My First Divorce and Car Accident
At the time I thought it was a coin toss whose fault the accident was.
Eleanor Shoreman was driving. She was my best friend Betsy’s neighbor growing up. Her family was vaguely eccentric for a non-eccentric Williamstown, Massachusetts family. I think the dad had a British accent. The mom was a caterer for Williams College and for herself. The mom took better care of her skin and jogged longer than most of her age mates. They had an additional greenhouse type thing on their small property, not a shed, not a garage, just a space. But that was eccentric.
Eleanor was dating my friend Conor. He had dated my friend Betsy. Maybe he was just dating everyone on Moorland Avenue before he moved up Cole Avenue. The summer of 1997, I’m preparing to go into my junior year of high school but I have a level of freedom that would make most college sophomores jealous. I don’t have a license, a learner’s permit, a car, but I also don’t have parental supervision. And Eleanor is doing most of the driving that summer. The hand me down ride is a Chevy Malibu that looks nothing like a modern Chevy Malibu. We are on Route 7 by Lake Pontosuc, soon to past Dunkin’ Donuts when Eleanor hits another car. The front of her car is completely shoved in. All I can see in the windshield after the accident is the brown hood of the car pushed all the way up. Besides for my dad hitting a parked car late into the night on a ride home from Fenway Park, I have never been in a car accident.
Even then I experienced the whole aftermath fondly. Me, Conor and Eleanor. We have no idea how to comport ourselves post accident\. Eleanor’s face is bright red, she is crying. Conor is not comforting her. Conor is making small talk with me and laughing. There are no cell phones quite yet. The police make everything easy on Eleanor: she is young, she is white, perhaps they can guess that she has a greenhouse looking thing from the address on her driver’s license.
I’m 1400 miles away from my mom and dad. They are in Minnesota, where I live. I am back in Massachusetts, where I once lived, for the summer. I’m sleeping in a house my parents haven’t sold yet, playing in a blues band every Tuesday night for $200 total at a club that, according to their promotions, is “the only straight bar in Provincetown”. We are playing in Western Mass. on the weekends. The spending money is from these blues gigs, the house, the Toyota Previa we drive in, it’s all bankrolled by my family. My brother is four and a half years older than me and he is the closest thing I have to an authority figure. He’s responsible in a junior in college way. I don’t call my mom, dad, brother to tell them about the accident. Why? On whose phone? With what phone card? Everybody’s fine. Somebody picks Eleanor, Conor and I up, we skip the movie we were gonna go see and the night proceeds quasi-normally.
At that time, heading into my junior year of high school in St. Paul, I had already been through my first divorce. Sitting in front of the Alumni House of Macalester College in St. Paul in the spring before we moved to St. Paul my mom pulled the rental car over and said “I propose a divorce”. We were at each other’s throats. I wanted to stay in Massachusetts. I had a girlfriend named Karissa, she was a junior. She was no-joke-sexually-ambitious and she loved me. She wrote all her yearbook notes diagonally. She drove me to Northampton to go recording shopping and she convinced me I liked Tori Amos. I was in heaven. And then my dad got a job in Minnesota. Not any job, he got the job as the President of Macalester. It was futile to be mad at my dad about it, when would he find the time to respond? He was wrapping up affairs at his job at Williams College and directing all his home energy towards talking about blues music and new movies. I saw my dad behind a set of papers for much of my childhood. In elementary school Dad would take me to breakfast before school on Tuesdays. He’d read the New York Times while I tried to find things interesting enough to get him to fold the paper and look at me. I think it’s why I’m great at asking questions now. Probably no prouder moment than seeing that Science Tuesday crumple down and see his moustache turn up and have him ask “explain that, what do you mean?” But there was no paper to crumple here, Dad had one leg at Macalester, one leg at Williams College and at home he was just letting his nuts hang.
But I could be mad at Mom. She was there, she listened and she fought back. I hated her. I blamed her for moving our family to Minnesota. Granted, my dad landed the job, but my mom had told him she wanted out of Massachusetts after she got fired from teaching job at the Elementary school. I thought I hated her for all of that and all of that alone. But I hated her for the way she treated me when I was a little boy. The way she treated me when me gaining weight at age five confused her, and the way she treated me as the weight just kept on coming. The way she treated me when she couldn’t get back into the teaching world cause there were no jobs when her kids were finally in school. The way she told me she’d feed me paper towels to help me lose weight. The way she called me dumb shit more than she called me Sean. But I thought there was a rule, no matter how much you hated your parents they couldn’t hate you back.
On the day of the divorce we were driving around the Twin Cities looking at different high schools I might go to when we move out here. We skipped Cretin-Derham Hall cause there’s a note in the guidebook that says “good page boys won’t have hair growing past their ears”. So we are in the car, fighting, without an agenda, with some gap of time before my Dad came back from his meetings and we had to make a half-hearted attempt to appear like we were fine. We are yelling at each other and she pulls over to this quiet lane on Summit where no cars are whirring by. She says “I propose a divorce. You don’t like me. And I don’t like you. And we are a family. We can get through these next couple years before you go to college apart. We’ll share a home, but we’ll stay out of each other’s way”. A truce between completely unequal partners, astronomically unequal partners.
It made so much sense at the time. I didn’t like her and I learned that day that she didn’t like me. It wasn’t an uneasy peace. It was just a peace. She said what I thought she couldn’t even feel. And it exposed this rawness of the world that changed me from that day forward. There are actually no laws, no rules, and no conventions against hating your kids. There are no rules against telling your ninth grader you want a divorce. It’s shit. It’s forgivable shit, but shit nonetheless. But my Mom never asked for forgiveness. She’s dead, but I have no idea if she even remembered that day for the twelve or so more years she would live. I made her a card for Mother’s Day once when we were in a better place telling her I was thankful for how far we had come from that time, and she cried. But we never talked about it. That day I learned that there aren’t rules, there aren’t things you can count on.
Back to the car accident: I’m a divorced rising junior in high school making small talk with Conor while he ignores his girlfriend and I’ve never felt freer. I was a musician, high school was a technicality. I was on my own, my mom and dad were a technicality. There were no apps to look for a new mom. There was just me getting home somehow to our old empty house in Williamstown and telling Steve “I got in my first car accident today”. He asked a couple questions, made sure I was okay, we played a game of Road Rash on the Sega Genesis and we went to bed. Two brothers with a more different set of parents than I think he’ll ever realize.