delicate on her tongue

When my mother’s marriage disintegrated, she stepped over that pile of rubble no bigger than a doorstep and made moving on look simple. The morning she left, she did not have the nerve to say goodbye. Instead, she slipped away at five a.m. and disappeared in a cloud of exhaust from an idling taxi at the front of the house. Her “things” would follow her, but not before sitting like unwelcome guests in the front hallway for days that seemed like weeks. And when they were finally picked up, the empty spaces they created echoed through the house.

The night before she left, however, she did visit each of us, one by one. I can only imagine what her visits to my brothers must have been like. All three of the boys in one room like that – the room they shared for their whole growing-up lives. What intimate affection could she have shown those boys each, individually? And yet I have no doubt that she did. She was accomplished that way.

When she came to my room, which I was obliged to share with no one, being the only girl and getting to “that age,” whatever that meant, she sat with a sigh on the edge of my bed. My mother wasn’t one for tears, and so there were none. I refused to disappoint her by crying. Instead, I mimicked her composure. She held my hand for several moments and looked all around my room before finally meeting my eyes with her own dry and unremorseful ones. Then she put her fine and perfect hand to my cheek and stroked it once, slowly, and did the one thing that was guaranteed to lodge itself within the minute crevasses of my heart forever. She said my name, Moss, with such a tender affection that her voice has echoed inside me for all these years. Moss. And there it hung between us, my name like a pungent odour, suspended, until it finally fell to earth when she let go of my hand and rose to leave my room. I suspected she had more to say, but when she stood, the moment was shattered and there was nothing else.

And now, all these years later, she has returned.

When my mother and father announced their divorce, I wasn’t angry or sad, as I believe the boys were, but secretly elated. No one in my class at school had parents who were divorced except for my best friend Holly, who had only just recently made her dramatic announcement, attempting to look stricken but unable to keep the shadow of a smile from creeping onto her lips. Our impression of children of divorce was that they were exotic and worldly. Children of divorced parents stood to be spoiled. Parental guilt and neglect translated into money and presents. Trips to a new household, Disneyland, who knew how far it could go? A whole new world opened up with divorce, and with it, the promise of a whole new self. With divorce, it was entirely possible to imagine yourself living a parallel, but different (and this was the key), life. But we knew we were supposed to be upset, so we tried.

Of course, my family was different. In 1969, how many mothers up and left their families – and to go to such a far away, mysterious and yet mundane-sounding place as Philadelphia? Who even knew where that was, except to say in America?

And being the children of divorce, although not as glamorous as we once imagined, did turn out to have its rewards. At the end of each summer, we would return to our ordinary working-class neighbourhood from summer holidays, brown and happy with stories of a splendid house and a notorious, rakish new stepfather – one so different from our own father that it was difficult to imagine the two of them inhabited the same world – were even the same species.

“Miss Moss,” my new stepfather called me affectionately and I blushed every single time he spoke to me. Parties at their house were the norm; no one seemed to work, or get cross or be busy. Those summers seemed endless and full of promise.

Those were stories for my friends, though, not for my father. My older brothers likely didn’t see things the same way. I recall my genuine surprise as they, one by one, stopped going on the summer visits, opting instead to stay at home and keep my father company – to build their transistor radios and spend the summer reading and eating small sour apples from the tree in our back yard. Those apples were a favourite of my father’s and he never missed commenting with wonder each summer when the first apple turned from green to red on the branch. He made it special to be the one offered that first apple of the season. After that, they were more abundant than we could eat, and the fruit would eventually drop and be raked up with the fall leaves into piles to be burnt in the back garden. It had never occurred to me that my father might be lonely while we were away, or that he missed us at all. I never thought to wonder what he did all summer. I assumed he worked, but I can’t say for certain if he did.

Eventually, we all married and started families, with the exception of my oldest brother, who, looking back, had been the one most genuinely devastated by the divorce. He remains to this day a confirmed bachelor – something that the rest of us are, by turns, both sad and envious about. My visits to Philadelphia ceased for a time when my children were small and I was busier than I could have imagined; when the visits resumed, I was surprised to find the scale of everything diminished. Perhaps in my brother’s mind, the scale of it all had always been clear.

I have not been to visit my mother since my father died a little over ten years ago, when she didn’t have the decency to get on an airplane and come to the funeral. In fact, in retrospect, I realized that she’d never had the consideration to inquire about my father over all those summers we visited as children. Yet when we returned home my father would always ask, How’s your mother? His interest was genuine, his heart on his sleeve. Somewhere in these last ten years, I found I stopped caring about what she thought of me, about whether or not I was worthy of her approval. I stopped calling to tell her in an affected, offhand manner about the degree I had earned or the award I had received. I can’t pinpoint when exactly that happened but I can recall the relief of waking up one day to realize it was gone. It was like a miraculous recovery from a chronic illness that one doesn’t notice until the last phlegmy cough completely clears the lungs.

And now my mother has returned.

I can’t help but think it merciful that my father is dead, for my mother has changed so much. Frail hardly begins to describe her. And if she understands what has happened to her, the ways she’s been betrayed, she doesn’t let on. She maintains her dignified, upright posture despite her condition and circumstance.

Do I find it ironic that the life she left us for has abandoned her, pushed her aside, stepped over her like a small, crumbled pile of dust? Perhaps, but I haven’t any cruel intentions. I like to imagine myself to be resigned and indifferent, a state that has taken a great deal of effort and time to achieve. And yet I have found in the days that she has been here, after being dropped off by taxi at my front door while I watched from a window – an uncanny reminder of the day she left – I have found myself supple, bendable, pliable to her touch. Though not a physical touch, I feel it all the same. But I have come to understand this one thing about my mother – that one word she spoke between us on the eve before she left, Moss, my name, delicate on her tongue, that word and the way it left her lips was no accident. She meant for it to stick.

I reach for the tea from the top cupboard and flick the switch of the kettle, my watery actions reflected in the dim evening twilight of the kitchen window. My mother waits in the back yard, the garden, she calls it, even though it’s just grass. She’s acquired certain affectations from her life in high society. What is there to do but make the tea and carry on? It’s what we’ve always done.

But if I were to tell the truth, I might say that I’m waiting to see if perhaps she came back to tell me what she meant to say next, that last night in our house, after she said my name.