She Effin' Hates Me

by Scarlett Savage

  Copyright © 2014 by Scarlett Ridgway Savage

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62873-916-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Savage, Scarlett.

  She effin' hates me : a love story / Scarlett Savage.

  pages cm

  Summary: "Based on the award-winning play, She Effin' Hates Me is about three women relearning to love one another for who they are . . . and more importantly, for who they're not"-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-62636-556-8 (pbk.)

  1. Women--Fiction. 2. Families--Fiction. 3. Female friendship--Fiction 4. Love stories. gsafd I. Title.

  PS3619.A848S44 2014

  813'.6--dc23

  2013040783

  Printed in the United States

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  To Daphernunu and Jessaboo, my Funny Bunny and my Baby Lady: You are the lights of my life, the pride of my soul, the treasures of my heart. Without you, I am nothing.

  To Thomas Bruce Mills ( A Love for Traitors), writer, would-be Olympian, intellect, and the best friend a girl ever had for more than a quarter of a century now: Here’s to twenty-five more creative years . . . but with fewer divorces on both our ends!!

  To my parents of choice, Joel and Edith Ellis. Joel, your stories about Vietnam inspired so many of the stories Buddy tells about “Jimmy.” I found a way to put you onstage without putting you onstage! And Edith, at one point Buddy tells Suzanne, “Your mom was a woman, all right—wars are fought over women like that.” I can’t think of a better description of Joel’s love for you. Thank you both for adopting me into your family and for loving me in the bad times as well as the good.

  And finally, to Bruce “the Shark” Allen, who helped inspire the character of Buddy McKinley by approaching me during intermission at a fund-raising run (for Sexual Assault Support Services in New Hampshire) of my rape-awareness play “Dear Daddy, Love Cassie,” and saying, “So, genius, when are you going to write a romantic lead for an old fart like me?” I knew immediately what he was saying. So many actors hit fifty or sixty and suddenly the phone stops ringing; for women, it’s even worse. And why? Do we stop falling in love after age fifty? Stop learning life lessons? Stop feeling? No. Thank you for reminding me of that, Bruce. And to his two wonderful daughters, Susan and Katherine, his lovely wife, Jean, his amazing sister, Karen, and so many others in the Portsmouth theater community. I still miss you every day.

  (And yes, I’ll tell everyone that you were so dubbed “the Shark” because as a book reviewer you so ravaged Peter Benchley’s Jaws in the Boston Globe that it prompted Steven Spielberg to name his mechanical shark after you!!!)

  PART ONE

  ONE

  “You know, as your mother, I’d rather give myself a bikini wax with Super Glue than criticize a single thing about you. But, honey, I say this with love—when are you going to do something about your weight?”

  Suzanne had been waiting for that comment to find its way into the conversation ever since she’d grabbed a third glazed donut at breakfast.

  “I’m only a size eight, Ma.”

  Suzanne leaned back in her lawn chair, her damp tendrils framing her face as the sun streamed down on them in the front yard of Ava’s house, where Suzanne was currently “hanging her hat,” as her late father would have said. And it was a beautiful place to be able to do that, she thought fondly, looking through the lush, leafy yard that looked out onto the Piscataqua River. The three-bedroom, two-hundred-year-old button house was snug, but the high ceilings and smart layout gave the illusion of roominess; it had been modernized without destroying its antique value. Ava had seen to every detail of that operation personally when she’d moved in. There were several maple trees, a couple of ash, and four oak trees in the yard, between here and the riverfront, and the leaves were just beginning to hint that they’d soon burst from their deep green to their scarlet, russet, and walnut.

  She hadn’t travelled much in her lifetime, but every autumn she still felt blessed to live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, right on the waterfront.

  “That’s four sizes smaller than the ‘average’ woman my age,” Suzanne continued, just as though she and her mother hadn’t had this same conversation a thousand times in the past ten years. “You can’t force me into some ridiculous Hollywood standard just because Madison Avenue has somehow duped women into draconian methods of starvation in order to consider themselves attractive.”

  Suzanne tossed her braid primly, as always, priding herself for turning a fondness for cheeseburgers and fries into a political stance.

  “Besides,” she added, by force of habit, “it’s just my baby weight.”

  “Your baby just turned eighteen. That’s baby weight with some staying power,” Ava observed; her tone of voice brooked no excuses, for this or any other matter. “Now that you’re finally divorcing that bum, I would think you’d want to clean up your act altogether. You were eighteen years old the last time you were on the dating circuit. And thirty-six is a lot saggier than eighteen, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “Ma, I’m hardly fat, or . . .”

  “And speaking of her, when is the princess coming back from freshman orientation?” Ava interrupted her. “After all, I’m not going to be around forever, so she’d better see me while I’m still here to see.”

  “You’ll outlive us all,” Suzanne said airily. “You’re too tough and bitchy to die, and you damn well know it.”

  Ava snorted, giving her a hurt look, but she did not, Suzanne noted, deny it.

  “Anyway,” Suzanne informed her, “I just talked to her, and she said she had to check her schedule. Probably later this afternoon, by bus, or early tomorrow morning.”

  She flipped the magazine calmly, but each page snapped as she turned it.

  “What she’s really doing, of course, is checking with this new guy, Brandon, making sure that works for him. Ten to one, she’s spending all her time with him these days.”

  “Oh, what the crap is that?” Ava scoffed. She put a yellow mum next to an orange gerber daisy; she’d been tempted to use a hollowed-out pumpkin rather than a crimson vase, but regretfully decided September 1 wasn’t quite in pumpkin season. “She’s way too young to ‘check her schedule.’ She’s got her whole life to throw away on some loser, so why can’t she spare a week or two for an old lady before she goes off to college? What was the last one, the on
e with the hair that stood straight up? A minister’s son?” She shook her head grimly. “A horny teenage boy stole your last days of childhood from me, and now the sons of bitches are after Molly’s. How can a mere grandmother compete with that?”

  “The one before that got her forty percent off at L.L.Bean, remember?” Suzanne remembered. “I really liked that one.”

  “Honey, I’m more important than a silly date. And if I’m not, well, damn it, I should be.”

  Now Ava hauled out the big gun.

  “I know you like to joke about it, but the fact of the matter is that I really will be gone in the not-too-distant future. I don’t always feel as strong as I used to. In fact,” she touched the back of her hand to her forehead dramatically, “I’m feeling a bit faint as we speak.”

  “Are you serious?” Suzanne leapt to her feet and led her mother over to the picnic bench; since her father died eight years ago, Ava’s frequent jokes about her mortality didn’t strike her quite so funny as they once did. “Did you take your blood pressure pills today? I knew I shouldn’t have let you work out here in this sun . . .”

  “Let me?” Ava demanded; she was getting impatient with Suzanne’s overreactions to the tiniest jokes. “We’ve got quite a ways to go before we get to the part where you ‘let’ me do things. And, yes, yes, yes, of course I took the blood pressure pills. Do you think I’m crazy enough not to? And I took the vitamins. And yes, yes, yes, lots of water, and I exercise every day.” She glanced at her watch. “But you’re right. I should get inside and get moving. The new neighbors are moving in this week, and I want to make sure that the flower arrangement is ready. First appearances are very important, you know.”

  Suzanne watched her closely for another moment, to Ava’s annoyance, just to be sure. Finally, she returned to her lawn chair. “How do you know they’re moving in so soon, Mom? Have you met them?”

  “No,” Ava said breezily “But like any good neighbor, I took out my footstool and peeked in the windows.”

  “Mother!”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Ava picked up the broom and started sweeping up the errant stems and petals that had fallen to the ground as she created her neighbor’s welcome gift; bits of yellow mums and orange gerbera daisies decorated the ground, as though evidence of some flower-related crime. “It was a violation of my neighbors’ privacy, but they weren’t home. Like your father used to say, ‘Cop didn’t see it, I didn’t do it.’”

  Suzanne leaned back again in her chair, her eyes disapproving, but the corner of her mouth twitched into a smile.

  “He stole that line from George Carlin. But your nosiness is getting out of hand—worse than a child’s, I swear.” Suzanne flipped another page to see who was wearing what to yet another unnecessary awards show. “Molly gives me less headaches than you do. Just remember, do what you have to do in this world, but if you get caught, lose my number—I’m not dipping into my cigarette money to bail you out.”

  “God forbid—and I certainly wouldn’t expect you to dip into the money you’ve got earmarked for The American Lung Cancer Society.” Ava watched Suzanne light up the fifth cigarette she’d had in the past hour, then patted her own ample bosom. “That’s why I always keep a little extra in my ‘lucky pocket.’”

  “You know,” Suzanne warned as she exhaled loudly to annoy her mother, “your nosiness is going to get you into big trouble one day, young lady, you mark my words.”

  “Who the hell are you calling a young lady?” Ava demanded. “Look, I just needed to know if it was someone interesting, someone with stories to tell, who’s not afraid to have a good time. God forbid it’s some old fuddy-duddy who’s going to discuss the frequency and consistency of his bowel movements the first time we say hello.”

  “This is the nicest retirement village on the whole Seacoast,” Suzanne pointed out. “We looked at them all. You’re the one who wanted to live right here in good ol’ sunny, cobblestoned Portsmouth.”

  “If I can’t see water, I don’t want to live there.” Ava repeated her lifelong motto firmly. “Not to mention, I have to be where I can get my fix of Molly Malone’s Irish stew—it was the one thing even your father admitted they did better than our restaurant.” She dumped a load of stems into the trash. “But the thing is, honey, people under fifty call it a retirement village; we call it ‘A Place for Human Raisins to Turn into Mush.’”

  “Give your neighbors a little credit!!” Suzanne cried indignantly. “You’re not like that; maybe some of them aren’t, either.”

  “Of course I’m not like that. I’m an extraordinary lady.” Ava smiled to take the edge off the pompous words. “At any rate, I hope the new neighbor hates bridge and golf as much as I do, otherwise they bug you constantly. ‘Just give it a try; you’ll enjoy it if you give it a chance.’” She snorted. “Pushers, that’s what they are, just as bad.”

  “I’m not sure that someone trying to get you to go golfing can be compared to a drug dealer, Mother, but A for effort.”

  “I mean, golfing!” Ava spat. “What’s the point? You try to hit something into a hole. Well, if a man can’t do it in the bathroom, how the hell’s he gonna do it on a great big field . . . with a much smaller hole, no less?”

  “Again, Mom,” Suzanne grinned despite herself, “not quite the same thing.”

  “I’m telling you, a good neighbor is the key to living, and not just existing, in a place like this. Just someone to hang out with. As long as they like to do all the same stuff as I do, of course. If they don’t, they can just go to hell, and I’ll tell them so.”

  “I’ll just bet you will, you old bat.”

  Ava gave her a warning look and fell silent for a moment, concentrating on her arrangement, the soothing silent harmony of the colors in the basket casting a calming spell on her. A rare quiet moment passed between the two women. The sun shone down on the tops of their heads, and a cool breeze from the shore, a hundred yards away, whirled up to take the slow burn of the strong rays away.

  “What did the message say, exactly?” Ava asked innocently, snipping away at a mum head. Without being told, Suzanne knew exactly which message she was referring to.

  “You were right there when I played it, Mom.”

  “Yes, well, my memory isn’t quite what it used to be, whether I take my ginko or not.”

  Suzanne sighed.

  “Molly said, ‘I’ll be home Friday afternoon, Mom. And I’d like it if you, me, and Grandma could have a talk. I’ve got something very important I want to tell you.’ Then, you know, she said good bye, I love you, some kind of crap like that.”

  She hoped that would be enough to satisfy Ava and get her to shut up—at least on this particular topic—but she also knew that was wishful thinking.

  “Well,” Ava persisted, “what was her tone like? Did she sound like it was good news, or bad news?”

  Suzanne paused, recalling her daughter’s words, her inflection; more than anything she recalled the wall of worry that had crashed into her at Molly’s words. But after repeated listenings, she had been no more the wiser as she was on the first go-round.

  “She sounded like it was . . . news.” Suzanne said at last. She continued to flip through her magazine, but she realized she was more yanking than turning the pages. Don’t take it out on the magazine, she chided herself. You still want to see pictures of the new Johnny Depp movie.

  “No clues at all?”

  “I get the idea,” Suzanne conceded, “that it’s got something to do with this Brandon.”

  Ah, I’ve gone and done it, she cursed herself. I’ve made him “this” Brandon. I’m officially an old bat. A thirty-six-year-old bat.

  “Well,” Ava sniffed in her I’m-not-kidding voice, “she’d better not be engaged, or moving in with a boy, or anything ridiculous like that.”

  Suzanne sat perfectly still. If she froze completely, maybe time would stand still, and her mother wouldn’t be able to finish this train of thought.

  “Or pregnant, worse
yet,” Ava continued.

  Damn it! The accursed word had been spoken aloud. Now the gods had been officially tempted.

  She wondered if she should get up, turn around three times, and spit, the way her friend Thomas Mills did when he’d slipped and mentioned the name “Macbeth” in a theatre once. (Apparently, you were supposed to call it “the Scottish play.”) She wondered what euphemism you were supposed to use for pregnancy you desperately hoped didn’t exist.

  Most women loved being told they looked young, and most of the time Suzanne was no exception. But Suzanne looked so young that whenever she introduced people to her daughter, they’d often ask both Molly’s and her own age and then she could see them mentally doing the math.

  Thirty-six minus eighteen equals too damn young to have a baby in this day and age.

  She’d been eighteen when she pushed Molly out of her vagina and into this cold cruel world; the very same age Molly was now. The age that had seemed plenty mature at the time now seemed terrifyingly young—infantile, in fact.

  Well, they say history repeats itself. Apparently they say that for a reason, damn it.

  “At her age, just heading off to college,” Ava continued her tirade, blithely unaware of the embolism her daughter was having. “Although, it’s not like when you were young, sweetie. She won’t have to give up college, though, not like you did. Universities are all set up for that sort of thing now—heck, even some of the high schools.”

  Ava snorted in disgust at this twenty-first century marvel.

  “When I was in high school, if you got in trouble, they just shipped you off to your Aunt Sandy’s in Texas,” she confided, “whether you actually had an Aunt Sandy in Texas or not.”

  “Really?” Suzanne felt a bit faint, suddenly, even though she was already sitting down.

  “Oh, yes, indeedy-do. But nowadays . . .” She stopped to point at Suzanne with a dahlia. “Did you know that Portsmouth High School now has day care for the students who have children?”

  “No, I didn’t know that, Mother.” Now Suzanne felt downright nauseated.