What happened one awkward night
- Posted on February 16, 2017
- in Uncategorized
- by caseyshuniak@gmail.com
When I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters, she smiled and made an awkward “That’s complicating” face, and she asked the bartender for a pencil when she ordered our next round. “It’s easier this way,” she said, then we both laughed. She drew a smiley face no bigger than a dime and said, “That’s my dad. And this here,” another smiley, “this is my mom.”
Her mom looked just like her dad except for a squiggly that was hair. They were side by side and she drew a line that connected them. “They got married and had three kids.” She hesitated, thinking about where to draw those faces – smaller because they were children – because there’d be more and they needed go in every direction. She only connected the children to the mother.
“Oh wait, I forgot his first marriage.” She drew marriage with a dark vertical line down the length of the napkin, almost tearing through it. Ultimately the napkin was in four pieces, three hard lines in a speckle of big and little circles, like a graphite sketch of lampposts in a blizzard.
But I followed the whole story. Mom was on the right and a dad was on the left. Another mother was left of dad. “They only had one kid. He’s my oldest brother. His name’s Robby. He’s in Colorado.”
“This is me here. These are my sisters. Sarah was a smart kid, always did good, never got in any trouble. She was in law school. Lauren’s a bed wetter. She peed on herself all the time, even in high school.”
As she talked, she doodled facial features – noses, pigtails, buck teeth, eye lashes, baseball caps. Someone got a unibrow. All she said was, “That’s him,” and three more children went around her mother again. They surrounded her like the electrons of an atom.
“And after those two got divorced it was kind of rough. Then Alice, Tommy, and Austin were all still pretty little and we didn’t have any money and my mom was really depressed. I was fifteen and she was drinking and she didn’t want to drink alone so she’d let me drink with her.”
Every now and then the girl thought about what to say next. She poked her tongue out from her lips, tasting the atmosphere, deciding whether to tell me too much or gloss over the real stuff with extra smileys.
“She said it was better than me drinking with my friends and getting raped by boys or killed in an accident. We drank a lot. Honestly I didn’t even talk to boys and I thought vodka tasted like hairspray… but drinking with her wasn’t a big deal and it was better than leaving her alone.”
She added some fangs and pointed ears to someone. Then she talked about these twins that had a different mother and how they looked like her, but still they all looked like their different mothers, too. And she laughed at how weird it is that things could happen that way. She lost me when she laughed like that. She said I just had to take her word for it.
“I haven’t seen them in over fifteen years, but I remember the first time I met them, it just blew me away! Same eyes, same smile, just like me.” On the napkin, the twins were a lopsided infinity topped with mini bows and googly eyes.
She doodled next to the faces. Robby had some jagged Rockies around him, and a sister was scratched out. “It was an accident. She was loopy after this knee surgery, and didn’t read the directions on the Oxycontin right,” she shrugged.
When I asked about her mom again all she said was, “She did the best she could with what God gave her,” even though it didn’t really answer my question. She must have felt differently, though. Or maybe it was something in my face.
…But, ok, see now… I didn’t know this girl well at all before this night. It was only our third date, and she was way drunker than I expected her to be. So anyways, she said something to me like this:
“I know how this sounds, how you’re probably thinking ‘Holy shit,’ right? But you know this wasn’t like right away or anything. All of this. It just sort of all happened and I look back at it now and I definitely know some of it was fucked up and wrong but… I mean…” then she shrugged and smiled, “it builds character.”
Just some blank shrug, like: That’s my story, now it’s your turn, Romeo.
I’m from northern Pennsylvania. I have a younger sister, and my parents gutted and remodeled an old farmhouse to make our home. The fireplace was solid stone, and my mom calls that character. It’s rustic and spacious and there are deer skins on the walls. My dad and I take hunting trips every year. Since I was eleven.
That’s why I lied. I’m really a good guy. I just didn’t want to talk about the farmhouse and our fireplace, about my parents, about rural Pennsylvania. Then for some reason, I have no idea why, I told her that my dad used to beat the hell out of me with his belt, the buckled end, and it’s where a tiny scar above my eye came from.
I just fell off my bike. No clue where that came from or why.
“Wow, what an asshole,” she smiled and laughed. She lost me every time she laughed like that. I’m a good guy, really I am. But for the life of me, when she called the next time, I just couldn’t pick up the phone.