Mrs. Fletcher

by Tom Perrotta

  “My name’s Russ,” said the first guy to speak. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and a Bruins T-shirt that seemed to have been shrink-wrapped around his beer gut. “I was supposed to be in Briggsy’s class, but that got, uh . . . canceled, and this was the only other writing class in the time slot, so . . .”

  “Poor Hal,” said Professor Fairchild, and several heads bobbed in melancholy assent. “He was such a nice person.”

  There turned out to be three other transfers from the same class, “The Modern Coliseum: Sports in Contemporary Society,” which was apparently one of the most popular course offerings at ECC. It had been taught by Hal Briggs, a former sportswriter for the Herald, who had just died of a heart attack at a Labor Day barbecue, right in front of his wife, kids, and neighbors. Eve had seen his obituary in the newspaper.

  “He was too young,” said Professor Fairchild. “Only forty-nine.”

  “Were you there?” asked a bearded guy named Barry, who said he owned a sports bar in Waxford. “At the cookout?”

  “No, thank God.” The professor twirled a lock of hair around her index finger, as if she were still in junior high. “Briggsy and I were just colleagues. We used to play in a faculty basketball league on Sunday mornings.” The memory made her smile. “He had the ugliest jump shot I ever saw.”

  “Was that a coed league?” asked Dumell, the black guy with the worried expression.

  “I’m glad you asked that,” said the professor. “That’s exactly the sort of assumption our class is going to examine throughout the semester. The way our preconceptions about gender condition our responses to the social world. But I think we need to unpack your question.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I’d like you to articulate the question behind your question. In other words, what are you really asking?”

  “Okay. I get it.” Dumell nodded uncertainly. He looked a little more worried than before. “Uh, were there other ladies besides you on the team?”

  Professor Fairchild had to give this some thought. “What if I told you that our players ranged widely across the gender spectrum? Would that be a satisfactory answer to your question?”

  “I guess,” Dumell said. “But it’s kinda complicated, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” said the professor. “And rightly so. Because there’s nothing simple about gender. Nothing natural. It’s an ideological minefield that we walk through every minute of every day. And that’s what this class is about. How to walk through the minefield without hurting anyone’s feelings or blowing yourself up.”

  *

  When class was dismissed, Eve headed out of the building with Barry, the bearded bar owner, tagging along beside her, totally uninvited. They’d been randomly paired off for an in-class exercise, and had spent the better part of the past hour exchanging “gender histories,” focusing, per the professor’s instructions, on moments of gender-related confusion, doubt, and/or shame.

  “That was pretty intense,” he said. “I have ex-wives who don’t know me as well as you do.”

  Eve didn’t say so, but she doubted Barry’s ex-wives would have complained about not knowing him well enough. He was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of guy, a blustery jerk who began his conversation by insisting that he’d never in his life experienced a single moment of confusion, doubt, or shame in relation to his gender identity. The story of Barry’s life, as narrated by Barry, read as follows: first he was a boy, and then he was a man. The path from Point A to Point B had been straight, self-explanatory, and fun to travel.

  “I don’t get the point of all this navel-gazing,” he’d told her during the exercise. “I was born with a penis. End of story.”

  Eve had tried to draw him out, asking if he’d ever wished he could get pregnant or breast-feed a child. Ted had once called the ability to bear children a female superpower—he was trying to cheer her up at a particularly bloated and trying moment in her third trimester—and the description had stuck with her through the years.

  “It’s kind of a miracle,” she said. “Feeling that little person growing inside you, and then feeding it with your body when it comes out. I imagine most men would be at least a little jealous.”

  Barry chuckled appreciatively, as if congratulating Eve on a good try.

  “God bless the ladies,” he said. “And thank you for your service. I really don’t know how you do it.”

  And then he’d launched into a long and needlessly graphic account of the toll that childbirth had taken on his first wife’s body—especially her breasts, which were never the same afterward, he was sorry to say. He’d hoped they would bounce back, so to speak—they were her finest attribute—but no such luck. At least he’d learned his lesson. When his second wife got pregnant, he persuaded her to bottle-feed, and it was a smart decision. The baby didn’t give a shit, and mama’s hooters—those were his actual words—remained miraculously perky. She did thicken a bit around the waist, but that wasn’t what caused the marriage to go south. They had bigger problems, most notably his affair with a twenty-five-year-old waitress who would soon become wife number three. With that one, he laid down the law—no fucking kids—and she was all right with that until she turned thirty, at which point she wasn’t anymore, and that was that.

  “Jesus,” Eve wondered. “How many ex-wives are there?”

  “Just the three. I’ve had a few girlfriends since then, but it’s not that easy to convince someone to be Wife Number Four. Believe me, I tried.”

  In the classroom, Eve had listened to Barry’s checkered history with scientific detachment; the point was to write a profile of the subject, not to judge him on his shortcomings. Out in the parking lot, though, a sense of retroactive revulsion came over her, exacerbated by the fact that he was crowding her as they walked, occasionally bumping shoulders with her in a way that might have seemed friendly, or even intriguing, if he hadn’t just outed himself as a heartless creep.

  “I’m a big girl,” she told him. “You don’t need to walk me to my car.”

  “And I’m a gentleman of the old school. Nothing wrong with a little chivalry, right? Women say they don’t like it, but in my experience they’re pretty grateful if you hold the door or pick up the check or bring them flowers.”

  Eve didn’t want to admit it, but she knew he had a point. Things had changed so much over the course of her lifetime that women her age had all these different models of behavior jammed into their heads—you could be a fifties housewife and a liberated professional woman, a committed feminist and a blushing bride, a fierce athlete and a submissive, needy girlfriend. Most of the time you could switch from one role to another without too much trouble, and without even realizing that you might be contradicting yourself.

  “There’s some gender confusion right there,” she observed. “I guess I learned something tonight.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna study this crap, you might as well do it with a shemale, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t know?” Barry seemed pleased by her cluelessness. “Our professor used to be a he.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. Margo was Mark Fairchild. He was a great college basketball player. Even played pro in Europe for a couple of seasons.” He tugged his beard. “Not a bad-looking woman, actually.”

  Eve’s surprise was short-lived. The signs were there, now that she knew what she was looking for—the voice, the hips, the incongruous breasts, the riddle of the “coed” basketball league. But she never would have guessed it on her own.

  Live and learn, she thought.

  “I’ve never met a transgendered person before,” she said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Not that I’m attracted to her,” Barry added, in case she’d misunderstood his earlier comment. “I mean, to each his own, right? But that’s a bridge too far for me. I wonder if she tells the guys she dates beforehand.”

  “How do you know she dates guys?”

  “Just
the general vibe I’m getting. You think she got the surgery? I’m not really sure how that works.”

  Eve was relieved to arrive at her car. She’d had more than enough of Barry for one night.

  “All right.” She clicked her remote key, and the van flashed its lights. “Guess I’ll see you next class.”

  “Hey,” he said, as she reached for the door handle. “You want to get a nightcap? My bar’s right down the street. Drinks on me.”

  “It’s been a long day,” she told him. “I need to get home.”

  “Suit yourself,” Barry said with a shrug. “I’ll take a rain check.”

  *

  It was too bad she didn’t like him a little better, because a drink after class would have been nice. At the very least it would have given her an excuse to stay out for another hour or two, to delay the inevitable moment when she returned home and had to once again confront the enormity of her son’s absence—the fact that he’d grown up and left her, and the knowledge that this was good and proper—exactly what nature intended—and that she had no right to complain.

  The fact that her life had turned into this: this lifeless hush, this faint but elusive whiff of decay. This absolutely-nothing-to-complain-about.

  She didn’t linger downstairs, just poured herself a glass of wine, grabbed her laptop, and headed up to her bedroom. She locked the door behind her, not a real lock, just a hardware store hook-and-eye that wouldn’t have kept out a determined intruder, but might give her a few seconds of advanced warning, hopefully enough time to grab her phone and dial 911. She’d installed it six or seven years ago, after a couple of embarrassing incidents where Brendan had wandered in while she was getting dressed. He’d insisted that these were honest mistakes, but she wasn’t so sure—he was just at that age when boys get curious—and decided that a little deterrence would go a long way.

  *

  For the past few years, ever since she’d opened her account, Facebook had been an integral part of Eve’s bedtime ritual. She found it soothing to scroll through her news feed one last time before turning in, paying a visit to her various friends and acquaintances, reminding herself that she wasn’t really alone. They were always right there where she’d left them, the usual suspects posting about the usual stuff: recipes, pithy sayings, scanned photos from the good old days, the inevitable pets, the banal declarations, witty memes, deep thoughts, political rants, viral videos. A group from her hometown had a new thread rhapsodizing about the Freezy Cone Ice Cream Stand on Franklin Street—gone for at least two decades—that included eighty-seven comments, most of which expressed sentiments like “Yum!” and “BEST. ICE. CREAM. EVER.” and “Vanilla with Rainbow Sprinkles!!!”

  She forced herself to read every last one of them. That should have been enough to put anyone to sleep, but Eve was still wide awake when she finished, still as restless and aroused as she’d been when she started. So there was nothing to do but the thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do, though it was, admittedly, a promise she’d made with her fingers crossed, knowing it would probably have to be broken.

  *

  For a sexually liberated person in her mid-forties, Eve had had, until a few days ago, a fairly limited acquaintance with pornography. She remembered thumbing through a friend’s brother’s stash of magazines as a teenager, being intimidated by the airbrushed beauty of the centerfold models in Playboy, and genuinely shocked by the “beaver shots” in Hustler. Her visceral distaste turned ideological in college, where it was a feminist article of faith that porn degraded and objectified women while exploiting them for financial gain. Why would you want to have anything to do with a dirty business like that?

  After she graduated, she began to notice that this opinion wasn’t universally shared. Lots of supposedly enlightened men she knew seemed to like porn—or at least they liked joking about liking porn—but she was surprised to learn that a number of her women friends were fans, too. Her grad school colleague Allison reported that she and her fiancé had a standing Friday night porn date that they both looked forward to all week. (Allison also had a vibrator that she’d nicknamed Black Betty and half jokingly described as the best thing that had ever happened to her.)

  Succumbing to peer pressure early in their marriage, Eve and Ted had rented a movie called Fuck My Secretary—this was back when every video rental store had an XXX section, usually hidden in a basement or tucked away in a separate room—but they only made it through a couple of minutes before throwing in the towel. The actors had seemed like freaks, the secretary endowed with gravity-defying breasts while the boss sported an erection the size of a prize zucchini. It did absolutely nothing for Eve or Ted, so they turned off the VCR and made love, cheerfully enough, with their own serviceable, human-sized equipment. Her XXX history had pretty much stopped there. She’d never surfed for porn on the internet, and hardly ever thought about it, except in an anxious parental capacity.

  Which was why it was so disorienting to find herself returning, for the sixth day in a row, to milfateria.com (“World’s Biggest Buffet of All-You-Can-Eat Amateur MILF Porn!”), scrolling through the thumbnails of recently uploaded clips. Lovely Wife BJ, Anal MILF with Creampie, Abby Loves BBC, Sexy Samantha First Time on Camera, Saucy Soccer Mom Takes It Like a Champ. Saucy soccer mom. Eve smiled at the description and clicked on the link. That seemed worth a look.

  *

  It was the anonymous text that had led her here, the one that had arrived last Friday night. She’d forgotten all about it until Saturday morning, when she turned on her phone and saw that idiotic message staring back at her:

  U r my MILF!

  She wasn’t sure why it had bothered her so much. It was probably just a harmless prank, the handiwork of a drunk teenager getting his late-night kicks. Texts like this were the digital equivalent of obscene phone calls.

  Send me a naked pic!!

  All she had to do was delete it and get on with her day. But she kept squinting at those words, floating so innocently in their cartoon bubble, as if they had every right to inhabit her phone. Before she realized what she was doing, she’d typed a reply of her own.

  I’m not a MILF, you little shit

  Luckily, her good sense kicked in before she pressed Send. There was no point in engaging with an anonymous pervert, giving him the satisfaction of a response, a reward for his harassment.

  *

  MILF.

  She knew what the acronym stood for, of course—she hadn’t been living under a rock—or at least thought she did. In her mind, it was just an updated name for the old Mrs. Robinson stereotype, the predatory middle-aged woman with a taste for younger men, maybe even boys who were Brendan’s age. That was the main thing that creeped her out, the possibility that the text had come from one of her son’s friends, or maybe even his new roommate.

  I want to cum on those big floppy tits!!!

  What kind of person would say something like that to a friend’s mother? And what if it was Wade or Tyler or Max, boys she’d known since they were in preschool, whom she’d taken to the beach, who’d slept over at her house? It made her queasy to imagine one of them thinking about her body in such prurient detail.

  And they’re not that floppy, she thought indignantly. They’ve actually held up pretty well.

  One thing that she’d learned from her web search that morning was that she’d been conflating the terms cougar and MILF, which turned out not to be synonymous at all. MILF was a broader, more passive category, basically just “any mother that is sexually desirable.” What that meant, Eve realized, was that you couldn’t really say, I’m not a MILF, because a MILF was in the eye of the beholder. The other thing she’d learned was that you shouldn’t google the term if you didn’t want to find yourself swimming in an ocean of porn.

  There was no doubt about it—milfateria.com was part of that “unregulated cesspool” the assistant DA had warned about so many years ago at the PTA meeting. Eve was regularly shocked and frequently disgusted by what
she found there. She disapproved of the site—she would have been horrified if she’d ever found anything like it on her son’s computer—and sincerely wished it didn’t exist. But she couldn’t stop looking at it.

  A few of the allegedly “Amateur MILFs” were clearly porn stars, with huge fake boobs and full Brazilians, but the vast majority looked like ordinary people. They had stretch marks, C-section scars, pimples on their faces and butts, bruises and rashes, cellulite, underarm and pubic stubble. Some of them wore glasses while they had sex, and more than you might have expected kept their socks on. A lot of them seemed to live in drab houses or cramped apartments. While a few of the women seemed embarrassed by what they were doing, others looked straight into the camera, as if they were a lot more interested in whoever might be watching them than they were in their partners. And the men! They were (most of them, anyway) a parade of horrors—hairy and potbellied, wheezy and much too talkative for Eve’s taste. They loved to narrate their orgasms in real time—Here it comes, baby!—as if the whole world was waiting for an update.

  *

  In the past week, Eve had spent more time watching milfateria videos than she would have liked to admit, and she’d barely scratched the surface. The site was organized by category (Oral MILF, Anal MILF, Threesome MILF, Lesbo MILF, Ebony MILF, Solo MILF, etc.), body type (Busty MILF, Shaved MILF, Big Booty MILF, Redhead MILF), but also by nationality (Turkish MILF, German MILF, Canadian MILF, Japanese MILF, Israeli MILF, Iranian MILF, and on and on), a global community of women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and even older (Granny MILF), united by their willingness to have sex in front of a camera and to share the experience with the rest of the world (unless a man was sharing it without their permission, which probably happened a lot). The sheer number of videos was overwhelming; you could never watch them all, not that you’d want to. There were so many that it seemed like only a matter of time before Eve would find herself looking at someone she knew, a high school classmate, a neighbor, maybe her old friend Allison.