Parents and a Suburban Heart of Darkness

All five of us kids are Boomers. Our parents were products of the Depression, World War II and the Post-War boom — exciting, if not romantic, times of rapid change. Struggling young workers in the midst of fast-moving history, Wes and Mary couldn’t see it swirling all around them, while I, their confused eldest son, tried to see who they were in order to see who I might become.

Even with the coatings still wet on the Polaroids, I knew Wes and Mary were more than the black-and-white photos I still see them in now. I don’t know if they were in love — I didn’t know what that was. I couldn’t understand the changes they went through as the years rolled by. We all careened ahead, unwitting.

I think of them now as I never could have known them: young and in lust, former lovers still remembered in their heat but discovering something new and tender in their touch that led them on to solemn pledges of togetherness, foreverness, to make a home and then to be alone no more because of us — the children they were no more thinking of in their passion than the far side of the moon.

I search old photographs for the couple they must have been: him so lean and handsome in pleated pants and work shirt, Wildroot Cream Oil Charlie curls, dark and high above down-lidded eyes, cheeks tan and smooth, that toothy come-on smile hiding all his doubt and fear; her so pretty-primped and eager, pixie-styled hair unreal red, shoulders in her sweater pulled back, proud of what was in her bra, but with that lip-stuck smile already tired of the game where all the trudge and drudge came down on her — to take or leave until she finally took her leave to discover who she might become.

I see her still with rubbing alcohol, cleaning blackheads from his back on hot summer afternoons, his hands, if not his heart, always free with her, his arms, his rosy throat and neck, his hairless chest, his workman’s might, his wooing ways. Sometimes, too, I can see his angry and indifferent lust, but always there for her to lean on in the pillowy darkness, where, through a single sheet of drywall, I heard their rhythmic embrace, the guarded groans and panting sighs of lonely release I did not want to hear, but listened to nonetheless in wonder at what it meant, and at how alone it made me feel.

An entire lifetime is sometimes not enough to find out who we are to ourselves and to one another, to fully understand the human heart.

Michael Bickford is a writer in Arcata.