We were passing the Kroger near our house, the dry cleaner’s and movie rental place. This, also, always happened in South Bend-I was struck by how homely it was, how accustomed I’d become to Ault’s bricks and flagstones and Gothic tower, its marble mantels and blond-haired girls. Outside of Ault, people were fat, or wore brown ties, or seemed to be in bad moods.
We pulled into the driveway, and I saw from the car that my mother had attached a sign to the storm door, the sign partly blocking the wreath that hung on the real door: Welcome home for Xmas, Lee! In the corners of the sign, she’d drawn sprigs of holly. “That’s so cute,” I said.
“You know I’m not much of an artist. I asked Joe to make one for you, but he went over to Danny’s so that’s what yours truly came up with.”
“You’re the next Leonardo da Vinci.”
“More like the next Leonardo da Nobody.”
And I felt it then, in the ordinariness of our words-a kind of rising pressure that would, surely, result in an explosion if we did not open the car doors. She knew I’d had sex. She also knew: It had been with someone who didn’t love me. My mother wasn’t mad, but she thought that I deserved better. Oh, sure, Ault was a fancy place and I’d always been impressed by it, but didn’t I understand that I was special, too? I’m not that special, Mom, I said, and she said, Yes, you are, Lee. You might not see it, but I do. We weren’t actually speaking, we weren’t even looking at each other as we climbed from the car and I retrieved my suitcase from the back seat, and then we were speaking, but it was to debate whether I needed help carrying the suitcase into the house, and the debate lasted several seconds longer than the time it would have taken to walk from the car to the front door. “I don’t want you hurting yourself,” she said, and I replied, “I’m strong.”
Once the moment was over, I might have decided that I’d been making up our exchange except that that night, after I’d already said good night to her-my brothers and I kissed our parents on the cheek every night before bed-she returned to my room. She was wearing her red terrycloth robe over her nightshirt (for as long as I could remember, she’d worn a gray Notre Dame nightshirt that came down to her shins; unlike my father, she had no particular fondness for sports, so either he’d given it to her or she’d found it on sale at the mall) and she was carrying a single roll of toilet paper, I think to take to the downstairs bathroom. She stood in the door to my room and said, “Did you bring home your nice shoes?”
“Yeah, of course.”
She continued to stand there. “You would know how to use a rubber, wouldn’t you, Lee?”
“What are you talking about?”
“A condom-I guess that’s what everyone calls it now.”
“My God, Mom.”
“They’ve taught you is all I’m asking.”
“Yes,” I said. By they, she must have meant Ault, did Ault teach sex ed? Which they did, in a series of four nighttime meetings that occurred in the winter of your sophomore year. The meetings were called Human Health, or H.H., which most people pronounced in two heavy breaths. I had gone out of my way never to pronounce it at all, so as not to embarrass myself either by panting in front of other people or by looking like a spoilsport for not panting in front of other people. Neither of my parents, meanwhile, had ever provided any real sex education except that once, when I was ten and they’d had friends over for dinner-perhaps the friends had remarked on how boys would soon be after me-my father had roared, “She’s staying a virgin until she’s thirty! No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And, Lee, don’t let anyone tell you oral sex isn’t sex.”
“Terry!” my mother had said, but I think she’d felt constricted on behalf of the guests more than on my behalf. Neither of my parents had seemed to imagine that I knew what either virgins or oral sex were.
Standing in the doorway of my room, clutching the toilet paper, my mother said, “You know I’m not accusing you of anything.”
I just wanted her to leave. Her talking about it in her ratty robe-it made sex seem, frankly, disgusting. And not even intriguingly disgusting, just disgusting in a daily way, the way of the household. It was like the smell of someone else’s shit lingering in the bathroom while you brushed your teeth.
“I trust you, Lee,” my mother said.
“Mom, I get the point.”
“But I’m not stupid. I know things are different than when I was your age.”
If I spoke, I would say something like, Good for you.
“Just be careful,” she said, then paused, then added, “if you decide to share yourself.” (My mother was so awkward! How had it taken me until this moment to realize just how awkward she was?) “That’s all I’m trying to say, honey.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Let me tell you good night again,” my mother said, and she stepped into the room to kiss me.
When she was gone, I could breathe, I could think a thought without trying to insulate her from it, and I also knew that it had been unfair of me to have acted like what she was saying was strange and off-target. And that she was a mother who would go along with such a charade, instead of calling me on it-that made my own behavior worse. Or maybe she’d wanted to pretend, too. Maybe she didn’t want to know, she’d have been as horrified as I would have if suddenly I’d started describing Cross. Really, we did not share a vocabulary that would allow for such a conversation; it was far too late to tell her anything.
When I went down to the kitchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Joseph said, as I poured my cereal, “Remember to save room for Chez Hairball tonight,” and my mother said, “That was years ago.”
“Hey, Linda,” my father said.
She looked at him. “What?”
“Have yourself a hairy, hairy Christmas,” my father said.
At midnight mass, because it was midnight, because the church smelled like incense and the carols reminded me of being younger, because outside it was cold and dark, I wished that Cross were in the pew next to me so we could hold hands or I could lean against him. I wouldn’t have grabbed him in an obvious way anyone else might notice; I just wanted him to be there, so I could feel sure of him. I pictured Cross with his brother and sister and parents in Manhattan-his family was probably the kind that had a tree with only white lights and glass ornaments-and how all of them probably drank scotch together and gave one another not tube socks and plastic key chains but leather wallets and silk ties.
Then Christmas passed, New Year’s passed. I had no friends left in South Bend and stayed at home with Tim eating pizza and watching movies he’d selected. Joseph was going out with his friends, and my parents went every year to a party across the street. Before they left, my mother exclaimed festively, “Get pepperoni on it!” which was one of her comments that sort of seemed funny and sort of made me want to cry-my mother’s sense of what was extravagant and celebratory, her attention to whether I was celebrating, her kindness to me. Then, finally, it was the night before I was supposed to go back to Ault; to me, that had been the real countdown.
It was a Saturday and a girl in Joseph’s class was having a fifteenth-birthday party at a roller-skating rink. At ten o’clock I went with my father to get Joseph, because my father had asked if I wanted to and though normally I’d have said no, I was leaving in less than twenty-four hours. And besides, hadn’t I planned to be more generous this vacation?
The rink was twenty minutes from our house. My father pulled up to the entrance of the wide, low building. The parking lot was enormous and half-empty, and a few boys loitered in front of the glass doors, wearing hats but not coats.
“You see him?” my father asked. Before I could answer, he said, “Dammit,” and stuck the car into park without either moving it from in front of the entrance or turning off the engine. “I told him to be waiting.”
“I’ll get him,” I said. If our father went to retrieve Joseph, the mortifying part would be our father’s tone more than what he said, his grumpiness, and how you’d sense that other kids felt sorry for you because you had a father who sounded mean; how could they understand that what he really was, was a father who didn’t care how he sounded? Which was a form of meanness, but far from the most extreme kind.