than my own kids are now. We were a broken working-class family in the 1970s. No housekeepers or maids or nannies, but ours was always a spotless house.
Mom made a deliberate decision to stay in the neighborhood when she moved out, purchasing a run-down but nearby house so she could hover around the edges during my teenage years while she renovated her new property. She and Dad settled into a friendly relationship. They showed up as a twosome to all my games and chaperoned school events together. We even celebrated holiday meals together. The whole thing was so weirdly civilized that I doubt most of my teachers even knew that Mr. and Mrs. Norris were no longer officially a couple.
I’ve always found my parents’ marriage enigmatic. There was the romance, then the partnership, then the breakup. When they split I was of an age when I’d just begun to think in rudimentary ideas about intimate relationships. Most of what I gleaned came from magazine articles or eavesdropping on my sisters. They were ten and twelve years older than me, and they were fabulously entertaining to a preteen kid. Their clothes. Their music. The dance moves they tried out. The hair tape one of them would wear to bed the night before a school dance, so that a little curl would dangle from her hairline and cling to her cheek. The young men they swooned over while giggling in the basement. But Marguerite and Cindy had moved away by the time my parents’ marriage started to crumble.
Looking back, I missed the cues. I knew there were tensions and occasional arguments. Mom spent a lot of time away from home, working her side job at the post office library or bowling in a league; Dad often whiled away hours at his brotherWoody’s house. The chatter of late-night TV was sometimes interrupted by the clink of bottles—a search for small comfort in drink. There were no screaming matches or explosive fights, at least not when I was around. Belvin and Betty just seemed to glide to the finish line. One day they were living under the same roof; one day they weren’t. I now know they must have orchestrated the transition to play out so smoothly. They must have made arrangements for me to be absent when they moved my mother’s suitcases to her new home, or conveniently to be at a sleepover when they carried out her book collection and favorite pieces of furniture. And my extended family was in on the conspiracy of silence. No one ever talked to me about my parents’ divorce beyond asking, “Ya doin’ all right, Mickey?”
Over time, I, too, joined the conspiracy. Only once did I ask each of my parents what happened to their marriage, and on both occasions, I learned not to ask again. As I speculated about the reasons for their breakup, I could only conclude that their work schedules had done them in. Mom worked early mornings by choice so she could be home when I returned from school. Dad worked eight to five. I figured they’d been like ships passing, for even as Mom was retiring at night, Dad was putting on his slippers to relax at the end of a long day.
Only in the course of writing this book have I finally been able to talk to my mother about her decision to leave our home. It is not painful in the ways I’d expected, which is not to say it didn’t hurt. As I listen to my mother, the picture of my father that emerges is very different from the one I have clung to for all these years. The man who turned our home into an island of calm was also a man compelled to disdain all outside forces that might disrupt his domestic serenity. I thought my father had learned to exercise extreme discipline to rein in those things he could control, in order to rise above those things he could not. As I hear my mother’s side of the story, his control was something less virtuous and much more like the bars of a cage. Momdid not relish sharing her story. She has always known how close I was to my father. She did not want to tarnish my memories of him. It’s an
Mom made a deliberate decision to stay in the neighborhood when she moved out, purchasing a run-down but nearby house so she could hover around the edges during my teenage years while she renovated her new property. She and Dad settled into a friendly relationship. They showed up as a twosome to all my games and chaperoned school events together. We even celebrated holiday meals together. The whole thing was so weirdly civilized that I doubt most of my teachers even knew that Mr. and Mrs. Norris were no longer officially a couple.
I’ve always found my parents’ marriage enigmatic. There was the romance, then the partnership, then the breakup. When they split I was of an age when I’d just begun to think in rudimentary ideas about intimate relationships. Most of what I gleaned came from magazine articles or eavesdropping on my sisters. They were ten and twelve years older than me, and they were fabulously entertaining to a preteen kid. Their clothes. Their music. The dance moves they tried out. The hair tape one of them would wear to bed the night before a school dance, so that a little curl would dangle from her hairline and cling to her cheek. The young men they swooned over while giggling in the basement. But Marguerite and Cindy had moved away by the time my parents’ marriage started to crumble.
Looking back, I missed the cues. I knew there were tensions and occasional arguments. Mom spent a lot of time away from home, working her side job at the post office library or bowling in a league; Dad often whiled away hours at his brotherWoody’s house. The chatter of late-night TV was sometimes interrupted by the clink of bottles—a search for small comfort in drink. There were no screaming matches or explosive fights, at least not when I was around. Belvin and Betty just seemed to glide to the finish line. One day they were living under the same roof; one day they weren’t. I now know they must have orchestrated the transition to play out so smoothly. They must have made arrangements for me to be absent when they moved my mother’s suitcases to her new home, or conveniently to be at a sleepover when they carried out her book collection and favorite pieces of furniture. And my extended family was in on the conspiracy of silence. No one ever talked to me about my parents’ divorce beyond asking, “Ya doin’ all right, Mickey?”
Over time, I, too, joined the conspiracy. Only once did I ask each of my parents what happened to their marriage, and on both occasions, I learned not to ask again. As I speculated about the reasons for their breakup, I could only conclude that their work schedules had done them in. Mom worked early mornings by choice so she could be home when I returned from school. Dad worked eight to five. I figured they’d been like ships passing, for even as Mom was retiring at night, Dad was putting on his slippers to relax at the end of a long day.
Only in the course of writing this book have I finally been able to talk to my mother about her decision to leave our home. It is not painful in the ways I’d expected, which is not to say it didn’t hurt. As I listen to my mother, the picture of my father that emerges is very different from the one I have clung to for all these years. The man who turned our home into an island of calm was also a man compelled to disdain all outside forces that might disrupt his domestic serenity. I thought my father had learned to exercise extreme discipline to rein in those things he could control, in order to rise above those things he could not. As I hear my mother’s side of the story, his control was something less virtuous and much more like the bars of a cage. Momdid not relish sharing her story. She has always known how close I was to my father. She did not want to tarnish my memories of him. It’s an
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