How will I know her when she returns? Will she still be my terrible home? So much has blown down and scattered since she retreated. The surface of my world juts, prickly and bare now. When she first pulled away I wanted it to be because she was dead. That, however searing, would have been easier to bear in the end than the certainty that it was because she didn’t want me and couldn’t take it back. There is an old black and white photograph of her reclining on the stone patio of my grandparents’ house. Her full skirt is plumed grandly around her, her loose ankle an elegant line emerging from the skirt, beautiful toes extended in an open sandal dropping toward the ground. My grandfather’s dog, Zoo Zoo, is trying to lick her face and she is laughing and dodging his advances. The tight, smooth bun and one dark curl, neatly flattened to the corner of her forehead, belie this moment of playful abandon. This woman is careful; constructed. After she was diagnosed and moved back to my grandparents’ ranch there was no more vain spit curl. She had gone slack in some way that confused me. It was as if I should be able to get to her–she did seem softer somehow–but there was no way I could find to get in, to happen to draw her attention and then lay back there.
In those days I walked the three miles from second grade along the rows and rows of dark-leafed orange trees with winter white blossoms and a fragrance so frantically lovely I grieved in the pall of it. Many afternoons, as I turned, finally, into the dirt drive that led between the groves to the little red house I could hear her cackle; loud, with an abandon both vulgar and infectious. A gush of regret would tackle me in these moments for having turned my heart against her. Damn her! God damn her! And then the familiar, dreadful slick of longing would sluice out into my belly, slogging my bare knees; a congestion of thwarting. I’d stand outside the garage in the dry dirt and fallen oak leaves, so still now, live, wondering how to go in there. Some afternoons I’d steel myself and sneak in silently, below the television blare, for the big spoon of peanut butter that consoled me. Others I would turn from the door and climb into the hammock under the grand old oak whose branches gnarled over the roof to slowly sway in the rhythmic creaking until I was sure that in outer space none of this was actually happening; that, since no one knows how much it hurts, it can’t actually be hurting. The cool, shaded blank of this custom gave something to me that I needed to walk back into that little house and remain invisible there. But even if she had noticed me I’m certain the strain of being seen would have pushed me back out into deep space.
Marla McFadin is a trained psychotherapist interested in transitions into and away from connecting to the expected world. She grew up in a small, progressive town in California where she carried the natural environment into her way of understanding traumatic relationships. She is moved by expressions of yearning.