Trips Home

Trips Home
By Sara Cohn

I had to drive home for the weekend. Although I was to return to school on Monday, I didn’t have the slightest inclination to return to the small town where my family lived. Not that where I was coming from was any more interesting. Due to my father’s declining health, I had found myself taking this trip home from college more and more frequently. Growing up, I grew bored of the small, rural, culturally deprived town in the Midwest. I bolted to NYU after graduation. The busy, bustling, boisterous, always entertaining New York seemed like a perfect way to escape what I knew was happening to my father at home. Before I left, I found out that another girl, who was living in the dorm next to me, was about to take the trip home as well. I offered to drive, and she quickly accepted my offer. She was dying to go home, a feeling I could not relate to. Her family had arrived in the US from Korea six months ago. She was embarrassed by her inability to communicate with her peers, and seemed excited to return to familiar smells and sounds. Once in the car, I asked her if she had seen any movies lately.
No, she replied with deadpan indifference. I tried again,
Do you like the classes you’re taking?
No answer, only Silence. I looked out at the road, the landscape gradually becoming more and more desolate. It was as if it had been put in a washing machine and all of the excitement was being drained out of it like dye.
After two hours, I decided to stop at a coffee shop that I made habit of visiting on my way home. It was the only semblance of society and friendliness from here until I got home. She appeared tired, and I asked
Would you like a coffee?
She wouldn’t, but she would come in just the same. We walked into the hole-in-the-wall cozy coffee shop, overflowing with overstuffed chairs, occupied by over-caffeinated baristas and customers. The girl behind the counter had clearly consumed too many espressos as she asked
What could I get for you today?
A large mocha to go.
I had been here multiple times, always getting my same mocha made by the same over-caffeinated barista, and yet, she still doesn’t remember me. My father, dying of Alzheimer’s, hasn’t remembered much of anything lately either. As I ambled to the other end of the counter to wait for my drink, I thought of my father. He was the first person to give me coffee. My mother had been dead set against it. ‘It won’t hurt her!’ he lobbied in my favor. I was dying to have some. One day, my dad took me to a little coffee shop under the pretense that we were going to a movie. When we got there, he ordered a large black coffee for him and a small mocha for me. It tasted like a rotten hot chocolate. After all my pleading, I was determined to finish it anyway. Of course my mother found out. I had spilled a tiny drop on my new shorts. My taste for coffee grew and lasted longer than the stain.
The mocha came, and we returned to the car. With many hours remaining, I needed to try to talk again. I asked her why she was returning home. She replied that she needed to go to the restroom. Agitated, I pulled over at a small café at which I had once stopped, and then later regretted it for days. I went to the bathroom too, since we had stopped. When I left the stall, I did not see her. I felt anxious, like a mother who had lost her child. When I returned to the restaurant, I spotted her, reading something on the far wall. Smiling, I made my way through the tables of families eating badly scrambled eggs, drinking weak coffee. As I looked at the quote on the wall that she had been studying, it struck me that I had missed something about her. I had not yet seen the pensive, insightful aspect of her personality—and here it was written on a wall. “Happiness is not a place to arrive, but a manner of traveling” Mary Katherine Rubbok. She knew how both of us felt, despite barely having exchanged twenty words with me. Why are you going home, I tried again.
My father is sick. I don’t know the English word for what he has, but he doesn’t remember we are in America. Everyday we tell him, but he still thinks we are in Korea. “Why are these signs not in Korean?” he asks. Everyday we tell him, “It’s because we’re in America, Papa.” So, I go home for the weekend to see him. I want him to remember me.
We stood silent, still, in the middle of the grimy café. A tacky quote on the wall of this filthy place had brought together two unlikely strangers. ‘Doctors say he’s not well. I want him to remember me before he dies,’ she said, looking at the floor coated in grease. Dumbfounded, I told her we had to go. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my father, who shared the same disease. Silence filled the car again, but this time it was different, more somber.
The inevitable question finally came up. Why are you going home? she asked. Voice quivering, I whispered
The same reason as you.
I hadn’t told anybody about my father being ill. I had come up with many excuses for my trips home: My cousin was getting married. My older brother’s wife just gave birth twins. None of the excuses bore any resemblance to the truth. Then we traveled in complete silence. We stopped as infrequently as we could. When we were approaching the neighborhood where I would be dropping her off, I felt the inclination for another coffee. I pulled into a Starbucks. While I was pulling the keys out of the ignition, she asked
What’s it like?
Being an American? I asked, surprised be her forthright nature.
No, the coffee. I’ve never had one. We moved to South Korea after the war, and my father had been a commander for the north, so we had to live in hiding. Coffee was a privilege we never got.
The amount of our conversation had just doubled, despite our many hours in the car together.
Would you like me to get you one, I asked
With a wry smile, a meek yes emerged from her thin lips. I figured after all of the hours we have spent in the car together, what would 30 more minutes matter? We sat in the hard chairs, and I missed the overstuffed couches of the previous coffee shop that was farther from home. I didn’t want to confront my dilapidated family- my mother who had become depressed as a result of my father’s degenerated health. While sipping on two mochas, we talked about New York and our childhood. Throughout the conversation, I kept thinking about my father. I knew he didn’t remember talking me to get me my first mocha, a seemingly unimportant to him that had meant so much to me. When our coffee was finished, we limped back to the car. I pull into her driveway in a neighborhood that looks like it’s a 1950’s movie set. After taking a deep breath, I back out her driveway and head to my home.
After the visit, I drove home and she took the train. We rarely saw each other at school. Months later, I found out that her father had died on that visit. My dad died a year after the visit, just before my graduation. I was distraught those final days. One day before graduation, while I was sitting in a café, she came up to me while I was reading the arts section, holding two mochas. She had the same dark, crescent moon shaped shadows under her eyes as me.
Do you want a coffee? She smiled the same, tired, wry smile. She nodded towards my mug, which had been empty for hours.
I would love one, I said.
She sat down in front of me. After a few minutes of silence, she reached for a section of the newspaper that was sitting on the table between us and began to read silently. When she got half way through the section, she looks up at me and nonchalantly questions, as if she is merely thinking out loud,
So how are you?
I wanted to just let go and have everything that was going through my head about my father and my still depressed mother flow out of my mouth and let it linger in the public. After months of not talking to anybody home, trying to keep a normal façade, I was tired. Our eyes met, and she knew everything. I told her anyways. She looked up at me, tired eyes behind half-moon shaped glasses, and leaned forward and hugged me. It was the first genuine hug I had received since my father’s funeral. I was tired of the ‘Poor baby’ and ‘Oh darling’ and faux hugs that were merely given out of custom. I melted in her arms out of gratitude for her demonstration of genuine care and empathy.