Little Nightmares, Little Dreams by Rachel Simon

Author:Rachel Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497693357
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

The Long Sadness of No

When my mother turned seventeen, she fell in love with a man who had multiple sclerosis. For dates, she and Peter rode buses, looping through one town after another in the slanting sunlight of each afternoon. They sat close, the sides of their bodies touching, their hair weaving into the wool of each other’s sweaters. He whispered funny stories about other passengers; she giggled. They rode until night fell, and on that final run they would slouch down and kiss, stopping only when my mother noticed that they had passed Peter’s stop. Then he reached for his cane, and shuffled off the bus, and poked through the brown leaves shriveling on the sidewalks. She inched along, holding on to steady him. The few blocks to his house often took an hour. Afterward, she ran home, keeping in the street, as far as she could get from shadows and strangers.

If my mother was awake during the afternoon naps we took together before I was old enough for school, I would ask her about Peter. She told me about the stars he notched into his cane after their trips, about the melted-chocolate sound of his voice. She never refused to answer my questions. And I asked so many. Sometimes, when she and I were riding in the car, or cooking dinner, and there was a lull in our conversation, I would pick up where we’d left off the day or the week before. On occasion, her stories about him made her voice crack, and she would turn and hug me. I always squeezed hard when I hugged back.

Once, when the whole family was at the shore, and my father was hauling the beach chairs back to the car, and my mother was holding the baby, and the rest of us were grumbling about the hot sand, I ran up to her and asked why she hadn’t married Peter. She did not say, “I fell out of love with him.” Nor did she say, “He fell out of love with me.”

She said, “Because then I’d have to do everything by myself. Like carry those beach chairs and your sister at the same time.”

I tried to protest but I didn’t know what to say. It simply made too much sense.

Later, after the divorce, when my brothers and sisters and I pleaded with my mother to explain why she ever married my father in the first place, she told us, “I was so depressed after I broke up with Peter that I couldn’t see straight. I used to walk in front of cars.… Then someone introduced me to your father…”

Now she is almost sixty, and has gone through two more marriages and countless other men. Sometimes she goes to singles dances. Inevitably she ends up in the ladies room, weeping behind a stall door so she doesn’t have to face anyone, not even herself in the mirror. She calls me from a nearby pay phone, where she twists the segmented cord

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