Free Goodbye To All That by Judith Arnold Page A

to rotate this mattress and I get stuck with the worn-out side. My side isn’t worn out. Why should I have to sleep on the side you wore out?”
    “Can we move on?” Melissa begged, her hands still clamped to her ears. “Enough with the bed. La, la, la, la  . . . ”
    “All right. Just wait until you’ve been married for forty-two years to someone who weighs forty pounds more than you and he wants to rotate the mattress. That’s all.” Jill’s mother circled the table with her gaze. “I’ve never lived alone in my life. I grew up, I went to college, I met your father. We graduated in May and got married in June. Then we had children. And now, here we still are, side by side, rubbing up against each other all the time. I’ve never been alone in my life.”
    “You want to be alone?” Jill’s father asked. “I could leave you alone. Melissa, darling, how much fun is it living alone?”
    Melissa shifted in her seat. “I’ve been living alone for years, Dad. And sometimes I love it.” She shifted again, eyeing their mother. “Sometimes it’s lonely,” she warned.
    “That’s a chance I’m willing to take. We all have our dreams, right? Well, this is my dream: to do something without first thinking how it’s going to affect someone else. To decide what I want for dinner without thinking, ‘Richard doesn’t like having chicken two nights in a row, so I’d better make lamb chops.’ To go to a movie without thinking, ‘Richard hates subtitles so we can’t see that foreign film.’ To not have to check everyone else’s schedule first. To not have to worry that what I want interferes with what someone else wants.”
    “That sounds kind of selfish,” Doug observed.
    “Yes. It’s selfish. That’s my dream. For once in my life, I want to be selfish. I want to put myself first.”
    “You’re still going to have to scrub the sink,” Jill reminded her. “I assume this apartment you’re moving into has a sink.”
    “But I’ll be cleaning up my own messes,” her mother explained. “No one else has ever cleaned up after me. I always clean up after everyone else. It used to be all of you I cleaned up after. Now it’s just him—” she gestured across the table at her husband “—but I’m still cleaning up other people’s messes. No one has ever cleaned my mess out of the sink. Not that I shave, but I spit out toothpaste. And I clean up my spit toothpaste. I’m already cleaning up after myself, so I’ll keep doing that. But no longer will I have to think, ‘I clean up after everyone else and no one cleans up after me.’”
    More silence.
    Jill avoided her siblings’ faces. She wondered if they were all stewing in guilt the way she was. They should be. They had more reason to feel guilty than she did. She’d cleaned the sink in their shared bathroom when they’d been growing up. Doug couldn’t, of course, because as the oldest he’d always had the most homework. When she’d been in sixth grade and he’d been in eighth, he’d complained that eighth graders had tons more homework than sixth graders so she should clean the bathroom. Once she’d reached eighth grade and had just as much homework as he’d had in that grade, he’d been in tenth grade and still had more homework.
    And Melissa had never cleaned the bathroom because she’d been a spoiled little princess.
    Jill shouldn’t feel so damned guilty. But she did. She couldn’t recall ever thanking her mother for all the other things she’d done. Mothers were taken for granted. Jill knew that better than anyone else at the table—except, of course, for her mother.
    “So, look,” she said quietly. “You’ll live in the apartment for a while, and you’ve always got the option of moving back home. As you said, you and Dad aren’t talking to lawyers. So you’ll live by yourself and clean up your own messes and go to foreign films.”
    “You could go to foreign films without moving into an apartment,” Doug noted. “You