The Sand Hill Review          http://www.sandhillreview.org             2004

 

Returnings

 

The long night starts under the Departures sign at San Francisco Airport. It rumbles through time zones and loses an entire day before bleary-eyed dawn in Auckland.  At first it was 20 hours. Now it’s down to about 12. On early trips there were layovers at Honolulu at 2:00 am.  Later it is a nonstop flight, but from Los Angeles. A frantic dash from terminal to terminal at LAX, the United shuttle from San Francisco always late. 

 

The first journey back to New Zealand is July 1968.  My husband and I have been gone seven years.  My mother has idealized the grandchildren she has never met. She does not know how to share. She drags my father and my sisters to the town where my mother-in-law lives. They overflow her tiny house. They plop down in chairs, pull out their slippers and their knitting. Later, when we are staying at her house, she confesses she hadn’t realized how noisy the children would be. My father’s goat butts the two-year-old. My father hits the goat.  I tell him to stop. This is the first time I have dared talk back to my father. The winter rain is incessant.

 

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The long night.  The Departures sign. The tedium of  airport waiting rooms.  The motion sickness, until I learn how to control it. Limbo of darkness and engine drone. Gray lumps of bodies draped with airline blankets, the grunts and snorts of the sound sleepers, the sighs and creaks of the half-awake.

 

January 1984.  I bring my tape-recorder.  My mother-in-law, my father and my mother all tell me their stories.  My father tries to contradict my mother’s story, until I ask him to leave the room. My mother is hurt when we insist on spending some of our time with siblings or just by ourselves.  We visit old friends and walk the Milford Track. In Christchurch the ghosts of our student and young married selves glide silent beside us.

 

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Long lines at the check-in counter. Long passageways to the departure gate.  The sleepless night, reeking of  boozy Australians heading home. The chemical smell of airplane upholstery and air-conditioning. Frowziness of bodies cramped for a long night in narrow seats.

 

January 1986. My parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.  Our sons stop out of university to go with us. Mum guesses, correctly, that the corsage Dad presents to her is not his idea. He has never before given her flowers.  She wants to wear her ragged housedress to the party.  She says she’ll be working in the kitchen all the time, so what’s the point of dressing up? Uncles I haven’t seen for thirty years introduce themselves. When people take photographs of the original bridal party, Mum snaps off huge hydrangea flower heads for herself and her bridesmaids to carry as bouquets. Her laugh is brittle. 

 

We tour the country with our sons.  One rental car gets a ruptured gas tank, which a gas station hand up country fixes with a bar of soap.  Another has a back windscreen shatter when a stone flies up. People in shops think we are Americans.

 

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The stiff-shouldered night that crosses the Dateline into tomorrow. Accents of the Air New Zealand flight attendants comforting as the blanket tucked under the chin. The Southern Cross low on the horizon, where a dull red line edges a sea of cloud. Memory of my father teaching me how to find due south.

 

October 1993. My mother’s 80th birthday.  I am making the journey alone for the first time.  At Waitomo I go rafting through a cave to prove to myself that I can still take risks. In Christchurch, I go for the first time to Linwood Cemetery, where my stillborn daughter lies in an unmarked grave. My father has had a stroke.  He moves slowly, speaks little, especially to my mother.

 

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Again the long lines at the check-in counter. Scrape and thump of luggage as it inches forward.  The routine of the cabin: the meal, the movie, the blankets and pillows, the turning down of the lights.

 

April 1997. Our American passports stamped with visitors’ visas. We arrive in Auckland at 5:00 am on my mother-in-law’s birthday. To fill in time before we go to her house, we take a walk on the golden sands of Takapuna Beach.  In Tauranga, we plant a kauri tree over my father’s ashes. Although some of my siblings are angry with Mum over her treatment of Dad in his declining years, we are polite to each other. The country’s language is changing.  We feel like foreigners.

 

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The Departures sign at SFO, the sprint from terminal to terminal at LAX, the usual crowded plane. The long night.

 

April 2000. My mother-in-law’s 90th birthday. She is in failing health. She repeats questions over and over. In a year she will be gone. We take my mother to visit the gold rush town where my great-grandmother was born of young Irish immigrants. Tearful farewells.

 

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Passports, tickets, security checks. Birth canal of the boarding gate. Stow the carry-on, kick off shoes, fasten seatbelt. Steady the breath as the plane lumbers toward takeoff. Try to sleep.

 

October 2003. Relatives gather for my mother’s 90th birthday celebration. Aunts and uncles look old.  Some have faded away already. All five siblings are here with our mother, the first time in 45 years. We pose for photographs. When she is gone, what then?

 

Maureen Eppstein