Come Stay

Photo by Eva Darron via Unsplash

In Chicago, the immigration line is short. February is too cold for visitors. More than the dull fluorescent lights and the stale, clean smell of airports at night, I notice the cadences: American and overclear. I’m so used to living in languages I partly know. Now, even in my native tongue, I’m slow to stretch sounds into meaning. Where I grew up, in the Northeast, speech is snippy, syllables ziplocked and released with precision. Accents from the South, fat on the tongue, grate the ear there. My mother buried the last of her Texas accent when she met my father. She wanted to sound educated. That’s what Clara Ann always said — Clara Ann, who couldn’t bear to be called Grandma or any variation of it. In the North, she’d say, speech forgot its sing.

I slide my passport to the immigration officer. He has gold buttons on his shirt and a white mustache that twitches as he reads the visas, marks the countries I’ve visited, and squints to reconcile my face with my photograph. He sees what I can’t — whatever binds me to myself.

“Well,” he says, stamping my passport, “welcome home.”

The sound lingers, the hum of the m.

Some people leave home and never return. I’ve been abroad ten years, and the home to which I’m traveling is a house I’ve never seen. My journey has the shape of a return but isn’t one, because we are supposed to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, and because itinerant heroes and prodigal daughters bring wisdom in their baggage, and any wisdom I’ve accrued is in storage in Brussels with my canvases, keyboard, summer dresses, brushes, and sketchbooks — the things I drove there from Paris because it was cheaper.

After immigration, I board a tiny plane to the town where my mother moved three years ago. I should have come sooner. The flight is short, but our landing is thwarted by heavy fog. Twice the buildings come even with my sightline, but we nose up after grazing ground. A voice over the loudspeaker says it wishes it had better news, setting off sighs throughout the cabin. From the air, I sense my mother’s disappointment, and I wonder whether my ambivalence has drawn out the fog to delay my return. The plane will fly back to Chicago.

I’d have preferred to return to an America I know — Massachusetts, where I grew up, where my father still lives. But what homecoming is ever straightforward? Think of Odysseus. My mother would. She teaches ancient Greek literature to university students. And this isn’t a homecoming, really. This is just a visit. Ten days.

Just over a year ago, when Clara Ann died, my mother asked me to fly to Texas for the funeral. When I didn’t show up, they must’ve called me cold, unfeeling, self-important — a Northerner. But I can’t stomach funerals; closeness to death brings on a nausea that lasts years. And everyone knows that it’s after the funeral when people need you most — when well-wishers taper off and go home, leaving you to life with a piece missing. This is part of why I’ve come. Not to Texas but to my mother.

There will be buses from Chicago to that town across the plains, hours and hours by road, and my mother will probably retrieve me past midnight from some tiny bus depot, her barking dog in the car fogging up the windows.

When she left my father, my mother’s vowels softened, but they’ll never be Southern again, like they are in the home movies on Super 8 that my grandfather made in the ’70s: my mother in a wide-brimmed hat, thick hair spilling down, curled with plastic rollers. Clara Ann cut my mother’s ponytail the day she turned thirteen and kept it, my grandfather says, setting the camera down. The screen goes blank.