Balloon Ride

You exist as daughter and orphan, both, neither, independent woman. Mary Tyler Moore-like, thinking you’re gonna make it after all! and yet always screwing up and turning to some man for advice or just turning to some man because you like the strong smell of him, the way even his sweat is different, heartier than yours. You like men who boss you around and treat you like shit. These are men who could protect you. If you were cave people living in some prehistoric society writing symbols that no one else could read until someone deciphered the code.

You wish that life were like that, like a puzzle, a fill in the blank word game, a Rubik’s cube. You are good at riddles, solving things, especially when there is a definite answer. But then, there is the rest of life in which it is all so murky, hazy. It’s like with those admissions brochures that you got to colleges after you took the PSAT and did well. They all looked so pretty and nice and many of the schools did have strengths, good qualities. A low student teacher ratio. A wired campus. A great biomedical lab. Strong intramural athletics. Opportunities for study abroad. There were so many choices that they just made your head spin. And, in the end, what you did was you got out a spinner from an old childhood game and, instead of colors for the spaces you would move to, you wrote the names of colleges on the wheel, and then you spun it, let the needle stop and that’s how you decided, that’s where I’m going. Dad, that’s where I’m going. I’m going there. I’m proud of you, he said, for being so decisive. You will do well. You will go far in life. You’d smiled, but, even then, you’d doubted him. You’d lost your confidence in yourself, in everything, when your mother died.

She was so flighty, so unstable, your father said. Yes, you’d agreed, but then, when she was gone the kitchen seemed too clean, the dining room too orderly without her oils and acrylics everywhere. Your father took to ordering out pizza. Cardboard boxes and red and white Chinese food containers sat everywhere. He took to making simple things, and you ate it, whatever it was, even bland macaroni with low fat, bright orange, chemical looking cheese. You ate it without complaining. He did not ask you to cook. Women don’t need to do that anymore, he said. We live in the age of feminism or is it post-feminism? Secretly though, you missed the sight of a messy kitchen, your mother, blond hair half pulled up, half down, flour all over her apron, when she remembered to wear one. The metal strainer with noodles stuck to the edge, the stove with sauce stains on the range top right near the burner, bags and bottles of spices, spilling over: parsley, oregano, basil. Messy, creative. Your mother’s world.

As the rain falls on the busy-workday-filled-with-commuters street, you pull the small, hideaway umbrella out. When you push the button, unfold it, the umbrella expands, rises like a hot air balloon, and you remember how you always wanted to ride one but never did. That’s silly, your father said that day at the fair, you looking up at the multi-colored wonder. Silly, you repeated. But your mother had said, don’t you think it would be fun for her? Do you want to do it? she’d asked you. Oh no, not really, you’d lied turning your gaze to the grass. You wanted to ride the hot air balloon but it wasn’t really practical, not really necessary, so you settled for something easy, something sweet but not surprising. Funnel cake, a slushy, something like that. You don’t even know, don’t even remember because it hadn’t seemed to matter then, but you realize now that it did matter, that you mattered, but you let the balloon ride, everything, slip away. As the rain falls against your open umbrella, you understand something big, something that you hadn’t before— you should have insisted on riding that balloon. You wonder if it’s too late.