After dropping my oldest brother off at college, my mother proceeded to cry the entire ride home, silently sniffling as she navigated her way through Ohio cornfields in her red Suburban. Ten years later, after emptying the same, slightly beleaguered car, I stood facing my parents on Healy Lawn. My mother’s mascara was already tear-smudged as my father gave me his final words of wisdom:”No drinking, no drugs and no boys; we’re not paying for a party.” With that, they kissed me goodbye, slipped me a twenty and set me on my way.
I worried a lot about them those first weeks of school, recalling the stories I had heard of kids who came home at Thanksgiving to find that their parents had split after years of living a lie. My mother assured me that this was not true in their case, and that she would not be initiating a torrid affair with the mailman any time soon. Still, when my plane touched down in November, I prepared myself for the worst, and prayed that their melancholy new existence would not bring down the holiday cheer too much.
To my surprise, the first night I was home, my mother and father announced they were going to drinks and a movie with their friends. Hours later, my beloved parents, who had spent years telling me that, “nothing good happens after midnight anyway” returned home at close to two in the morning. Later, they informed me that they had really gotten into art house flicks, a surprising fact— especially since, at age thirteen, my father made me leave a movie when he felt that the actors were kissing too passionately. Now he was spending his Friday nights enjoying films about transvestite cobblers and heroin addicts.
For years my parents had to live with a somewhat stunted social life. Finding a competent babysitter willing to watch six children is something of a challenge, and they quickly ran out of options. I was a major part of the problem. Normally a well-behaved kid, I would cry hysterically and cling to my mother’s legs when she tried to leave for an evening out. I’m sure there’s nothing quite like watching your three-year-old’s weeping face pressed against a windowpane to guilt you into never leaving the house again.
With no field hockey games or open houses to attend, my parents discovered new ways of occupying their time. My mother played the piano with gusto, my father went to high school football games with his buddies, and together they began lap swimming, growing increasingly competitive over who swam more yardage each day.
Their greatest passion, however, became ballroom dancing. For Christmas, my siblings and I purchased a few lessons for them at a local dance studio and months later, they are still at it. My father, ever the athlete, took to the classes enthusiastically. “It’s all about the footwork, it’s no different than football,” he would tell me over the phone. My mother regaled me with the gossipy tales from dancing school: the couples in matching outfits, the dancing shoes she just had to get and the man she was forced to tango with who “smelled like death.”
Each Wednesday night before their lesson they dance in the kitchen, past the fridge and around the marble island, grooving to the beats of classic Sinatra and Cuban jazz. My father counts the steps out loud while my mother rolls her eyes at his insistence on precision, but they keep on dancing. They have been known to go on for what seems like hours, trying out their new steps; a spin here, a weave there, maybe even a dip thrown in for good measure. Over the summer I sometimes watched them as they practiced after dinner. Amidst the dirty dishes and leftover fruit salad, they box-stepped, fox-trotted and sambaed, spring in their steps and wiggle in their hips. In those few minutes it is just the two of them, the kitchen radio and the newly discovered freedom of their empty-nester life. And just when I think they might have happily forgotten that I even exist, my father will turn to me with an eager smile and say “your turn.”
