Melusine

Ted McLoof

This Is Not My Beautiful Life

The girl’s voice raises Elaine from her bed.

All night, her son Kevin and his friend Jonny have been downstairs, having a sleepover and laughing at things: South Park, farts, stories of teachers and substitute teachers. Elaine hasn’t been able to get to sleep with all the noise, but then Elaine hasn’t been able to sleep soundly for years now. There’s always noise. If there isn’t noise from downstairs, there’s noise on the TV that she falls asleep with to keep her company, noise in the are-you-okay looks from her co-workers, noise in the empty half of the closet and the extra wire-hangers, devoid now of collared shirts and ties, noise in the unpacked cardboard boxes from the move; there’s noise in her head. That’s what divorce is: noise, and she wishes to God that someone would have just told her that. If she’d been prepared, the noise would still be there, but she’d have known how to deal with it.

This noise, though, the sound of her son snickering steadily, is at least something she can smile about. She’s spent the past few hours listening to, and savoring, the sound. Kevin, that happy boy who used to find his mother hilarious. The boy who she’d shopped for at Sealfon’s Department Store, who’d hide in the browser wracks and laugh his head off when his panicked parents got security to look for him. He smiles less and less these days. She hasn’t heard him laugh first-hand, in front of her, at one of her jokes, since she can’t remember when. She tries all the time, relentlessly. She’ll drive him to school and they’ll pass something, a man on the street with a sandwich board, and she’ll say, “School may not be fun but at least it’ll keep you from becoming that guy!” and he’ll stare out the window like he’d rather be in the car with anyone else in the world.

A laugh rises up uncontrollably now from downstairs, and she recognizes it as Jonny’s. She’d been worried about Kevin finding friends in his new school, especially with that whiff of divorce about him now, and she knew she had to be indiscriminate about whoever he brought home. But Jonny is a good kid. A rebel; a hard ass; but a good kid, a loyal friend. A swearer; a spitter; a smoker; but an anchor. He gets detention; he drinks; he smokes pot; but he overlooks in Kevin what other kids do not. He’s not the kind of good kid that other mothers would consider a good kid. Other mothers have written him off as a miscreant and a ne’er-do-well. Ne’er-do-well! Where had that come from! Elaine knows where it came from: high school English class, when she was fifteen, Kevin’s age, as angry at her own mother for no good reason as Kevin is at her right now. How could she not, in light of that memory, feel a certain love for Jonny? He even looks a little like her first boyfriend, Scott, the boy with the greasy black hair and the holes in his t-shirt, the boy with the bad grades and the broken home. That’s what they called it when she was fifteen: a broken home. Divorce was an anomaly in those days, and shouldn’t be in these ones. Who do these mothers think they are, she wants to ask at PTA meetings—the morality police? What century do they think they’re living in? She wishes Jonny’s mother, Jo Anne, would show up to some of these meetings. They could share a secret cigarette before the sewing circles saunter in, whispering and casting nasty glances.

Elaine is thinking all of this in lieu of going downstairs to check what the scene is like in the living room. It’s 2:48 AM and in the past half an hour, amongst the chorus of teenage male laughter—thin voices that crack at the crescendo—a new sound can be heard: a girl, talkative, proud, unafraid to keep up with the conversation when she’s outnumbered. But—is she outnumbered? Are there other girls down there? When? For how long? Elaine’s pacing around her room, standing, occasionally, at the top of the steps to hear a little better, putting on her jeans and then taking them off, planning her course of action, and presently she’s naked, unsure of… of whether she should… or rather what she should…

If this had been just a year ago, Roger would be here with her, and for once that prospect sounds appealing again. He’d be asleep—he could sleep through anything—but she’d wake him up and ask what to do about their son. Roger is a shitty husband but you could certainly ask for worse as far as fathers go. Unlike Elaine, Roger was a goody-two-shoes in high school, star of the track team, honor roll every month. Every maternal instinct Elaine has comes from picturing what she would have wanted her own mother to do when she was fifteen. Roger is just the opposite. “You’re not a kid,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you wanted. It doesn’t matter what he wants you to do. You have to do what’s best for him—he doesn’t know what that is yet.” Poor Roger, the straight-arrow. She pictures what life must have been like for him in high school, the loneliness of the studious valedictorian, highlighting words in his dictionary, overhearing talk of a million parties each weekend and never being invited to one. Elaine had spent her weekends driving around with Scott in his van, living in the back of it with him some weekends, smoking and screaming the wrong lyrics to the new Talking Heads album: “This is not my beautiful life! How did I get here!” Roger probably didn’t even have a car. And if he did, he certainly wouldn’t have listened to the Talking Heads in it.

Sometimes, in her darker moments, Elaine wonders if it’s not this teenage loneliness in Roger that’s affected their situation now. If he’d just gotten it out of his system early on, maybe he wouldn’t feel the need to go exploring as a forty-five year-old man. What had she done to bring on this change in him? Roger, that nerd, that prude, telling her with the cavalier air that broke her heart that he “needed to see what was out there.” He began their marriage as such a romantic; he was devoted to her from their first date. He’d tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the world and she’d tell him to shut the fuck up and stop being so damn corny all the time, and then they’d curl into each other and have sex, and he’d say I love you and she’d say Don’t say it, don’t say that right now and he’d say I have to, I have to, and she’d say Fuck it I love you too, and they’d come together and fall back sweating and she’d say I didn’t mean it silly, and he’d pull her close.

I’m okay being alone, she’d tell him all the time when they first got together. I don’t want you getting hurt—I’m not leading you up any false paths here, I’m being straight with you. What more could he have wanted from her? Men. They ask for honesty, they beg for it, they get furious with you for dancing around the truth. But tell them the truth and you can’t help but feel sorry for them. They’re so ill-equipped, so out of their depth in the face of hurt, so quick to turn to anger. Roger is that sort of man, of course he is, they all are. But just when Elaine had finally coaxed him over to her side, reasoned that unreasonable romanticism right out of him, she began to miss it. “We’re unhappy,” he told her matter-of-factly, when they spoke of divorce. “We should go our separate ways—doesn’t that make sense?” It did, of course it did, but it killed her all the same: she wanted the Roger who did things that made no sense, the Roger who forgot the rules in the name of love. She wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up and stop being so damn corny, but she didn’t need to, because at some point, despite her, he’d already taken the advice.

And now here she is, without him, making her first big parental decision as a single mother. She wonders if it’s really that big a deal, anyway, whether it’s really worth it to go downstairs and embarrass her son. They aren’t being discourteously loud, after all. She can hear the door downstairs open and close—cigarettes, she assumes—but even when they go outside, they aren’t causing a disturbance. She won’t have to deal with angry neighbors tomorrow. And if they’re at the house, at least they’re safe. But then, are angry neighbors the real concern? Is that what mothers are supposed to be worried about, when their sons have snuck girls in the house in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t she be outraged? But she isn’t. How could she be? She’d snuck Scott into her bedroom window almost nightly as a teenager. She can’t bring herself to get angry about something as endearingly youthful as a secret late-night rendezvous. Kevin is entitled to a little joy, the poor kid. What is Roger’s fucking problem? He couldn’t have waited until Kevin was out of school to do this shit? After everything else, Kevin almost deserves some teenage mischief. He’s still a kid and he deserves to be a kid. And he’s not doing what she used to do with Scott, anyway, or at least she assumes he isn’t. He wouldn’t be having sex with this girl, in their living room, in front of Jonny, though Jonny himself might consider it. Ah, high school sex. So clumsy, so messy, so imbued with the assumption that it means more than it does. She wonders if Kevin’s had it yet. Roger says no, but then of course he would. He never would have dreamed of sex in high school. Elaine had been his first, his first and only until last year.

But who is this girl? Elaine has seen Kevin talking to a few of them outside the high school when she drops him off. Girls in cut-off jean shorts, completely unaware of how those boys are looking at them. Last week, Kevin jumped out of the car without saying goodbye—he kissed her on the cheek because she refuses to let him give up that habit; he can stay quiet if that’s what he wants but she will not allow him that kind of space—and she nearly broke into tears, watching him for a beat before driving away, as he approached a group of girls who wouldn’t look up from their phones, texting. Texting! How do kids do it these days? Everything is so disconnected now, so removed; life, for them, exists through a screen. And poor Kevin, so desperate to escape the attention of his mother, and so desperate to enter the radar of theirs. She just wants to get out of the car and hug him sometimes, and tell him life won’t always be like this, but she isn’t sure anymore if that’s true.

And letting him stay down there with this girl in the house: that will gain him some points with these girls. That will make him cool. And if he’s cool he’ll be popular, and if he’s popular he’ll be happy. So many times, at Kevin’s old middle school, she’d chaperoned assemblies about bullying and peer pressure and staying true to oneself, and she came very near—more than once—to taking Kevin aside and telling him the truth. Individualism, that great myth of school administrations everywhere. The truism of popularity as an unimportant value in the grand scheme of things: it was all bullshit. But was Kevin old enough to hear that kind of honesty? The sad, hard fact that his coming-of-age was going to be miserable if he didn’t start giving in to peer pressure and conformity, and quick? She had been wise to keep quiet, she decides now.

The door downstairs opens and she hears whispers flow outside like the low, steady hiss of a river, and she walks to the window, to get a glimpse of the lake of laughter it will become on the patio. She parts her Venetian blinds—Venetian blinds! Venetian blinds! Why had she let Roger decorate their bedroom?—and feels for a moment like one of those old film detectives on a stakeout, the lights shining onto her naked stomach in that noir-y kind of way, the rising smoke of the kids’ cigarettes only adding further to this ridiculous fantasy. She can smell, through the window’s screen, that they’re smoking cloves. It brings her back. You could, if you were that way inclined, chart the path of your life based on the kind of smoking you do, she thinks. How else to explain such a clear contrast between what her son is doing now and the way she smokes these days, a half a pack hidden in a shoebox underneath her bed? She’d smoked cloves when she was fifteen as well. Perhaps this girl, the one Kevin’s brought over, has more in common with Elaine than she even first suspected. Maybe all girls of a certain age have a universal female knowledge, whatever that may be, in a way that she’s sure men do not. She stands on her tip-toes to see over the roof shingles and get a look at this girl.

She can only just make her out—this girl is talking animatedly as the boys lean against the garage, trying to keep up, but she’s near the porch and it’s hard for Elaine to get a good view. What she sees is strawberry-blonde hair and round hips; a yellow tank top and shockingly short white shorts (shocking, of course, to other mothers, Elaine holding herself at a certain distance from those kind of priggish values); a right hand with rings on every finger and a left hand that holds a clove as Cruella De Vil might, sans cigarette holder. Her back is arched, showing off her breasts, proud in the way only someone who just recently grew a pair could be. Elaine’s own breasts had been large to the point of awkwardness, and boys would grab at them all the time, as though she’d grown them just so they could have something new to play with. At first she’d tried wearing bathing suit tops—two, then three at a time—to de-emphasize them, but after a few years she gave up trying. It was better to own these things, which is the one piece of advice she’d give her daughter if she ever had one.

She takes another peek at this girl, whose bravado is becoming increasingly impressive. She’s energetic and bouncy, even at this late hour, still going at the business of the teenage girl who’s caught the uninterrupted focus of the male gaze. The male gaze! Oh, college. How fun it had been, and yet how frustrating, shaking her head at the concept of being objectified in her Women’s Studies class, when in reality Elaine relished the attention she got from men. It was like trying not to laugh in church, or so Elaine presumes, never having gone to one herself. And Roger, sitting in the front row, in his Mondale t-shirt, espousing the theories of their professor with such tenacity. Of course she couldn’t take him seriously. Who could? It had been such a pleasure, stealing this boy away from that morality, daring him to let her corrupt him.

This girl doesn’t seem to even approach the kind of cool you’d need to pull all that off, the cool Elaine is proud to have been born with, but something in the way she’s standing reminds Elaine of that sensibility you gain in high school, the power you start to catch on to that you lacked even three years earlier, the complete and utter bafflement you have at what to do with it. It makes for a dangerous recipe, with obvious ingredients but whose repast is unknown. She decides it’s time. She can hear them coming back in now and she realizes she’s still naked. What if they’d looked up at her window while they were out there? Is it odd that Elaine doesn’t care about, is even kind of amused by, the idea of them seeing her naked?

She puts some clothes on, sweatpants and an oversized Talking Heads t-shirt, faded with age from their 1983 Speaking in Tongues tour, and heads down the stairs. At first she stomps down on them loudly, trying to give the kids a head start on their excuses before she gets into the room, but then she feels silly and stops because what’s the point, they’ll never come up with something clever enough anyway. And just when she hears them hushing and shushing and whispering and hiding, figuring out their plan, she realizes she doesn’t have one of her own, not one that goes past the initial walk down this staircase, anyway.

When she walks into the room she sees Jonny rocking back and forth on her mother’s old rocking chair, one of the few things she inherited when she died four years ago. Kevin is lying on the couch, hands pressed together as if in prayer underneath his head, like someone pantomiming sleep, but with his eyes open and glued to the TV. They’re watching South Park. The four boys on the TV are talking to their guidance counselor about something that happened before Elaine walked in.

“What’s goin’ on, boys?” she says, leaning a hand on Jonny’s shoulder. He looks up at her.

“Mrs. Riggs! Or—I mean, Miss—Ms. Uh…” he says, lost for words for the first time since she met him. For a moment she’s so touched that she wants to cry, willing to let him get away with whatever he wants, ready to go back upstairs and pretend it all never happened. But common sense gets the best of her.

“Mrs. Riggs is fine, Jonny.”

“Hey, mom,” Kevin says, still looking at the TV.

“How can we help you, ma’am?” says Jonny, back in Eddie Haskell mode.

“Ma’am’? What am I, ninety? I—it’s late, guys. What are you still doing up?”

“Just watching some TV,” Jonny tells her, but she keeps her eyes on her son, who won’t look up at her. She already knows how the conversation went before she walked in; she’s sure Jonny said something like, “I’ll do the talking,” though she doesn’t know if people still use that phrase. She thinks for a minute about entering into this back-and-forth with Kevin’s friend, sure though he may not be that she’ll beat him at his own game, until she sees something at the end of the couch. Kevin, she realizes now, hasn’t been looking at the TV but rather at the pile of blankets in the corner just next to it. The blankets normally are nicely folded, but now they’re just dumped onto each other messily, like a pile of rags at the Salvation Army or a laundry hamper, and the one on top just moved an inch.

“Whoever that is,” she says, “come on out. I won’t bite.”

She’s surprised that both Kevin and Jonny laugh at this, and wonders for a second if they’ve been drinking. The girl pokes her head out and Elaine notices, first and foremost, that her hair is not strawberry blonde but more an auburn with bleached-blonde streaks, and she also notices that her hair is disheveled. She hopes it’s because of the blankets, but she isn’t so sure anymore of what they’ve been doing down here. The girl starts talking immediately.

“I’m so sorry; I’m so sorry, I was just hanging out for a while, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay, honey,” says Elaine, noticing the girl’s pretty face. She’s got baby fat in her cheeks and looks a good two or three years younger than Kevin, if not for her body. But then, hadn’t Elaine herself had the body of a woman, too, when she was still a girl? “Where do you live?”

“I can walk,” she says. “I live close.”

“I’m sure you do,” says Elaine, as if to say, Everyone lives close in this tiny fucking town, but they don’t pick up on it. “I’m going to drive you anyway. It’s late.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” she says, bouncing up and down on her toes, hands in her back pockets. Elaine notices the several necklaces around the girl’s throat, one acting as the hanger for a sterling silver star. “I’m kind of grounded,” she says. “I’m dead if they find out.”

“What’d you do?” asks Elaine.

She shrugs her shoulders and looks at Kevin, who smiles back at her. “Snuck out of the house.” Elaine gets her keys from the counter and tells Kevin and Jonny not to burn the house down. “I’ll be back in a few.”

It’s foggy outside, New Jersey fog, a late-night thickness in the air Elaine has gotten used to and almost loves. Every now and then she’ll take a trip down to Atlantic City or Point Pleasant for the weekend, and she’ll stand on the boardwalk and smell the ocean, and think that, yes, this is where she’s meant to be. For all the garbage and the bullshit New Jersey is filled with, both literally and figuratively, it’s sometimes undeniably romantic. There had been nights when she walked down that Point Pleasant boardwalk hand in hand with someone, with Roger, or with whoever she’d met at the Casino bar, and at the same time, she both forgot and remembered that she was a mother, and she loved that, being everything all at once. This girl slides into the car and scratches her crotch, pulls at the frayed ends of where her jeans are cut, and Elaine thinks about the nights this girl will someday enjoy, nights that she can only hope will approximate her own.

“What’s your name, honey?” Elaine asks, turning the car on.

“Dani. Please don’t tell my parents. Please?”

“They probably already know your name, sweetie.”

Dani laughs as Elaine pulls out of the driveway and Elaine feels the glow of the kindred spirit, the warmth of the possibility that, had Dani been born in another life at another time, maybe they’d have been friends, college roommates, airing their smoky clothes out the window after a night at the bar. But Dani was born in this life and she’s fifteen—or however old—and so all she looks right now is scared. “Please don’t tell them,” she says again.

“I’m not going to tell your parents, Dani. Does that make you feel better, now that I’ve said it?” Dani is skeptical, as she should be. “It does.”

They start to drive and Dani tells Elaine what grade she’s in—ninth—and what age she is—Kevin’s—and which teachers she likes—Mr. Levering’s cool, Mr. Vargas is a bit of a nerd—and which street she lives on—Spruce. “Do you know it?” she asks.

“I do. There aren’t many in this town,” says Elaine. “Streets, I mean.”

“Mrs. Riggs? That’s what you like being called?” Dani asks. No, is the answer. She never liked being called Mrs. Riggs, not even when they were still married. Roger Riggs was not a name, not a man, not a lifestyle, she wanted to be permanently attached to. She wanted to be Elaine Frankel, married to Roger Riggs, and there were nights she hadn’t even been sure of that.

“I do,” she says. “It means Mother of Kevin Riggs, so I’m proud of it.”

Dani kicks off her flip-flops and puts her bare feet up on the dashboard. She leans back and closes her eyes. “Boys,” she says. Elaine assumes she’s just shrugging the thought off, but when nothing happens and she offers no follow up, Elaine realizes she was talking to her. Dani opens her eyes and looks at Elaine. “Know what I mean?”

“How old were you, Dani,” Elaine asks, “when you snuck out your first window?”

Dani closes her eyes again, scrunching them shut and twisting her mouth, like Elaine had just asked her to divide ninety-five thousand, five-hundred and thirty by twenty-two. “Couple years ago, I think. I was dating—is it okay to tell you this?” Dani asks, more about whether Elaine will keep her secret than whether she’s comfortable being told it.

“Sure,” she says.

“I was dating this guy who was a senior. But he was kind of a perv.”

“He would have to be,” Elaine says, surprising herself.

“Why’s that?” asks Dani, genuinely curious.

“Nothing. You’re just – you must have been thirteen, barely.”

“Yup,” she says, as though Elaine was merely trying to chart the timeline in her head, rather than giving a totally valid explanation as to why this guy was a perv. Isn’t that odd, still? Taboo, even? Eighteen-year-old boys and middle-school girls?

Dani pops some gum in and takes a brush from her purse, running it through her hair. “You’re really nice, huh, Mrs. Riggs? I mean, Kevin’s a really nice guy, and you’re being pretty cool about all this.”

“Dani,” says Elaine, positive, for some reason, that she’ll regret whatever she’s going to say. There’s something about Dani’s attitude that has shifted. In the living room she’d been pleading and apologetic, and even before that she was confident but falsely so, putting on a show for an audience of two who’d, frankly, have paid whatever she asked for the price of admission. But now she’s unfolded herself all over the passenger seat, tired and maybe a little weary from having to affect this personality all the time. The lights pass over Dani’s face and Elaine can see bags forming under them. The poor girl, in need of rest but never going to get it; the rest of her life will be more of the same, more of this pushing and looking and searching and finding and fucking and fighting and hurting and bumping and bruising and losing and wondering and wandering and kicking and screaming and acting and aching and smiling and crying but never, ever settling. And all, all, all of that noise. What would Roger make of Dani? Would he give her the benefit of the doubt? Would he recognize in her what he’d recognized in Elaine, twenty-five years ago? Elaine never felt broken when she met Roger, but she still sensed in him someone who could fix her all the same. No matter how cool she acted in front of him during those first dates, she knows it was this other side of her that constituted what drew Roger in completely. Maybe that, in the end, is the draw for everyone: the need to see and be seen, completely, to be nakedly held by someone who’ll do it gladly and tell you so. But what does that matter now anyway? Roger is gone.

They’re pulling into Dani’s driveway when Elaine thinks of a way to finish her sentence.

“Is Kevin dating anyone?” Elaine finally asks, relieved at her own restraint and a little surprised at her own question.

Dani shrugs. “Don’t think so. But I think he’s kinda cute. Don’t tell him that, though,” she says, and Elaine knows she wouldn’t, even if she had the kind of relationship with her son where that kind of conversation was possible. “Would you mind turning off the headlights when you pull out?” She turns them off. “You’re okay getting in?”

“No problem. I’ll go through the window,” she gets out of the car and whispers, “Hey, thanks for the ride. This was cool.”

“Come here,” Elaine says, looking at the girl. Dani’s eyes widen, as though Elaine is going to tell her a secret, or a miracle, or a pristine piece of sage advice. When she leans back inside, Elaine hugs her, holds her close, feels Dani’s young body in her grown-up arms. She holds onto her for dear life, and wants desperately for Dani to be someone else right now. Not Roger or Scott or even Kevin, or any man, but some other woman who might understand her; or her own mother from a different life, the kind of mother who might’ve helped her through all of this instead of dying on her; or her daughter, the one she will, it occurs to her now, never have, the beautiful little girl she’d gossip with and who’d never for one second hate her; or an aunt or a best friend or anyone. Dani starts to feel restless in her arms, ready to sneak back up to her room, but Elaine won’t let her go just yet, holds on for an extra beat, holding her like she is a life raft in the middle of a giant ocean, whose waves are calm and motion still, but whose intractability is constant and terrifying. At the moment when she thinks she may be scaring the child, she feels Dani’s fingers grip her back, holding just as tightly, and they just stay like that, hoping the other won’t let go first.

Ted McLoof is an MFA candidate in The University of Arizona's fiction program. His work has appeared in Trillium and Short Story America, and he is a finalist for Glimmer Train's Family Matters contest.