The Fucker Mothers hated me. When I didn’t have anything to add to their conversation last year, and didn’t join them for drinks, I think they felt slighted. By snubbing them I had pinned a bulls-eye on my chest. Now I was the mother for them to judge and belittle every morning. I tended to give them a ton of ammunition. If showing up at school looking like a train wreck four times a week hadn’t earned me a permanent spot on the neighborhood blacklist, I was pretty sure the fruit roll-up I’d sent for Lucie’s snack time yesterday had pushed me off the ledge. We were going to be eaten alive today. But really, was a fruit roll-up all that different from their pretentious fruit leather? I thought not.
7:49 A.M
Fall was gorgeous and colorful in the Midwest. I admired the colors of the leaves under our feet. It was the perfect kind of weather for Halloween — not warm enough that I was sweating in my blazer, but not cold enough that Lucie needed to wear a jacket over her costume.
As we walked to school, her in her store-bought Elsa costume, and me in a pencil skirt with black heels (just in case), I could imagine the kind of snark I was going to hear from The Fucker Mothers. They would say something about how nice I cleaned up when I knew there was going to be an eligible bachelor around. They would mumble about how “cute” it was that I thought I had a chance with him. They would also make sure I knew what a loser I was for putting my child in a costume bought at a store.
I guess I was just a sucky mom. A custom-made costume wasn’t in our budget. I knew some mothers could go to the fabric store and whip up a costume in a jiffy, but I wouldn’t even be able to pick a sewing machine out of a lineup. #momfail #isuck.
At least I had a little something else on my mind today other than The Fucker Mothers.
Ben Ogea.
TGIF.
Every Friday since the first week of school, at some point around 7:56 am, Lucie and I arrived at the corner of Elm and Oak Streets at approximately the same time as Ben and his daughter, Olive. Olive was in Lucie’s first-grade class.
I’d done a little bit of sleuthing and discovered that Ben and his wife divorced when Olive was three. As part of their custody agreement, he got every Thursday through Saturday with Olive. The girls were in different kindergarten time slots last year, so we didn’t run into them. I didn’t see Ben much last year at all, except at a few special events and ceremonies, like the kindergarten graduation (which, by the way, I thought was incredibly gratuitous. But that was a story for another day).
On the few occasions I’d seen Ben last year, I’d gone out of my way to avoid him. It was pretty easy to avoid someone in a crowd. It was generally pretty easy to avoid people altogether, and I kind of preferred it.
It was less easy to avoid Ben and Olive on the first Friday in September when we approached the corner from opposite directions; they were headed east, we were headed west, and all of us needed to head north. We were walking to the same place at the same time on the same street. There was no way around it.
I’d maintained my composure, and acted like my stomach wasn’t somewhere around my knees. Just some guy walking his kid to school. No big thing. Nothing to see here. Move along. I gave him what I hoped was a confident smile. He gave me a friendly nod.
To him, I was just some chick walking her kid to school. No big thing.
We now had a Friday morning routine. Whoever got to the intersection first waited for the others. We gave each other a quick nod or smile, sometimes even a “Good morning,” and as the girls chitchatted about princesses and nail polish, the four of us walked the last block to school together.
We didn’t talk much, the two of us. We listened to the girls instead, occasionally exchanging knowing looks when they got excited about a TV show or a friend from class. But I preferred a comfortable silence over gauche small talk anyhow.
The few things I knew about Ben Ogea could be listed on one hand. I knew his ex-wife was gorgeous, smart, and successful — even The FMs were intimidated by her. I knew he lived somewhere close enough to the school to walk. I knew he worked for a TV station, but not in front of the camera. I also knew The Fucker Mothers panted and salivated when he walked by, like a bunch of desperate housewives.
What nobody else knew was that we had once shared a night together in a dark room.
October 22, 1999
Hope Jameson had lived around the block from me all our lives. We’d been best friends since kindergarten; a fact that baffled most people, nobody more than ourselves. She was a social butterfly who loved shopping, makeup, and boys. I was the quiet and bashful type who preferred fictional characters to real people. Real people, especially boys, terrified me.
When we were in the ninth grade, Hope’s parents retired from their desk jobs, and bought themselves a dive bar a few towns over. They never came home from work before three A.M. on the weekends. My girlfriends and I (I mean, Hope’s other friends — I didn’t have any) would hang out in her basement, steal from her parents’ liquor cabinet, and invite some boys over to flirt with. By the time her parents would get home from work, the boys would be gone, the mess cleaned up, and us girls passed out on the floor of Hope’s enormous basement bedroom.
In October of our sophomore year, Hope decided to play a game. Had I known about this game beforehand, I would have stayed far away from Hope’s that night. But she would have known that, which explains why I was not given a warning.
There were twelve of us in the basement that night, six guys and six girls. A few were sprawled on the couch, some were on the bed, the rest, myself included, were lounging on the floor on giant pillows and beanbags. We were drinking cheap vodka mixed with cherry Kool-Aid, and watching a Halloween marathon on TV.
Suddenly, Hope stood up from the couch. She used the remote to turn off the TV, held her red plastic cup up in the air like she was about to toast, and yelled, “LIGHTS OUT! Grab the person closest to you and make out!”
She clapped her hands twice and the lights went out. The small basement windows were covered in black sheets, so we were in complete darkness. Just like that. No warning. I hadn’t even had a chance to look around and see which guys were near me on the floor.
I heard a bunch of scuffling as people began to pair up, but I stayed frozen in place. I really, really wished Hope had warned me of this plan. This was totally not my thing.
I had very limited experiences with guys, and each one seemed to get more clumsy, awkward, and embarrassing than the last — they were nothing at all like the steamy romantic scenes I’d read in books or seen in movies.
I thought having a guy’s tongue in my mouth was disgusting. Slimy and wet, and probably filled with a billion contagious bacteria, and just, ick. And the one time a guy had unzipped my pants and slid his hand in my underwear, I’d been even more sickened. Long fingernails, dirty hands filled with a day’s worth of germs. Gross. I thought this was supposed to be fun. I shouldn’t be thinking of germs. I should be gasping and panting and tearing off his clothes in an animalistic rage. But I wasn’t.