Orphans

Who knows why we got out of bed that night, or what even woke us to begin with, but by the time I came out of my room, my brother was awake, too. We’d been upstairs in our bedrooms. I was four, and he was five.

We waited before heading to our parents’ room. Should we wake them? We should. Opening their door, we found no one. No one in the bathroom, no one in the hall. We made our way down the narrow, enclosed stairs and walked through the living room and dining room, winding our way to the kitchen.

The basement lights were off. The front porch was empty; everything was still. No one was anywhere. We were alone in the house.

The animosity that would grow between us had not yet taken root. Any voyeur catching a glimpse of us through the window would have seen my brother’s pale hair shimmering in the streetlight, while mine hung down as straight and charred as a burned match. We were unafraid, two small children in pajamas in the dark.

Only years later would it occur to me that my father’s absence that night hadn’t been a surprise. My mother was the one we sought out when we were in distress, our lone interpreter and go-between with the world. It was her vanishing that unsettled us.

My preschool self tried to picture this mother who would go out at night. It was impossible. More crucially, our mother—who made every recipe exactly according to instructions and could be relied on to have a plan in place for handling any situation—had failed to discuss this contingency.

She was someone who followed rules whether she liked them or not. Only by knowing the correct rule would anyone know how to make a path through life. Now here she was, gone, without ever telling us what to do if she disappeared.

Everything would have been different in daylight, I knew. On weekend afternoons, when my grandfather visited, he might give my brother and me a dime each—enough to buy a candy bar—and send us to the Kompak market four blocks away, leaving the grownups to talk. The store sat at a busy intersection, but since the streets had sidewalks, and no stoplight stood between the house and our destination, my mother regularly let us go together unaccompanied.

Yet I couldn’t remember ever being at home without an adult, let alone at night. My brother and I stood downstairs conferring, my height barely sufficient to survey the empty field of the dinner table. Should we call the police? An ambulance? An emergency was when someone was hurt, but we were uninjured.

I wasn’t frightened, just confused. If we weren’t in an emergency, we still had a mystery on our hands. It seemed out of the question to simply go back to bed. How long could our mother go missing, I wondered, before we became orphans?

If a policeman had asked me that night what clothes my mother had been wearing before she disappeared, I wouldn’t have known. Her presence was like air, a medium I moved through without noticing. I would have been able to say that her name was Shari Pitzer, that she was taller than I was and, like me, had dark hair and eyes. She wore a thick copper bracelet I wasn’t allowed to play with stamped with the name of a soldier missing in Vietnam.

Beyond that, I didn’t have a sense of her as a separate person. There was no way to get the kind of distance necessary to describe her well enough for anyone else to recognize her.

My brother and I decided to consult a higher authority. We picked up the receiver on the phone and dialed the operator. The woman who answered listened while we told her that we’d woken up and our house was empty. We didn’t know where our mother was.

After getting our address, the operator asked if we knew our neighbors. There was Nellie next door, we said. Nellie had a grandson named Brian, who sometimes played with us when he was visiting. The operator told us to go to Nellie’s house, and if no one was home there either, to come back and tell her.

We dutifully went out the front door, across the tiny yard, and onto Nellie’s porch. It was past the time of fireflies, hours after bedtime, though probably not yet midnight. It felt exciting to knock on a front door in darkness, arriving as I imagined prophets from the Bible had appeared, bearers of strange news.

Nellie—surely younger than I am today, but who then seemed already old to me—answered the door. We went inside to explain the situation: the silence in the house, the telephone operator, the command to knock. Then we returned to her porch, waiting, I suppose, to see if my mother would appear as mysteriously as she had left. I was still in pajamas.

I don’t know whether Nellie made calls or events unfolded on their own, but after a time, I looked up to see my mother crossing the driveway and stepping into our front yard from the far side of the house. As we stood up on the porch, she caught sight of us.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked.

“We almost called the police,” I told her. She seemed flustered—even more so when she learned we’d given the operator our address.

She’d only gone to get something from the neighbor’s house on the other side, away from Nellie’s. There had been no need to go for help at all. She wasn’t the kind of mother who would leave her children. She hadn’t been more than fifty feet from us the whole time.

She walked us inside and put us back to bed. I had no uneasy sleep afterward; I didn’t wake in the middle of the night to check on her. Nevertheless, despite my mother’s protests, we’d seen with our own eyes that she’d been gone. We’d walked the rooms of the house in her absence, unsupervised. If anything happened to us, how would she have known?

Until then I had assumed that we would always live together. For the first time, I began to conceive of myself as someone who might one day move through the world absent the protection of a mother—that, in some still-hazy future, I might not always know her whereabouts. I pictured myself as a person who would need to understand how to solve a crisis, to face danger, or to make up my own rules, that I might face moments in which my mother would reveal herself to be someone other than the person I’d imagined her to be.

But now it’s the telephone operator left waiting on the line I think of. Bridging the gap, she had to improvise for us in the absence of any rule. Did my brother go back and pick up the phone at some point to say that we were safe? Or did my mother find the receiver off the hook and talk to her before hanging up?

Or maybe she was waiting and waiting but never found out what happened, having protected us without thanks or closure as we crossed the bridge she’d improvised over the tiny abyss that appeared when we found ourselves alone at night.

And what became of Nellie, the other agent of our preservation? Like a hidden stitch mending a jacket, she vanishes after that evening, along with her grandson Brian, her house, and various dependent details.

It’s impossible to carry in memory all those who owe us nothing yet manage to rescue us. No one is ready for the realization that, sent out into the streets to find our way without a mother, we stand helpless before the strange angels of the world.

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]