The Wooden Chair

My mother was sick.

My sister called it the sleeping sickness. She said she called it that because my mother might as well have made up, like something that only comes to you in a dream, like she was always asleep.

Caroline first called it that when I was twelve. My mother would lay in bed all day, bruising like some overly ripe fruit on the counter. At night she would shuffle out to the living room and sit in her wooden rocking chair and gently push herself back and forth.

“It’s just my brain,” she told me one time I saw her after I snuck out of my room, her rocking keeping me awake in an otherwise silent house. I knew something was wrong from the way she would climb out of bed, springs still creaking in her absence, groaning under her weight whether she was there or not. From the way her feet would drag across the floor like wet matches striking the surface, not quite catching a spark.

“It’s just my brain,” she would say again, chuckling softly, like we were the only one’s not in on the joke.

At night, she was careful not to make noise. She knew she was bad at hiding. She wanted to make sure nobody heard her, trying to silence herself, and it took me years before I realized she wanted to disappear.

“Your grandmother had the same thing,” she told me one night, her eyes shut tight. I thought she was sleeping. I was glad when she wouldn’t open them. When she was tired, she looked like a different person, her eyes sunk into her face. She looked like a mouse when she’d squint, and that’s when I was most afraid she’d get stuck like that.

This was bigger than her, a fact she knew.

Her pale skin, her gaunt cheeks, her hands shaking, her skinny chicken legs, strong from slowly rocking herself all those nights she could not sleep. I didn’t recognize her when she looked like this, I couldn’t remember her as anyone else.

But as a child, on those nights, I loved watching her, as if everything she did was a secret. No one was supposed to know she was out here, but I knew. When everyone else whispered about her during the day while she lied in bed, I stayed silent.

No one understood; they would just stand around wondering when she would be like she was, when this would pass.

The first person to say that to me was my father.

We would sit around the dinner table, he, Caroline, and I, my father becoming more convinced that she was doing this to get back at him for something he couldn’t say.

“It’s not that I don’t feel like shit from time to time, but you don’t see me laying around for days on end, acting as if the world was out to get me. I deal with it like a normal, functioning human being because you girls deserve more.”

He would open twist the top off another glass beer bottle and drink half in one long gulp before continuing. A silent prayer: beer be my strength.

“I mean, I have bent over backwards to provide for you girls, and you don’t think I’ve wanted to just leave some days? But I don’t just lay around pretending no one knows how I feel. That woman in there,” he would always sneer in the direction of her room during this often repeated rant, raising his voice slightly hoping she’d hear.

“At this point, she’s not even a mother. And you girls deserve better than some crazy woman living in this house who’s nothing more than just another body taking up space. I mean, what could be so bad in her life? I never hit her, I never did anything to her, and this is all I get to show for nineteen years of marriage? Bullshit.”

And Caroline and I would chew our green beans and nod, as if we were truly contemplating what he was saying, as if we were taking his harsh words for a harsher truth he had awoken us to.

“Yeah,” Caroline would say, her voice flat. “Mom’s pretty messed up.” Caroline had this uncanny ability to shut off her emotions, eyes blank, everything about her cold and emotionless, the same way she’d scare me out of crying over scraped knees when I fell off my bike as a kid.

“She always gets better, though,” I defended her every time.

“If she’s so depressed she should do us all a favor. It’s not like she’s having the time of her life here,” my father would say, wanting to hurt us like she hurt him by promising in sickness and in health and not holding up her end of the deal.

He left on their twenty-second wedding anniversary.

It was February and it was cold, but all the windows in the house were sweating. My mother was slowly cutting peppers in the kitchen, her first good day in weeks. My sister was practicing her French. I was reading by the window. The wallpaper in the dining room was peeling at the edges, and the whole apartment had the faint smell of gas from the heater.

My father said he had to go buy cigarettes.

My mother stopped her cutting. “I thought you quit.”

“I just need ‘em.” He wouldn’t look at her as he put his coat on. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, hands in her apron pockets.

Something in her must’ve known.

Every man in the gas station buying cigarettes looked like him, picking up old habits after years of abstaining. However long the illusion lasted, my heart in my throat, looking for him in everyone, all the families he could’ve created trying to forget us.

Maybe he told them he was going to buy cigarettes, too, when it got to be too much.

It was hard to hate him though, imagining us haunting him into misery. How many families he’d destroy, how terrible he felt each time, never enough. It was almost unbearable to think he could have been miserable with us, only to leave and be the only one happy.

I used to replay the scene over and over again in my mind, that last hour he spent at home before he left, imagining it ending differently.

He bumped into my mother’s chair, knocking it over, nicking the arm. I could feel her tense up from the kitchen, sensing the anger and hurt inside of him that would eventually cause him to leave, all the things she kept and held and valued above him.

She just stared. But this time he didn’t tell her to stop looking at him like that. He didn’t say anything at all. They both looked at each other, so disappointed with how it all turned out. He looked at his hands like he knew that in an hour they’d be turning him onto some highway somewhere, swallowed up by the blue hour light that made the road feel as expansive and lonely as what he’d just left.

That’s when he said he was going out. Somewhere along the way I realized how tired he was. He wanted an out. I wanted to hate him, but he was the only one who could take that out, however cruel it turned out to be.

Caroline used to call him a “modern day Judas Iscariot,” but I remembered the ugly part of the story where Judas hung himself, and I didn’t want him to die. I just wanted to know why he did what he did.

It was easier to believe that he just left, that he hadn’t been planning this for months. He never seemed to think about the possibility that my mother wanted to leave herself, too. That maybe that’s what she was trying to do all along.

The first three years after he left, he sent both my sister and I birthday cards one week before the actual day, as if punctuality made up for absence. He stopped sending cards the year I turned eighteen. I needed him, I missed him, and I was glad to not be waiting for him to decide he wanted us, too. Caroline always says he gave the greatest gift of all: a sigh of relief.

I kept the three cards he wrote in a shoe box under my bed as a reason for resentment. Three cards for each person he left, as if mailing the cards was an act of atonement. I kept them until I turned twenty, and my sister had already moved away, and I took her cards and mine and cut them up and threw them all away, the very last pieces of him.

*

When my father first left, everyone in our apartment building knew what happened. I opened the door to see food and pity extended to us, as if all it took to replace my father was the casserole Mrs. Thomas brought over bi-weekly.

“He was a good man, and he put up with so much,” Mrs. Thomas said, holding my mother’s hand. My mother handled his leaving well enough, but the pity made her feel useless over perceptions, and she internalized that guilt until she was immobile again.

I was offended by Mrs. Thomas, but all I could do was nod, not sure how to respond to my mother being called “so much.”

Mrs. Thomas looked both to Caroline and I, as if she were waiting for us to agree.

“God, he’s not dead,” Caroline would say later, but the only words I could find setting the casserole on the wooden dinner table was, “thank you,” and “I know,” and I hated myself for being another person my mother could add to the list of those who didn’t understand what she was going through.

*

My sister went out into the world like a blackhole, grabbing every unassuming thing she could find to try and distract her, and I felt like she was trying to disappear on me, too.

Caroline came in late one night after the first warm day of the year. All the windows were open, and I sat at the kitchen table, chewing the skin off of grapes before popping them in my mouth. The still air made the room sticky with humidity, and all the noises outside had to swim through it. The ambulances and their sirens rang far off in the distance and I had terrible thoughts that it was her. It was always her.

Caroline flung open the front door and I jumped, knocking my bowl of grapes onto the ground. I bit my tongue and tasted blood. My mother was asleep in her chair in the living room, but Caroline didn’t see.

I met her in the kitchen, eyes glazed and shining. My pang of jealousy that while she was running, she was the one who, after so many years of responsibility, got to be young.

She swayed slightly and I tried to steady her, to let her know I was there, but she whipped around violently.

“Don’t touch me.” She pulled away so jarringly, I could only stare.

She didn’t know what she was doing. Everything we knew we had to figure out on our own, like when I went to grab a pile of her laundry and a note landed at my feet. I bent over to pick it up, carefully reading the rushed handwriting that came from Mrs. Thomas’ son.

Caroline and Mrs. Thomas’ son had been seeing each other for a month now. He was thirty-two and had a wife and a two year-old son. Caroline and Mrs. Thomas’ son met when he brought over one of his mother’s bi-weekly meals one week when his mother got sick.

His note was damning, leaving nothing out. I felt every part of my body clearly and painfully, like someone was sitting on my chest and I was losing blood in my hands and feet.

Bennie’s suspicious, he wrote. Bennie went into his work to bring him lunch one day and they told her he had already left for lunch with his sister, despite being an only child. It was a dead give-away, but Mrs. Thomas’ son lied through his gritty teeth, words so ugly when I looked up from the note, the whole room was tainted black—dusty, coal stained walls that would suffocate and coat my lungs if I breathed in too deep.

I told Caroline I knew what she was doing with that sad man.

“He’s not sad,” she wouldn’t look at me.

“He has a son.” I could have yelled, had it not been for my mother rocking in the other room. I wanted to protect her, although I didn’t quite know what from.

“He’ll get custody,” she shrugged.

“He has a wife,” I emphasized indignantly.

“He already has the divorce papers.”

“Caroline, you are destroying a family,” I waved the note in her face, wanting her to understand the severity of what she was doing.

“He loves me,” she said quietly.

“And? Do you love him?” I felt small suddenly, like I would blow over if she exhaled too deeply.

She looked down at the cracked kitchen tiles beneath her feet. “He’s going to leave her.”

But I knew. All my sister ever wanted was to stick her thumb out to anyone, hoping someone would pause long enough for her to get a ride out of her own miserable life. It just so happened that Mrs. Thomas’ son was the one who spotted her and stopped the car.

After I found out, she started bringing him over late at night. Caroline made the mistake one night of bringing him in through the front door. My mother was sitting in the front room, rocking, but her eyes were closed and her forehead was wrinkled like everything she wanted to say would soon be smoothed out. My sister walked right past with Mrs. Thomas’ son. My mother never opened her eyes, but her rocking slowed to silence and we all knew that she knew. My room was closest to the fire escape, so he came in through the window of my bedroom from then on.

I heard them laughing quietly in the late hours of the night, when it seemed that everyone else in the world but those in this apartment were asleep.

Sometimes I listened for the laughter, it sounded genuine and sweet, but after the second month passed the laughter stopped and all I could hear were mumbled voices.

Soon enough they moved into the kitchen. They didn’t bother hiding in her room anymore. They stopped caring about hiding it from my mother. She wouldn’t do anything about it anyway. All they did was sit around the kitchen table and talk, their conversations slowly growing in intensity, and I would flip onto my left side and listen.

“I don’t know how we’re going to keep doing this,” Caroline said to him one night after they were silent for a long time. I hadn’t closed my window from when he climbed in, and the outside air settled in the room, heavy and stifling, and I wondered if that was how the world felt for my sister felt all the time.

My mother’s rocking slowed, as if she was trying to listen as well.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Mrs. Thomas’ son cut her short. He sounded worried, like he knew that if they talked about it, it would mean the end.

“I want to talk about something else, tell me about your father instead,” he said. The rocking stopped and so did my heart.

“What’s there to even say?” Caroline laughed gently and then was quiet for a long time.

“Why’d he leave?”

I had to fight the urge to burst into the kitchen, not wanting to hear what she thought as if it would confirm something we all knew long ago. I pulled my covers closer around my neck and just laid there.

“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Caroline was so quiet for a minute I wasn’t sure she was still there, but she continued.

“He got tired of her wanting to be someone he wasn’t comfortable with. He told her he didn’t want her to get a job, or invite her friends over. She couldn’t do much of anything, because he was scared. And he did what any scared man afraid of his wife would do.”

“So that’s it? He’s the bad guy here?” I could hear the disbelief in his voice, and I wished Caroline would defend her. I felt like a glass of water on the edge of a night stand that had been knocked into, I was on the edge and there would be quite the mess to clean up.

“I don’t think I understand,” Caroline said slowly.

“Well, he put up with a lot, you know. You can’t blame him for feeling overwhelmed and tired.”

“My mother’s not ‘a lot,’” Caroline sounded offended, “she’s sick.”

“You know that’s not what I meant, I was just saying—”

“But that is what you meant.”

“Caroline, c’mon. Don’t be like this,” he tried to calm her down.

“I don’t want to talk about him with you or anyone. It’s late and you should go home to your wife,” Caroline sounded defeated, and there was no fight. I heard footsteps and doors open and close and chair legs scrape against the ground and silence.

I opened the door and went out to Caroline. I stood in front of her, rocking on the balls of my feet, wanting to run to and away from her. I wanted to grab her and yell and grab her and hold her.

I stood across from her silently, wishing I knew what to say, wishing that things were different, and that I never had to say these things at all.

“You said the right thing,” I told her.

She looked up, her eyes all red, and she looked pristine and unrecognizable. “There is no right thing.”

I almost stood up to leave but looked over at the front room, and there was my mother, standing up, watching us. The image of her, limp, small, and curled up in that chair every night was permanently burned into my brain. But so was this image—tall, aching, and something inside of her looked like it was alive, even if that thing was the pain.

Caroline saw too, this one thing that awoke our mother again, even if only briefly, even if it was fleeting.

No one mentioned Mrs. Thomas’ son after that night.

*

My sister moved out shortly thereafter. She was accepted to a small college a state over. She said she wanted to be able to do things for herself. She didn’t want to depend on anyone, ever, she laughed, folding her shirts into large boxes.

“You’re going to forget all about me,” I told Caroline the night before she left. We were sitting on the counter, drinking red wine from old mason jars tannins clung to.

She smoothed out the wrinkles on her blue dress. “It’s not going to be easy,” she smiled, “but I’ll try my hardest.” She laughed and poured more wine.

She was still for a minute, shifting her tone. “I’m scared. I’m leaving Mom, and every time you call I’m going to look at my phone and think ‘Is this it? Is this the call?’ One day it’s going to be, and I’m sorry.”

“She’s going to get better.”

Caroline smiled softly, “I’m just afraid of the way she’s going to take to get there.”

“I think she’ll be more okay than you think.”

“I hope so,” she smiled weakly, neither of us sure of what to believe.

But neither of us knew. Neither of us could foresee months into the future, when she seemed like she was getting better. When she started sleeping at night again. When she started cooking dinners for the two of us, like when dad was here. When she brushed her hair, and sang over the sink while washing dishes.

Drinking wine and cheering to the future, neither Caroline or I knew we would walk in on her in the kitchen, cold and blue, and probably seeing something better than this.

No, that night before Caroline left, I held onto that ugly hope I had when I was young. She’s okay, was all I could tell myself. And I watched her in the living room, rocking steadily, floors creaking soundly beneath her in her wooden chair.