She Effin' Hates Me

by Scarlett Savage

  “I’m with you, Grandma.” Molly shuddered, then brightened. “Cinnamon bread! Thanks, Grandma!”

  Brandon helped himself to a huge chunk. Suzanne watched enviously, knowing that if she ate a piece even a third that size, she could kiss zipping up her size eight jeans goodbye. “I’m officially declaring you a goddess of the first realm,” he enthused.

  Suzanne turned to Laura. “Is there such a thing?”

  Laura shook her head. “I think he invented it just for Ava—ten bucks says he’s an online gamer. That sounds like something one of them would say.”

  “Well, if I’m a goddess, and everyone’s full and happy, then my work here is done. Goodnight, all,” Ava told them. “I’m going inside before the mosquitoes eat me alive. I’ve got an important date tomorrow, and I don’t intend to be covered with little red marks.” She disappeared inside quickly, leaving them all hanging.

  “Date?” Molly repeated. When Suzanne glanced over, she tried not to react to the sight of Sandy’s arms around her daughter, her multipierced head lying on Molly’s shoulder. “Did Grandma say she had a date?”

  “That’s what it sounded like,” Suzanne agreed, looking down at her lemonade. “But who . . .”

  “Take a wild guess,” Brandon called, from his position on the grass. “Go on, just one wild, crazy guess.”

  Well, Suzanne thought, what do you know about that? What a very little amount of grease it had taken to get those wheels turning.

  Her first date since Daddy . . . well, since Daddy.

  “Okay, back to Suzanne’s shady past.” Laura was more than happy to color in the details of her friend’s teenaged sex life, seeing as she did once have a front-row seat. “You see, Steve, her ex, had this no-one-understands-me James Dean kind of thing going on.” She nodded her head dreamily. “Let me tell you, he had half the seniors and all the juniors and sophomores just lusting after him. They were all aching to wrap their little arms around him and save him.” She pointed at Suzanne. “No one more than this one, though.”

  “That’s the second time this night I’ve been called ‘this one,’” Suzanne protested. “When did I become ‘this one’?”

  “I remember that.” Billy climbed up and sat behind Laura, taking her silky blond hair into his hands. She closed her eyes and enjoyed his touch.

  It occurred to Suzanne that they didn’t look like a married couple. Instead, they looked like a couple of high school kids who’d snuck out for a late night date. Their attraction to each other was so obvious, so honest and real.

  I want that, she realized. Just like Brandon says, I want to ‘get it’ again. Is ‘he’ out there for me? My Billy? My Buddy?

  Billy went on, “Suzanne would run out to the parking lot every day to climb on the back of that motorcycle, and they’d tear off like crazy. It was straight out of a John Hughes movie.”

  “See, that’s the thing,” Suzanne sighed. “I don’t remember any of that stuff. It’s like that was some other guy, and the Steven I know now is a totally different person. I look at him now, and I can’t even imagine him making me go all gooey.”

  “‘Go all gooey,’” Sean nodded. “Yes, siree, I believe I know exactly what you mean.”

  “So, anyway,” Suzanne continued, “one day I took a history test, and then right after it I took a pregnancy test. Both times I saw a big ol’ plus sign staring right back up at me. I took twelve more EPTs, praying I’d get at least one minus.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Molly blew her another kiss from across the lawn.

  “You know how happy I am now that it was a plus,” Suzanne scolded. “And you’re eavesdropping on the grown-ups, dear.”

  Molly turned back to her conversation with—what was her name again? The lyrics to Summer Lovin’ popped into Suzanne’s head. Oh yes: Sandy. Lily-white, virginal Sandy. She looked at the girl, who oozed sexuality. Not so much, in this case.

  “How’d Steven take it?” Billy asked. “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “Neither did I,” Suzanne said with a laugh. “But in the end, he just sprang into action, God love him. He had a plan all ready. We’d get married the day after graduation, even though the baby would be born by then. Neither of us was eighteen yet, and I think he knew my parents wouldn’t approve. We’d both stay in school and graduate, he decided. And we made a zillion plans for the future.”

  “And what was Ava’s take on it?” Sean asked. “I can just imagine her blowing, like, six gaskets.”

  “She actually guessed before I worked up the nerve to tell her,” Suzanne admitted. “Overnight, my boobs exploded, and I was retaining so much water it looked like I was showing. I’d been on the skinny side before.”

  “Beanpole with boobs,” Laura commented. “I’ve got the yearbook to show it.”

  “So, anyway . . .” Suzanne glared at Laura, who was laughing, well pleased with herself. “One day, I came home from school, and she had a bunch of bags of maternity clothes on the kitchen table and said, ‘I think we need to talk about this before your father figures it out, don’t you?’” She laughed at the memory. “Oh, was she mad! She was going to kill Steve, she was going to torch his parents’ house, she was going to ground me until my fiftieth birthday . . .”

  “Does that mean you still can’t come out and play?” Laura cried, grabbing her hand. “I’ll sneak over to your house when she’s at work!”

  “And we’ll do each other’s hair and talk about boys!” Suzanne chimed in excitedly.

  “All right!” Brandon chimed in. “When do we start?”

  The entire group was hit with the giggles then, and it took some time to calm down.

  “Does anyone want a beer?” Sandy said suddenly. “I’ve got a twelve-pack in my car.”

  “Sorry, I don’t drink,” Sean said.

  “I’ll pass,” said Suzanne out of habit; drinking while living in a recovering alocholic’s house seemed unduly mean, although Ava had told her time and again that keeping Suzanne sober wasn’t part of her program. “So, you’re a non-drinker too?” Suzanne asked Sean. “By choice or by necessity?

  “We’ll get to that later.” Sean waved her question away. “I want to know how it ended with Motorcycle Boy.”

  “Motorcycle Boy! From Rumble Fish!!” Billy and Suzanne cried in unison, a little too loudly. Molly and company looked up the way kids do when the adults are talking about something before their time.

  “Oh, my God,” Laura breathed. “S. E. Hinton, the teen writer who gave us That Was Then, This Is Now, and most importantly . . .”

  “The Outsiders!” Suzanne and Laura chimed in together, off in their remembered world of eighties romance. Billy and Sean laughed. Molly groaned and put a hand over half her face—the half facing her mother—in a gesture that Suzanne couldn’t distinguish as sarcastic or comedic.

  She grimly staved the feeling off—I’m having a nice time, she realized, and I deserve it, dammit.

  “How many times did you see the movie?” Suzanne asked Laura. “Six times at the theatre, and if I’m not mistaken, it was the first videotape I bought. That’s the movie where everyone fell in love with Ralph Macchio or Matt Dillion, but . . .”

  “I hear you,” Laura was once again reading her thoughts. “I was Ponyboy Girl myself.”

  “Aren’t you glad you started this?” Billy asked as the women gushed about the sexual appeal of C. Thomas Howell—an actor who had long fallen into obscurity—and Sean held his hands up innocently.

  “I was just trying to make a witty crack about her ex. I didn’t mean to get them started down Teenaged Hunk Memory Lane,” he apologized. He looked up to find Molly tearing her attention from her date—who was busy disputing the politics of the long-dead Clinton administration with Brandon—and for just a minute, their eyes locked. Molly gave him a smile, one of the smiles that made her look more like the happy five-or-six-year-old she’d once been rather than the I am Lesbian Woman, Hear Me Roar that she was now. Suzanne, still partly caught back in the life
and times of Mr. Howell, caught the exchange out of the corner of her eye, wondering what the hell it was all about.

  “In our world,” Laura was explaining now, “S. E. Hinton’s books were second only to, maybe, Judy Blume’s.” She patted Sean’s arm admiringly. “Boy, did you say just the thing to secure yourself a spot on her good side.”

  “I’ve been known to crack a book or two now and again,” he explained modestly. “Accidentally, of course, while looking for a centerfold.”

  “Anyway,” Suzanne said in a tone that properly chastised Sean, although it did nothing to stifle Billy’s laughter, “to get back on topic, the first year—or three—was great.” Suzanne said simply. “We had each other, we had Molly, we had the world’s shittiest apartment, but we didn’t care. We stapled fabric onto packing crates for end tables, placed a couple of plants here and there, hung some decorative lighting, and put throw rugs and some of our friends’ attempts at artwork on the walls.” She shrugged, remembering those days more fondly than she wanted to; it was so much easier to out-and-out hate the bastard who’d sucked her life away for all those years. She stared off for a moment, remembering those nights. Remembering wanting to rush home from whatever restaurant or bar job she was holding at the time, to climb into Steve’s arms and rouse him for a quick round or two of bed-shaking before sleep claimed them both. There had been the time that Molly cried for two days straight. They’d rushed her to the ER after the receptionist at Molly’s pediatrician’s office suggested she might have broken her leg kicking it against her crib, but several x-rays showed that the leg was fine. Her whole body was perfectly fine, in fact; she’d just overcharged her whole nervous system. The only thing to do was to wait and she’d eventually tire herself out, the doctor said and offered to give them a medicine that would help Molly sleep. To Steve’s dismay, Suzanne adamantly refused, terrified of giving her baby any kind of narcotic; by then she’d read enough to know that addiction was a genetic trait. Suzanne came home from her second job so depleted that she wanted to cry but could barely muster the strength to push the tears out. When she’d stepped through the front door, the house was blissfully quiet; Molly had finally knocked herself out, just like the doctor predicted. Steve had been at the table, holding his head in his hands. An ashtray full of Newburyport butts covered with lipstick told her that his mother’s help had been required, and for once she didn’t blame him. Wordlessly, he’d stood up and took her in his arms, and they both just stood there, clutching each other, two survivors in the dangerous and energy-killing game of parenthood. He’d kissed her, and a spark of passion she didn’t know she had left in her arose. Her waitressing outfit flew across the room, his dirty jeans dropped almost of their own accord, and right then and there, on the floor his mother had so recently washed, they fucked away all the stresses of the past few days.

  Yes, indeed, she thought, some of the first years had not been bad at all.

  “What happened?” Sean prodded gently.

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry,” Suzanne said, pulling herself back to the here and now. “What happened? Time happened,” Suzanne lamented. “Everything happened—life happened. I blinked twice, and suddenly Molly wasn’t a baby anymore. She was six and in school and coming home with a long, daily tally of all the things her friends had that we couldn’t afford: dance classes, swim classes, karate classes. Though, when Molly really wanted to get involved in something, Steve’s mom or mine stepped in to cover those expenses, thank goodness. Still, it was embarrassing to ask.” She shivered, as much from the memory as from the cool night air. “So I took a few classes in office management and sales, and managed to get jobs that paid better. But it still seemed like everyone we knew was just sailing right by us, making so much more money, with such a strong idea of where they were headed.”

  “Or at least giving the illusion they did,” Laura winked at her. “Stop knocking yourself, sister. You’re not so far behind.”

  “Thanks,” Suzanne said softly. “The same can’t be said for young Mr. Lauder. The more money I managed to bring home, the more he took license to do nothing. It wouldn’t even have been so bad if he’d just helped with the housework.”

  “Whoa, let me get this straight,” Billy said, “He’s not working, and he’s not lifting a finger around the house? Changing a diaper? Mowing a lawn? Does the word ‘leech’ mean anything to you?”

  “It does now,” she replied, hiding her face in her hands ruefully.

  “Live and learn,” Laura consoled her, rubbing her back. “Honey, none of this makes you Idiot of the Millennium. There are so many strong, smart women with practically the same story.”

  “I know. So I took on a night job, and then I’d come home to a filthy house because Steve had been too busy meditating or practicing his synthesizer or smoking pot to lift a finger.” She tried not to let the anger seep into her voice, but just remembering that she’d put up with that for one minute made her crazy. “And the best part was, his mother often told him I wasn’t being supportive enough.”

  “Not supportive enough?” Billy cried.

  “What did she expect you to do, shake his dick for him after a piss?” Laura wanted to know. “I’d like to meet this woman, I really would.”

  “Oh, you can con yourself into believing all sorts of ridiculous crap when it comes to your kid.” Sean nodded knowingly, sparking another Marlboro. “For years, my mom thought I was just too high-strung and sensitive to deal with menial things, like paying the bills or raising my kids, which is why I had to drink. Not my fault at all—or, more importantly, hers.”

  “See?” Suzanne patted him on the knee. A little charge sparked between her hand and his leg, and she nearly gasped, she was so startled.

  She didn’t dare look up to see if he’d felt it too, but suddenly there was heat, a hotness that hadn’t been there just a moment before. It had been so long since she’d felt this way—or any version of it—that for a moment, she replayed the touch over and over in her mind.

  Is that what it feels like? She tried to remember.

  It had been over a decade since she’d felt that for Steve, and because faithfulness seemed a trait she was stuck with (likely a side effect of working too hard to conjure up any sexual energy), whenever she needed that bit of “oomph” when Steve was on top of her or she was discreetly giving herself a moment of pleasure in the shower (the one place she had any privacy), she usually stuck to people like Hugh Jackman or Hugh Laurie or Hugh Grant (what was it with those Anglos and their Hughs?). But thoughts of celebrities ripping her clothes off in a moment of passion couldn’t give her the jolt she’d just felt, the jolt she’d completely forgotten existed.

  She tried to shake it off and found she couldn’t. Apparently the spark had a lingering effect.

  Clearing her throat, she said lightly, “Oh, you know. Mommies and their little boys.”

  “And if I had a son, I’d be worse than all of them,” Laura moaned. Billy smiled and didn’t disagree. It was another endearing moment between them.

  “So what was the straw?” Billy reached for the Old Milwaukee Suzanne hadn’t opened. “That one thing that made you say, ‘I quit’?”

  Suzanne grinned and pointed across the yard at her daughter.

  “That’s her, right there: the last straw.” She looked at her daughter, realizing yet again that Molly was ten times the young lady she’d been. “For years, she’d seen me work my ass off while her father sat on his, doing nothing, and apparently she grew to resent the hell out of him for it—and to think of me as something like a doormat.” She winced, recalling the look of disgust that haunted Molly’s eyes for the last few months of her marriage. “The day after she graduated . . . she made it pretty clear what she’d think of me if I stayed with him.”

  “Good for her,” Billy called to Molly, who gave him a thumb’s up right back. Sandy was stroking Molly’s back now, and there was a lot of giggling going on.

  From this angle, Suzanne could see four tattoos on Sandy
’s back. What is it with my kid and body art? Jesus.

  “Oh, yeah,” Suzanne said sadly. “And it was too bad, really, because they were close, once upon a time. Not as close as we were, but he gave her regular piano and guitar lessons. They were some of the few things he was really consistent with—until she turned nine or ten.”

  Right around then, Molly had started getting more interested in the funkier fashions of her days. She began collecting music that had nothing to do with her father’s tastes, to his great dismay, and having her own opinion over whether the lead singer for Rush was actually a belter, as Daddy called him, or just a plain old screamer. That alone, Suzanne often thought, could have been the severing point.

  “By the time she was twelve and had gotten her period and developed breasts, the separation was complete. He’d pulled away from her completely; it was like he just didn’t know what to do with her. Like he was afraid of her because she was so attractive. Afraid that men would be attracted to her, and he didn’t know how he’d handle that. I think she was hurt, at first, but by the time she came to talk to me about it, she’d seen enough of his ‘life’s conspiring against me, I need special treatment’ act to feel anything but disrespect for him.”

  She sat up suddenly.

  Had Steve’s pathetic lack of parental responsibility turned her child off men forever? Could that do it? She’d snuck down to the library and scanned on the Internet (in case Molly happened to check the history on the browser, and Suzanne for the life of her couldn’t figure out how to clear it). What little she could find left a lot of big, fat blanks.

  Having spent so much time doing theater as a child, Suzanne knew that despite many “studies” to the contrary, homosexuals are born, not made. Reminds me of the old joke, she thought. Your mom made you a homosexual? If I buy her the wool, would she make me one too? Just as Ava had been an alcoholic from the moment she’d first drawn breath, so had Molly been what she is. Did I just compare alcoholism to homosexuality? What is wrong with me?