Melpomene
I don’t remember what it sounded like, whether it was shrill, hoarse or cracked, but I know that the sound that has been permanently branded into my brain was that of my mom screaming my name from across the house.
It was a hot spring day in south Texas, or maybe it was summer-it’s been over fifteen years since this has happened, so the timeline is understandably jumbled. I was 23 and living at home with my parents, having recently flunked out of the University of North Texas, and my days were spent playing video games with my friends, hanging out with my on-again-off-again girlfriend at the time, or at the local university where I would eventually graduate with my B.A. in English. This specific day I had planned to go to a car show with a friend-we were very into muscle cars and it was an excuse to drive into downtown Mission with the top down in his Jeep. I was in my room, deciding what to wear, when I heard the scream. My heart dropped because I knew what was happening; my dad was breaking her heart. My pulse quickened as I grabbed my phone to text my friend that I had to cancel, quickly tossing it on the bed and walking towards my parents bedroom. Each step made my stomach drop deeper and deeper as I dreaded this bizarre death march towards the dissolution of my family.
I was looking down at the cool tiled floor, my feet echoing as they slapped with each step, and heard my mom panting heavily, asking my dad a barrage of questions. When I walked into the room, my dad was standing up facing her and the look on my mom’s face was full of sheer panic. She looked at me wide-eyed, tears streaming down her face, as my dad repeated different versions of “it just happened” after each panicked question. I sat down next to her and she grabbed ahold of me, terrified of what was happening to her, to us. The next moments were a blur of questions and yelling-at some point my aunt (my father’s sister) was called. I had also, somehow, grabbed my phone to text my sister, telling her that she really needed to get home right now. The next memory is of me standing in the corner of my parent’s room, my dad still standing next to the bed, only now my sister was curled into my mom, the two of them sobbing and at one point my mom said something to the affect of “have you no morals” to my dad.
“Who is she?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
That one I remember clearly.
Later, I was looking out the double-doors of their bedroom, which led out to the backyard. I looked at the dry grass and imagined the feeling of its crunch against my feet. When you live in Texas, you learn to gauge heat by the relative brightness of the sun, and it was out in full force that day. The effect of it made everything outside look like an illustration, an artists’ rendering of a crime scene. The voices of my family behind me folded into an unidentifiable din, my brain trying to find some sort of escape from this familial collapse. Later still: opening the front door for my aunt, who I followed as she forcefully marched to their bedroom like a gladiator heading into battle. The very moment she stepped foot and saw my mother and sister on the bed, she unleashed a barrage of insults at her older brother. She was the youngest of my dad’s siblings and we had always been particularly close with her. I was worried about what my family’s reaction would be to all of this, but in that painful moment was a bit of relief that, even though this was her brother, my aunt was fully on my mom’s side and was not hiding it.
Weeks earlier: I had emailed my dad asking him to meet me for lunch. At some point, my mom pulled me aside, asking me to reach out to him. This wasn’t the type of relationship we had-we mostly shared references and jokes and, when he was drunk at home with his friends, would come into my room and make fun of me and my motley band of friends, which they all found hysterical. But we didn’t share our deep thoughts or feelings, so this was a very strange ask. But she was my mom and, because she said she’d felt he’d been “distant”, thought that I’d be the best one to relate to my dad. So I did, he accepted, and we met, of all places, at a Hooters. There, in the din of ESPN blaring over the TV’s surrounding us and one plate of boneless parmesan wings and another with a chicken sandwich, my father told me that he, “was going to be a father.” I was initially confused because he was already a father, but as I realized what he was saying, I sat there in a shocked stupor. What do you do in that situation? Make a scene? Throw a plate of wings at him or against the wall? I said the only thing that came to mind.
“...you know you have to tell mom, right? This isn’t my responsibility…”
“No, no, no. I know, mijo. I’m just telling you what’s happening.”
I hugged him in the parking lot and as he drove off, the only thing I could think was that he was probably going to see his mistress at that moment. I suddenly felt complicit in the knowledge that my dad was not only having an affair, but was also going to leave my mom. Did that mean I was somehow culpable? Did I have a duty to disclose? I never asked for this. Hell, the only reason I did any of this was because my mom asked me to and now I’d have to sit with this even bigger ball of self-loathing in the pit of my stomach. All of this at a fucking Hooters, no less.
For the weeks and months following “the disclosure” our home felt like the aftermath of a funeral: family members intermittently coming and going, consoling us, but mostly my mom who was permanently laid out on the couch having taken weeks off from work. Once the din of divorce mourners died down, it was just me, my sister, and my mom in the house. I remember how much quieter things were, my sister constantly off with friends, understandably self destructing over this. I was mostly numb and avoiding the house with a part-time job, school, or distracting myself with my friends. My ex, after learning about what happened, said at one point, “that’s the thing with men-they’re never happy with their women and just want more.” I remember feeling stung by that comment and feeling like that was a not so subtle dig at me for breaking up with her. I also remember feeling like I deserved it.
I don’t watch a lot of tv, not because I’m some snobby elitist, but because any narrative that reflects genuine emotion, particularly negative emotion, gives me anxiety. The games I’m fond of playing are largely open world or exploratory in nature; No Man’s Sky is very calming because I can just build things and explore worlds with a very calming soundtrack as a backdrop. I’ve learned to shelter my psyche from potential trauma because, in all honesty, I can’t handle it. I panic and don’t know what to do or how to feel or how to react. So I shrink into myself like an emotional pillbug. I’ve talked about my parents’ divorce since then with a sort of dispassionate distance. It happened, my family is different now, life has since moved on. It never really felt painful to talk about, which I always found odd, but recently I was talking to my therapist about my family history and for the first time since it happened, I started crying. Not because of the divorce, or the fallout, or the subsequent paths of self-destruction that my sister and I would go down. It was my mom’s face, in that moment, and seeing the look of someone whose world was breaking piece-by-piece and was trying to understand why it was happening, but being powerless to stop it.
