Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Regardless. She wasn’t done: “Colleen was brilliant. I mean, obviously. And so beautiful . . . and so accomplished. His father and I always knew that she was going to do something very special. She was going to leave her mark, you know? There are so few people like that, where you meet them and you just know they’re going to change the world. Colleen was like that. Just an extraordinary girl,” and she shifted the weight of the laundry hamper to one side and shrugged, affecting enormous compassion as she looked down at me, hard at work on a puzzle of puppies spilling out of a basket, and she’d say, “but he seems really happy with you.”

  Before you become practically impressed by her contempt, I want to drive home the point that this was an extremely typical example of Telling Stories About All the Girls My Son Has Known Who Are Better Than You. She even had a favorite variation on the game, which she played whenever she tired of other narratives. It was called Laura—with Whom He Went to High School—Is a Model and you can probably guess how it’s played, but it went like this: she was obsessed with reminding me that Laura, with whom he went to high school, was a model. If you think it’s hard to tease more than one conversation out of a seemingly very simple, discrete piece of data, you are dead wrong. No visit, whether for a weekend trip or weeks in close quarters, was complete without a reminder of Laura from High School.

  My then-boyfriend’s mother and her great venomous showpiece always began with a wistful look far away from me and then went like this: “I saw his old friend Laura today at the grocery store. All the boys were just in love with Laura. She was so tall,” and then she’d look at me because I’m five-eleven and say, “a little taller than you. She must have been almost six feet tall. And, God, she was so thin, so thin,” and then she’d look at me, up and down, say nothing, and continue. “She had the most beautiful skin and long beautiful brown hair. Just the most gorgeous girl. The kind of girl that you only see once in a lifetime. So, of course, she had to go and become a model. I think as soon as she graduated high school, she went off to Europe to walk the designer runways. I knew she was going to be a model, from the time she was thirteen. I remember seeing her when I was chaperoning a dance once and she just lit up the room,” and she’d pause again, because pauses were how she indicated the encroach of the killing blow, and she’d say, “She had such a crush on my son.”

  Her sheer commitment to the game and its brutal passive aggression was at least amusing. I acclimated quickly and learned not to take it personally because it seemed every time Laura from High School was in play conversationally, her presence would expand upward and become taller and thinner and somehow, impossibly, more beautiful. Every time. The game and its increasingly obvious exaggerations brought me much bittersweet entertainment until the night I actually met Laura from High School.

  I was in his hometown for Christmas, and all the kids who had moved away were back, catching up over drinks and pool games in the local dive bar. Right around ten o’clock, a young woman walked in and parted the crowd and many eyes were on her. It was Laura from High School, I knew instantly, and I can confirm she was indeed taller than me. That, though, was the only shred of truth.

  I’m not going to disparage Laura from High School (too much) because my dislike of her was colored almost entirely by my then-boyfriend’s mother. Almost. It was not her fault that my then-boyfriend’s mother had weaved for her this kind of outlandish folktale that didn’t line up with anything real.

  Laura from High School was absolutely not a model and that’s no disrespect to her. She was pretty in a robustly conventional way. She had the kind of forgettable, blandly attractive features that would make for a mean toothpaste commercial. But this isn’t about feelings of vindication regarding Laura from High School; this is about my then-boyfriend’s mom being a liar.

  One thing did really strike me about Laura from High School—and you could tell just by looking at her. A few years ago, she had indeed been very desirable and presumably very popular, but that was the apex of her existence. Life for Laura from High School was never going to approach the exhilarating, impossible high of being hot shit at seventeen—she would never be Laura from Anthropology Class or Laura from the Office.

  Have you ever met someone who said high school or college years are the best of your life? As soon as anyone ever says that, you should just X them permanently. They’re done; they don’t have anything to offer you; they are husks of humanity shuffling blind through an eternal dark. Worse still, they will drag you down with them in a flurry of insisting the jeans they’re currently wearing were purchased at sixteen. Anyone who has ever made a positive impact on society does not think of high school as the gold standard of human happiness.

  Within moments of entering the bar, fratty satellites moved into orbit around her, guys in visors who still hadn’t let go. She talked to them without seeming to pay attention, glancing over their heads and checking the bar for more important characters, clearly relishing not needing to uphold her end of conversation. After a while, she split off into a hallway, where the bathrooms were located. I saw my opportunity. Not in, like, an assault way, obviously.

  I was pretty fascinated to learn as much as I could about her and observe her in a secluded habitat. I ran into the hallway and took my place in line. There I stood behind the fabled Laura from High School, staring pretty unsubtly. She noticed, because she was a small-town pretty girl, which meant she always expected people to stare at her. We accidentally made eye contact a few times and on the third or fourth, we both held it long enough to require some next step.

  “Hi!” I said.

  She arched her nose and hesitated so I’d recognize that I was out of line by speaking to her. She said reluctantly, “Hi.”

  I kept staring now, because I was even more curious about her than before.

  Laura from High School looked away. She’d glance back and again look away in a huff. With each cycle, she became more irritated until finally she said, “Do I know you?”

  “No,” I said, in my most sprightly, aw-shucks homeschooler diction.

  “. . . Okay,” she said.

  I tried to stop staring at her, but by this point, our interplay of glances and looks away had become enthralling. She seemed urgent for the thrill of scowling at me and then looking away.

  “I’m Ashley,” I said, putting out my hand.

  She looked at my hand for a moment. She did not put out hers. Instead, she mustered all the judgment contained within her and said, “Are you, like, a lesbian or something?”

  “Totally!” I replied and then, as if to lay her down gently, added, “But you’re not my type.”

  Her time came and she entered the restroom. I wandered off. The last thing I’ll note about Laura from High School is that, later, I waved to her enthusiastically as I was leaving and heard her describe me to one of her fratty acolytes as “the dyke that tried to follow [her] into the bathroom.”

  Meeting Laura from High School proved that I was never going to be a good enough son’s girlfriend to my then-boyfriend’s mother. I tried, though: I even went to his little sister’s dance recital. If you’ve never been to a middle schooler’s dance recital, I would describe it as “the most anguish a human can endure without suffering physical pain.” It is three hours with one sickly sweet fifteen-minute break of eleven-year-old girls in unitards doing cautiously incompetent interpretive dance to currently chart-topping popular music. If you become a parent, you must remember to never ask someone not a blood relative of the child onstage to attend one of these hallucinatory nightmares. It is the single worst thing you can imagine that doesn’t involve harm to you or your loved ones.

  —

  Until you date a Mormon, which really distorts your understanding of being dealt a poor hand.

  For the moment, all you need to know about him is that he wasn’t very religious but his father, mother and extended family sure were. This was fine because,
though I like to make fun of it sometimes, I’m not intolerant at all of religion or people of faith. Some of the smartest people in history have believed in God, people vastly smarter and more talented than myself and almost certainly you who are reading this, unless your name is Homer, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky or Isaac Newton. You can’t say that people who believe in God and practice religion are all idiots. But the Mormon’s parents made it really hard.

  Once, I was staying with his family for Christmas Eve and, that morning, they invited us to church. Which is to say, they forced me to go to church with them by stating there would be no other option. That if I wanted to stay in their house, I would be accompanying them to church that morning. On a practical level, how am I supposed to wake up at seven a.m. and tolerate a God I don’t believe in? It’s not like they made coffee.

  The Mormon himself had a kind of agitated resignation when it came to his parents and he wasn’t going to speak up on my behalf. Because I was all of twenty years old, unable to afford a last-minute hotel room and in the middle of Colorado without any place to go as an alternative, I did what I thought was my only option: go to church with them and cry the whole time. Not gasping, snot-filled sobs or anything that would make a scene—I have way too much pride for that sort of thing—more like a quiet, defeated-but-dignified weeping. Like a Confederate soldier. There I sat in that church on Christmas Eve, completely astonished that I’d been made to worship, convincing myself I was a Faulkner character and this was a picture of reticent Southern dignity in the face of overwhelming loss.

  Some people might say, “Oh, shut up, Ashley, they just wanted you to come with them to church for like two hours for one morning in your life. They were putting you up!” But no, actually, what they were doing was shanghaiing someone to church. If the tables were turned, no one would defend me if I demanded they spend Christmas Eve getting shitfaced on bourbon and having guilt-free sex with someone they weren’t married to. That they’d have no choice if they were staying at my house. I wouldn’t do this because I’m not a bigot. It was the most I’ve ever hated religion in my entire life, the morning I sat in a Mormon church refusing to eat the sacrament of cubed Wonder Bread they passed around and miming hymns through bitter tears.

  I must admit the Mormon’s parents had a longstanding dislike of me going much further back than this fateful Christmas Eve morning. It actually all began within the first hour of our introduction. The Mormon and I had been dating for a few months at this point and it was time to finally meet his parents, so we drove about seven hours to Colorado for Thanksgiving. We showed up and they were distant but not cold, excited to see their son but understandably less excited to see the physical manifestation of his soul’s eternal damnation. Because—and this is a very shitty thing about being a girl—people think they know your sexual proclivities just by how you talk or dress or generally conduct yourself. Even though I’d packed every knee-grazing skirt I owned for the trip and weeded out any necklines that dipped below my scandalous collarbone, I wasn’t fooling them.

  Tangentially, I don’t know what it is about me that makes people so certain I’m “very” sexually experienced, as if that’s a sort of thing you can tell by looking at someone. I’ve been told variously that people think I’m promiscuous because I “speak my mind,” because I “wear short dresses,” because I’m “assertive,” because I “wear lots of eye makeup,” because I wear “heels “and “low-slung pants,” because I “drink whiskey.” So it sounds like all of these assumptions are pretty arbitrary and, fundamentally, sexist. Personally, I think the real reason people assume I’m sexually active is my wide stance. It always looks like I’m recovering from something.

  The Mormon’s parents took one look at me and determined immediately that I was not saving it for marriage, much less marriage in a Mormon temple (even though they give you your own planet, which sounds great). They had met me moments before and shook my hand and somehow they just knew their son and I had pulled over to have sex at least twice on the drive there. Maybe the second time we didn’t even pull over, because why would you make a seven-hour drive longer if you don’t have to? And they were right. They were absolutely right.

  But! I actually intercepted their suspicion early on and almost started turning things around. His mother and I had both studied art history so we ended up having a polite conversation about Hellenistic sculpture. She seemed cautiously impressed. Better still, it was extremely easy to find common ground with his father, because I’m a great cook and he’s a misogynist. Before I knew it, I was getting on surprisingly well with my Mormon boyfriend’s parents.

  At one point, his father became so enthused by my interest in cooking that he began describing a recipe for pasta sauce that he loved despite its sounding totally gross. It amounted to buying store-bought sauce, putting it in a pan and adding hamburger meat. Which isn’t really a recipe when you think about it. More like just combining things. I don’t buy two paintings and put them beside each other and then claim to have created a newer, better painting. That’s crazy. But I wanted him to like me (an instinct that results in approximately ninety-nine percent of my grief as a human) and I didn’t yet know these were the kinds of people who, a year later, were going to drag me to church despite me being a separate individual from them.

  He finished telling me the recipe and, up to that point, our conversation had mostly been about my personal interest in cooking and not much as it related to his son. He then motioned to his son, my boyfriend, my first adult boyfriend, my college boyfriend and said, “Do you cook much for him?”

  And, because I am a hopeless idiot, I replied, “I cook him breakfast!”

  He flinched. He visibly flinched.

  What is completely devastating about this situation is my answer was actually a very earnest, nonsexual one. What I meant to say is that we both lived on campus and didn’t have all that much access to a cooking facility, with the exception of morning meals during which the dining hall staff would set up a make-your-own-omelet station. You’d stand in line for a few minutes (judging others on the quality and execution of their omelets) and then take your place at this podium in front of a little hot plate and pan. Spread out before you were chopped vegetables and shredded cheese so you could customize your own omelet. It was the only actual cooking I could do, living on campus. So, when I told his father I “cooked him breakfast,” I meant that I would make him omelets in the dining hall before class in the morning and it was really the only kitchen time afforded to me. Granted, we were absolutely having sex the night before, but there was still a really wholesome aspect to my response.

  Let me tell you something about dealing with your significant other’s parents: don’t remind them you’re fucking their kid inside the first hour of meeting them. Especially if they’re religious. Especially if they’re Mormon. Let that go unsaid. They find the whole concept unsettling enough without you just letting the cat of the bag.

  I’ll tell you something else: there is absolutely no bouncing back from this. I tried, I really tried, I babbled something incoherent to the effect of, “Because they have a make-your-own-omelet station in the dining hall!” And then I tried to really sanitize it and said, “We meet there! He comes down from his dorm and I come from my dorm—we come from our respective dorms!—where we sleep, after studying, and we meet before class. Before class. In the morning. Our dorms are really far away.” But his father’s look of equal parts horror and recognition didn’t dissipate and in fact, over the next two years that I dated the Mormon, kind of seemed to harden there.

  Even though it was the most awful and uncomfortable moment I have ever shared with a boyfriend’s parents, the thing about it that still haunts me is my naïveté: I really was speaking to being devoted and adoring. I just wanted to make him omelets. In the morning, before class, at the expense of last-minute studying. And you know what? Most parents would think that makes me a great girlfriend.<
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  STRIPPERS

  I don’t talk to a lot of sex workers but that’s probably because they can smell fear. Still, from what I’ve deduced, there are three prevailing opinions in popular culture about what kind of person becomes a sex worker. First off, let’s just define our terms: by sex worker, I mean adult film stars, prostitutes and strippers. Strippers may not be explicitly paid for sex, but they certainly trade in it, so I’m counting them even though this flippant characterization may be a bit controversial. There are various schools of thought on whether or not strippers are indeed sex workers and I’m sure these various schools align themselves with progressivism in a way that I should do some rote Googling to discern. I chose not to because as soon as the Internet becomes a barometer of morality, we should probably all just die.

  The three predominant views about why women become sex workers are as follows:

  Whether for reasons of misogyny or guilt or moralizing, camp 1 suspects that the sex worker found his or her way into the industry through unsavory means like abuse, molestation, bullying, self-loathing, addiction, desperation, poverty or a pathological and relentless desire to be filled with dicks. These people buy into the stereotype of the damaged whore. They are bad or misinformed people who believe women in short dresses were all molested as children. They also tend to be the kinds of people who correct your grammar, which is even more repulsive.