“What are you reading, Markie?” she would ask when she woke up and saw him sitting with a book in her hospice room.
“Berlin Diaries, by Marie Vassiltchikov.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s interesting.”
“Oh, good!” Maternal relief in her voice. Marky-lark was happy. She would open a book of her own, Ruffian, the true story of a racing horse with a big heart who died young. She had been staring at random pages off and on for the past two years. Like a small child, she would gaze at the text for a few seconds, then fall asleep with her finger in the book.
Mark contemplates the kitchen. Her domain. “I hate this fucking kitchen,” she would spit out every few days, when the appliances were from the fifties and there was too little countertop space. One Christmas Susan gave her, as a joke, a poster that read Fuck Housework in huge fluorescent letters and Mom surprised everyone by putting it up on the wall next to the refrigerator. It stayed there for ten years, only coming down when she finally had the kitchen remodeled. She liked the amenities better after that, but she still announced regularly that she hated cooking. Yet every night she made dinner.
She never allowed anyone in the kitchen while she was cooking. It took Mark years to figure out (when did he figure it out? he can hear Susan calling him a dumbass, and later, when she was kinder, referring to his “healthy obliviousness”) that his mother had arranged her day so that she would spend as little time as possible with his father. Dad got home from work at 5:30, at which point Mom was already in the kitchen cooking. Dinner was at 6:30. At 7:00, Mom would go upstairs with a gin and tonic and a mystery, and read in bed until she fell asleep at around 8:00. She would sleep through the evening as heavily as Susan did all those afternoons when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, doing drugs (about which Mark was equally clueless). When Dad climbed into the marriage bed toward midnight, Mom would pop out to walk the dogs, then sit downstairs in the living room with another gin and tonic, reading more in her mystery until—well, Mark doesn’t know. Susan probably knew.
Maybe his father was as blind as he was. Hard to believe, but evidence suggested it. When Mark was in graduate school, his mother moved into his old bedroom, informing his father of the new state of affairs, and Dad seemed thunderstruck. As far as Mark knew, Mom never relented, and Dad never got over it. Through all Mark’s childhood, his father had not uttered a word to him about his marriage, but now he broke down regularly in Mark’s presence. “She says she’s not sure she ever loved me. I asked her, ‘Were the children, at least, conceived in love?’” Mark noticed that his father—who had never talked about emotions, either his or other people’s, or their existence as a human attribute—drew on an almost Victorian vocabulary now that he was forced to. Mark, heartsick and helpless, would tentatively pat his broad back as he crumpled over the nearest tabletop.
For years Mark heard the same anguish every few weeks, virtually word for word, the story frozen, the pain ever fresh. He began to wonder himself if his mother had ever loved his father, and his old nighttime dream of visiting the house in the future morphed into a daydream about traveling into the past. It was like an answer to that silly hypothetical question people sometimes ask, as far as Mark can tell, just to keep a conversation going—if you could go back in time only once, when and where would you choose? For Mark, there was no contest. He would return to some weekend in 1965. He would ring the doorbell of this house, and when his parents answered (not recognizing him), he’d convince them to let him come in, a friend of a friend (though his parents had no friends), a third cousin, a census taker, an anthropologist, and he’d spend the day observing. What did the young couple talk about? Or if they didn’t talk, were the silences companionable? Seething? Who was the genius loci, the serene boy in his bubble of hobbies, or the smarter, haunted girl?
He eventually came to believe it was Susan, because his mother said such bitter things before and after his father died. But then one day he was sitting with her at the kitchen table, looking at some photos of the old man she’d unearthed during one of her unremembered rambles through the rooms and drawers, and she murmured in an unsteady voice, “He was such a good man.” She began to weep. “I miss him so much.”
Mark was gobsmacked. Time-traveling, his mother had arrived at the station where Mark’s boyhood lived. “Mom,” he wanted to say. “What year is it? Look around, do you see a newspaper?”
He leaves the kitchen and enters the dining room. The ceiling light is reflected in blurry stars on the newly polyurethaned floor. Probably a consequence of the circular polishing. The walls are a beige cream that the realtor chose, and earlier today apologized for. “Against the white trim, there’s too much green in it.”
“Looks all right to me,” Mark said truthfully.
His family never ate dinner here. That’s what the kitchen was for. Instead, the dining room table was where he did his schoolwork. During his high school years it was covered a foot deep in his books and papers. In his busiest period, the winter of eleventh grade, he would come downstairs at four in the morning to finish an essay and sometimes he’d fall asleep huddled next to the radiator. He would dream that he still had his paper route, but had somehow forgotten to do it for years, and all his trusting, loyal customers had been wondering where their newspapers were. Their wounded patience was the most painful part of the dream.
The
