LOST ON THE WAY HOME
Mary Elizabeth Holmes
The absence of my mother while growing up became a presence, the vacancy itself a constant companion that crowded out the possibility of considering another loss of similar magnitude. I thought I could feel nothing like it again, but I was wrong.
I still had not read the letter that Rosa left behind. Some of her personal affects, a small carved wooden bear, a photograph of a sign in a store window that read, ‘‘No Dogs or Indians Allowed”, and a heart-shaped piece of sea glass had been carefully arranged in a basket that she’d made. The letter, in a sealed envelope addressed to me, was on the bottom. The glass was a souvenir from a day that began with Rosa driving me to the school, and ended with her taking me to the beach. Her decision to simultaneously initiate me into adolescence and the systemic dysfunction of Public Education was based on what she thought I needed. But it was a hard sell and a bad fit, because even as I embraced the humanities, humans, and my failure to capitulate to them, found me up against the wall too much of the time.
“Why’s your mother so tan?”
It was the girl sitting behind me, staring out the window, referring to Rosa.
She wasn’t my mother, and she wasn’t tan.
“You sure don’t look like her”.
When I failed to respond, she started kicking the back of my chair in a measured rhythm to get my attention, or maybe she was just bored like the rest of us. I absorbed every thump, refusing to acknowledge the source, and focused instead on the dirty blonde hair of the girl in front of me, and the hypnotic percussion of chalk against black board.
“Where’d you get that name? Isn’t that a boy’s name? You’re not a boy are you?”, she asked, still kicking.
The woman with the chalk stopped writing and turned around.
“Is there a problem, Ray?”
She was looking at me like I was just one in a long line of nobodies trespassing through the world inside of her classroom, sucking all the juice out of what was once her noble calling. I knew that look. I also knew I would rather be in trouble than be tolerated. I could tell by the way she kept wiping the yellow chalk dust off her hands and onto her straight black skirt, that I jangled her nerves. She took a couple of steps in my direction, stopping far enough away to maintain a safe distance, but close enough for me to detect the scent of cigarettes, blood, and Aquanet. She smelled just like the girls bathroom, only older. I wondered how many years she had on me, and tried to imagine her having sex with one of the coaches, or grocery shopping, or loosing control. School had been in session less than a week, but I already knew that I didn’t like her, the class, or the kids in it.
“Ray, I asked you if there was a problem.” This time her voice betrayed the remote possibility of concern, but it was too late. I’d already made up my mind.
“Yeah, my problem is this asshole behind me won’t stop kicking my chair.”
The bigger issue was my frustration with the institution of institutions, which was already on a
fast track to becoming a life theme. I walked out of the classroom, down the long hallway, and out of the building. Rosa was sitting on a bench in the quad with her eyes closed. As I sat down beside her I noticed that she smelled like foreign countries, wet earth, and plants.
“Well?” she said.
“I tried”, was my response, and it was true. I never lied to Rosa and she knew it.
She opened her eyes and turned her head to look in one direction, then the other. Then she stood up and said, “We need to find an ocean.”
I used to think that the odd way Rosa phrased things had something to do with whatever language she might have spoken as a child, although she had no detectable accent whatsoever. The ocean wasn’t hard to find. All we had to do was head west, and we couldn’t miss it. I came to believe that every word she spoke was woven with deliberate care and precision into sentences that perfectly expressed her meaning. We found our ocean, and I found absolution in the elemental grace of the sun and the tides – and Rosa.
