Me and Mom Fall for Spencer Read online

  Me and Mom Fall For Spencer

  Chapter One

  Beige is the color of safety.

  It’s the color that sells a home. If you put away your knick-knacks, any personal symbols that remind others that you’ve actually been living in the place shedding your dead skin cells all over everything, the house is more likely to sell.

  I shouldn’t have painted the ceilings red. Except for the one I painted yellow. Bright, bright yellow. And the failed attempt to paint Marie’s bedroom ceiling to look like a cathedral, that was really not successful…those cherubim, naked and angry…I meant well.

  But I blame her and all the refrigerator art she hung over the years, sheathes of painted and crayoned works of art, three thick, defying the weaker refrigerator magnets, papers so frequently dislodged when she’d be talking while cooking and she’d slam the refrigerator door cause she’d get worked up when she talked about her work--she encouraged me to keep creating is what I’m trying to say.

  Being a teacher’s aide in the middle school classroom where the degenerates are sent, that’s only what she calls them at home, at work they are called special students needing special assistance, but being that, she is often frustrated and loud while she rants on and on about the broken academic system she is caught up in.

  Bunch of little bastards is what I called them because she is my mom. But my point, she gets worked up when she talks about them and slams the doors and dislodges artwork. They, the students aren’t the heavies, well a few are, but the administration, now they are worthy of the firing squad. Or at least a good tee-peeing like we did last Halloween--Mother and I and her horny friend Christine--fellow aid at the halls of debauchery and shame.

  They were tipsy and I was their designated driver. We tee-peed the principal’s house. It was obscene let me tell you, those two crazy old bats throwing the rolls all over the place, and not getting caught. I was sweating bullets, the sad adult in the mess, while they did this. And I ended up helping. Peer pressure from my own mother. But it was funny. Well I was doubled over laughing at one point when the principal came to the door with a paint-ball gun. We got the hell out of there and the two splatters of yellow were on the trunk until we had a real good freezing rain.

  And yes, I’m twenty-seven and still putting artwork on the fridge because I live with mom and until that movie came out a few years ago about a girl who never left home, I didn’t realize there was a cut-off when you had to be out if you’re…A-Okay as in normal.

  I remember Mom brought that movie home and I heated up the pizza and brought it to the table and there we were two munching bunnies and we figured it out soon enough as the lead character’s failure was revealed…she’d stayed too long with Mom and Dad. She was hiding out and in a state of arrested development.

  I hadn’t even finished my pizza that night, and that never happens. It was embarrassing to realize I was such a cliché they’d made a movie about me. But Mom was quiet too.

  So I went right out the next day and found my own apartment.

  Got ya.

  I should say up front, it’s summer. Late summer. Nothing much happens around here since the murder next door seventeen years back set the bar so high. After Frieda was killed, dear Frieda who made me popsicles since I was three, maybe two, or one perhaps, but after that, no one wanted to buy her house and so the earth took over and weeds grew through the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets.

  Not really.

  Things don’t sell quickly in this town, that’s for sure. But with the murder, no one wanted Frieda’s haunted house even though it was repainted beige and all personal knick-knacks were long gone. Such as blood spray on the walls. No one wanted that really.

  Mom said it was all about the missing granite counter tops, the missing stainless appliances, the missing cabinetry and hard wood floors and livable floor plan.

  Too much home improvement TV for Mom and me. We’re practically real estate agents. And decorators. And yeah, we’re kind of chefs, too.

  Yeah on that one. I mean yeah for real.

  I work at home evaluating ingredients on government labels on packaging for the food industry. I have a boss, and I work for a company, I just don’t ever go there. Well hardly. The city is an hour away and people…not my thing.

  So imagine my shock, or dismay I should say, my gaping amazement when he moves in. I see him over the fence. I go out there because the squirrels keep stealing my sweet corn and I only planted four short rows. So I go out there to whack a stick at the squirrels and I see that rental truck in front of the place and no sooner do I think about that and here he comes from around the back of it holding a big box full of…beakers and Bunsen-burners maybe.

  Right off I am interested. I mean, who buys a house where…who does that?

  And why I start to think about myself, right then--like my bare feet with the chipped polish on my toenails, and my hairy legs, my cut-offs, one leg whacked off a couple inches shorter than the other—not my leg-legs, but the legs on my cut-offs, why I am thinking about it, who knows. And the funny stains on my shirt, on the boobs, the food-catching ledge God stuck on the front of my body…ha-ha. Hair? The hair on my head I mean, brushed…when?

  I don’t wear make-up, but maybe mascara. I always forget I’m wearing it and rub my eyes. Always. So I don’t even try.

  I don’t have any zits, but a quick probe connects with sand in my eyes.

  I am disgusting. So now I am tip-toeing through the scraggly grass that’s thinning like an old man’s hair because we haven’t seen rain in a month and it’s been hot enough to slowly boil our insides.

  But I’m oohing and owing my way to the backdoor cause, no shoes, and I am nearly there when he calls out, in a very handsome voice, a voice so nice I would know it belonged to a very handsome man if it’s all I had to go on. And he is handsome. I knew that at the three second glance when he’d first manifested from the back of the rental truck.

  The closer he gets the more right I am. And I have to make myself not bolt. I am so painfully shy it’s like keeping my eyes open when someone is trying to poke me right in the pupils. I need to hide.

  But here I am, caught during squirrel duty. I’m still holding a stick even. Well I need to stay far enough away that he can’t make out my details. I hate to disappoint him right off. I would have liked a minute to digest all this, but no such luck. However….

  “Hello,” he says.

  I just make a sound, my fretting sound I can never quite trap in my neck before I make it.

  “Hello?” he says again, still approaching, though more hesitant what with all the growth along the fence, some of it his, some of it ours, a shared landscape disaster. Yes, Mom and I are also occasional, uncommitted landscapers. TV again.

  But I can’t think of it now with this human being peering at me through the wild cherry tree and the milk weed and unfortunate bamboo plant experiment from back in 2007?

  It’s absolutely blowing up my mind to see a human coming from the direction of Frieda’s. It’s been so long. He has no idea. And then, this human. Even through the beard and the explosion of hair growing from his head are like the fencerow for hiding things. I can see he is possibly even more striking than I first imagined. In a good way? I don’t know! What am I? I’m angry.

  I’m really pissed off at him.

  “What are you?” I say.

  He smiles, and he’s got his lips pursed to repeat the ‘what.’ I don’t give him time.

  “I have to go in.” That’s me.

  Is that the best I can do? Yes it is. I go in the house and close the screen door and the heavy wooden door with the curtain and the shade because Marie is an over-doer, and I pull the shade too and lean on the
door, then think, no, I can’t put my back to this, so I run through the kitchen and the living room and up the stairs to the second floor and hurry to my room and my window, and I lean next to it and huff and puff because it’s been ages since I’ve jogged, then I peer out my window, after I move all the crap obscuring my view and he’s not around. Thank God.

  What did I say to him exactly? I said something like, ‘what are you?’ I said that. It didn’t sound intelligent. He couldn’t answer. That is exactly what I did. People made a bid, and I slammed the door shut on any attempt anyone made to take a step toward me. Well, I’m not apologizing. She was killed there…and he shouldn’t…. I had only gone out to see to the squirrels.

  And speaking of, one is running across my yard with a whole ear of corn. The whole ear in his little mouth and I laugh and say no at the same time. And now I don’t even have the freedom to do anything about it because this damn new…person has invaded my life and it’s not like a continent…my life…it’s relatively small and he’s moved into it uninvited…yes.

  Me and Mom Fall for Spencer

  Chapter Two

  Later that day I exit the bathroom in my birthday suit, a big cloud of steam following me into the hall like I’m a rock star entering the stage instead of the dark narrow tunnel that leads to my bedroom. But I can barely think about it, or strut into my room singing into my fist, flinging my wet hair. I can’t do any of that because I hear Mom on the phone downstairs.

  She’s obviously home from spiffing up her classroom, or Cindy’s classroom as Mom is just an aid with a Master’s degree, pulling in the big bucks, all eighteen-thousands of them a year. Anyway, Mom is speaking with that energy that would be like, Flight of the Bumblebee, if it was music.

  She only speaks that way to Horny Christine. Her real name is Christine Horner. So you see the joke.

  I have this urge to shout over the banister in an Italian accent, “Ma, what the freak you doin’?” But I don’t do that because we’re not Italian. So I run in my room and pull on underwear, the kind you can wear proudly to the hospital if you’re in a car accident, I mean stylistically, not…well nappy green with yellow polka-dots, and I snap on my completely shot and useless favorite flesh colored bra, about as supportive as my dear old dad Fred. Now I do hurry to the top of the stairs. “Mom, who are you talking to?”

  She ignores me.

  “Mom!”

  She keeps talking.

  “Mom! Mom! Mom!” I say this running down the stairs. I’ve perfected this in early childhood, saying Mom over and over until she answers.

  But she doesn’t even see me standing there in my underwear chanting her name.

  So I do the hand wave in her face and she does blink and bow her back to escape my hand, but she just keeps talking without even looking at me.

  “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

  So I shut up and hear what she’s actually saying, “…forget the internet, Christine. I’m telling you I could twerk up a freaking storm with this man. A what? A twerking sandwich?”

  Then raucous, obscene, non-example-setting laughter.

  “No I get the front…his front…oh you’re foul. You did not say that. Christine Kaye Horner you sick little….” More raucous laughter.

  It’s happening. It’s actually happening. She’s seen him. Good shit Mom has met the new neighbor. She’s objectifying him, stripping him of soul, turning him into man-meat. But wait. No wait.

  I’m tapping her shoulder and am completely off guard when she nearly backhands me and jumps and screams all at the same time. “Why are you hitting me Sarah Marie? I swear to God I’m going to break that finger!”

  She seems to notice me finally. “And get your clothes on!”

  “Mom, Mom I need to talk to you,” I appeal.

  “I am speaking with Christine.” There is an energy rolling off of her and it’s not a hot flash.

  “You’ve been with Christine all day. I need you for five minutes. Your daughter?” My hands are on my hips. I readjust the front of my underwear so no pubes are showing.

  Mom just grunts in disgust and says, “I’ll call you back Christine. No. Oh. Okay. See you in twenty.”

  She hangs up.

  “No,” I moan. “Not her. We’ve got five more episodes of our show,” I say.

  “Sarah…you’re going to have to start wearing clothes. We have a new neighbor.”

  I look at the window I’m pretty well standing next to. With that growth on the fence he’d have to…get close and peer through like he did earlier to see me. And then the lights aren’t on, so chill out Mom.

  “About that guy….”

  “What guy, Sarah Marie? Do you mean Spencer Gundry?”

  When she says, ‘Spencer Gundry,’ there is this lift in her voice and this light in her eyes and I am not even capable of imagining what is happening anywhere else on her person. But I’ve seen it before cause she’s brought one long string of losers through our lives and she loves, loves the attraction phase—phase one of a relationship where you project onto him who you think he is, based of course on whom you want him to be, and he projects onto you who he imagines you to be, and as long as you can keep that illusion alive and not burst that balloon, and let me tell you it can be popped in a split second, then you stay in the euphoria of that phase like two romping unicorns.

  Mom loves that phase. She doesn’t love anything beyond it…like reality. Mom hates reality. She says she’s a hopeless romantic. Yeah, she calls it that. And I’m a freaking Polar Bear.

  So in her denial she keeps broadening her range on her dating website too, younger to older, kind of widening the trajectory, the spread. We have everything from crazy old Vietnam vets to freaked out mama’s boys who’ve never…ahem, launched. We’ve had all the stops in between those two endpoints as well. And now she is fishing in our own backyard…practically and I can already feel the disastrous humiliation this will bring.

  It’s the knock on the door that pulls me out of my musings. I have to turn just a little to see him. And he sees me. Oh boy does he, Spencer Gundry, our new neighbor who has shaved and is gawking at me, then looking away, hand in his hair.

  I can just now move, just now.

  I run up the stairs to my room, the sound in my neck and I get in my room and slam the door and pace back and forth, back and forth…Oh God, I say, or think. I don’t know. He saw me. He saw me in my underwear.

  I go to the closet and yank it open. There’s a full length mirror and I swear I forgot it was there. I can now see what he just saw.

  I am almost naked. My boobs shoved haphazardly in this bra, one nipple scrunched up ready to shoot a hole in the ceiling, one pointing straight at me. These underwear are so old…and crazy faded and at the seam…side seam…a hole. Did he see me tuck my pubes? I don’t know. I don’t know anything, but I have to die now. I should.

  But I’m not able to kill myself. I don’t believe in it.

  Mother is knocking, but she doesn’t actually wait for me to answer, which is what makes a knock worthwhile, but she comes right in. “Sarah he says he didn’t see you.”

  I am incredulous. They have talked about this? “He’s a liar!” I yell which is almost as embarrassing…no, it’s not nearly that embarrassing.

  “He didn’t see anything,” Mom insists.

  “Oh my God,” I groan hoping to blot out her voice.

  “Don’t pull on your face, Sarah. You’ll be so sorry someday.”

  I stop pulling and stare at her. “Mom…go downstairs.”

  “Not until you tell me you’re alright. It’s a big deal…someone bringing life to that house again….”

  Mom stares at me now. She does this all the time. All the time. She says something…then she stares at me. I’ve never been able to understand what she wants me to do when she stares.

  “Mom…go downstairs.”

  “No Sarah. I am not going downstairs until we talk about this.”

  “Go downstairs.”

  “He didn’t t
hink a thing of you standing there in your little panties.”

  “Oh my God,” I yell, “do not ever say panties in my hearing. I hate that word. You know I…did he say that? Did he say panties to you?”

  “No. He said he didn’t see anything.”

  “He saw plenty,” I said with this scathing tone that just showed up on its own.

  “He’s a very nice….”

  “You don’t even know this jack ass.”

  “Sarah Marie don’t you dare….”

  “Don’t I dare what? You don’t know this guy, Mom. And now he’s seen my underwear.”

  “You aren’t showing any more than any girl in a bathing suit.”

  “I am in my underwear, Mom. You can see my vagina!”

  Her eyes go there and I put my hands in front of it. “Stop looking at it.”

  “Honey I told you to wear clothes. We have a neighbor now.”

  “I didn’t expect him to show up at the front door…which you left open by the way. But you had to make him feel right at home, didn’t you. I can just hear it. You invited him over, didn’t you?”

  “Not tonight. Friday night.”

  “Game night? You asked him to game night?”

  “Sarah…stop. He’s our neighbor.”

  “You know men aren’t allowed…you know this.”

  “He’s not a man, Sarah.”

  I didn’t know how the hell to respond to that.

  “Anyway, Mike comes, Jason comes. Merle comes. Cyro.”

  “They are nearly family, Mom.”

  “They are neighbors, honey. That’s the commonality. They’re neighbors. You get a new neighbor…you invite them over. It’s what good Christians do.”

  “Like a twerk sandwich? I mean, invite him over so you and Horny can make a twerk sandwich with him…on him?” I ask.

  “Twerk sandwich?” she smiles. She laughs. She twinkles. She shines. She is beaming, almost lost in the mental picture she…we are making. Sick!

  “I am feeling very violated here. So I don’t know why you have that ridiculous look….”

  “Honey, let it go,” she says. “Don’t overthink this. You’ll just make yourself uncomfortable.”