"A Divorce" by Laura Newbern

A Divorce Winner: Editor’s Choice Award

Laura Newbern On a Monday evening, December, early dusk of an especially difficult winter, I spoke to both of my parents in the space of an hour. My father first: I owed him a call; we hadn’t spoken in months. And my mother, a few minutes later: I called to tell her a package she’d sent hadn’t arrived. Tomorrow, she said, Tuesday, I told you—and call again, she said, when it gets there; it’s perishable.

It is beyond rare for me to speak to my mother and father almost at the same time. They live far away from each other in time and space, and they always have, since their divorce, when I was four. Afterwards, off the phone, I found myself in a mild stupor, having brought them, without any planning, so nearly together, and I went out, into a night lit, as small towns are in December, with rickety decorative angels and oversized snowflakes.

When I’d reached him, my father was at an old people’s home in the Ozarks, the northwest corner of Arkansas, in the town where he grew up. We’re doing a concert, he said. Ah, I said. But I have time, he said, before we start playing; let me settle myself.

My father’s the tuba player in a brass quintet. They’re in demand during the holidays. Older men, in tails and bow ties; my father dragging the biggest case, with the heaviest horn. This one’s just work, he said wryly into the phone, but I know him and know what a pleasure it is, and how golden the shine, and how low and rich the notes. And how dark the ancient mountains surrounding the town, and how gladly those in the home would receive him.

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My mother was home, as always, washing her dishes by hand, one by one, after supper, her elegant slippered feet on the tiled floor of her kitchen—a summer kitchen, it’s called—just a few yards from the 18th-century house she inhabits, alone, in Virginia.

Surrounding her are the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge, and from there, where she is, when the sun is out, the Blue Ridge is truly blue; at night it’s a gray-black hood under the stars. She’s lived there for more than twenty years, walking daily out to the barn, walking back; walking between the house and the kitchen; cooking her meals; sitting and reading while she eats. You’ll call back tomorrow, she said, again, from that low building made of stone.

I am too old to call out to them. And yet, the older I get, the more I want to sometimes; to turn their faces toward me, toward what they made long ago, at the same time, and then, then—to make a sound. I am lost, I wanted, that evening, to say to the two of them. Listen to me. I am not all right.

But that cannot happen. I humored my father, told him some truth—the old depression, I said—but tempered it, tuned it finely to something partly smiling and well short of grief. And I half-coddled my mother, who said, before hanging up, that we must someday sort through my childhood things in her attic; who wished me a Merry Christmas, though Christmas was three weeks away; whose pain is as hard as those stars and whose disappointment, maybe in all of life, is a country.

I am not all right.

But I’m all right. Of course. Yes. Soon. I don’t know. O my parents— Perhaps this is vanity; I am too old to be good, but it is all I can do.

Divorce is common. My grief is common, and it’s so old, it is harder to move; but I moved: I walked down the street where I

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live, I turned one corner, another; then I looked up at the antique angels bound to the telephone poles, blowing so hard, it seemed, and faithfully, into their bright and silent trumpets.