SHIVER: 13 Sexy Tales of Humor and Horror (6 page)

I was not able to join them for margaritas before their Pilates class, because I was one of those poor schmucks who had to work. Because my husband died young. My husband died two years ago, at the age of twenty-eight, in a fork-lift accident at work. He left behind a four-year-old daughter who loved Goldfish crackers, and sometimes asked to wear the same shirt three times in one week. He also left behind a wife who didn’t know how to live without him, and had a hard enough time getting out of bed in the morning, let alone listening to this bullshit before nine A.M. And guess what else, bitches? This is boxed color on my hair. (Gasp.)

I didn’t say any of that out loud though. I smiled and politely declined the invite instead. I didn’t usually tell people what I really thought about them. That kind of shit would just get me into trouble. And without Will, I wouldn’t know how to get out of it.

Will had been my partner-in-crime since junior year of high school. Both introverts, the two of us – plus Lucie once she was born – had lived happily and quietly in our own private cocoon. Until death did us part.

You know how you’re supposed to make every moment count because you never knew when it would be your last? I can’t say we made every moment count. I would bet most people didn’t live that way. If we said goodbye every day as if it were the last time we’d ever see each other, imagine how tragic and intense life would be. Sometimes we just had to have faith that the person we loved
would
be coming home from work that day, and that we would get a lot more chances to perfect our goodbyes.

The last time I saw Will alive, he was standing in the hallway outside our bedroom door. I still remembered what he was wearing – khaki shorts and an old Budweiser t-shirt he’d gotten at a club when we were twenty-two. Will had taken very good care of his clothes. He was the stain-removing and ironing mastermind of our household.

“Have you seen my ______?” he asked.

His what? I couldn’t remember. It drove me crazy that I couldn’t remember. His keys? His shoes? His wallet? What did he ask me for that morning?

“No,” I said, as I knelt on the floor to put on Lucie’s sandals – the pink jelly ones. I did remember
that
detail.

With Lucie’s backpack and my purse on one shoulder, I picked up Lucie to carry her out to the car.

“Shit,” Will said. He stood still, his finger on his chin, trying to remember where he’d put his ______. Then he’d shrugged and walked over to the front door. “All right. Love you. See you later.”

“Love you,” I said.

“WUV YOU!” Lucie yelled. “Kiss and hug!”

He gave us each a kiss, gave Lucie the hug she always demanded, and we walked out the door.

As far as forever goodbyes went, we could have done a lot worse. It was what happened the night before he died that had nearly crippled me.

As I’d driven to the hospital that morning, my knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, and my heart beat so fast I felt dizzy, like I was living in fog. I prayed for Will to be okay. He
had
to be okay. Because the eggplant parmesan I’d made for dinner the night before had been terrible. I couldn’t live the rest of my life knowing the last meal I’d made for my husband had been an embarrassing disaster. Yeah. My husband was dead, and I was thinking about eggplant.

That eggplant remained in focus for the entire first year. I acted like the eggplant was directly responsible. I avoided the produce section of the grocery store. I felt sick to my stomach when I saw an eggplant entrée listed on a restaurant’s menu. I couldn’t even stand to see that shade of purple. It made my eyes burn, and my fists clench in anger.

By the time Lucie started kindergarten, I was beginning my second year as a widow. I had set up a trust fund for Lucie with the settlement, cleaned out most of Will’s things from the home, and even started brushing my box-colored hair once in awhile. It was around that time when I stopped hating the eggplant. That was when the eggplant started to make me cry instead.

Because, you see, Will had eaten it. He had somehow chewed and swallowed two whole bites of that garbage. He wasn’t even going to tell me how bad it was. It wasn’t until I tried it myself, spit it out, and said, “This is disgusting,” that he laughed and asked if I wanted him to order Chinese.

I was now starting my third year, and I felt like I was really turning a corner. Just a few days ago I’d thought about that eggplant and laughed. I had learned to appreciate our easy-going relationship, and the moments we always made the best of. I was trying to find a way to live the same kind of life without him, and I thought I was doing a better job of it every day. Just in the past few weeks I had been to a salon for a professional color, started wearing makeup again, and even got a pedicure.

The Fucker Mothers had also turned some kind of corner since the previous year – they’d gotten more vicious. This was, apparently, the year of the Bento Box Battles. Every morning was the same routine – the four lined up and opened up their kid’s lunchboxes to show the other mothers how much better theirs was. Every morning it was a challenge for these ladies to beat the box (not like
that
, you pervs). It was a one-up-a-thon of designer foods – hard boiled eggs and lunch meat sculptures, mini sandwiches in seasonal shapes, cheese chunks shaped like moons and stars, fruits and veggies carved into popular cartoon characters – and my personal favorites – desserts made to look like sushi rolls. Seriously. One food made to look like another. Who had the time for that? Not this girl. You want to know what Lucie got in her lunchbox? A sandwich in the shape of a sandwich. A banana in the shape of a banana. And sometimes even a juice box.

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.

Being in complete darkness, I was more aware of the sounds around me. They weren’t pleasant. Kissing noises. Gross. Everyone else seemed to fall into Hope’s plan with ease and enthusiasm.

I wished there was a way out of this. Being chased around a neighborhood by Michael Myers seemed less scary than this stupid game. I contemplated staying still and pretending I wasn’t there. Hope’s game would eventually be over and the lights would turn on and I could just pretend I’d been making out with someone. How would anyone know? Well, except the guy who I was supposed to be making out
with
. Since there was an even number of us, we’d both have to sit this one out. Hey, that was perfectly fine with me. I’d stay where I was, he could stay where he was, and no one would ever have to know.