“Mom, I want you to meet Zoe,” he said.
“Hey there,” his mother said, still smiling. “Great to meet you. Have a seat. Would you like a drink, maybe some lemonade, or a glass of wine? Sit down, please, let’s get comfortable.”
I glanced at Simon Robbie, who looked like he was about to break into a sweat. I couldn’t figure out what about this woman was so terrible. I sat down across from the mother, and he sat down next to me. We were on a kind of love seat, and she was in a recliner. The cats relaxed and resumed their vigilant stares at the outer dark.
“Zoe,” his mother said, “that’s such a beautiful name.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I was named for a character in a children’s book.”
“Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother chose the name, but she
died when I was young, and my father didn’t know which book it was.”
“And you never tried to find out? A good library—”
“Of course I’ve tried,” I said, cutting her off. “But no luck.” I leaned back in my seat, pleased with how things were going so far.
“You’d think that if you cared enough you wouldn’t let the issue drop,” the woman said. “About your dead mother, that is.”
I looked at Simon Robbie. I was starting to get a sense of what he was grappling with. But I had an advantage: Zoe’s mother wasn’t real. “Maybe so,” I said, smiling wistfully at the carpet, as if long-held grief was welling up inside me.
Simon Robbie put his hand on my elbow again, maybe to comfort me, or possibly himself. Sitting next to me on the couch he exuded a faint, clammy smell of nerves mixed with the residual odor of scallion pie.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some lemonade?” his mother said, and the pressure on my elbow intensified.
“Sure, why not?” I said. It was the wrong answer. The lemonade was made from a mix, using all the wrong proportions. It was thick and sludgy with particles and so sweet that one sip made my teeth call out in protest. The woman across from me smiled as I set the glass down on a coaster. I was starting to think that this was some kind of demonic ritual practiced by the two of them, that she was a sorceress who demanded her son bring home victims for her to torment. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t know how to make lemonade.
“Delicious,” I told her.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, and crossed her legs. One of the
cats came over and jumped up in her lap. She didn’t pet it or anything, just let it settle itself on her thighs.
“Zoe’s an actress, Mom,” Simon Robbie said.
“How wonderful! What do you act?”
“Funny, that’s exactly what he asked,” I said, gesturing at him companionably.
“Well, it’s a logical question, isn’t it?”
I was going to explain my confusion, but decided to let it drop. “Mostly commercials,” I said.
“Oh, I love commercials!” she said. “Some of them are so clever these days. They tell a whole story in under thirty seconds. They have this wonderful”—here she snapped her fingers, looking for a word, and the cat jumped down and rubbed itself against my legs—“
economy.
”
“That’s true, I guess,” I said.
“Show me one.”
“What’s that?”
She gestured at me, commandingly, like a queen. “Act one out. Please?”
I glanced at Simon Robbie but he was staring at the ground. Then I reminded myself that I was still Zoe, not me, though by this stage the lines were getting blurred. I thought about my last callback, for a car dealership. They went with a taller woman in the end, my agent said; I looked too small next to the trucks.
Standing up in that clean, heavily scented room. I motioned at the love seat behind me as if it were a gleaming 4 x 4. “Come on down to the lot at Ed’s Car and Truck!” I said loudly, smiling to show as many teeth as I possibly could. “We’re practically giving away our inventory of quality preowned vehicles, with no money down and delayed interest payments for up to a year! These deals
won’t last, so visit us now! At Ed’s, we’re not just your dealer, we’re your friends!”
At this point in the script, the rest of the dealership was supposed to crowd around me, although, as my agent said, they were all men and having them crowd around a young actress as she smiled by the pickup looked like the beginning of some porno movie. But I didn’t say anything about this, just stood there, still smiling and a little out of breath. Then I sat down.
“I don’t really feel it,” his mother said.
“Mom,” Simon Robbie said reproachfully.
“What? I just call them like I see them. Would
you
buy a car from that girl?”
“Don’t listen to her, Zoe,” he said. “That was great. Is that commercial still on?”
“Uh, no. Although I wasn’t actually pretending to be a salesperson,” I said to his mother. A high-pitched pleading tone surfaced in my voice, the same as it did whenever my agent called with bad news. “I was just advertising their Labor Day sale.”
“Those guys at Ed’s are sharks,” she said. “Don’t you feel bad working with sharks like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice still squeaky.
“I always go to Millingham Honda. They’ve done right by me.”
I stood up again. “I think I’d better be going.”
“You didn’t finish your lemonade,” the mother said.
“That’s okay.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“It’s delicious,” I said. “I’m just, uh, full, or whatever the equivalent of that for drinking is.”
“Hah!” the mother said, then looked at her son. “I can tell she’s lying. She doesn’t like lemonade. Probably goes for the hard stuff.
Watch out for this one, babe. She’ll lead you down the garden path.”
“It was very nice to meet you,” I said softly, inching toward the door.
“You aren’t even really his girlfriend, are you?” she said. “You don’t have love in your eyes when you look his way.”
“I do love him!” I whispered desperately from the doorway, all conviction gone. “I love him very much!”
“You don’t even know what love is,” his mother said.
Red-faced, hands in pockets, Simon Robbie walked me outside. We ambled together down the block, until we were out of sight of those staring cats. As soon as we hit the street I’d started to cry, but Simon Robbie didn’t notice at first.
When he did, he nodded his head glumly. “She got to you too,” he said.
“She’s right, isn’t she? You wouldn’t buy a car from me either.”
“That’s the worst part. She only tells the truth. The things that other people think but never say.”
“She’s like a
witch.
”
“She’s my mother,” he said.
I wiped my nose with my sleeve. If we kept talking about it, I was going to be blubbering like a baby. “You don’t have to buy me dinner this week,” I said. “Okay?”
He just shrugged. I guessed he was used to getting the brush-off after these home visits. “Sorry about my mom, Zoe,” he said. “She does that to everybody.”
I left him at the corner, his yellow T-shirt glowing faintly on the dark street, and started back to my apartment. The whole world
was colored in hues of truth. I saw the Chinese restaurant clearly as I passed by: a small, grimy place that wasn’t worth returning to night after night, that didn’t offer any refuge, or even serve decent food. I saw myself reflected in its windows, a girl who was all alone and scared of it, who’d deceived herself into thinking that lying and acting were the same thing. The next day, when I woke up, I talked myself out of this state and got back to the business of living. But ever since then, I’ve looked back on the night I met the truth-teller as the one moment of perfect clarity I ever achieved—a moment when I realized I had no idea what I was doing or who I thought I was. And often I ask myself: who was she, Simon Robbie’s mother? Where did she get her power to speak the merciless truth? And if I ever meet her again, will I still be found wanting?
I’m grateful to all the editors of the literary journals in which these stories appeared—especially Sudip Bose, Jennifer Cranfill, Thom Didato, and Don Lee—for their support of my work and of the short story in general. And thanks are due, as ever, to Gary Fisketjon, Jenny Jackson, Amy Williams, and my family, who mean more to me than I can say.