One night after a show, I’m walking around in the garden alone.Everyone has cleared out and I have a whim to call my parents to share the news of how their delinquent daughter is making it in the big city after all. My mom picks up the phone right away. She’s all freaked out, asking if I’m okay. It kind of cuts me to realize that I call so rarely, they assume it must be from the emergency room. She puts me on speakerphone and my dad comes over and joins. I tell them about the theater company I’ve founded, though I leave out the name of it. No need to get them riled. I expect them to ask when I’m getting a real job or a husband who can support me, but they’re actually pretty interested, or at least pretend to be.
We could end the conversation right there, pocket the win, and avoid conflict. I nearly say goodbye, but my tongue catches and I know what I’m being asked to do.
“I need to tell you something else,” I tell my parents over the phone. “It’s about the piano lessons I took when I was little.”
“Yes, we know you blame us for forcing you into hobbies that you hated,” my mom says in a tired voice, anticipating the same old attacks. “But it didn’t ruin you too badly. Look at what you’re doing now.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not about that.”
I lay it all out there as minimally as I can, just the cold, hard facts, no gory details or anything, but my mom starts bawling and my dad drops more expletives than I’ve ever heard, even when the Lions lost the Super Bowl. They’re aware that Mr. Hubert died—he was their neighbor after all—but they begin talking about how we should press charges against his widow because leave it to them to blame a woman somehow. I’m just kidding, sort of. I really do appreciate their outrage but I say no, I don’t want to do that, I just want to move on. I’m not going to use the abuse as an excuse.
“Yeah, it was awful and it hurt me,” I say. “It messed me up in ways I probably still don’t fully understand, maybe never will. And I think I’ve been punishing both of you for this thing that you never even knew about.”
“Well, of course you’ve been punishing us, honey, as you should,” my mom says between hiccups. “Does your sister know?”
I say no, she doesn’t, but this is why I fought so hard for her not to take piano lessons too, even though she resented me for it. I tell them that I don’t want to keep circling over the past, I just want to live in the now, and it would be good if maybe our family could sort of start fresh?
“How about a family vacation soon?” my dad suggests. It sounds very quiet in the background, like he’s turned off the TV, or at least muted it. “I start collecting Social Security next month. I can treat us all to a Caribbean cruise.”
The suggestion feels like a big hug from him, the kind I used to wriggle out of but vow not to anymore. “I don’t do cruises,” I say. “But a beachside villa and swimming with dolphins wouldn’t be the worst thing.”
They say they would like that very much, or at least I think that’s what my mom says. It’s hard to understand her since she’s still choked up, and my dad is all congested with emotion too. The old me would be thrilled about how worried they are about me, how they’re beating themselves up over this thing that happened so long ago, but the new me doesn’t want suffering to beget suffering. Though I have to admit it’s a nice feeling to be heard and cared for in a way that I never thought I would from my parents ever again. They stopped showing up for me long ago, but maybe it was partially because I stopped giving them a chance to show up for me. It was easier to suffocate the shame in a coffin than let it air out in the cold. Easier to twist my parents into caricatures, complicit in the crime, than to see them as the complex characters they are.
After we say goodbye, there’s this peace rippling around me, rippling in me. I have the urge to swat it away or do something dramatic to disrupt it because peace is boring, right? Peace means you’re content with the way things are, and where’s the inspirationor innovation in that? But the longer I breathe in the peace, the more I want to keep it, nurture it.
Maybe Chris has a point about contentment. Maybe contentment can carpet your life and free you up to do cartwheels and handstands and backflips without worrying about cracking your head on the cement because you know you’ll have a soft landing no matter what. It’s an interesting theory. I’ll have to test it out a while longer, but for now at least I’m not feeling like contentment and happiness are rivals the way I used to think they were. It feels truer to me that contentment is a prerequisite for real happiness. I mean, how much can you really enjoy the flight up in the sky if you know you’re going to shatter the second you hit the ground again?
Chapter 41
Tara proposes to Niles one night when they’re drunk. It spurts out and sticks.
“I was going to take it back the next day,” Tara tells me when we’re together at home, recounting it all. “Because I thought I’d pressured him into it by popping the question out of nowhere. But he’d already posted about our engagement on his socials, so there was really no going back.”
“You could still go back,” I say. “If you’re having doubts.”
“I’m not,” she says. “I mean, I’m nervous about the scale of the change, sure. But I have no doubt he’s the person I want to build a life with. It’s way scarier thinking of life without him than life with him.”
“Damn,” I say, feeling only slightly slighted at how I’m not that person for Tara anymore. “You’re the queen of confidence these days.”
“Learned it from you.”
“Not when it comes to romantic relationships.”
“I really am sorry to be doing this to you,” Tara says, and it’s clear she’s been nervous about my reaction, no matter how supportive I’ve been of her and Niles. “Walking the marriage plank and leaving you by yourself.”
“I’m not by myself, I’m with myself,” I say, laughing at the cheese of it, the truth of it. “Besides, I don’t really see marriage as a deathplank anymore. It’s more of a bridge that can be wobbly or well-built, depending on the people. And I have faith in you and Niles. I’d bet all my investments on your marriage, and that actually means a little something these days.”
“Thanks, EJ,” Tara says, both of us sloshy in the eyes. “I’ll try not to let you down.”
“It’s no big deal if you do,” I say. “Just don’t let yourself down or my whole Redstocking reign would be a total waste.”
Soon after, I go back to Michigan for my annual holiday trip. It hits differently this time, sort of like I’ve escaped the need to escape. Christmas Eve Mass no longer sends me spiraling. I just take it for what it is and think back to my first Communion at this church, what a trusting little kid I was. My heart rips for her, but I get the sense she’d actually be pretty proud of where we are now. Every life has dents; every life has detours. I’m not special really, though I like to think I am because my ego is still there; I can be objective about that.
Afterward we have dinner and my parents hardly even argue over how spicy the chili should be, though they do argue a little, just for the tradition of it. Then we take a family walk around the neighborhood to see the lights. My sister’s husband stays back with the baby, a snarky toddler now whose favorite word is still “no,” which makes me very glad to see. So it’s just the four of us—my mom, my dad, my sister, and me. The originals.
When we pass Mr. Hubert’s old house, my mom takes my gloved hand in hers and gives me a squeeze through the knitted wool.
I look at the green shutters, the nondescript gray siding, the snow-covered shingles in need of replacing. My head feels the spin, the stress, the sadness. But my body stays calm, not clamping up or burning or itching. It’s like I’ve finally metamorphosedthe abuse into fuel, expunged the evil to make space for openings, or something like that. Healing isn’t linear—it’s like I told Chris when we were talking about his brother—but for the most part my trajectory is upward, with a few jagged spikes because those shapes are more interesting than straight lines.
