One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

My brother Jeff probably knew him.

The jail was not in Langhorne proper. That was how the people who lived there always referred to it, “Langhorne proper,” so that you would know who lived on one of the oak-lined streets and who lived in the slapdash houses and trailers outside of town. The jail was over by the gas stations, the storage facilities, the Acme and the Safeway.

No matter what the police and the district attorney said, no matter what the papers wrote, no matter what people believed then and still believe, these years later, the truth is that I did not kill my mother. I only wished I had.

this is geting so good!

“It’s a mistake to base your entire life on one man’s approval,” my mother added quietly.

How providential that most children left home when they did, before they were wise enough to understand their parents.

“You want me to be dead. You want me to die so you and your father can get on with your lives.” She was wrong. I had hoped the wheelchair would give her back some of her dignity, not take it away. And I’d hoped I’d get her back, too, for a few weeks more, another book perhaps, another series of lessons in her old familiar domestic life. But I knew the only thing that would restore her to her old self, bouncing on the balls of her feet, baking the day away with flour in her hair, keeping her dark feelings inside, was the clean slate of death.

I tried to tell Jonathan all this. Dr. Cohn was right; I needed someone to talk to. After we made love I lay staring up at the ceiling fan, tears running down the sides of my face, and said, “If I had any guts at all I would hold a pillow over her face.”

I spent the rest of that evening creaming onions, peeling yams, making stuffing exactly as my mother directed, producing a great groaning board of dishes just as she always had. After Jonathan brought me home, as I stood in the kitchen in my nightgown slicing celery, I realized that I was doing it all for the sake of stability, to make it seem as though this Thanksgiving was no different from any other. I was maintaining, abetting, creating a kind of elaborate fiction, just as my mother had, with gravy and pumpkin pie and heavy cream. The fiction that everything was fine, that life was simple and secure, that husbands did not stray and children grow, that the body did not decay and finally fail, that the axis of the earth passed dead center through the kitchen and the living world and the world kept spinning, our family unchanging, safe and sound.

So that when I saw my parents together day after day during that winter I could not truly say whether their relationship was changing or whether I was really seeing it for the first time because I was seeing my father for the first time.

“It’s more important that you take advantage of the time you have than that you worry about how much time there is.”