Katie Durant

Word Count 1730

It started as we sat around the square table beneath the  five-point chandelier in our condo’s dining room in rural New Hampshire. I was 12, my brother Aaron was 9, it was 1992. My 15 year old sister, Sarah, was talking about her boyfriend, Paul.  Music practice had drawn them together; she was in the choir; he played the trumpet. Every year, amid a few new songs, the band always played “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Sarah and Paul had been dating for a few months at the time of the incident.

Sarah was talking about Paul when my mother interrupted her. “I want you to know that you’re lucky I like Paul. ” she said, waving her saucy fork in a circle toward Sarah’s face.

 “I don’t care if you like him,” Sarah answered. “ I like him.”

“Well, if I didn’t like him, you wouldn’t be seeing him.”

 “I’ll see whoever I want.”

 Our mother put her fork down.  “If I thought for one second he wasn’t good for you...”  

Sarah stood up, took up her plate, extended her arms, and dumped her spaghetti onto our mother’s lap. She then turned and fled upstairs to her third-floor room. Aaron and I looked at each other and then at our mother, who took the plate from her lap and brushed the spaghetti to the floor. She inhaled as though setting up for some tedious task, picked up her own plate of spaghetti and started up the stairs.

As our mother turned the corner on the stair landing leading up to the second floor, Aaron and I crept behind her. We gripped the handrail and walked on the balls of our feet, careful to stay out of sight. Our mother banged on the door to the third floor.

When the door did not open, we saw her fling it wide and make it reverberate as it hit the wall.

“Leave me alone!” Sarah yelled.

“I’m coming up!”

She took the steps slowly with her heavy legs. She rounded the corner on the third-floor landing, while Aaron and I crept up to peek around the bend in the staircase. The walls of the stairway and the room were as blue as a chunk of kidnapped sky. The rug was blue too, because our mother said it was the color of the Virgin Mary. I looked around the corner to see Sarah running from her bunk bed to the top of the stairs where the loft opened up and where our mother was heading. Sarah again shouted, “Leave me alone.”

“I will not leave you alone,” our mother said, and then they were one step apart.

Putting her hands up to our mother at the top of the stairs, Sarah squeezed her eyes tightly and turned her face away preparing for impact. Our mother pushed the plate upward, but Sarah’s hands were in the way. Sarah shoved with her eyes closed, our mother grimaced and squinted, turning her own face away. The plate tipped with our mother’s hands pushing up and Sarah’s hands pushing it back and down. I ducked behind the divider in the middle of the stairs.

Because I didn’t see exactly what happened next, I was not helpful to the police nor was I decisive in the years to come when the argument repeatedly reared as to whether Sarah had actually tried to kill our mother by shoving her down the stairs. I only know what everyone agrees happened afterward: the sauce-smeared plate came clanging down, ringing like a smothered bell and staining the carpet permanently. Our mother’s pin-wheeling arms came next. She stumbled a few steps backwards before grasping the handrail.

Aaron and I ran back downstairs, slid into our chairs, scooted them to the table, and jammed our forks into our piles of pasta. We sucked up the now-cold, metallic-tasting noodles while our mother stomped down the stairs and snatched up the rotary phone. It jangled as she stabbed each number out and dragged it around the face. The dial ticked back into place and our mother tilted her head back and screamed to the ceiling, “I’m calling the police.”

She said she called the police because things were out of control, but she really called because she was not in control anymore. The threats and use of shoes, wooden paddles, mixing spoons, metal yard sticks, and her palm were no longer enough to keep us in line. My mother had been a single mother since I could remember. Our father never came home to scold us, to belt us, or to tie us to chairs as her father had done to her. Nor did our father come home to calm her or tell her to take our upheavals of spirit in stride because we did love her, what we all needed was some space to play and learn, to grow up and become independent.

When the police knocked on the front door, our mother opened it and backed herself against the wall, waving her arm toward the stairs. “She’s up there,” she said, resignation and exhaustion filling up the space that her receding anger was leaving behind.

Clutching their gear-heavy belts, four officers climbed the stairs. Aaron and I stayed at the dining room table watching the shiny black boots disappear around the wall. Sarah had locked herself in the second-floor bathroom. The sound of the officers knocking on the door drifted down with the light from the chandelier. Aaron kept eating, but our eyes rolled up to the second floor. The officers spoke in low tones, pleading with Sarah to come out. They didn’t want to break down the door; they only wanted to talk. Sarah only wanted to be left alone.

She did come out, though, and the police took her downstairs. They brought her to the station, and because she was not actually arrested, but rather removed for her own good, our father was free to pick her up. Aaron and I were jealous that Sarah got to stay with our father without us, but he wasn’t going to keep her; he had work, and she had school. Neither the police nor our father ever tried to remove any of us permanently from our mother’s custody. Within a few days everything had blown over, and Sarah was unhappily released back to our home.

The spaghetti incident was the culmination of years of fighting between our mother and Sarah. Outwardly there was a lot about pasta, but it really had to do with love and power and the adolescent ritual we would all have to go through: removing ourselves from under our mother's thumb and eventually our mother’s roof. None of us speak to our mother now, all three of us made our escapes before we were out of high school: Sarah left by herself at 16, a year after the incident, and stayed in rural New Hampshire; she’s still there now.

She and Paul married at 19 in a tiny wooden church in our small town only a block or two from their apartment at the time. Three grown children later, they are still married. At the ages of 12 and 15, Arron and I moved together, against our father’s wishes, to our father’s small apartment in the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. But, these are different stories for a different time. 

Katie’s work has appeared in The Citron Review, The James Franco Review, The Voices Project, The Middlesex Review, The Dead River Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bennington College. Katie is now working on a memoir exploring the depths of her family’s struggles with poverty and mental illness.