To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. — Henri Bergson
"You can fold them any way you want. You're going to refold them anyway! You want my help, then you criticize everything! Everything!"
"I've told you how to fold the towels before! You never listen to me. This isn't rocket science, Anna!"
"Mom, why are you always after me? About the dumbest stuff. I listen to you. You never listen to me. Honestly, if someone else yelled at me as much as you yell at me, you would kill them. I'm sick of you, Mom. You're always mad about something. Always criticizing me."
"No, I'm not always mad."
"Seriously, I can never do anything right for you. Which makes me give up trying to help you. Which makes you yell at me. Which makes me want to leave. It's like the worst ballet ever." Anna turned and walked out the front door of the house.
"Don't slam the—" I called after my daughter as the door slammed. I fumed. "Dammit!" Why is she always storming off like that?
I forced myself to breathe in. And out. I sighed. "Because there was nothing else she could do. That's the way it goes: I yell, she stomps. I threaten, she slams," I explained to myself.
I sag under the weight of our patterns. My patterns. I rubbed my lower back and bent to pick up the stack of folded towels from the floor.
"But I didn't need to get so mad. They're just towels."
"Well, she didn't need to get so mad, either!" I retorted to myself, smoothing the towels, casualties of our fight. "I've told her a thousand times how to fold them."
I scowled at my own rigidity. "It just needs to get done. I shouldn't care how. Why can't I just let these things slide?"
Mid-fold it seeps in. "Oh my god. She's right." I turned and ran to the door. "Anna! Come ba—"
But I couldn't run out the door after my daughter. There was another girl standing on the porch. One I wasn't in a fight with. "Oh. Hello. Who are you?"
"I'm Lizzie," with a thirteen-year-old's natural aversion to eye contact. A handshake was out of the question. The sky darkened and it occurred to me Anna might not have taken a jacket. I looked over this girl's head to see if I could see Anna on the street.
But I was drawn to this girl on my doorstep. Awash in a desire for the simplicity of the beginning of life, I leaned on my door. I ached to be in her moment and start everything over.
"You came to see Anna?"
Her backpack dangled from a shoulder, her posture insouciant. She nodded. A lock of blond hair flopped over her eye.
"Oh, are you her new lab partner?"
She adjusted her slouch in a way I took as a full-body nod.
"Anna, uh, just went for a walk," I said. Hoping it was true, I offered "she should be back in a few minutes. You can come in and wait for her."
I opened the door and led the girl to the kitchen.
"So, uh… So, you're new at school?" I asked, then chided myself for being overly-friendly, reminding myself not to make her uncomfortable. I expected the girl to object to my politeness with outrage like my daughter would. I may never know what Eighth Graders want, but pleasant small talk was not it. Lizzie seemed different.
"Yes, I'm new, Mrs. Bradbury," and steadied herself under the awkward weight of her identity. "My parents got divorced over the summer. My dad moved here. Then my mom and I moved here in January so I could still see him," she said matter-of-factly. It was only March. She was really new.
"Few things are worse than settling in at a new school," I said, remembering my own dark days of being the new kid.
She looked around. "I like your house. It's nice. I like all the colors, they're calm. I feel calm here. Nobody can be sad here, I think." Her eyes were bright blue. Her nose still had freckles.
Nobody is sad. My neck itched where my necklace pinched. Did she mean me? Did she mean her? I blindly reached back to soothe my neck. Everybody is a little sad, I wanted to say.
"Uh, well, thank you. Right. Well… uh, I hope you're happy here," wobbled by the likelihood she was wrong. "We all have our moments," and laughed too loudly.
Lizzie smiled politely. I got her a glass of juice and a bowl of goldfish crackers without asking if she wanted any. She sat down at the kitchen counter readily, still young enough to welcome afterschool snacks without question. "Thank you, Mrs. Bradbury."
"Please, call me Elizabeth," I offered as I fussed with the napkin holder. "We don't need to stand on formalities here," and smiled.
She smiled back and shrugged as if to say I don't have anywhere to go with that.
I don't usually hang out with my daughter's friends but it seemed rude to leave this new girl to wait alone in a strange house. And I didn't feel the usual charge of teenage impatience and dread spilling off Lizzie. I pretended it was normal to sit with her.
"So uh, how are you feeling? With the divorce?" I touched my throat in regret. Divorces and feelings about divorces were too-much-too-soon for a light conversation. Why can't I just ask about school? "I mean, uh…" fumbling to soften my inquisition, "I mean, when my parents split up, I was about your age and it was hard." I looked to the rafters for some way to excuse my over-reach. "Nothing was exactly wrong anymore — I mean once they finally divorced, you know? I was so glad the yelling stopped, right? But nothing was the same again. And that was weird. Hard."
Lizzie nodded, a little warily. My own daughter was always trying to get me to stop over-sharing and grossing her out. The outrage I had come to expect from Anna clattered around the kitchen. I stood up abruptly and went to the refrigerator.
We all have feelings, I thought defensively. "If we all were just more honest about our feelings, everyone wouldn't get so crazy trying to hide them," I muttered, my back to Lizzie. I pushed a box of leftovers around the top shelf thuggishly. I heard nothing behind me, no uncomfortable shuffling, no impatient waiting. I shoved the array of condiment bottles into a line.
"I think that was the whole problem with my parents."
Wheeling around, I saw only empty chairs.
Of course. Alone. Again. "I am doing just great today. Why can't I just act like a normal mom?" This new Lizzie had simply left in embarrassment. I would too if I were her.
I set to tidying the countertop as my parade of lifelong regrets shambled into my mind, both as comforting and as intractable as a rosary prayer. I touched my necklace. Why didn't I say something else? What must she think? Why am I so bad at being normal? When am I ever going to learn?
Then Lizzie popped back up. "Oh! Hi." Hand on my heart. "I thought you left."
"No. I just dropped a cracker," and smiled broadly, arm raised in victory. "I have to do all the vacuuming at my house now," as she settled back onto the barstool. "So there's no point in leaving it for someone else to clean up. I'm the someone else," she laughed lightly.
I marveled at how different her view was from my daughter's. I was always after Anna to clean up her things. I might have even used that exact phrase with her this week.
"Well! Aren't you helpful? Thank you. Your mom must appreciate your help."
"Sure. Well, I have no idea if she appreciates it. It just needs to be done," she said sensibly. "But, like you were saying, if my parents would just be straight with each other, how they felt, they could have made up." She popped goldfish in her mouth. "Like, if I was that mad at someone, or got my feelings hurt, my mom would make me go talk and make up. I have to treat strangers better than they treat the people they love. Why do they have different rules?"
"That's very reasonable." I took one of her crackers for myself. "The world should work that way. It's hard to be honest sometimes, though. It takes a lot more than one argument to justify a divorce. There's probably a lot more going on."
"Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. It's not a big deal. It's fine. I mean, what do I care? It's their marriage." She slumped her elbows onto the countertop and peered closely at her juice. "I mean, they both said it had nothing to do with me. So, sure. OK. If you say so. I don't care."
My heart gushed for this kid. I remembered this same need to tell people no, it's fine, I'm fine, it's all fine, as if I was managing my parents' cover-up. Their efforts to comfort me with "it's not about you" just isolated me from them. Lizzie was young enough to try to believe the words her parents were saying, but clearly smart enough to see how their words didn't match their actions.
I reached across the counter to touch Lizzie's hand or pat her shoulder or stroke her hair before I remembered she wasn't mine. I had no right to comfort her. My hand changed directions and picked up her glass instead.
"When my mom told me they were divorcing," I offered, "I felt, um, I remember feeling kind of relieved, you know?"
She looked up at me, blue eyes framed in dark lashes.
"I mean, 'relieved' is not the polite word," I said. "I would never say that to them. But it was like I had been waiting, and now, with the divorce, it was here and we could finally call it what it was, right? The worst thing I could imagine had finally happened. It had a name so now we could deal with it." I set down a fresh drink.
"Yeah. I get that. My mom sat me down and made this big deal over 'we're separating' and she wanted me to act surprised and I just… I just wasn't," Lizzie shrugged, eyes focused on the past. "I didn't care anymore. Whatever. Do what you want. I don't care."
"It gets better with time," I offered. "And some days it will be worse. But it'll be OK."
The girl looked at me dubiously and a sigh slipped out. "No, it won't. It won't get better. My dad will have always left us. My mom will always be freaked out and upset about it. I'll always be the weird new kid." She shoved the drink away.
"How did your mom tell you things were going to change? That they were divorcing?"
"Things had already changed by the time she actually told me. My dad stopped coming home. But! It turns out, he was sneaking in while I was at school and, like, packing up his clothes. It wasn't hard to figure out. I guess he waited until I was gone? If none of his stuff was here, he probably wasn't either."
"Oh sweetie, I'm sorry." I sighed and a long-forgotten ache pushed at me. "Your mom probably didn't want to admit what was happening. I'm sure she didn't mean to leave you out."
She rolled her eyes impatiently at me. "When she finally did tell me, she told me we were moving here. And I was just sort of nothing about it," with a shrug. "Then Mom got all mad at me 'how come you're not more upset?' What was I supposed to say? I already mostly knew. But she wanted some big reaction like I should be outraged or something." Lizzie looked up, still incredulous at her mom's theatrics.
I felt for her mother and opened my mouth to assure Lizzie that moms don't mean to be weird, it just comes out that way sometimes.
But she cut me off. "Then my mom kept digging around asking which friends I would miss most and asked 'aren't you going to miss this house?' So I blew up and yelled at her to stop it. Then she said, 'see, I knew you were upset' all smug like she's got this all under control and I'm the basket case."
"Obviously you were upset. The whole thing, the fighting and then not talking about it, and the move. Your mom was probably saying more about her own emotions than yours." I found myself a little irritated at her mom, too. "But it's not for me to take sides," I chastised myself, and boxed up my outrage.
Maybe I could help Lizzie see her mom's point of view. "It's easier to act like the one in control than to feel what she's probably feeling. By the time my parents announced," I started, and then hesitated at the edge of my admission. But Lizzie was interested. "I just sort of switched off. I could see I wasn't going to make anything better between them. And I couldn't leave. So, I did what I could to not be there mentally. I kind of checked out. I guess it worked, you know?"
She nodded. "I could see some value in not being here. Check out."
I looked up at the rafters, shocked I had allowed that. "I shouldn't have said that. It's not very evolved. It was…"
"It was a tough time."
"Right. It was a tough time. I couldn't deal with them and their weirdnesses. So I stopped caring. Put them on 'ignore.'" I rolled my glass between my palms. "When I think back about middle and high school, it blows me away how few memories I have from then. I remember being mad. And lonely. But I had friends, so I couldn't have been that lonely, right? But huge blocks of time are gone. I just sort of woke up in college."
Lizzie nodded, but it was obvious she remembered everything. "Not remembering would be nice. They've been fighting since I was a baby. Sometimes they even tell me stories about the fights they had before I was born as if it's…"
"Part of the family heritage," I nodded absently, my mind barreling down an ancient track.
"Right, part of our family heritage," she agreed.
"All that fighting… You're right. It sticks to you, makes you weird." My own voice sounded far away. "I realized so much later than most kids — so much later — I didn't know how to just talk with someone and simply say 'I see it differently,' or 'here's another way we could do it.' I couldn't just disagree without kicking people out of my life. So many ex-boyfriends and ex-friends. Some never talked to me again." A single laugh snorted out of me. I touched my necklace absently, my hand flattening over it to protect my throat. "But the worst ones were sweet and wanted to stay friends, no matter what I did. I couldn't deal with them being nice to me. As if they were the ones who couldn't be trusted. I still suck at relationships, apparently."
I turned to Lizzie. "And you know what? Even after they ended it, my parents still fought. I thought, 'What was the point of the stupid divorce? Just stay married and don't have two rent payments!' Their marriage sucked, and then their divorce sucked more!"
Lizzie laughed sharply.
I knew I had stepped across the line between adults and kids. But we seemed to be in this together now.
She pulled her drink back, ran her finger around the rim. "Yeah. My mom was mad before the divorce. And now she's only sad. I think all the time, 'why did she do this?' It's a little better for them because they get to be away from each other. But now I have to listen to BOTH of them complain about the other! When do I get a break?" Her hand went to her heart, eyes wide and indignant. "It's like now she transferred all her anger to me."
I realized her mom may not know where Lizzie was or when she would be home. "Hey, does your mom know where you are? Can we call and ask if you can stay for dinner?"
"No, she's… she's working." Something pulled her down again. "She's always working."
I didn't push. I knew that look. Only she could navigate through the swamp of needs and expectations she and her mom lived in.
"My mom needs so much from me now," her eyebrows went up. "And then other times she just totally isn't there. She's always working, or when she is home, she's 'tired.'" Lizzie made air quotes and wobbled her head sarcastically.
"When we moved here," she continued, "I blew it. I missed the bus the first morning. I was waiting at the wrong corner. So, I went back home to get a ride and she got all mad at me because I was going to make her late. I'm just a kid! In a new neighborhood! How am I supposed to know where to go if she doesn't show me? She just turned and went into her room. I hate her stupid room! And her stupid door." She slurped at her juice, not really tasting it. "I threw things at her door until she came out and took me to school." A mischievous smile crept out. "I made a dent." She looked a little sorry about the dent, but not that sorry.
"Sometimes you just need to throw something."
"And then I'm supposed to just go have stupid Happy Daddy Time. Nobody asked me if I even want to see him. He's a jerk. He moved out. But I have to go see him. It is so unfair! If we lived together, I wouldn't have to spend every Friday night with my dad! It's so—"
"Unfair! They shouldn't have put you in the middle."
Lizzie was riled up now. "But I'm not allowed to actually have a good time. I can't tell either of them if I had a good time with the other. My mom gets all hurt like, 'you love him more than me.'"
"Or if your dad tells you about his new girlfriends." I was scandalized by the unfairness of her parents putting their egos ahead of her needs. She's just a kid. I had pushed my teenage outrages into storage long ago and made peace with my uneven lot. But the vividness of her frustration left me breathless.
Her eyes were wild. "Right! They're keeping secrets! They've both asked me to not tell the other something — and it's always stupid stuff. I've been told my whole life not to keep secrets! They're setting a terrible example."
"Right. Well, maybe," I wanted to soothe both of us and laid my palms flat on the cool tile. "Oh, I don't know. There's no tutorial on how to get divorced correctly." Someone had said that to me once. "They're trying."
That idea was flat soda to her. She wasn't ready to be conciliatory yet.
"If I was a better kid, maybe they wouldn't have broken up," and shrugged. "I tried… I tried to be better. I tried to help my mom, I tried to make my dad laugh. I tried to be quiet, be good at school. Nothing helped. I might as well go steal things and break stuff because nothing matters," she said with a pout.
"Look," I took her shoulders and addressed her square on like a coach before a big game. "It does matter. And you matter. You can't see this now because you're so young — but they have their own issues they're trying to figure out. But I promise you, you do not want to go back to Before the Divorce. You don't want to go back to when they fought all the time. It wasn't better. It was just familiar."
She looked up, her eyes wide. Her chin wobbled. "But I'm part of them. You know? So, if they're fighting because they don't like each other, then it means they don't like part of me."
"No, no, no." I panicked, desperate to fix this. I had stepped so far over the line of acceptable adult-to-kid conversation that I should be fined. No, imprisoned. "Lizzie. Lizzie, honey, they love you. Believe me, being married is hard. It's really hard. You have to negotiate everything. All the big stuff, and a zillion stupid, little things. And you don't always know which is which until you've screwed it up. Sometimes you don't get what you want, and you have to do what the other person wants to do. Then you have to decide if that's an OK trade-off."
"So, it's like being divorced."
My bark of laughter surprised me and startled her. All the walls of decorum between us crumbled. We gave in to the ridiculousness of everyone's drama to giggle at the situations people create for themselves. We were safe for a minute from other people's craziness.
She wiped an eye, then held her juice glass in both hands. An old image must have revealed itself to her. "When my dad left, my mom cried and cried in our rocking chair. She was so sad. I've never seen anyone so sad." Her face pulled down. "I didn't know why she was crying. Dad wasn't there. I missed him. I missed her. I sat down on the floor and cried just because she was crying." Lizzie let me be there with her, feeling that moment again.
In the face of her honesty and her strength, I was choked by my own shame. I touched my necklace protectively again. I had always tried to hide the bad days from other people. I wasted so much energy pretending I was okay when I wasn't. Everything I thought I had to be for everyone else was suddenly of no value. In watching her, I saw that there was another way I'd never considered. I could have been strong enough to just feel it, like this girl. I gulped in a deep breath like I'd just surfaced after being underwater too long.
"You're so brave."
"I don't feel very brave."
"I always tried to seem all put together. But I wasn't. Maybe I could have moved on sooner if I was as honest as you're being."
"If I'm being so honest, I don't think my dad wants to spend Friday nights with me, either." She sagged on her barstool, the fight draining out of her. "He left her. And he left me, too."
"Ooh. I felt that one, too. That one is really insidious. But you can't let it get a foothold. My dad was always sort of standoffish and stiff around me. He finally admitted years later that he'd been embarrassed because he felt like he'd failed. He meant the marriage. But what he should have been embarrassed about was letting me think for years that he just didn't like me by keeping his distance. What else is a kid supposed to think?" I chose not to tell her about the ten years of corrosive self-doubt that had already weakened me and changed my trajectory.
An idea I had been struggling for years to see took shape and stepped into the light. "Lizzie, this is important." I touched my hand to my heart. "This thing happened near you, Lizzie." It was vital that she be made to understand this. "You didn't make it happen." I nodded. She nodded. "But you do have to survive it."
She looked up, desperate for this to be true. It was taking shape in her mind, too. "Like a terrorist attack?"
"It was like a terrorist attack. You didn't cause it — but you have to survive it."
"Ha! Sure. Right." I laughed at how a terrorist attack could be comforting, but, fine. "Yes. You didn't do this. And, better yet, nobody thinks you did. You have your own future to discover. I promise you will have a future. It's all yours to make any way you want to."
She shook her head. That was too easy. She pushed it away, unable to see her future.
But I'd spent thirty years thinking about this. Someone was going to hear it. I made a little "hey" sound and her chin tilted up. I thought I might drown in her desperate blue eyes.
"You are perfectly loveable, Lizzie. Your path isn't their path, OK? You are going to be exactly who you're supposed to be, even though this thing happened."
Her eyes slipped down again, but she nodded dutifully.
I rode the lull swelling between us, as if we were floating just beyond the surf, looking back at the beach and the lives we'd just abandoned.
"You know, these days, my parents mostly get along," I told her. Lizzie made a doubtful sound. "I wish they'd settled down earlier, sure. They could have gotten some peace sooner. They met other people, they did other things. They found some happiness eventually."
"That would be nice."
I wanted Lizzie to have some happiness now, without waiting years for it like I did. Decades. I ached to reach across the chasm that divides people and give her something to hold on to now in her turmoil.
My neck itched and I reached up to soothe it. By habit, my fingers slid down to the Mobius strip, the shape of a sideways eight, in the necklace's center. Its coolness calmed me. I blindly traced the strip around and around in its infinite roller coaster with my fingertip. Her eyes followed my finger as it looped along the smooth path.
"I want you to have something." I reached both hands back to the clasp. Her eyes met mine, bright and curious. As I took off the necklace, something crackled inside me.
I held out my necklace and the looping design rocked gently like a swing in the wind. Lizzie touched it with a fingertip, then cupped her other hand under its wide, flat loop. The single strip of gold at the center twisted so the outside became the inside and the inside became the outside.
"I honestly don't recall where I got this, but I've had it since I was about your age." I met her eyes. I was a little breathless, desperate for this to help her. I pushed against a sense that I was losing my grip on something important. But holding on to her right now was more important.
She traced the little track with her finger and said "it's so smooth."
"The Mobius Strip is special." My breath was short. "Is it really hot all of a sudden?" I had to concentrate. "See, it looks like two sides, but it's really only one side. The loop makes it both the inside and the outside."
"It's like everything connects."
"Yeah," I nodded to put it on her. "We're all on the same path, dealing with the same problems." She scooped up her hair and I leaned in. "But we're in different parts of the cycle." Eyes closed, I swept past the silky soft white hairs behind her neck, breathed in her coconut shampoo, basked in the warmth wafting up from her collar. A darkness crowded into the room and I heard thunder in the distance.
I opened my eyes to a woman being very close to me, her arms high, fingers behind my neck. I blinked to focus. She said "There. That looks lovely, Lizzie. Wear it and know that things will go up and down, but you'll always stay on track." Her blue eyes sparkled. I felt safe.
The necklace was a strange, dense weight against my collar bone. "Now I remember!" I got this necklace when I was thirteen. "How could I have forgotten?" I reached up and traced my fingertip around its cool, languid track. I tasted orange juice as I licked my lips.
The cloud shadow shifted and the room swelled in a burst of yellow afternoon light. I blinked hard against it, lifted my arm to protect my eyes, my equilibrium slipped. I lost track of the lady in my dizziness. Static crashed in my ears. Darkness pushed in at the sides of my eyes and compressed my vision. I held the counter and struggled to hold myself upright.
"Thank you," the girl sitting across from me said. "I think I should go now."
I don't recall her picking up her bag, but she was already retreating down my hall when I looked up. Did I say good-bye?
"Mom? Mom! What are you doing?"
Oh, she came back, but it was a different girl. This girl looked familiar. Auburn hair, not blond. Green eyes, not blue. She reminded me of my eldest, but she was older than I recalled my daughter being. She touched my shoulder, concern crumpling her face.
"I was… I was talking to your friend." I touched my forehead and searched for some anchor in time. I leaned around Anna and scrutinized the front door. A stack of towels drooped in a pile in the hall. "She was just here. Did you see her leave?"
"Uh… nobody is here."
"Anna, honey. I'm glad you're back. I'm sorry. I got mad… I didn't need to. It was a small thing. Who cares about stupid towels? I want us to talk to each other differently. I care about you, not about towels. I don't want to fight. It's a bad, bad habit and it makes everything worse." She looked sideways at me. "Did you have a nice walk?"
"It started raining on me," gesturing to her wet shirt. "And no. I didn't. I never go on walks to enjoy them after we've had a fight. I go to cool down and try to figure out why you're always mad at me."
"I know. Look, I'm never actually mad at you. I don't know who I'm mad at. But I don't want to treat you that way. I was just talking about it… with your friend. Hey, where did she go?" I pointed at the door limply. "Lizzie? New girl? Your lab partner. She's a good kid."
"Mom," she gave me a slow side-eye trying to sort out this latest Mom nonsense. "We always get into a fight. We can't not fight. I'll believe you want it to be different when we actually make it through one day without you having to be right about everything." She glared down at me.
"I don't have a friend named Lizzie. I'm not trying to start another fight, but please just believe me — nobody is here. And I've never met anyone with that name except you."
My fingers sought out the comforting loop of my necklace, but only found skin.