A SUMMER AT HOME
Katherine Miller
“Oh, I’m just so depressed,” I said in mock whine. An uncontrolled sigh belayed the humor I tried to relate. I hoped Mike wouldn’t be more concerned than he already was.
“So, Di, your stint as domestic goddess is going that well, huh?” I could just see his goateed frown on the other end of the phone. It was strange hearing from him during the summer. We see a lot of each other while on campus, but I never thought of keeping in touch over the summer. We have an odd friendship anyway. Mike is eight years older than I; a returning student after that long of a lapse. We’ve had some pretty deep conversations over lunches and biology labs, but both of us were always too busy to see each other away from classes. I figured Mike had called, like many of my other friends who I never hear from, to check up on me. To make sure I hadn’t done anything drastic.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” I sighed again. It’s an annoying habit. “I’ve been keeping this place from falling apart.” The house was spotless. “In fact, right now, I’m getting ready to make dinner.” And I was too. I juggled the cordless phone as I wrestled the pressure cooker from it’s bottom cabinet.
“Really?” Mike’s voice perked at the mention of food. “What are you making?”
“Spaghetti. You want some? You could jump in your car right now and make it in time to finish off the last of it.” Mike lived only an hour away in Lincoln. I set the cooker on the front burner of the stove and collected the partially defrosted hamburger from microwave and onions from the fridge. I was glad the subject had deviated from myself, and it suddenly occurred to me that it might be nice to see Mike.
“Don’t I wish,” he said. “I have to be at work in about an hour.”
“I’m sorry.” Mike was a Psychology major who worked part time as a counselor for the juvenile branch of the state corrections board. I knew he hated the job sometimes. Mike is a sympathetic sort and hates not being able to really help people. I had tried my best—unsuccessfully—not to unload on Mike.
I broke up the hamburger as best I could and turned the burner to high. I cleaned two onions and started to cut them up; the garden hadn’t yielded any fresh green peppers yet.
“Actually, I do have a reason for calling...”
“Oh, really?” I said in mock surprise. I knew there had to be some ulterior motive.
“You know I told you last fall about my sister’s house on the lake?”
I nodded—another annoying habit especially when one is on the phone—I did remember, vaguely. “You spent your vacation last summer there. Some family get-together?”
“Yeah, well, this summer I’m spending my vacation taking Abnormal Psych during the second session—”
“Oooh, fun.”
“Yeah, and my sister and her family aren’t going to make it out there because of some business Bob has to take care of. Bob’s her husband,” Mike said without taking a breath. I nodded again with total non-understanding as to what all of this had to do with me. “Well, she doesn’t want to leave the place unoccupied all summer. The last time she did they had to spend about five hundred dollars fixing damages. We seem to be safe if someone spends at least a couple weeks there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So, we were looking for someone to look after the place, and I thought of you.” There was certain tone of victory in Mike’s voice like he’d just found the perfect solution to everyone’s problems.
“Ah.” I wasn’t sure what else to say yet. The onions were browning nicely with the ground beef. I dragged one of the kitchen chairs into the pantry so I could reach the cans of tomato sauce and paste on the top shelf. I balanced the phone between my ear and shoulder.
“Diane? Are you still there?” I really hadn’t meant for there to be such a long pause; it just sort of happened. I was trying desperately to think of excuses to turn the offer down. “Yeah, I’m still here I was just working on my sauce.”
“I thought you might want to get away from everything for a while,” his voice quieter now. He was only trying to help. My family had fallen to pieces during my sophomore year in college. This would be the first extended stay in a household that had no parents. My father had left without leaving behind a cause, and my mother, well, she had just changed.
“I don’t know, Mike. You know, I’d love to, but I should stick around here, for my little brother’s sake anyway,” I said trying to convince myself that was the only reason I was here. Right now, my brother Tom was “vacationing” with my grandparents in Minnesota. I envied him; even though he’d have to attend the huge Johnson family reunion, he could at least leave all this behind for a month.
“I thought he was going to Minnesota with your grandparents?” The man’s a mind-reader!
“He is, but that’s not for a few weeks yet,” I lied. Actually, they’d be back in a few weeks. I’d totally forgotten I had mentioned the trip to Mike when last lamenting my situation. Luckily for me, he’d forgotten when the trip had been planned.
“Well, come down when he leaves,” said Mike.
“How am I going to get food and stuff when I’m there? I still don’t have a car. And I’d be all alone out there with nothing to do,” I said. This was my last-chance out.
“There’s a Mom-and-Pop market about two blocks and around the corner, I’d be only twenty minutes away, and it would be a great chance for you to catch up on your reading,” Mike replied to my points as quickly as I had presented them. I was impressed; he’d thought out all the excuses I’d use before I had even heard the question. I sighed again. This time it was mixed with a chuckle. When Mike resigns himself to helping a friend, he goes all out. The offer was tempting, but there was really no way I could go. I was needed here. Maybe I could straighten things out...
“Your being at home isn’t going to change anything,” his voice was low and sensible. It made me want to cry because I knew he was right. Or maybe it was just the vapors off the simmering onion.
“I know,” I whispered. There was more to that smell than just onions... “ACK! The meat’s burning.” I grabbed the pressure cooker by the handle and moved it to a cold burner. “Listen, Mike, I better go or we’ll be eating out again. I’ll think about staying at the lake while my brother’s gone and give you a call then.”
“Do you have my number?”
“Um,” I tried to think, “I did, but I lost my address book moving home.”
“Okay, I’ll give it to you again.”
“Wait a minute, let me grab a pen. There’s never one by the phone.” I picked a felt tip out of the kitchen utility drawer. Mike gave me his number, along with an assurance he’d accept charges if I’d call collect. I wrote it down on the post-a-note pad by the phone’s cradle.
“Remember, call me.”
“I will,” I said as I hung up.
“Who was on the phone?”
I whirled around, startled, like I had been caught in the illegal act of conspiracy. My mother had just come in the sliding patio door and was standing at the kitchen table. I don’t think she noticed the odd look on my face, so I recovered before she saw it. She was still dressed from work in black jeans and a country-looking shirt complete with fringe; overdressed, in my opinion, for telemarketing. She had a strange glassy eyed smile on her face. I wondered how many drinks she’d had before she came home. I dug the electric can opener out of the cupboard beside me and went on with my cooking, my back to her, before I answered.
“Oh, it was just Mike,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.
“Mike? Mike? Do I know any Mikes?” I withheld a sigh for once. She was in a spacy mood.
“No, he’s my friend. You know, the old guy,” I said. Mike has always been “the old guy” because Mom can never keep the people I know from school straight. I had met Mike during my Freshman year, when my mother was still over-protective of me, before her own separation She had nearly flipped when she thought I was actually dating someone eight years older then myself; none of my assurances that Mike was “just a friend” had ever sunk in. But that was before. Now, I’m sure she wouldn’t care less if I was sleeping with him. I wondered if I should bring up his proposal of a summer away.
“Oh, him,” she said, understanding dawning on her. “Gee, maybe I should meet him. We might get along well together.” I was still turned around adding the tomato products to my meat and onions (it wasn’t as badly burnt as I thought—a little garlic salt would cover the taste) and gathering seasonings from the cabinets above me. She didn’t see me cringe. I hoped she was kidding and knew she probably wasn’t.
“Do you need me to season that for you?” she asked as I liberally shook oregano into the pot.
“Nope. I can do it myself.”
“See, you really don’t need your old mother any—”
“Are you eating with me tonight?” I interrupted. I did not want to hear another one of her little spiels about how it was all right for her to act like a rebellious teen-ager
while I was “doing just fine”. I snapped down the lid of the pressure cooker and put it back on the hot burner. I turned around to see her answer.
She had seated herself at the far end of the kitchen table. The cordless phone was in front of her as well as her electronic address book. She had no intention of staying and eating with her eldest child. My mother, the socialite, always had plans to be somewhere other than home.
“You’d better put your noodles on,” she said without looking up at me.
I shook my head and made no secret of my fourth sigh of the day. I made a lot of noise getting the spaghetti cooker out. It was a big cast-iron thing and made a satisfying amount of racket.
“Oh, alright,” my mother gave in as though I had been arguing with her. “I’ll stay home tonight if that’s what you want.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I muttered. She either didn’t hear me or simply ignored it. I kept my focus on filling the spaghetti pot with water.
We had been going on like this, to a greater or lesser extent, since September. I wanted her—all of us—to get counseling; we needed it, really. But she countered that with a lack-of-money plea. It was strange how she had money for everything except what was good for her family. It wasn’t that I wanted everything to be the way it used to be. My father had been unhappy in the marriage. Even though my mother hadn’t started drinking until after he left, I tried not to blame him. All I wanted was my mother back. I wanted her to care enough not to even joke about hitting on my friends. I wanted her to remember what classes I was taking next semester like she used to. I wanted her to do little things like staying home to eat the dinner I had made. But my mom had changed so much, more than seemed reasonable to me.
Maybe I was just being selfish. I had tried everything really. I had talked until I was blue in the face: to her, to Dad, to anyone who’d listen, even Mike. Guilt trips and rebellions didn’t work anymore because she had this new Enlightened Philosophy that no longer required her to care. “The only person I have to answer for is myself.” It was what my father had said when he left, and she had done her best to live up to that ideal from then on. I wished sometimes I could buy into it, too. I had even cried; at twenty years old I had cried like a helpless child.
The spaghetti pot was overflowing. I shut the water off and dumped out a fourth of it. I added salt and put it on the other large stove burner, cranking it up to high. I had to wait now for everything to come to a boil.
It was as I set the timer for the spaghetti that the phone rang. Mom and I had been sitting at opposite ends of the table in silence. She was fiddling with her check book, trying to find money where there was none. I didn’t even get up once in a while to check if the water was boiling. I just gave it a good ten minutes before I added the raw, stiff noodles.
The first ring was nearly drowned out by a combination of beeping from the digital timer and the hiss and sputters of the pressure cooker. Mom caught it on the second ring before the answering machine kicked in.
“Oh, hi, Gene.” Gene was one of her latest best friends. I tried not to listen in, even as I strained to hear over all the kitchen noise. I had my back to her again, stirring the noodles to keep them from sticking.
“That sounds like fun,” my mother smiled. “When are you two going? Hmmm.” I wonder if she looked up to check my reaction.
I knew whatever Gene’s plans were they began now, would continue through dinner time (probably until the bars closed), and would be irresistible to my mother. I threw her a poisonous look over my shoulder; she didn’t see it. She was writing something on the pad she’d nabbed from beside the phone. I turned back to the stove. I felt paralyzed. I wanted to stop her to force her to stay here and eat dinner with me, but I couldn’t move.
She hung up the phone. She walked up and stood behind me. I didn’t turn around.
“Gene and Dawn are going out to celebrate Dawn’s birthday at the Winchester Bar. I’ve never been there before. Dawn had to give me the address,” she explained. “I’ll only be gone an hour or so, and I won’t drink anything but Diet Pepsi.”
I managed a shrug. They were all promises I’d heard before. She didn’t say anything more because there was nothing more to say. She grabbed her purse from the table where she had set it when she came home and left through the patio door. The timer on the spaghetti hadn’t even rang yet.
“Fine,” I muttered. I couldn’t hear myself, the pressure cooker had settled into it’s chug-chug rhythm. Dinner was almost ready. I could see, out of the corner of my eye, through the kitchen window, her car back down the driveway.
“FINE!” I screamed. I grabbed the pressure cooker from the stove and threw it down. It’s amazing it didn’t put a hole in the floor. All I can think now, looking back, is pressure cookers must not have safety devices for occasions when people slam them into the ground. Upon impact, it nearly exploded. The lid burst off and hot, very hot, tomato sauce splattered on to everything including my ankles. I didn’t notice any pain.
My violence seemed to be cured, though. I stood there for many minutes staring at the mess I made, but left the boiling pot of noodles where it was. I even reached over and calmly turn the burners, both of them, off. My brain finally registered a hot sensation from the lower part of my legs, but it wasn’t unbearable. For a while, I contemplated cleaning it up.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said out loud to myself. It took a few minutes more to realize what I meant by that. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to be here to clean it up. I was going to be gone. I was going to a house by a lake where I could cook spaghetti without interruptions. I only ended up eating alone anyway. My ankles were burning now, but I had no time. I had to leave now.
I ran down stairs to my basement bedroom and grabbed the suitcase out of the closet. I dumped the winter clothes stored in it into a messy heap on the floor. My mind was reeling as I tried to think of everything I should take. I shoveled clothes and underwear from my dresser drawers into the suitcase, not worrying if the case would close later. I’d take one of the boxes of books I hadn’t unpacked when I came home from school this summer. I had to remember to get stuff from the bathroom upstairs: toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, my headache pills...
“I have to get out of here,” I explained to no one. “I have to leave now.” I glanced at the clock. “I have to call Mike before he leaves for work, before I run out of time.”
I dashed back up stairs to the telephone in the kitchen despite the disabling pain in my ankles. I picked up the phone before I realized I didn’t know the number. Where was the notepad? On the table. I spun around, phone receiver in hand. The pad was on the table where Mom left it. It was totally blank. I blinked. It was still blank. It slowly sank in. My mother had written the address for the Winchester Bar on the same sheet of paper I had written Mike’s number. It wasn’t here. I didn’t have it.
All the energy I had drained out of me. I knew it wouldn’t work. I could look through my boxes again for my address book, but it wouldn’t be there. It was too late anyway, even if I called information for Mike’s number. He would be at work by now. He wouldn’t be able to take me out to the lake house until tomorrow. And tomorrow, Mom would be back. She might even stay for a while...
I went back down stairs and slowly unpacked the suitcase. I folded each garment of clothing to perfection. I put the suitcase back in the closet, and forgot all about the books and the necessities in the bathroom upstairs. My ankles were red even after I wiped the sauce off. Several blisters were forming, but I really didn’t feel any pain now.
I went back up stairs to clean up the mess on the kitchen floor. The sauce was still hot.
