She Effin' Hates Me

by Scarlett Savage

  Dear God, did something happen to my baby girl and I didn’t see it? Couldn’t see it?

  Don’t be ridiculous, another part of her brain—the less hysterical, more rational part—soothed her. Molly tells you everything. She’d have told you.

  But Molly hadn’t told her everything, after all, had she?

  She shook off the horrible thought. She would force herself to ask Molly—before she left, maybe even tonight—but before that happened, she needed to take a few deep breaths and collect herself. She shook her head again, pretending to shoo away the mosquitoes and no-see-ums that were out in abundance tonight, even though the city of Portsmouth usually tried to spray such pests away.

  Why the hell am I acting like being gay is some kind of disease? Like it’s some horrible affliction? she asked herself, and to her relief, it sounded like her own voice—neither the hysterical nor the super rational one, but just plain old her. I know lots of gay people, and they’re just people like everyone else . . . Some are nice, some are great, and some are assholes, just like the rest of the human race. Hell, some of my best friends are lesbians, after all, as the old saying went, although she couldn’t think of any lesbians she was tight with, just now.

  “So that’s your story.” Sean clapped politely, once again taking her attention away from her daughter’s fondling session. “Not exactly a summary, but the salient points came across.”

  “We’re so proud of her.” Laura reached over to squeeze Suzanne’s hands. “She could have left long before she did, but those vows, those weren’t just words to our girl. No sir; lots of other people would have given up on the bum much sooner.”

  That was sort of true, Suzanne reflected, in spite of the hokey way Laura put it. She’d never thought of it quite like that. Maybe she hadn’t so much as wasted half her life as really, really tried to make her choices work. She’d made a commitment, and she was the type of woman who honored her word.

  Oh, yeah, I definitely belong in PR, she thought, if I can actually make that bullshit stick.

  She’d stayed with Steve for the same reason a lot of people clung to crappy marriages—out of fear, out of apprehension. Her marriage was a joke, but it was familiar, it was what she was used to. After years of coming home to the sound of Steve’s music in the studio, could she really handle a silent house, all by herself? Just her and Molly?

  But when she could take it no longer, she had left. She sat up just a little straighter, feeling slightly proud of herself.

  Suzanne lit up a cigarette and suddenly realized that, somewhere in the past forty-five minutes, she had stopped waiting anxiously for the first opportunity to get all her guests on their feet and moving toward their cars. At some point before her ice tea glass was empty, she realized she was having fun. Not only was the evening fun but it was a kind of fun she hadn’t had in a long, long time. The kind of fun that her life hadn’t had time for in . . . Her eyes misted up alarmingly quickly, and she blinked them clear, thinking, Well, let’s just say it’s been a while.

  Suzanne glanced over and saw Molly and Sandy sitting as close as two people could without being in each other’s laps. Sandy’s arm was around Molly’s shoulders, and she was toying with the strands of Molly’s long, auburn hair. They’d shifted from the topic of Billary and were now deep in a discussion about the state of the pop scene today, especially the artists who were little more than tabloid fodder, the kind of conversation you had on a first or second date when you were still feeling each other out, taking baby steps toward getting closer. She was relieved to see Brandon was still there keeping things from getting too heated between Sandy and Molly, and hated herself for it.

  “I personally blame that arrogant little shit from Youtube,” Sandy insisted, clearly implying Justin Bieber. “He’s not only a joke of a musician, he spits on people, and he’s walking around free as a bird.”

  It was dark, and they were at least twenty feet away, but there was a smile on Molly’s face and a blush on her cheeks that Suzanne hadn’t seen since—actually, she realized, this was a Molly she had never seen, a Molly that very few people had probably ever seen. She knew Molly despised Justin Bieber, but suspected that had very little to do with her daughter’s smile.

  “It just doesn’t look like what you expected, huh?” Laura tilted her head toward the girls.

  Suzanne lowered her voice to the barest whisper possible. On the Seacoast, a voice traveled easily, and Molly had ears like a bat, just like her grandmother.

  “I keep trying to tell myself I’d be this uncomfortable if it were a guy hanging all over her,” Suzanne admitted, breaking a cookie in half and crumbling chunks of it with her fingers. She’d just put out a cigarette and needed something to do with her hands in the twenty minutes before she had decided she’d allow herself another one. Watching Sean out of the corner of her eye, she had realized that was about the same allotment he allowed himself.

  “You probably would,” Laura said calmly. “This part, the actually seeing someone lustfully touching your daughter . . .”

  “Keep your voice down!” Suzanne hissed.

  “Sorry.” Laura lowered her voice. “But the fact of the matter is, this means No More Little Girl. And looking at it—even though it might be a little different from what you had in mind—hurts. You’re thinking all kinds of things—that now that she’s seeing people, she won’t need you as much, that she’ll spend her free weekends with her dates instead of coming home to visit, but more than anything,” she leaned forward and tapped Suzanne’s hands lightly, “you’re thinking that even though things might be a lot better than they once were, this still isn’t an ideal society to be a gay chick in.”

  Suzanne glanced quickly at Billy and Sean, wondering what they had heard, if anything, but Sean had flown past high school tales to AA war stories.

  That’s where Mom knows him from, Suzanne thought, and oddly felt a wave of relief.

  She supposed after watching her mother dive into gin and tonics and her husband light a bong the second he awoke, it probably wasn’t such a wonder. She glanced at her cigarettes, which Steve had always claimed were much worse than any habit he might have.

  But for the moment, Sean was in full storyteller mode, in the same hypnotic voice that had so charmed Molly, and Billy, an avid talker, was apparently also a rapt listener. From her experience with Ava, Suzanne knew that they could be awhile, and she was grateful.

  “Can I ask you a question, Laura?”

  “Anything but my weight—that info goes with me to the grave.”

  “How the hell do you always know exactly, to the letter, what to say?” Suzanne shook her head. “I’ve got to tell you, since you were once a self-centered, smug asshole, it’s disturbingly unsettling.”

  Laura tossed her hair back, and there was that easy, happy laugh. Her hair, Suzanne noticed, wasn’t too thin or too thick, but just right. It floated back down to her shoulders in loose waves. Yet another trait to envy about her, and Suzanne did.

  “Yes, I was a smug, self-centered asshole in high school. I had all the right answers, but I had no idea what the real questions were.” She nudged Suzanne’s shoulder. “Besides, you were a spazmoid drama queen in school, bouncing off the walls so hard it made a thud each time you hit the floor, which was, quite frankly, often.”

  “Do you hear me denying a thing?” Suzanne asked. “I ate five candy bars a day and still wore a size four, that’s how much I burned off in a day. And that was back in the day when they hadn’t made zero a size yet, so in today’s terms, I’d have been a two.”

  “Yeah, well, now we both know what we were doing—distracting ourselves from the drunks waiting for us at home.” Once again, Laura got to the heart of the matter in a matter of moments, while Suzanne would have stumbled and stuttered over the topic for ten minutes before broaching it. “But, to answer your question, no.” She shook that enviable hair again. “No to the supernatural. I wish—can you imagine how much dough I’d rake in if I could add a psyc
hic to the regular staff?”

  Suzanne laughed. With Laura, everything invariably went back to business, and that was just like high school. Some things never changed, as they say, and it was a comfort in her recently-turned-upside-down life.

  “But it’s easy to know you,” Laura went on, “because I know me. I spent a long time getting to know me.” She was smiling at her new friend, happily, without an ounce of reservation; her whole personality shone through in that smile. “And since we’ve, what do you want to call it, renewed our acquaintance . . .”

  “That’s implying we had one before,” Suzanne interjected. “I think the extent of it was that we could probably pick each other out of a lineup and had just enough surface info to come up with a zinger or two when the situation called for it.”

  “If you have to get graphic, I suppose that’s true.” Laura pretended to look down her nose at Suzanne. In that moment, she looked like the prom queen about to stomp on the pregnant drama queen with her sharp wit. After all these years, it was still unnerving. “I’ve come to realize that you’re not unlike me, well, apart from a law degree and a professional witch’s license, that is.”

  “That must be true,” Suzanne conceded, sipping her iced tea, wondering at the fact that there was actually such a thing as a professional witch’s license. Or maybe Laura was pulling her leg. Hard to tell. To her intense relief, it was time to light up again. As soon as she put the cigarette in her mouth, Sean leaned forward and sparked his old-fashioned Zippo, touching the tip of the flame to her American Spirit. Their eyes met, there was an almost audible sizzle, and then he smiled, winked, and turned back to listen to Billy, whose turn it was to speak, apparently.

  Okay, he’s hot. I admit it, no question, she thought. But don’t, I repeat, do not mistake sexual attraction for anything other than what it is. Of course it feels intense—anything would after all these years.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex with Steve, but it had been sometime before the new millennium. He’d complained and pushed and begged for a while, then discovered all kinds of ways to deal with his needs on the Internet. Suzanne, thoroughly relieved, made sure he had his own Hewlett-Packard in the basement.

  “It’s funny,” she said to Laura, sneaking one last peek at Sean. “At the reading, that’s what I thought to myself. That back in high school, we had so much in common, but no one, least of all us, ever guessed it. We could have been a real comfort to each other.”

  “Coulda, shoulda, woulda.” Laura waved it off, biting into a cookie she held in one hand and running the other through her husband’s paint-flecked hair.

  “But,” Suzanne lowered her voice to a decibel only the poodle next door might hear, “the things you’ve said about Molly, they’ve all been spot on. It helps, you know? To hear this stuff out loud, to have someone actually say it.”

  “Corny, but true,” Laura admitted. “Now, I don’t have a gay child—that I know of,” Laura corrected herself. “After all, Hermione’s young still, although she’s had ‘boyfriends’ every school year, starting with a kid with black hair named Angus.” She nodded at Suzanne’s aghast expression at the boy’s unfortunate name. “The big attraction to him, she said, was that his teeth were so white they burned her eyes.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” Suzanne asked doubtfully.

  Laura shrugged, giggling. “To Hermione, it was. She’s also been moon-eyed over more boy band members than I care to think of.”

  Suzanne snorted, remembering the walls of Molly’s room. “Molly used to have posters of One Direction up on her wall,” Suzanne realized. “But, now that I think of it, she never begged and pleaded for tickets to their concerts, even though her friends were all going. I thought she was old enough to be aware of our budget situation and didn’t want us to feel bad by asking for something she knew we couldn’t give her.”

  “Yeah,” Laura marveled, “kids are usually real considerate about that sort of thing.”

  Suzanne laughed, taking a fake swat in her friend’s direction. “Thinking about it now . . . she was probably doing what the other kids were doing. Just because they were doing it.” Suddenly her heart ached for that long ago-Molly, thinking she was different and desperately trying to fit in by pinning up posters that had no meaning for her. Had she been scared? Had she thought there was something wrong with her? Had she thought pretending to swoon over Justin and Lance would make these strange feelings go away? And why hadn’t she told her mother what she was feeling? Why hadn’t she come to her?

  Maybe because she saw me getting treated like a doormat all those years, and she didn’t respect me, Suzanne realized, a lump forming in her throat that she tried to politely cough away. Maybe something did happen to her, and I was too busy or too tired to notice, and I didn’t help her. Maybe she didn’t like me any more than she liked her father. I can’t think about that now.

  She glanced over just in time to see Sandy nibbling on Molly’s earlobe, while Molly stroked her hair as she casually spoke to Brandon.

  She hastily pulled her eyes away, but the image was burned into her brain. She felt as if she’d invaded Molly’s privacy, but then again, Molly wasn’t going out of her way to be private.

  I really need a break from thinking of my child’s sexuality. Or seeing it.

  “So, while I don’t know what it’s like to have a child come out to me,” Laura was saying as if she could read her thoughts, “I can imagine what it would be like. This is a patriarchal society, no matter who says different. I worry about all women and the things they face. Men don’t have to freak out about walking to their cars at night, for example, or getting told that their body is an asset to a white-collar job. But to be a gay woman?” Laura shook her head. “God love her for accepting herself, but I’m sure she knows she’s got a hard row to hoe ahead of her. She’ll hear ten zillion jokes from assholes asking if they can watch, asking if she’s sure she’s gay or maybe it’s because she’s never been with a ‘real’ man before. Like I said, it’s better than it used to be,” she sighed, “but it still ain’t easy. I see enough of them at my store every day to tell you that. The only thing worse would be if she were fat.”

  “If she were fat?” That came completely out of left field. “What does that have to do with it?”

  Dear God, maybe because Suzanne’s size-eight jeans weren’t zipping up so well and she’d had to discreetly buy a pair of size tens from Déjà Vu, the chicest second-hand store on the Seacoast. Maybe Laura was hinting that fatness was coming, and she should try to get Molly to do something about it.

  Laura, once again utilizing the near-psychic powers Suzanne was sure she possessed, read her thoughts and kicked her ankle.

  “The average size for an American woman is five-foot-four, one hundred forty-four pounds, and size twelve. Both you and Molly are much taller than five four, and you both have a ways to go before you’re there.”

  “Not that far,” Suzanne mumbled, but Laura ignored her.

  “I’m just saying,” Laura sighed, “that this country will forgive anything—alcoholics, drug users, wife beaters, people who cheat on their income taxes—they’ll come to terms with all that crap. But there’s nothing in this world that they hate more than a fat chick. How pathetic is that? But we can’t fix it unless we say it out loud. And that sick POV really, really needs fixing.”

  Suzanne closed her eyes, knowing Laura was right, and hating it. Hadn’t she herself, at the reading, noticed distastefully that there were a number of women there who could use a little exercise, to put a polite spin on it?

  I’m no better than they are, she thought despairingly. The realization that she had been conditioned by her society to be this way was a cold comfort.

  In addition to the possible prejudice she’ll face, now I have to worry that one day she’ll eat too many Klondike bars and get crapped on even more.

  “Speaking of alcoholism, insofar as being a survivor of someone bitten by the bottle,” Laura steered t
he topic to another topic, and Suzanne was desperately grateful, “I didn’t figure that out until Ava first came into the store. But once I did, it was like all these puzzle pieces fit into place. All the things I thought I knew about you in school . . . I suddenly felt like I knew you.”

  She reached over with such a comically sudden fierce hug, it made Suzanne burst out laughing.

  “That’s why I was so glad to see you—I felt like we were alike enough to be sisters, sitting three desks apart, and never knew it.” She smiled and touched Suzanne’s hand again, a gesture she performed often and one that Suzanne felt profoundly comforting, “But then, I knew it, so I figured when we bumped into each other again, well, we’d have a lot to talk about.”

  “That’s how I feel, too. Exactly how I feel—like, we could have been together talking about our problems rather than competing with each other.”

  “Yeah, but again, hindsight is a beautiful thing.” Laura sneaked a drag off Suzanne’s cigarette, careful that Billy didn’t see it. “How long has she been sober?”

  “A long time, about seventeen years.” Suzanne smiled. “She said she realized she was going to miss out on Molly’s upbringing if she didn’t clean up her act. So, she cleaned up her act.”

  “Must be nice,” Laura’s blue eyes clouded. “My mom can’t seem to choose Hermione over the rum or the Valium.”

  “I’m so sorry, sweetie.” Suzanne didn’t know what to day. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a mother who’d never stopped boozing, and, thankfully, she couldn’t. She wanted to reach into her mind and find comforting words, the way Laura had done for her, but there was nothing there except another “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know. But it’s like they say: That’s who she is; it doesn’t have to change who I am. It does mean that Hermione has absolutely no contact with her grandmother, but that’s just the way it is.” She brooded a few minutes, sneaking another drag. “It’s just that when she’s sober, she’s . . .”