Wednesday, January 7, 2009

ring.

When my grandmother was little, she used to cry. She sat alone, in the dark, in her bedroom. She cried as her mother's various boyfriends came by the house and drunkenly partied until dawn. So she swore she would never drink or have drinking in her home.
Today, I cry too. But it is not because there is loud, wild, intoxicated laughing, crying, and fighting. I cry because of the silence. Today, Billy came into the house like it was nothing. Like he hadn't moved out in October because he was in love with another woman, who he had been with for a year and a half. He walked in, looked at me. We made eye contact, he said nothing. He went to the refridgerator, then went to his former bedroom and plopped down on the bed. I hear the croak of the bed as he shifts.
The phone rings. But I've left the room. I'll not answer it. I've retreated to my own bedroom, like my grandmother before me.
There is another silence. Another creak.

The phone rings again. This time, my mother comes outside my door, asking where the phone is.
"By the game, where I just was."

The front door squeaks. I'm unsure of who is coming or going.
The door closes. It always makes a squeak, then a thump as the whole foundation of our nearly forty year old home gives a little shudder, as if to say, "There's just too many opens and shuts, squeaks and slams."
The last time I saw that door and Billy was when he picked up a chair from our dining room and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and into our glass table. The table gave a shrill sigh as its pieces were suddenly relocated throughout the kitchen, dining room and living room.
He and I paused, as if unsure whether we were caught in a bad dream, some unreal reality. In another world, I would be the first to scream, to rise up to the anger from my mother's devistation, to throw something back, to make him know what a terrible human he was, what a painful position he had put my family in, how much it hurt to see, to hear, my mother hurt. But in this world, he is the first. His words don't even make any sense. All I hear is the piercing bullets of his screams, as "fucks" go flying and his anger heats the room, setting my armhair up, my ankles unsteady, my adreniline pulsing.
Why didn't I just leave, retreat to my room, let him destroy the house? It is his, after all.
I took it. I let him scream at me, until he was crying and racing to separate parts of the house, turning on the lights, turning on the lights. Checking every room, as if to find a sign that this was not his life, that this was not where he had quietly lived for most of his life.
But it was. This was real. The phone rings. He was real. Ring. I was real. Ring.
Finally, he quieted to sniffles. He pulled out a trash bag.
Still, I stood there, afraid for what would happen if I let it go, if I didn't speak to him in a convincing tone of reassurance and calm, if I didn't baby him into not harming me or anything else in the house. Ring Ring Ring.
Finally, I answer. My mother says that she is coming home. I tell him. He doesn't want to be here. He leaves. He says he's sorry, that he loves me.