Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn

Author:Laura Flynn [Flynn, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, Siblings
ISBN: 9781582434612
Google: UM80B6dpQskC
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2009-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

MY FATHER FILED for full custody of my sisters and me in the summer of 1975. His suit did not go before a judge until the fall of 1976, a full year and a half later.

Finally, in preparation for the hearing, during the fall of fifth grade, the child welfare department sent a social worker out to visit. He was supposed to speak to all the parties involved, observe the home, and make his recommendation to the court.

My mother prepared for him. We helped her clear a path—right down our old running track—through the long front hall, past the piano, to the couches in the living room. The doors along the hallway—to the bedrooms and the kitchen—were pushed closed, and everything that might have blocked his path we piled behind them. The dining room, which opened to the living room and could not be concealed, we arranged so that it looked clean as long as you didn’t get too close. We transferred everything from the dining room table—the sewing machine and all the material and patterns, plus all the bills, papers, and books that had settled in on top of that—to the floor of my mother’s bedroom. The back hallway was so crowded with all the mail and newspapers we’d lugged from the living room and front hall that Sara could barely get in and out of her bedroom. The back door was impassable. All the junk on top of the coffee tables and the parquet floor in the dining room we scooped up and jammed into the drawers of the buffet in the dining room, flattening them out so the drawers closed. Our stuff—clothes, games, toys, and books, which had spread throughout the house—we shoved into the large walk-in closet in the bedroom I shared with Amy.

When my mother swept the front hall and living room, the vacuum cleaner heaved and rattled, choking on tacks, coins, rubber bands, on two years of debris, but somehow got the job done. After, the sight of our naked, sky blue carpets, the ones that had seemed so open and limitless just four years before when we moved in, shocked us. The vacuuming revealed ugly spots, oily and coarse, brown stains in the carpets that would not come out. We pushed the couches and armchairs and throw rug around as best we could to cover them. Then we waited in the unfamiliar clean of the living room for the man from child welfare to arrive.

Mr. Judson sat at one end of the green sofa, looking down though his glasses at a sheaf of papers he’d taken from his black briefcase. I don’t remember if he asked to see the rest of the house—our bedrooms, the kitchen. Surely the jig would have been up if he’d seen the kitchen. My mother would have headed off any suggestion of a full tour. She had a way of foreclosing certain lines of conversation.

He was round and middle-aged. His suit—perhaps it had fit better a few years earlier—made it difficult for him to get comfortable on the sofa.

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