Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “Are you worried?” she asked him.

  “Naw, not really. I’ll just be pissed if they shut us down.”

  “Shut the company down?” Sara felt something go fluttering down inside of her, like a bird shot from the sky. The sip of chenin blanc she’d intended expanded into a sudden mouthful.

  “Not the company, babe. The social-network ops. Fred’s thinking the judge might grant them an injunction. I’m trying to sort the shit out, okay?”

  “Oh.” Drifting to the far end of the table where a cardboard pizza box lay open, two slices congealing inside, Sara asked, “Where’s Alexis?”

  “I dunno.” Dave lowered his face closer to the paperwork, either his weakening eyesight or what he was reading painting a scowl onto his face. “She grabbed half the pizza and ran off to her room.”

  “I told you to go easy on the pizza,” she said, shaking her head as she tallied the number of slices this meant. “You know she needs to watch her weight.”

  Alexis flat-out refused to discuss all the weight she’d gained—which was dismaying Sara, both Alexis’s reticence and the sight of her once lithe and athletic daughter going flabby and schlumpy—though Sara knew just how much it bothered her. (She was eighteen, and about to start college: of course it bothered her.) Two weeks ago Sara had taken Alexis to the doctor to get her immunizations certified, something Richard Varick College required of incoming freshmen. They’d gone to the same pediatric clinic where she’d been taking Alexis for years, though, as Sara learned that day, Alexis’s longtime pediatrician had decamped for a clinic in Princeton. A nurse led Alexis onto the scale, balanced the weights, and announced, “One hundred and twenty-nine pounds.” From behind, Sara noticed Alexis’s shoulders begin to shake, and she stepped forward at the same time as the nurse put a hand to Alexis’s arm and asked, “Are you okay?” Alexis was crying, or rather, they saw, struggling not to cry: squeezing her eyes shut to stifle the tears, her front teeth clamped hard upon her lower lip, her quivering shoulders racked by the effort. Together the women stroked Alexis’s hair and told her not to worry, the nurse peeling back the chart and saying, “It’s just a gain of . . .” but electing not to finish the sentence. Sara promised, “We’ll put you on a good diet. That ‘Half Way to Healthy’ one, the one everyone’s always talking about?” With a deep and approving nod the nurse said, “My sister’s lost twenty pounds on that,” before shepherding Alexis and Sara to the examination room. An unfamiliar male doctor—to Sara, he looked barely older than Alexis—dashed in and went about quickly scribbling down Alexis’s absence of health complaints, aside from the Irritable Bowel Syndrome which she said she was managing with medication; that she said she was presently and normally menstruating; that he’d palpated no abnormalities; and that he’d given her a shot of the chickenpox vaccine Varivax to comply with the college’s immunization requirements. Noting the stunned look on Alexis’s face as she rose from the exam table, Sara whispered to her, “Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing. Dr. Michaels never rushed us through like that.” Then Sara showed her the purchase confirmation from Amazon for the copy of The Half Way to Healthy she’d just ordered on her phone. “Okay?” Sara said cheerily, and Alexis nodded, that dazed, spooked expression still lingering on her face.

  “She asked for pizza, okay?” Dave said, and with a burst of irritation lifted his head from the legal papers. “What’m I supposed to say? No? Your mom says you’re too fat?”

  “Don’t you bite my head off,” Sara snapped back. “I’m not the one suing you for your ‘ass-quisitors’ or whatever you call those girls.”

  “Tim called them that. Once. At dinner after way too much wine. Goddamn.” Haphazardly gathering the documents, as though to heave them into the garbage, he mumbled, “This is always how you act when you come home from seeing Lizbo.”

  Another sip of wine ballooned into a mouthful; it tasted bitter, and hot on Sara’s throat. “When are you going to finally come off that? The whole lesbian joke wasn’t funny the first time and it’s even less funny the millionth time.”

  “I never thought it was funny,” Dave said quickly. “I thought it was true.”

  Just then Alexis swerved around the corner into the kitchen. She was wearing baggy gray sweatpants and was braless in an oversized navy V-neck t-shirt that, unless Sara was mistaken, belonged to Dave. Her hair hung down in lifeless brown strings, and her movements were sluggardly, dumpy, depressed. The impression was of someone who’d just been drained by a vampire. “Hey, honey,” Sara said.

  Alexis pulled open the refrigerator and stared into it vacantly, as if to air condition her frontside. “What are you guys fighting about?”

  “Whether your aunt is a lesbian,” said Dave.

  “Oh, totally,” she said.

  Dave leveled a vindictive smile at Sara. “See?”

  “No,” said Sara coolly, “Dave’s just upset because he’s being sued for pretending to be hot girls on the internet.”

  With a drowsy frown Alexis turned from the refrigerator. “You can get sued for that?”

  “Of course not,” sniffed Dave. “The entire internet is people pretending to be hot girls.”

  “You would know,” said Alexis, and shutting the refrigerator she moved to the open pizza box on the table and gave it the same empty stare she’d given the interior of the refrigerator. She picked up a slice and drew it toward her mouth.

  “Alexis, honey,” Sara intervened. “Haven’t you already had some pizza?”

  Alexis went rigid, the slice drooping limply from her hand. “I’m still hungry, okay? Am I not allowed to be hungry anymore?”

  “Calm down—Jesus,” Sara said. “What is it with you guys today?”

  “Maybe we’re on the rag,” Dave said, and a twitch quirked Alexis’s face as she shifted her gaze down and away.

  Softening her voice and curling her lips into a compassionate pout, Sara said, “Honey, I’m just thinking about that day at the doctor’s office, and—”

  “Can I please be in charge of the size of my own ass?” She took an oversized and resentful chomp of pizza. “Can I?”

  “It’s just that the weight is so much easier to gain than to lose . . .”

  Alexis threw up her hands, her cheeks bulked and round. “This is like, so—pleasant.” Her voice was gulpy and doughy. “You’re really making my dinner.”

  “Mine too,” Dave sneaked in.

  Flushing, Sara pressed her palms onto the tabletop to steady herself. This was what she’d tried but failed to describe to Liz: Alexis and Dave’s magnetic alignment, the way the dividing line always seemed to be drawn between them and her. It was more than unfair; it was unendurable. Overcompensating from the effort to hold back a scream, Sara spoke coldly and sharply: “Well please excuse me for not wanting my daughter to start college in two months looking like—” She fumbled for an analogy, and with a numb glance at Alexis found it instantly—“like she’s about to give birth.”

  Immediately the kitchen went silent and motionless, like paused video, or as if the sounds of an intruder had just registered and everyone was frozen in that pre-panic moment of stiffening comprehension. But Sara herself was that intruder, she realized, as Dave let out a low, grave-sounding whistle and with bunched-up fury Alexis hurled Sara a look unlike any she’d ever seen on her daughter’s face, or on anyone’s face for that matter. “Fuck,” Alexis spat, “you.”

  Lobbing the half-eaten slice back into the pizza box, Alexis flounced out of the kitchen. “Oh, shit,” Sara moaned, and tracking the echoes of the stomps she followed her daughter into the hallway and through the living room then up the stairs where she heard the slamming of Alexis’s bedroom door punctuated by the icy click of the lock. Gently, Sara rapped on the door. “Honey?” she said to it. “I’m sorry, honey.” No response. She knocked again, adjusting her voice. “Honey?” Crisp, sweet: the voice of a mother bearing oven-warm cookies. When that yielded nothing she adjusted it again. “Honey.” Deeper this time, more somber: as
if needing to inform her about the passing of a distant relation. Then Sara cracked—“Alexis!”—and grabbing the doorknob with her left hand yanked it and shook it, the door shuddering against its hinges and Sara flooding with a sadness and rage that felt alien and unwarranted to her, less like something churned from within her than like something injected into her, a poison someone had slipped into her overheating bloodstream. When the rattling proved ineffectual she surrendered herself against the door and from behind it heard Alexis sobbing, long hoarse wails she must’ve been smothering with a pillow. “Honey,” she said again, with honest pleading in her voice, aware that it was futile. She felt no longer like a mother, nor even an actress playing the role of one. She was just an intruder, and a failed one at that.

  Retreating to the kitchen, she went straight for her wine. Dave was still sitting in the exact position as when she’d left, staring off into the ether beyond the bay window where in the gold-green twilight two deer were grazing on the fescue. “What just happened?” she said to him.

  Maintaining his gaze out the window he answered, “You opened your mouth and a cruise missile shot out.” Then he turned to her, with a soft and unfamiliar cast of melancholy to his face, and said, “That’s what.”

  Sara shouted, “I’m trying to help her!” She brought a fingertip to her mouth to dab the wine that’d just leaked out. “I mean, Christ, she’s preloaded her freshman fifteen. Her freshman thirty. And that—that attitude. What in God’s name is up with her?”

  Dave said flatly, “Beats me.”

  “No.” She braced herself with another dose of wine, then refilled her glass. This was how bad actors drank in plays and movies; an acting teacher had once cued up a clip from Casablanca, that scene where Humphrey Bogart downs vehement shots of something-or-other after Ingrid Bergman re-enters his life, as an example of how even great and subtle actors can overdo it. “No one drinks like that in real life,” he’d said. But here she was, in her own real life, slugging wine like a cut-rate Bogart. “No,” she said again, wagging her head and swinging around the table to station herself directly across from Dave, jamming his view out the window. “No, that’s not true. It doesn’t ‘beat’ you. What is up with her?”

  He lifted an eyebrow, studying her. “I’m not catching your drift.”

  “I feel like I don’t know my own daughter, okay?” Her grip felt wobbly on the stem of the glass and she could feel herself swaying, though not from the wine. “And maybe I’m not sure—I’ve ever known her.”

  “That’s not—”

  “You’re the one who knows her,” she interrupted, “you’re the one she talks to.” She added bitterly, “You’re the one she loves.”

  “That’s not true.” His jaw was firm, his tone anchored and businesslike. Their positioning at the table and the official-looking paperwork between them sent a fleeting shadow through her mind: a foreshadowing, perhaps, or maybe just a bleb of repugnance at the way Dave appeared to her, like a negotiator tabulating risk and profit. “That’s not true at all. I’m just the one who pays attention to her.”

  Gasping, Sara swiveled around to the bay window to collect herself. Noting her sharp movement, the deer outside flicked their white tails and gawked at her dumbly, chewing their pilfered share of her lawn. Then spinning back, uncollected, she yelled, “I don’t pay attention to her? How dare you say that to me?”

  His own sudden movement—striking the tabletop with the heels of his hands as he threw himself back into his chair, red-faced and erect—startled her, and her left hand flipped upward in instinctual fright, like the tails of the deer. “You don’t pay attention to either of us!” he thundered.

  From the recoiling expression on his face she could tell that he’d startled himself as much as her. He glanced down at his hands and flexed them. In his wheezy shock she sensed a vulnerability, some underlayment of resentment he hadn’t meant to expose, and drawing a cold and livid conclusion she said, “Oh, right. I get it. We’re back to your blowjob deficit.”

  His shoulders went limp. “I didn’t say anything about blowjobs.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “Right, fucking guilty.” His own sarcasm came close to drawing a vinegary laugh from him. “Because my chances right now, they’re about as good as ever, aren’t they?”

  “So we’re here again. The same old fight? How should we play it this time, Dave?”

  “Actually, no. You’re the one who steered us here. I think the word I said was—attention.”

  “Is that your code word for it?”

  “Lexi,” he said calmly, pushing down the air in front of him. This was clearly a gesture rehearsed over the course of a thousand business meetings: Guys, let’s stick to the issues here. “If you remember, we were talking about Lexi.”

  She spluttered, “Who—”

  Spluttering over her he said, “Who excuse me for saying so could use a little more attention to things besides her—besides her grades, and her future earning capacity, and the size of her fucking ass.”

  “Oh no. That is my daughter and—”

  “Did you even know she had a boyfriend?”

  Sara’s rage stalled. In her mind she went rifling through a cache of half-remembered glimpses of Alexis’s Facebook page, looking for missed clues. “What boyfriend?” she finally said.

  “Name’s Miguel. Or Pedro. No, Miguel. He’s Pedro’s kid.”

  “Who’s Pedro?”

  “The Mexi?” Dave said, indicting her with a raised eyebrow. “Does our landscaping?”

  The landscaper’s son? Their—landscaper? (The landscapers always worked in teams of three or four, indistinguishable in their quick and wordless efficiency: unloading their machines from the trailer, launching a rapidfire assault on the lawn and plantings, disappearing in a puff of single-stroke engine smoke.) None of this made any sense to Sara, and her expression must’ve reflected that; bewilderment often brought a sneer to her face, incomprehension disguising itself as contempt.

  Dave nodded at her, his lips pursed in disappointment. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably why she never told you.”

  She ignored this, concentrating instead on the sudden gush of relief she was experiencing. The weight gain, the schlumpiness, the woe-is-me demeanor, the unfathomable yin to the yang of her graduation and preparations for college: It was all just puppy love, off-the-rack teen heartbreak. Finally it made sense. “So is that what all the crying is about up there?” she said, too lightly. “They broke up?”

  “What crying?”

  “She’s up in her room sobbing her guts out.”

  “No.” He knotted his face. “They broke up—I don’t know, four or five months ago.”

  An extreme case of puppy love, then. It happened: the cancer of desire, or in this case the flu. She’d deal with it. In the meantime she glared at Dave and scolded, “You could’ve made things a helluva lot better around here if you’d just told me.”

  “Told you?”

  “Told me. You know, talking? About other things besides your blue balls and your creepy work innovations?”

  Something snapped inside him as he rose toward her and with looming and vaguely sexual menace roared, “You could’ve fucking paid attention!”

  She leapt back from the table, fearing he might come swimming across it in order to—to what? For the first time in her marriage—maybe in her life—she felt physically threatened; not acutely enough to cower, but enough for his offense to revolt her, and for that revulsion to transform itself into a cold bionic alloy inside her. With that steel girding her voice she said, “Yeah, right. I don’t think we’re talking about Alexis anymore.”

  He was panting now, upright out of his chair, and with a wince he reached his right hand to his left shoulder, as if in the early throes of a heart attack. Sara felt a bubble of cruelty rise within her as it occurred to her that she might not attempt a rescue if he was—she might, but hard deliberation would preface any action or inaction. He didn’t look
threatening now, but pathetic instead, like one of those cable-news blowhards he was so fond of watching whose argument has just been decimated, whose slimy lobbyist’s motives have just been exposed. That rage she’d once found so compelling: It had been absurd, and in its later manifestations even more absurd, a bratty, petulant response to life refusing to pay him the exorbitant amount he demanded. In a crumpled gesture he waved a hand toward all the paperwork between them and said, “I’m getting sued.”