Lighting Out
I was eleven when I ran away from home. My mother had been at me for what seemed like ten years. “Don’t aggravate me,” she’d hiss at me. I looked up the verb. It means to make things worse. So, I aggravated my mother even before I aggravated her.
“Your hair, don’t you ever brush it? Either grow it out or cut it but do something…A ‘B ’ — ? In math maybe, but history? Really?… Stop being so fresh… If you slouch like that boys aren’t ever going to like you… One more eye-roll and I swear… It wouldn’t hurt to lose a little weight, you know… Enough with that godawful noise already — and no, I don’t mean turn it down — turn it off… No way you’re going out looking like that… Jesus, your room! You really are a pig, aren’t you? Oink, oink!”
I made her shiver. I looked up words for the way she looked at me. Antipathy, repugnance, loathing. I never measured up. How could I? I didn’t even know what her standards were, only that they were way beyond my reach.
My mother’s discontent determined the house’s weather, which was generally like one long rainy November day. Her depression wasn’t mine but I was pretty sure I caused it. I was even surer that hers caused mine. When I was eleven, I stopped caring why she was miserable; I only knew that I was.
One afternoon, before my father got home from work, she really lost it. It began as a lecture (my weight, encore), turned into a sermon (my shabby values), then a denunciation (my embarrassing conduct, my bad taste), a philippic (my absent manners, my depressing grades), and finally a prophetic screed (my bleak future). I stormed up to my room, slammed the door and only came down for dinner. It was during that frosty meal that I said, under my breath, that my friend Sheila, whose mother had just died of breast cancer, was lucky.
“What was that? What did you say?”
My mother turned on my father. “Did you hear that?”
My father didn’t look up from his plate. “Nope.”
“That does it! Put down that fork and go to your room. Immediately!”
As I stomped up the steps I could hear her going at my father. “Nope? Really? Oh you coward. You damn well heard her loud and clear…”
I got up before dawn and hefted my backpack which I’d stuffed before going to bed. I tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen and laid the backpack beside by the refrigerator. I wanted a bowl of Cheerios for the road. I didn’t turn on the light so I was startled to see my father seated at the table with a mug of coffee.
He nodded at me, then the backpack.
“Remember your toothbrush?”
I stared at him.
“Hand sanitizer? Water bottle? Shampoo? PJs? Socks and underwear? Clean sheets? Rain jacket and sun hat? Phone charger? Flashlight? Space heater?”
I began to giggle.
“Wait,” he said.
He went down the cellar steps and came back up with his own backpack, the big one he used when we went camping.
“What?”
“I keep it ready, just in case.”
I felt an odd ache in my stomach, a kind of panic.
“Daddy?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Shh.”
“But —”
“Come on, sweetheart. Before she wakes up.”
“Did you have a big fight or something — you know after I went upstairs?”
He didn’t answer, just rinsed his mug and put it in the dishwasher.
I couldn’t believe he was serious or whether I wanted him to be.
“But where?”
“Does it matter? Out. Away. The open road.”
“But… school?”
He tossed his keys high in the air and caught them, all happy-go-lucky.
“There are schools everywhere, Pook.”
“But your job?”
“Jobs too. Now, come on.”
If you’re going to run away from home, it’s nice not to have do it all by yourself. It makes it easier to live happily ever after.
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Superb!