by Tom Perrotta
Of course Eve’s thoughts turned to Brendan—how could they not? She was overcome by an almost desperate longing to see her son’s face, to put her arms around him, to hear his voice, to assure herself that he was okay. She’d been a fool to surrender Parents Weekend to Ted, to volunteer for her own deprivation. She could feel her only child slipping away from her, and understood that she’d been complicit in the process. They hadn’t spoken on the phone in almost two weeks, and their text exchanges had been brief and unrevealing, just the usual banalities and apologetic requests for money. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten him, but she had allowed him to fade in her mind, to become peripheral. And it had happened so quickly, with so little resistance from either of them. She’d justified it by reminding herself that a little distance was good, that he was growing up, becoming independent, and that she was reclaiming a little of her own life, and maybe some of that was true, but the expanding lump in her throat suggested otherwise.
“This is my mother,” Margo said, as an old high school yearbook photo filled the screen, a pretty young woman with dark hair and an enigmatic smile. “Her name was Donna Ryan when this picture was taken. A few years later she became Donna Fairchild.”
A wedding-day picture replaced the yearbook photo, the bride admiring herself in an oval mirror. And suddenly the bride was a bald, emaciated woman in a hospital bed, staring at the camera with a bleak, defeated expression.
“If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-four years old. She died too young.”
Donna washed the dishes. She fed a baby with a tiny spoon. She stood beside Mark on the day of his high school graduation. Her head only reached to his shoulder.
“I fooled a lot of people,” Margo said. “But I never fooled her.”
Another picture appeared, this one an overexposed snapshot from the late seventies or early eighties: Donna Fairchild, neither young nor old, standing on the beach in front of an empty lifeguard chair, wearing dark sunglasses and a blue bathing suit with a ruffled skirt. Her face was blank, unreadable.
“I loved that bathing suit,” Margo said. “I loved it a little too much for my own good.”
Donna remained frozen on the screen throughout the entire anecdote that followed. It happened when Margo was in fifth grade, and still thought of herself as Mark. One day Mark pretended to be sick so he could take a day off from school. Previously, his mother, a second-grade teacher, had stayed home to care for him when he was feeling ill, but on this particular day, Donna decided he was old enough to stay home alone, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for. As soon as his mother left for work, Mark went straight to her bedroom and found the blue bathing suit with the ruffled skirt. It was right where he’d expected, in the second drawer from the top.
“I thought I just wanted to touch it. But touching it wasn’t enough.”
Mark was only eleven and hadn’t begun his big growth spurt, so the suit fit surprisingly well, everywhere except the chest, which had a droopy, deflated appearance. It looked a lot better once he stuffed the padded bra cups with paper towels. In fact, it looked amazing.
“I’m pretty sure I hypnotized myself. I must have stared at my reflection in the mirror for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was like I was seeing me for the first time.”
Mark eventually left his mother’s bedroom, but he didn’t take off the swimsuit. He went downstairs, opened a bag of potato chips, and turned on the TV. He figured he had at least four hours before he had to worry about anyone coming home and finding him like that.
“It was such a luxury,” Margo said. “Just being alone in the house. That never happened.”
It was a beautiful hot day, late September or early October, and Mark headed out to the back deck to do a little sunbathing, an activity very popular among the girls at his school. He brought a portable radio and some Bain de Soleil, and he tugged down the shoulder straps of the bathing suit to avoid an unsightly tan line.
“It was so relaxing. The sun and the music. I guess I just let my guard down and fell asleep.”
It must have been a deep sleep, because he didn’t hear the car pulling into the driveway or his mother entering the house and calling his name. She’d been worried about him, and had come home on her lunch break to see how he was doing. What she found was the daughter she didn’t know she had, wearing a matronly bathing suit that did her no favors.
“For a long time, my mother didn’t say a word. She just kept staring at me and shaking her head. No, no, no. I remember how pale she looked, like she’d just received terrible news about someone she loved, an illness or an unexpected death. When she finally did manage to speak, she asked me if this was my idea of a joke, if I thought it was funny to wear her clothes. It’s clear to me now that she desperately wanted me to say, Yes, Mom, it was just a stupid joke. But I was so scared and ashamed, all I could do was tell the truth. I love this bathing suit. It’s my favorite. She ordered me to go upstairs, take it off, and never touch it again. Or any other article of her clothing, for that matter.”
They never discussed the incident, at least not directly; they weren’t that kind of family. But Donna had seen what she’d seen, and it had frightened her.
“She had a code word,” Margo explained. “She called it my nonsense. Whenever my parents left me home alone—and believe me, they didn’t do it very much—my mother would say, You better not get up to any of your nonsense! If she ever caught me looking sad, she’d say, Is this about that nonsense? And when I finally got engaged to be married, she said, I hope this means you’re done with all that nonsense.” Margo shook her head, amazed by her mother’s stubbornness. “Even on her deathbed, after I’d transitioned and was living as a woman, she looked at me and said, Are you ever gonna stop with this nonsense?”
Eve knew it was rude to text in the middle of a presentation, but she couldn’t stop herself. She pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to Brendan.
I miss you.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Margo told the photograph. “I can’t stop my nonsense. I’m your daughter and I love you very much.”
* * *
I couldn’t wait for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to go home, sleep in my own bed, eat some decent food, sneak onto the golf course with Troy and Wade, polish off a couple of blunts and a bottle of shit vodka, just like the old days. We’d get completely annihilated on Wednesday night and then drag ourselves to the homecoming game on Thursday morning, where we could brag about our hangovers to people we hadn’t seen in three months, though it felt way longer than that. Becca would be cheering on the sidelines—the last football game of her career—and I was hoping maybe I could catch her in a sentimental mood and convince her to give me another chance. I loved the way she looked in that stretchy little dress they all wore, red with a big white H on the front.
H is for hot, I used to tell her.
H is for ho, I used to tell my friends.
The only thing I dreaded about going home was having to talk about my college experience, pretending it was the greatest thing ever, parties on top of hookups mixed in with challenging classes and inspiring professors and lots of cool new friends, when the truth was, it had pretty much all turned to shit in the past couple of weeks. I was on the road to failing Econ and Math, Amber wasn’t responding to my texts, and Zack was hardly ever around. He was spending all his time with Lexa, sleeping in her room, pushing her wheelchair all over campus, like he was her fucking caretaker instead of her boyfriend. One day I bumped into him at the Student Center Chick-fil-A and asked him point-blank if he was pissed at me, but he said he wasn’t. I told him it didn’t feel like that, and asked why he’d never said a word to me about Lexa.
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” he said, though he didn’t sound all that happy about it. “But honestly? The way we talk about girls? The shit we say? I didn’t want to do that to her. She deserves better.”
“What are you talking about? I would never make fun of a disabled person.�
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“It’s not you, bro. It’s me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He took a while to answer. I could see him thinking it over, trying to get it right.
“No offense, dude, but the person I am when we’re together? I just don’t want to be that guy anymore.”
All right. So he was in love or whatever. Good for him, I guess. It didn’t really bother me, except that I hated being alone in our double, especially at night, when I had work to do, and I always had work to do, not that I ever did any. When Zack was around, we would procrastinate for hours, trash-talking and playing video games, and it would feel great, exactly like college was meant to be. But on my own it just seemed kinda pathetic, like I was a loser with no friends who was failing half his classes. I started keeping the door wide open, in case somebody I knew walked by and felt like saving me from my solitary confinement.
That’s what I was doing that boring-as-shit Wednesday night, sitting on the ratty couch Zack and I had found on Baxter Avenue, playing Smash on auto pilot—I was Captain Falcon—just killing time, waiting for something to happen that would give me an excuse to get off my ass and out of that depressing room. I remember how my heart jumped when the phone buzzed—I was thinking, hoping, Amber, Becca, Zack, Wade, in that order—and how disappointed I was when I paused the game and realized it was just a text from my mother.
I miss you.
I mean, it was sweet, don’t get me wrong. I was glad she missed me. But it didn’t really help with my situation.
Miss you too, I texted back.
And then I looked up and saw Sanjay standing in my doorway, staring at me with his big sad eyes. Somehow, just from that look on his face, before he even said a word, I could tell that bad news was coming.
* * *
Somewhere in the middle of the slide show, Margo felt the audience slipping away from her. No one laughed at her jokes; a handful of spectators were behaving badly, disrupting her talk with loud whispers and possibly derisive comments, some of which drew appreciative snickers from their neighbors. The applause at the end of the main presentation barely rose to the level of basic politeness.
But it wasn’t until the lights came back on for the Q&A that she realized the extent of her flop. She could see it in the faces staring back at her—some blank, some icy, many others disgusted or confused.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Ask me anything. There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
The silence that followed took on an embarrassing density. Then, mercifully, she noticed a hand inching upward in the center of the crowd. It belonged to the woman in the lavender turtleneck, her imaginary ally, whose face no longer seemed quite so sweet or supportive.
“Some of us ladies were wondering,” she said in a frail voice. “Which rest room do you use?”
Really? Margo thought. It wasn’t just the question that depressed her, it was the loud murmur of approval that followed it. After everything I just told you, that’s what you want to know?
“I use the women’s room,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “I think I’d cause quite a stir if I wandered into the men’s room.”
The seniors took a moment to discuss the matter among themselves. Margo noticed another hand jabbing into the air, offering her a lifeline.
“Next question. Over there.”
The words were already out by the time she realized that she’d called on Julian Spitzer’s neighbor, the loudmouth who’d made such a ruckus during the slide show. He rose with some difficulty and gazed at her for a long time with a weirdly expectant expression, his arms spread wide, as if he himself were the question.
“Mark,” the man finally said. “Don’t you recognize me?”
Margo winced, but maintained her calm. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t go by that name anymore. Please call me Margo.”
“You really don’t know who I am?” He removed his baseball cap, giving her a better look at his face, but it didn’t help. Margo had spent so much time trying to forget so many things that huge swaths of the past were lost to her. And that was okay.
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to help me out.”
“Al Huff.” The man’s tone was reproachful, as if he shouldn’t have been forced to say his name out loud. “Coach Huff. From St. Benedict’s? We played you twice in the state tournament, ’88 and ’89? You were such a great player, Mark. Best pure shooter I ever saw at the high school level.”
“Oh, wow.” Margo nodded in fake recognition, trying unsuccessfully to connect the Coach Huff she remembered—former Marine, lean and athletic, a motivator and disciplinarian—with the old man standing in front of her, his face bloated with alcohol and disappointment. If she remembered correctly, Al Huff had resigned under a cloud, some kind of recruiting scandal, ten or maybe even fifteen years ago. “It’s good to see you.”
“You killed us with that buzzer beater in the semis.” He shook his head, as if the memory still stung. “Just broke our backs. I’ll never forget that.”
“Coach Huff is a local legend,” Margo informed the crowd. “St. Benedict’s was our arch-rival and always one of the best teams in the state.”
A few people clapped for the local legend, but Al Huff didn’t seem to notice. He opened his arms a little wider.
“Mark,” he said. “What the hell happened? Why would you do this to yourself?”
Margo tried to smile, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. Moments like this always knocked her off-balance, times when she realized that other people—some of them near-strangers—were more invested in the young man named Mark Fairchild than she herself had ever been.
“Coach,” she said. “This is who I am.”
Al Huff looked at the floor and shook his head. When he spoke it sounded like he was close to tears.
“You need help, son. You can’t live like this.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Margo said, a little frostily. “But I’m doing just fine. I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been in my life.”
As if to underline this declaration, Dumell chose that moment to arrive. He entered through the back door, unzipping his leather jacket in slow motion as he glanced warily at the old white people in the audience, and then at Margo. He grinned when their eyes met, and gave her a sheepish little wave, apologizing for his tardiness. She wanted to blow him a kiss, but settled on a fleeting smile before returning to her duties.
“Any other questions?” she asked.
* * *
Sanjay had warned me about what to expect on the way over, so I wasn’t exactly surprised when I walked into the Student Center and saw my face up on the wall. But it still felt like a kick in the gut.
It was crowded in there, lots of kids milling around, checking out the paintings and sculptures, all of them made by undergrads in the Visual Arts Program. Most of it was the standard crap you’d find at any high school art show—still lifes with fruit and wine bottles, self-portraits of hot girls, black and white photographs of poor people. What made it a college art show were the little cards that accompanied each item, which listed the name of the artist and the title of the piece, along with a brief Statement of Intent.
The “project” I was part of was the biggest and most eye-catching work in the show. It took up an entire wall of the gallery and was the first thing you noticed when you walked in: two rows of bigger-than-life portraits, each one with a little caption underneath. The card identified the artist as Katherine Q. Douglass, class of 2017, and the title of the work as My Call-Out Wall. The Statement of Intent read, I asked a few of my friends to call someone out for behavior that damages our community and threatens our safety. This is an interactive project. Feel free to add your own call-out to the Call-Out Wall!
The portraits themselves were pretty good—acrylic on canvas, according to the card—not perfect, but I recognized myself without any problem. There were ten faces in all, nine of them dudes, along with one unlucky blond girl, who was actually pretty cute. Two
of the guys were black; one was Asian. There were no names attached to the faces, only a brief description of the offense the person supposedly committed. A ginger-haired dude GROPED ME ON THE DANCE FLOOR. The Asian kid THINKS HE’S WHITE. The blond girl LIES RIGHT TO YOUR FACE. A fat kid I’d seen around was a CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR. One of the black dudes—I’m pretty sure he was a football player—was an EXTREME HOMOPHOBE. A bro in a knit cap was a GASLIGHTER, whatever that was. Three guys were labeled RAPIST.
“I’m not sure this is legal,” Sanjay told me. “It’s got to be a violation of due process or something.”
“Whatever,” I said, because I really didn’t give a shit about due process.
“You want to get out of here?” he asked.
I knew I should leave, but I couldn’t stop staring at my face on the wall. It looked so real up there, just as real as the one I saw in the mirror every day. Even worse, I was grinning like an idiot, as if I were thrilled to be included in the art show and had no objection to the words written beneath the painting, a brief summary of my entire life:
HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT.
I smelled a sharp, medicinal odor and turned to see Amber’s friend Cat standing right beside me, rubbing sanitizer into her hands.
“Wow,” she said. “Look who’s here. You’ve got some nerve.”
I was surprised by the coldness in her voice. Cat had always been pretty nice to me. She nodded toward the wall.
“I had a hard time with your eyes. They’re a little asymmetrical.”
“You did this?”
She shook her head, like I should have known better.
“I told you not to hurt her.”
* * *
Eve hadn’t planned on company, but she was relieved to see that the living room looked fine. The throw pillows on the couch were plump and perfectly spaced, one per cushion, exactly as God had intended. There were no slippers abandoned on the rug, no mug of yesterday’s tea or crumpled kleenex marring the pristine surface of the coffee table. Even the TV remotes—all three of them—were resting in front of the flat screen in perfect alignment, arranged in descending order of size. It was, if anything, a little too neat and fussy, as if she’d stepped inside a museum exhibit documenting the uneventful life of a woman of exactly her age and circumstances. But better that than a dirty sock on the arm of the wingback chair or a beige bra slung over the newel post.