“Know your place,” my son said. I simply replied, “Understood,” and when the cook came, there was silence at the table.

 

My son, whom I had raised to be a courageous man who stands up for what is right, had become a coward.

I sat there, hands in my lap, watching. My glass of water remained untouched. I had no appetite. It wasn’t about thirst. It was about dignity. And in that moment, I felt as if they had sucked the last drop of water out of me.

Marlene’s father, a burly man with a gray mustache and an arrogant manner, finally spoke.

“Michael, your mother is very quiet. Has she always been like that?”

He spoke about me as if I weren’t there, as if I were merely a topic of conversation and not a real person sitting less than two meters away. Michael swallowed his mouthful before answering.

“Mom has always been simple and modest. You know, she belongs to a different generation.”

“Modest,” Marlene repeated, and there was something poisonous in her tone. “Yes, absolutely
modest.”

I wanted to say something. I wanted to shout at them that modest doesn’t mean invisible, that simple isn’t synonymous with stupid. But I held back because something inside me told me to wait, observe, let them dig their own grave.

Marlene’s mother poured herself some more wine. The bottle was already half empty.

These must be really tough times for people your age, Helen. No steady income, too little savings. It’s a shame the older generation didn’t make better provisions for their future.

There it was, the first direct blow, disguised as concern, but it was still a blow that implied I was a burden, that I was poor, that I hadn’t made anything of my life.

“Mom will be fine,” Michael said, but his tone was defensive and weak, as if he didn’t believe what he was saying.

“Of course, of course,” Marlene replied quickly. But her smile betrayed the opposite. “We all do our best with what we have. Although, well, some of us have more than others.”

Silence. A silence so thick you could have cut it with a knife. No one defended me. No one said, “Hey, that went too far.”

No one.

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