Mrs. Fletcher

by Tom Perrotta

  “Nobody’s blaming you,” Ted told her. “Jesus. I’m just saying, people don’t always make the right choices in life. That doesn’t mean they have to be stuck with them.”

  Eve tried to laugh but nothing came out.

  “Do you even hear yourself?” she said, but the question went unanswered.

  Ted had shifted his attention to Brendan, who had one hand clamped over his mouth, as if he were about to be sick.

  “You okay?” Ted asked. “Are you choking?”

  Brendan shook his head and burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he sobbed through his fingers. “I fucked up.”

  Eve couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him cry. At least five years, she thought. Maybe longer. But the sound was instantly familiar, like an old song on the radio. Ted reached across the table and patted him on the arm.

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  Brendan struggled to catch his breath. “I’m sorry I . . . disappointed you.”

  “Hey, hey.” Ted shook his head. “Don’t say that. Nobody’s disappointed.”

  Speak for yourself, Eve thought. Ted was staring at her with raised eyebrows, requesting a little support.

  “It’s okay,” she said after a moment, reaching out to pat Brendan’s other shoulder. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  *

  The next morning, Brendan filled out the paperwork to formally withdraw from BSU. The day after that they drove to campus and moved him out of his dorm room. Zack wasn’t around to help, didn’t even show up to say goodbye. It didn’t take long to load Brendan’s stuff into a big orange bin, take it down in the elevator, and cram it into the maw of the van. It barely fit, just like at the beginning of the semester—the oscillating fan, the lacrosse stick, the toiletries, the laundry bin, the rolled-up rug, the suitcase and the garbage bags full of clothes. It had all looked so hopeful back in September, an emblem of the future. But now it just looked shabby and depressing, like they’d found a bunch of crap on the sidewalk and decided to take it home.

  Somebody Loves Me

  Valentine’s Day felt like just another Saturday in winter, which was bad enough in itself. Eve kept herself reasonably busy during the daylight hours—food shopping, laundry (there was so much more to do now that Brendan was home, especially since he’d gotten into CrossFit), bill-paying, a solo afternoon walk around the half-frozen lake. When she got home, she roasted a chicken with fingerling potatoes and brussels sprouts, a delicious, lovingly prepared meal that she ended up eating by herself, because her son had plans he’d forgotten to mention.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Thought I told you.”

  “Nope.”

  “My bad.”

  Yeah, she thought. Your bad.

  “Who are you going out with?”

  “Chris Mancuso,” he said. “I don’t think you know him.”

  “Why can’t you eat here and then go out?”

  “We’re gonna get pizza and watch the hockey game. Is that a problem?”

  “Fine. Do what you want.”

  “Jeez, what’s the big deal?” he asked. “When I was away at school, you ate by yourself every night.”

  It was true, of course. She’d happily eaten alone in the fall, because that was how it was supposed to be. His absence was part of the necessary and proper order of things. His presence now was the problem—a huge backward step for both of them—along with his uncanny ability to take up more than his share of space in the house while giving so little in return.

  “You’re right.” She waved him toward the door. “Go have your fun. Don’t drink and drive.”

  “I know, I know,” he said in a weary voice, as if he were a mature adult who could be counted on to make good decisions. “Enjoy your chicken.”

  *

  She lingered at the table for as long as possible—she owed herself that much—and then dragged her feet on the cleanup, doing her best to stave off that troubling moment when there was nothing left to do, the official beginning of what she already knew would be a melancholy and restless night.

  It had been like this all winter long. She found it difficult to relax after dark—couldn’t curl up with a book, or settle down long enough to watch a movie from beginning to end. She was full of nervous energy, a nagging, jittery feeling that there was somewhere she needed to go, something else—something urgent and important—that she needed to do. But that was the catch: there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do.

  All the freedom she’d experienced in the fall, that giddy sense of new horizons, all that was gone. She wasn’t a student anymore, puzzling over feminist theory, drinking and dancing with her friends, exploring her sexuality, making stupid but sometimes exhilarating mistakes. She was just plain old Mom, chopping onions, feeling neglected, cleaning lint from the filter. Her life felt shrunken and constricted, as if the world had shoved her back into an all-too-familiar box that was no longer large enough to contain her. Except that the world hadn’t done any shoving. She’d volunteered for her confinement, climbing in and pulling the cardboard flaps down over her head.

  She told herself that she’d done it for Brendan’s sake. After all, he was the college student in the family, not her, despite the fact that she’d completed her first semester with flying colors, earning a solid A in Margo’s class, and high praise for her final paper, which explored the fraught relationship between radical feminism(s) and the transgender movement.

  This is excellent!!! Margo had scrawled on the back of the essay, in sloppy, barely legible cursive that Eve couldn’t help but think of as manly, even though she knew it was a faulty mental reflex, a kind of residual transphobia. But Brendan came first: he was the one who really needed to be taking college classes during the spring semester, and ECC was the logical place for him to do it. Eve understood that it was a tricky moment in his academic career—his confidence at an all-time low—and it had felt right to give him some space, to spare him the embarrassment of attending the same college as his mother, of possibly bumping into her at the library—if he ever actually went to the library—or having to compare his grades to hers.

  It had seemed like a minor sacrifice at the time—a brief hiatus from her continuing education—but it turned out to be a much bigger loss than she’d anticipated. Without a class to get her out of the house—to focus her thinking and provide her with a community of like-minded people—her intellectual life ran out of steam and her social life went into a coma. She felt like a teenager, grounded indefinitely for one stupid mistake, though she was also the parent who had imposed the punishment, which meant that, as usual, she had no one to blame but herself.

  * * *

  Chris wanted the last wing in the basket. I told him to go for it.

  “These are pretty good,” he said.

  I agreed, and had a big pile of bones on my plate to prove it. But I felt kinda guilty, too, because my mom had cooked a whole chicken at home, and here I was eating hot wings at the Haddington House of Pizza.

  “There was this place at my school, Pennyfeathers? Their wings were fucking awesome. Dude, they’d deliver until like two in the morning on weekends.” He got this faraway look in his eyes and nodded for a long time. “I miss those wings.”

  Chris missed a lot of things about college. His frat brothers, his rugby teammates, this amazing ice cream place that had waffle cones dipped in chocolate, all the bars on 12th Street that didn’t care if you had a fake ID, and now these wings from Pennyfeathers.

  “Those were good times,” he told me.

  Chris and I knew each other a little from the Haddington High football team, but he was two years older, a varsity starter back when I was still warming the bench. I’d heard he’d gone to one of those small colleges in Pennsylvania, so I was pleasantly surprised to spot him in the hallway at ECC, where I hardly ever saw anyone I knew from high school (the only exception was Julian Spitzer, who seemed to pop up every time I turned a corner, though we always walked right past each
other like we’d never met, like I hadn’t found him sleeping in my fucking bed that night, a memory that still gave me the creeps). Chris explained that he was home for the semester due to some disciplinary bullshit and said we should grab a beer sometime. I thought he was just saying it to be nice, but he repeated the offer when we bumped into each other at CrossFit, and it wasn’t like I had anything else going on.

  “I guess you’ll be happy to get back there,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I’m going back.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin, but he missed a greasy streak on his chin. “It’ll suck without the frat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They shut us down. Five-year suspension.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the kid. You didn’t hear about it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Huh.” He seemed surprised that it wasn’t a matter of common knowledge. “This freshman pledge died of alcohol poisoning at our house. It was all over the internet.”

  “Holy shit. Were you there?”

  “Kind of. I mean, I was playing air hockey in the game room, just minding my own business. I saw this kid staggering around, but he wasn’t the only one. All the pledges were shitfaced.” He pulled the visor of his baseball cap lower, like a celebrity who didn’t want to be recognized. “I guess he went outside to puke and everybody forgot about him. My buddy Johnny found him in the yard the next morning.”

  “Jesus. How much did he drink?”

  “A shitload of vodka shots.”

  “Like how many?”

  “I don’t know.” Chris sounded pissed. “It was a fucking drinking game. Everybody makes it sound like it was our fault, like we poured it down his throat. But he was totally into it. Screaming and high-fiving everybody. Having the time of his life.”

  He stopped himself, like he realized that probably wasn’t the best way to put it.

  “We had to write apology letters to the parents, which was brutal. And then there were hearings, and the whole frat got suspended. Didn’t matter if you were involved or not. And now if I want to go back I have to reapply. For my senior year. Can you believe that shit?”

  “Wow,” I said. “I just thought you failed a class or something.”

  “That would at least make sense.”

  “So what are you gonna do?”

  Chris took another napkin from the dispenser. Instead of wiping his face, he unfolded it very carefully and laid it over his plate, like he was covering his bones with a blanket.

  “I might join the Marines,” he said. “Just get the fuck out of here, you know?”

  * * *

  Facebook wouldn’t let her forget what day it was for a second, flooding her news feed with images of hearts and flowers, a seemingly endless torrent of saccharine memes, happy couple photos, and loving tributes to loyal partners.

  Thank you, Gus, for twenty-two years of red roses!

  A romantic dinner for two at the Hearthstone Inn. So blessed . . .

  This wonderful man didn’t just make my DAY! He made my LIFE! I love you, Mark J. DiLusio!!!

  Snuggling by the fire with my handsome hubby on V-Day

  Somebody’s gonna get a little surprise tonight . . . #feelingnaughty

  She tried her best to be a good sport, issuing a handful of halfhearted likes and offering a supportive comment when she could, but she gave up after a few minutes of resentful scrolling. It wasn’t that she begrudged her friends their happiness—she wasn’t that kind of person—she just wished they’d be a little quieter about it, a little more private.

  You won, she thought. There’s no need to gloat.

  She knew that the winners didn’t think they were gloating—in their own innocent minds, they were just celebrating the holiday, sharing a sweet sentiment with people who cared—but it was hard for Eve not to take it personally, not to feel like a weepy high school girl stuck at home while everyone else was slow-dancing at the prom. It had been a lot easier to be a loser back in the days before social media, when the world wasn’t quite so adept at rubbing it in your face, showing you all the fun you were missing out on in real time.

  * * *

  I wasn’t crazy about the idea of partying with a bunch of high school kids—it’s kinda awkward once you graduate—but Chris really wanted to go. He was friends with the girl who was hosting and said she was totally chill and down-to-earth, despite the fact that she went to the Hilltop Academy, a local prep school that cost almost as much as an Ivy League college.

  “How do you even know her?” I asked. Kids from Haddington High and kids from Hilltop didn’t usually mix.

  “Summer camp. She was my junior counselor. We flirted a lot, but we never hooked up. I’m hoping to take it to the next level.”

  “That’s cool,” I said. “You mind if I just drop you off? I’m not really in a party mood.”

  “Dude,” he said, like I’d failed to live up to his expectations. “Just come in and have a beer. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. But don’t be a pussy about it.”

  *

  His friend’s name was Devlin and she lived up in Haddington Hills, in what looked like a fairly normal house, except that it was like four times bigger than any house I’d ever been in. She was half-Asian and very cute, dressed in a short black skirt and white knee socks. A construction paper heart on her shirt said, Are You My Valentine?

  “Oh my God.” She gave Chris a fierce hug, like he’d just returned from the dead. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “You too,” he said. “This is my buddy Brendan.”

  She gave me a stern look, her heart all crooked from the hug. “You’re going to have to help me talk him out of it.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Joining the Marines. It’s crazy.”

  “Good luck with that,” Chris told her. “Brendan’s joining up with me.”

  She squinted in dismay. “Really?”

  “Why not?” I said. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  I was just goofing around, following Chris’s lead, but Devlin didn’t know that. She told some of her friends, and pretty soon it spread through the whole party. That was all anybody wanted to talk about, which was fine with me, because it spared me the embarrassment of having to explain that I’d flunked out of BSU and was currently living at home with my mom and taking classes at community college.

  Most of the girls I talked to were firmly opposed to my enlistment—a couple said they were pacifists, and others just thought it was too dangerous, or that it made more sense to join the Peace Corps, to help people instead of trying to kill them. Some of the guys were more gung ho, and wondered if I’d given any consideration to the Special Forces, because those dudes were the true badasses, the Rangers and the Seals and Delta Force.

  The best conversation I had was with this light-skinned black kid named Jason, a middle-distance runner who was heading to Dartmouth in the fall. He’d taken a summer school class on Contemporary War Literature and told me about a bunch of books he liked—the only one I’d heard of was The Things They Carried, which I’d read in English class junior year—and then we switched to movies. Our tastes were pretty similar—we both liked Lone Survivor and The Hurt Locker and also Tropic Thunder, which wasn’t really a war movie but was still hilarious.

  “Not very PC, though,” he said. “I know I’m not supposed to laugh at Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, but damn. Funny is funny, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, and we clinked our bottles.

  Jason was one of the few guys at the party with a paper heart pinned to his chest. His said, Somebody Loves Me! He tapped it with two fingers.

  “All right,” he said. “Gotta get back to my girl before somebody steals her.”

  After that I danced with Devlin’s friend Addison, whose heart said, Make Me an Offer. I hadn’t been out on the dance floor since my date with Amber, and it felt really good to be moving in the dark, getting all sweaty and goofy with a bunch of cool people
I’d just met. It was almost like I was back in college, except that it was a better college than BSU, and I was a better person, too, a thoughtful guy with interesting opinions and a solid plan for the future.

  *

  I’d only had two beers, so I wasn’t close to drunk, but I did need to find a bathroom. Addison told me it was down the hall, just past the den.

  I got a little distracted on my way. It was a long hallway, and the walls were lined with photographs of Devlin and her little brother and her mom and dad, a good-looking family who seemed to live their lives near water—beaches, lakes, swimming pools, fountains—and were always laughing about something when the picture got taken.

  The first room I stuck my head into was a home office, and the second had a yoga mat on the floor, along with a big red exercise ball. I found the den on the third try—bookshelves, fireplace, leather chairs.

  “Sorry,” I said, because there was also a couch, and it was occupied by Jason and the girl he was making out with. They were going at it pretty good, and my arrival had startled them. “I was just trying to . . .”

  “Trying to what?” Jason said, after an awkward moment of silence.

  I didn’t answer. I was staring at the girl. She was staring right back, looking just as confused as I was.

  “Becca?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  * * *

  Eve closed her eyes and let out a heavy sigh, the way she always did before she started watching porn. It was somewhere between an admission of defeat and an attempt to clear her head, to create a mental space free of judgment and open to erotic suggestion.

  She had cut way down on her porn consumption in the past few months—that was one upside of Brendan’s return—but she still found herself visiting the Milfateria from time to time, usually on nights like this when she was bored and lonely and looking for something to cheer her up, or at least distract her for a little while.

  I deserve some pleasure, too, she reminded herself, which wouldn’t have been such a terrible status update—not to mention an epitaph on her fucking tombstone—if only she’d had the courage to post it.