Penelope Lemon

by Inman Majors

  “I actually have read that book,” Penelope said, though not exactly sure why. Maybe it was Theo’s honest interpretive dance on the field. Maybe because this woman, despite having a sensitive-looking son who didn’t wear cleats, wasn’t quite what she hoped her to be.

  The woman didn’t reply but did set the book on her lap. Penelope breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment she’d feared the snob was going to fling it at her. She had begun walking back to the bleachers when the woman called out: “I love this book!”

  Penelope stopped in her tracks and turned. “Really?” she said.

  “Oh, hell yes. I was getting all hot and heavy over here. I was just embarrassed you busted me. I figured my face was flushed or I was moaning out loud or something. Was I moaning? Tell me I wasn’t.”

  Saying this, she broke into a strange laugh, like a small bird twittering and hiccupping at the same time. The nervous laugh didn’t match the woman’s voice or demeanor, and Penelope felt sure she was in the presence of a complicated person.

  The woman stood now and knocked her chair over backwards in the process, the folding part snapping onto her bottom until she had to squat, still hiccup-laughing, to try to shake it off. She was laughing and breathing hard and trying to say something now. Then she reached into her pocket for her phone. With the chair still stuck on her rear and the romance novel clumped on her stomach, she tossed the phone to Penelope.

  “Take a photo, quick. My friends will love this.”

  Penelope did as requested.

  “Take a bunch. I do this sort of thing about twenty times a day and my friends post them on Instagram. I don’t do that teenybopper crap, but apparently I’ve got quite a fan club. My name’s Missy, by the way.”

  “I’m Penelope.”

  The boys in the field were staring at them and the coach had turned to see what the commotion was about. Missy’s son at second base was shaking his head, more in a knowing fashion than an embarrassed one, as his mother tried to extricate herself. Even Theo had paused mid-shimmy in the outfield.

  “Do you mind pulling this chair off my ass?” the woman said. “I seem to be stuck.”

  Penelope walked toward her, feeling certain she’d made a new friend. The T-shirt the woman was wearing was Van Halen, one of her favorites.

  2

  “So practice was fun?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Theo said from the backseat, where he was doing something hectic with his handheld gizmo. His face was angry, brow furrowed, mouth twisted, the way James’s often was when watching the History Channel or reading about volcanoes.

  “I was glad you swung at some today. You’ll hit one pretty soon, I bet.”

  Theo made no response to this but grunted rhythmically with his game.

  “Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  In the rearview she could see her son, his face still holding some baby fat, though it looked, judging by his feet, like he would end up tall and rangy like James. Penelope was shortish and had been told on more than one occasion that she resembled a soccer player. She guessed this was a compliment, but wondered if people were suggesting her thighs and butt were wide. Whatever. She was strong for her size. Both her first husband and James had found that out during bedroom wrestling matches. Did all men like to wrestle women for fun? Or was this just a ploy, as these bouts generally led to messing around? Anyway, the grappling had been fun even if both ex-husbands, caught in the death grip of her leg vise, would resort to tickling, which she considered beneath her and not worthy of a true combatant.

  Oh why couldn’t Theo have inherited her legs, her strength, her athletic ability? Her whole side of the family could throw and catch and hit a ball. Also run without wheezing or flopping your head around like James did. She studied her son some more in the mirror. He did have her eyes, wide and blue and a little surprised-looking, as if just pleasantly startled by good tidings. And his thick dark hair, wavy and untamed, was a carbon copy of her own. He wasn’t a Weird Turd. He was a neat kid, once you got to know him. But what about this Fart Boy stuff? That sounded specific, the kind of name with some backstory.

  Did Theo toot frequently on the bus, so much so that he was known by both eye and ear on those early mornings when all was sleepy and quiet? Or had it been just a single gastric explosion, epic and historic, that had sealed his etymological fate forever more?

  Who knew?

  Maybe Fart Boy was a character from a cartoon or video game she’d never heard of, one who was funny and well-liked, but a little gross at times like all boys were. Just a silly, popular, occasionally flatulent, animated what-have-you. This thought appeased her briefly, but only briefly.

  “How’s your stomach, Theo?”

  “What?”

  “How’s your stomach? Has it been upset lately?”

  “No.”

  “What do you eat at school? Do they serve chili?”

  She’d had his attention momentarily but now he was back on his game. The question went unanswered.

  “Do they?”

  Again no answer, but she did glimpse a triumphant smile. Something menacing had been destroyed or evaded.

  “Will you talk to me for a minute, Theo? You’re at your dad’s all weekend and I’m not going to see you again until Sunday.”

  He sighed as James did when asked to take a pause from deep concentration. She might as well have been asking her ex-husband to take a break from his archery magazine to empty the trash.

  “They serve chili sometimes. Why? That’s a weird question.”

  Penelope should have been expecting this. Her days of seemingly innocuous queries to glean information about his life had been over for a while. She felt nostalgic about how easy it had been to trick him into telling on himself back in the good old days. He was getting savvy as third grade came to a close. The only way to stay in the loop was to improve her detective skills. She gave this some thought before proceeding.

  “I was just wondering.”

  Theo smiled. He seemed to understand the advantage was now his. “Just wondering about chili?”

  Penelope laughed. “Yes. I’m interested in your diet.”

  “You’re wondering about the Fart Boy thing, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Penelope said, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a smile. She was a terrible liar.

  Grinning and going back to his game, Theo said, “Right.”

  “Well, why do they call you that on the bus?”

  “It’s not everyone. Just Alex and Ty. And sometimes Jason.” He paused. “And also Sondra and Madeira.”

  “Girls?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I don’t know. When I was in school, girls didn’t talk like that.”

  This was another lie. Girls on the bus back in her day had talked pretty nasty sometimes, at least the ones Penelope hung out with. Just not where the boys could hear. She considered the fact that she wouldn’t see Theo for the next forty-eight hours. Why end their week together on a sour note?

  “Theo, do you toot on the bus or something?”

  It was out before she could stop herself.

  Theo, who had been looking at her through the rearview, now gazed out the window.

  “Theo, just tell me. I don’t care. I’m just curious. Are you ripping big juicy ones on the bus or not?”

  “No more than I do at home.”

  “Theo, you toot all the time at home. You’re like a walking whoopee cushion.”

  Theo smiled at this but said no more.

  “I think you might need to go to the doctor.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You can’t be farting all the time on the bus. The kids will tease you if you do.”

  “They usually laugh.”

  “Yes,” Penelope said, “and then they tease you. What, do you like being Fart Boy?”

  Still looking out the window, he said, “I don’t mind.”

  “I think you do. Or else you wouldn’t have told me about it. Do
es Ms. Dunleavy know about this?”

  “I don’t think so. But please don’t call Ms. Dunleavy. There’s only three more days of school. It’s not a big deal.”

  “What’s to stop them from calling you names next year?”

  “They’ll probably forget by then. Please don’t make a fuss. I’ll hold them in these last few days.”

  “Why didn’t you hold them in before? That’s not really something meant for public consumption.”

  “I told you. The kids thought it was funny. I was just goofing around.”

  Farting for attention. Could there be anything sadder? Perhaps James had been a publicity-seeker as a boy. She tried to picture him in his youth, on the bus, but couldn’t fully conjure the image. The best she could do was a frowning boy, wearing a short robe and holding a plastic dinosaur. The little James in her mind looked as if someone had just questioned his theory on the evolution of pterodactyl flight. He didn’t seem like a Fart Boy. A Weird Turd, sure. But that was no surprise.

  Nearing her ex-husband’s new house, Penelope wondered about her attraction to the Weird Turds in life, the redneck ones who tried to set the record for household items—apple/flashlight/thermos/deer antler/Christmas ornament—turned into pot smoking apparatus, and the academic ones in kimono robes who were aroused by biographies of Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe her friends were right. Her track record with men didn’t hold up under close scrutiny.

  Speaking of men, a little church bell had just chimed on her phone, the signal that someone was contacting her on her new dating app. It was called Divote, For Modern Christians on the Go, and was a fortieth birthday gift from her mother. It wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself, but she was too broke to afford a different one and beggars couldn’t be choosers. She wasn’t even sure she was ready to date again. Yet here she was, her Christian dating app tinkling away like the tiniest and most wholesome of churches.

  The whole concept made her feel unworthy, as if by signing up she was guilty of false advertising. And the chiming bells didn’t make her feel less Jezebellish. Regardless, she wasn’t going to even look at who had contacted her until Theo was out of the car. It would be perverse to engage in cyber-whatever while chauffeuring her nine-year-old. That was simply a bridge too far.

  She glanced in the rearview, feeling proud of her self-restraint. Theo was back to his game, thumbs careening on the keyboard, face twitching with the thrill of competition. A quick glance wouldn’t hurt anyone. On the other hand, it wasn’t that perverse. Who wouldn’t look? Moms were curious too. And Theo wouldn’t know anyway.

  Feeling like an international spy, she snuck her phone from her purse, set it surreptitiously on the seat away from curious eyes, and took a peek. The man who’d rung church bells in her honor was handsome and smiling in an ironic way. His name was BrettCorinthians2:2.

  The picture was so small that it was hard to tell much about this fellow, but unless her eyes were mistaken, there was definitely something afoot. Glancing once in the mirror to see if the coast was clear, she raised the phone close to her face. What she discovered was that she’d seen what she thought she’d seen: BrettCorinthians2:2, modern Christian on the go, was shirtless.

  Penelope found this odd and also interesting. He was pretty fit. Very fit actually, and under thirty. Wow. Her first ever contact on a dating app was a young, hot guy who lived within forty miles of her. She made a note to look up Corinthians 2:2 when she got home. She’d been a regular churchgoer all her life but had never really thought of bare-chested men from The Good Book. She assumed they all wore robes or cloaks or some kind of flowing garment, other than Goliath or maybe Samson, who she could see strutting around with their shirts off. Who did this BrettCorithians2:2 think he was?

  On the other hand, his Likes, signified on Divote by tiny wedding cakes, included many of the same TV shows she watched. That was big. Finger hovering over the screen, Penelope pondered. A swipe left would mean no thanks. A swipe right and PenelopeGenesis2:1’s Easter bonnet was in the ring. She knew what her friends would say, that she needed to be less concerned with dating and more concerned with discovering exactly who she was and what she wanted out of life. Her friends seemed pretty hung up on the two-divorce thing, much more than Penelope herself was. It wasn’t like she was racing toward a hat trick of “I-Dos” in the next week or anything.

  But tell that to her happily married busybody friends.

  Then again, her own mother had gotten the dating app for her. To swipe left or right? Did she want to date or not? Would Theo care? Had it been long enough since the divorce?

  From the backseat came a shout—a triumphant war cry—that shocked Penelope so that she instinctively hit the brakes, the result being that her phone, perhaps still showing a shirtless young Samaritan unfamiliar to her son, flew out of her hand and over the seat.

  “Good God, Theo. You scared me to death.”

  “I just kicked Gorzomo’s butt.”

  “Congratulations. Still, I wish you wouldn’t shout like that when I’m trying to concentrate on the road. You almost made me wreck.”

  Theo didn’t reply, but did reach across the seat for the phone. He scooped it up and looked intently as Penelope watched in the mirror. From the scowling face Theo made, it was clear that BrettCorinthians2:2 was still smiling out at the world, and that his ironic look displeased her son.

  “Who’s this guy?”

  “I don’t know, Theo,” Penelope said, stretching her arm backwards over the seat. “But please hand me my phone.”

  Theo did as asked, but with a knitted brow. “What’s Divote?”

  In her hurry to be rid of the shirtless hottie, Penelope tossed the phone across the front seat, where it slid like a tiny sled to a stop against the passenger door before clunking down on the floor.

  “What’s Divote?” Theo said again.

  “It’s an app,” Penelope answered, feeling caught in the act.

  “Why do they misspell devote on purpose?”

  “I don’t know, Theo. Why did they name the guy on your game ‘Gorzomo’?”

  This was a mistake. Theo now went into a lengthy synopsis of several games and creatures, the upshot of which was that Gorzomo was both an evolution and an amalgamation of other creatures. Apparently this was rare and impressive, for when he finally stopped for breath, he gazed toward Penelope with a look of sophisticated bliss, as an English professor might after a well-delivered lecture on Derrida.

  “Wow, I didn’t know that,” said Penelope, nodding as if she’d understood. She felt sure this must be connected to Pokémon but knew better than to ask. Theo would talk to a stop sign, and at length, about Pokémon.

  The good news was that during his seminar on Gorzomo he seemed to have forgotten about BrettCorinthians2:2, who, now that she thought about it, had been staring pretty knowingly at her. That horny little Christian dog.

  “So who was that guy?

  Penelope came to. Her head still felt a little woozy from Theo’s taxonomic lecture, which had covered everything from kingdom to phylum, genus to species. He really liked Pokémon.

  “What guy?”

  It was an idiotic response, but at this point she was stalling. Theo locked skeptical eyes with her in the mirror.

  “Divote is sort of like Facebook,” Penelope said. “All kinds of people come across your page. He’s probably some friend of a friend.”

  Theo gave a nod to this, less satisfied with the answer than antsy to get back to Gorzomo and the struggle for universal dominion.

  Penelope felt as if she’d simultaneously dodged a bullet and taken one. The divorce had been final for four months as of this week. The notion of dating hadn’t come up before with Theo, but sooner or later she’d have to get back in the game. Had James talked to Theo about the prospect of his parents dating?

  On one hand, she hoped so. She thought boys were less bothered by their fathers dating than their mothers, and if James brought up the subject, maybe it would temper things a bit. O
n the other hand, James’s discussions with Theo were infamous for going into a lot more detail than a child would need: Now your mother and I may one day begin to see other people. Adults have urges. You’ll understand that some day. Lovemaking—sexual intercourse—is a natural thing. And now that Mommy and Daddy are no longer together . . . The man’s penis becomes erect . . . Erect means standing straight and stiff. Yes, like a soldier about to salute. And then the man . . .

  Oh God, it would be even worse than that, a weird mix of physiology and Darwinism and James’s brand of gentle romance. She felt sure some combination of these words and phrases would be used: Beautiful shared ecstasy, vulva, spermatozoa, The Origin of Species, stimulation, zygote, coital union, climax, and Galapagos Islands.

  She’d once pointed out that coital union was redundant, and this had spoiled his post-coital mood. But that was beside the point. All he’d really needed to say to their son was what Penelope now said:

  “Theo, you know that one of these days I may have a date, right?”

  Theo didn’t look up, but said, “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, let me know if that bothers you.”

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Dad’s already had a bunch of dates.”

  3

  Penelope pondered the dad-dating information as she entered Meadow Creek, James’s new subdivision. When they’d split, their old house, the cute little Cape Cod in the quaint neighborhood, had been sold and the money divided. There wasn’t much to divide, unfortunately, as they’d bought high and sold low. Penelope considered the real estate market as she drove through her ex-husband’s new neighborhood, as well as the financial claims he’d made during arbitration, and discerned a certain tension at work. All the houses here in Meadow Creek had that fresh, hopeful look of the young newlyweds who’d just moved into them. Penelope thought it was a surprisingly tony place to live for someone who’d cried so poor during the divorce.

  Then again, she was currently living with her mother and stepfather, so any tent in a field was starting to look good.