Reunion

It’s a hot April day and Diane can smell everything she has eaten in the last few days in Happy Van and she feels nauseous. Happy Van has many wonderful qualities, but air-conditioning is not one of them. She's decked out with decorations. Pink and silver streamers hang around the perimeter of the van. Over her mattress she’s hung a painting she did of the Grand Canyon a year back. It doesn’t look much like the Grand Canyon, but she loves how the reds, browns, and yellows pop out and envelop the van in a warm glow during sunrise and sunset. She has a cat tree for Mouse standing up on the chair by the driver's seat and she’s even managed to keep a few spider plants and a small little lemon tree alive. The chalkboard she’s painted on the side of the van overflows with the funny little quotes she wrote down from the people she has met on her travels. 

 

Even so, lately, Happy Van hasn’t felt like herself. She had to paint over her sunflower mural on the outsides with brown paint six months ago, and now she is inconspicuous but boring. She can’t risk being stopped these days. Still, even on the inside Happy Van no longer evokes the same joy; the aspirations and possibilities that once sat eagerly behind the wheel, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Great Redwood forest, is a mere memory now. 

 

 Diane pulls Happy Van up to the spiked, iron gate, flanked on either side by a long hedge. She leans out the window to punch in the four-digit code into the keypad. 6674, “M-O-T-H,” the name of her childhood dog. She’s surprised when the gate slides easily out of her way, oblivious to her intrusion. They hadn’t bothered changing the codes in the past four years like they promised they would. Sloppy. 

 

Coaxing her van up the steep hill, she curses as the engine sputters. Poor thing’s not meant for trudging up some Sisyphus hill. As she rounds the top of the hill, she sees her parents’ house perched, a watchful eagle minding its roost. The tulips march in stately rows along the side of the house like little soldiers protecting her parents from incoming change. From the top of the hill, she can’t help but think how out of place their house feels in Hermann, a castle on a hill presiding over the neighboring flat fields of two-story colonial brick. Three stories high made up of stones and dark wood with a green turret crowning the roof for gosh sakes. Her father liked to brag about how the hill was man-made. “The first man-made hill in Missouri, can you believe it!” We all knew what that really meant, man-made by unpaid laborers back in the day, but her father took great pride in puffing out his chest to exclaim that “they pay their help now.” 

 

Standing on the doormat, she twists the sleeves of her sweater. She tangles the stray pink string around her finger watching the tip of her finger go purple. Anything is better than facing them, she thinks to herself as she stares at her distorted figure through the glass panels. And yet here she is. While she inspects the curves of her slender frame she runs her fingers along her sides feeling swollen in the reflection. Her tangled black curls lie in mats alongside her head and her cheeks look hollow. The ends of her overlarge, pink sweater are beginning to fray, loose threads hang all the way to her knees and her sweats have a sizable stain at the calf. The sweater looks like it has swallowed her whole and only her head sticks out, disembodied from her torso. She had debated stopping at a rest stop with one of those coins for pay showers on the way here, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Besides once they see what she has to offer they won’t care anymore about her dirty sweater. With arms shaking she presses her finger to the doorbell, taking a few steps back to wait. 

 

When her mother opens the door, she does not say a word. They remain silent, expressionless. Diane thinks she looks like a robot experiencing a coding malfunction. “Daughter Return. Do not compute. We do not have the word “daughter” in our dictionary. What is “daughter”? Please run another code.” Diane feels the outlandish desire to giggle as her mother stands frozen. She feels like she is eight again and she has done something against the rules like run away at the shopping mall or knock over one of her mother’s antiques. But this time, instead of getting punished, she had somehow gotten away with it. Rebellion tastes good. 

 

            Finally, her mother says, “You came back.” That’s it. Three words to greet the return of her daughter. Nothing further. She doesn’t move to embrace her, but she doesn’t block the entryway from Diane either. Stepping into the house she feels like she’s visiting a museum or maybe a mausoleum. They have preserved everything. The wood floors sparkle, newly waxed, in the dim glow of the foyer. Nothing had changed, but why would it have? The sterile smell of the house, overclean like a hospital, nauseates her. For all the antiques and the dark woods and maroons her mother favors, you would think it would smell like a mothball or an old ladies party gown left in an attic to rot. But somehow the hospital smell is worse. She shivers. It feels like she is being ushered into a version of the past curated by her mother.

 

            Looking at her mother, she can’t help but feel surprised. Like her house, she looks frozen, with the exception of gray streaking her dark hair, she looks unchanged. Eyelashes curled within an inch of their life, blazer, and silk shirt, ever playing the politician. She doesn’t know why, but she expected the intervening years to soften her or at the very least roll her into submission. Although, now that seems almost wishful. Nothing had seemed to tear down her absolute confidence in her own ability before - not as a mother and not as a politician. 

 

The media had never been kind to her; she was always wearing an inappropriate neckline, driving a nice car, speaking too harshly, not making enough time for her family, prioritizing her family too much. But her mother was like quartz, impervious to acidity, so confident in her own grandeur, she absorbed that acidity to strengthen her resolve.

 

And she had won in almost every election she had ever run. Some were saying she might even run for president, though she had been out of politics for the last four years. That was the only election she ever lost, though lost wasn’t quite the word for it. More like resigned before she could get her butt handed to her. Diane wonders if her mother still considers it her fault. Even so, as soon as she had dropped out she had been planning her comeback. She remembers the clicking of her mother’s heels all throughout the house past midnight, her mother’s frantic assembly of her team to begin to plan for the next run, the next gamet. 

 

Diane sits on the red, leather couch, her parents staring down their noses at her. The silence engulfs them and all she can do to distract herself is stare at the wood cabinets stuffed to the brim with antique figurines. Diane remembers when she was eight, she was obsessed with the idea of playing with those figurines, itched to touch those delicate glass animals. Her favorite was her mother’s glass nativity scene that she assembled every year before Christmas. 

 

She loved to look at Mary, the delicate folds of her white dress, the gentle curve of her hips, and the gold painted embroidery on her dress. Her lips always turned upwards into a beatific smile but her eyes cast up, slanted, with defiance. It looked less like she was praying to God and more like she was cursing him out for her lot. Church Mary never looked like that.  

 

She remembers when she was eleven, walking home from school early with Vince from around the block, the day they got let out for Christmas break. As soon as they were in the living room she saw that her mother had constructed the nativity scene and she pressed her head against the glass enclosure, eyes widened.

 

“What are those?” Vince asked. 

 

“A nativity scene.”

 

 She had tried to sound casual, as if it were nothing. Vince reached his hand to open the glass cabinet and she knew she should stop him but she didn’t. Vince was always opening things he shouldn’t and speaking out of turn. He never paid attention in class and he was always playing pranks. One time he brought his pet bunny to school and let it loose in the cafeteria. She liked that about him because she could never bring herself to take the first step. She could follow along with his mischief, albeit with guilt, but she could never bring herself to instigate. It seemed unlikely they would be friends and if they hadn’t been neighbors her mom probably would have forbidden it. 

 

“Were you going to tell me to put them back and “behave?” He said, mimicking her mothers intonation. “That I shouldn’t be going through grown people’s things.” She laughed. 

 

“No. We should play with them.” She said. And so they spent the better part of the hour pretending the lords were super spies sent on a mission to help Marry and the baby Jesus escape an incoming attack. All was well, baby Mary was hiding with baby Jesus behind the bananas in the fruit bowl, until playing one of the Lords, Vince plucked Jesus from the fruit and threw him in the sink for his baptism and lost him down the drain.

 

They both had frozen, terror briefly illuminating Dianes eyes until Vince started to sob. Diane sprung into action, carefully putting the figurines back into their case, adjusting Baby Jesus’ porcelain cradle, so that his face would be obscured from view. 

 

“It’s alright she won’t know, at least until she puts it away, and then she’ll just blame me anyways.”  

 

“That’s worse.” That was the end of the discussion and in the end, when her mom could’t find the baby Jesus, she blamed it on herself, never suspecting that Diane would break the rules.

______________________________________________________________________________

 

“So you want money.” 

 

These are the first words out of her fathers mouth, breaking the silence. It is not a question but a statement. He loves statements, big sweeping ones, as if he is the politician and not her mother. She’s not sure what to say, how to explain exactly why she’s here in their home again after so many years apart. 

 

Instead of speaking, she stands up and lifts her sweatshirt to reveal her swollen belly, and looks her mother in the eyes.

 

Her mother stares, “no, that's not…” She stands up and begins to pace, her house slippers leaving little foot indents in the carpet as she stares intently at her daughter's belly. Her father sits dumbfounded, for once, unable to give a platitude or a vacant remark.  Her mother finally speaks.

 

“This is a miracle.” She doesn’t say it in a sentimental way, she’s trying to be matter of fact but she’s thrown off, unsure, something Diane has rarely seen. 

 

“Is it?” Diane can feel the hairs on her neck begin to prickle up, and she’s not sure she made the right choice by coming here. She can see the hungry look start to develop in her mother’s eye as she stares as the treasure Diane has brought her.

 

“Diane.” Her mother saying her name cuts her, it almost sounds rusty, unused in her mouth. “I know you haven’t been living under a rock, even if you have been living out of a van.” Diane stays silent, willing her to say it. “You know as well as I do that no one has gotten pregnant in years.”