Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

Her mom stood at the bar, staring at her dad from across the room. She wore a strong-shouldered blazer, her short hair bleached white. When he waved, she strode over to him. His friends stepped away as she approached, almost as if they were afraid of her. Then he grinned sheepishly. He seemed to be wearing eyeliner. He handed her his beer and she took a long drink, handing it back with a carnal smile. They were so young and thin, Dawn observed. So attractive . Her mom tucked a strand of her dad’s hair behind his ear. She said he looked good. Then she kissed him. It was a greedy, penetrating kiss and he accepted it, clutching her jaw.

Dawn was wary of these visualizations. They felt imported, not of her design: real . The mouth of history was opening. This is no dream, she thought.

Again her mom kissed her dad and then drew her mouth away, as if to see the effect. He looked ambivalent suddenly. He rubbed his chin.

Her mom hardly blinked. She smoldered with certainty, her body tipping toward him, offering itself. It didn’t seem like a trick. It seemed like love. Her mom had damp eyes and a muscular mouth. It was a beautiful combination of will and passion, Dawn thought.

Her dad said nothing but his face was a mess of feeling. His hands moved oddly over her mom’s body, almost appraisingly. God, Dawn thought. He has never been able to express himself. But then she realized he was. He always had been. Even in 1986. His face said everything he couldn’t.

Theo wanted to run away. She crouched beside the cafeteria garbage can and planned her disappearance, eating a jelly sandwich and then a cookie, quickly so that no one could ask for a piece. She pictured her mother Linda sobbing onto a pillow, waiting for the phone to ring, expecting the worst. And then begging on her hands and knees for God to bring her daughter back, even though Linda had never shown any interest in God. On TV people who asked God for things were in jail or they had cancer. They seemed desperate to Theo and she took great pleasure in pitying them. Theo envisioned her classmates praying too. Even the mean ones, and in her mind they were made tender by grief. She couldn’t hear their prayers but she could see them. For them praying was the act of remembering everything she had ever done in public. Theo licking a popsicle. Theo drawing a monkey on lined notebook paper. Theo in denim overalls with her arms folded, refusing to recite times tables in front of the class.

Theo felt buzzed. She sauntered past a long line of kids waiting with orange trays. Then past exhausted lunch ladies who leaned with big drippy spoons over vats of hot meat in sauce. Theo sat with a thud next to Charlie, a gentle boy with long dirty hair and a runny nose. He gulped from a small red carton of milk and then slammed it down on the beige Formica table, gasping for breath and then coughing.

“I have a boyfriend,” Theo announced, chewing her index finger. She could say anything; she would be gone soon.

“I thought I was your boyfriend.”

“Well you’re not.” She spread her hands flat on the sticky table. “He comes to my house every day,” she said and Charlie leaned in, pawing his nose, entranced by her certainty. “Then we you know,” she said, though Charlie didn’t and neither did she. Theo understood sex as a session of spirited naked wrestling that took place when a man with wild charm talked a woman into his room. Women on TV didn’t like sex. They were never ready unless they had been molested by their uncle or their brother when they were kids. And then their whole sense of readiness was thrown off kilter and they said yes to everyone. Theo couldn’t wait to be not ready, to say no please no and be savagely undressed.

She sat thrilled by her fib, eyes darting around the cafeteria. Theo didn’t like to talk to anyone besides Charlie but she felt free to look long and hard at anyone she pleased. Charlie stared at his food, mystified, letting mucus run into his mouth. “Do you kiss?” he asked and took a big bite of fish patty.

“Yes.”

“Kissing is fostrup,” Charlie whispered through his food.

“What?” Theo demanded.

“Fostruppuz.”

“I can’t hear you!” Theo jabbed him in the ribs and his bowed face shot up.

“Kissing is for strippers!” he blurted and then looked back down at his food. Theo considered this. She imagined a stripper kissing a fully dressed man with her tongue. The two were quiet for a while.

“My mom doesn’t want you to come over anymore,” Theo said.

“Why?”

“Because she really hates you a lot,” she said and watched him want to cry. He breathed heavily through his open mouth, which smelled like cloudy goldfish water. His mother Sandy never closed her mouth either and Theo hated when she got close, filling the air between their faces with gross little wafts of whatever she had eaten that day. Sandy was barrel-shaped with boobs like elf shoes. She had a stripe of hard black hairs above her lips and Theo couldn’t help but stare. “Why do you have a mustache?” she had blurted one night during dinner at their house, though she really wanted to say: “You have a mustache.” She had been pleased with her choice of words, knowing that insults from children were always more forgivable when posed as questions. Who did Sandy think she was, with her prickly whiskers and stained sweaters, stinking up the dishes and the air and her own son? Theo felt that someone had to embarrass her. Someone had to let her know who she was.

“When you get older, you get hair in all kinds of places. Just you wait. It’s perfectly normal,” Sandy assured with a huge hard smile and set her fork down as if to keep from using it violently. Theo eyed the little hairs all night, as they twitched like roach legs with each bite. She pushed her spinach into careful gray islands and spoke only to the mustache when she asked Sandy to bring her home.

• • •

Theo sat bent over a blue egg crate full of dirty plastic toys when Linda appeared in the doorway. Her mother often stopped and stood in the doorway but rarely did she go into Theo’s room. She stopped to make sure Theo wasn’t dead or destroying something valuable and then left.

“What are you doing?” she asked the backside of her daughter.

Without turning, Theo pointed to a facedown rag doll.

“She had sex with her best friend’s husband,” Theo said, gnawing the stiff lesions around her fingernails. “Her best friend came home and they were taking a bubble bath with candles. She said I knew it you bastard and got a divorce.”

“I need you to zip me.” Linda walked to the front of her daughter. She knelt in a backless green dress that brought out the veins on her breasts. Theo raised the zipper to the base of her spine. Her mother was sweating; she always radiated heat before she went out at night.

“Don’t trash my room while I’m gone,” she said and Theo stiffened, glowing with panic. But this was the sort of fright she enjoyed. Because Linda rarely snapped and Theo wished she would more often. Her mother had a maddening way of composing herself quietly, sitting in bed touching her hair instead of slapping her daughter. Theo tried to imagine the places her mother went at night and who she showed her underwear to. Men sometimes slept at the apartment and in the morning Theo stared, amazed by how comfortable these strangers were in her house. They winked at her while gathering their belongings or sipping coffee. One man gave her a handful of coins and pocket dirt. He said she was a very serious child and could one day make a fine judge if she cared to.

Those mornings her mother was a hideous flirt, letting her robe fall from one shoulder, her whole body blushing. She would stand at the stove scrambling eggs and fondling her weird dangly earrings, sometimes glancing over one shoulder, grinning.