Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

Jesus. I feel sick. Even while I was trying to untangle myself from him, from how much he defined me, I never really did. With the studio, with my innate comparisons of my marriage to theirs. With the years I delayed in getting back to the one thing that I loved more than anything other than him. Even in my attempts to run away from him, I snared myself back in his net . And now, for the past few months at least, I’ve done it all over again. Working at the gallery. Listening to my mother and accepting my too-flawed husband because I didn’t trust myself to stand out on the high wire and walk across it on my own, without a safety net below.

I unlace my fingers from Wes’s and push my chair back, standing upright and feeling my legs steady beneath me, ready to take ownership of what is mine. My life, my name, my memory.

“Eleanor Rigby…waits by the window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for?”

Of course it’s only a song. How was I ever foolish enough to think something otherwise?

“Forever Young”

—Bob Dylan

M y mother is waiting on the front porch when we pull up. I slam the Land Rover door shut, and Wes does the same— bam, bam —the sounds of the metal doors reverberating through the quiet country air like gunshots.

She starts to rise when she sees us, like she’s actually going to greet us as if this were some sort of homecoming, but for once in her life she reconsiders and flops back on the bench, which has been righted after Peter and Anderson’s earlier melee.

As I get closer, I can see that her eyes are bloated, the skin around them puckering like cauliflowers, and they are pink and watery and guilty. She opens her mouth to speak, but I flare a hand up quickly— don’t —because I do not, not for one second, want to hear another excuse from her.

Wes scoots around me and heads inside with a squeeze of my shoulder, and I stop, there on the front steps, and jut my chin, wondering if words can ever be enough to clear the debris from the fallout, to say what needs to be said. After a lifetime of carrying around the weight of her—of all of the grown-ups’—sins, of the debt that mired us, what is there even left to do to move toward healing?

She clears her throat. “Before you say anything, I sent Peter home. Rory took him to the airport.”

“And?” I say, like I’m supposed to thank her for this when I didn’t ask her to bring him here in the first place. Didn’t ask her to stick her head into any of this in the first place, until a wiser voice reminds me that, in fact, I did. Back in the hospital, when I didn’t know where to lean, I leaned on her, and asked indeed. So maybe the lines are blurred between black and white, family and foes, instinct and self-preservation. The new me and old. And also, my responsibility in this and to her and my loved ones.

“And I’m sorry,” she says, hiccupping like a toddler.

“For which part?” I contemplate sitting next to her but it feels like too much of a concession.

She gnaws her upper lip and blinks, and for a split second I think she’s going to delve back into her plasticized, spiritual guru self. I can see her debating it, slipping under that mask because under that mask, she never had to reveal her true self. The woman who stayed with him despite my purple welts. But then she surprises me.

“Look,” she says in a voice so guttural I barely recognize it. “I screwed up. I screwed up from the minute your father first met Heather, and I didn’t stop until now.”

“And you’re only realizing this now? Because of everything that’s happened?”

She shakes her head, staring down at the painted white porch. “No, no. I’ve pretty much known it from the start. I just didn’t know what to do about it, didn’t know any better. And he was everything I had, back then, when they met at some party for the artist crowd. I was just…I didn’t find out for a few years. He always told me he was in Vermont at his studio.” She loses herself to something, then circles back. “And by then, well, I was desperate. You’d already been born, and I had no career, and our lives rose and set around your father, and so when I discovered that he was screwing other people, well, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

“What else were you supposed to do? Are you seriously asking me this question?” After everything, is she really asking me this ?

“Well, sure, now, today, you guys are all very I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, but it wasn’t like that back then. And besides, he promised that he wouldn’t leave. Not leave leave. I mean, not leave us. Just for a few weeks in the summer because, well, there was Wes, and then you sometimes went with him and seemed content. He had his terrible moments.”

“Clearly an understatement.” I instinctively reach for my upper arms, and she knows exactly of what I speak, her eyes welling.

“I drove down and got you as soon as I could,” she says, her voice breaking. “Of course I knew that he had his moods, but never once…”

“You know what I hear? I hear a whole slew of excuses. I hear a mother who didn’t do right by her daughters twenty years ago and who didn’t do right by one of them this past year, either.” I am suddenly seething, rage boiling viscerally in my guts, that she could sit here and still not own it, still not see the weight of my inheritance. Even though I know that I’m better than this anger, even though I know I need to let it go if I’m ever going to find it in me to move on. “I’m seeing a mother who didn’t learn from her own goddamn mistakes! Who instead urged me, when I was most vulnerable, to repeat them! To take my own dickish husband back, for god’s sake!”

“You don’t get it!” She stands now and squeals. “It wasn’t just me! It was you, too!”

“Don’t make me complicit in your games! Don’t tell me that I knew what I was doing when you told me to forgive him because I was, for all intents and purposes after the crash, a goddamn newborn! How can you hold me accountable for my decisions when I had no information—except what you told me—in making them?”

“No, no,” she says more quietly now, retreating and sitting back down. “I meant with your dad.” She sighs and regroups. “After I picked you up that summer, you refused to talk about it. Refused to even acknowledge it. And you were so very, very angry with me for ruining your time here, for making you leave. So angry.”

I narrow my eyes and try to remember—how much of this is coming through her own filter?

Bits and pieces come to me: of the drive home, of the hot pleather seat in the station wagon on the back of my thighs, of Rory sitting up front and tuning the radio from station to station, the static of the in-between moments fraying my already frayed nerves. The bruises were ripe by then, so I’d tossed on one of Wes’s long-sleeved lacrosse shirts, like concealing the welts meant anything. I stared at the back of my mom’s head, at the wisps on her nape that dragged beneath her ponytail, and wished her dead. Dead in the way that only teen girls can. I wish you dead! I’d watch the hairs fly around from the open window, Bob Dylan singing dissonantly between us —“May your heart always be joyful, may your song always be sung, and may you stay forever young”— and come up with the various ways that I could maim her.

“Go on,” I say to her today, the seeds of her truth finding their way into me.

“I tried to make you go see a therapist, which, at the time, was almost unheard of.” For a moment, she can’t help herself, and she so easily slides back into her old persona. But she realizes her mistake, clears her throat, and continues. “But you were having none of it. You retreated to the guesthouse and painted and painted—music blaring just like he used to, like you were, I don’t know, sending him a message, compensating. And then your dad did come back—one day, a few weeks later, out of the blue, he shows up, and you ran out to the front lawn, swallowing him up. Instant, total absolution on your half. Both of you pretending like nothing happened.”