Red Balloon

Imagine three children: two girls and a boy. Young. Brown hair, brown eyes. Age-wise spaced about 18 months apart. They want peace and support. Love would be nice but seems too much to ask, something too distant, like wishing to be gifted a star. It’s imaginable but who would hope for that? Not the boy, the boy who as an impressionable six years old was told by the Mother how much better it would be for the family had they bought a dog instead of had a son. Love? No. That is light-years away. Just peace and support would be oxygen.

Imagine the parents: married but shouldn’t be. Father is tall. Bald. Soft but not in the body. What does Father want? He probably wants the same thing his children do. And he wants a key. But he can’t find the key. It’s the key to escape. Escape to life before the Mother’s withering criticism and insatiable disappointment, life before self-imposed confinement with a cellmate who shivs her words into his heart and pride with implacable grit. Escape to a time before he cracks a marble ashtray over his bald head and collapses, crashing like a cut tree. Imagine the son sees Father fall, hears him moan, rushes to him, spies the Mother sitting at her vanity applying mascara, her back to her downed husband. Father’s scalp is cracked like a tectonic fissure. He’s bleeding, his head already turning purple and black, and the son learns the lesson of the drift, to let his emotions and cognition float away like when he was five and saw a child’s red balloon whipped away by storm winds; he had watched it carried distant until it disappeared into a gray sky.

(The son learns years later Father had been in a rage, but a rage cocooned by his sense of impotence against a wife impregnated by another man he thought was his friend.)

The Mother is compact. Chiseled. Inside and out. What does the Mother want? No one knows except the Mother. Sometimes she wants to scream. Sometimes she wants to hit. Sometimes she wants to chase her son with a knife or backhand him across the face with a closed fist or cut holes in her daughter’s shoes.

Mother is the one who always gets what she wants.

They live in a house scented with the acrid tang of an unneutered cat. The house has green vinyl siding outside, dark brown carpet inside. Father says they chose brown because it hides the dirt. The walls are white except for the walls that aren’t: those walls are covered in square 12 x 12 mirrors – an entire hallway wall! – or textured with rough kraft wallpaper laminated with straw. Another wall is covered with a giant photograph taken from the vantage point of someone standing inside a dark Autumn forest of endless trees.

One night, the son has a dream. Dim moonlight permeates the house. Something chases him, something like a scarecrow flashing knives. He flees from the foyer (mirrors on those walls, too) through the living room (walls laminated with straw) into the family room (forest wall; notably there’s only one chair in front of the TV) into the small kitchen (they eat at the counter) back the way he came and up the stairs it’s getting closer right turn on the landing it’s getting closer up more stairs closer! left turn leap into his bedroom catapult into a corner of the closet. But the door glides open and a giant silhouetted by a hoary glow towers over him. Glint off a silver blade as it slices down towards his upturned face.

He wakes.

Does he wake? No. Because he’s being chased again, his heart galloping like he were a fawn fleeing the wolf or a swimmer sighting the Great White or a child afraid of his own mother. He tries hiding under a rocking chair. He screams because she is right there, her face inches from his, her eyes tight furious torches. He’s trapped, he can’t get away, he’s somehow entangled in the chair legs. She’s like a snapping turtle, her big square teeth click click clicking, ripping the air by his eyes as she stretches to bite his face.

But the condos are nice, nestled on lanes named after wines.

Twenty years later, the son is newly married. Imagine the bride: beautiful, inside and out. Full of compassion and gentle strength, full of forgiveness and grace. They’re at the Mother’s condo (they finally divorced, his parents; then the Father died twice: first in his heart, then from a heart attack). The Mother hasn’t aged. She is still all sinew and muscle sheathed in an iron will untempered by time, experience, or loneliness. She is still a force of nature. A pop-up lightning storm. A flash flood careening with broken concrete.

She criticizes the young bride. She wants the daughter-in-law to know her place.

“No,” the son says. His wife is his North Star.

“If you speak to her that way again, we’re leaving.”

Of course, she does it again.

“Goodbye,” the son says.

They leave.

Two hours later, as he parks the car, she asks, “Why do you go back?”

He sits against the car hood and crosses his arms. Wedges of orange sunlight dapple the sidewalk in the cooling air. He notices the mundane click of the parking lot lights flipping on.

“I’ll give it a couple weeks to make the point. You don’t have to go. I get it if you don’t want to. She’s my mom. She needs me.”

They walk through the foyer.

“There are reasons she’s the way she is. They’re not excuses. But they are explanations.”

The building is quiet. The hallway well lit. Her hand is warm in his.

“You’re a good son.”

He shrugs. He finds the key and unlocks the door.

Imagine the newlyweds: He’s just starting his career and she’s working retail as they try for their first child and prepare to be a Mom and Dad. They can picture a beautiful future with children, but for now they live in a small apartment where they have student loans and too many bills and sleep on the skin of a broken waterbed while they save for a new mattress.

But it’s their home.

Here, with her, he can be present.

He can breathe.

It’s peaceful. They support each other.

They’re in love.