"In Another Place and Time": A Personal Essay

The sad pumpkin pie, which had been battered during an intense argument, sat limp in my lap. Cracks formed in the burnt orange flesh of its surface. Whipped cream melted and slid off the slide. Condensation built up a layer of liquid on the clear plastic top of the container and dropped back down onto the pie in slow, steady droplets. I looked over at my mother in the driver seat of our RV. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, her red hair stood wild with fury, and her knuckles turned a contrasting white. She quietly stared out the front window, lost in thought as she had been for the last ten minutes. Like the droplets of water onto the pie, tears melted down my mother's face in slow, angry waves.

The RV hummed with power but remained still. The engine rumbled and lagged every few minutes, its vibrations constant under my feet. I wanted to ask my mother when we would leave, when she would put the van in motion and take us away from there, but I couldn’t bear the thought of breaking the silence. Not a word had been uttered since we got in, since the van doors slammed harder than I’ve ever heard them shut before, since my mother and grandmother had screamed at each other with such anger that it visibly spat out of their mouths and blood pooled in their faces. The forgotten Thanksgiving turkey, burned to an awful charcoal black and still steaming, sat in the yard just a throws distance from the porch. Our red front door hadn’t opened once since shutting us out with a loud finality.

My little brother, Colby, tapped my shoulder from behind me, and I shot him a scolding look so fierce that I thought he might be mute forever. He sat back quietly into his seat but rolled his eyes, pointed to his lap to inform me that he had to pee. At eight years old, I knew he wouldn’t hold it long.

Kyle, just two, slept quietly in his car seat beside him. His chubby cheek pressed hard against the side of his seatbelt, flattening out his face and making his pink lips puff out. One noise could wake him and then, well, then the screaming would come back, breaking the frightening silence and adding to the chaos.

“Mom?” I managed to whisper.

She didn’t move. She was somewhere else, somewhere in another place and time. A place where we were all gathered round the dinner table, eating mashed potatoes and gravy and golden, juicy turkey and cranberry sauce and not at all melted pumpkin pie. A time when we were laughing and saying what we’re grateful for, not yelling and screaming and kicking mothers with babies out of their house over a turkey that sat in the oven forgotten while everyone scurried off into their rooms and did things that adults do when they’re overwhelmed with never-ending holiday responsibilities.

“Mom?”

She wiped a tear from her face. “What is it, dear?”

Back. She was back with me and the melted pie in my lap, with its leaking all over my hands and my bewildered blue eyes that searched for answers in hers. She listened to me, and I had to figure out what I wanted to say. What would make her not shout again or cry again or go somewhere else again?

“Mom, Colby needs to pee.”

Her eyes forced themselves shut, a little too tight. She nodded.

When she put the van in gear and reversed out of our driveway, I asked her something that, as a selfish twelve-year-old girl, I didn’t fully understand.

“Where will we go?”

The van's brakes squealed an eerie screech as she slowed to a stop. She looked up at our yellow house with the wrap around porch my grandfather had built, at the horses grazing in the pasture, at our home.

“I don’t know,” she said.

* * *

It would be twenty years before I saw that red front door again. But when I did, the red door would belong to me and opened into a 1,700 square foot home. It welcomed me and my four children with open arms, empty with possibility, after my boyfriend of five years handed me the keys one easy July afternoon. I filled it with used furniture that the kids would inevitably jump and climb all over. I hung family photos on walls that were completely free of holes punched during arguments. I cooked family roasts on Sundays and mopped up vomit off the floors during flu season. I danced in the kitchen with my love and had snowball fights in the yard during winter.

When Thanksgiving rolled around last year, I invited my entire family to make the seven-hour drive to come visit. My mother and her new husband, my father and his wife, my grandmother and my brothers and all my extended family, too. When the day came, more than thirty people gathered in my kitchen. I was surrounded by my family and their loved ones, their children, and their partners. I pulled a perfectly cooked turkey out of the oven and my family oohed and ahhed with amazement, drool visibly forming in the sides of their mouths. I cooked a proper feast for them with all the fixin’s: turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn, casseroles, pumpkin pie, rolls, all of it.

The only yelling that occurred was when the card game got a little too exciting. My uncle’s cheeks flushed from embarrassment as he hid behind his grotesque Cards Against Humanity card. We all laughed so hard that I nearly peed my pants.

Before she left the next day, my mother hugged me as we stood in my driveway. She told me how proud she was of me and how magical that Thanksgiving was for her. Tears swelled in her eyes, and an unspoken truth fell down her face.

Our hearts rejoiced.