"What the fuck is your problem, Mary", my dad yelled to my mom.
"I don't have a fucking problem, what's yours?" She yelled back.
I was 11 at the time, and my younger brother, Andrew, only 7. We were sitting out in the living room watching tv while they argued for the millionth time. I looked over at my younger brother to see if he was getting upset. He stared back at me with tears in his eyes.
"What do you want me to do? Move out?! Would that make you happy?!" Dad shot back at mom.
It was then that I got up, walked over to Andrew, grabbed him by the hand and then walked down to my bedroom, closing the door behind us. Mom and dad were too busy fighting to even notice we had even left the room. Even with the door shut, we could hear them yelling back and forth to eachother. I didn't have time to get upset, I had my little brother to worry about. I was laying on my bed, and Andrew sat on the floor beside me.
"Is dad not going to live here anymore?", he asked, looking up to me with tears streaming down his face.
At eleven years old I had to find the words to say to comfort my brother over the same fear I had, of my parents splitting up. His question punched me in the stomach. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, closing them to make sure none escaped. After all, I had to be the strong one.
"No, they're just fighting again. It'll be fine in the morning." I managed to say without my voice cracking. Although, one more question like that and I would have had a melt down.
I turned on the tv in my bedroom so we had something to drown the fighting out with, which also put us to sleep.
The next morning I didn't dare be the first one up, since I didn't know the result of the argument. I didnt want to be the one to discover that Dad wasnt here anymore, but I also didnt want Andrew to be the first to notice either. I dragged myself out of bed, already trying to find an excuse to give to Andrew as to why Dad had left. Walking into the kitchen, I was surprised to see them both out there, coffee cup in one hand, and a pack of cigarettes in the other, getting ready to walk outside to have a smoke.
I let out a sigh of relief as I walked back down to my room where Andrew was awake when I walked back in.
"Is Dad still here?", he hesistated.
"Yeah, they both are.", I replied.
A smile started to come across his face. "Good, because Dad said we were gonna work on snowmobiles today!" He gets up to run out, and see them.
I tried to act excited for him, but I was too busy wrestling with the same old question that weighed on my mind after every argument they had.
"How long will it be until the next one?"
I like a piece that gives us the child's point of view but isn't childish in its development--take a look at the last two grafs for an example of what I mean. Those represent a combining of your memory of yourself at 11 plus you adult POV, which is very much there, but subtly. You do that throughout and paint a grim portrait of a child having to be the adult parent for her younger brother, while the parents are too busy elsewhere to play their proper roles.
ReplyDeleteYou're quite right to end it where you do and to avoid the tempting but unwriterly path of explaining too much; "Sadly, by the time I was 13, my parents had divorced. They shared custody, but we only saw my dad every other weekend, and slowly we drifted apart from dad. Now we only see him and Christmas and Thanksgiving, and I don't think Andrew has worked on a snowmobile since the days before the divorce."
That would betray the tone and put the reader in a different mood, so good for you for resisting the temptation.