Dot draped her hand across my shoulder and I didn’t mind. “That line’ll be all over the valley by sundown,” she said. “Thirty years from now your name’ll come up in conversation and they’ll say, ‘Did you hear about her first night at the White Deck?’”
Lydia opened her menu. “Just tell them I own a rifle.”
I looked up at Dot and she smiled at me.
One thing I’ve always wondered is whether or not men found Lydia good-looking. It’s so hard to be objective on your own mother. Most people tend to look at their own mom as beautiful until you hit seven or so, then you ignore her for a while, then you decide she’s an old hag.
I had just turned thirteen then, which would put Lydia at twenty-eight, not all that over the hill, even for a mom. And, as we hung out together most of the time, we’d developed kind of a bitchy husband-and-wife deal. I don’t mean Oedipal or anything disgusting like that. When or if she kissed me good night, I always screamed “Ooooh yech,” and she screamed right back “Ooooh yech.” I just mean I took care of Lydia as much as she took care of me, and we hung around each other a lot, so I felt like we were orphans together, sort of.
She hadn’t told me to go to bed or pick something off the floor in eight years—if she told me then.
But back to pretty. Nine men out of ten took one look at Lydia and were afraid of her; the other one was willing to give up wife, job, and reputation to fuck her on the spot. But this effect wasn’t from looks. I’d call the deal demeanor. Lydia had demeanor. And a fairly decent set of knockers.
“So what happened in the seventh grade today?” Lydia held her cheeseburger in one hand, peering at it suspiciously.
“Do you really want to hear?”
She turned the cheeseburger around to inspect the other side. Lord knows what she was afraid of. “Of course I want to hear. It’s my job. If I don’t want to hear, Caspar will take you to Culver Military Academy. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Lydia gave me a sharp glance. “Neither would I. Now tell me what happened in school today.”
“I think I fell in love.”
Lydia was back inspecting the burger. Maybe she expected something to crawl out before the first bite. “That’s nice,” she said. “How can you tell you’re in love?”
“Because there’s this girl in class and I can’t stand her.”
“That’s always a good start.”
I was eating the Tuesday blue plate—pounded steak with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. “She hates my guts, called me Ex-Lax yesterday.”
“Sounds like love to me.” Lydia finally took a bite, chewing very slowly. When she swallowed, twelve men in the room exhaled.
The pounded steak desperately cried for ketchup but, for some reason I never understood, Lydia considered ketchup plebeian. If I used a dribble, we’d go into twenty minutes on the sort of people who put ketchup on food—the sort who eat pounded steak in the White Deck if you asked me—and I’d rather try to understand conflicting emotionalism.
“I don’t like any of the kids at school because they’re all idiots, only I don’t like her the most and she’s not an idiot. Not liking the others is like not liking grits—big deal. But not liking her is like not liking a water moccasin. When she looks at me it’s like I have the flu. My stomach aches.” It’s hard to explain love at thirteen.
Lydia looked at me with interest. “Better eat fast. That gravy is turning to axle grease.”
Maurey said to Sam, “Let us walk through the oak forest along the stream.”
He stood and together they strolled up the dirt path. Birds flittered over their heads, deer watched quizzically from the shadows. The forest had no underbrush. Everything was clean. It was a scene from Bambi.
Maurey took Sam’s hand in her own. Their fingers entwined, not like shaking hands with a stranger, every pore of her hand touched every pore of his.
At the stream they found a small waterfall tumbling over moss-covered rocks into a deep pool where trout jumped lazily for mayflies.
“Let us sit,” Sam said.
“Whatever you want,” she murmured, taking off her sneakers.
They kissed, faces pressed together, arms around one another’s backs. Maurey smiled at him. “You know why I like you more than the other boys?”
“Because we’re the only two in seventh grade who can read?”
She laughed and shook her head no.
“Because I’m a suave big-city Easterner who’s been to New York and seen a baseball game at Yankee Stadium?”
“No, silly.” She leaned her head on Sam’s shoulder. “Because you’re so tall.”
There was a crash. I lay in the dark, eyes open, hoping it was a one-time deal. Lydia and I’d had contact after 10:30 before and it never was good luck. Something heavy slid across the floor and there was another, smaller crash. What would Beaver Cleaver do if June was so drunk she trashed the living room?
He’d go help her to bed.
As I pulled myself out from between the sheets, a big crash came, followed by Lydia’s raised voice. “Cheers. You’re dead, Les, and I’m not.”
The TV lay on the floor sideways. The big crash had been a couple of book boxes going over—science fiction and Westerns. Lydia stood with her back to me, her head up toward the moose.
“Mom?”
She turned. “Honey bunny?”
“What’s up?”
Lydia waved her shot glass in the direction of the moose head. “Les and I were toasting our new relationship.”
I looked at the big head mounted on the wall. “Les?”
“Short for Less Like Drinking Alone. That’s his name. We’re buddies.”
I pointed to the television on the floor. “You made a social blunder.”
Lydia tried to follow the direction of my point and almost fell. She caught herself with one hand on the end of the couch. “Social blunder, my ass. I knocked over the goddamn TV.”
I moved into the room to catch her if she went down. “Any chance of you going to sleep?”
“You’re joking your mama, aren’t you, sweet prince.” Lydia closed one eye to focus on me. Her skin seemed paler than usual and her hair needed washing. Her posture wasn’t worth a poop. Her mouth opened and shut before she spoke. “I had you too young.”
“Are you sorry about that?”
She took a step back and fell into a sitting position on the couch. Took her a second to recover. “I don’t think in those terms.”
“You’re sending me mixed messages, Lydia. Caspar’s shrink said you shouldn’t send me mixed messages.”
“Oh my God.” She slapped her hand over her mouth and spoke through her fingers. “I’m sending my baby mixed fucking messages.”
I stood there in my blue-striped pajamas, watching her. “Maybe I’ll go back to my room.”
Wrong thing to say. Lydia’s lower lip quivered and the tears came. I had to go through the arm-around-the-shoulders, patting-her-hair, apologizing-for-the-world deal. She blubbered. “You’re all I’ve got. If he takes you I’m all done.”
“He won’t take me.”
“I’m twenty-eight and everything good that’s ever going to happen to me has already happened.” She sniffed a couple times. “And I hate myself when I do it, but sometimes I blame that on you.”
“Lots of good things might happen to you.”
Her face turned to me. “Name one.”
I looked at the TV on the floor, then at the moose, Les, then back at Lydia’s tear-blotched face. “You might win a contest.”