Live a Little (32 page)

Satan. How appropriate.

“Thanks anyway, Eliot, but Micah needs me to be there,” I say with an extra-super eyebrow raise directed at Ma, which she ignores.

Two minutes later, I am easing the Sienna under the mature canopy of trees overhanging the drive, having accomplished nothing but hurting and scaring my mother. It occurs to me as I squint into the metallic sheen of light rain that whichever of Dad’s flaws live most vividly in Ma’s memory, needing to be protected from the truth isn’t one of them.

CHAPTER 23

Separation Anxiety

“Just don’t threaten. Every time my parents threatened me, all I wanted to do was pound a bunch of acid and screw bikers.” Sue adjusts her sarong over her face, exposing her round belly, and grabs blindly for her virgin mai tai.

It is one of those unseasonably warm days we have sometimes in northern California, the kind that imparts a brief feeling of smugness before the pessimism of winter descends again. We are taking advantage of it by lying out beside the pool, which, due to a combination of insufficient funds and Phil’s relocation, has a lily-pad-like layer of foliage in it, along with a healthy helping of slimy-looking algae.

Tonight’s intervention was prompted by the latest in a line of clues that my daughter’s chastity is, if not a relic of purer times, dangerously imperiled. Also, long experience has taught me that once the anvil of Ma’s wrath comes down, it is better to heed the order to act than delay and risk further reproach.

Here’s a tip for parents everywhere seeking to pierce the web of secrecy surrounding their teenager’s (no doubt sordid) existence: Everyone has to shower eventually. After Taylor had several “study” nights at Lindsay’s that required a push-up bra, hoop earrings, and berry-red lip gloss, I simply waited for her to start her shower one evening, sneaked into the bathroom, and snitched her cell phone off the countertop. As it turned out, Tay had not only not broken up with Biter, she was—oh, this hurts—“hawt 2 luv u 2nite.”

“Phil’s coming over after work,” I say to Sue.

“That’s good. You shouldn’t do this alone.”

“If I find out she’s actually sleeping with that little shit Biter, I’m going to kill him. And her,” I add. The boy’s name on my lips feels raw and on the verge of decay, the oral equivalent of steak tartare. It is impossible,
unthinkable,
to imagine the two of them together. His person is so greasy, he is a veritable full-body lubricant.

“I tried to be deflowered by my geometry teacher,” Sue offers.

“What?” I can tell she is trying to make me feel better. Universal pain and all that. Biter is too gross; it’s not going to work.

“Mr. Morioka. He had the smoothest hands. I just thought he’d be, you know, sensitive. Mature. Honorable. He had that Japanese way with us, kind of distant and formal. He always called me Miss Banicek” Sue fans her face. “God, he was so hot.”

“What did you do?”

“I failed a test so I could get after-school tutoring with him. I wore a high-necked ruffled blouse like Laura Ingalls and these white patent pumps that made my feet bleed. I thought he might be attracted to my, you know—”

“Blood?”

Sue grins. “Purity. I wanted him to think about ripping off all those buttons. It was a metaphor.”

“What happened?” I adjust my sun hat. Why undo the benefits of all that anti-aging lotion I bought for the reunion?

“I got a C in geometry and didn’t get laid till college.”

I nod. “I had a thing for the swim coach.”

“Isn’t it always the swim coach?” Sue rolls toward me slightly to make her point. “Everyone in bathing suits. All that butt slapping and yelling. All the tears after you lose and you need a big sunburned chest to cry on.”

Taylor’s swim coach is Ms. Orvalli, a redwood of a woman with a whiff of
Xena
about her. She does have a big chest.

“I don’t think it’s going to be her swim coach.” I choke a bit on my mai tai. The automatic pool sweep whines into action, burying itself blindly in a miniature Everglades of green crap. “I’m worried she’s going to think we’re double-teaming her,” I yell over the din.

Sue nods.

“I don’t want Taylor to have sex at all.” There, I said it. I am not evolved. I am not a cool mom. I am not a liberal realist with a packet of glittering condoms I keep fanned out on the bathroom shelf. I’m just my mother—plus ten inches and a fat wad of insecurity.

“No sex. No. Sex.” That’s good. Tough. Concise. If I practice saying it out loud now, maybe it will come out right tonight, after Phil and I have had our requisite pre-talk fight and I’ve downed a couple of Prozacatinis.

“Okay,” Sue says too lethargically for my taste.

“What, you think I should let her have sex?” Visions of GED tests and manicurist academies in lieu of college flood my mind.

“I don’t see how you’re going to stop her.”

“Sue!”

My friend uncovers her eyes. “Remember the
thing
?”

I nod.

“I wish my parents had been there for me instead of judging me and fighting over custody of the Peekapoos. I wish they’d really listened to me. I swear, they had absolutely no sense of reality. They’d made it perfectly clear back in high school that they didn’t want to hear anything about me and sex, and when I finally started getting some, my birth-control method of choice was basically OYLAP.”

“OYLAP?”

“Open your legs and pray.”

The
thing
was Sue’s college abortion, a mildly traumatic yet lingering event to which I accompanied her and held her hand. The drive home stands out in my memory: me grasping the steering wheel between knobby knees as we shot down the 101 so I could shift with my left hand, my right futilely patting Sue’s shoulder while tears saturated her fingerless Madonna mittens. Sue’s bitterness over her parents’ lack of support has not decreased over the passage of years, merely fermented, like bad wine that has given itself over completely to its mouth-puckering tannins.

“All I’m saying is, just be there for her. Show up and really try to listen to her. Let the conversation take its course. Let her talk. I know it’s hard, Quel, but try not to go in with a preconceived idea of what you want to happen. It won’t help you. It won’t help Phil. And it definitely won’t help Taylor.” Sue munches on the handful of cheese puffs—baked! all-natural!—that she’s been fondling for the better part of an hour.

Sue’s right. My friend is the sort of sensitive earth mother who knows what’s best for everyone except herself.

“Hey,” I say, pressing a damp finger into the crescent of orange cheese dust on the table, licking it. “Why don’t I buy one of those ear-wire thingies and you can tell me what to say? Like in the movies.”

“Taylor, your father and I want to know if you are sexually active.” I actually wince when I say this. It does not come out as planned. Instead of a warm, supportive, sensible mom offering wisdom and guidance, I am a Procter & Gamble research scientist whose closest relationship is with a praying mantis.

Taylor’s eyes dart over to Phil for respite, in spite of the fact that
I’m
the one who breast-fed her five months longer than the doctor said I had to. To Phil’s credit, he manages to maintain eye contact, though he does swallow visibly.

“I can’t believe this,” Taylor says. Then, to Phil: “Do I have to answer that?”

We are now officially a
Law & Order
episode.

“Not if you don’t want to,” Phil says almost automatically. He glances at me. “I mean, yes. Yeah, you sure do, kid.”

Taylor slouches into the sofa. “Well, I’m not. I’m too much of a dork for anyone to want to have sex with. I’m probably going to be a virgin for the rest of my natural life. Thanks to you guys.”

Great. That’s resolved. Now, who wants to go to Baskin-Robbins?

“Are you dating anyone?” I say instead.

“Are you?” Taylor rests her feet on the glass coffee table. She knows I hate that. I may not have standards, per se, but I do have an aversion to sweaty footprints under my Doritos.

Before I can present a defense, Baby Daddy Phil snaps into action. “Goddammit, Taylor, don’t talk to your mother like that. She’s only trying to help. Nobody’s pressuring you. It’s our job to know these things. Contrary to what you may think, at sixteen, you don’t know everything there is to know about sex. Or life. If you
are
having sex, we need to make sure you’re taking the necessary, uh, precautions. You want to get pregnant, or get a social disease? You think that’d be fun?”

Taylor’s eyes widen at the rawness of Phil’s stump speech.

My daughter may or may not have gotten the condom part right, but she is not stupid. Taylor, too, saw the unflattering Britney photos, watched the flat-bellied pop goddess go lumpish and swollen while the fork-tongued Federpup sharpened its talons inside her.

I grant a silent salute to Phil, who has clearly learned a thing or two during his years in the high school trenches. I study my husband, looking, I suppose, for deep-seated reasons to remain married to him that go beyond second mortgages. His visage is stern yet paternal. His voice is a gravelly font of insight. At this moment, were I a Hollywood casting agent, I would definitely cast him as the Wise Yet Fun Dad Who Just Happened to Do His Boss’s Emaciated Wife.

Taylor’s tears begin to flow. “I don’t know what dating is. Sometimes I think we’re, like, together, but then he’ll, like, go out with someone else or kind of ignore me at the mall or something.”

“Oh, honey. It’ll be okay.” I pull my daughter to my side. Her skin is downy, almost marsupial. I cannot envision such softness yielding itself to invasion without pain. Bile curdles at the back of my throat.

Taylor hiccups under my arm. “It’s just . . . this stuff with Biter . . . and you being sick. I mean, even though you’re better . . . you could get sick again. And you and Daddy splitting up . . . I’m so scared, Mom.”

“Mom and I are here to take care of you, sweetheart. We love you. Nothing will ever change that.” Phil takes Taylor’s hand in his own, confident that he’s out of the parental outback and back in the paternal largesse zone. We sit in hiccupy silence for several minutes, focusing on various inanimate objects around the room while our daughter welds us together with tears, the human-emotive version of chemical epoxy. After a while, Tay’s strangled sobbing ceases. Nestled on the old slipcovered khaki sofa, I am fairly sure we present like a normal family, soldered together by affection instead of fears of teen pregnancy, adultery, cancer, and lies.

I clear my throat. “Tay, do you want me to take you to the doctor to get some birth control?”

“I don’t know.”

Phil and I look at each other. With the sort of gunshot telepathy that is possible only after nineteen years of marriage, soccer tryout failures, and family diarrhea, we glean that it is Phil who must deliver the next line.

“Tay, you know we’ll support you in whatever you decide is best for you, but we need your promise that you’ll use protection when and if you become sexually active”—Phil’s and Taylor’s matching kiwi-green eyes widen simultaneously at the Maury Povich–ness of these words—“and we both feel strongly that the sooner you choose a course of action, the better. Don’t let making no decision
be
your decision.” Phil pauses to let the threat fester, a neat trick he has always performed better than yours truly.

Such is Phil’s unique gift that he manages to squander all gains with his next comment.

“I personally know of several girls at school who’ve begun their sexual, uh, explorations and successfully gone to their parents for the proper, um, accoutrements.”

This, at least: He does not attempt to say “accoutrements” in French.

Taylor stares brokenly into her vitamin-water bottle, probably wondering how, in the game of genetic chance, she got assigned two notorious overcommunicators as parents.

“Daddy,” she says, “will you stay here tonight?”

“Of course.” Phil doesn’t look at me. We both know that if Taylor had asked for a time-share in the Bahamas, he’d have said yes.

Like a lot of watershed conversations in my life, this one has not gone exactly as planned.

“Unzip me?”

“Hair.”

I lift the three inches of wavy regrowth off the nape of my neck while Phil zips me out of my turtleneck. Amazing to me—though why, really, should it be?—it’s like Phil never left. Here, in the familiar confines of our bedroom, we glide through the motions of our regular ablutions like ballerinas circling the lid of a music box. If Phil is relieved to discover how little I’ve done to purge the ancestral digs of his presence, he hides it well. His remote still rests, sleek and fat, on the left-hand nightstand, next to a dusty stack of
Consumer Reports
I am unlikely to consume until long after our divorce decree yellows around the edges. His electric toothbrush stands next to mine on the sink vanity, as if guarding the fort in his absence. There’s even a crumpled-up pair of boxers in the otherwise empty dresser drawer, which Estrella must have found in the laundry and slipped optimistically back in their rightful place.

I strip off my black slacks and knee-highs, which have pinched a groove around my calves. Automatically, I reach for the sweatsuit of the day, a pilled gray affair with saggy glutes that is designed to dissuade trespassers. Nighties, a vague, silken filament of a memory, went AWOL around the time Phil and I started procreating. I am not sure what the protocol is for such encounters as this, but I am fairly sure it does not mandate consigning your ex-sandbag to the army cot, which, in addition to smelling like gangrenous leg, sports a stain of unknown, suspicious origin.