4

Lydia

Lydia is plagued by nostalgia for her children’s days of youth.Where did I go wrong? she asks herself, standing over the kitchen sink waiting for the coffee to brew. She rewinds time in her mind, stopping and playing, pausing to reflect, and rewinding more. Further and further back she goes, letting time fall away like leaves off a tree. She sees her hair grow longer, turn from grey back to blonde, the now ever-present muffin top melts off her waistline, and she is restored to her former self, her younger self. She thinks about how in the beginning she took it all for granted. That if she had only known how things would turn out, maybe she would have done it all differently. She shakes her head knowingly, brushing off such a thought, because in the end she only had so much control, and this has been one of the hardest lessons motherhood taught her.

Picking up her phone, she goes into her list of contacts and hits “Lillian.” The phone rings to voicemail and she cannot help but picture her daughter looking to see who is calling, realizing it’s mom, and hitting “decline” instead of “answer.” Despite the infinite rational explanations she could tell herself to excuse Lillian’s failure to pick up, she chooses to believe in this moment that a call from mom is discriminately screened. She sets the phone down on the table, even though what she would really like to do is throw it through the window into the yard and for it to shatter into a million pieces. Then when the “convenient call back” came that night or the next day she would not be able to answer it, and maybe Lillian would understand for just a moment what it felt like to be ignored. Instead she looks down at the touchscreen, at the stock image background of bright springtime flowers, and wishes more than anything that it would ring so she could answer and hear her daughter’s voice.

“You have to move forward; stop dwelling in the past,” her therapist told her at their most recent session. She wondered how old his children were. He looked young, and so most likely they still needed his help with homework and cared if he went to their games. The age of ambivalence had not yet struck and so he was ignorant.Give it ten years, she thought to herself as he rambled on, something about picking up a new hobby, volunteering, bullshit.

Lydia never swears out loud, but she finds herself doing it more and more in her mind. She cussed out the barista for making her vanilla latte with whole milk instead of nonfat. She cussed out the beautician for painting her pinkie nail unevenly, but she stored up her most offensive and venomous silent response for Barbara, her next door neighbor, when she set out her sprinklers just close enough to splatter Lydia’s newly washed car with droplets that then dried and left water marks all over her dark red Prius.

Someday she will say it out loud, uninhibited, like a man. She will say exactly what she thinks and enjoy the look of shock and offense that spread across their faces. Maybe she will give someone the finger when he cuts her off on the road.The possibilities are endless, Lydia thinks, and she will get there, someday.

That day is not today though, and so Lydia pours her coffee, adds artificial sweetener and sugar-free creamer, stirs them to a milky brown and takes a seat at the breakfast table to read the morning’s news. Gary suggested “going green” a few years ago, and although recyclable, the first thing to go was the traditional morning paper. She powers on her computer and opens two windows, one for Associated Press and the other for BBC. Scanning the headlines she feels disint