I
always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they
used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former
houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges
now that they were gone.
I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d
grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither
my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so
the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the
driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp,
and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the
little toolshed.
We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by
dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind
the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother
had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer
trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her
new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have
his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.
--Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed
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images: abandoned farm, Dublin, Ohio
