Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  7.3.   My mother and stepfather came home with an extremely tall, thin Christmas tree wrapped tightly in twine. We slid it into the house without knowing much about it, though my stepfather predicted it was going to be too big, like he did every year. We placed the tree in the base, aimed the top for the center of the vaulted ceiling, and screwed it in, while the girls ran around throwing tissue paper from the ornament boxes, singing “Jingle Bells,” the “Batman Smells” version, and my son, who had recently mastered the stiff-legged toddle-run, bounced off all of the low objects in the room. I snipped the twine girdling the tree together, and when it exploded several feet outward, the bottom branches knocked my son off his feet. Wrapped up in all that twine was an enormous fat lady of a tree, a tree so magnificent it belonged in a church, or a department store in a midsized city. We started laughing. I picked up my son, who had begun to cry.

       “Look at this thing!” my mother said.

       “It’s too goddamn big is what it is,” my stepfather said.

       “Watch your language, David,” my mother said. “The children.”

       “It is a goddamn big tree,” said my oldest, who had just turned six.

       “Don’t cuss,” I said, and she asked, honestly, “Why not? You told Daddy ‘Merry fucking Christmas’ on the phone last night. I heard you.”

  8. BASIC RECONNAISSANCE

  8.1.   The dating site dude’s name was Keith. Forty-two, retired navy captain. Divorced, no kids. Lived off his investments. His photo was nice and I liked the idea of career military. It showed that he could follow rules, stay the course, yet I still looked up everything I could find about him without paying for a subscription database. After a week of e-mails, which I used to check his grammar, and another week of phone conversations, which I used to discern if he had the voice of a psychopath, I agreed to meet him at a high-end restaurant/bar in Fort Lauderdale for drinks and a bite to eat. He told me he would be wearing a white linen shirt. Like Jesus.

  8.2.   I wasn’t trying to date because I was lonely. Technically, I wasn’t lonely, because I was never alone. Every time I sat down in a chair, children would climb up in my lap. When I went to the toilet, there was a knock on the door from someone who had to ask me an important question right at the glorious crowning moment that makes a bowel movement worth it. Nearly every morning I would wake up with my face pressed against the wall, sleeping like a plank because the three-year-old had snuck in when I wasn’t looking and was spread like a snow angel in the middle of the bed. Sometimes a child would be spooning me. Sometimes the bed would be wet with pee and I would be sleeping in it. I wasn’t lonely at all. Far from it. What I was trying to do by attempting to date was to prove that I wasn’t worthless. Rejected. Unlovable. Unwanted. Unwanted is the worst.

       The alarming thing about this is that I had no business dating with young children and no career, and a heart and soul fresh out of the marriage ICU, a big battle scar in the place where relationship knowledge should have been. Anything you do, either with or without your kids, will eventually affect them anyway, so you need to be extremely careful. You must tiptoe through the rest of your life. I shouldn’t have tried to date, but I didn’t know it then. I was young. I was dumb. I felt so unwanted.

  8.3.   I put the children to sleep and got dressed up in a skirt for the first time in a year. I put on real earrings, not the puffy Ariel stickers the girls pressed onto my earlobes when I fell asleep. I hugged my mother good-bye and drove into town. The bar was decorated with party store Valentine’s Day kitsch, pink and red hearts with strips of plastic bursting forth from them, hanging like fake fireworks from the ceiling tiles, big X and O letters scrawled on the mirrors in lipstick. Everything looked shiny. Keith stood to shake my hand and lilted sideways briefly, and then steadied himself with one hand on the edge of the bar. I could see the beginning of an unfocused glaze in his eyes. Behind the bar was the kind of bartender you would want to hire if you owned a bar—crisp shirt, bright teeth, compassionately tipped eyebrows, cheerfully drying glasses with a white towel. We sat down.

       “What are you having?” Keith asked me.

       “A cranberry juice,” I said.

       “She’ll have a vodka cranberry,” Keith said to the bartender. “And I’ll have another Manhattan.”

       The bartender looked me in the eye as he gave us our drinks. He looked at Keith, then back at me. He raised an eyebrow.

       “So,” Keith said. “Tell me all about yourself.”

       “Well, I’m starting a handmade natural soap business and—”

       “Imma stop you right there. You know what I like about you? Your legs. They go on forever. You play basketball?” He looked me up and down.

       “Not so much,” I said. “I’m more into cycling.”

       “Me too,” he said. “I love to cycle. Love it.”

       “What kind of riding do you do?” I asked.

       “I don’t actually have a bike right now, but I love cycling. Anything you love, I love.” He put his hands on my knee. I looked at the bartender.

       “Please don’t,” I said, and I pushed his hand away.

       “Imma go to the head,” Keith said. As soon as he left, the bartender leaned in and said, “Did you drive here?” I nodded. “You need to go. This guy’s a creep. A drinker. He brings women here all the time.” This scared me. I stood up, but before I could gather my purse, Keith was back, sliding his hand around my waist.

       “Listen,” I started, “my son is sick. I have to leave.” I peeled his arm off me, and walked through the crowd of people to the door. Keith followed me. I walked toward my car and he followed me, bumping into people as he walked. I hadn’t realized he was this drunk. At my car, he said, “I made a mistake. I had one too many. Can you drop me off at my house? It’s three blocks away.”

  8.4.   I didn’t say no when I should have. It was a problem of mine. I unlocked my car door and let him in. He couldn’t give me clear directions to his house, so I drove him around for twenty minutes while he babbled about the babies he was going to put in me, and when we found his house, he wouldn’t get out of the car. I had to go around to the passenger side and pull him out by his arms. I raced back around to the driver’s side, locked my door, and had begun to back down the narrow road when he pulled out a handgun from inside his waistband, pointed it into the air, and shouted, “Nobody tells Keith when the date is over!” He shot once into the air. I peeled out.

  8.5.   I was still shaking when I unlocked my mother’s front door. You’re an idiot, I thought. You have children. You have no business ever dating.

       My mother was in the family room, reading. “You’re home early,” she said. “How was it?”

       “I’m an idiot,” I said. I stomped past her and went straight to the computer in my room to unsubscribe from the dating site. Right as the arrow of my mouse hovered over the “Delete Profile” button, a new message popped into my inbox. The photo was handsome. Athletic. Ruddy cheeks. He looked like a coach. Nope, I thought, do not click on that, but something seemed to guide the mouse arrow over to the inbox and I clicked open the message and fell into it like quicksand, though I still don’t know how. It was the last week of January, three weeks before Valentine’s Day.

  9. BREAKING THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  9.1.   I met the coach at a Mexican restaurant. There was a waiting list, so they gave us a small plastic box and told us to come to the hostess desk when the box began to buzz. We sat outside on a bench and talked while we waited. He showed up dressed like a coach: khakis with sneakers, polo shirt, a windburned, sunburned face, and a ruddy red neck. His hair was also parted on the side, but it didn’t matter. We talked so much that we didn’t notice we w
ere the only ones left, that an hour had passed and everyone else had gone in and our buzzer never did buzz. We found the hostess and she sat us right away.

  9.2.   After dinner, we went out to the parking lot and sat in his car, an ’86 Mustang, so we could look at the interior. I love car interiors. It’s an odd interest of mine. The smell of them, the dash design, the shape and feel of the seats, the color choice, the door handles: All of this makes me happy. It’s the closest to being in a spaceship that most of us will ever get. We talked about car upholstery, cars we had owned and loved, our kids (his two and my three) and where we grew up, and sports, and other things. We sat there so long we watched the dishwashers leave out the back door, and the restaurant manager lock up for the night. We agreed to see each other again.

  9.3.   After our work was done and the kids were asleep, we would talk on the phone, often late into the night, long past when we should have gone to bed. We talked as if we had a lifetime of talking to catch up on, but I was wary. I didn’t want to like him too much. There was my own heart to protect, but there were also five children. I didn’t want us to do anything rash. At one point, I tried to discourage him from seeing me.

       “I’m a disaster,” I told him. “I live with my parents in a back bedroom. I don’t even have a job.”

       “Very smart. You’re taking some time to regroup.”

       “I have chronic anxiety,” I said.

       “I don’t ever have that,” he said.

       “My kids are so little they’re a liability.”

       “A month after meeting me they are going to like me more than they like you,” he said.

       “I’m telling you, I’m a disaster,” I said.

       “Well, I’m an engineer. We love disasters.”

  9.4.   Valentine’s Day was a Wednesday night. We were scheduled to go out on our third date the following Friday, but he dropped by after my kids had gone to sleep to bring me a chocolate bar. He said he could only stay a minute, so I walked him out to his car. I wanted to kiss him, but I didn’t say anything. We had not kissed yet.

       “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.

       “I didn’t get you anything,” I said.

       “I don’t need presents,” he said. We lingered by the garage door for a minute.

       “Well, I’ll e-mail you tomorrow,” he said. E-mail is also how I first checked his grammar and punctuation, but it became a way for us to talk during the days when we were busy with our families.

       “Okay. Good night,” I said. “Thank you for the chocolate.”

       “You’re welcome,” he said. I watched him walk toward his car, and when he reached the bumper he turned and walked back to where I was standing, grabbed my face with both his hands, and kissed me until my knees buckled. I had to lean up against the garage door to recover.

       “I wasn’t quite ready to say good night,” he said. “Now I am. You good?”

       “I think so,” I said.

       “Good night, then,” he said, and he drove away.

  9.5.   Two months later, we stretched out in the hammock on my mother’s back porch and held hands while we looked at the light pollution in the South Florida sky. We talked until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. It was time for him to leave. He turned to me all of a sudden and said, “I love you.”

       I didn’t know what else to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind.

       “Thank you.”

       We were married a year later.

  10. CLEARING THE MINEFIELD

  10.1. Second marriages have a low rate of success. A statistic I found from one of those imperfect, yet snooty psychotherapists who gets a book deal and thinks he can save the planet with his impartation, says that two-thirds of them fail. That’s worse than first marriages, and first marriages are a liquid love minefield, simmering with all sorts of malignable potential, and when they go wrong—kabloom! I don’t think children of divorce can survive a second detonation. To survive a second marriage, you must completely demine the field of any explosive remnants of war, however slow, expensive, and dangerous the process may be. Along the way, if all goes well, the protocol itself will change from military to humanitarian, and the children will once again begin to feel safe.

  10.2. Because we had each been through a divorce, my second husband and I should have been frightened of the ways our new marriage could explode us and our assemblage of children, but we chose to be proactive instead, deliberately unfurling our hands from the grip we had on failure, misperceptions, bad patterns of thought, and the very idea of what a family should be. We rebuilt something new from the ground up, out of the rubble of two destroyed families, from swords of bone and flaps of muscle, from misalignments, and fractured loyalty, from the stumps that are left after you step on a land mine. We cleared the field. We built the fort back up and lived in it fiercely. We hung our flag.

  MEN I WOULD HAVE SLEPT WITH

  Disclaimer: I am happily married.

  BATEMAN, JASON

  Because freckles. And because he is the kind of guy who would probably like to be on bottom. The kind of guy who, being in this position, could watch you, but wouldn’t. He’d just close his eyes, clasp his hands behind his head, and let you watch him, which is strangely intimate. Also, the fact that it is easy to imagine being in a relationship with him based on characters he plays in the movies, which is what every straight woman who has seen Jason Bateman says. I’ve never denied being basic.

  BRUNO

  The French exchange student when I was a high school freshman and he was a senior and he flew back to France at the end of the year without having known I existed. He wore a tiny biracial Afro when everyone was wearing fades, and tight pants when everyone was wearing baggy. And his polo shirts were of a European fit, which means I could see his latissimus dorsi when he turned his back on me, shifted his books in his arms, and walked down the hall to chat up the cheerleaders who attached themselves to him like ticks. He looked so very French, although he is probably bald now. Sometimes you can forecast things like this by high school hair patterns, but for me, baldness is not a problem. See also Levin, Tony.

  BUCKLEY, JEFF

  Because he used his knowledge of Bartók to create atypically phrased, elongated rock arrangements and because his last good-bye was something only Mark Twain could have drummed up: drowning in the Mississippi River. He drowned in a river while sober and while singing “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin. Who does that? If it were up to me, I would have been f%*ing him silly that night instead of letting him walk alone at night by a river.

  BULL, SITTING

  I fear people will think I am adding him to build a dimension of diversity to this list, which I am not doing. He was hot and I’m an equal opportunity sex fantasizer. Because cheekbones. And because I would have tanned hides for him. And watered his horse. And disrobed for him under the night sky.

  CARSON, BEN

  Because hands that hold tiny tools that separate people who are stuck together at the brain, and because soft-spoken, though putting Ben Carson on this list is like saying I want to know Jesus in the biblical sense. Carson is a devout man and as such, it feels wrong, but look what I’m doing here as a whole: You’re not reading any prize-winning advancement of modern literature, you’re reading a fantasy sex list. See also Tebow, Tim.

  CENA, JOHN

  Because cancer kids, and perhaps a low-rolling sexual rage that only comes out during the full moon, and because I am an unabashed muscle slut who dreams of feeling like a tiny, delicate flower for fifteen minutes. See also James, LeBron.

  CHEADLE, DON

  Because a thousand times yes, although I fear I would squash him like a bug.

  CHEKHOV, ANTON

  Becaus
e beard and because he wrote Ivanov in two weeks, while also working full-time as a doctor, while also treating the poor free of charge, which speaks to a kind heart. No lip kissing the lungers, though due to Chekhov’s Generalized Hotness Factor (GHF) of 8.2 on a 10 scale that rivals even the best of the Pinterest inked-up hipster beard boards, this would be the kind of nearly impossible primal challenge hot-blooded teenagers battle during religious retreats. You know you’re not supposed to do it, but you want to so bad you could crush a mason jar in your fist. See also Holliday, Doc, and Irving, John.

  CUSTOMER IN WHEELCHAIR—LEGAL SEA FOODS, COPLEY PLACE, BOSTON, MA

  Again, not trying for any inclusivity awards here. This list does not use universal design. So what, the wheelchair? I don’t care about that stuff. You don’t need working legs to be sexy. The man had massive shoulders and a presence that caused me to sweat inside my bra, and I made another waitress switch tables with me so I could wait on him. He ate a cup of clam chowder, a roll with butter, and a steamed lobster. Then he ordered coffee and one profiterole, of which he ate one bite. The economy of that—that measured self-control—made me want to intimately know him. This was before the Internet, so I would have had to put out some effort, riding my bicycle to the library, then looking up the phone number to a major teaching hospital with a spinal cord injury center, and requesting literature on sexual positions and special considerations for wheelchair-bound populations, et cetera. Then I would have studied the literature. Then shaboinked this man with the lights on.

  DE NIRO, ROBERT

  Because as a straight woman, I am required by the Union to put him on my list, although I fear I wouldn’t stand a chance with him because he has a type and I am not it.

  DOCTOR, FIRST-YEAR RESIDENT, EMERGENCY ROOM, NORTH FLORIDA