Story Girl (15 page)

“Well? I mean – it’s kind of a big deal. And I want you to know that I’d be okay with it. I’ll just need a teensy-weensy bit of time. Oh – and by the way, Ellen’s my favorite comedian, and I never miss Suze Orman’s money show.”

“Thanks, Dad. It’s nice to know I have a supportive father. But I really like somebody, and he’s definitely not a woman.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. And I didn’t even want to have to bring him up because things aren’t going so good. So please don’t tell Mom – I’d rather she think me a lesbian.”

“But why?”

“Because I just can’t live up to what she wants. And I doubt this thing’s going to work anyway, and I’m not even sure I want it to. She’ll just end up disappointed – like usual.”

“She wants you to be happy.”

“She wants me to be like her – the perfect idea of a woman and a homemaker. And I’m not an idea – I’m a person.”

“Your mother’s a person.”

My father traced his finger along the edge of my dresser but all he caught was the slight residue of Lemon Pledge.

“So what’s his name?”

“James.”

“I like that name.”

“Yeah – me too.”

“Does he make you happy?”

“When he’s not ditching me.”

“Ditching you?”

“It’s no big deal.”

I nestled myself deeper under the covers and away from his earnest glances.

“You’re way too big for that bed.”

“I have been since grade eight.”

He shook his head like he’d failed me in some indefinable way.

“Do you want to talk about him?”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like using the past tense.”

“You’re not being very optimistic.”

“Sue me.”

chapter
20

I
WAS IN
no way prepared for the answer.

Still, I really wanted to ask him where he was spending his nights. And I wondered if his wife – my mother – had become some sort of a glorified roommate.

My father was stalling in my bedroom while Kyle and my mother reminisced about simpler times when people knew their place and loyalty was less complicated.

“I know about tomorrow,” he said.

“What?”

“The anniversary thing.”

“Oh shit.”

“Your mother’s sister accidentally called here to book the hall. She thought she was talking to the hall person but she was talking to me.”

“Have you told Mom?”

“No, but I’m tempted.”

“You can’t tell her.”

“I won’t.”

“Because Jenny would die.”

“I know.”

“Where are we having it?” I asked.

“The bingo hall – pre-decorated. I got all the details from Mertyl when she was telling me what our competitors were offering.”

“Wow. The bingo hall? Really?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure Mom doesn’t know?”

“I’m sure. She would have put me on a treadmill or something.”

“Pre-decorated?”

He nodded.

“But Jenny wanted to decorate.”

My father shrugged and looked mildly devastated, as if he was about to accompany my mother on an extended shopping trip.

“You don’t seem all that excited, Dad.”

He looked at me without saying anything, but there was a message in his expression. Something about old cans out-lasting their shelf life.

“Should I bring up the double wide air-mattress from downstairs?” he asked.

“I’ll be okay.”

“So you’re not gay, huh?”

“Unfortunately not. But let that be our little secret.”

“I guess I should go back down,” he said. “They’ll wonder why I’ve been gone so long.”

“Tell them I was waxing your back.”

After my father left the bedroom, I snuck into the basement.

The entire space, which had once been mostly unfinished, now sparkled with glossy blue paint and a gigantic leather chair facing a high-definition television. My mother’s large hummingbird collection was no longer down here nor were any of her framed stitchings. He had covered the walls with the license plates he’d collected from his life-long trucking career. The musty basement smell had been replaced by the one conspicuously absent from the upstairs bedroom.

I studied his new sleeping quarters – Jenny’s old bedroom. The closet was full of his clothes and ancient sports memorabilia. His old turntable sat in the corner along with a hefty vinyl collection of Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. The side table held a digital alarm clock and two Connelly paperbacks.

This was definitely my father’s pad.

When I heard voices saying goodbye, I hurried back upstairs – my nostrils filled with the familiar memories of Old Spice, and my heart further emptied of its illusions.

I scrunched myself into the fetal position, but my little bed just wasn’t working for me, so I made a makeshift mattress on the floor consisting of the folded linens in my mother’s closet. It was risky and inconsiderate, but after this night it was either the linens or a cab to the airport.

I’d never know the fine print of the deal they’d struck, nor was I privy to the changing nuances of their union, but I now felt absolved of the crime of confusion. I was vindicated in my inability to so easily slip into the threads of a hand-me-down reality. And I could no longer allow my mother to shoot her angst-inducing arrows from her hilltop of hypocrisy.

But I still felt like shit. I remembered all the years she couldn’t sleep without my father next to her. All the nights they had cuddled on the sofa watching wildlife documentaries and old Doris Day movies.

I opened my curtains and the bright sky fell into my room as silver light. My father was down in the yard, puttering in his vegetable patch. The big moon and porch light marked his outline, but I still couldn’t see what he was doing. I walked to my closet, found my old binoculars, and returned to the window.

He was caressing a tomato the way one would a newborn infant’s head. I focused in on his thumb – ever so gently rubbing the delicate skin, not unlike the way I had touched James. Then he pulled out a little ruler from his breast pocket and began measuring the vines. I zeroed in on his face and doubted I had ever seen him look so peaceful.

And that made me happy and sleepy. Floating away on my drowsy imaginings, I hoped not to encounter James and the all too inviting fictions of love. It was impossible however, as my head was filled with nothing but.

chapter
21

A
SHIT
-
STORM WAS
brewing.

The day of the anniversary had arrived, and breakfast was tense. My mother and I had not spoken since Kyle, and now I knew she thought me a lesbian. I was still almost tempted to let her stew in the anxious juices of what she may have done wrong as a mother, her most prominent identity. But instead, I looked directly at her and admitted the truth.

“I’m not gay.”

She snapped her head toward my father, “Why would you tell her our private concerns?”

“Why keep everything under wraps, Joanne? Same as not telling the elephant that it’s in the room.”

“Thanks for that analogy, Dad.”

“None of this is funny,” she said. The tiny vertical lines atop her upper lip were especially visible today, and she’d only smoked for a year. She quit when she found out she was carrying a child, the only problem being that she was already four weeks pregnant with
me
.

Now I wanted to cough in her face and blame her for everything that had ever not gone right, including my perilous love life and inability to finish
Space Boy
.

And after learning of my parents’ sleeping arrangements, I felt unapologetic about poking large holes in my mother’s delusions,
“I would be perfectly happy if I was gay. Sometimes I really wish that I were.”

She looked at my sloppy appearance, and I could tell she wasn’t fully convinced of my heterosexuality. How could a straight woman start her day without a matching bra and panties?

“You were so rude to him last night.”

“He sells ovens.”

“So what?”

“You’re right – I’m sorry. I guess I was just shocked that you invited him over here thinking that we’d somehow hit it off, and that you’d somehow save me from myself. And do you truly believe that if I
was
a lesbian, Kyle Steinke would be the remedy?”

My mother wiped her eyes with a cream napkin from last night, “I’m not saying that your life stinks, or that Kyle Steinke is the remedy. Is that what you
think
of me, that I would think your life stinks? Do you really think I think that?”

I wanted to scream that
YES!
I did think that’s exactly what she thought. And I also wanted to let her know that she had – indeed – driven me to stress, hives, and a near ulcer. Instead, I sat quietly and managed a meager shrug.

“And my God, Tracy – Kyle’s not a barbarian. He’s just a man trying to make an honest living. Selling secondhand kitchenware is an honorable profession, and years ago it would have been right up there with all this fancy new computer stuff.”

It was still very possible that aliens had long ago abducted my real mother.

“But no, you had to treat him as if he were a slug dropping on the bottom of your shoe. One lousy matinee wouldn’t have hurt you.”

I shrugged again, tempted to block her out with Colin Farrell. His rugged grunginess wanted to emerge, but who needed to fantasize in the midst of such vibrant melodrama.

“I just get a little concerned that my thirty-year-old daughter is living alone in a very strange place, far removed from her family and her church.”

“There are all kinds of churches in California.”

“Not the Presbyterian Knights for Christ.”

Perhaps my mother should have been a stand-up comic, but alas, she took her solemnity very seriously.

My father poured all of us more coffee, happy to watch the infested waters from the safety of the shoreline.

“Do you have a plan for your life, Tracy? A woman’s reality is different from a man’s. Sometimes a woman’s got to be thinking about other things, more practical things. I mean, don’t you want kids?”

I took a large sip of coffee and tried to let her question float through me as though I were invisible. Watching my mother’s emotional fragility, I knew this was not the time to let her trigger an avalanche of my own insecurities – I refused to explode in a reactionary fit.

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” she asked. “You’re thirty years old.” Huge tears of frustration balanced precariously on the inside of her eyelids.

My father was fussing with a bent fork prong, and I could tell he wanted to defend my case.

I drank more coffee, wondering why I had to immediately know everything just because I’d turned a specific age.

“Are you just going to lollygag around Hollywood forever?” she asked.

“I’m not lollygagging.”

“What are you doing?”

“Lots.”

“Like what?”

I thought about
Morbid City
and
Space Boy
and all the rejections, false starts, and crumpled dreams – as abundant as the paper wads that used to blanket my apartment like giant snowflakes.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Just tell us what you
do
?”

I couldn’t tell her how hard I’d tried to create something from nothing. Nor could I tell her that the only thing I really knew how to do was fetch coffee for people who had somehow managed to attain
my
dreams. It was just too humiliating to admit such a thing to these people – anyone else, but not these two.

“What difference does it make? I mean – how would it affect
your
life, Mother?”

I could feel the pre-show under my skin, warning that hives were preparing an entrance. Some sensible part of my brain was already counting blocks to the nearest Benadryl supply.

Her tears could no longer balance themselves and were now sliding down her cheeks; in an instant, I was filled with both guilt and bitterness. It was true, I didn’t have the right answers to her questions – at least not the ones I could share – but that didn’t justify her non-stop badgering. I felt like a helpless bug being poked in the belly with a hairpin.