Crossed Over

by Wyatt Tremblay

I’ve crossed over.

I never saw it coming. I was blindsided, like turning a corner and walking head on into a closed door. That was how I felt as I stood at the Save On Foods “Eleven Items or Less” checkout counter. I had three items: a tube of Arm and Hammer Ultimate Whitening toothpaste, a tin of No Name low sodium cashews, and a three-pack of Dentine Cinnamon-Fresh chewing gum.

I arrived at the store moments before closing, specifically to purchase the toothpaste, but, well, those items they stock at the checkout bewitch me.

There was no one else in line at the till, so the cashier and I chatted it up a bit. Yes, the evenings were getting cooler, but the stars were nice to see again; and yes, toothpaste is expensive. You know, simple idle conversation between two people who weren’t quit strangers, but perhaps who could be considered acquaintances by way of association. I had seen her and one or two of her children on a soccer field or two over the years and, of course, she worked at the grocery store nearest my home.

“Don’t you have a son in soccer?” She casually asked while scanning the toothpaste.

“Yes,” I answered, then corrected myself, “Did, actually. He just turned twenty and hung the cleats up a while ago, I guess.”

She nodded and smiled, “Mine just went off to university.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Scotland.”

“Mine leaves for college after Christmas,” I countered.

She nodded, her till beeping as she scanned the cashews, and then asked, “How many children do you have?”

“Two.”

She scanned the Dentine, “I have three.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering if she felt giving birth to more children then I qualified her for some kind of crown of maternal achievement. So, foolishly, I tried to one-up her. “My youngest just turned twenty.”

“Ah, yes, you mentioned that.”

“Oh, right.” I chuckled, feeling embarrassed.

“Well, you’re in that place,” she said, her expression seeming quite sympathetic.

I frowned, “What place?”

“Why, the place.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No more teenagers.” She sort of half laughed and raised her eyebrows, as if she had just stated the blatantly obvious.

Suddenly, I felt the smile freeze on my face. That’s when I walked into the shut door. The very definition by which I had qualified a good part of my reason for existing over the last twenty or so years was immediately, and rudely wrenched from my grasp and forever altered. With out parade or fanfare, I was no longer just a mother with children. I had become the mother of adult children. At that very moment I felt myself cross over. It was almost spiritual, a definable shift in my reality, like the apprehension accompanying that first menstrual period that launched me into womanhood, or the final, painful contraction that produced motherhood. I was about to become something I had not been.

“Nineteen, thirty-six.”

I was old.

“Ma’am?”

I am old.

“That’ll be nineteen, thirty-six, please.”

I focused on her face. There was a hint of a smirk in her eyes. She knew what I was feeling.

“How old is your youngest?” I abruptly asked, hoping to return the favour of this uncomfortable revelation.

Her smile slowly grew, “Twenty-one.”

“Oh.” I muttered as I handed her two tens. She had already gone where I was now standing.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” she said, taking the bills as our fingers briefly touched.

“Hurts?”

“No more teenagers. It changes who you are.” The till popped open and she began fishing coins out as she continued, “They grow up. Move out. Get on with their adult lives. Now, all the mismatched socks are either yours or your husbands. You can no longer blame your children for anything that gets broken or goes missing, or for that glob of peanut butter and jelly on the kitchen floor,” she paused to draw in a breath, “or a thousand other little things that happened everyday of every week of every month, but don’t anymore.”

She dropped coins into my hand, counting out the twenty with a deliberate finality. I slowly closed my fingers around their cold hardness.

“And,” she said, placing her hand gently over mine, “the silence. The house is so quiet.”

“Oh?”

“Are your parents alive?”

“Yes.”

“Do they live here?”

“No. Out east.”

“Do you visit them often?”

“As often as I can. I don’t…”

“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“Yes. Well, two brothers, but…”

“After you and your brothers left home, did you notice that whenever you returned to visit, and you were watching television with your parents, that it seemed as if they had the volume set way too loud?”

“I guess.” I nodded hesitantly, wondering where she was going with our odd conversation.

“You see it’s not only that they are aging and losing their hearing, but also because the non-stop symphony of discordant noise that accompanies raising children, is no longer present. Those endless morning until night marathons of running to this child’s class play and that child’s after school event, and this one’s weekend soccer tournament, and all those countless trips to the mall,” — she raised a hand, groping the air like a Shakespearean actor — “have been replaced with the deafening sound of silence,” — her hand collapsed into a tight fist — “and the crushing reality of ‘what do you do now’ with all this time?”

She suddenly blushed, aware of her somewhat dramatic oratory. She quickly bagged my three items and handed them to me along with my receipt. Feeling disorientated and adrift in unfamiliar waters, I turned to leave. I had just come for toothpaste; I hadn’t expected to have a life-altering encounter. It made me angry, and I wanted to scream. I wanted to run home and paint the kitchen counter with peanut butter and strawberry jam, and leave sticky fingerprints on the hallway walls. In the upstairs closet was a box of old toys — G.I. Joes, Transformers and Lego — that I could scatter across the living room floor. I hadn’t stepped on a toy in years. It wasn’t fair.

Afraid that she might sense the anger rippling beneath the surface of my tight smile, I mumbled a thank you and began to walk away, but then stopped. She, this middle-aged cashier, had thrown me a lifeline. This woman was obviously familiar with that place where I had just now crash-landed.

I turned back to her, “So, um…”

“What do you do now?” She finished, her expression kind and all knowing.

I nodded slowly, my heart an empty but anxious vessel of expectation.

She reached across the space between us and patted my arm, “Go home, honey, and turn up the television.”

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