Last Summer Home
Inspired by “What’s Love Got to Do?” by Richard Blanco
All that summer I wondered why the gentle green mountains around my parents’ home weighed on me so darkly. In the room my dad cleared out for me, leaving me two empty drawers, I woke in a panic, trying to figure out how to climb out of my skin, how not to be me. Not this body again, not this prison. I stared at Vermont’s beauty and saw only emptiness.
All summer long I got up in the grey pre-dawn, when my parents’ fields were still shrouded in mist, and sat outside on the screened porch to write a letter to my daughter at camp. She needed time away from us, our adult worries, time in the mountains, with other children. I knew this. The whole thing was my idea. Yet after dropping her off I cried for ten hours until I slept. Every morning I wrote her a new episode of a story, something just for her, and walked two miles down the dirt road to put it in the post box.
All summer I cooked dinner for my parents and washed the dishes, but that was not the help they needed. My dad tried to prove to me that they were fine, that they didn’t need help. They are a thirty-minute drive from groceries, medical care, friends. My mother cannot drive. I asked my father when he last took my mother swimming. In the pause, I saw that he hadn’t. That he has forgotten she swims, that she is a swimmer. Because he is not and it doesn’t occur to him. He can’t do everything. Which is my point.
I drove her to the lake and she swam. After she got out, I kicked to the middle of the water. When I turned around, my mother was waving me back. “You can’t swim out that far without a lifeguard here,” she said as I walked up the sand. “It’s against the rules.” I wrapped myself in a towel. “There is no lifeguard here,” I said. “There has never been a lifeguard here.” She frowned and looked around. “What do you know,” she says, “you’re never here.” I learned to swim in that pond, learned to save lives. She took me over to read a sign she said would explain about the lifeguard, but it’s about boats and where to launch them. She was quiet on the drive home. We both were.
All summer I thought of all of the questions I had for my mother that she will never be able to answer. All summer she asked me the same things, over and over. I tried to write about the gender of underground novels for my dissertation while my mother—the woman who used to be my mother—hovered behind my chair. What are you doing, she asked. Why are you wearing that brace? What are you doing what are you doing?
All summer, at fifty-two, I had to ask permission to drive my parents’ car, to go to the store, to report my whereabouts. I have not lived with my parents since I was fifteen. I became fifteen again.
All summer I sat working in my neck brace trying not to be in pain, trying to forget the pain. All summer I was in so many prisons. I didn’t come down for breakfast or lunch because even the idea of regular meals felt like a prison.
All summer I thought, this could be the last time I am here with them, and also, please let this be the last time.
All summer my mother asked me to come out to the blueberry bushes she planted and pick blueberries with her and all summer I said no, I have to work. Each day, she forgot she had ever asked me, and asked me again. In my last week, I said yes. We bent over the netted bushes, thick with fruit. It hurt her to bend over so she sat down in the tick-infested tall grass. All summer she forgot to use tick spray. All summer she took doxycycline for Lyme disease. We picked in silence. I remembered the summer after eighth grade, when my best friend and the boy I liked decided they liked to hang out with each other more than they liked hanging out with me. I cried every day and my mother took me up Wachusett mountain to pick blueberries. We filled plastic gallon milk jugs and I didn’t talk about Libby and Mark and my mother had no words of comfort, just the being outside with berries on a mountain. I wanted to remind her of this now, to thank her, and I opened my mouth but the words evaporated. She will not remember, and I am not sure how much more I can bear for her not to remember.
Neither parent remembers my sister’s abortion, the family meetings we had to support whatever decision she made. My mother went with her to the clinic, held her hand. And does not remember it. I do not tell my sister.
My dad wasn’t there for so much of our childhoods; our mother had almost all of the memories. My sister said this summer, “Mom was the only one who was with me for all of the worst moments of my life. Every diagnosis, every hospitalization. She was my only witness and I am losing her.”
All summer I swore I would be a better person and daughter. All summer I got worse. I could not have a conversation that didn’t end in tears or start with them. I argued with my father and one day I packed the car and tried to leave. When my mother found me throwing things into a suitcase, blinded by tears, she asked what I was doing. “Dad threw me out,” I said, not entirely accurately. “Oh,” she said. “Well, don’t forget to make the bed.”
I couldn’t leave, of course; my dad wouldn’t let me take the car.
All summer I wondered how I ended up so far from everyone I love. Living halfway across the planet, moving every few years, failing to keep in touch with everyone in my heart. All summer I wanted to ring friends from my US mobile, but I didn’t. I had nothing to offer. Obliterating nerve pain made me dull, a drag, a black hole. How could I inflict that on people I love? I am vanishing like my mother, only differently.
All summer I counted the days and minutes and seconds until I could talk with my daughter again. Until I could return with her to Tashkent, our then home. I arrived at camp early, expecting to find her in tears, not wanting to leave. But she was glad to see me and to be coming home so she could tell me all of her stories. It was the right amount of time to be away, she says, it was time to come home.
I took her for ice cream and she talked for hours while I drove back to my parents’ house. As we draw near, she asks about them. “If I ever forget who you are, T, please have me put to sleep,” I say. And she begins to cry, her camp happiness fading already in my dark presence. “I’m sorry, forget I said that.” I reach over to touch her leg. “I will live as long as you want me to.”
Jennifer Steil is the author of Exile Music, which won Grand Prize in the Eyelands 2020 International Book Awards; the Multicultural International Book Award; and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. Previous books include the novel The Ambassador’s Wife and memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. She also writes essays and stories and a weekly newsletter at https://jennifersteil.substack.com/.
