Summer of 1996, California

By Lee Hale

My mother had an affair and an aneurysm at the same time. She was always a great believer in multitasking.

I’m 19 years old, a college sophomore who attends class by day, busses tables at night, and only manages to not fall apart from exhaustion by telling myself that a few years without sleep will pay off in fabulous career dividends later.

My schedule is punishing, but my mother has it harder, so I don’t believe thatI have an excuse not to succeed. She runs her own business while raising three children and an honorary fourth, which happens to be our father. Her commute is long, her hours are longer, and the money just never stretches far enough.

When I was in high school, she went to the local junior college and took classes at night, and somehow, she found time to study and collect stellar grades as well. Then she applied and was accepted into graduate school. Her diet is microwave popcorn and soda, which I bring to her at regular intervals in her bedroom, converted by means of a massive desk and several file cabinets into a study.

My father sleeps on the living-room sofa. The extreme of the marital mismatch they create is comical to me. She is a marathon ahead of her less type A contenders. He spends his time on the recliner, constructing inexplicable conspiracies out of Democrats, Islamic terrorists, Oprah Winfrey, ecologists, and our local church, with all of their devious schemes circling him as the target.

They are not happily married.

She graduates at the top in her class from graduate school during my sophomore year, and she decides to drive my brother up to camp 500 miles away as a little vacation for herself.

I am barely aware of this decision, swamped with my own life. I don’t remember the two of them leaving. I don’t know if I said good-bye. But I’m home when the phone call comes, 7 p.m. that Saturday, when I slump into my bedroom, wiped out from a matinee shift.

By 2 a.m., I arrive at the hospital. I drove nonstop, except once to buy a map and once for gas. I meet the man she had spent the week with after dropping my brother off. I go to the hotel with him to gather up her belongings. I move her car to a neutral location and concoct a cover story for my family. They will never know.

These two events in singular, the affair and the aneurysm, are devastating, and yet they are prosaic, everyday occurrences, engendering prosaic, everyday responses of outrage, grief, and fear. But when they happen together, the magnitude of the maelstrom they create is exponential.

How can I be upset about the man when I’m grieving the force of nature that is my mother, lying unnaturally, still in a coma? How can I fear the discovery of the affair when I’m also terrified that she won’t come home at all?

I don’t know how to look at the nurses, who know about the man, since he stayed with her initially, and I am thankful and embarrassed by our secret that we keep when my family shows up. I worry that one of us is going to stumble on the lie. I worry about my youngest sibling growing up without a mother. I feel caught in all of these canceling crosscurrents, and there is absolutely no one I can talk to about what has just happened.

I have been taught that adultery is wrong, that it breaks up a marriage. An affair is a tawdry and disgusting business, a temporary refuge for the immoral and sex-crazed that inevitably leads to a spot on a cheap television talk show being booed by the audience with beefy security on standby.

Other people, those sorts of people, have affairs. It is surprising to me that I am shocked but not angry to find out that my family is those sorts of people too. But I have no fantasy of my parents’ relationship to protect. I have seen their unhappiness together since I was very small.

Their marriage was over well before the man happened. He was kind, my mother was lonely, and that was all it took. There was no great betrayal in that hotel room; perhaps there was a moment of honesty in my mother that all the ambition and drive in the world could not mask her loneliness.

I am simply annoyed to be drawn in as a participant. I don’t care about her sex life. I don’t begrudge her any happiness she found with that man. I just don’t want to be a part of it, and in all fairness, I don’t think she ever meant me to know.

The aneurysm unwittingly unveiled the affair. It is the first time I know my mother as a human. It is also the last time.

Lee Hale is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She lives with her partner on the West Coast and is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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