LARRY LAU

     It was the summer between my seventh and eighth grades and I had just turned thirteen. My brother, Bill, two years older, and I, were slated to spend the majority of this vacation time with Mom. She lived in Bend, Oregon, on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountain range, with her new husband, Bob. We lived in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on the western side of the Cascades, roughly a four-hour drive between the two.
       The idea of spending nearly two months with Mom had its good and bad sides. It was good because I still loved her, even though she had left us six years earlier, and because there was the unspoken hope that she might someday return. The bad side of visiting Mom and Bob was that Bob was a part of it, and it was their home. I was always suspicious of Bob and held the little kid instinct that he couldn’t be trusted. I didn’t like him and the feeling was mutual.  Which was why he was always picking on me. Case in point: one night the four of us were playing cards and Bob was obviously cheating, slipping cards from the bottom of the deck.  When I called him on it he laughed in my face. Furious, I threw my cards down on the table, stood up, and declared, “I’m not going to play with a cheater. I’m going to play with myself!” and charged out of the room.  Bob laugh even louder, yelling, “Yeah, you go do that!” (I didn’t understand the tactical opening I had left him with.) But there was another time he was so nasty to me with a crude joke that my mother exploded in a fury at him, letting loose a torrent of protective maternal invective at the top of her lungs that was so loud she froze the whole house in fear. It was in the immediate aftermath of the silence that followed, that I knew I had a mother who still loved me.
         We got out to their house located just outside of town on several acres of land, which included a private airstrip, a runway to accommodate Bob’s Cessna 180, a four-seater single-prop airplane.
       It was going to be the longest extended vacation ever with  Mom. However, a couple of days later, Mom pulled us aside and a new plan was laid out for the two of us, a new plan for the summer, full of fun and adventure, a character-building adventure. Now, as soon as you hear the words, “character building”, you know you’re not going to like it.
        Bob and Mom had arranged for Bill and me to spend the summer on a wheat ranch, working.  Bob had a friend, a Mr. Hudspeth, who owned one of the largest wheat ranches in Eastern Oregon, something like 50,000 acres, and he was more than happy for the extra hired hands. It wasn’t as if Bill and I had any say in the matter; it was decided for us – a fait accompli.
        So, a few short days after arriving in Bend, we climbed into Bob’s Cessna and took flight into the blue morning sky heading east. I don’t really remember any specific conversation during the flight, just some vague talking sounds coming from the front seat, Mom trying to paint a rosy picture of the adventure to come, barely audible above the loud and constant growl of the airplane’s engine. We flew above a terrain that was expansive and vast and essentially deserted. Looking out the window, I remember seeing miles and miles of endless rolling hills covered with billowing windblown wheat fields. This is what we finally landed on, a converted stretch of field that had been cut down to make a rudimentary landing strip.  Bob taxied to a stop next to an old pick-up truck and we were met by Mr. Hudspeth, a crusty old codger. Greetings ensued and everybody had their smiles on, except for Bill and me. Then we watched Mom and Bob climb back into the plane and take off into the still blue morning sky and disappear into the direction from which we had just come.
       Mr. Hudspeth drove us in the pick-up down to the main farmhouse, which operated as the headquarters of this working wheat ranch. It was where all the meals were served and it had several rooms upstairs where most of the hired hands slept. There were a large living room and a long porch outside with wooden chairs. The dining room opened off the living room and accommodated a sizable table, where everyone sat together at mealtime. Mr. Hudspeth introduced us to a few people, including the main boss, and more or less just handed us over to strangers, with instructions to get us bunked, get us fed, and get us to work. Separate from this main farmhouse was a smaller but nicer farmhouse where the head guy, the main boss, lived with his wife and 14-year old daughter. These two women did all the cooking—-three large meals a day for upwards of a dozen people—-and kept the main floor clean. I remember the daughter being pretty.
       Now, there’s one thing about the main boss that was new to me and to which a few people would refer to from time to time behind his back, and that was that the boss had tits. Big tits, as big as a full-grown woman’s and he had to wear a bra. Most of the time he would cover them up with his blue work shirt, but every now and then he’d walk around the house with just his white tank top on and it’d be hard not to look at them.
       After introductions, Bill and I were led out the back door to a shack about 30 yards away. It was situated under the shade of a big old tree and it didn’t look like it had seen a brush of paint in a long time. There were no interior walls, just the frame structure of a square shack, boarded up on the outside with weathered planks. When the wind blew outside, it was drafty inside. There was no plumbing, just some creaky beds and some wooden boards for shelves and one exterior door that never seemed to close right.
       The next day, it was an early rise, breakfast at 6 am. Then we were loaded into the trucks that took us up to the fields. Being the smallest person there, I always rode in the back of one of the pick-ups and it was cold most mornings, especially before the sun came up. And then, of course, by mid-day it got really hot, the kind of hot that makes almost everything stick to your skin, like wheat dust and wheat chafe, the latter of which, when it got down into your jeans, required immediate attention.
       So, we worked the wheat fields of Mr. Hudspeth’s wheat ranch, with a crew of about ten to twelve men, mostly misfits, parolees, probationers, some down and out adult delinquents, and a few serious dimwits. I remember this one guy, you couldn’t say the word “mother” around him or he’d explode into a paroxysm of profanity and run insanely out of the room. I learned that the hard way. At dinner one night, I spoke the word ‘mother’ in some lame adolescent joke and this man dropped his fork and sprang up from his chair, screaming, “don’t you talk about my mother. Don’t you ever talk about my mother!” and he cussed his way out of the room. From upstairs you could hear him slugging the walls for a while.
        It turns out I was too small to lift the bales of hay up onto the flatbed truck. Each bale weighed 80 to 90 pounds and try as I might, I couldn’t get them up there. So, being as I couldn’t do the full work of a man, they said I was only worth half of what they paid the men who could. The minimum wage at the time was $1.35 an hour, half of that was .67 cents, which is what they paid me.
        They finally settled on me walking ahead of the flatbed truck and pulling the bales into straight lines so the men who could buck the bales onto the truck wouldn’t have to veer very far to pick them up. At one point, they did try to teach me how to operate and drive the big truck, which was a prospect beyond my wildest dreams. Imagine me, driving a thirteen gear truck, sitting up there on high in the cab, while my brother had to slog along bucking the bales all day behind me. It was a possibility that couldn’t be topped. But they gave up on the idea pretty fast after I messed up with the clutch one too many times. I just couldn’t get the hang (quickly enough) of working the clutch and the accelerator at the same time, which made the truck  lurch forward or slam to a halt going backward, causing the stacked hay bales on the flatbed to tumble down.
         We were warned to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes, the kind that likes to sun themselves in the field and become almost invisible in the color of the grass. You had to be careful not to step on them, which I nearly did a couple of times, the rattle of the snake’s tail so loud and frightening I swear I leaped 20 feet high and 20 feet backward, landing in a sprint, screaming, “Snake!” There were also badgers, which we saw, but only at a distance; flat, low to the ground, aggressive looking. We chased one once to his burrow in the field, but he wouldn’t come out and let us get a better look, even after I found a stick and poked it into the hole several times. We found out later that badgers belong to the wolverine family and could have, in the blink of an eye, torn our faces off. We saw a cougar once, stalking the ridgeline, looking lonely and hungry, but he never got any closer. And there were the porcupines that would come and visit us in the middle of the night, as we slept in our rustic little shack. The thing with porcupines, we learned, was that they liked to clean and sharpen their quills on old boards, which made the exterior walls of our little shack the perfect tool for their needs. That first night, the scraping noise that the sharpening and cleaning created scared the bejesus out of the two of us, having no idea what the sound was.
        There was also a fistfight, if you could call it that. A couple of weeks into our sojourn, a 16-year old juvenile delinquent from reform school was sentenced to work the ranch, and they bunked him in with Bill and me. After exchanging greeting preliminaries, we all agreed that a pillow fight was in order, and we began to whack each other in friendly fashion. But then, I got in a better than expected whack in the new guy’s face and his look of shock was so funny that Bill and I couldn’t help but laugh. This made him furious and set off a barrage of profanities and fist punches directed at my brother, who was ill-equipped to avoid them. After landing a few choice hits, this scary young man slammed outside, nearly wrenching the door off its already rusty hinges. He was never seen by us again.             

         Later that day, I heard my brother crying from inside the barn. He was hiding behind a large stack of hay bales. Approaching quietly, I shuffled my feet in the gravel to let him know I was there. He stopped crying, but his eyes were red with tears. I sat down nearby, but we didn’t talk. Bill and I weren’t really friends. We were two angry boys, who took that anger out on each other, fighting constantly, with me usually getting the short end of the stick. But now, we only had each other, and an unspoken truce seemed to have been agreed upon. After waiting a bit, I climbed to the top of the haystack and sat on the highest bale. Looking down, I saw that Bill had started throwing rocks at the back wall of the barn, denting the wooden planks. I stood up and stretched out my arms, pretending to do a swan dive, but Bill just ignored me. Jumping down, yelling, “Geronimo!” on the way, I landed on a bale right next to him. But even that death-defying feat didn’t shake loose the hurt he was feeling. After one last hard pitch, and one last dent in the wall, Bill said, “I hate this place,” and walked out of the barn into the bright daylight. Sitting on the bale of hay and plucking at the twine string that held it together, I hummed an old cowboy song for a while. Then I caught a couple of barn mice and put them in a box. I watched them run around for a bit, looking for a way out until finally, they stopped. Then I tipped the box over and left the barn. The dinner bell was ringing.

I remember the sound of the Oregon coast. Thundering plumes of sea spray exploding up into the air, like howling giants, as wave after wave smashed into the massive rocks jutting out into the ocean at both ends of the short, nearly deserted beach. Rolling mounds of sand dunes spread across the distance, thick with tall grass whipped by the constant wind. It was the last day of our vacation and Mom said she had to talk to us. We followed her out of the beach house down through the grass. Finding a clearing, the three of us sat down in the sand. My brother Bill, nine years old, on one side of her, and me, seven years old, on the other. And we waited to hear what we had done wrong. When Mom said she had to talk to us, it usually meant a reprimand was on its way. But she was quiet for a while and didn’t seem angry or mad. Bill and I were adept at picking up those signals, so we were unsure of what was to come.
        Finally, Mom put her arms around our shoulders and, pulling us tightly together, said,  “I want you boys to know I’ll always love you. Okay? I want you to know that. But I have to leave for a while. I’m not sure how long, but I’ll always be coming back. Okay? I’ll be back.” There was a silence for a moment, and then Bill began to cry. Mom embraced him with both her arms, rocking him gently back and forth. As Bill continued to cry, I watched, confused and alarmed. I didn’t understand what was happening. Why was Bill crying? Mom said she was going away, but she was coming back. That’s what she said. But I was frightened at being left out and started to cry too, and Mom put her arm back around my shoulders, holding both her sons in a tight huddle. When the crying was over, we brushed the sand off and walked back to the beach house, quietly. I still didn’t understand what was happening, but I felt better, believing the crisis was over.
      Dad had joined us that afternoon, it was dark by the time we started packing up the cars to begin our trip back to Lake Oswego. When it was time to go, Bill and I were told to pile into Dad’s car. I remember watching Mom getting into her black Buick convertible. The top was down, and as she drove away, I remember feeling a little something not right about her being alone. Dad kept a close distance behind her, his headlights lighting up the back of the Buick as we sped through the dark coastal hills. Watching Mom drive through the night, I couldn’t take my eyes off her thick, blonde hair thrashing in the wind.
       Mom never did show up at the house that night. Curled up in the back seat, I had fallen asleep and didn’t wake up until I heard Dad and Bill getting out of the car. Expecting to see her Buick parked in the driveway, I was surprised that she was nowhere to be seen. Then I remembered what she’d said at the beach. “I’ll be back.” That’s what she said. And day after day from that point forward she remained nowhere to be seen.  I never stopped believing those words, but with each passing day, it became harder to hold onto them, like a flame getting smaller until it’s gone.
        If you’re lucky, that’s when disappearing comes to your rescue. I was lucky.
       Most of the time I didn’t even notice I was disappearing until I reappeared, and I quickly came to prefer being there than in the land-of-hurt. The first time it happened, I was so surprised, I almost laughed out loud. Having given up my daily walk around the house looking to see if Mom had returned, going from one room to the next hoping to see her, I was downstairs in the family room, sitting on the old couch, staring out the window. The house was completely quiet, all three floors. Dad and Bill must have gone somewhere, leaving me by myself, which was happening a lot. Then I felt a small jolt, a gentle shudder as if I was going into a deep sleep. But it wasn’t sleep. I had gone someplace new without knowing where I’d gone. And it wasn’t just daydreaming. I had gone someplace real, where I no longer felt any fear, where my chest no longer ached from sobbing, where my throat wasn’t ripped sore from screaming out in the middle of the night for my mother.
        It was a gift, a special gift, and I didn’t know where it came from, or why I got so lucky, but I was happy to have it. Because as soon as I felt the hurt coming on, all I had to do was sit quietly, close my eyes, and wait. Within moments, I’d disappear and click over to this special place. And I could take it with me, wherever I wanted to go. This was especially useful when, a couple of weeks later, I started second grade. During recess, the other seven-year-olds would pour out of the school and out onto the playground, yelling and laughing, racing to the swing sets and see-saws and monkey bars, or running in packs across the grassy field playing tag. But I would hang back and wait until I was alone, not willing to share my secret with anybody. Once alone, I’d lean against the brick wall next to the door, and slide down to a sitting position, knees close to my chest, arms crossed on top of them. Then I would lower my head, close my eyes, and wait. Within seconds I was gone.
       Not only could I disappear, but I could fly. Literally taking off from the ground, soaring over the playground, high above everyone else, performing thrilling feats of death-defying aerial stunts, swooping over running kids, hovering over those standing still, sometimes bolting straight up to dizzying heights, and then diving like a rocket, straight back down, pulling up and away just in time. It was so joyful I sometimes forgot to breathe, tripping me out of the special place for a second, as I gulped a bucket of air. But I quickly returned and continued my invisible performance, never wanting it to stop.
       The gift of disappearing lasted nearly the entire school year. It saved my life. I remember feeling alarmed the first time it began to slip away when I had to struggle to bring it back. I was afraid that without it, the hurt would kill me. But the harder I tried to keep it, the harder it became to hold onto. It was leaving me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Not knowing if I could survive without the special place, I found a way to bury the hurt deep down inside of me, so deep I didn’t even know it was there anymore. And then I was shocked to discover that I had begun to play with the other kids again. And little by little, I came to prefer being with them, rather than being alone. But I never stopped hearing the soft echo of the words, “I’ll always be coming back.”

     She pulled the Jaguar off the road at a clearing in the trees. It was near the end of the school year and on that day we had decided to drive up to Mountain Park. We got out of the car and found the entrance of a trail that led into the forest. It was a blue sky day and there was no one else about that we could see. Coming to an open space with a view of the valley below, we sat down on the dry grass, admiring the rolling hills in the distance. There was a chilly breeze swaying through the air and I remember the feel of her thick Irish sweater against my cheek as she put her arm around me and pulled me close. We talked softly, admiring the beauty of spring and the colors of the wildflowers. We had taken many walks over the past few months, each one bringing our friendship closer together. I’d quit hanging out with my buddies. Things felt different, in a way I couldn’t define. After a particularly long, quiet moment, she turned to me and asked, “Have you ever made love before?” Completely surprised by her question, I didn’t know how to answer.
     At fourteen years old, I thought I knew what she meant, but I had to think back to a year before when a friend asked me if I wanted to have sex. I remember at that time mumbling something approximating a “Yes, please”, shyly nodding my head up and down, and that girl saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll show you how.” Then, she lead me downstairs to the basement to a mattress set up behind the furnace, where she promptly initiated me. It was over in less than five minutes. I didn’t know if that was the same thing as making love, but I answered, “Yes”, to Mrs. Urban’s question. I had to tell her the truth, even if my answer risked lowering her opinion of me. After a brief moment, she stood up, reached out her hand to me, and whispered,  “Let’s go.”
        As we quietly retraced our path back to the car, I knew my legs were moving and I knew my lungs were breathing, but I couldn’t quite grasp the reality of what was happening. It was like I was floating in some kind of dream world. To say my heart was pounding with anticipation and disbelief would have been an insult to understatement. Without a word being spoken we arrived back at the Jaguar, and climbed in, closing the doors. Everything held still for a brief moment, and then Mrs. Urban put the key in the ignition and started the car. As she backed up onto the country road, she glanced at me and smiled.
        We drove in silence back to her house. It was a fifteen-minute drive and was, without a doubt, the longest fifteen minutes I’d ever known. She pulled the car into her driveway, but before getting out, she reached over and took my hand in hers and gently explained that David, her husband, was away for his annual National Guard duties. He would be gone for a few days.
        It was a small house, with a small front yard, nicely tended, as were most of the other houses on this quiet street. Entering through the front door, my first impression was how graceful it was. Every space, every wall, every nook and cranny, tastefully adorned. Intelligent people lived here, it seemed to say. Mrs. Urban closed the door behind me and then led me on a quick tour. Once that was done, we ended up back in the living room, in front of the fireplace.     “Take your coat off, she said, “I’ll be right back”, and she disappeared into the rear of the house. Draping my coat on an antique wooden chair, and then, not knowing what to do next, I sat down. She was talking from the other room, but I really didn’t listen to what she was saying. I was trying as hard as I could to feel and appear normal. Crossing my left leg onto my right knee and pulling back on that knee with my hands, fingers intertwined, I rocked forward and back hoping it would bring about a sense of casualness. I felt it was crucial, at this stage, to project confidence, as if none of this was a big deal.  Then I switched legs, thinking it would be better if I crossed my right leg onto my left leg. But in doing this the wooden chair began to squeak, loudly, when before it hadn’t. Quickly shifting my legs again the squeaking stopped, but now I heard a pounding in my chest that sounded like war drums preparing for battle. I felt a catastrophic embarrassment was about to occur from a panic I couldn’t control, much less prevent. At a total loss, I watched my right foot tap rapidly on the wood floor. And then I heard Mrs. Urban from the back of the house ask me if I liked music, and I heard myself scream, “Yes!”
       A moment later, soothing classical music began to pipe softly into the room. And then Mrs. Urban appeared, carrying three large comforters and two pillows. She dropped the bedding on the floor in front of the fireplace, then looked over to me and said,
       “We should light some candles! Why don’t you do that, the matches are on the mantle, and I’ll get the wine. Do you like Sangria?” Not knowing what that was, I said yes. And then, trying to match her enthusiasm and grateful to have something to do, I bounded up from the chair, crossed to the mantle, found the matches, and with trembling fingers, lit the candles. That done, I stood there waiting for what was to come next. Looking down at the comforters in front of me, my hands now tightly clenched in the pockets of my blue jeans, I imagined this could look like we were just about to have a picnic. But of course, I knew better. I knew what was coming. Why pretend otherwise? This is what all the preceding months of courting had led up to. This moment was the final expression of my feelings so innocent, so pure, born in the heart, unplanned but inevitable, with the unshakable knowledge of the beauty we had found within each other, beyond even words to express.
       Caught up in these thoughts and the magic of that moment, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard her say, “Here’s your wine.” Entering the room, she handed me a glass. Standing close, looking straight into my eyes, she took a sip from her glass. I followed suit, first sipping, then gulping the most delicious beverage that had ever entered my mouth. I felt a sudden flush and light-headedness. Smiling at me, she took the empty glass from my hand, placing both on the table nearby. “Come, let’s spread the blankets.”
       Feeling a pleasing warmth in my belly, I helped her lay out the three comforters, one on top of the other. Then we placed the pillows near the fireplace. Sensing there was nothing left to do, I struggled to come up with something poetic to say, but having lost all power of coherent thought, I failed miserably. It didn’t matter, because Mrs. Urban stepped over to me, placing her hands gently on my face, and kissed my lips slowly and softly. To me, that was far more poetic than anything I could have said.
       Within moments, we were underneath the top comforter. I could hear Mrs. Urban murmuring gentle reassurances in my ear, as I attempted, with one hand, to get my jeans down to my ankles. Wanting to sustain the appearance of cool and collected, I decided it was okay to leave my hi-top tennis shoes on. I didn’t want anything to impede this moment. As awkward as this first performance was, Mrs. Urban cuddled me in a warm embrace and calmed my beating heart when she said, “Don’t worry, it gets better.”

       One day my parents disposed of Stephen. He was my little brother, not quite two years old. We pulled up to the curb in our family car, stopping in front of a strange house. We were out in rural Oregon somewhere. It was quiet. A heavy, overcast day. Dad was in the driver’s seat and Mom was next to him sitting shotgun. She was holding Stephen.  My older brother, Bill, and I were in the back seat, we were seven and five respectively. None of us had spoken the entire trip. And no one made a move. It was a harsh stillness. I didn’t understand what we were doing, but I could feel enough to be scared.
Finally, Dad said, “It’s time. Let’s go.” As he climbed out, he looked back at us sadly and said, “Come on boys, out of the car.” Then he walked around to the other side and opened Mom’s door, helping her out, as she held Stephen. Looking over the seat, I could see her eyes were wet. But I knew she wasn’t just sad, she was angry. And it frightened me.  The five of us walked up to the front door and were greeted by an older couple. They welcomed us into their house with friendly smiles and polite introductions. We stood uncomfortably in a large living room, with two playpens lined up together against one wall and assorted toys scattered about on the floor. As the adults conversed, I watched Mom inspect the premises. She paid especially close attention to the two other infants, who were both in one of the pens together, moving about, making baby sounds. They were clean and unsoiled, and the rest of the room seemed well cared for.
       I wondered if these two babies were damaged like Stephen was. It was hard to tell. My poor little brother had been born healthy, but after a few months, he developed a hernia and had to have surgery. And it was during that operation that a mistake occurred and Stephen was given too much anesthesia. It destroyed his brain. The doctors said it was irreversible damage. But I remember watching my mom struggle day after day, moving little Stephen’s legs and arms, convinced that if she was persistent enough, she could get those muscles working. We were downstairs in the family room, and Mom had brought down a walking board, with a divider in the middle. Picking up one foot of his at a time, she’d move it forward, and then she’d do the same with the other one. Up and down the walking board, back and forth, Mom was determined not to let this tragedy be the truth. Curled up nearby on an old couch, watching TV shows, like Wagon Train, I could hear Mom talking softly to Stephen, repeating encouragements, over and over with every step.
       But as weeks and months went by, the gentle tone of Mom’s voice became increasingly the sound of frustration and pain. Her efforts to rehabilitate Stephen were interrupted by cries and tears, and helpless failure. If she remembered that I was nearby and listening, she gave no indication of that. She would pound the table and shout out God’s name for help, and then she would curse that same God for allowing her little boy to suffer. Then, Stephen would start to cry and she would pick him up and hold him close to her heart. He would gradually grow quiet, and she would lay him back down on the table and begin the exercises again. I wanted so badly to walk across the room and be held by her, too. But I didn’t, of course. I was undamaged.
       The conversation among the adults seemed to be winding down. My dad shook hands with the other man, said goodbye to his wife, then he walked to the door, indicating for Bill and me to follow. We watched as Mom softly put Stephen down in the unoccupied playpen and covered him gently with his blanket. Then she whispered to him things I couldn’t make out, as she leaned down and kissed his forehead. Standing up, she turned to the couple and said goodbye, and then walked quickly out the front door. The three of us followed her to the car, no one saying a word. When the car doors closed, there was a harsh silence again. And this time, I felt a frightening finality in the silence. There were five of us when we drove up there. Four of us were leaving. Dad and Mom had just given Stephen away. And the thought occurred to me, that if this happened again, I would be next. 

     It was Christmas and there we all were, gathered in our living room. My brother Bill, thirteen, knelt near the Christmas tree, with a hopeful look on his face. Dad sat on the couch, engaged in what appeared to be friendly conversation with our Mom and her new husband, Bob. There was my Grandmother’s sister, Aunt Edith, my favorite because she was always so loving and cheerful—-she could have easily passed for Mrs. Santa Claus. Then there was, of course, Marnie, our maternal Grandmother, who was in the kitchen preparing dinner as she always had for as long as I could remember, but just never in our house, the house my brother and I and our Dad lived in. Christmas had always been held at Marnie’s. But not this time, for some reason that was never explained. There was also my Grandmother’s other sister, Aunt Gertrude, and I’ll get to her very soon. And there was me, eleven years old.
      In the living room there was a Christmas tree, decorated by Bill and me, with a few presents scattered around it. Other little seasonal things, like paper angels and popcorn strings, candles and cut out snowflakes, were positioned about the room, small things just adequate to the task of creating an atmosphere of joy.  We had never had Christmas at our house before, so we didn’t have a box we could pull down from the attic full of holiday stuff.
       Everybody was talking, lightly and cheerfully, adults with cocktails, Bill and me mostly listening, wondering when we were going to get to the presents, and doing our best to filter out a confusing tension filling the room. And then suddenly, a loud crashing sound came from the kitchen. We heard Marnie say, “Oh, Gertrude, look what you’ve done!” You see, just before this crash took place, we could hear Marnie trying to get her sister to stop helping her and get her out of the kitchen, because, I later learned, Gertrude was notorious in our family for getting drunk at every family gathering she had ever attended. That is why she had been banned for years, up until now. Apparently, because her husband had died the previous year, she was all alone and terribly lonesome, and because of that Marnie took pity on Gertrude and broke the family rule, inviting her this one time, having obtained an inviolable oath that she wouldn’t get drunk.
Well, now there was a large casserole dish of scalloped potatoes shattered on the kitchen floor, which apparently Gertrude had dropped. And it was at that point that something snapped inside my mother. Maybe it had something to do with having to cope with her two husbands in the same room, or the awkward atmosphere provoked by this season of wishful thinking. But, whatever the reason, Mom shot up from her chair, loudly exhaling a terrifying gust of rage, and stormed into the kitchen and grabbed Gertrude by the hair, yanking her violently out of the kitchen. Pulling Gertrude across the foyer, passing the living room, we all watched in stunned silence as Mom dragged Aunt Gertrude down the hallway and into the bathroom, where she unceremoniously, and still raging, with Gertrude shrieking and gasping in pain, threw Gertrude into the bathtub. Then, as if that weren’t enough, Mom ran back to the kitchen and grabbed a very large bowl of string beans and bacon bits, and then ran back to the bathroom and dumped the entire contents of that bowl onto Gertrude’s head.
       Mom then left the bathroom and charged down the hallway toward the front door. Nobody in the living room had yet said anything. Dad just looked down shaking his head, then got up and walked out of the living room and down the hallway to his bedroom, kicking a hole in a closet door on his way. It was rare if ever, to see Dad get angry. And Bob, I’ll never forget this, just sat there on the couch, smirking and chuckling to himself like an idiot. Seeing him enjoy watching our family dissolve, I knew I was right to hate him and hate him forever.
       Aunt Edith sat on the big stuffed chair in horror at what she was seeing, uttering little painful pleadings, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Bill still knelt by the Christmas tree, silent, eyes full of hurt.
    From the kitchen we could hear Marnie, saying, “Joanie, Joanie!” as she stepped out of the kitchen into the foyer, nearly colliding with Mom heading for the front door. Whereupon Mom slammed both of her palms violently into Marnie’s chest, sending her reeling off both feet and flat onto her back. I was right there, just feet away, an invisible witness.
       Without saying a word, Mom left through the front door, as Marnie pulled herself up off the floor. It only took me a moment to shake off what I had just seen and run after her. She was already at the far end of the driveway when I yelled, “Mom!” She stopped and turned back to me and said, “What?”  “Where are you going?” I asked. “I’m going to your Grandmother’s house.” She turned around and continued her march into the dark, disappearing night. And as scared as I was, for her as well as myself, I thought she was magnificent.