(no subject)
Lordy, how I miss Lamentations. *sniffle* Perhaps I shall be newly inspired. Someday. Maybe.
In the meantime -- once more with ducklings.
Yearbook signing, I discovered that day, differed somewhat when you were graduating. Tacked onto 'have a good summer,' or replacing it completely, was '(and) good luck out in the real world!' or something like that.
It was actually sort of scary.
I had things figured out, of course. Order was sort of a thing of mine. My closet was color coordinated and everything, lights to darks. It just seemed to make everything a whole lot easier. And the thing was, I knew what I was doing. Come June 16, I was going to Seattle to live with my aunt and go to the University of Washington. I'd gotten a reasonably impressive scholarship, I was planning to major in elementary education, and everything seemed somewhat in order. I'd even raised enough working at the ice cream parlor over the past few years to afford all my books and the complete first and second seasons of The X-Files on DVD.
Which, of course, I would only indulge myself in on weekends when I'd gotten all of my other work done.
Bethany was coming with me. Not because she was going to school in Washington, or because she knew someone there or wanted to get a job collecting tickets at the Seattle Center or anything like that. She didn't have a plan. The rush of being free, she informed me, was composed entirely of not having a plan. I told her that I was plenty free-rushed, and she replied that I was in figurative shackles and would be until I ditched college and got a job dancing on a bar like in that Coyote Ugly movie.
If Bethany and I hadn't sat next to one another in kindergarten and bonded over the rather disturbing experience of witnessing Joey Grant attempting to make out with his paste, I kind of doubt we'd have ever gotten to be friends.
Still, I had a plan. Eternally chained by the binds of civilization, sure, but at least I wouldn't wind up living in a box outside Fred Meyer and asking passing house wives for change or their used copies of Soap Opera Digest.
And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I was doomed.
Doomed was stretching it, yes. Melodrama wasn't exactly my thing, so the fact that I even though 'doomed' was a bit freaky in itself. But I simply wasn't ready to be out on my own. My mother still did my laundry. I could cook Top Ramen and Pop Tarts, and therein lay my kitchen expertise. I, though not for lack of trying, couldn't drive a mile without utterly destroying something.
And that was in a town with a population of five thousand. And only one traffic light.
By the time Bethany dropped me off at home after school, I felt like gathering an insanely large amount of food and locking myself in my bedroom for the next year. Or possibly going back to school and begging the principal to fail me and force me to redo senior year. Yes, all right, I'd maintained a 4.0 GPA since they stopped giving out checks, plusses, and minuses, but that was nothing. I could easily blame it all on a highly sophisticated system composed of men in black jackets and the internet that resulted in cheating. Lots of cheating.
Yes, it was safe to say I was scared.
The only thing that could soothe my anguished soul, I'd figured by the time I reached the front door, was a banana flavoured popsicle and an hour or so with Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen, I had long since discovered, could not only expand one's vocabulary, but calm one down considerably.
Maybe I'd get so wrapped up in the obviously meant-to-be state of Marianne and Colonel Brandon's relationship (for the fifteenth time) that I would accidentally forget about the graduation ceremony.
Six thirty, the high school auditorium, bring along something delectable for the party afterwards.
. . . No such luck. It had been carved into my brain by the morning announcements and numerous signs that had apparently been put up by Colin King, who had a tendency to go tape-happy.
And whose tape-happy ways, I realized, I would never be forced to endure again, unless by some strange twist of fate he wound up putting up posters all over the University of Washington hallways. It was faintly unlikely.
Feeling rather melancholy, I prepared to step inside, wondering vaguely how I was going to explain to my mother that we now had an extremely feathered new addition to our family. This particular line of thought, however, was put to a rather abrupt stop by--
"How the hell could you do this to me??"
It was, I instantly recognized, my mother's voice, but there were two things very, very wrong with it. One was that it actually displayed an impressive amount of feeling, which she usually tried to smother in favour of being mildly polite all the time. The second was that she'd dared to say hell. My mother didn't swear. Ever. She'd always simply claimed that my father did enough for the both of them, and quite possibly the rest of the block.
Who, coincidentally, could probably hear her screaming at that moment.
The duckling and I came to the wise conclusion to remain in the doorway, lest we should walk inside and be hit by Hurricane Mother.
"Suzanne, you're being Goddamn ridiculous--"
Ah. Dear old dad.
"Leah Reyes! LEAH REYES! You know how I loathe and despise that woman!"
"Yeah, you've pretty much made that clear over the years . . ."
"All I ever hear from her is how smart her daughter is and isn't it a shame that our daughter isn't quite as charismatic as hers and oh, she and her family are jetting off to Paris for spring break, we're just staying here, hmm, how unfortunate, and you let her catch you!"
"She did not catch anything, Suz! Come on, sweetie. You're acting crazy."
"And with good reason, thank you very much, you . . . you cad."
The duckling quacked.
I couldn't blame it.
"Cad?" my father repeated, sounding very much torn between amusement and incredulity.
"I can't believe that after twenty years of marriage, you . . . you just . . ."
"Did you call me a cad?"
"Throw it all away! For some blonde . . . secretary . . . thing!!"
"When was the last time anyone even said cad?"
"Why a mechanic industry would even need a secretary is beyond me--"
"1940?"
"But now, thanks to Leah, it's quite clear indeed!!"
"You could just be normal and say son of a bitch."
"She says she went in there to ask about her car, and she saw you and Felicia quite cozy together on the desk!"
"Honey, get logical. It's not possible to be cozy on that desk."
"Of all the people in the world--"
"Suz, it wasn't what it looked like, believe me--"
"And on our daughter's graduation day! How am I supposed to go and be the quintessential proud mother sitting two seats down from Leah when she and I both know that my husband is a cheating, scruple-deprived, conniving . . ."
"Oh, come on. Don't be irriational. You're never irrational. Licia's just a friend--"
"LICIA! So we're dropping the first syllable of her name now, are we??"
"You're being stupid, Suzanne--"
"Am I really?"
"I'll take 'hell, yes' for three hundred, Alex."
"Fine then. Fine." The don't-mess-with-me-for-I-am-Mother tone was becoming more and more prominent with every word. The only thing I could bring myself to think at the moment that I was a bit frightened for my father. Of course, that could be because I hadn't quite wrapped my mind around the possibility of him making out with his twenty-two year old secretary atop a desk. My old desk, to be precise. I'd gotten a new one after junior year, and my dad had taken the other one to the shop. I was beginning to regret letting him have it.
"Thanks. Say, could you grab me a beer out of the fridge?"
"Aaaurgh!"
CLANG.
"Ow!! What the f--"
I contemplated covering the duckling's ears before realizing that it was a bit insane to even think it. In truth, I was feeling a bit dazed at the moment. The last time I had heard my parents fight, I'd been twelve and it had been over a pint of chocolate chip mint ice cream.
"Frank, I want you to look me in the eye right now and tell me that you didn't touch that secretary."
A very long pause.
"I didn't touch that secretary."
"You're lying. You're lying to me! I can't believe this!"
"What makes you automatically think I'm lying? I'm sorry, hon, I can't answer you right away, I'm a little distracted by the throbbing pain in my head, courtesy of the frying pan!"
"Oh, hush, I barely touched you."
"And I barely touched Felicia."
My father was sometimes a very big idiot.
Though, admittedly, never before to this particular scale.
There was a very prominent pause, during which I could feel the tension vibes drifting from the kitchen and straight to the doorway. I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the duckling, being brought into such an unhappy and violent household.
"I was just kidding, Suzanne."
"Well, it's not funny."
"Yeah it is!"
"Oh, yes. I'm terribly sorry, darling. I couldn't seem to find the humour in your infidelity for a moment there, but I'm due to laugh any time now--"
"Suzanne, I am not having a Goddamn affair with my secretary!"
"You were just kissing her."
"I -- no! I was not kissing her!"
"Or maybe she was just straddled over you on the desk."
"Believe me, honey, Leah Reyes did not know what she was looking at--"
"You could have at least told me first. I was just innocently standing in the check-out line at the grocery store when she comes over to me and tells me how sorry she is--"
"Suzie--"
"And how men can be such monsters sometimes, but she's glad to see I'm coping so well. And I have no idea what she's talking about, of course, and then she acts completely sympathetic -- tells me she's 'ever so sorry' to have to be the one to tell me this--"
"Baby, come on--"
"And you know, yes, I had noticed you were spending more time at work lately, but I didn't think anything of it! I suppose I'm an idiot, to actually want to trust the man I've been married to for the last two decades--"
"Suzanne, just stop it. You're being irrational. There's nothing going on."
". . . Nothing?"
"Nothing. She's my secretary. She's a great girl. That's it."
"So you're not sleeping with her?"
"Absolutely not."
"And you weren't kissing her?"
"No. She was wearing these ridiculous heeled shoes and fell into me, and I fell backward onto the desk."
"And you've never kissed her?"
"No."
It came a mili-second too fast, and I knew right then and there, the way you just know things sometimes, that he had utterly messed up.
There was a moment of silence, and then I heard my mother's heels clicking and looked up to see her approaching me. She still looked like my mother - beige skirt, white blouse, shoes on even though she was inside, hair perfectly fixed, makeup impeccable. If it weren't for the fact that she looked as though she might have collapsed on the spot, there wouldn't have been anything the least bit off-putting about her.
As soon as she saw me, her I'm-so-proud-of-you-sweetie Super-Mom smile was in place.
"My girl's out of high school!" she exclaimed, positively beaming as she made her way over to me. "Congratulations, darling."
And I knew that I should have awknowledged that I'd overheard the whole Felicia drama (and exposed my poor, impressionable baby duck to the whole thing), but couldn't bring myself to. Not when she was making such an impressive effort to appear as though it had never happened.
"Thanks," I said, leaning into her. The duckling let out a squeak of protest, and my mother immediately echoed it with a little cry of shock.
She pulled away and stared, rather bewildered, down at it.
"A boy at school gave me a duckling," I offered, rather lamely.
"Hmm," my mother said, and smiled up at me. "Well . . . isn't that nice."
"Something like that," I replied.
In the meantime -- once more with ducklings.
Yearbook signing, I discovered that day, differed somewhat when you were graduating. Tacked onto 'have a good summer,' or replacing it completely, was '(and) good luck out in the real world!' or something like that.
It was actually sort of scary.
I had things figured out, of course. Order was sort of a thing of mine. My closet was color coordinated and everything, lights to darks. It just seemed to make everything a whole lot easier. And the thing was, I knew what I was doing. Come June 16, I was going to Seattle to live with my aunt and go to the University of Washington. I'd gotten a reasonably impressive scholarship, I was planning to major in elementary education, and everything seemed somewhat in order. I'd even raised enough working at the ice cream parlor over the past few years to afford all my books and the complete first and second seasons of The X-Files on DVD.
Which, of course, I would only indulge myself in on weekends when I'd gotten all of my other work done.
Bethany was coming with me. Not because she was going to school in Washington, or because she knew someone there or wanted to get a job collecting tickets at the Seattle Center or anything like that. She didn't have a plan. The rush of being free, she informed me, was composed entirely of not having a plan. I told her that I was plenty free-rushed, and she replied that I was in figurative shackles and would be until I ditched college and got a job dancing on a bar like in that Coyote Ugly movie.
If Bethany and I hadn't sat next to one another in kindergarten and bonded over the rather disturbing experience of witnessing Joey Grant attempting to make out with his paste, I kind of doubt we'd have ever gotten to be friends.
Still, I had a plan. Eternally chained by the binds of civilization, sure, but at least I wouldn't wind up living in a box outside Fred Meyer and asking passing house wives for change or their used copies of Soap Opera Digest.
And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I was doomed.
Doomed was stretching it, yes. Melodrama wasn't exactly my thing, so the fact that I even though 'doomed' was a bit freaky in itself. But I simply wasn't ready to be out on my own. My mother still did my laundry. I could cook Top Ramen and Pop Tarts, and therein lay my kitchen expertise. I, though not for lack of trying, couldn't drive a mile without utterly destroying something.
And that was in a town with a population of five thousand. And only one traffic light.
By the time Bethany dropped me off at home after school, I felt like gathering an insanely large amount of food and locking myself in my bedroom for the next year. Or possibly going back to school and begging the principal to fail me and force me to redo senior year. Yes, all right, I'd maintained a 4.0 GPA since they stopped giving out checks, plusses, and minuses, but that was nothing. I could easily blame it all on a highly sophisticated system composed of men in black jackets and the internet that resulted in cheating. Lots of cheating.
Yes, it was safe to say I was scared.
The only thing that could soothe my anguished soul, I'd figured by the time I reached the front door, was a banana flavoured popsicle and an hour or so with Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen, I had long since discovered, could not only expand one's vocabulary, but calm one down considerably.
Maybe I'd get so wrapped up in the obviously meant-to-be state of Marianne and Colonel Brandon's relationship (for the fifteenth time) that I would accidentally forget about the graduation ceremony.
Six thirty, the high school auditorium, bring along something delectable for the party afterwards.
. . . No such luck. It had been carved into my brain by the morning announcements and numerous signs that had apparently been put up by Colin King, who had a tendency to go tape-happy.
And whose tape-happy ways, I realized, I would never be forced to endure again, unless by some strange twist of fate he wound up putting up posters all over the University of Washington hallways. It was faintly unlikely.
Feeling rather melancholy, I prepared to step inside, wondering vaguely how I was going to explain to my mother that we now had an extremely feathered new addition to our family. This particular line of thought, however, was put to a rather abrupt stop by--
"How the hell could you do this to me??"
It was, I instantly recognized, my mother's voice, but there were two things very, very wrong with it. One was that it actually displayed an impressive amount of feeling, which she usually tried to smother in favour of being mildly polite all the time. The second was that she'd dared to say hell. My mother didn't swear. Ever. She'd always simply claimed that my father did enough for the both of them, and quite possibly the rest of the block.
Who, coincidentally, could probably hear her screaming at that moment.
The duckling and I came to the wise conclusion to remain in the doorway, lest we should walk inside and be hit by Hurricane Mother.
"Suzanne, you're being Goddamn ridiculous--"
Ah. Dear old dad.
"Leah Reyes! LEAH REYES! You know how I loathe and despise that woman!"
"Yeah, you've pretty much made that clear over the years . . ."
"All I ever hear from her is how smart her daughter is and isn't it a shame that our daughter isn't quite as charismatic as hers and oh, she and her family are jetting off to Paris for spring break, we're just staying here, hmm, how unfortunate, and you let her catch you!"
"She did not catch anything, Suz! Come on, sweetie. You're acting crazy."
"And with good reason, thank you very much, you . . . you cad."
The duckling quacked.
I couldn't blame it.
"Cad?" my father repeated, sounding very much torn between amusement and incredulity.
"I can't believe that after twenty years of marriage, you . . . you just . . ."
"Did you call me a cad?"
"Throw it all away! For some blonde . . . secretary . . . thing!!"
"When was the last time anyone even said cad?"
"Why a mechanic industry would even need a secretary is beyond me--"
"1940?"
"But now, thanks to Leah, it's quite clear indeed!!"
"You could just be normal and say son of a bitch."
"She says she went in there to ask about her car, and she saw you and Felicia quite cozy together on the desk!"
"Honey, get logical. It's not possible to be cozy on that desk."
"Of all the people in the world--"
"Suz, it wasn't what it looked like, believe me--"
"And on our daughter's graduation day! How am I supposed to go and be the quintessential proud mother sitting two seats down from Leah when she and I both know that my husband is a cheating, scruple-deprived, conniving . . ."
"Oh, come on. Don't be irriational. You're never irrational. Licia's just a friend--"
"LICIA! So we're dropping the first syllable of her name now, are we??"
"You're being stupid, Suzanne--"
"Am I really?"
"I'll take 'hell, yes' for three hundred, Alex."
"Fine then. Fine." The don't-mess-with-me-for-I-am-Mother tone was becoming more and more prominent with every word. The only thing I could bring myself to think at the moment that I was a bit frightened for my father. Of course, that could be because I hadn't quite wrapped my mind around the possibility of him making out with his twenty-two year old secretary atop a desk. My old desk, to be precise. I'd gotten a new one after junior year, and my dad had taken the other one to the shop. I was beginning to regret letting him have it.
"Thanks. Say, could you grab me a beer out of the fridge?"
"Aaaurgh!"
CLANG.
"Ow!! What the f--"
I contemplated covering the duckling's ears before realizing that it was a bit insane to even think it. In truth, I was feeling a bit dazed at the moment. The last time I had heard my parents fight, I'd been twelve and it had been over a pint of chocolate chip mint ice cream.
"Frank, I want you to look me in the eye right now and tell me that you didn't touch that secretary."
A very long pause.
"I didn't touch that secretary."
"You're lying. You're lying to me! I can't believe this!"
"What makes you automatically think I'm lying? I'm sorry, hon, I can't answer you right away, I'm a little distracted by the throbbing pain in my head, courtesy of the frying pan!"
"Oh, hush, I barely touched you."
"And I barely touched Felicia."
My father was sometimes a very big idiot.
Though, admittedly, never before to this particular scale.
There was a very prominent pause, during which I could feel the tension vibes drifting from the kitchen and straight to the doorway. I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the duckling, being brought into such an unhappy and violent household.
"I was just kidding, Suzanne."
"Well, it's not funny."
"Yeah it is!"
"Oh, yes. I'm terribly sorry, darling. I couldn't seem to find the humour in your infidelity for a moment there, but I'm due to laugh any time now--"
"Suzanne, I am not having a Goddamn affair with my secretary!"
"You were just kissing her."
"I -- no! I was not kissing her!"
"Or maybe she was just straddled over you on the desk."
"Believe me, honey, Leah Reyes did not know what she was looking at--"
"You could have at least told me first. I was just innocently standing in the check-out line at the grocery store when she comes over to me and tells me how sorry she is--"
"Suzie--"
"And how men can be such monsters sometimes, but she's glad to see I'm coping so well. And I have no idea what she's talking about, of course, and then she acts completely sympathetic -- tells me she's 'ever so sorry' to have to be the one to tell me this--"
"Baby, come on--"
"And you know, yes, I had noticed you were spending more time at work lately, but I didn't think anything of it! I suppose I'm an idiot, to actually want to trust the man I've been married to for the last two decades--"
"Suzanne, just stop it. You're being irrational. There's nothing going on."
". . . Nothing?"
"Nothing. She's my secretary. She's a great girl. That's it."
"So you're not sleeping with her?"
"Absolutely not."
"And you weren't kissing her?"
"No. She was wearing these ridiculous heeled shoes and fell into me, and I fell backward onto the desk."
"And you've never kissed her?"
"No."
It came a mili-second too fast, and I knew right then and there, the way you just know things sometimes, that he had utterly messed up.
There was a moment of silence, and then I heard my mother's heels clicking and looked up to see her approaching me. She still looked like my mother - beige skirt, white blouse, shoes on even though she was inside, hair perfectly fixed, makeup impeccable. If it weren't for the fact that she looked as though she might have collapsed on the spot, there wouldn't have been anything the least bit off-putting about her.
As soon as she saw me, her I'm-so-proud-of-you-sweetie Super-Mom smile was in place.
"My girl's out of high school!" she exclaimed, positively beaming as she made her way over to me. "Congratulations, darling."
And I knew that I should have awknowledged that I'd overheard the whole Felicia drama (and exposed my poor, impressionable baby duck to the whole thing), but couldn't bring myself to. Not when she was making such an impressive effort to appear as though it had never happened.
"Thanks," I said, leaning into her. The duckling let out a squeak of protest, and my mother immediately echoed it with a little cry of shock.
She pulled away and stared, rather bewildered, down at it.
"A boy at school gave me a duckling," I offered, rather lamely.
"Hmm," my mother said, and smiled up at me. "Well . . . isn't that nice."
"Something like that," I replied.