Touchdown…wheels slam…the great flying beast settles on the runway. I snap awake in a flicker of overhead lights and immediately magnetize my eyes to the little airplane window. Out there in the cold November darkness, Boston gleams for me just as it had months before. My heart thumps deeply in my throat from the drowsy shock, and a prickle lingers in the tips of my fingers. This is my first time North since August, the month I made that road trip to Virginia and lugged down a half-dozen bags to be unpacked in a college dorm. Now I sit bolt upright with the whirling sound of landing mechanisms and that subtle echo of restlessness travelers try to bite and swallow, waiting with unbuckled seatbelts for the plane to stop. The son, precocious, prodigal—whatever you want to call me—has returned.
Everyone’s in such a hurry to get off the plane and step on real ground that I am rushed out of my seat in a swirling swarm, down the aisle, and finally into a familiar airport terminal. The Dunkin’ Donuts with a chain link gate pulled over the entrance, the tired floor cleaners, a few bleary-eyed families scanning boarding passes on their way to Chicago…everything is in its proper place for a nighttime arrival. Yet something is different.
My father picks me up on the curb outside the baggage claim. The wind bites underneath my thin jacket as he weasels his way through a traffic clog and opens the trunk for my bags. He is happy to see me, naturally. A hug from across the center console then, behind us, a horn from some pissed-off traveler sparks the natural progression into driving and conversation. There’s really very little to fill him in on, we speak every week generally, making the homecoming far less climactic than his favorite Walton’s special. But he smiles anyway and drives on down the Mass Pike westward, tunneling underneath the Boston cityscape—the John Hancock Building, just white light windows on a sheet of black glass.
I am on my cellphone when we hit my street and look up just in time for the wheels to turn onto the driveway. The lamp in the living room has been left on, welcoming, and my father has trimmed the lawn so precisely that even in the darkness I can see the attention to detail. I am expecting a deep, shivering nostalgia to climb up my back or a sweet childhood scent to bloom in my nostrils when I open the door. Instead, when the rest of the lights flick on and I make my way inside, there is the dining room and the kitchen, the marble green island, the stool. The only noteworthy features are the suitcases I have dragged onto the rug.
I give my father a proper hug and tell him that a couple of my friends want to see me tonight. My body feels a little tense saying it, maybe guilty that I am coming home only to leave again within the hour, but he doesn’t seem to mind, even offering to drive me over.
Up the stairs, my bedroom lies untouched except for a few vacuum streaks in the carpet. I throw down my bags with the zippers still closed and take a quick shower. My father sits in his couch chair with legs draped over the ottoman when I come downstairs. He always sits there like that past 9 o’clock, dozing off, then catching himself as the news babbles on.
“Ready to go?” he says.
I nod. Half way through the drive the cast iron sky opens up into a miraculous whirlpool of snow. The first of the year. It thickens on the windshield as we pass through town, the old hang out spots. Light and dark memories alike cling to each other, bundled against the storm. By the time we reach my friend’s house, I find out far too late that they have already gone out for ‘supplies.’ The house sleeps in their absence, and my father leaves me alone in the driveway. As I approach the back door, a dagger of white light shoots from a motion sensor LED and I duck into the shadowy yard, waiting. The night lies silent except for the whisper of falling snow, and I watch the large wet flakes—the kind that build up whole memories of snowmen and snowballs—slant in the beam. I wait and enjoy my personal winter welcome until I see two headlights cut through the driveway, snapping me out of my flowery thoughts and crunching my footprints in a beeline toward my friends.
…
By morning, everything has melted. The nearly half gallon bottle is empty and stashed away behind a couch cushion. Nothing but relics from the night before: bowls crusted over from late-night mac and cheese, rings on the coffee table, a scatter of sweatshirts and shoes. My friends still sleep uncomfortably, one sitting up with a crooked neck, his head suspended in a fleshy brine of alcohol.
I spend the rest of the day walking around my house, back and forth between my room and the kitchen, a fine day forming outside behind locked windows and closed sliders. The television measures the dip in sunshine as it passes noon and approaches sunset. A hungover nap then another. I waste away the day until dinner time, devoting most of it to the ins and outs of how I might attend the party I had been invited to that evening.
By 11 o’clock, any productive minute of the day has long been neglected and my friend and I have no choice but to make our way to the party. My father drives us there too, tired and not as enthusiastic as the night before. Some great gathering of high school memories and reignited friendships. But when we get there, the place seems fairly apathetic in the moonlight: just some kids smoking joints and cigarettes on the back porch. I know a few of them and, standing there in the smoke, they don’t seem to have any sense of life in their cheeks—bodies reduced to chilly landmarks of a mundane land. Inside, our host bum-rushes me from the kitchen, wielding a boombox on his shoulder and calling my name in a drunken slur. Everyone wears sweatpants and sweatshirts, baggy ones that smell like weed and some even bearing designs of that seven fingered leaf. I wear khakis and a polo, maybe because I am trying to prove something. To whom I haven’t the faintest clue.
The basement blares from multiple speakers in a deep rap baseline, filled with faces I thought I might never see again…maybe had even hoped a little. Guys that have dropped out and joined the HVAC industry, whose ears had not been pierced three months before. A few high school seniors who are ready to have the night of their lives…getting every last drop out of Blackout Wednesday. Little do they know, like me, they too will soon stand on the stirrups of a very high horse.
I’m not having fun and I know it. I putter around from conversation to conversation, even winding up talking to the mother of the house—watching her pry open her eyes and brace against the countertop to avoid spilling her own tumbler of vodka. I carry on my stiff lip the sneer of pretentiousness, and wait in the dark basement for my friend to quit flirting with a girl he hasn’t seen since chemistry class. I have made friends down in Virginia, real friends…the kind you meet on the first night of college and swear they’ll be in your wedding, mostly because you’re not even close to comfortable enough to let a secret pass through your friendly facade. I even have a girlfriend down there, a sweet girl that none of these kids would ever meet and could only take my word for it. Maybe a drink or two can cure my growing pains, soothe the bildungsroman blues.
My dad picks us up after an hour and a half.
…
Sunrise brings Thanksgiving, and with it comes the usual family truce outlined over a plate of tryptophan. My dad and I roll north to New Hampshire, toe tapping to the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre the whole way up 495. I am exhausted but try not to show it as I entertain my little cousins at the dinner table.
“So,” my Aunt says, “tell us everything.”
“Not much to tell,” I mutter. “I’ve just been very busy.”
“Oh come on. Just one little thing.”
The food is cooked with love as it always is, and the conversations grow stagnant as they always do after a while. At one point, I startle myself in a moment of quiet pumpkin pie contemplation when, looking at the wrinkles in people’s faces, I take on the feeling that everything has suddenly grown old, and not knowing how or why I have become so bleak. But my smile stays upright, and I give everyone firm hugs to last until Christmas, before the two of us, father and son, make the journey back to Massachusetts. I watch out the window as we reach our part of the state, where whole communities try so hard to emulate the quaint New England postcard, but just end up becoming unchecked suburban sprawl.
The next couple days swallow themselves up in an array of empty cans, more basements, and a few 2 a.m. profound proclamations of “Hey you know I really DID miss you guys!” Everyone wants to catch up and I keep obliging…by this time sick of all the drinking but understanding that it was the only common ground, an expected indulgence and needed buffer in the teenage gathering.
I hear through the hometown grapevine that three of my classmates have transferred universities or plan to come spring, one is in the midst of a full-fledged breakdown somewhere in the frozen boondocks of the Northeast, and four more have given up college altogether…statistics that might usually be inconsequential except for the fact that there had only been thirty kids in my graduating class. A half dozen have gotten tattoos ranging from full sleeves to cutesy butterfly stencils, one boasts a new septum piercing, and another has most certainly come out as lesbian. The final story to reach my ears is of a friend of a friend who, seventeen and quite pregnant when I left, has since given birth to a newborn, only to have been caught blowing marijuana smoke in the infant’s face.
All these stories, true or untrue, swirl around my head as I try to settle back in—coming to the conclusion that this is what must happen to the affluent teen after it frees itself from the shackles of a private school education. I must be doing alright, as there are no rumors about me yet, the little old UVA undergrad who has been busy building a double life six hundred miles south.
…
On Sunday, the last day, a couple thumping knocks on the bedroom door throw me out of my sleep like a bullet. Time for church.
Tardiness would not be tolerated, so I have only five minutes to kill the thrice-snoozed alarm, spring out of bed like the resurrected Lazarus, grab a few clothes, brush my teeth while dodging the mirror, and hop into the defrosting and impatient car with sleep still pulling at my skin.
The morning flock of churchgoers teeters along in their little line through the parking lot, above them the great iron bell clanging its hollow song across the trees. One step inside the vestibule and I can feel the eyes on me. The heat, the prickling. Everyone stands in a jolt as the priest steps into view, the cross in front sweeping away his path down the aisle. A new priest that looks and sounds like the old one just with more hair. Off stained glass and high, swooped gothic ceilings, voices ricochet and tunnel into my ears; piano keys and clashing tambourines tremble before the altar. My father likes to sit front row, no one between him and God, but I have to grab him and pull him into a middle pew, ducking in quietly out of desperation.
The eyes again. They seem to needle into the back of my neck or catch the farthest corner of my gaze, but whenever I turn…nothing, no one. All around me are the faces of deep personal history: middle school teachers, old classmates, the church ladies with their rosary beads snaking between crooked fingers. Their mouths all seem lockjawed on comments about me. My father is oblivious but I know what they see. Scruffy, four-eyed, stained sweatshirt—my hair an uncut, uncombed bramble. “Look at that townie,” they whisper in the pews and from behind the organ pipes, “yes right there, look at him!” My skin crawls, its pores still sloughing off the nostalgia of a five day drinking binge. “I knew he would never end up anywhere,” their silent words and dirty looks decide with a communal certainty, causing my head to revolve in a snap…only to see them all just singing again. Each just following along to the most beautiful hymn ever to come from this den of wolves.
When I finally escape and the car door closes, I feel my time here running short. The plan is to hit the house, grab my bags, and hightail it back to Logan Airport with perhaps a sliver of time remaining to be eaten up at a restaurant. How sweet the anonymity of an airport feels in my mind, the facelessness of a crowded college campus.
I turn to my dad and ask him if there would be any time for a haircut.
“I doubt it. Unless you don’t want lunch.”
“No, I do.”
“Pizza?”
“Sure,” I pause, “I’ll just get a haircut when I get home.”
He looks at me with ghostly eyes of silence. “Home?” he says.
It’s true, I’ve made the slip. But at what cost?
Out of the marshes and bluffs of Leitrim, Ireland formed the first of my kind years ago and sent him off in a steamship to Massachusetts. A westward crawl and allure of gold beckoned us to leave, but God knew better. He sent an earthquake to San Francisco and my great-grandfather back east. Massachusetts was their promised land. The Lowell mills, the Franklin suburbs: life for my father, grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins. But isn’t it time to give that all up? The vein of northern blood had pulsed in all of them, rushing in an unbelievable burst that only I am bold enough to cauterize.
So I sit there, watching the trees whip past on the freeway, and think to myself what a burden it is coming home.
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