Except Herself
by Ethan Gilsdorf
When a wife who has lived by the Midwestern laws of marriage finds herself suddenly and inexplicably divorced, when this same mother of three meddling kids is faced with raising them alone, when this woman has lived 30 years and doesn't fully understand her story or even who's telling the tale, what's the next logical step? Simple: Puerto Rico.
This is the abridged version of a family story my mother liked to tell. It has been elevated to the level of myth, so the details have ceased from being accurate. But surely they ring true. When my mother wrapped herself in this story, as she did the years before she died, she taught me a thing or two about freedom. She became so sure of herself in this story, she was suddenly a character in her own novel, entering the airport with her phrase book firmly held in her long, slender fingers, ordering a drink once she became airborne, perhaps getting good and trashed for her first out-of-continent experience. The subtext said, It's easy to inject adventure into your life. (This may explain why, years later, my wife and I hopped a plane for Paris and haven't looked back.)
And the story itself? It goes something like this: my father's wish for a divorce granted, my mother discovered her world completely reversed. She found herself in a rotting, two hundred year-old house, in January, in New Hampshire. The furnace ate up all the oil, the kids cried, and teaching wasn't getting any easier. She needed to exit the local map and go where no one knew what a New England winter felt like. Calling up her college roommate, whose husband was a commercial pilot, she weaseled her way into a discount ticket and got a week off from school. After affixing a "Don't even think about it" note on the basement freezer, Mom invited her ex-, my father, back to the house to take care of us kids. Then she drove to Logan, landed in San Juan, rented a car, grabbed a copy of Que Pasa? and made her way across the island.
The bare anecdotes reveal a miserable week: budget motels, sunburn, stolen car and stolen rum. I imagine there may have been another story. A fancier hotel, with free piña coladas. A young man, Orlando, who carefully rubs sunscreen on her pale back. A moonlit encounter ending under a boat. I may be hoping into the past for my mother's sake, conjuring up more pleasing details so that her present might be changed, as in time travel, when stepping on a blade of grass during dinosaur times throws the world off its axis eras later. As if by inserting a different plot with different characters and a different outcome, some element of her life to be, my life and the lives of my siblings, would have bended into another shape. Would Dad have come back? Or that brain aneurysm, might it have passed her by at age 38, and struck down some other more deserving mother?
This was the future, which none of us knew. No ominous foreshadowing. For the moment, we have a woman who, even without possessing the perfect tropical break experience, at least has done it. Escaped. Alone. No one has seen her do it, except herself. Which perhaps is all she needs to demonstrate, if to no one than herself, that this young mom isn't all out of tricks. She can remake herself, return to a New Hampshire winter with a peeling nose and hangover, grinning like an idiot during teacher's meetings. "Where did you say you went?" I imagine my mom's colleague and my third grade teacher Mrs. Kinzie asking. And Mom, her two-word response, "The sun."
When my mother told the story in her final year, she couldn't quite catch her breath. She'd stop, ask for her inhaler, a sip of water. She'd continue the tale, hurtling back and forth between her past and my future as she always did those post-stroke days, asking me about my job, talking about her lousy lunch, then popping back to the narrative to revel in the beaches. When I'd press her to continue, to tell me how her trip ended, I already knew the story backwards and forwards, though her jumbled delivery required some assembly. I wanted to hear and see her tell it. To watch its significance flood across her face.
She comes home again, sunburned, raises three kids on her own, and survives to tell me about Puerto Rico again. The way "Puerto Rico" fondles her tongue as she says it means a part of her, two decades ago, was sighted quietly swimming just offshore. That she's still there, on the only trip she ever took off the continent, bobbing and body surfing, that strong part of her, perched at the bar with two good hands wrapped around a fruity drink and flirting.
The final time she tells me, I see that there's more to comprehension than following the action, characters, plot. I nod as I hear the story because I understand not only each detail in sequence, but what it means to the speaker.
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