment and everything else. The crop prices were too low and the farm debt was too high and Jeff spent a lot
of time stewing and chewing about it. He referred to the president as “the peanut farmer,” as if growing peanuts was laughable in some way, and inferior to growing corn, beans, and wheat. He’d got stingy about the money she spent on the house, on food. But he was the one who’d wanted to be the big shot in the first place. If business was that bad, he could go to work and do something important about it.

  Her old street. The trees on her parents’ street had begun to turn color. Dusty oaks and yellow sycamores and here and there a maple sending up a red flare. In spite of her father’s and everyone else’s best efforts, the neighborhood was showing its age, on its way to being just a little run-down, no place she’d want to live now. She pulled into the driveway next to her mother’s car. Matthew was still asleep and she was able to carry him into the house without waking him.

  Her mother had been watching from the front windows and she met them at the kitchen door. Anita made a hushing face so she wouldn’t start in.

  “Oh look at him,” her mother breathed. “Little angel boy.”

  “I’ll put him down.” Anita carried him back to her old room. Her mother had taken to being a grandma in a big way. No one was surprised. She’d hauled out the old crib, stroller, and swing, and Anita, who’d wanted to buy her own things new, had to persuade her mother to keep them here for the times when Matthew visited.

  Back in the kitchen her mother had coffee ready, and sour-cream coffee cake, and fried apples, and corn bread. Anita said she couldn’t possibly eat all that, she’d already had breakfast, and her mother said just have a little bit. She shouldn’t eat anything, it made her grouchy to think about eating. She still hadn’t got rid of her baby weight and she hated the layer of padding over her hips and breasts and having clothes she couldn’t fit into and probably never would again, and she was impatient with her mother and all her useless food. But in the end she ate two pieces of coffee cake and some apples and coffee with cream.

  Just the three of them were living here now, her mother and father and Torrie. Blake worked construction and had a house outside of town with a buddy. Ryan was in Chicago doing his usual stupid Ryan thing. Her mother was finding it hard to adjust. “I should go down to Des Moines and cook for some orphanage,” she said from time to time, one of her hopeless jokes. Even though it would be good for her to do something like that, anything to get herself out of the house once in a while.