Dirty Read online

  The waiter arrived to take our order, and my mother ordered her usual, a house salad with dressing on the side. I ordered a cheeseburger and fries with a chocolate milk shake.

  “Elspeth!” You’d have thought I’d ordered a roasted baby with a side of cute little puppy, from my mother’s horrified expression. I’m not sure which offended her more, the food itself or the fact I was ordering something as plebeian as a cheeseburger in a restaurant as fancy as Giardino’s.

  “Mother,” I replied, calm because that infuriated her more.

  She shook out her napkin. “You do it to upset me, don’t you.”

  “Oh, Mother. I’m just hungry, that’s all.”

  She made no secret of her appraising look. “At least black is very slimming.”

  I glanced at my black sweater and black fitted skirt. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who doesn’t wonder if her thighs could be thinner, her ass flatter. But overall, I’ve made peace with my body and the shape it takes.

  “You’ll get heavy again,” she continued. “And after you got so slim, too.”

  I had been “heavy,” as she put it, in self-defense, and slim from circumstance. It wasn’t a diet I’d like to go on again.

  “I’m happy with the way I look, Mother. Please drop it.”

  “Nobody’s ever happy with the way they look,” she said, echoing my thoughts of the moment before. “It’s woman’s curse, Ella. We’re doomed to always want to be thinner, have bigger breasts and longer legs.”

  “I am more than tits and ass. I have a brain, too.”

  She wrinkled her nose at my use of language. “Well, nobody can see your brain, can they?”

  As I’d told Dan, abandoning a task you know is futile and pointless is not giving up. It’s being smart. I didn’t bother arguing with her. She’d been giving me the same lecture for years. I sipped some water, instead, using the ice in my mouth to keep my tongue from snapping.

  For once, she let it go. The detailed, gossipy story she began telling me next was a little better, in that it in no way involved me, my weight or my brain, but instead was the story of my mother’s friend Debbie Miller’s daughter, Stella, who’d just had a baby.

  “…and she named it Atticus!” My mother shook her head, her opinion of such a name quite clear.

  “Atticus is very nice name. At least she didn’t name him Adolf.”

  “You’ve got a smart mouth,” my mother replied, “to go along with that smart brain.”

  “I’m sorry.” Funny how being an adult doesn’t always change our relationship with our parents. I wasn’t worried she’d reach across the table and smack me…but some part of me reacted as though she might.

  The waiter brought our food, though I was no longer hungry for it. I sipped the thick shake anyway, just so she wouldn’t have anything to remark upon.

  “Ella,” my mother said at last, her salad half-eaten and pushed away with a sigh. “I need to talk to you about your father.”

  “All right.”

  I put my own fork down and wiped my mouth with a napkin. I didn’t speak to my father much. We talked if he answered the phone on the rare occasions I called the house, and my mother referenced him often in terms of her daily routine: “Daddy and I watched that show about psychic pets” and “Daddy and I are thinking about redecorating the kitchen,” when really, the truth was my father spent the day in front of the television with an ever-full gin and tonic in one hand and the remote in the other.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  I’ve seen my mother shed enough false tears to fill a swimming pool. She does it so expertly her makeup never runs. So when a tear glittered in her eye that smudged her carefully applied liner, alarm shot through me.

  “Your father,” my mother said, “isn’t well.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  She made a little fluttering motion with her hands, and my alarm grew. She might be a martyr, but she was rarely without words. I watched her mouth work and nothing come out, and I had to link my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking.

  “What’s wrong with him, Mother?”

  She looked around before she answered, like the other diners might care about what she said. “Cirrhosis,” she whispered, then clapped a hand over her mouth as though she hadn’t meant to say it.

  It was no surprise, of course. My father had been a heavy drinker for most of his life. “Has he been to a doctor? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s been too tired to get out of his chair, and he’s lost weight. He won’t eat.”

  “But he won’t stop drinking.”

  She lifted her chin. “Your father deserves a little relaxer in the evenings. He’s worked hard to support us all these years.”

  I didn’t push her on it. “Will he have to go to the hospital?”

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she whispered. She dabbed her eyes, and the brief moment of honesty we’d shared disintegrated.

  “Of course not. We wouldn’t want the neighbors to know.”

  She gave me a glass-edged glance. “Absolutely not. What happens at home stays at home.”

  What happens at home, stays at home.

  How many times had I heard that, growing up?

  We stared at each other across the table, two women any stranger would have guessed belonged together. I was the child who looked like her, with the same full mouth and the same crooked hairline. My eyes were more gray and hers more blue, but they were the same shape and size, wide set in a way that could make us both look innocent when we were not.

  “Won’t you ever forgive me?” I didn’t want my voice to shake but it did. I gripped my napkin again. “Mother, damn it, won’t you ever let that go?”

  She sniffed again, like I wasn’t even worth a response and I wasn’t Elle anymore but Ella again, and I hated it.

  She didn’t deny my question though, or pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I set my gaze on my half-eaten burger in order to gain some perspective. The waiter saved me from blurting more by asking if I wanted a box.

  “No, thank you.”

  That made her cluck her tongue again. “Waste!”

  “I’m paying for lunch, so you don’t need to worry about it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she told me. “Ella, you can’t afford to go throwing your money away.”

  “Because I don’t have a man to take care of me,” I finished for her. “I know. Can we have the check, please?”

  The waiter, caught between us like a dolphin in a tuna net, backed away. My mother glared at me. I had no more glare left inside me. I could only stare.

  “The waiter doesn’t even know you,” I told her. “And what’s more, he doesn’t care.”

  “That’s not the point.” She shifted in her chair, frowning.

  I couldn’t fight her any longer. My lunch had settled in my stomach like a stone. I wiped my mouth again, then my hands, and set the napkin over my unfinished lunch so it could no longer accuse me.

  “You really should come visit. Before it’s too late.”

  Ah, simple. The real purpose of this lunch had raised its head at last. I shrugged.

  “I’m very busy with work.”

  She reached forward, too fast for a woman who complained her fibromyalgia made her too clumsy to do her own cleaning. She flicked open the top button of my blouse, exposing my skin. Her face twisted.

  “Work. Is that what you call it?”

  I put my hand over my throat in automatic response, then rebuttoned my shirt over the small purple mark she’d exposed. “I have a job—”

  “Are you a whore?” She sneered. “Is that your work? Or maybe it’s not just work that keeps you from doing what any decent daughter would do. Maybe it’s something else? Maybe you’re too busy being…dirty.”

  Unless you’re staring into a mirror it’s impossible to know what your own expression looks like, but I felt mine go cold and blank. It must have looked something like that