Fool For Love, page 20
Rob Williams
We were on our way to set up for Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen birthday party when my mother, who was driving, slammed on the brakes of our burnt-red station wagon, causing the entire contents of the back seat, including tablecloths, multicolored disposable plastic cups, streamers, rolls of butcher paper, and Mrs. Kingston to come hurtling to the front of the car. Mrs. Kingston, our neighbor and my mother’s new party planning assistant, was fine, if a little disheveled and shaken, but the tiny black pillbox hat she had attached to her head with an elastic band had slid further forward so that it was just below her forehead.
“Cocktail napkins!” my mother screamed at her. “For God’s sake, how hard is it to get simple cocktail napkins!”
Poor Mrs. Kingston. She was a novice. She’d only been assisting my mother for a few days after begging for years to let her tag along, to help out. (“I’ll just watch from the sidelines. I won’t be in the way.”) My mother said she just didn’t have the knack for parties. Her taste in streamers was appalling. But her husband had left her three months ago and my mother took her under her wing. A new project. My mother was famous for her projects.
And now Mrs. Kingston had made a mistake. She’d bought rectangle-shaped paper dinner napkins, and not the square, thin, cocktail napkins with the shell embossing that my mother had asked for.
“You can’t fan a dinner napkin!” she screamed again.
“Maybe we can cut them in half?” asked Mrs. Kingston, her voice cracking. She had straightened her hat and was now picking up the plastic cups that had fallen between her legs and onto the floor of the car.
“Don’t be an idiot,” my mother said. “You can’t even do a simple thing like buy cocktail napkins. We’re going to have to stop at the five-and-dime, which is going to put us seriously behind schedule.”
“I’m sorry.”
Party planning was never something my mother got paid for—she worked part-time in the credit union where my father was manager—but it was her hobby, and from the time I was old enough to hold a glue gun or know the difference between a sequin and a spangle, I was her assistant, her right-hand man.
A Tupperware party, as hosted by my mother, would become a Tupperware luau. We’d drink frothy, fruity drinks out of coconut shells. She would light citronella tiki torches and place them around the backyard, and then put Tupperware products on tiny rafts and float them out into the middle of our pool. In order to inspect the goods, guests had to take a dip. For that party I made two dozen multicolored crepe paper leis and draped our backyard fence with fish netting and glitter-encrusted seashells.
My mother also made her own clothes, not in the traditional sense—not with tissue paper patterns—though she had a sewing machine. Instead she would buy her clothes, jeans with elastic waistbands, plain sweatshirts in soft pastel colors, at Gemco or Mervyns and then she would alter them, as she called it. She would accessorize them. She would BeDazzle the sweatshirt or a pair of jeans with beads, sequins, puffy wash-proof glitter paint, and remnants and leftovers from her projects. Because she never threw anything away.
Party planning kept her extremely busy. My dad was free to have his poker nights and his football Sundays while she whipped up theme parties for the community. The neighbors “hired” her to plan their events. The elementary and high schools consulted her for their dances and parties. She was never paid for it; she would have a budget to work with, but she never charged for her services. She was having too much fun. Sometimes she would be treated to lunch or receive bouquets of flowers, fruit baskets, or gift certificates. Mostly, though, my mother’s reward came from being completely in control of someone else’s celebration, someone else’s happiness.
She pulled the car into the store parking lot, and I decided to save Mrs. Kingston any more embarrassment by getting the napkins myself. I knew exactly which kind to buy, but really I just wanted to get away from my mother, who’d been growing more and more irritable since my decision a few weeks earlier to keep my party planning assistance to a minimum. I was, after all, a sophomore in high school, and I was beginning to realize that my constant creative collaborations were hindering my social life. I wanted to go to parties, I told her, not plan them.
The other problem was that we were becoming a familiar sight in our community, too familiar: mother and son in the station wagon, the back seat crammed with foam rubber, yarn, old costumes, ratted wigs, and odd pieces of furniture. Hardly a holiday or friend’s birthday party went by without us playing some part in the planning of potential merriment.
There was a time when I thought I had the most inventive mother in the world. What was more, she seemed to understand me. Unlike my father, who was frustrated at my failed attempts at helping him change the oil in the station wagon, my mother marveled at my craftsmanship. She respected and often sought my opinion for color schemes and flower arrangements. She helped cultivate my artistic inclinations while offering up excuses to my father for my athletic and automotive shortcomings.
I had decided that Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen party was going to be my swan song—the last party where I would be my mother’s sidekick. Sure, I would be available for consultations or questions about color schemes and party themes. But no longer would I assist my mother at the parties, donning embarrassing homemade outfits: a court jester in satin knickers, a butler in white gloves with an oversized bow tie and tails. I had finally gathered up enough nerve to tell her a couple of weeks earlier, much to her dismay, as we were setting up for my sisters’ high school Valentines Day dance. It was a fifties theme—a sock hop—and as usual, my mother and I spent several evenings in her sewing room going over the preliminaries.
While she silently sewed my sisters’ poodle skirts, I put on a K-Tel record that she’d ordered off the television. It was a two-record set of 1950s girl singers who chirped about love and loss, boyfriends and bobby sox.
“Heatwave” by Martha and the Vandellas came on the record player while I kept myself busy with the party decorations. I glued shiny chunks of confetti onto old 45s we found at a garage sale. I also covered several hula-hoops with glitter, and then started going through a stack of glossy black-and-white photos of 1950s celebrities: Connie Francis, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Annette Funicello, and Frankie Avalon—signing their names in thick black marker.
Then I sprinkled these with glitter.
Tension hung in the room like too much V05 hairspray, as my mother let it sink in that I would no longer be her party planning assistant. But how else did you break up with your mother than by being completely honest and straightforward?
“It’s just…It’s time for me to move on,” I told her, sounding like one of the soap operas my grandmother watched. “We’ve had a good run.”
“Forgive me if I’m a little shocked that you’ve never said anything to me before about this. But if that’s what you want to do, break up the partnership.”
She continued working, pretending that she was fine, that she could get along without me, but I could tell by the way she hurled the spool of thread into her sewing box that she was upset. She held up several colors and styles of felt poodles, comparing them to the skirts, and let out a series of dramatic sighs. Every few minutes she’d look over at me as I was painting the malt shop signs she’d sketched. Several times she started to say something but stopped and shook her head. It was clear she wanted my approval or opinion on something, but because of my recent proclamation she was forcing herself not to ask. She hemmed and hawed over two poodles, one covered in fake rhinestones and the other trimmed in fake fur, until I was about to scream.
“Mother,” I finally blurted, “why don’t you just try the brown poodle with the little puffs of fur on it?”
“Yes. I guess the brown poodle is better. But what about the leash?” She languidly held out a thin black ribbon.
“You could go with that. But the whole ensemble would be sort of boring. I mean, the skirt and the brown poodle are both pretty tame. Why don’t you use the multicolored sequin leash—the silver and gold thing we used as a necklace last year for the flapper costumes?”
“I don’t know.” She wrinkled her forehead. “I just don’t know.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? The sequined leash would go great with the brown poodle. Look.” I picked up the strap and held it next to the poodle—its fake black onyx gemstone eye caught the light and sparkled like a lone star in the night sky—then I realized what she was doing. My mother was trying to prove to me how vital my involvement in all of this was; how she just couldn’t do it without me, trying to entice me into staying on with her.
She smiled at me with a skirt in her lap, arms crossed over her chest, a needle poking out of her mouth.
“It’s not going to work,” I said and handed the poodle back to her.
“What’s not going to work?”
“You know what. This game of I’m-so-helpless-without-you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said and picked up her puffy tomato pincushion covered with pins with the plastic colored balls on the end.
“Yes, you do. You’re trying to get me to stay on with you, working as your assistant, but I told you I’m done.”
“Done? You mean completely?”
“Mom. I said I would offer my advice if you need it but yes, done. I’m not going to any more parties with you. No more late nights sprinkling glitter onto records, or cutting out snowflakes, or shellacking fruit.”
“But what about Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen party in two weeks? You practically planned the entire thing—it was your idea to make it like a film premiere.” She began pinning the poodle to the skirt.
“Okay. I’ll help you with Linda’s party, but that’s it. Really, Mom. You have to let me go.”
We sat, not talking to each other for a few minutes as I finished up the last of the photos and she pinned the second skirt. Then I watched her try to thread a needle. She dabbed the tip of the thread on her tongue and held the needle close to her face. She attempted to push the end of the thread through the tiny hole but missed. She tried it four more times.
“Let me do that.” I took the needle and thread from her.
“Seems I can’t do anything right anymore,” she said, pouting. “Aren’t you going to miss our little projects together, sweetie?”
“Mom.”
I threaded the needle and handed it back to her.
“We’re good together, you and I,” she said, stabbing the needle into the felt. “It’ll be hard to find someone out there who appreciates you like I do. I’m just worried that you’re going to be all alone without something to do with yourself this year.”
I didn’t say anything. But in my mind I pictured myself five, ten years from then, never having gone to college, still living at home, still accompanying my mother to parties. Me, in a Hawaiian shirt, with a ukulele. Or me as a harlequin in diamond-patterned tights. Me, alone.
I set the stack of glossy photos down on our workbench and looked at the list to see what to work on next.
“I’m going to start drawing the sign for the kissing booth,” I told her. As I grabbed a few thick magic markers and a piece of poster board, the first few bars of “Who’s Sorry Now?” began to play on the record player.
My mother and I had truly outdone ourselves with Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen. Because Linda was a budding actress, and her family liked to pretend they were from money, we’d turned her party into an old-fashioned movie premiere. Her mom wore a mink stole and, it was rumored, rented diamond jewelry, and her dad hired limos to pick up Linda’s close friends and family members and bring them to the house.
Party guests, who were mostly Linda’s snotty drama club and homecoming court friends, had to walk up a red carpet that was rolled out and down the Simon’s driveway (actually butcher paper painted red with tempera paint—my mother was creative and thrifty). Strobe lights attached to the roof of the house clicked on and off like reporters’ flashbulbs. The neighbors, playing the part of movie fans, lined the driveway, instructed by my mother to ooh and ahh and to thrust slips of paper and autograph books at partygoers in their dresses and suits and ties. There was even a movie screening: a video of the first sixteen years of Linda’s life played on the Simon’s wide-screen television. My mother had connections at our local video production company who put together the movie from the various family snapshots and 8 mm films. Small bags of popcorn were served to the audience. Card tables with crisp black tablecloths dotted the room, and, per my suggestion, fragrant gardenias and votive candles floated in small round fishbowls on the tables. My inspiration was the Coconut Grove and Club Babalu from “I Love Lucy.”
During the spectacle, my father drove by the Simon’s house in his Ford Pinto on the way to his poker game. I watched from the porch as he carefully slowed down to let more partygoers, in feather boas and top hats, cross the street in front of him. The familiar look of blank reticence, or maybe relief that it was me and not him suffering through this, was on his ruddy face.
I’d refused to wear the turtleneck that matched my mother’s terra-cotta-colored silk pantsuit, opting instead for tennis shoes, a white T-shirt, and gray pullover V-neck sweater. Mrs. Kingston looked ridiculous in her black bow tie and tiny pillbox hat, frantically running back and forth for my mother, helping with crowd control and keeping the gawking, hammy neighbors at bay as the procession of Linda and her friends walked down the red carpet. I’d reluctantly agreed to usher people inside to tables and seats for the movie, after which Mrs. Kingston and I were supposed to serve hors d’oeuvres and slices of birthday cake off of round metal trays.
The strobe lights were still blinking as my mother barked at her new assistant, who looked like a lumpy bellboy, to carry a huge floral wreath inside. “And don’t smash the flowers! Please!” she yelled as she pinned one of the extra gardenias to her lapel.
I wanted another chance to escape while the movie was playing, so I told Mrs. Kingston to go on in and that I would get the wreath. Outside, the sky was just beginning to darken and the streetlights were starting to pop on. On the Simon’s curtained front window, I saw the silhouettes of partygoers as they laughed and mingled.
In front of the house, slips of autograph paper had been carelessly tossed, littering the lawn and sidewalk. I picked one up, and on it were the words, Love Linda, Sweet Sixteen 1985. I recognized my mother’s handwriting and noted that she’d gotten pretty creative with her new calligraphy pen. I was about to crinkle the paper in my hand when I heard footsteps shuffling behind me.
“You collecting souvenirs?”
It was Linda’s eighteen-year-old brother, Kurt, in some seriously scuffed black Dr. Martens boots. I was surprised he’d come down for the birthday. Kurt had dropped out of high school the year before and last I’d heard he was living in Berkeley. His breath smelled metallic. Probably alcohol, I thought. He swayed in front of me.
“No,” I said. “I have enough of these at home.”
“Oh. That’s who you are? I thought you looked familiar.” He put his face closer to mine. I could see his nose hairs. A shiver passed through me, but one of those good shivers. “So it’s your mom who’s responsible for the debauchery,” he slurred.
When he pointed at his house, the black bracelets he was wearing moved from his wrist to the bottom of his palm. From the way he was squinting at “the debauchery,” I took it that he wasn’t crazy about the party in his house, and decided not to mention that I’d created the 3-D star centerpieces on the tables inside, or that I had BeDazzled Linda’s name onto a director’s chair.
Kurt looked different to me. Older. I think we used to consider him somewhat hardcore. Possibly one of my sisters had even referred to him as a punker. But in those days, my sisters called Duran Duran punkers. Kurt was the first guy in our neighborhood that we knew, or had heard of, who had both his ears pierced. He wore shirts and pants that had a lot of snaps and zippers on them. He used to break-dance and do strange moves, like the Robot, on a flattened cardboard box in his garage. Kurt went “both ways,” as one of my sisters’ friends put it. They said that after a school dance his freshman year, he’d been caught having a three-way with a guy and a girl in a van in the school parking lot. The term finger fucked was bandied about...though whose finger fucked whom was still a mystery.
“You’re the kid who had the wild Halloween costumes every year, aren’t you?” His brown hair had the remnants of faded blond-orange streaks in it. Sexy, I thought. He wore a frayed denim jacket with a small blue button that said English Beat on it.
“Yeah.” I tried to sound disinterested. “I used to do stupid stuff like that.” But it was true—with the help of my mother, my costumes had won first place in the Halloween Carnival five years in a row. I was everything from a walking fish tank to the Jolly Green Giant.
“You used to be a queenie little squirt. But you’ve grown up, I see.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, irritated.
He gave me a suspicious once-over, and shook his head as if he were trying hard to stay awake. Something about the way he said, I see, the way he let the words linger, made me forgive him for the part about me being queenie. I didn’t want to look in his eyes, which were bloodshot, so instead I focused on the rip in the knee of his acid-washed jeans.
“What grade are you in?” He fumbled a lighter out of his jacket pocket.
“I’m in tenth.”
“Oh, yeah? Sophomore, huh? You have Mr. Dimatillo yet?” He flicked at the lighter.
“Not until next quarter.”
“Yeah?” said Kurt, and then he licked the thumb he’d been using to flick the lighter. “Mr. Dimatillo rocks. You tell Mr. D that Kurt says hello. And he owes me a pack of Camels.”
“Okay. I’ll tell him.”
“Uh huh.” He tried to burn the fray on the front pocket of his denim jacket.
“Did you use a cheese grater to give your jacket that look?” I asked.
