Something New (20 page)
Authors: Janis Thomas
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #General
The other thing that’s bothering me is that I know how bright Connor is. He is aware of the locker checks at school. How could he be so stupid as to leave such damning evidence where there is a good chance it will be found? It’s not on the same level as Clinton and Monica-gate, but still! Did my son just assume it would never happen to him? Or was he so attached to the magazines that he thought it was worth the risk? And what does that say about him? Is he some kind of perv in the making because he can’t, just
can’t
bring himself to dump the twat magazines into the trash?
I steal a glance at him, and although his posture is defeated—shoulders slouched over and chin resting against his chest—he still looks just like my Connor.
He catches my glance and turns to face me. “Mom?” His voice is soft and unsure. I return my focus to the road.
“I’m not ready to talk about this, Connor,” I say.
“But—”
“Seriously.”
My cell phone chirps. Connor quickly bends over and grabs it from my purse then hands it to me. I have no hands-free device—Jonah gave me a Bluetooth once, but it never fit right, and it is
not
because my ears are misshapen—so I pull over to the curb and punch on my flashers. I check the Caller ID and see Jonah’s name.
“Hi.”
“Hey, babe,” comes his excited voice. “You are never going to guess what I got from one of my clients.”
Lice? Herpes? Diphtheria? “What?” I ask.
“Tickets to the
Blue Man Group
!” he says excitedly. “For tonight! Do you believe it? The guy’s wife and kids came down with food poisoning from Grandma’s pork loin, or something. So he can’t use them.” He’s talking in a rush, not giving me time to interject. “The one snafu is that there are only four tickets. But I know how much you hate the Blue Man Group.”
Loathe
would be a better word. I saw the show years ago during a trip to New York and I honestly cannot understand the appeal. All I could think of while watching their painted, shaven heads was
blue balls
.
“So I thought I could take the kids. You know, give you the night off.”
“There’s a slight problem with that,” I say. “Connor is grounded.”
“Come again?”
“As we speak, I am on my way home from school with him after having a charming conversation with his principal.”
“Herr Rodriguez?”
“The very same.” Again, I can feel Connor’s eyes on me, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of looking at him.
“Is this a joke?” Jonah asks, perplexed. “Connor?”
“It seems your son has taken up a new hobby. Pornographic magazines.”
“What?!”
“Well,
Hustler
for sure. I’m not certain what the second one was. I never saw the cover.” At this point I do look at my son. He all but shrinks into the seat as I glare at him expectantly.
“Shaved.”
His voice is practically inaudible.
“
Shaved
,” I report to Jonah.
There is a long moment of silence, and I can almost see Jonah’s face. Knowing him as well as I do, I have no doubt that he has a grin on his face and is thinking
Atta boy!
to himself. The boys’ club strikes again. As long as it’s not guy-on-guy action, he’s okay with it. He will not, however, admit this to me.
“That sounds pretty serious,” he says.
“He also made a drawing of one of his…classmates?”
Connor nods. “Becka.”
“Becka,” I repeat into the phone. “
Naked
Becka, I should say.”
“Is it any good?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I reply, knowing that Connor could not hear the question.
“I know this is serious, Elle, but…”
“It
is
serious,” I say for Connor’s benefit.
“Maybe we could suspend the punishment until tomorrow. I mean, it is
Blue Man Group
. Connor’s been dying to see it. How often do they come to the Garden Hills Performing Arts Center?”
“Never,” I admit, knowing that I am going to give in. I can feel it already, and I am annoyed with myself for caving so easily.
“I’d hate for him to miss it. What do you say I come home early and have a talk with him? I’ll get there before you leave to pick up Matthew and Jessie. He and I can have a good heart-to-heart.”
I take a deep breath and sigh. If Ms. Rodriguez knew that instead of locking Connor in the basement without food or water, we were taking him to a show he’s always wanted to see, she’d probably call up the department of child and family services to have him removed from our care. Still, Jonah and I have done our best to instill solid values in our children. At some point, they will have to make their own choices as to the kind of people they want to be. I just pray the foundation we have provided inspires them to make the right decisions…and keeps them out of jail.
“Fine,” I say into the phone, then hang up.
I turn and face Connor, watching him as he nervously plays with an errant thread on his shirt. He is my baby, my firstborn. When the second and third children come along, life becomes so chaotic that specific events and milestones become hazy, memories fold over each other and become impossible to differentiate. With Matthew, and then Jessie, I cannot recall with clarity when they spoke their first words (although I do know
what
their first words were:
help
in Matthew’s case and
mine
in Jessie’s). I don’t remember the specific date that each took their first steps or cut their first tooth or pooped on the toilet for the first time. But Connor is different. I had him all to myself for almost two years. We were a team, and my memories of holding him in my arms, of nursing him, of carrying him through the aisles of Target in his front-facing carrier so he could see all of the bright
colors, of lying on the daybed next to his crib, my fingers intertwined with his through the crib slats, are crystal clear.
But he is no longer a child. I have to accept that fact, no matter how difficult and painful it is for me. He is growing up. A part of me mourns that little boy who couldn’t fall asleep without me lying by his side. I suppose a part of me always will.
“Hey,” I call to him, willing him to look at me. When he does, I can almost see the handsome man he will someday be. I hope he keeps his hair short so that his beautiful green eyes will always stand out. Those green eyes of his are sure to melt many hearts.
“Yes, Mom?”
“The sketch,” I say solemnly. “Did you actually see Becka naked?”
He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, then forcefully shakes his head. “No, Mom. I just sort of imagined it.”
“Good,” I say with an emphatic nod. “Let’s keep it that way for a few years, okay?”
Eighth Post: March 23, 2012
SomethingNewAt42
BOYS TO MEN
I am not a boy. I have never been a boy—and you’ll just have to trust me on that. So I cannot begin to imagine what it’s like to have this three-inch piece of flesh dangling between my legs that, for all intents and purposes, dictates (no pun intended) just about every aspect of my life. It’s like a prank, another one of God’s little jokes. I mean, when He
was busy creating us, why did He bother to put a brain inside a man’s skull when He was going to put another one down there that would end up overriding every decision the skull-brain makes?
Now I know the same could be said of women and their hormones, that we are frequently driven by them, but, in our defense, our brains are never completely taken over by hormonal surges. We are consciously aware of it when it happens, like
I am sobbing over a Maytag commercial because I am about to get my period
or
I am throwing away every single pair of underwear in my drawer because I am perimenopausal
. Though the action is absurd, rational thought prevails.
Men are different. When the penis-brain takes over (and let’s be frank, the penis-brain has only one thing in mind), the skull brain simply shuts down. You have to kind of feel sorry for the guys. I mean, let’s take a look at the statistics. If a healthy man has about twenty erections a day, and erections can last anywhere from ten seconds to thirty minutes, by the time he’s forty, the average male has lost days, even weeks, of his life. “Where were you on the night of September 18?” “I have no recollection.” Erection. “What are you doing home in the middle of the workday?” “I have no idea.” Erection. “Honey, where is the remote control?” “I don’t know.” You better believe that if he doesn’t know where the remote control is, it’s due to an erection.
I was up very late one night putting the finishing touches on one of my children’s school projects. My husband was in his office getting some work done, or so I thought. When I finally trudged into the bedroom, I found him fully clothed on top of the comforter, his fly open, and his hand resting on his thigh. When I asked him what he was doing, he
looked at me with glassy eyes and shrugged. When I questioned him as to why he hadn’t gotten into his pajamas or brushed his teeth or turned down the bed, he merely shrugged a second time and said, “I really don’t remember. I don’t even know how I got here.”
My nameless relative, heaven help her, is surrounded by testosterone, with a husband and three sons. I often wonder how she deals with it. (She once brought home a female dog in an attempt to balance out the estrogen level in her home, but within six months, little Fifi was humping everything in sight.) She explains to me that she treats her four boys as though there are eight of them. She can always tell which brain is controlling the body, and her response is based on that knowledge. If the skull-brain is in charge, she uses her reasoning and carefully chosen words to defuse an untoward situation. If the penis-brain is calling the shots, she screams like a Neanderthal and lets fly a properly placed, and never forceful, spanking, in hopes, she says, of shocking the penis-brain into relinquishing control back to the skull-brain, at which point she can fall back on logic. (I should add that my nameless relative majored in anthropology, and clearly, this serves her well in a house full of men.)
The preoccupation with the little brain starts early, in case you hadn’t noticed. From the time baby boys begin flexing their fingers, their first destination is always their pants. “Oooh. What’s this? Fun!” It’s all over for them before their lives even get going. And the fixation continues to grow until they are, haha, erecting shrines to their penises. You see them everywhere: skyscrapers and rocket ships and those color-changing columns that greet you at LAX.
Not that I am putting down the penis, Lord no. I love the little guy. He comes in handy quite often. And I love men,
too. At least, I love them when they’re not busy being total jerks. I just think it must be hard—uh, difficult—to be a man. I feel sorry for them, actually. Here you have a being on the face of the planet who is so deluded as to think he is in control of his own destiny, when in fact he is ruled by a small squishy creature that looks like an oversized flesh-toned amoeba. God help them, every one.
Fourteen
•
I
thread my way through the heavy foot traffic that crowds Center Street on this unseasonably warm March evening. The Garden Hills Friday Night Farmer’s Market is in full swing, and all of the stalls that line the main thoroughfare are jammed with customers looking for the perfect organic tomato or hemp handbag or Indian scarf. I myself am in search of the rose-infused honey, which I’ve left to the last minute to acquire. Jonah and the kids are leaving on Sunday, so if I don’t find it tonight, Margaret is shit out of luck in the honey department. I could have come a couple of Fridays ago, or last week before book club, but I rationalized that I wanted to give Margaret the freshest batch available. I wouldn’t want my father-in-law to get a rash, now would I?
My farmer’s market friend, Masood, has apparently moved his stall because it is not where it was the last time I was here, before Christmas. I used to come to the market frequently, just to wander, and occasionally, on a whim, I
would buy something. Like the organic beets that ended up rotting in my fridge. But as life got busier, my visits became less frequent, and now it seems I only come four times a year for the honey. It’s my go-to gift for my mother-in-law: Christmas, her birthday, Mother’s Day, and the spring break trip. I know it’s not original, and it takes no thought at all on my part, but she loves it. And if you find something your mother-in-law loves, my advice is to stick with it.
I am still energized from my time on the treadmill, can still feel the endorphins coursing through my veins. When Connor and I got home, I sent him to his room to think about his actions, then carefully tucked the sketch of Naked Becka in a file folder in Jonah’s office. I spent the rest of the early afternoon writing my blog and finished just before Jonah got home, and the two of us were able to communicate like the adults we claim to be as we rehashed the Connor situation. I finally managed to get my exercise in while the rest of the family excitedly got themselves ready for their night out.
And how I needed it. All week, I’d felt as though I were riding on an emotional roller coaster. I’d been working so hard to stay on an even keel, fighting to maintain my precarious grip on the steering wheel of the familial vehicle in order to keep it from crashing into the side of a mountain. My blog was helping a lot and I’d definitely been using it as therapy (and was heartened to see my hits numbering close to thirty thousand), but there is a finite amount of angst and rage that can be defused through the written word, so I cranked up the resistance on the treadmill and poured the rest of my pent-up emotions into my workout.
With each inhalation and exhalation, I told myself that I had an evening of freedom ahead. While I was conflicted
about letting Connor off the hook so easily, I knew that a timeout from my family was exactly what I needed.
By the time I hit the shower, I was blissfully alone in my home, and therefore, I had no one to brag to when I donned my favorite pair of jeans and found that I needed a belt to keep them from falling off.