A Wisp, or Maybe Not

I remembered something tonight as I was filling the dishwasher, one of those memories that pops up periodically, that you have in a recurring way but usually with years in between the occurrences.

The memory is this: I am in my childhood bedroom, kneeling at the window that looks out the front of the house onto the field. It is summer; I know this because there are haystacks in the field, not the loose piles of hay that appear in children's books, but tightly packed, cylindrical haystacks that we used to climb and play on until they were taken away and the grass allowed to grow again.

It is summer, and it is just dusk, the sky still the sky of the late afternoon as though viewed through a veil, barely darker, a little less crisp. I am alone in my room, which is small and square; it contains a full-size bed, which I consider very sophisticated for sleepovers and in general, a white desk made by my grandfather, a dresser painted by my grandmother, and a closet full of books, which are mostly soft-covered paperbacks I have read a dozen times each and occasionally organize into categories.

I am kneeling by the window because I am watching out the window, which frames the entire gravel-covered driveway. From my room, a person could still be the first person in the house to see a car turn the corner, make a right onto the driveway, descend, and pull up in front of the garage.

I am waiting for my mother to come home.

She has gone out to dinner with The Girls. Although my mother has always had quite a number of friends from different parts of her life, The Girls were the only cohesive group, remain so, really. When I was growing up, they used to come over once a week, year round, to drink wine, eat cheese and crackers and laugh so loudly the house seemed to shake as I lay in my bed at the top of the stairs. I can hear them still, laughing, my Aunt Bev's throaty deeper laugh, Mrs. Pisinki's higher, more giggly one. They made being a grown-up seem like so much fun; they made my mother seem like a stranger to me, but in a way that was glamorous, covetable.

On occasion, when it was one of their birthdays, for example, The Girls would go out to dinner. Sometimes they met at somebody else's house for some reason. I have no recollection of why my mother had been out with The Girls on this particular evening, just that she was, and that it was still light out, and that I was kneeling on my floor at the window waiting, pretty patiently but intently, for her return.

It is important to note that I was not a small child in this memory. We moved to this house when I was seven, and I feel like this happened a few years later, although it's impossible to be sure. But it was around the time I had a pale blue silky nightgown with a scoop neck and little bell sleeves that made me feel beautiful and a little grown-up, and I want to say I was at least eight or nine, maybe ten.

And so I waited; in this memory, I wait. I am not anxious; I have nothing in particular to tell my mother; I am not ill. And my mother went out fairly regularly, and I was not a clingy, needy child. In fact, I have no other memory of waiting like this for her to come home from an ordinary evening out.

But the feeling, I remember, and it is this feeling, I think, that keeps me from letting go of this memory, makes it pop into my head every few years, makes me now feel like a child.

I know my father and sister, cat and dog, were all home. I would not have been lonely, did not need to be alone. It wasn't bedtime. But in that moment, that pre-evening hour as the sky darkened imperceptibly outside my window, my mother was not home. I don't remember her getting home, which bothers me. There is no ending embrace to this memory. But I remember the waiting, the absence of action, of motion, of doing, so rare now in this life, as it may well have been for her then, and in the patient waiting the unfailing knowledge that when her car pulled in, when she walked in the front door, that all would be well.