I watch her assemble an outfit for a night out, lounging on the silky discard pile on her bed as she tries on each ensemble with this belt, then that one, this necklace, that heel. Her body is exactly like mine, but grown; her kneecaps are smooth and rounded, her ankles small and bony, her wrists too small for most bangles. I stand by as she drapes eye shadow onto her deep-pocketed eyes, the silver dust clinging to the wide awnings of her lids. I love the way my mother smells, how soft her skin feels just above the knuckles.
I am happily, completely, my mom’s spawn. She is my world or, more specifically, my country, and now, in the time of my parents’ divorce, the country is at war. My parents, who fought regularly but never seemed to hate each other, have turned into vicious adversaries. In a panic to assemble some foot soldiers, my mom shares details to get us to join her side—which we do, given that my dad’s influence in our lives measures just a drop compared to the ocean of our mother’s, and that my dad refuses to talk about the divorce with us, never presenting us with his defense. I feel guilt over this years afterward, but we were just kids; it wasn’t a fair contest.
My quiet dad grows even quieter. The invisible force field that has always surrounded him now turns so hard that I can almost see it, and because we’re not sharing a house any longer, I lose even the small bits of affection that I used to glean from just being in his presence. He makes regular, awkward trips to the city to take us to professional sports events or to formal dinners. By this point my mother has taken on a character role, the wronged woman, and she is “spitting mad”—even though we are pretty sure the divorce was her idea. Midway through their three-year court battle, my brothers and I lose interest in her character, and in his character, and for once in our lives feel a unanimous desire to flip the channel and watch a new show.
That the divorce’s eventual outcome takes my mother by surprise is an understatement. The judge does not seem to agree with her request for lifetime maintenance, and it turns out that in addition to raising us and ferrying my brothers to early-morning hockey practices and weekend tournaments, she will also soon have to get a job. When I come home from school, I sometimes find her in bed. It’s so unlike her that I worry. I crawl in next to her and listen to her rail against the evil cards our dad’s lawyer played that week in court.
Finally, one day she gets up early and decides to enroll in a college class to renew her teaching license. This does not mean that her fury has dissipated. It means it has solidified into a mantra.
“Kids! It’s time for a new family motto,” she says, as I riffle through my memory to recall any previous mottos.
“Fuck it!” She was referring to the divorce, to the move, to all our struggles to adjust, to our collective fear of an unfamiliar future. “Fuck! It!” she says, laughing, her new blunt haircut shaking. We look at her in shock, and then at one another with cracked conciliatory smiles, because even though the subversion was hers, she means for us to share it.
—
Somehow in all the fighting over monetary details, the big question—Why can’t you just get along?—was neither posed nor answered. We never did find out why they split up. Being kids, all we really knew was that we were now living in a new town.
After six months in the office-apartment complex, my mom moved us into a big beige house in a freshly constructed suburban neighborhood so twisting and dizzying that the developers must have been high when they plotted it. Our house was identical to two others in the neighborhood, and more than once I pulled into the wrong driveway. Driving in circles along the endless meandering snake paths of my new streets, I felt out of the bottom reaches of teenage lostness, not yet understanding that the visual sense I was missing in my environment was soul. My mom sought out only the freshest of Sheetrocked starts for all of us, but I couldn’t help but feel the lack of history there: Park Rapids could feel gritty, at times about as glamorous as carpet worn down to the plastic mesh, but it was nonetheless storied. And when we lived there, so were we.
My brother Bob shot up about a foot, grew out his hair in the back, and won a rare freshman spot on the varsity hockey team. A true northerner, he found his footing on the ice. The familiar, funky, dry-aged-beef odor of his and Marc’s hockey equipment thawing out by our fireplace, the fresh layer of animal-boy sweat drying into a shellac on top of the last one, remained the only reassuring indicator of our former home.
Marc, at only ten, was a powder keg, tossing off insults at every provocation, as if he were walking around with tiny sharp rocks in his shoes. Wielding my own wicked tongue and using my language abilities to full press, I appointed myself family judge and chief arbitrator. I spent lots of time telling everyone what they should be feeling so as to cover up the fact that I had no idea what to feel myself. Sometimes my brothers listened to me, and other times they sneered that I was just like Mom, walking around the house with a tissue lodged between coffee cup and saucer as she did, and about as bossy. Mostly, when I wasn’t eating bowls of oily leftovers, I drove around and got lost in suburbia, blaring the alternative radio station at top volume. My adolescent rebellion—“Smells Like Teen Spirit”—had been curtailed out of necessity, but it was still active, like a buried hot spring.
Walking around loose and unknown in my enormous new school, I had my first taste of anonymity. Despite this, I made deep instant friendships with an already established crew of theater goofs, and we spent a lot of time studying for our AP English exams, smoking loosies and drinking strong black coffee in Minneapolis’s late-night coffee shops. My mom insisted that I must be out partying, that there was no way in hell we could be hanging out that long in cafés.
But I was a good girl. And, suddenly, a very hungry one. At home we ate, with more sickly comfort than ever. Feeding hungry, emotional suburban kids—the three of us and, eventually, many of our friends—became my mom’s specialty.