Crickets, circa 2010
Crickets
My dad and I rattled down the highway in a car full of boxes packed with shirts and pants and socks and a kettle and silverware and his embarrassing records and albums full of photographs we didn’t ever look at and our cat in her cage.
My bare legs stuck to the seats and made slurping sounds every time I moved. Outside the windows were green hills spotted with tipped houses, as if God himself had thrown them like dice upon the earth, and I imagined us to be pilgrims, driving our station wagon to a holy land.
I wore my dad’s construction headphones for silence and he listened to Deep Purple. Every twenty minutes, he flung his packet of rolling papers in my lap. I put down my book and my flashlight, laid the paper out on the dashboard, sprinkled tobacco with my dirty fingers, pinched the corners, and felt it round into a cigarette. I looked over the racingfields as I licked it closed, put the cigarette between my lips and sucked as I set it flame, handing it to my dad as the smoke dribbled out of my mouth.
Sometimes, in between drags, my dad would mumble and curse at people not there. I watched his mouth and listened to my empty headphones, and wondered if he was talking to my mother or God, if he was reciting all the prayers he should have prayed or kindnesses he should have given. I wondered if he told her cruel things and hoped that she would hear them in her heart, the way I sometimes did. Sailing through the thin darkness, we sat side by side like ghosts with a woman-shaped emptiness curled between us.
My dad got a perm that summer. A divorce perm, I overheard Mrs. Walden call it when she did not know I was on the other side of the grocery aisle. He had stopped wearing his shirt that said ‘Garage’ at night while listening to Joni Mitchell albums. I had taken my mom’s leaving as an opportunity to cut short the hair she had been saving atop my head for all my fourteen years. I stood on a stool in the bathroom and cut it with her abandoned pinking shears. When my dad came home, he sighed like a slowly dying balloon and I wanted to paste all that severed hair back onto my head for him to pull that sigh back in.
In our house there was such a silence; I felt heavy all the time. It pressed against my chest while I ate breakfast and hovered above my bed at night and some days I could feel it sitting next to me on the sofa. It was as if all her sounds had been sucked up and their echoing shells left behind.
I sometimes told people that my mother had been swindled away by feminists. Like the wife two houses down from us had been, women who liberated themselves of their husbands and children and disappeared into freedom.
I sometimes told tales of her wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, and driving off to California to become a movie star or a waitress, while I stood in the driveway waving. I thought of her in bikinis hanging from strings and her hair in braids, spending her days bobbing up and down in the ocean, waiting for waves to carry her into shore.
I sometimes thought, but never said, that she was dead.
In my mind, I hung soft portraits of her with black-clad arms and watched her be reborn a saint, as is a habit of the dead, stitched into holiness by our false memories.
I didn’t tell anyone that she left us for the pharmacist who filled her sleeping pill prescriptions and had once shown her how to give me ear drops after a summer of too much swimming, or that she told me love can die slowly and secretly, until the cold heart gets lit anew by someone else. But that’s what she said.
The car slowed on a bony shoulder of the empty road, kicking up rocks until it stood still. My dad touched my headphones like he was ringing a doorbell, and when I took them off he said, “Come on out and stretch your legs. We still have hours to go.” He got out and started doing gym class stretches next to the car, raising his skinny arms to the sky. I stood there staring at him. They looked like divorce stretches to me.
Then he got a blanket from the trunk and spread it over the hood of the car. “Hop up there so you can see the stars.”
I climbed up and sat with my legs crossed, listening to the clinks and clanks of the cooling engine, wondering if this is what it would be like now, if our old silence would follow us, slide out of one of my boxes and live in our new house. Maybe it would wait for me in the bathroom, while I brushed my teeth, and press against my dad at night, in the place where my mom used to be. I wondered what kind of woman he might love soon. I thought some cruel thoughts and hoped my mom’s lit heart could feel them.
My dad put two rolling papers on the blanket and filled them with tobacco. His cigarettes were much more beautiful than mine. “It’s not ladylike, but I don’t suppose you care about that,” he said, looking at my best of hair and handing me one. We lay on a blanket on the hood of the car with our backs against the windshield, looking up at the sweet round sky, under which all things lived, and the only sounds were soft exhales and small voices of crickets.
(First published in Kiss Machine 2010.)