The Dark Spot

By the fourth day I snuck into the smoky basement and pulled open the pressboard panel door of the furnace room. Cobwebs caught my forehead as I reached for the light chain. I pawed my face clean and cleared a path to the old weight bench that hadn’t been moved in thirty years. Balanced on each end of the bar were old rubber Halloween masks: Death and the Wolfman, hidden from us as children because of how frighteningly realistic they were. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I whispered to them before reminding myself that I’d come downstairs to be alone. I sat down and laid out a week’s worth of yawns.

I’d spent the holiday clapping for every song my nieces performed, filling myself with apple desserts, and rehashing the plot points of past Thanksgivings with my sisters and parents.

I held my head in my hands and wondered if a hundred years in this filthy closet could be enough to undo the past few days. My inner eye zeroed in on an escape, but there were rides to be given to the airport in the morning, babies to be cuddled, dishes to be washed. The polite thing to do was stay.

I remembered that final holiday before anyone went away to college, or moved out of state, or spent Thanksgiving with a boyfriend’s family. A distinguished year if only for the fact of our obliviousness of how easy everything would never be again. We dedicated the abundance of food and quarrels to the notion of family, and we did it with gusto. We daughters clinked our etched wineglasses filled with sparkling grape juice and made sure we looked everyone in the eye with our mischievous smirks. This was the last holiday I could remember without the nausea. After that, I started to feel ill from the pressure. From the feeling that everyone was supposed to live more on holidays, pack a year’s worth of a relationship into several days, feel all that love and hate in such quick succession. It was all I could do to find the darkest spot in the house, the room where one of my sisters had grown penicillin on oranges back in junior high and where Halloween masks too scary for little girls were hidden out of sight, where I could sit and let my mind loosen.

I had tried to turn the weekend into a science, to make it into a game I could learn the rules for, to escape the cliché of it being difficult to be home for the holidays. If you asked me who I loved most in the world, the people I would list were under that roof, but spending four days with their adult selves, with the spouses they’d chosen and the children they’d wrought and the opinions they’d formed where curiosity had once lived, was more than I could manage.

Alone in the furnace room, I thought of a person trying to remember a phone number while someone else shouted random numbers in their ear. I thought of trying to sync three clocks perfectly with only two hands. I thought of impossible pulses.

There are times when I know I’m a part of something, even when I’m not actively adding to that thing. Like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, I can feel the other sections buzzing around me, and I know people can make sense of the words, because the light of the working parts is enough. They can fill in that dark gap because they know what should be there. And sometimes the hardest thing is to be recognized as a part of something that I know I had nothing to do with, no matter how much I wish I did.