“Many is a word that only leaves you guessing/Guessing bout
a thing, you really ought to know.”
-
Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin
Maggie assumed changing her hair caused this. Clipping her
tangled blonde locks to a stubble and bleaching the remaining fuzz white had
felt right after the blowout with RJ, knowing how much her husband adored her
hair. Well, it wasn’t going to stick around much longer anyways, she might as
well have it go out in style. She didn’t stop to consider how every change
disrupted the fragile constitution of her son’s nerves. RJ liked to blame that
truck ride a few years back, but the fact was that their son was always emotionally
high-strung. She cranked the window down, letting the damp spring air into the
stale climate of her Honda. Her son was descending the stone steps of Jordan
Middle School, his dark hair matted to his skull. He wore a black t-shirt
tucked into his blue jeans, a pair of generic sneakers, and black gloves. It
was April, and still he wore gloves. Maggie knew that RJ would blow a fuse
seeing it. She was more forgiving of Richie’s picadilloes than her husband, but
she couldn’t help but worry that other boys would pick on Richie.
Richie opened the
passenger door, dropped into the seat, his bookbag falling to his feet, and
crossed his arms, hiding each gloved hand under the opposite arm. His face was
pale, his eyes dark, and his shoulder blades pointed sharply out on each side
of his t-shirt. He was slightly undersized for his age, and very undersized for
his peers, who were all older after she and RJ had been convinced to bump him
up a grade several years earlier before all the behaviors were noticeable and
before that damn truck ride. His grades never slipped, but his moods and habits
grew extreme over time.
“Well?” She asked. She was still figuring out the liberal
parenting techniques she had embraced after seeing how terribly her parents’
ultra-conservative approach had pushed her out the door when she was seventeen.
Well, her parents’ style had pushed, and the Led Zeppelin tour of 1977 had
lured her away for good. Those two forces combined had meant she’d seen her
parents twice in the last fourteen years.
“Well, Richie?” She asked again, when her first attempt
didn’t yield a response.
“Rich, I’ve told you, call me Rich,” he mumbled. She ignored
the statement and waited. “I was washing my hands.”
“For twenty minutes?”
Unable to watch him stare at the dashboard any longer,
Maggie turned the Honda’s key and the engine coughed to life. Pulling away from
the school, Richie cranked his window down and then made for the radio dial.
“No,” she slapped his hand away. “We need to talk.”
“I was washing my hands, that’s why I was late to class. We
were outside in gym, throwing that stinking germ-infested rubber ball around. I
had to wash it off.”
“For twenty minutes, Richie, that’s crazy? Are you smoking?”
“Call me Rich, and Christ, Mom, smoking? Shit.”
“Don’t curse at me,” Maggie could drive with one eye on him
and one on the road, it was a skill she’d mastered over the last few years.
“I don’t smoke,” his gloved fingers smashed the radio buttons, and
the speakers burst to life, playing her Houses of the Holy tape. The
volume was cranked, as it often was when she’d been out driving alone.
They came to a stop sign and to their right was a cemetery,
most known for its monument to a Civil War veteran, who had fought for the
South despite being from Illinois. Why anyone wanted to honor the man in Jordan
was lost on Maggie. She’d volunteered for a group devoted to the removing the
monument, but so far, they had garnered little support from the community.
People like their monuments and hate change.
“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” she said. “That was
wrong of me.”
“Why? I am crazy, that’s why you send me to Dr. Bitch.”
“Don’t call her that, and no, you are not.”
“Whatever, I washed my hands for twenty minutes and then I
told the teacher to get bent when he asked me about it.”
Someone honked behind them, and Maggie flipped her middle
finger out the window before pulling over to the shoulder and killing the
engine in the middle of a Robert Plant vocal. The guy behind them, driving a
big Chevy, kept honking as he passed, and the word ‘bitch’ trailed in the air.
She embraced the term, when it came to her driving and her son, she could be a
Grade-A Bitch, and she felt no reason to apologize for it.
“So, now you’re suspended?” Her voice came out hoarse.
“Yeah, two weeks.”
Quiet followed with only the traffic resonating in their ears
and the lingering smell of fast food assaulting Maggie’s nose. She tried
to be a good mom, a good cook, a good housekeeper, but often they ate crap from
McDonalds or Hardees in the car as she raced from one cause to another.
“Well, then you’re going to the doctor with me tomorrow?”
“Doctor? For what?”
“For me.”
“You?”
“Yes, honey, your father and I have been putting off saying
anything until we knew more, but you’ll know now, I guess.”
“What is it?”
“A lump, honey, on my breast.”
No comments:
Post a Comment