Mercury

When it comes time to bid farewell to Tangletown, Mom chooses a little condo near downtown; the three Olders chip in to buy it for her.

The day of the estate sale, we drop Mom at her new place: blue velvet chairs, delicate new furniture. “It doesn’t have to be childproof!” she crows. At day’s end, a few of us return, find the liquidators have trashed Mom’s wedding sash on the lawn with other unsalables. We enter our ghostly house. Farewell, flying steps. Feel the thrusting absence of the dining room table, pity the sunroom, bereft of its desk and magnificent typewriter.

And then we scatter from the fracture of Dad’s death like mercury from a snapped thermometer. Away from the mother lode/load.

•••

Now out of the convent, Mary Kay has learned to write checks, pay rent, wear makeup, and hold down a job. Sick of Minnesota winters, she buys herself a white Mustang and moves to southern California to work for the Department of Defense (!). Her obesity is still a painful issue, but she joins AA and remains sober. She will never marry.

Stationed now in northern California and five years from retiring with a full pension, Tom can no longer stand the Army. They finally accept his resignation. Always money-smart, he buys real estate. He and Linda rear their two boys with practical wisdom, teaching them to raise chickens and use computers.

“Whatever the future brings, they’ll benefit from one skill or the other,” Tom reasons. (Both Don and David grow up to be tech whizzes and make good livings from their computer knowledge.) Don, his eldest, eventually takes a rafting trip to Montana with his own son Derek and daughter Lauren.

Once John is released from the asylum, he hightails it West, where he works off his alternative draft service fighting forest fires. On completing his duty, he moves to Washington state, builds himself a cabin in the wild, and spends a year alone like Thoreau, albeit much further from civilization. He then moves to Portland where he becomes a leading classical guitarist and teacher.

Jim heads west as well and marries a sharp wise Montana woman. His father-in-law Bill, a doctor, warns him that her juvenile diabetes predicts a short life.

“I’ll take whatever time I can get with her,” says Jim. Though plagued with various medical challenges, they enjoy many years together rearing their three boys as Jim practices law. He and the boys learn backcountry skills and survival on frequent trips with tough taskmaster Bill, and make use of them on one particularly memorable rafting trip on the South Fork of the Flathead.

The West calls Ro, too. After college, she also moves to Montana, then on to Seattle, where she meets and marries a brilliant and sensitive lawyer. They move to Portland, raise two remarkable artists. She finds her creativity and serenity teaching Waldorf kindergarten.

I move to New York to pursue acting, then writing. I marry a wonderful man who both acts and writes. I gain and lose weight for decades until therapy and inner work brings me to balance.

Mom by now wakes up with a crossword puzzle and a gin-and-orange-juice, refreshing both throughout the day. She tops it off with wretched, repetitious phone calls to whomever of us answers.

Her affronts to me continue. Oh my Belfast, my Jerusalem.

After my sixty-pound loss, she sends me a huge muumuu for Christmas. It’s covered with multi-colored fruits with bites taken out of them. “If you lose too much weight, aren’t you afraid of losing your rings?” she asks.

She breaks her own cardinal rule—“Never wear white to a wedding; it’s the bride’s day”—by packing a cream lace dress to wear to my wedding when she knows I will be wearing a cream lace dress.