"Time to leave. Time to end this state we have found ourselves in." Her heart was beating rapidly and she could barely slur the words from her mouth by imagining them to come from some source outside herself. "I've been waiting. I wasn't sure the context of giving it to you: a birthday or Christmas gift, a banana waved under your nose to get you through school, or to facilitate a permanent departure."
"You're kicking me out?"
"Yes."
"Where would I go?"
"You just go. Just as I went to Ithaca. You just go, deciding that you will suffer through anything so as to end it with people who failed you." Tiring, she stopped and put her hands on her pounding head. Then seconds later she continued. "Anyway you stop thinking about them. You will them into non-existence, or as close as you can, because as cold as it is nothing else works."
"What sort of a person tells her son to leave?" The reality of being cut off with no one filled him with dread and his voice had a whining undertone for he was questioning if the end of family had been his aim.
"You will them into non-existence," she murmured in a despondent redundancy, "because to even take in one nice enough memory would bring in a stampede of others to trample over you leaving you nothing but bitter in those memories, never able to reestablish yourself anew. No need for sentimentality: will a permanent end. Resurrecting yourself anew is only possible with the gates closed." She was remembering that day she arrived in the airport visibly pregnant and intent to move to the East Coast to begin family anew. They inveighed the Rice University graduate school graduate with their artillery of words: whore, loser, [bastardess] whom they had taken in, and not in [her] right mind. She had been matched to an old doctor named Jerry, hand-Picked by Peggy. Marriage to him and living the remainder of the myriad days of her life in Emporia, Kansas would have been the payment for her indulgence in being allowed to study abroad in that quasi-nation of Texas. Merging the more affluent family to hers had been the price for Rice that Peggy had put on her head. Standing there unwed and pregnant, the bulging belly an ignominy, they saw her as ungrateful for their charity in taking her in. They believed that her education had gone to her head, and that she was so unlike that little girl they trained to be a housekeeper—the one who did her perfunctory duties even if her eyes were hard and cold toward those who tried to finger her. Without words those eyes had demanded all these males to get their fingers out of her and put them into their own rectums but back then she had done it in wordless etiquette as a respectful family member. But as a graduate she was releasing her latent honest thoughts in contemptuous words. She was as a madwoman rebelling against that designated role as a lesser family member by a pregnancy and a declaration to leave them forever.
"Making oneself anew. It can be done if the gates are shut completely and the herds of memories are kept at bay. Then there is no bitterness to poison the present. But be forewarned that if one creates family of his own the new self and the new life might go awry. Then he or she needs to fulfill the expectations of the new family, needs to sacrifices himself for their sake, perhaps is in a detestable job, and needs to raise children with only that defunct model of a bad parent as the example of being a parent for oneself." She saw his smirking and it aggravated her. "Don't be so amused by what you don't understand."
"You always say weird shit all the time. What else can I do but laugh at it? You aren't really kicking me out are you?" He asked this but she did not say anything. "Are you in a lot of pain?"
"Some," she said. "My medicine is in the kitchen. Could you bring it to me, and could you bring back a cold washcloth too?"