Scene: A sweaty woman with sweaty hair, wearing grass-stained jeans from yard work completed several hours earlier in the day (and a lumpy white T-shirt that shows her love handles, emblazoned with the smoldering face of the movie actor Robert Mitchum above the words, “Baby, I don’t care”), carries a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs back to the car from the brightly lighted gas-station convenience store on the Sag Harbor Turnpike at 10:15 p.m. She is alone. She opens the ice cream and sits for a few minutes in her car, in the dark, waiting for the ice cream to soften, wondering what to do next.
Mother is at loose ends.
Mother has been left home alone.
This past week has been a strange one. Sad one? Big one? Notable one? Landmark one? It’s been A One.
All of a sudden — very slowly then all at once, as they say — the nest is empty, and it’s just me rattling around and opening the refrigerator door and wondering if I need to cook something for dinner or if I should just have Stoned Wheat Crackers and crottin au poivre cheese. Is the half-eaten crottin au poivre still viable? I bought it back in July for a beach picnic.
Maybe I should get a sponge and a bottle of bleach and clean out the refrigerator. I’m seeing things in the back of the refrigerator I haven’t seen in actual years. I have no recollection of ever having used miso paste.
Who left Lemon Lime Pop Culture Probiotic Soda in my refrigerator?
Maybe I should weed the brick walkway at the front of the house. You never get a second chance to make a first impression! What if someone were to come over?
It’s been fully 20 years since I have been unencumbered — I shouldn’t say “burdened” — from the care, feeding, watering, laundering, schedule-maintaining, and nagging of at least one other human being.
Very slowly then all at once, it’s just me and Teddy’s cat, Maui (a.k.a. Mouser, Mau Mau, the Mauler, or Meowie), and the dog, who seems to have picked up fleas on one of her naughty, naughty, naughty forays beyond the hole that I know is somewhere in the stretch of garden fence along the eastern property line (but that is concealed from sight by the high ornamental grasses that are slowly but surely edging out the phlox and astilbe). Home alone, just me, the Mouser, an itchy Sweetpea, a bunch of fleas, and possibly an injured mole or vole brought in by the cat, a criminal character who reminds me more and more of Al Capone every day, corpulent and amoral.
Nettie, as I reported in last Thursday’s column, is now at Gee-Dub in Washington, D.C., running laps around the National Mall between crying jags, and Teddy is up in the mountains of New Hampshire, refusing to text or call his mother with anything other than a once-a-day, two-word report: “It’s fine.”
The absence of my daughter is not new; she was away at boarding school for three school years and now, as ever, calls or FaceTimes frequently, several times a day. Just this morning, for example, she texted me a video of herself in skimpy black workout gear going for a “hot girl walk” (don’t blame me, I didn’t coin the phrase!) with matcha in hand between the first kickboxing class and the first political science class of her college career.
But the absence of Teddy?
The absence of my son is like a phantom limb.
I keep thinking he’s there. It’s a confusing sensation, feeling his shadow moving around the house.
And I keep standing up in some sort of autonomic response, an involuntary maternal action, as if I had to rush to address some dependent child’s urgent or petty need, when there is no need at all. I start to stand up . . . to cook someone breakfast, or take someone’s sweater out of the dryer, or pick someone and their Boogie Board up from the beach, or move someone’s pile of sneakers away from the front door . . . and then I sit back down again.
I’ve added a GIF app to my phone so I can send Teddy humorous cat memes. A cat kneading the air with one cute paw and then the other, above graffiti letters that spell out “I miss you.” A cat eyeballing a pile of French fries with a thought bubble that says, “Haz cheeseburger?” Teddy finds cat antics humorous. But so far, nothing. He’s not biting. He’s ignoring me. I might try Adam Sandler memes next. See if Adam Sandler will get a response from Teddy. Adam Sandler’s “cherish the moment” scene from “Billy Madison” (1995), where he grabs some kid by the face, gets up close with his own face, and shouts, “Stay young as long as you can!”
Teddy’s new school is beautiful, high up near Monadnock. The classroom buildings are like pretty, shingled New England barns and there are views across a broad valley to the mountains where he will ski after Thanksgiving break. Teddy will be sailing on Dublin Lake right about now. He will have taken his first A.P. U.S. History class this morning, and eaten nine meals over the last three days in the lovely dining room with the mountain-and-valley view. I hope he is getting to know his new roommate, who is from China, or the boy across the hall from Ukraine.
I know the silence is a good thing.