Live a Little

by Kim Green

  “I don’t think it’s going to be her swim coach.” I choke a bit on my mai tai. The automatic pool sweep whines into action, burying itself blindly in a miniature Everglades of green crap. “I’m worried she’s going to think we’re double-teaming her,” I yell over the din.

  Sue nods.

  “I don’t want Taylor to have sex at all.” There, I said it. I am not evolved. I am not a cool mom. I am not a liberal realist with a packet of glittering condoms I keep fanned out on the bathroom shelf. I’m just my mother—plus ten inches and a fat wad of insecurity.

  “No sex. No. Sex.” That’s good. Tough. Concise. If I practice saying it out loud now, maybe it will come out right tonight, after Phil and I have had our requisite pre-talk fight and I’ve downed a couple of Prozacatinis.

  “Okay,” Sue says too lethargically for my taste.

  “What, you think I should let her have sex?” Visions of GED tests and manicurist academies in lieu of college flood my mind.

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop her.”

  “Sue!”

  My friend uncovers her eyes. “Remember the thing?”

  I nod.

  “I wish my parents had been there for me instead of judging me and fighting over custody of the Peekapoos. I wish they’d really listened to me. I swear, they had absolutely no sense of reality. They’d made it perfectly clear back in high school that they didn’t want to hear anything about me and sex, and when I finally started getting some, my birth-control method of choice was basically OYLAP.”

  “OYLAP?”

  “Open your legs and pray.”

  The thing was Sue’s college abortion, a mildly traumatic yet lingering event to which I accompanied her and held her hand. The drive home stands out in my memory: me grasping the steering wheel between knobby knees as we shot down the 101 so I could shift with my left hand, my right futilely patting Sue’s shoulder while tears saturated her fingerless Madonna mittens. Sue’s bitterness over her parents’ lack of support has not decreased over the passage of years, merely fermented, like bad wine that has given itself over completely to its mouth-puckering tannins.

  “All I’m saying is, just be there for her. Show up and really try to listen to her. Let the conversation take its course. Let her talk. I know it’s hard, Quel, but try not to go in with a preconceived idea of what you want to happen. It won’t help you. It won’t help Phil. And it definitely won’t help Taylor.” Sue munches on the handful of cheese puffs—baked! all-natural!—that she’s been fondling for the better part of an hour.

  Sue’s right. My friend is the sort of sensitive earth mother who knows what’s best for everyone except herself.

  “Hey,” I say, pressing a damp finger into the crescent of orange cheese dust on the table, licking it. “Why don’t I buy one of those ear-wire thingies and you can tell me what to say? Like in the movies.”

  “Taylor, your father and I want to know if you are sexually active.” I actually wince when I say this. It does not come out as planned. Instead of a warm, supportive, sensible mom offering wisdom and guidance, I am a Procter & Gamble research scientist whose closest relationship is with a praying mantis.

  Taylor’s eyes dart over to Phil for respite, in spite of the fact that I’m the one who breast-fed her five months longer than the doctor said I had to. To Phil’s credit, he manages to maintain eye contact, though he does swallow visibly.

  “I can’t believe this,” Taylor says. Then, to Phil: “Do I have to answer that?”

  We are now officially a Law & Order episode.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” Phil says almost automatically. He glances at me. “I mean, yes. Yeah, you sure do, kid.”

  Taylor slouches into the sofa. “Well, I’m not. I’m too much of a dork for anyone to want to have sex with. I’m probably going to be a virgin for the rest of my natural life. Thanks to you guys.”

  Great. That’s resolved. Now, who wants to go to Baskin-Robbins?

  “Are you dating anyone?” I say instead.

  “Are you?” Taylor rests her feet on the glass coffee table. She knows I hate that. I may not have standards, per se, but I do have an aversion to sweaty footprints under my Doritos.

  Before I can present a defense, Baby Daddy Phil snaps into action. “Goddammit, Taylor, don’t talk to your mother like that. She’s only trying to help. Nobody’s pressuring you. It’s our job to know these things. Contrary to what you may think, at sixteen, you don’t know everything there is to know about sex. Or life. If you are having sex, we need to make sure you’re taking the necessary, uh, precautions. You want to get pregnant, or get a social disease? You think that’d be fun?”

  Taylor’s eyes widen at the rawness of Phil’s stump speech.

  My daughter may or may not have gotten the condom part right, but she is not stupid. Taylor, too, saw the unflattering Britney photos, watched the flat-bellied pop goddess go lumpish and swollen while the fork-tongued Federpup sharpened its talons inside her.

  I grant a silent salute to Phil, who has clearly learned a thing or two during his years in the high school trenches. I study my husband, looking, I suppose, for deep-seated reasons to remain married to him that go beyond second mortgages. His visage is stern yet paternal. His voice is a gravelly font of insight. At this moment, were I a Hollywood casting agent, I would definitely cast him as the Wise Yet Fun Dad Who Just Happened to Do His Boss’s Emaciated Wife.

  Taylor’s tears begin to flow. “I don’t know what dating is. Sometimes I think we’re, like, together, but then he’ll, like, go out with someone else or kind of ignore me at the mall or something.”

  “Oh, honey. It’ll be okay.” I pull my daughter to my side. Her skin is downy, almost marsupial. I cannot envision such softness yielding itself to invasion without pain. Bile curdles at the back of my throat.

  Taylor hiccups under my arm. “It’s just . . . this stuff with Biter . . . and you being sick. I mean, even though you’re better . . . you could get sick again. And you and Daddy splitting up . . . I’m so scared, Mom.”

  “Mom and I are here to take care of you, sweetheart. We love you. Nothing will ever change that.” Phil takes Taylor’s hand in his own, confident that he’s out of the parental outback and back in the paternal largesse zone. We sit in hiccupy silence for several minutes, focusing on various inanimate objects around the room while our daughter welds us together with tears, the human-emotive version of chemical epoxy. After a while, Tay’s strangled sobbing ceases. Nestled on the old slipcovered khaki sofa, I am fairly sure we present like a normal family, soldered together by affection instead of fears of teen pregnancy, adultery, cancer, and lies.

  I clear my throat. “Tay, do you want me to take you to the doctor to get some birth control?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Phil and I look at each other. With the sort of gunshot telepathy that is possible only after nineteen years of marriage, soccer tryout failures, and family diarrhea, we glean that it is Phil who must deliver the next line.

  “Tay, you know we’ll support you in whatever you decide is best for you, but we need your promise that you’ll use protection when and if you become sexually active”—Phil’s and Taylor’s matching kiwi-green eyes widen simultaneously at the Maury Povich–ness of these words—“and we both feel strongly that the sooner you choose a course of action, the better. Don’t let making no decision be your decision.” Phil pauses to let the threat fester, a neat trick he has always performed better than yours truly.

  Such is Phil’s unique gift that he manages to squander all gains with his next comment.

  “I personally know of several girls at school who’ve begun their sexual, uh, explorations and successfully gone to their parents for the proper, um, accoutrements.”

  This, at least: He does not attempt to say “accoutrements” in French.

  Taylor stares brokenly into her vitamin-water bottle, probably wondering how, in the game of genetic chance, she got assigned two notorious overc
ommunicators as parents.

  “Daddy,” she says, “will you stay here tonight?”

  “Of course.” Phil doesn’t look at me. We both know that if Taylor had asked for a time-share in the Bahamas, he’d have said yes.

  Like a lot of watershed conversations in my life, this one has not gone exactly as planned.

  “Unzip me?”

  “Hair.”

  I lift the three inches of wavy regrowth off the nape of my neck while Phil zips me out of my turtleneck. Amazing to me—though why, really, should it be?—it’s like Phil never left. Here, in the familiar confines of our bedroom, we glide through the motions of our regular ablutions like ballerinas circling the lid of a music box. If Phil is relieved to discover how little I’ve done to purge the ancestral digs of his presence, he hides it well. His remote still rests, sleek and fat, on the left-hand nightstand, next to a dusty stack of Consumer Reports I am unlikely to consume until long after our divorce decree yellows around the edges. His electric toothbrush stands next to mine on the sink vanity, as if guarding the fort in his absence. There’s even a crumpled-up pair of boxers in the otherwise empty dresser drawer, which Estrella must have found in the laundry and slipped optimistically back in their rightful place.

  I strip off my black slacks and knee-highs, which have pinched a groove around my calves. Automatically, I reach for the sweatsuit of the day, a pilled gray affair with saggy glutes that is designed to dissuade trespassers. Nighties, a vague, silken filament of a memory, went AWOL around the time Phil and I started procreating. I am not sure what the protocol is for such encounters as this, but I am fairly sure it does not mandate consigning your ex-sandbag to the army cot, which, in addition to smelling like gangrenous leg, sports a stain of unknown, suspicious origin.

  The conjugal bed it will have to be.

  “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” I say as an opener.

  Phil peers at me over the top of the sports section he plucked at random from the gigantic pile of newspapers he’s been collecting since 1981. As with his allegiance to all things turd-colored, something in me rebels at the idea that a person could just start reading about a football game that took place nine years ago, and still be regarded as normal.

  “I wish I knew this little fuck. I’d rip his nuts off and feed ’em to Stella,” he says.

  I glance at Phil appreciatively. This is the side of my erstwhile husband’s coarseness that I like. The side that is primitive, tribal, brutish, manly. The side that used to make me feel like we were together for a reason. A primal reason that did not involve IRA plans and retirement villas in Florida but, rather, some savage imperative to mate.

  Phil stares back at me. As usual, his eyes drop to my legs, which, I believe, are still long and lean enough to command a man’s attention, in spite of the fact that they originate in a quasi-girdle. In another telepathic moment, I glean what is simmering on low heat behind my husband’s saturnine gaze.

  Lust.

  Okay, not lust, maybe, but something animal and avid. Something that signals a desire that goes beyond Phil’s standard cravings for TV and beer.

  Without thinking, I drop the sweatpants I am about to pull on over my stomach-compressing white undies. I have no bra on, just a camisole with a shelf bra that proffers my supposedly rebuilt rack like a row of recycled carburetors. Since I hadn’t anticipated disrobing, my fake scars—discovered at a gag gift shop in the Haight amid sacks of itching powder and piles of fake poop—are tucked into my lingerie drawer, along with the twenty-three-year-old photo of me and Ren at a Stray Cats concert and the frilly thong I purchased for Defilement

  by Duke Dunne Day 2005.

  Phil lunges.

  We bang together like two atoms in a fission chamber. Phil’s hand snakes its way into my granny pants, sliding between the folds of my crotch without hesitation. After a few instrumental plucks at the nub of his former friend, the hand migrates to my back, skirting my chest as if it’s ringed by an electric fence.

  Call me ungrateful, but this annoys me.

  In full battle-ax mode, I wrap my legs around Phil’s waist, grab a hank of his hair, and yank his head back. Phil yelps as I capture a nip of man-wattle in my teeth.

  “Fuck.” His voice is near growling. The green eyes have gone yellow and feral. With great abandon, my husband rips through the buttons on the fly of his Levi’s with one hand, probably wishing he’d gone zipper back in 1987, when he could still change his mind about things.

  Phil flings me onto the bed and lands on me with a chuff of breath. The underwear is around my knees. Phil’s shirt is off. He’s lost weight since the eviction, his abdomen firmish instead of packed in layers of excess meat. This pleases me. I may no longer want Phil for myself, but I certainly don’t want anybody stuffing him with refined carbs. At least not until his pension matures.

  I stroke him in all his familiar places. Phil’s face is darkening to that impending-cardiac-event shade of tomato unique to white descendants of northern climes. I suppose he’ll have me stop soon because of the whole heart-attack thing. Now, there’s a book I could write: The Joy of Spooning.

  “Was she good?”

  In the midst of this glorious marital clit-and-cock jubilee, some idiot blurts out this. . . monstrosity.

  Oh no, it’s me.

  “Who?”

  “Tate.”

  Phil groans and rotates away from me, quickly doing those minor adjustments men do when caught in a state of untimely arousal. His shorts tent out in front. Why is it that the same hard-on that makes young men appear virile makes its middle-aged bearers look ridiculous?

  “That’s real nice, Quel.”

  “I’m sorry.” Strangely, I am.

  Phil levels me with a glare, as if I suggested we ask a Cub Scout to join us.

  “I didn’t mean it. Honestly, Philly. It just came out. I don’t really want to know. I mean, of course she was. Otherwise why would you have bothered?”

  Phil adjusts himself down to pup-tent dimensions. “She wasn’t. It wasn’t, okay? I can barely remember, anyway. It was ten fucking years ago, for chrissake.”

  “Gimme a break! I saw you in North Beach!”

  “I told you. That wasn’t me.”

  Since I first confronted him, Phil has maintained his innocence on this point. For the first time in a long while, I stare directly into my husband’s eyes. His are puffy and mean and intelligent and weary. Not for the first time, gazing at them makes me think of a wolf forced out of his habitat, a formerly sleek animal made to survive on fast-food remnants and beer dregs abandoned in alleys bordering tract homes. It strikes me that he might be telling the truth. For some reason, this idea sends a rush of shame to my head and a bolus of blood to my crotch. I really do hope it is not too late for Phil to raise the jib, as it were.

  “Come back,” I say. Aiming for Bacall, I deliver a perfect Harvey Fierstein.

  Phil inches toward me on the bed. He looks a bit wary, but who can blame him? I did, after all, subscribe him to Titty Titty Bang Bang magazine and have it delivered to his school office without discretion wrapping.

  I put my arms around his neck. He smells. . . like Phil. Not objectionable. Not great. Well rounded. Like whole-grain toast sprinkled with yeast.

  “At least we have two lovely children.” I slide my hand into the pup tent, which is rapidly ballooning to a ten-man.

  “Yeah. I was going to nominate you for mother of the year,” Phil gasps.

  “Funny, me, too.”

  This cracks us both up. Phil gently removes my hand from his shorts and eases off my remaining clothes. I halt him at the camisole with a shy glance borrowed straight from Tatum O’Neal in Little Darlings; he acquiesces. As my sort-of husband begins the next stage of his ministrations, I wonder if he can sense the opening of my body to another and, if so, whether it is as clear to him as it is to me that we have Duke Dunne to thank for relighting the oil-lamp glow of libido inside me.

  “You know what I’ve missed?” Phil sa
ys into the dimness, inhaling. “Your skin.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Assume the Position on Memory Lane

  I run into Tate Trimble at yoga several days after Phil and I advised Taylor on the dangers of penile penetration and had—for the first time in a while—pretty hot sex (hoping the two aren’t related, obviously).

  Facing my husband’s lover would have been a lot harder before I became a BC superstar and started selling my work. I know it is appalling, but for me, success has put a neat spin on the typical wronged-woman scenario. It’s almost as if I am the victor and she the victim, being saddled, as it were, with the immensely past-its-sell-by-date spoils of battle, Phil.

  This is not to say I don’t experience the sickly trickle of nerves that begins in my stomach and branches out across my lower region like forked lightning. I do. I just don’t immediately vomit and collapse in a paroxysm of inferiority, that’s all.

  “Hello, Tate,” I say gamely. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Annunciata Milk whisper furiously to Rochelle Schitzfelder. The rest of the class has gone rumps up, assuming the position of downward-facing dogs, but several women in our circle are simply staring, tights straining at crossed thighs, watching the spectacle unfold, awaiting action. “How are you? How’s Ross?” I say.

  The woman who would be my nemesis if my life ran to such luxuries stares blankly at me, her pert nose wrinkling above unnaturally pillowy lips. I realize with a frisson of horror that she does not know who I am.

  “Fine! Fine,” Tate says, not even bothering to whisper (the bitch). The instructor never chastises anyone who has the balls—and butt—to go thong-’n’-tights in lieu of sweats. One of those squirming, sweaty-armpitted hippie-whippet types who populate the ranks of yoga teachers like worms on organic compost, Ms. LaRaza McGuire—no joke—is thoroughly cowed by the vulpine and entitled among us.

  “Your husband bought one of my sculptures,” I say, increasingly frustrated with the situation. I mean, for God’s sake— I’m big, muscular, cuckolded and reputed to be psycho. Why isn’t she scared of me? “I’m an artist,” I add with as much contempt as I can muster.