Mom is severely silent, her face gripped tight; I can see the tiniest bones that make up her face, the bones in her neck, clenched like barbed wire . She looks so much older today than she ever has. She frightens me with her weakness, her moment of surrender. If she surrenders, she who’s always been at the top of the game, what would become of us? She doesn’t break though, only answers curtly that she is too tired to think or to answer. My sister can’t concentrate on her home work. She is angry because she has a full-time job and two classes and can’t be home enough to help out.
“It was all my damn idea to buy this house,” she says, as she’s said many times before.
“No. It wasn’t all you. We ALL decided. We all thought it through and agreed,” I say and mean it.
“Still. It was me.”
Damn the unfairness of life. I told her that I didn’t want to leave her alone for the night, alone in her miserable thoughts and the fact that she had an exam she hadn’t studied for the day after tomorrow.
“It’s not fair,” I say, “to leave you. Alone.”
“Nothing in the world is,” she says in English.
I sigh. I curse. I get angry at the one god I’ve always counted on, though still believe somehow things WILL be okay again. That after all we’ve been through, after all that has happened to my father, to my mother, to them and to us and to the world and to our houses and our homes, everything, will, be, okay. Again. Somehow.
And with this I walk up the stairs, tired again, not only from physical pain, but from the sadness that I see in their faces, the failure that my sister sees in what she thinks she brought upon us, forgetting that the house brought more blessings than curse, that we needed it for rejuvenation if not for other things. I am sad as I try to fix my own life, move on independently, ahead, while I watch them try to rebuild. I watch my sister, who still feels responsible for everything, and my parents who try to make us perfect to cover up their imperfect pasts. And I become them. I am them in so many ways and I don’t know where to go, how to make it okay for everybody.
How do I do that? How do I make life fair?
The lingering silence of their dissatisfaction is something you can’t quite let go of no matter how much you try because in the end you too are dissatisfied.