He did nothing to stop me, and soon I was pummeling him with both my fists, crying and still saying, “I hate when you do that! I hate when you do that!”
I punched him again and again and again, harder each time. I hate when you do that!” I knelt, my knee pressed against the wooden slats, and punched him in the shoulder for emphasis. I pushed the swing faster, but his foot was settled firmly on the floorboards, so the swing just wobbled in place. He was always doing that, humming or whistling or singing in response to something I’d said. My father started to whistle a tune I didn’t recognize. Neither of you are going anywhere.” This was what I had wanted, and yet for some reason, it made me feel inordinately angry. “I guess it’s just the two of us now,” he said. My father winced, but settled himself next to me. I sat up and used one leg to push the swing forward. “She’s gone, then?” he said when he saw me. He trudged up the steps as if his whole body had grown heavy. When he arrived, he didn’t see me lying there. My father had been working late, and I stretched out on the porch swing while I waited for him to come home. I wasn’t used to seeing her from this distance, and her neck had never seemed so long and pale. He said something, and she tilted her head back as she laughed. He didn’t get out of the car when he picked her up, and I watched from the front porch as she got into the car. His name was Rob, and he was an optometrist. He was the cousin of one of her friends, she told me. One evening, toward the end of the summer, my mother went on a date. They joked with each other and chatted about their days and asked me about mine, and I could almost pretend that we were a family again. They didn’t start fighting again, either. They said they lived better that way, and it’s true that the silence stopped. My mother transferred her things to the spare bedroom, said she’d always preferred it anyway, and they continued on as roommates. They never answered what I was really asking though, which was, of course: What about me? Where will I go? Then my father was getting the house two doors down, then they were both moving, to make a clean break. Then my father was leaving, getting an apartment across town. First, my mother would be moving out, into a house that had just gone on the market two doors down. Over and over, I asked them: which one of you is leaving? Which one of you is going away? Their stories changed. I followed my parents from room to room-my mother during the day and my father once he came home in the evenings. I’d be entering eighth grade in the fall, and all summer long, my friends called me, wanting to go to the mall, to the pool, to the diner for phosphates and malts, but I always said no. By then, maybe I, too, no longer cared.īut over the next few weeks, I pestered them. I was 13 then, and I think they expected me to cry or rant or even beg them to reconsider, but I just nodded and asked which of them would be moving out. It was when the fighting stopped that I became worried, and it’s also true that it was during a summer of silence, as if they no longer cared enough about one another to even dredge up anger, that they finally told me they were getting divorced. In the morning, it was as if nothing had happened: they joked at breakfast, asked me how I’d slept, what books were on my summer reading list, and my mother kissed my father goodbye when he left. After my mother screamed at him, after my father willfully tuned her out, after she screamed some more, after he finally snapped and shouted back, they would dissolve into laughter and kiss each other and go to bed. That might make it sound worse than it was, because the truth is, my parents seemed to take a perverse sort of pleasure out of their fights, and they often ended peaceably. Hot nights now bring a strange feeling of nostalgia for the days when I lay in bed at night, my sheets in a tangle at the bottom of the mattress, sweat beading on my skin, listening to the sounds of crickets and my mother telling my father he’s a dirty son of a bitch and he doesn’t know a good goddamn thing when it’s standing goddamn in front of him hitting him in the goddamn face. Summer for me will forever be tied up with the sounds of my parents fighting.
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