A divorced mother, waiting nervously for her teenage daughter to return from a Saturday night date, can’t help brooding on the man who seduced and left her many years ago.
On a seductive, starlit evening made for teenage romance, Sherri’s sixteen-year-old daughter was out on a date. The jittery mother, seated opposite the dining room window, stared out at the deep-blue sky as her own mother filled her coffee cup. So here we sit, she reflected, planning to wait up until Renee gets home, however long that takes. Why else would we be drinking coffee at eight o’clock on a Saturday evening? Isn’t it the same pose Mom and Dad used to strike on those charmed date nights of seventeen years ago?
“It’s only a school dance,” she reasoned, giggling as if she were still the teenager involved. “A dance in honor of the football team. What could be more innocent?”
“Frankly,” remarked her mother, weighty with prior experience, “it’s what happens after these dances that concerns me.”
“After the dance, he’ll bring her home,” Sherri reasoned further. “According to Renee, he’s one of the star players. That means he’s on a strict curfew all the time. He never stops training.”
Buoyed by this reassuring thought, she sipped away complacently. Still, she couldn’t help reliving that other occasion, that “after the dance” of long ago. The memory made her gulp painfully, nearly singeing her throat. Dare she remind her mother that if it weren’t for a certain incident “after the dance,” Renee never would have been born?
“What else do you know about this boy?” pursued her mother. “Renee barely introduced him. She ran downstairs as if the house was on fire, grabbed his arm, and rushed off.”
“That’s perfectly natural. She knew we might’ve spent half an hour scrutinizing and grilling him.”
Sherri could supply her mother’s next remark, and her own after that, if they were headed down this beaten track again. Sure enough, her mother maintained, “If we scrutinize who she goes out with, it’s for her own good!”
“Of course it is,” Sherri replied, “but if you’ll remember, you and Dad used to apply that same scrutiny to me. How’d that turn out?”
“We did our best, dear. We had no way of knowing you would go out with one boy and end up in the back seat of someone else’s car.”
“That was normal teenaged rebellion,” Sherri said, “against the neighbor my parents hand-picked for me. Not that he wasn’t nice, but …” If she didn’t stop now, Mother would remind her that the hand-picked Bobby Bellack, the one she’d blown off, had not only become a respected attorney, but had acquired a supportive wife and lovely family.
“You don’t have to say it again,” Sherri continued. “I might have been an idiot not to love Bobby, but I simply didn’t. I loved …” She stopped when she saw her mother put her hands over her ears, as if she couldn’t bear to hear her ex-son-in-law’s name.
That goaded her to shout, “Jesse! That handsome, arrogant, long-haired kid who used to drive the school administrators insane. The one who used to paint those tasteless, scandalous murals on the school walls in the dead of night. I was a budding artist too, you know. How was I supposed to resist a rebel like that?”
“We tried to instill you with good values and a sense of responsibility,” Mother said. “Your upbringing should’ve prevented you from throwing away your life for a … a childish infatuation.”
Ah yes, my upbringing, Sherri reflected. My bulwark against disorderly passion. It’s upbringing that we’re now trying to impose on Renee, for her own good. For the sake of peace and safety, we three generations of women … the widow, the divorcee, the still-innocent if headstrong girl … have banded together in my childhood home. That pink bedroom, adorned with sweet still-lifes I painted myself, is now Renee’s whether she likes it or not. Meanwhile, her father has spent the past decade adventuring in that wild, pulsating world out there, pursuing all kinds of “alternative art” with his second wife.
Her mother refilled her coffee cup. “Now, Sherri,” she said in a tone no doubt meant to be comforting, but that came off as grating, “you have to stop brooding about the past. I can see that’s what you’re doing, and once you get in that funk, it goes on for days. In my opinion, the best thing that your … that Jesse ever did was leave you for that other woman.”
Now she had done it. True as it might be, why did she have to state it so baldly? Tears of humiliation filled Sherri’s eyes. She banged her coffee cup into her saucer, spilling it like a rebellious child. Her mother’s voice droned on in that oblivious, self-satisfied way: “It’s a shame you’ve never gotten on with your life, but it’s not too late. There’s no reason why you couldn’t still meet some respectable man … unless you’re still harboring the notion that he might someday come walking back through that door. As if he wasn’t remarried with another child.”
“No, Mother, you’re wrong. I don’t think that, and I never have.” Herein lay the dilemma of Sherri’s life. If Jesse had chosen to remain at her side, drawing ads in her father’s advertising agency for a steady wage, would her passion for him have survived? Instead, he had fallen in love with a model whom he was photographing for an experimental one-woman show … a sidelight that he never discussed with his conventional employer or his family. Her husband had humiliated her to the depths of her soul, leaving her and the life she represented … and she could neither forgive nor forget him.
Her mother sighed, as if acknowledging the futility of revisiting the past. Renee, who represented the present, was all that mattered now. “Well,” she said, “at least this football hero of Renee’s, being an athlete, couldn’t be much like her father. And Renee isn’t much like you, either. I mean, she’s never shown artistic tendencies.”
Mother sighed again, and added, “Not that your still-lifes aren’t nice, dear. The flowers in the vase are especially pretty and tasteful. But art is such an impractical thing, unless it’s channeled into something useful.”
“Let’s just hope Renee can learn from my terrible mistakes.” Despite her ironic tone, Sherri honestly believed that was what she wanted. It would make life infinitely easier if Renee married the “right man.” She was smart and pretty, and probably could have her pick when the time came.
Still, Sherri couldn’t resist one moment of revenge over the coffee cups. Her mother could always be needled with news of Jesse. “You know those letters Renee’s been getting from her father? The ones she won’t show us? Well, I think … I suspect he’s raised the idea of her going to New York to live with him for awhile.”
Sherri was right: it was Mother’s turn to spill her coffee as she rose to her feet in a near-howling rage. “Send my granddaughter off to live with her father and his mistress while they make porno films? Over my dead body!”
Sherri greeted this with wild laughter. “Honestly, Mother, he hasn’t got a mistress anymore. He’s got a wife and child, as you just pointed out yourself. And it so happens that a few of those experimental films of theirs have made some serious money. Jesse is almost respectable now.”
“Respectable?” Her mother laughed mirthlessly. “He can pretend to be as respectable as he likes. He’ll still be the degenerate who … who stole your virtue. Your innocence. I can only hope and pray that Renee will stay put. I think she will, if she’s really interested in this boy.”
The mother and grandmother were reduced to waiting on tenterhooks for hours, not knowing whether the teenager could be “saved” by a football hero. They jumped to their feet when she came in and slammed the front door … not a good sign. Maybe, Sherri thought, her petulance was due to their habit of waiting up for her.
Renee gave them a weary glance, devoid of those earlier stars in her eyes. “No third-degree right now, please. I’m not in the mood.” She bounded upstairs to her bedroom.
“Well,” Sherri proclaimed, “looks to me like he bored her.”
“You don’t know that,” Mother shot back. “It’s too soon to tell. She’s just tired.”
Now that the evening’s watch was over, they followed Renee upstairs, vowing to sleep on the issue. No sooner did Sherri lie down than a coffee surge almost lifted her out of bed.
Her usual remedy for insomnia was to pull a sketch pad out from under her bed and “fool around” until sleep came. She flipped through previous late-night efforts, yawning at the countless still-lifes of common household objects. She might try again to improvise on the vase and flowers, a version of which hung on her wall. Maybe tonight she would draw with abandon, until the vase melted into big drops and the flowers mingled together in a surrealistic dream or nightmare.
She knew what her mother would say if asked to hang such an effort. “But dear, you can’t even tell the flowers apart!” In the light of day, Sherri undoubtedly would agree. With scarcely an argument, she would step back within the boundaries of what Mother, and most of the world, considered good taste.
I LOVED IT! A CANDID, BELIEVABLE SCENE- GETTING DOWN TO THE REAL NITTY GRITTY OF FEARS, TEARS, REGRETS...DEALING WITH LIFE AND FAMILY. THANKS FOR SHARING. LOVE, BLESSINGS AND FAITH...JOYCE * HIS INSPIRATIONS
I enjoyed your realistic story, leaving me to wonder what transpired on Renee's date. Sherri needs to think outside the box, or in her case, a flower vase mired in the past.
The Wholly Book of Exodus is humorous adult literature that features adult language, situations and content. It is the companion book of Jay Dubya's The Wholly Book of Genesis that satires the entire first book of the Bible.
The Wholly Book
Major League ballplayer Justin Moore is kidnapped from his own ballpark and transported to a foreign land. It might take high-level international negotiations to free him. Or maybe he will take matters into his own hands.
