BIO
Robin Vigfusson earned an M.A. in Political Science from NYU, but her real love is fiction, especially short stories. Her work has appeared in Coe Review, The Blue Hour, Referential Magazine, Caravel Literary Arts Journal, Lunaris Review, Bookends Review, Junto Magazine and podcast on No Extra Words. |
Find Your Way Home
The day after Dean Llewellyn came back, I woke up with a headache caused by the tension of her return; she’d been out of the office for two weeks. Since I’ve been there, Dean Llewellyn has fired countless members of the staff or tortured them into quitting. At least, three went out on sick leave and one lost most of her hair from stress. Unless you’ve worked for a sociopath, it’s hard to convey how debilitating it is. You don’t even have to see her; her presence reeks malevolence.
I took a couple of Advil and called in sick. I never have any compunction about taking time off since I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Still, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve pretty much managed to stay under the radar and compared to other jobs I’ve had, this is plush. I have my own office even if it is a converted stockroom and I also have an impressive title, ‘Program Support Specialist I’. Essentially, I’m a secretary like everyone else.
As long as I work at NYU, I can get my Master’s for free which is why my parents were thrilled when I was hired and why they’re eager for me to stay. They’re trying to push me into nursing or computer science.
“Please, Caroline. Anything that’s marketable. Something you can use this time,” my father has pleaded.
I got my bachelor’s in Philosophy from Rutgers. My specialty was Applied Metaphysics.
Within an hour, my headache was gone and I called my mother and told her I was coming for the weekend. They only live twenty minutes away in New Jersey. My mother retired about a year ago though my father says he’s not ready, yet. She taught high school English and said she just reached a point where she was “tired of answering to so many people.” A month after she left, she knew she’d made the right decision because whenever she dreamed she was back in her classroom, it was always a nightmare.
I packed some things in a tote bag including a stone carving of a seashell I picked up from a vendor on West Fourth Street. As soon as the weather got nice, my mother planted a garden in the front yard, and put up a ceramic bird bath and pieces of lawn art. Nothing toocheesy,just meek little statues of bunnies and robins. She also adopted a pit bull from a shelter, reads a lot and even does watercolors. It’s as if she’s reliving her childhood, but this timeon her terms.
The bus from the Port Authority Terminal let me off on her street and though it was a beautiful day, she wasn’t outside. I still have my key to the house and when I opened the door she was in the living room reclined on Dad’s La-Z-y Boy, watching TV.
“Caroline!”
Her blue pitty, Denim, ran over to greet me. I stooped down so he could lick my face then he raced several mad laps of joy around the house.
“Rocket-ass!” I shouted which is one of my father’s pet names for him, and my mother laughed.
I came over and kissed her, then sat across from her on the couch where Denim leaped up beside me.
“What are you watching?”I asked.
“Mean Streets. Have you ever heard of it?’
“No.”
“Ithink it was Martin Scorsese’s first movie. I saw it years ago when I lived in the city. I was your age.”
On the big screenTV, two young guys were confronting each other in a bar. One of them, an obvious punk with a wiseassgrin, winsomely cursed at the other.
“Do you know who that is?” she asked, pointing to the punk.
“No.”
“Robert De Niro.”
“Wow!” I’m surprised at how sexy he was.
“This was his breakthrough movie,” she said. “He became a huge star at that time. They talked like he was the gold standard. The heir apparent to Marlon Brando.”
“You almost make it soundlike the second coming of Christ.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” she conceded, “but I have heard that lepers who saw ‘Taxi Driver’ left the theater healed.”
I burst out laughing as if I’d glimpsed for one instant the ironic sprite she might have been in her youth.
My mother looks remarkably good for sixty-four. She’s slender with beautiful skin andthick, dark hair, but her age is obviousbecause of a sad fatigue that’s as visible on her faceas lines or jowls. I keep forgetting about her languor until I see her and I don’t know if she’s aware of it, herself. It’s like a chronic, non-threateningillnessthat no one pays attention to or mentions.
“You look gorgeous,” she told me. “Have you met anyone interesting?”
Usually, she tries to contain herself since she knows how much her probing irks me, but we haven’t seen each other for a while. I’m her only child and she’s dying for grandkids.
“Not really.” I’m seeing a married professor, but she wouldn’t understand the dynamics.She can only think of romance in terms of a long-term investment that should yield dividends.To her, it’s the opposite of friendly sex and recreation which isbasically all this man and I share.
“I brought you a present,” I told her to change the subject. “It’s in my tote bag.”
I’dcovered the stone seashell in newspaper and when she unwrapped it, she looked honestly awed as if it was exactly what she wanted.
“This is so lovely! I know just where to put it.”
We went out to her garden in the front yard and she placed it next to a rose of Sharon tree. All the flowers in her garden are variations of blue. While the petals on the rose of Sharon are misty, the lobelia is iridescent and what with the little sculptures of woodland creatures, she seemed to be going for anenchanted forest effect.
“Gee, Mom, all you needare some toadstools,here.” We sat down on wicker chairs on the front porch.
“How’s work?” she flatly changed the subject.
“Dean Llewellyn has stage four cancer.”
“Really? And you said she was such a micromanager.’’
“Yeah,micromanage that.”
My mother shook her head. “No matter how hard you try to hang onto life, itslips through your fingers.”
“She’s still coming to work, do you believe it? In awheelchair. With a catheterattached.” It seemed natural that she’d decide to die there, wringing her last dregs of power.
“I feel sorry for her.”
“I don’t,”I said emphatically.
“Well, when the time comes, it feels like all your debts are being called. It’s hard for nice people. Imagine how she’s taking it.”
I was going to ask her how she knew how it felt, but she has known a lot of people who died. In fact, the dead people she loves has begun to outnumber the living. She lost her parents and her brother, and a year ago, her best friend, Nancy, died of leukemia. She’d counted on growing old with Nancy so her death was a huge disappointment. She spent a lot of time with Nancy when she was sick and kept marveling at how ‘amazing’ she was, as if dying was a skill you could master.
“I think a big part of what people fear about death is seeing themselves too clearly at the end,” she said.“This writer died. He was very famous.He won the Nobel Prize. You’ve never heard of him-“
“Who was he?”
“Saul Bellow.”
I shook my head. I’d never heard of him.
“His last words were ‘was I a man or was I a jerk?’”
“I think you’re reading too much ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.” I’d bought that to comfort her after Nancy died.
“I don’t mean to be morbid. Something happened that knocked me for a loop. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She usually talks that way after learning a child or an animal was horribly abused or murdered. “Why do you even watch the news?” I once asked her. “I don’t.”
She explained that when you reach her age, it’s as if this protective cushion of self-absorption is ripped away and your defenses are much weaker.
“What happened now?” I asked.
“Agirl I knew from high school died.”
“Were you in touch?”
“No. I haven’t seen her in over forty years. She took her life. She walked into the ocean. Can you imagine? In the dead of winter,”my mother let out a sigh that veered into a moan. “Someone found her on the beach. She was the last person you’d ever think would do a thing like that.“
“Maybe she was terminally ill.Or she found out she had Alzheimer’s.”
“I don’t think so. You can read between the lines. She lived in the city around the time I did, right after college. I think she even modeled. Then she married some filmmaker and moved to Martha’s Vineyard.”
“Who was he?”
“I never heard of him, but I guess he had some success at the time. She lived pretty well for a while. She owned her own horse and went in for a lot of those fancy competitions. What do you call them? Where the horses practically dance?”
“Dressage.”
“That’s it.Anyway, they got divorced.She stayed there, but had to sell the horse. At the end, she was working as a massage therapist.” My mother contemplated her own hands, lying in her lap. “At my age, that must be terribly hard. Your fingers get taut,even arthritic.”
I was starting to take this a little personally as if she were telling me a cautionary tale though I don’t think she meant it that way.
“Would you like to see a picture of her?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“She was beautiful,” my mother said. Like most older women, my mother dolesthat appraisal out too freely. For her, it’s becomesynonymous with ‘young’. She thinks I’m absolutely stunning since I’m a head taller than she is and inherited my father’s long legs and grey eyes. Hers used to be solid brown, but havefaded into a vague hazel.
We went into the living room and her high school yearbook was on the coffee table as if she’d been leafing through it. She turned to the picture of the girl whose name was Veronica Ann Greenwood. She did have a wonderful, infectious smile. Someone you’d want to be friends with.
“We called her Vera,” my mother said. “I even thought her name was sophisticated. Veronica.I thought shelooked like Jackie Kennedy, but prettier. She dressed beautifully. The most elegant shoes and hair. She was so far beyond the rest of us. I had no sense of style, then. I just followed fads. She was glamorous; that’s the word.”
The quote under Vera’s picture read I never met a man I didn’t like.
“What’s that about?” I asked. “Was she slutty?”
My mother frowned in disgust. “The girls on the Yearbook Committee were so bitchy. Of course, guys were crazy about her. She was so attractive. And funny. Playful.”
My mother turned the page and pointed to a rather plain, moon-faced girl whose quote read All abrim with joy, victory, mastery and beauty. “This cow was the head of the yearbook committee,” my mother said. “They gave the best quotes to themselves.”
I burst out laughing because that sounded like something I might do.
“I don’t know what to think. It’s not real to me,” she mused.“She must have felt she had no options left. Her youth was gone. So were her looks. But to do it that way?”
“I think she was lonely,” I said and my mother looked startled as if I’d said something prophetic.
“Oh, my God. You know, after I found out shedied, I dreamed about the songUnchained Melody.”’
I shook my head.
“It was popular when I was in high school. I dreamed the words ‘Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea, to the open arms of the sea. Lonely rivers sigh, wait for me, wait for me, I’ll be coming home, wait for me,” she brightened, then teared up. “And then you brought me the seashell. I think it’s a sign from Vera.”
Tears had turned her eyes the most ephemeral color. We went outside again and she picked the seashell up and cradled it in her arms.
I’d never realized how much power the dead have over the living, how intensely they animate this world. They weren’t static or inert, but reverberations that merge with the living in their purest forms. How else could my mother get obsessed with a girl she hadn’t thoughtabout or seen in over forty years?
I could have given her ateacup or a plant and she would have construed it as a message from Vera. Any object on earth could be related to someone who’d lived, there.
My mother hugged the shell as if Vera had brought it up from the ocean to show that she’d found her way home. She waslike a lostscout who had gone on ahead, hazarding unknown land.
The day after Dean Llewellyn came back, I woke up with a headache caused by the tension of her return; she’d been out of the office for two weeks. Since I’ve been there, Dean Llewellyn has fired countless members of the staff or tortured them into quitting. At least, three went out on sick leave and one lost most of her hair from stress. Unless you’ve worked for a sociopath, it’s hard to convey how debilitating it is. You don’t even have to see her; her presence reeks malevolence.
I took a couple of Advil and called in sick. I never have any compunction about taking time off since I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Still, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve pretty much managed to stay under the radar and compared to other jobs I’ve had, this is plush. I have my own office even if it is a converted stockroom and I also have an impressive title, ‘Program Support Specialist I’. Essentially, I’m a secretary like everyone else.
As long as I work at NYU, I can get my Master’s for free which is why my parents were thrilled when I was hired and why they’re eager for me to stay. They’re trying to push me into nursing or computer science.
“Please, Caroline. Anything that’s marketable. Something you can use this time,” my father has pleaded.
I got my bachelor’s in Philosophy from Rutgers. My specialty was Applied Metaphysics.
Within an hour, my headache was gone and I called my mother and told her I was coming for the weekend. They only live twenty minutes away in New Jersey. My mother retired about a year ago though my father says he’s not ready, yet. She taught high school English and said she just reached a point where she was “tired of answering to so many people.” A month after she left, she knew she’d made the right decision because whenever she dreamed she was back in her classroom, it was always a nightmare.
I packed some things in a tote bag including a stone carving of a seashell I picked up from a vendor on West Fourth Street. As soon as the weather got nice, my mother planted a garden in the front yard, and put up a ceramic bird bath and pieces of lawn art. Nothing toocheesy,just meek little statues of bunnies and robins. She also adopted a pit bull from a shelter, reads a lot and even does watercolors. It’s as if she’s reliving her childhood, but this timeon her terms.
The bus from the Port Authority Terminal let me off on her street and though it was a beautiful day, she wasn’t outside. I still have my key to the house and when I opened the door she was in the living room reclined on Dad’s La-Z-y Boy, watching TV.
“Caroline!”
Her blue pitty, Denim, ran over to greet me. I stooped down so he could lick my face then he raced several mad laps of joy around the house.
“Rocket-ass!” I shouted which is one of my father’s pet names for him, and my mother laughed.
I came over and kissed her, then sat across from her on the couch where Denim leaped up beside me.
“What are you watching?”I asked.
“Mean Streets. Have you ever heard of it?’
“No.”
“Ithink it was Martin Scorsese’s first movie. I saw it years ago when I lived in the city. I was your age.”
On the big screenTV, two young guys were confronting each other in a bar. One of them, an obvious punk with a wiseassgrin, winsomely cursed at the other.
“Do you know who that is?” she asked, pointing to the punk.
“No.”
“Robert De Niro.”
“Wow!” I’m surprised at how sexy he was.
“This was his breakthrough movie,” she said. “He became a huge star at that time. They talked like he was the gold standard. The heir apparent to Marlon Brando.”
“You almost make it soundlike the second coming of Christ.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” she conceded, “but I have heard that lepers who saw ‘Taxi Driver’ left the theater healed.”
I burst out laughing as if I’d glimpsed for one instant the ironic sprite she might have been in her youth.
My mother looks remarkably good for sixty-four. She’s slender with beautiful skin andthick, dark hair, but her age is obviousbecause of a sad fatigue that’s as visible on her faceas lines or jowls. I keep forgetting about her languor until I see her and I don’t know if she’s aware of it, herself. It’s like a chronic, non-threateningillnessthat no one pays attention to or mentions.
“You look gorgeous,” she told me. “Have you met anyone interesting?”
Usually, she tries to contain herself since she knows how much her probing irks me, but we haven’t seen each other for a while. I’m her only child and she’s dying for grandkids.
“Not really.” I’m seeing a married professor, but she wouldn’t understand the dynamics.She can only think of romance in terms of a long-term investment that should yield dividends.To her, it’s the opposite of friendly sex and recreation which isbasically all this man and I share.
“I brought you a present,” I told her to change the subject. “It’s in my tote bag.”
I’dcovered the stone seashell in newspaper and when she unwrapped it, she looked honestly awed as if it was exactly what she wanted.
“This is so lovely! I know just where to put it.”
We went out to her garden in the front yard and she placed it next to a rose of Sharon tree. All the flowers in her garden are variations of blue. While the petals on the rose of Sharon are misty, the lobelia is iridescent and what with the little sculptures of woodland creatures, she seemed to be going for anenchanted forest effect.
“Gee, Mom, all you needare some toadstools,here.” We sat down on wicker chairs on the front porch.
“How’s work?” she flatly changed the subject.
“Dean Llewellyn has stage four cancer.”
“Really? And you said she was such a micromanager.’’
“Yeah,micromanage that.”
My mother shook her head. “No matter how hard you try to hang onto life, itslips through your fingers.”
“She’s still coming to work, do you believe it? In awheelchair. With a catheterattached.” It seemed natural that she’d decide to die there, wringing her last dregs of power.
“I feel sorry for her.”
“I don’t,”I said emphatically.
“Well, when the time comes, it feels like all your debts are being called. It’s hard for nice people. Imagine how she’s taking it.”
I was going to ask her how she knew how it felt, but she has known a lot of people who died. In fact, the dead people she loves has begun to outnumber the living. She lost her parents and her brother, and a year ago, her best friend, Nancy, died of leukemia. She’d counted on growing old with Nancy so her death was a huge disappointment. She spent a lot of time with Nancy when she was sick and kept marveling at how ‘amazing’ she was, as if dying was a skill you could master.
“I think a big part of what people fear about death is seeing themselves too clearly at the end,” she said.“This writer died. He was very famous.He won the Nobel Prize. You’ve never heard of him-“
“Who was he?”
“Saul Bellow.”
I shook my head. I’d never heard of him.
“His last words were ‘was I a man or was I a jerk?’”
“I think you’re reading too much ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.” I’d bought that to comfort her after Nancy died.
“I don’t mean to be morbid. Something happened that knocked me for a loop. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She usually talks that way after learning a child or an animal was horribly abused or murdered. “Why do you even watch the news?” I once asked her. “I don’t.”
She explained that when you reach her age, it’s as if this protective cushion of self-absorption is ripped away and your defenses are much weaker.
“What happened now?” I asked.
“Agirl I knew from high school died.”
“Were you in touch?”
“No. I haven’t seen her in over forty years. She took her life. She walked into the ocean. Can you imagine? In the dead of winter,”my mother let out a sigh that veered into a moan. “Someone found her on the beach. She was the last person you’d ever think would do a thing like that.“
“Maybe she was terminally ill.Or she found out she had Alzheimer’s.”
“I don’t think so. You can read between the lines. She lived in the city around the time I did, right after college. I think she even modeled. Then she married some filmmaker and moved to Martha’s Vineyard.”
“Who was he?”
“I never heard of him, but I guess he had some success at the time. She lived pretty well for a while. She owned her own horse and went in for a lot of those fancy competitions. What do you call them? Where the horses practically dance?”
“Dressage.”
“That’s it.Anyway, they got divorced.She stayed there, but had to sell the horse. At the end, she was working as a massage therapist.” My mother contemplated her own hands, lying in her lap. “At my age, that must be terribly hard. Your fingers get taut,even arthritic.”
I was starting to take this a little personally as if she were telling me a cautionary tale though I don’t think she meant it that way.
“Would you like to see a picture of her?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“She was beautiful,” my mother said. Like most older women, my mother dolesthat appraisal out too freely. For her, it’s becomesynonymous with ‘young’. She thinks I’m absolutely stunning since I’m a head taller than she is and inherited my father’s long legs and grey eyes. Hers used to be solid brown, but havefaded into a vague hazel.
We went into the living room and her high school yearbook was on the coffee table as if she’d been leafing through it. She turned to the picture of the girl whose name was Veronica Ann Greenwood. She did have a wonderful, infectious smile. Someone you’d want to be friends with.
“We called her Vera,” my mother said. “I even thought her name was sophisticated. Veronica.I thought shelooked like Jackie Kennedy, but prettier. She dressed beautifully. The most elegant shoes and hair. She was so far beyond the rest of us. I had no sense of style, then. I just followed fads. She was glamorous; that’s the word.”
The quote under Vera’s picture read I never met a man I didn’t like.
“What’s that about?” I asked. “Was she slutty?”
My mother frowned in disgust. “The girls on the Yearbook Committee were so bitchy. Of course, guys were crazy about her. She was so attractive. And funny. Playful.”
My mother turned the page and pointed to a rather plain, moon-faced girl whose quote read All abrim with joy, victory, mastery and beauty. “This cow was the head of the yearbook committee,” my mother said. “They gave the best quotes to themselves.”
I burst out laughing because that sounded like something I might do.
“I don’t know what to think. It’s not real to me,” she mused.“She must have felt she had no options left. Her youth was gone. So were her looks. But to do it that way?”
“I think she was lonely,” I said and my mother looked startled as if I’d said something prophetic.
“Oh, my God. You know, after I found out shedied, I dreamed about the songUnchained Melody.”’
I shook my head.
“It was popular when I was in high school. I dreamed the words ‘Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea, to the open arms of the sea. Lonely rivers sigh, wait for me, wait for me, I’ll be coming home, wait for me,” she brightened, then teared up. “And then you brought me the seashell. I think it’s a sign from Vera.”
Tears had turned her eyes the most ephemeral color. We went outside again and she picked the seashell up and cradled it in her arms.
I’d never realized how much power the dead have over the living, how intensely they animate this world. They weren’t static or inert, but reverberations that merge with the living in their purest forms. How else could my mother get obsessed with a girl she hadn’t thoughtabout or seen in over forty years?
I could have given her ateacup or a plant and she would have construed it as a message from Vera. Any object on earth could be related to someone who’d lived, there.
My mother hugged the shell as if Vera had brought it up from the ocean to show that she’d found her way home. She waslike a lostscout who had gone on ahead, hazarding unknown land.