by Jeff Zentner
“Sometimes. Mostly newer stuff. Marisol isn’t a horror fan. She gets too scared.”
“Do you ever watch horror hosts anymore?”
“No.” He stares at the table.
So you were never going to see me anyway. Great. Excellent plan, Delia.
Our pizza comes. After the waitress leaves, Dad says, “The reason I couldn’t watch horror hosts anymore is because they reminded me.”
“So you ran from something you loved.”
Dad doesn’t say anything for a while. “How is she?”
“Mom?” I say through a mouthful of too-hot pizza. Per usual, I’ve burned myself.
“Yeah.”
I shrug. “She’s Mom. She’s a manager at Target. She earns extra cash doing palm and tarot readings at our house and selling jewelry she makes on Etsy. I have to stay on her to take her medication. When she takes it, she’s good. When she doesn’t, she’s bad. We’re thinking about getting tattoos together.”
Dad laughs. “Of what?”
“Don’t know yet. We also go thrifting and watch a lot of horror movies together.”
“You need a buddy to watch horror movies. Your mom was a good buddy for that.”
“Yeah.”
“You know that’s how we got together, right?”
“No. You didn’t tell me that when you were around, and you’re not Mom’s favorite topic of conversation now.”
“I guess not,” he murmurs. He takes a deep breath as he remembers. “Your mom and I met in sophomore year of high school. Became best friends overnight. Couple of weirdos who loved weird stuff. Your mom started making jewelry out of animal bones and discarded cicada shells in high school. Did you know that?”
I smile with one side of my mouth. “No. But I’m not surprised. That’s still pretty much her jewelry-making vibe.”
A look of nostalgia comes over Dad’s face. “It was the two of us against the world. We would go over to each other’s houses after school and watch MTV and smoke pot. Which you shouldn’t do.”
“(A) I don’t. But (B) you don’t really get to boss me anymore.”
He looks away in embarrassment. “Fair enough. Anyway. On Friday and Saturday nights, we’d drive to Videoville in my 1990 Ford Tempo and rent horror movies. The rule was neither of us could have even heard of it. Then we’d go sit on the couch at one of our houses and watch it. Well, that was the rule until we’d watched every horror movie Videoville had. The other rule was that we couldn’t make out during the movie. We had to pay attention. Afterward was fair game. Oh, and our favorite snack during the movies was melted cheese over Doritos. We were both sad and mad all the time when we weren’t together.” He speaks with the tone of someone delivering a eulogy. Maybe he is.
“So I’m sort of a genetic superhero.”
“You look like her.”
“I know.”
“People tell you that?”
“I have eyes.”
“Your mom would have loved the way you dress when she was in high school.”
“I’m wearing basically what I wear for the show. We went to the con in character, and I came right here. But how I dress normally isn’t super far off from this.”
“She’d have loved it. Me too. Am I telling you stuff you already know?”
“Like I said, Mom doesn’t ever talk about you and gets mad if I do, and when you were still around, I was a bit young to hear about you two getting high and dry-humping as wayward teens.”
“What about you? Boyfriend?”
“Nice segue.”
“Yeah.”
“I went out with a guy for a few months when I was a sophomore. He was a ferret guy.”
“Ferret guy?”
“He had like six ferrets and would hide them in his coat at school and feed them during class.”
“Ah. There was a ferret guy in my high school.”
“Of course there was. Anyway. After him, not really anyone. I’m tied up every Friday and Saturday night with the show, so I’m not big on dating.” I’m still not sure how much of my life I want to tell him about. It doesn’t feel like he’s earned it.
“What about your mom? She ever find anyone?” He says it with an odd sort of gingerliness, like it’s going to hurt him if he discovers she did.
It weirds me out, telling him about Mom, knowing how hard she’d freak. But…“When I was twelve, she dated a guy named Joey. He was nice. I guess maybe they were pretty serious. Seems like they were together until I was thirteen? Fourteen? I dunno. She’ll go on a date here and there, but nothing serious.”
“Where are you in school?”
“Do you really not know that?”
“I don’t know if you skipped a grade or something.”
“Nice save. Just graduated from high school.”
“Good job!”
“Well, barely, so don’t go nuts with praise. What’s with—” I motion at my chest, where the embroidered words are on his shirt, the way he did with my septum piercing.
“SynergInfo? They’re a data storage company. I’m a computer database administrator there.”
“That’s a new direction for you, from what I remember.”
“Yeah, I got my database administration certificate from University of Phoenix a few years back.”
“You turned into a real grown-up.”
He laughs hollowly.
I arrange my pizza crusts into a frown on my plate. “I remember you being a lot older. If you’d asked me as a kid how old I thought you were, I would’ve said forty-seven. Because you could drive a car. Which automatically made you forty-seven.”
“I was nineteen when we had you. Your mom got pregnant in the last few months of high school. We got married that fall.”
“So you’re not even forty yet.”
He shakes his head.
“Your summer’s almost over.”
He looks at me quizzically.
I toy with a scrap of pepperoni. “So, like, say humans live to be eighty. I always think about how you can divide human lives into the four seasons. From birth to twenty is spring, from twenty to forty is summer, from forty to sixty is fall, and from sixty to eighty is winter.”
He wipes a smudge of pizza sauce from his elbow. “So you’re almost done with spring.”
“Yep.”
“And I’m almost done with summer.”
“Got it.”
“You’re a deep thinker, DeeDee. You always were.”
“You’ve had a pretty wild summer, huh?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve had a pretty wild spring.”
We sit for a while, not talking, only eating. We alternate studying each other’s faces for too long and looking away bashfully.
“What if Mom hadn’t gotten pregnant with me?” I ask finally.
“What do you mean?”
“Would y’all have gotten married?”
Dad looks at me for a second, then looks down at the table. He toys with a bit of straw wrapper, twisting it around his finger until it snaps. “Um,” he says quietly. “I don’t…know.”
“Did you want to marry her?”
“I—I think so.”
“You think so?”
“There was definitely part of me that did.”
“So part of you didn’t.”
“I guess that’s what that means.”
“Did Mom want to marry you?”
“She did marry me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He sighs and fiddles with his fork. “I don’t know, DeeDee. I think so. I think she did.”
Momentous information has a way of turning time into a syrupy, delirious crawl. I always assumed my parents definitely wanted to get married. It never once occurred
to me that they only did it because of me. I’m the only reason my dad was around to leave me in the first place. It gives me that snake-eating-its-own-tail feeling of looking in the mirror too long or saying my name too many times.
I’m trying to make sense of my current tumult of emotions (a kind of storm I don’t love!). Anger. Disappointment. Sadness. Longing. Triumph. Wonderment. Hurt. It’s all there, like spokes on a game show wheel that keeps turning and turning, while I wait to see where it lands.
I wonder how much of me is him and how much of him is me.
I wonder who the man sitting in front of me would have been if I had never existed.
I wonder if I’m fixing something inside me at this moment or breaking something that can never be put right again.
Divine gesticulates with a fork. “So I say, ‘Hey, Cher, honey, maybe you could share some of that Bolivian marching powder, and while you’re at it, we better find your unmentionables because I think Sly Stallone’s pet dingo carried them off. And then Nicolas Cage comes in, and apparently he’s gotten ahold of a hot-air balloon and a pilot….”
If the measure of success of a TV industry dinner is picking at your sad, tiny, egregiously expensive salad while the person across the table regales you with an unceasing litany of stories about how famous he is and how many celebrities he knows, while you trade please let the sun turn the Earth into a scorched globe of ash this moment looks with your boyfriend, who is also glumly picking at his sorry salad, then this dinner has been a smash hit.
I slip off a shoe and run my toe down Lawson’s calf under the table. He grins quickly. Hey, if I’m going to be sitting at a goony restaurant, dressed like a vampire, listening to a goony dude tell goony stories, I’m pulling out my goony rom-com moves.
Yuri and Divine finish their dinners and lean back in their chairs, picking their teeth. Yuri gives a somewhat more jovial grunt.
The waiter comes by. “Madam, sirs, was everything to your liking?”
“Delectable,” Divine crows. “Please give my compliments to the chef.”
“Can I tempt any of you with some dessert? Perhaps our tiramisu or crème brûlée?”
“I couldn’t possibly,” Divine says. “Watching my figure. But do be a prince and package me another one of those four-pound Newfoundland lobsters to go. In case I get peckish in my hotel room later tonight. You know, there is nothing worse than being hungry in a hotel room.”
I can actually think of some worse things.
“Very good, sir,” the waiter says with a bow-like nod. “And then the check?”
“Please.”
The waiter leaves.
Divine turns his attention (I use the term attention very loosely) back to us. “Speaking of getting peckish in hotel rooms, I was in Joshua Tree in 1979 with Stevie Nicks. Now let me first say, frying eggs on a hotel room iron is not an ideal situation, but with Stevie Nicks, there is a sense of infinite possibility. Anyway—”
My consciousness exits my body and I become a soaring being of pure light and energy, throwing off the cruel shackles of this world’s gravity. I run through green meadows and flowered pastures. The sun is warm on my face. Lawson and I hold hands under the bracing spray of a waterfall. Jasmine and hyacinth waft on the air. Now I swim in a warm ocean under a moonlit sky. On the white sand shore, a harpist plays—
The waiter approaches with a box and what looks like an old-timey leather-bound, riveted ledger book from A Christmas Carol. He places the box by Divine and starts to set down the bill as well.
Divine motions at me with his head, mouths Thank you, and makes a namaste motion with his hands pressed together. The waiter sets the bill by me. It happens in slow motion. Falling like a sawed-through tree.
“Take your time, no rush,” the waiter says, clearing a couple of plates.
I laugh awkwardly. Divine has not shown a great sense of humor up until this point, but there’s a first time for everything.
Divine smiles and crosses his legs.
Okay, he’s going to play out the gag. All right. This is a very stressful joke, but fine, I’ll play along. A little hazing, Hollywood style. Good clean fun.
I open the bill and look at the total.
I feel like I’ve been impaled on a spear of burning ice.
$764.26.
I have to read it twice to make sure there isn’t a decimal in the wrong place. Don’t get me wrong, $76.42 would still be a hell of an expensive dinner for me, but it wouldn’t be about eighty percent of my total net worth, including all the blood plasma in my body. Time for the joke to be over. I’m not laughing anymore.
I look up again at Divine. He smiles serenely, beatifically, his face betraying no hint of the joke.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhh,” I say. It’s finally sinking in: this might be real. I want to pass out. I’m frozen. I don’t know what to do. For as big a turd as Divine is, he could still be our show’s only hope. I think about Delia confronting her dad right now. I can’t sell us out over $764. I can always get a job and make back the money, but I might not have another opportunity like this. I never want Delia to think I wouldn’t pay $764 (plus tip…oh dear lord, I forgot about the tip) to help keep our show.
“Is something the matter?” Divine asks.
“Nooooo, it’s just…wow.”
“Welcome to showbiz, my dear. Wining and dining the people who can make things happen for you is as important as anything. If you learn nothing else, let it be that. And I am well pleased with how I’ve been wined and dined.”
“Uhhhhh.”
“And trust me,” Divine says with a salacious eyebrow shimmy and speaking out of the corner of his mouth, “there are people whose wining and dining needs go far beyond mine, if you catch my drift.”
I have a sensation like a cockroach crawled up my spine.
Lawson, whom I can feel seething next to me, starts to go for his wallet. “Here—”
I pinch his thigh so forcefully, I feel guilty. This is my mess. I’ve got this. He takes the hint and backs down.
I swallow hard. “What if we go halfsies?”
Divine chortles and claps. “I like your moxie, young lady. I do. But no, I mustn’t. You have to know your value.”
“You pay,” Yuri says gruntily and more-to-the-pointily.
The waiter walks by. “Excuse me,” I squeak. “Is the tip included in the bill?”
He looks at me like I’ve just told him I’ve never been to a restaurant. “No, miss. A recommended gratuity of eighteen percent is not included.”
I get out my debit card and run the numbers on my phone. A tip of $137. Total: $901.26. When last I checked, I had a little over $1,200 saved up, which included my birthday money and graduation money from my grandma.
Think of it as an investment. Think of it as an investment. Think of it as an investment. Maybe he’ll make you so rich you’ll sneeze at thousand-dollar dinners.
“We should really do this again sometime,” Divine says.
“Oh, for sure,” I say, almost puking a little in my mouth.
We rise to leave, with Divine leading the way and Yuri bringing up the rear. Lawson hands the snooty host back his loaner blazer.
“Reba,” Yuri grunts as Lawson holds the door for him.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say. “I don’t know what it means when you do that.”
* * *
•••
We pile in the Escalade. Divine turns back to us from the middle row. “And now it’s brass tacks time! Rubber meeting the road time! Let’s go get a television program made! Yuri?”
Yuri grunts and puts the car in gear.
Could this really be happening? Did I just pay almost a thousand dollars to get our show made? Could this night have been worth it? Is this going to be an amazing story someday? I’m far too distracted by these visions
and reflections on my recent financial ruin to pay attention through the limousine-dark windows to where we’re going. We wind through streets and highways for about twenty minutes until we get to a nondescript, decidedly unglamorous part of town. We pull into a strip mall anchored by a Dollar Tree and a payday loan servicer. We park in front of a storefront that says Disme Entertainment in Comic Sans font. A vape shop and a dry cleaner flank it. This does not look great.
The tide of anxiety rolls in again. But a tiny ember of possibility still glows in my mind. Maybe this is how shows really get made. Maybe it’ll be a step forward for us.
Yuri gets out and opens Divine’s door, and the two stroll quickly toward the entrance. Lawson and I stumble out.
“If this is a porn studio…,” Lawson says under his breath.
I laugh, but not because the notion is at all implausible.
Divine rings a bell and mugs for the security camera. Someone buzzes us in. The air-conditioning is screaming, and it smells like moldy carpet. It’s as humid as outside, but (conservatively) thirty degrees cooler. Every surface feels slightly damp, like a layer of condensation and/or despair covers everything.
This place is so unpromising, it feels like a mass grave for promises.
“Back office,” a hoarse, high voice calls. We follow Divine to the back and walk into a cloud of cigar smoke that smells like someone burned a pile of dirty underpants to cover up the smell of a camp latrine. A man clenches a fat cigar between his teeth and types, hunt-and-peck style, on a wheezing slab of a laptop. A giant painted mural of some sort of rodent-like cartoon character covers the wall behind him. It’s an attempt at cute that landed squarely on terrifying. The man at the desk appears to have been made by some blindfolded god. Despite the damp chill, he’s somehow still sweaty, and his mustache looks like he glued a drain clog to his lip with spirit gum.
He does not look like a successful man. He does not look like one who brings success to others.
He starts to say something but instead coughs. And coughs. And coughs. He holds up a finger. More coughing.
Finally, Divine says, “Is your brother in the back? We have some business to talk with you, but first a little”—he makes a motion like he’s pulling a cord for a horn—“toot toot. To aid digestion.”