Page 19 of Come Back to Bed
When I check my phone and see that my parents still haven’t replied to the texts and emails I sent them yesterday, I know that I’m going to have one more infuriating conversation before this night is over. I’m going to call my parents. I’m going to call them and I’m going to make sure everything’s okay, and then I’m going to hang up and it’s all going to last one minute, maximum.
My parents are hippie artists who live on a farm in Vermont. They can’t balance a checkbook, but their chakras are always aligned. Legend has it, they met in New York in the Eighties when they’d both come here to party hard and sell out big time. Almost as soon as they fell in love and married they decided to move to the farm that he inherited, to make love and art, and a tiny person who would eventually grow up to be the opposite of everything they now stand for.
Even though I can feel my chest constricting, I call their landline. My parents have a landline, because the cell phone reception is so spotty out there, although there’s usually only about a twenty percent chance anyone will answer it. They are stubbornly off the grid, even though their only child is vehemently on the grid, in a different state.
“Hello?” An unfamiliar man’s voice answers, on the third ring.
“Hi, this is Bernadette, who’s this?”
“Hi, it’s Elijah. Bernadette who?”
“Bernadette Farmer, I’m Steve and Leslie’s daughter. Can I talk to them? Are they around?”
“Yeah hey, I’m the artist in residence here now, I’ve heard a lot about you. I really dig your painting over here in the living room, it really speaks to me.”
“Cool, thanks, so can I speak to my parents?”
“Yeah hang on.”
Okay, so at least they’re alive and still living on the farm and the electricity is still on.
“Bernie?!” My mother always yells into the phone, and yet I immediately relax when I first hear her voice.
“Hi Mom.”
“Bernie, it is so amazing that you’re calling me right now, because I just visualized it just five minutes ago.”
“Awesome, well you guys didn’t respond to my texts or emails, so I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
“Oh honey, you have to stop sending texts and emails! It’s so passive-aggressive!”
And this is why I don’t like to call my parents.
“Tell her, Steve.”
I hear my dad pick up the other phone. “Tell who what?”
“Hi Dad.”
“Bernie Baby? She called us? Our daughter willingly called us on the telephone?”
“Tell her, Steve. Texting is the communication equivalent of that powdered orange cheese that comes in those boxes of mac and cheese that you used to beg us to buy you. It’s not real emotional food.”
“Okay, well I’m glad to hear that you guys are alive and not homeless, and I have to go now.”
“No you don’t, Bernie, just talk to us. Just sit down, take three deep breaths, visualize connecting your spine to the earth and your crown to the skies with a golden shaft of light, and open up your lungs and your heart and tell us how you feel and why you needed to call us.”
“I mean, obviously it’s because you visualized it five minutes ago.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” my dad says. “Oscar Wilde said that.”
“Actually, the full quote is: ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.’”
“She’s right, Steve. She may be emotionally closed-off, but she has a mind like a steel trap.”
“A mind and a gift that’s being wasted on secretarial work. Just tell us if you’re painting at all.”
“I’m always doing sketches.” This is true. I always have my sketchbook with me. I’m always sketching, but I just keep drawing different versions of the forest’s edge, over and over. It’s like I can’t get past it. That painting that Matt is so taken with is the last one I did before I started working for Sebastian. The real reason it’s not for sale yet is that part of me is afraid I’ll never paint another one. “Don’t worry about me. I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay, and that you remembered to pay your bills and all that.”
