Authors: Elana K. Arnold
I’m not the kind of girl who gets lost in the shower, the way my mother does. She practically moves into the bathroom sometimes, lighting candles and oiling her bathwater, putting on just the right music. It’s like she’s romancing herself, the way she tends to her body.
My mother helped me shave my legs for the first time at thirteen. All my life, I had watched her shave hers—unbroken strokes from ankle to hip, sliding the razor across the bend of her knee, up her thigh, unflinching. The oil she used, the razor—an old-fashioned man’s razor, heavy and silver, with replaceable blades—not a pink plastic “women’s” safety razor. The way she sat in the bathtub and balanced her toes on the edge of the sink, pearlescent toenails like seashells all in a row.
She bought me a pack of three safety razors. “There is nothing wrong with the hair on your legs,” she told me one last time, almost like she hoped I’d change my mind, but when I rolled my eyes and said nothing she sighed and broke open the package.
“Always soak first,” she said. “Use warm water, and don’t press too hard. Okay?”
I sat in the bathtub, the water made murky by the oil she’d dripped in. I was naked. I remember the razor in her right hand. She kneeled by the tub and held my foot in her left hand. She pressed the blade just above my ankle. She paused, waiting for me.
“Okay,” I said, and I watched her hand guide the razor up my leg, scraping away the cream she’d rubbed on, leaving behind a shiny trail of hairless skin. It was beautiful.
“Now you try,” she said and handed me the razor. “Be gentle with yourself.”
As I shaved, one row and then another and then another, she sat on the floor of our tiny, steamed bathroom and gazed up at the ceiling. She was wearing this long silk patchwork skirt, and she ran her fingers along its hem as if looking for some answer in the stitches. She was in a nostalgic mood, I could tell. Then she said, “My mother didn’t let me shave my legs until I was sixteen. And she told me never to shave above my knees. Of course I didn’t listen to her.”
I traced the razor along my knee and then above, shaving all the way to the top of my thigh.
“I got pregnant with you thirteen months after I started shaving my legs,” she said with a smile. “That’s what I get for shaving above my knees, I guess.”
The razor slipped a little on my next pass across my anklebone, and I felt the sharp sting of cutting myself. A thin red line appeared where the razor had cut me, just a tiny thing. I splashed water over it and the blood went way, but it came back.
My mother didn’t notice. She stood and kissed my hair. “Best decision I ever made,” she said before she left the bathroom, leaving me to finish my legs. She didn’t say which decision.
Now, I am efficient. I shave in the shower, standing up, my leg against the wall. Short strokes. Like sketching. Sometimes I spread some shampoo across my skin before I shave, but that’s about as fancy as I get.
I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood when I emerge from the bathroom. Maybe it’s the prospect of the spending money a job would generate. Whatever it is, I’m actually not too annoyed when I emerge from the bathroom to find my mother wearing her red silk dress.
Now, normally it would be pretty stale to wear a Chinese dress to a Chinese restaurant, especially if you’re not actually Chinese. But my mom can pull it off. She’s had the dress for years. She picked it up at a thrift shop, and it’s one of those long, straight column dresses that doesn’t fit anybody right because it’s got these darts on the chest, and on lots of women those either hang like limp pockets or cut across the boobs all funny. But my mom isn’t anybody.
The dress is also sleeveless with a deep slit up the right side.
I mean, come on. Right?
But the thing is, my mother looks … charming in it. And with her long copper hair in loose waves down her back and her amazing lips darkened to red, she is so beautiful. Not ironic or anything.
My first thought isn’t that she is dressing up for Jordan. Because my mom and I, whenever we go out to celebrate anything, she’s always dressed up. Always. And I used to as well. I’m not really sure when I stopped or why. It has something to do with how uncomfortable I began to feel about people looking at me. It used to be that I was like an extension of my mother. I mean, she was the showstopper. I was just this goofy kid hanging on her arm, wearing a dress in a color that matched hers, but not the main point, you know.
Then I got older. And still, my mother was the star of every outing, but rather than an accessory, I became more of a sidekick, and people started saying things like, “Watch out! This one’s going to be trouble!” and “She’s going to grow up to be a heartbreaker, same as her mama!”
And like I said before, I don’t particularly like attention. Not that kind of attention. Plus, all these strangers who seemed to feel that they had the right to comment on us, they had it all wrong. I’d never seen my mother break anyone’s heart. I certainly had no intention of ever doing so. We had between us two whole hearts, and back then, as far as I knew, that was plenty for both of us.
***
Jordan is predictably impressed by my mother’s red dress. He says, “You look nice, Seph,” but without really looking at me. The way he looks at
her
—the intensity of his desire—almost makes me lose my appetite.
Almost. The promise of kung pao chicken has a way of rectifying most things.
***
The restaurant is packed, but that doesn’t matter. We’re with Rebecca Golding, and even waiting for a table is good times. The whole place comes alive when we walk in, and it goes from being this disparate collection of strangers to The Rebecca Golding Fan Club.
We don’t have to wait all that long, and when it’s our turn to be seated, I feel the eyes shifting to watch my mother walk by. There’s a guy with his average wife and average kid who might be sleeping on the couch tonight after the way he eye-fucks my mom; there’s a table of college-age guys, one of whom literally raises his glass in salute when she walks by.
We slide into the vinyl-upholstered booth in a row: me, my mother, and then Jordan. I wonder if she feels it—the competing pulls for her attention from all of us—the restaurant patrons, the waiter, Jordan, and me, always me. That’s how it is with my mother. Everyone wants a piece of her. Everyone wants her eyes on their face.
Mom has turned her body not away from me exactly but undeniably toward Jordan. And they are drinking together, some kind of Asian beer with Chinese letters on the sweating paper labels.
I’m not drinking, of course, because even though Jordan is technically more of my generation than hers, he falls on the other side of the invisible line of twenty-one, so he and she are the pair and I am the kid at the table.
We’ve placed our orders and the egg rolls have come and soon the main course will arrive. I try not to feel like I’m sitting at the wrong table, but it’s hard to be totally comfortable when she and Jordan are laughing about some running joke from the reggae concert and I have no clue what they’re talking about.
My mom finally notices that it’s been a while since I’ve said anything right around the time my kung pao gets to the table. She smiles at me totally, sincerely, and I know she doesn’t mean to exclude me. Jordan doesn’t, either—he’s a nice enough guy—but let’s face it, I don’t belong at this table. There are ensemble scenes, and then there are date scenes. Supporting cast is supposed to fade into the background when the music gets all romantic and the lights begin to dim.
“How’s your food, Seph?” asks my mother, and she turns to me in an obvious attempt to make me feel included. After all, this dinner is supposed to be about my newfound (potential) employment.
Right then my phone vibrates in my pocket.
I look down at the screen, and they pick up the conversation where they left off. I recognize the number, even though I haven’t saved it in my phone or assigned a name to it. I stare at the bright screen as it vibrates like a rattlesnake in my hand. After a moment or two, it stops. Then another moment passes and it vibrates once more, letting me know that he left a message.
Now that desire that I’d felt earlier, back in the apartment—to have fun—is completely gone.
“Hey,” I say. I have to say it again before either of them hears me. “Hey. I think I’d better go back and do my math homework.”
Jordan looks—for a flash, before he rearranges his expression—like he’s won a prize. Then he does his best to look sorry that I’m leaving, but come on.
My mom fakes it a little better. “You’re not even going to stay for fortune cookies?”
“I’ll grab one on the way out,” I tell her, and I do, in case she’s watching me leave, but I throw it in a trash can just outside the restaurant door without cracking it open. Minor players don’t have destinies.
My phone vibrates again, and I yank it out of my pocket. It’s a text, finally, from Marissa.
Party at Sal’s. Bring beer
, she’s written, ironically I’m sure, because she knows I don’t have money for beer. Or an ID.
So I show up empty-handed twenty minutes later.
The gathering of individuals hanging out on Sal’s mom’s shitty couch doesn’t really live up to the promise of the word
party
.
There’s Sal, of course, and Marissa, who seems to have forgiven Sal for whatever his latest act of assholery has been, and Sal’s buddy Blake. I hear the toilet flush, and then Darrin comes out, not even pretending to have washed his hands.
“He-y, Seph,” says Marissa, and she unwinds herself from Sal and weaves her way over to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and planting a big kiss on my mouth.
So there were beers earlier.
This is something Marissa likes to do: kiss me in front of an audience. We’ve kissed—I mean, a real kiss, on the lips, like this, with heat and tongue—maybe six times. I’ve enjoyed it exactly twice. Those were the two times we
didn’t
have an audience.
Tonight is public, not private. Marissa wants this from me, for whatever reason, and she is my friend, my sister, so I give it to her. And maybe it’s not just for her. Maybe it’s the unanswered phone calls, the image of my mother in her red dress, and Jordan’s dogged attentiveness to her. All of it peaks like a wave and crashes. I feast on Marissa’s mouth, feeling her lips soften and spread as my teeth press against them, and I fill her with my tongue. I sense them, the others—the audience—but it’s not for them that I perform. It’s for her and for me maybe too. It feels good to overwhelm her, to give her more than what she’s asked for. I feel her surprise in my intensity as her shoulders tighten and her breath catches before she melts against me, for effect or for real I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway.
My hands go up and down the sides of her body. My leg finds its way in between her thighs. I press up against her, and in a motion that doesn’t feel intentional, she pushes back, grinding into my leg.
I don’t pull away, so I guess it’s Marissa who does, with shocked wide eyes and parted lips, and it’s funny to see her looking like that—off-balance and surprised.
Our audience seems to sense the show is over. They hoot their approval and someone, I think Sal, says something about live-action lesbo porn, and it takes Marissa a moment to pull all the way away from me and a moment more before she finds her voice.
“Didja bring the beer?” she jokes.
“Uh-huh. Keg’s in the back of my Jeep.”
“’S okay,” she says. She takes another step back and smooths her hair. “Drinking beer is kind of gross.”
I refrain from mentioning that she’s clearly had a few already and say instead, “Lots of things people do are gross.”
“But drinking …” She run-skips into the kitchen and holds up a blue glass bottle that I hadn’t noticed before, all of her Marissa-confidence back, “ … vodka? Now that’s some classy shit.” She twists off the top of the bottle and pours more than I would into a couple of glass tumblers.
Giving one to me, she holds hers up for a toast. “To us,” she says.
I clink my glass against hers. “To us.”
***
Normally I’m not a big drinker. I don’t like the spins, I don’t like to throw up, and I don’t like to end up places without knowing how I got there. But sometimes, even if you’re totally sober, even if you think you’ve completely got a situation under control, you can still end up in places you haven’t imagined. That’s how things work.
So with Marissa and the vodka I kind of figure, control is an illusion. And hell, my mom was more worried about my fortune cookie than my homework, so I decide,
Fuck it.
I drink the vodka, and I pour us each another.
Around us the gathering begins to resemble something that more closely fits the definition of “party.” People start to show up and the music gets turned up and then there are a few drinking games and even dancing.
Maybe inspired by Sal’s lesbo porn comment, Darrin throws this gross DVD into the Xbox, and the moans and groans augment the party’s sound track. I do my best to ignore the hard jiggling boobs and condom-sheathed cock and bad lighting. I have gotten good at ignoring things.
In my pocket I feel the vibration of my phone three times. Three voice calls, none of which I answer. I don’t even pull the phone out of my pocket to see who is trying to get ahold of me. Marissa is here, playing Quarters with Sal and Darrin and Lolly, who for a change isn’t working any of her three jobs tonight, so
she
isn’t calling me.
In case you don’t know, Quarters basically goes like this: everyone sits around a table with a cup in the middle. The cup is half full of beer, if you’ve got it, or if it’s a shot glass, then something harder. Vodka works fine, as Marissa and the others were admirably demonstrating. Then you take a quarter and try to bounce it off the table and into the cup. If you make it in, you get to choose who has to drink and then shoot again. If you miss, the quarter goes to the next person. If you sink three shots in a row, you get to make up a new rule to add to the game. Anything you want. Like, drink and then take off a piece of clothing. Or drink and then kiss the person to your left. Or anyone who says the words
drink
,
drank
, or
drunk
has to drink. Whatever you want. You lose when you quit or pass out. Last man standing wins.