Love Under Glasse

by Kristina Meister

  “Anyway, damn it, where is my head?” Mama looked around and finally spotted her wallet among the paraphernalia on the settee. “Your sister and I are gonna do that, and then we are comin’ back here. We are gonna have a nice brunch, and then all three of us are going for our mani-pedis.”

  She snatched El’s hand before she could evade, and clutched until El’s fingers were sore, looking over the sparkling polish scathingly.

  “Honestly, Elyrra, you are so clumsy. How do they get this chipped? What are you doin’? Is Liz makin’ you do the dishes for her, because that is what I pay her to do.”

  There was that h again. She marveled that one small accent could trigger so much anxiety in her.

  “It was because of our science class. We had to work with this chemical that dissolves things, and it ate the polish.”

  Mama dropped her hand as if trying to bounce it off the floor. “I don’t see why they need to teach you things like that. It ain’t as if you are goin’ to be an engineer. Honestly. I’ve half a mind to put you in a private school.”

  El’s stomach tightened as she strategized on the fly. It had to be business as usual. Reverend Williams hadn’t told, and it seemed as she may have gotten away with her altercation with Jay as well.

  “If you did that, I wouldn’t get to see my friends! Or Jay.”

  Mama plopped down onto the sofa impatiently and swung her foot in the air. El saw the minuscule tell, as her mother avoided eye contact. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before, but then again, Mama was always plotting, and the tiny ticks and blinks of her duplicity were a commonplace thing. It was impossible to differentiate all of them.

  “I thought you didn’t like Jay.”

  “He is a stupid boy.”

  “All men are stupid boys.”

  “Exactly.” El tilted her head. It was something her mother always said, and if she made it seem that the wisdom had finally penetrated, she might be able to gain some ground. In reality, her best friend, her only real friend was a boy. It didn’t matter that she’d never actually met him; she knew Oscar wasn’t stupid.

  “How was your date last night? Did he try to make a move on you?”

  That confirmed it. Jay hadn’t tattled. Of course he wouldn’t. His link to El was the only ticket into whatever life he saw himself living, and he’d never risk disappointing Mama. El had worried herself over nothing.

  Relief was a few moments of reprieve from the constant battle.

  “He did. I managed to convince him that we should be chaste.”

  “And how did you do that? By not brushin’ your teeth?”

  “I made an argument he couldn’t resist.” With a fist.

  The doorbell rang. Even though Rose was a member of the family, she still had to ring the bell and be ushered in by the maid like a stranger. El stared at the ground while the mother-daughter reunion carried on in a series of shrill noises and superficial compliments. She found herself wondering what Riley’s house must be like, if there even was a doorbell. If El turned up on the porch, would Riley throw the door open and smirk at her? She would probably say something like, “Well la-dee-da, who’s this pretty young thing?”

  The image brought color to her cheek that was immediately fodder for mockery.

  “Elyrra did you try to put makeup on again? I told you to let me help you do it right, so it looks like a natural blush!” Rose tussled her up into a stiff and painful embrace, and then tossed her back. “Come on, Mama, we’re gonna be late.”

  “Oh Hell’s bells, Rose, you’re the bride, you are never late.” Mama collected their items and left her commandments, never missing the chance to sound like she would beat the small housekeeper if her instructions weren’t obeyed to the letter. “Elyrra, keep an eye on Liz and make sure she folds those linens properly. I swear she doesn’t understand a thing I say!”

  And they were out the door, her mother still ranting about how it was impossible to find help that wasn’t foreign, how the borders should be closed, how much she yearned for a maid who was white . . .

  But what really needed to be pronounced was that her mother had worked with extra diligence to find a black maid, because this was Mama’s South, and in her circles, it was still considered a mark of status. Racism was alive and well, and both her parents’ supporters wore their red hats and confederate flags with pride.

  El shut the door and leaned her forehead against it. “She understands you just fine, you’re loud enough about it, you ignorant bitch.”

  Behind her, Lizabet giggled. “Don’t give away my secrets. At least not while she’s sober.”

  Following the maid into the kitchen, El sat at the counter and helped her prepare the brunch tray. “Liz, this may be a weird question, but has Mama ever said anything around you about Jay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Has he ever called here to talk to her?” She took a deep breath and folded her arms. Liz was the last in a long string of housekeepers, but she was by far El’s favorite. In the two years since she’d arrived, Liz had been more like a sister to El than Rose, working with her to make both their lives easier. Even so, she had to be careful. If Mama caught wind that Liz and she were friends, the unspoken alliance would be crushed with terrible consequences. If Mama fired someone, they most often had to move away, or change occupations, because no one else would hire them. “I think Mama is paying him to date me.”

  Liz was at the sink, washing beans. The tap was turned off and the hands rubbed on her apron far past dryness. At long last, she turned.

  “Yeah . . . I was beginning to think the same.”

  To her own surprise, El was relieved to hear that. It meant she wasn’t going crazy, that she wasn’t so deep into the rules of this prison that she was paranoid and seeing spies where there were none.

  She sighed. “What should I do, Lizzy?”

  A uniformed shoulder lifted and fell in slow motion. “You know your mama best. Everything got to be the way she says it’s got to be. If it was me, I’d be on a plane to Alaska, before I’d marry that bully.”

  Nodding, El slid down from the stool and gave her a hug. Lizabet’s face was soft and warm when she smiled. Seeing it every morning and every night brought calm to her in this horrible place. She would be the one person besides Riley that El would hate to disappoint.

  Not for the first time, she considered confiding in the woman. If she just came out and said it, maybe there would be compassion, understanding. She opened her mouth to speak and then clenched her teeth together. There was an equal chance of rejection, disgust. Lizabet was a religious woman, and most of the religious people in El’s experience were fond of reading the Old Testament with an eye for the literal. El had no way of knowing her beliefs on the subject without giving herself away.

  She just couldn’t be sure.

  That was the anguish of being different. It was so solitary. Even if she met someone she thought might understand, their reaction would be completely unpredictable. How they treated her after she confessed was assumed to be entirely her responsibility, her confession something she inflicted on them. She didn’t change, but telling someone she loved a girl counted as a betrayal. It was the only truth that really mattered to her, but to confess it was to inflict herself on others.

  What a warped and hateful way to live. She could see that now—the bleak, dark poison that was seeping into every corner of her life. If not for Riley . . . she might already have succumbed.

  “Would you be mad at me, if I left?”

  “Where you going?” Lizabet held her around the waist as if they were dancing and then twirled her away. “You mean like college?”

  “Whatever. If I left, would you be okay with it? You wouldn’t hate me?”

  “Praise the Lord! Girl, you gotta get out of this place! Shoot, if I had a car, I’d give you a ride. She is gonna kill you if you don’t get out.”

  El swallowed hard. It was the first time they’d ever talked so openly about it, but knowi
ng Liz agreed with her made her feel that much more confident. “Please tell me you’re not staying here either.”

  Lizabet’s face drew up sardonically. “Oh no! I threw down my apron as soon as your daddy decided to run for office again. Ain’t no way in hell I’m gonna fold up his boxer briefs or cook his damn dinner. He wanna ruin this country, then he can mind his own damn house first. And that woman can make her own highballs.”

  “What about references?”

  “Oh please. How do you think I got this job? I got references of polished gold and my old bosses love me so much they ask me to come back all the time. Only took this job because I thought it was a step up. Should’ve known your mama wouldn’t settle for less than the best, so that she can make herself feel better by tearing them down.” She turned, shaking her head. “Don’t tell her. I can’t get fired before I have everything lined up. I got bills to pay.”

  “I promise I won’t say a thing. Not that she lets me talk anyway.”

  Pecking that darling cheek with a kiss, El dashed into the hall. Cake tasting would likely take hours. Rose was one of the most indecisive humans on the planet, and she never missed a chance to have sweets, if there was an excuse for it. Probably because she’d been on a model’s diet since the age of five.

  It would give El plenty of time to post her entries and check her replies.

  She was giddy with the anticipation, but as she sat down and began her usual series of web-based warding rituals, her thoughts became tangled in memories and questions.

  She had never given an inch in her demeanor, never even glanced at a girl in her mother’s company. So how had Mama found her out? It had to have something to do with @loveunderglass, but just thinking that made her sick.

  Her secret and now infamous online persona had had a humble origin.

  It all began with a spiral composite book and a fuzzy pen. In it she had written all about her long life of ten years, her mother, her feelings of isolation. Into those pages, she had poured her pain and been granted some reprieve. She’d thought it well hidden in the crawlspace beneath the stairs, but her mother had found it. Two things had been made clear while she knelt, bare-kneed, for hours on rough clay tile, saying prayers of punishment—firstly, she absolutely needed a diary, because it was the only time she felt any sense of internal peace, and secondly, she could never afford to write legibly again.

  That was when the code was assembled, and she had burned the protocol into her soul. It wasn’t merely a standard cipher, substituting symbols for individual letters. It also replaced whole words with symbols, and rotated using a random number generator. Twenty-six letters, twenty-six shapes or symbols—every couple of days she generated a random number for both columns and matched the letter to its symbol. There would be absolutely no way her mother could read it.

  Having that, she felt free to express all that she was, from lust to fantasy. Then one fateful day, she’d heard about a social media platform that allowed a user to create a blog, and talk to their readers. Now the @loveunderglass blog had thousands of followers, and Riley, an invisible club of lovesick fangirls.

  That kind of popularity gave her support, but it meant even more precautions.

  Her written journal could never be out of her sight long enough for her mother to take a crack at it. For the last ten hours it had been sitting in her bag in the back of Jay’s car, and she felt naked without it, but it caused her no particular anxiety. Not only was Jay not smart enough, he had already accused her of being a lesbian and made the decision not to involve her mother.

  She stared at the computer screen and frowned, knowing that there was no way her mother had discovered her secret from her journal.

  But the culprit also couldn’t be her phone, because she almost never used it. It was only allowed to be on her when she left the house. All the phones were on a shared plan and all of them used the same Apple ID to download apps, so of course, she didn’t download any, especially the ones for her social media. She only ever communicated with Oscar and her other online friends using an email she would access via her phone’s built-in email feature, deleting the account entirely every single afternoon on her way home.

  All that left was the computer.

  There was only one computer in the entire house. It did not have a password. This made it a perfect trap. El had always suspected that her mother checked the browser history and had a keystroke recorder. Consequently, El never traveled directly to her site. She’d long ago discovered a free conferencing webpage that allowed people to share the same screen and browser. She could surf the entire internet, and the only website that ever appeared in the history was the conference service. She would obscure her passwords and logins from the keystroke tracker by opening two or three different windows and moving between them while typing, so that the letters were randomized.

  Her @loveunderglass entries were typed on her phone in her breaks at school, saved to her email draft box, accessed at home via the conferencing site, and cut and pasted into the blog text box. That was how she managed to type out long essays on love, with almost no key strokes, no downloads, no IP addresses—no traces of any kind.

  It was almost impossible to imagine that somehow her mother had managed to get behind all these defenses.

  Like Riley had said, Mama had forced El to set fire to all the hoops and live the interesting life of a CIA counterintelligence specialist. It was tolerable, so long as she had her outlet, and could be free for a few hours, but the things people needed were their greatest weaknesses.

  She could see that now. Now that she knew her mother for the enemy, she could see how the woman thought, without her emotions getting in the way. The facts were clear, and unknown variables could be balanced without a thousand impressions and hopes clouding her judgment.

  How had Mama done it? It couldn’t be complicated, because while the woman could install a program, she didn’t have that much technical savvy.

  A camera?

  No, there was no way. Her father would never allow such a thing. He was a senator. If any of his communications or business were recorded, it could be used against him. He was incredibly vocal about his feelings of privacy, which was ironic, given how much freedom he allowed his wife to revoke all privacy from El. There were only three cameras on the entire property, and they recorded only the exits of the home.

  Then again, this was a recording studio.

  This was where her mother made all her videos, her podcasts, gave interviews.

  She looked up at the Thomas Kinkaid backdrop and the mounted digital camera. The thing had always made her nervous, it was true, but it was pointed at an angle, and turned off.

  Or was it?

  As if headed to her mother’s small fridge near the sound stage, El strolled past the recorder and glanced at it from the corner of her eye. Sure enough, the recording light had been covered with a tiny piece of black electrical tape. El opened a soda she had no intention of drinking and turned until she could see the camera’s angles. It was pointed at her mother’s large swiveling makeup mirror . . .

  Which was aimed directly at the mirror behind the desk.

  With all her cunning, defeat had come down to smoke and mirrors. All this time, her mother had been recording the desk whenever she left, just waiting to see if El would arrive at the computer. She’d been piecing together bits until she could identify what was on the monitor screen. Once she had the name of the blog, it would be easy enough to locate and read.

  Her mother was one of her followers.

  El comprehended all of this in one frightful second. Her stomach lurched and quaked. Her skin went cold, then numb. Most importantly, her heart felt as if it was being clamped in a vice and wrung out like a bloody cloth.

  This was how much her mother despised her. This was the extent to which she would go to make El miserable.

  Business as usual.

  El took a shaky breath, returned to the computer, opened the conferencing site, and got to work.r />
  The noise that heralded their homecoming was shrill and slurred. Cake tasting obviously meant also drinking an entire bottle of champagne each and driving home anyway. El logged off her extensive research, tucked her coded checklist into her bra, and allowed the stiff muscles of her back to uncoil. Sitting for several hours to obscure the camera was a small price to pay for the peace of mind she was slowly developing.

  As Riley had said, there was a fact she knew about herself, regardless of the things that might be less definite: she preferred women. It wasn’t going to change. Her mother could call her young, indecisive, worthless, ignorant, demonic, lazy, or any of the other things she wanted, but that was not up for interpretation. There was no magic to fix it, because it didn’t need fixing.

  That was a belief she now held close to her heart.

  She was not going to that camp. No matter what it took. El was done trying to be what they told her she should. El was going to be El. Her mother wasn’t unbeatable. Her mother was a stupid human being who wanted to turn the world as ugly as she was, and El wasn’t going to stand for it. For the first time in her life, she was making a decision, and it was a decision her mother wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Of that, she would make sure.

  As she listened to her sister retell a story from last week’s “Wedding Arguments With Tom” at garish volume, she walked calmly into the hall. Her sister’s handbag had been tossed onto the entry table, its contents spilling out. The jeweled phone was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  Walking calmly to the back garden, El hid the device by tucking it into her armpit. In the corner beside the pool house, there was no camera coverage, because of the changing rooms. Suddenly glad Rose was always asking her to text Tom as she drove, El dialed a number.

  Oscar answered within two rings. “El?”

  “How did you know?”

  His laugh was so soothing—low and soft. She loved it at once. “The area code. What’s happening? Your entry was so generic, and then I saw the tag. That was the code, right? ‘Or well,’ like the writer? I’ve been clutching the phone ever since, just waiting.”