“Pick up some Twinkies on the way back.” Marketa Winthrop shoos her on her way with a trill of fingers.
Sheila makes a left by the trusty 7-Eleven, onto the road to Maple Villas, where she and Briggs reside. Washington County scares her. What were farm roads three crops ago are now lined with strip malls and condos and industrial parks, each cluster of buildings shamelessly jury-rigged—cheap Tudor veneer on Ye Olde Shoppes. Months old and the whole shebang already looked worn out. There are no landmarks here. Down in the city, where they had lived with the ex, you navigated using the brewery, the steeple of St. Cecilia's, the smokestacks at the auto plant. In Washington County not even the old-timers knew their way around. “I think you turn down by the old Jamison place. Go another mile or so to where they tore down the silo.” Pale faces eyed her with mild contempt, as if a black woman didn't deserve a home on the grange. Or perhaps they blamed her personally for the distant city landing on their former cornfields in all its four-lane glory. Sheila turns past the crumbling sandstone cairns that mark the entrance to her apartment complex. There are no maples and the villas are peach-bricked, generic boxes, with opera balconies and too many yucca plants.
One thing for Briggs: He has the good sense to know when not to push his luck. He is waiting on the porch, just as he knew she'd expect him to be, one less thing to go off about. Fourteen years: She'd depleted her repertoire of responses to the boy. Hysterical mom. Frustrated mom. Blasé. Rageful. Shaming. She could mount a full season of one-woman shows—Hey, there was an idea: The Psychotic Divorced Mother's Repertory Company. Rent out a church basement. Sell gin and tonics and Prozac at the concession stand. Begin each season with Medea.
She rolls down her window. “Get in this car and start talking,” she orders. She'd save the small talk for the suits at school. Climbing in, Briggs slouched down next to her.
“Well, you see, the thing is, it was just that me and Cedric . . . Oh, by the way: You're looking fine today, Ma. That's a really nice dress.”
“Don't even, Briggs.” Sheila rolls her eyes. Instead of a theater company, how about an anticharm school? She could make piles of money training philandering politicians and your garden-variety teenage-male alternatives to being unctuous when caught with their pants down.
“Out with it,” she orders.
“Like I said. Me and Cedric . . .”
“Cedric and I.” What did they teach in these damn schools anyway?
“Yeah, that. We were sitting in class, and we were just sitting there and this one kid said that Cedric had ashy legs and then Miss Stephes said turn around and then Cedric said your mama's breath smells like socks and cheese and then I laughed and then Ms. Stephes said go to the office.”
Sheila monitors Briggs' face while she negotiates a turn. Sincerity to contrition, dissolving too quickly to oily self-pity.
“You don't even believe that story yourself,” she chides.
“Yeah, I do. That's just how it happened. Except . . .”
And there it was: there was always an “except.” Sometimes Sheila thinks she should carry in her lap posterboards with large numbers written on them that she could raise and vote on the most promising rendition. Version two of the story is parallel to version one “except” for the fact that Briggs had been the one making the comment about socks and cheese, and said comment had occurred after numerous attempts on the part of Miss Stephes to quell the squawk fest. Briggs looks gravely off into the distance as he delivers this tale, the same way the elderly grandfathers do on Masterpiece Theater. A gullible person would be moved to tears. Version three of the story, also fairly parallel, went into great detail about the baneful Miss Stephes, who evidently had installed a torture chamber directly beneath her classroom specifically for the purpose of making Brigg's life a living hell.
“She's evil, Ma. You don't know.” Briggs quakes a little, remembering, no doubt, the grip of thumbscrews, the pull of the rack.
Sheila sighs. Another Briggs three-pack. Somewhere in the middle of all these words is the truth. Or a truth. The frustrating thing is that Sheila knows her son isn't really a liar. His father? Now that was a liar. There was a man who could drag himself in at three in the morning, reeking of knock-off Chanel, with a pair of panties slung around his neck, look you right in the eye and tell you he'd spent the evening at the bowling alley. Briggs on the other hand is basically an honest boy. It's the basically part that troubles her. Like filling out your income taxes, with Briggs it was a game of approximations. Round up a little here, round down a little there. This was America: You develop a poker face, tell your best story, and stick with whichever version doesn't get you audited. What Briggs and his father had in common is that they both believed every word that came out of their mouths. Sheila spent sleepless nights worrying about quarters she'd neglected to return to petty cash. Briggs slept the sleep of angels, as serene and innocent as his first nights on Earth.
Sheila makes a left onto a short and nameless freeway that had been constructed for the sole purpose of carrying people like her from one side of the county to the other. What was she doing in a place like this? People like the kind of person Sheila had intended to become lived in the city, in red-brick and ivy-festooned neighborhoods, with coffee bars and cute restaurants that served things like couscous and tiramisu. These days it was the ex and his various sluts who got to sit under the ailanthus trees, read the New York Times and sip espresso. Sheila got to go to the 7-Eleven and to junior highs and drive on nameless roads past buildings too slick for growing things.
“Honestly, Briggs,” she says. “What am I supposed to say to these people?” That smug and priggish AP, who fired statements at you about your child and then dared you to come up with an appropriate response. Last time it was “We discovered your son and his buddies beneath the bleachers during a pep rally with a pair of binoculars and a flashlight,” and then he sat waiting with his fingers folded on his desk.
“Boy, I'm sure you'd hate to do something like that” is what Sheila had wanted to answer, though this was not the sort of response that won you the prize money. “He'll be dead by sunset” was the sort of thing they had in mind.
“We were collecting the money that dropped from kids' pockets.” That had been Brigg's excuse for the bleachers, though he really needed to work on his delivery. A truly unfit mother would have given some pointers. Smile and nod, son. Show some confidence. Try not to make each statement sound like a question.
Briggs, Briggs, Briggs. Just look at the darling boy. Wasn't it only yesterday he was burbling in his crib, taking his first baby steps? Now he was arguing with lunch ladies, cruising the hallways like a shark, firing off Vegas-style one-liners. Sunrise, sunset. A veritable storehouse of smarmy remarks, her son: “Hey girl, bring them twins over here.” “Stop by my locker so you can meet my friend.” “Baby, you know I could rock your world.” Briggs could give Ralph pointers on gross. She considered sewing his lips together, but that still left the hands.
“Your son had better learn where those mitts of his belong,” Antonio had warned.
Sheila remembers the sweet and endearing olden days at her own junior high, when squeaky-voiced boys would put an arm around you and maybe try to grab a feel. Silly things: They'd pretend to walk into walls. They'd bang their heads into lockers because you were such a knockout. But when you woke up one day and it was your son with the smart mouth and the fast hands and the too-smooth demeanor, the word “endearing” went the way of Quiana blouses and the Jackson Five.
“Understand our position, Miss Braxton. We're responsible for these young women.” That's what the John Antonio had said, a leaky hiss on the “ss” in Miss. Well, Sheila thought, fine: but slap a dickey over the cleavage of Miss C cup over there, and tell the rest of these hussies to stop calling my house at all hours of the day and night.
Didn't any of these people have children of their own? Wasn't there one person at Whispering Pines who had ever been fourteen? Maybe everyone here had been like tho
se AV club boys who at sixteen already wore white shirts and looked like they were about to knock on your door and sell you a subscription to the Watchtower. Maybe they were all like Miss Stephes, right out of teacher college and fresh off the farm. An ordinary brownskin boy like Briggs set her atremble. Imagine! Briggs! Harmless as a calf! What on earth would she do if she ever came across a truly tough customer?
No wonder they wouldn't help you. Sheila had pleaded with Antonio for advice.
“I'll do anything,” she'd begged.
He'd inhaled sharply through the nose in that way that all former coaches had of letting you know that they were about to tell you something that anyone other than an idiot such as yourself would already know.
“Bottom line, Miss. Boys need a strong hand. You either find a way of getting him in line, or he'll have to find another place to go school.”
What was it they were always saying about how it takes a village to raise a child. Sure sounded good, but try being a mother with a son. Then it became “You squeezed the bastard out, now you do something about him, or else.”
Traffic on the nameless expressway is backed up at the last of its two exits. Traffic is always backed up here, as unfortunately there are no other non-dirt roads connecting the two halves of the barbell-shaped region. In the seat beside her Brigg's long legs have begun bouncing the way they always do when he worries.
“It's a beautiful day today,” he cheers, brimming with false enthusiasm.
“I'm not doing nice,” Sheila responds. “Does the word ‘mortification' mean anything to you?”
“Ain't she the mom on The Addams Family?”
“Don't try and make me laugh.” She gives him the evil eye and then laughs with him anyway. Damn cute boys. What could you do but shake your head, throw up your hands, and join the fun? She'd even gone to her boss for help.
“I'm having some problems with Briggs,” she'd proffered.
Marketa Winthrop had riffled a page in her Black Enterprise. “This Briggs is your boyfriend, right?”
“My son.” Which Sheila had told the woman a thousand times.
“And he would be how old?”
“Fourteen. The school called again and . . .”
Marketa Winthrop had cut her off by waving her hand. “Look, honey,” she'd said. “Fourteen. Hair on the balls. I can sum this up in two words: military school.”
Ralph, who that day had been compositing personal ads on the computer, shared Sheila's outrage at this comment.
“It would be my hunnor to keel for a bootiful wummun lak jou,” he'd said, flashing and flexing his eyes at her. She'd recently had the misfortune of observing her own son practicing the same faces in the bathroom mirror.
“Oh, but you mustn't,” she'd demurred. She wondered if the mothers of fourteen-year-old boys were allowed to be ingenues.
“Lat me tek jou avay to peredize,” he'd cooed, and she remembers thinking, this is what Eve must have felt like when her big snake came along: scared and excited at the same time.
Sheila had declined. As a consolation prize, Ralph offered her a list of reputable, male-only boarding schools, the efficacy of which he could personally vouch for.
“Jes look vat thev dun for me.”
Indeed, she thought. She received similar advice from her parents and even from Brigg's father. Everyone so anxious to dump adolescent males. What was up with that? Maybe there was something she wasn't being told.
“But he's such a sweet boy,” she'd told Marketa Winthrop.
Marketa Winthrop had snapped her gum and taken a drag on her Kool and said, “Hun, that's about ninety-eight percent of your problem right there.” Then she'd sent Sheila off to the 7-Eleven for more donuts.
Ahead, just off the unnamed freeway, Whispering Pines Junior High looks to Sheila like the sort of building where secret plans are hatched to assassinate third world leaders. Beige trapezoids of white-stuccoed concrete, no windows, sit in the middle of parking lots, which sit in the middle of bulldozed fields, which back up against farms, which still have cattle grazing in the field. No pines can be seen, and nothing and no one here whispers about anything. When they'd come to register, Sheila and Briggs had been escorted on a tour by a helmet-haired woman who was advancing her career in public education by spouting phrases such as “child-centered” and “high tech, high touch, and high teach.” The woman was well put together for a school person, but around her eyes she had applied her makeup in a way that indicated to Sheila that at some point she had lived at least a marginally wild life. Did she ever imagine, back on those nights, haunting the bar at the TGI Fridays, that she'd be spending the rest of her life escorting herds of mothers and their sullen offspring on tours of a public school? Her junior tour guide had been one of those student council treasurer types, with a little too much enthusiasm for Sheila's taste.
“This is where we eat lunch. It's really neat. That's the library. It's really neat.” Everything had been “neat,” not just all the classes and teachers but also the girl's fingernails and hair and brand-name sweatshirt. She was the sort of girl that Sheila and her friends would have backed into a stall in the girls' bathroom and glowered at until she broke down in tears.
The former wild liver had described Whispering Pines as the Triple A+ Magnet School of the Future.
“Your children can take Aikido, Mountaineering, Reader's Theater, Cooking with Math. It's a rich and dynamic environment.”
Did they have any regular classes here, anything resembling literature or history? These were the sorts of questions that Sheila had wanted to ask, but the whole business of finding a place to live after the divorce and a school for her son had numbed her into silence. She had discovered that in the years she had been out of circulation, the leasing offices and schools had replaced all the people who used to answer questions—simple questions such as where's the laundry room and does this school have bus service—with well-groomed robots who only knew the words memorized from scripts. If you interrupted them, they had to go back to the beginning of the tape.
“Your child will absolutely love it here,” Helmet Hair had said, and for the most part Briggs did love it, but then Briggs could make friends anywhere. He'd probably win the congeniality award on death row, which is the place these people would like her to believe he was headed.
She should have known this was the wrong school. Too much perkiness in the hallways. Too many straight white teeth in too many expensive outfits. Too many Jennifers and Heathers and Jacobs and Sams. She'd had to resign from the Whispering Pines PTA after one too many conversations with parents who'd already put down deposits on their childrens' Ivy League educations. What do you have planned for Briggs? they'd asked. “I was kind of hoping he'd impregnate your daughter Brittany and move into your house,” she'd thought. Sometimes Sheila wants the bumper sticker on her Neon to read “My C Student Kicked Your Honor Roll Student's Wimpy Ass.”
Thank God Briggs was resilient. These Whispering Pines people could stamp their damn cookie cutters on him all they wanted and Briggs would still be Briggs, at least that's what she hoped. But didn't resilience wear down? Wasn't it like the rustproofing on your car? A year of rain, fine, but five years and all warranties were off.
She eyes him there in the seat beside her. Head nodding gently to some tune in his head, oblivious, whistling—against fear perhaps, but it was hard to say with Briggs. He had never been the whistle in the dark type. All Briggs knew of the hard streets he'd learned from the make-believe videos on MTV. Damn cute, silly, silly boy. He really believed he was the life of the party, everybody's best friend. He didn't even have a clue as to how much trouble he was in.
The point of all of this, of course, was to raise them up and send them off into the world, into their own happy families and into fabulous careers of their choosing, but thinking of this only causes Sheila shudders. Frankly, she was barely employable herself. Twelve years of diapers, volunteering at school, cooking nutritious meals, and then, just like that, she'
d been out on the street. And while child support looked good on paper, she wasn't about to rely on regular checks from a man who couldn't figure out to at least take a cat bath before leaving some whore's motel room.
Publisher's personal assistant: that seemed like a glamorous enough position. On the days Sheila feels great she even believes that she is the glue that holds her office together. Most days, however, she knows this is hubris—a good former English major word. For the most part Sheila gets paid for returning clogged nail polish and to shop around for humane poodle groomers.
Even so, despite spending her days with a woman who believed it was a good idea to wear cruise wear to the office everyday, Sheila knew that there were many worse jobs. Winthrop and Rolle left plenty of time to make another plan and for her, as of late, weekly visits to Whispering Pines Junior High. The only really bad part were the hourly trips to the 7-Eleven. It had occurred to her only last week that the Pakistani man behind the counter believed that she herself consumed the mountains of junk food she hauled out of there each day.
“Not for me,” she'd shouted last week, waving her hand over an assortment of Ding Dongs and packaged nuts.
“Very good, very good,” he'd said. At the time she'd thought it polite, now she believes it's the Pakistani version of “Whatever.”
That could be Briggs, she thinks. My son, spending his life trapped behind the counter of the convenience store, bagging up junk food for lying binge eaters.
She pulls into the visitor's parking space by the front entrance.
“Sorry I'm so bad,” Briggs says.
Something in Sheila's chest does a somersault. She feels herself filling up with that sensation she remembers so well from when Briggs was an infant. She would get this way when someone, usually an older woman, would lean over the carriage and cluck over her adorable child.
“Yes, he is precious,” she'd concur, despite his being covered at the time with chunky yellow bits of gummed Zwieback. She'd always found this emotion unnamable. What would you call it? It wasn't pride and it was something other than love. It was a kind of ecstasy, and mixed in with that the absolute conviction that if anyone so much as plucked a hair from her angel's head, she'd hunt the barbarian to the ends of the Earth and peel him alive with a dull vegetable knife.
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