Mother May I(58)

Before I met Kelly Wilkerson, What did you do? was such an angry question that the dear, familiar shape of my husband twisted into a monster when I tried to look at him through the lens of it. I’d had crazy ideas about how to know if his answer was the truth.

I would hold his hand, feeling for a pulse jump when he lied. Or I’d make him swear on his daughters’ lives after every sentence that each word had been gospel. Robert’s life, actually hanging in the balance, was too frail a thing to swear on. I’d watch for his lawyer tells, the confidential lean-in or the skeptical cocked eyebrow that I’d seen him practice for his closing arguments. On some cop show, the main detective said that people look up toward the right when they lied, trying to access the creative side of the brain. People telling the truth looked up and left, toward where their memories were stored. I’d planned to watch his eyes when I finally asked. I would convict him with his own glances.

But as he spoke, he barely looked up at all. We sat down together, and he told the story to his hands, clasped tightly in his lap, and I understood how foolish those ideas had been.

As if truth ever gave itself away so cheaply.

Back in high school, I’d played Blanche DuBois in a version of Streetcar Named Desire that was edited for teens. Our Stanley genuinely had no idea why he was yelling “Stelllllaaaaa!” in the road. He shook his fist and screamed the name because the script said it was time. But I’d read the unredacted play. I knew what happened in the lines and moments we were deemed too young to say or even know. As Blanche I lied like it was breathing, a necessary thing she didn’t even notice she was doing. In that show I’d been Bree, pretending to be Blanche, who was pretending to be truthful, even to herself.

So I knew that people could tell lies in layers, and yet as Trey spoke, I thought that he was being genuine. Only a monster, a sociopath, could rack himself with such deep-set shame over a lie. And I had not married a monster.

When he did meet my gaze, I let my face show all my love and faith. I wanted him to understand that he was safe. I might not like his story, but I had accepted that no matter what Trey had done and no matter the mistakes I’d made, Robert’s absence, the danger he was in, was on the mother’s tab. Not ours. Now I simply wanted the truth.

“Do you remember 1992?” he asked. I nodded, but I shrugged at the same time. I’d been nine or so. “The Internet had just opened to the public. It didn’t have pictures yet, much less video. There were very few women online, or frat boys either. I think it was just scientists and nerds. I knew people who had cell phones, but they were still these chunky blocks. Nothing with a screen or Internet.”

“And this matters?” I asked, because even though his shame was palpable, this did not feel like the answer to my question. He nodded, though.

“What happened—what we did to Lexie Pine—it’s different now,” he told his hands.

I silenced myself. I listened. I let him set the scene.

In the early nineties, the Greeks whom Trey knew drank a lot and gobbled No Doz like it was PEZ during exams, but at Trey’s frat particularly drugs were seen as “hippie shit.” X was for Eurotrash, pot was for losers. Coke was the exception, because it felt so Wall Street. A real man’s drug, and many of his brothers were not averse to bumping up their weekends, privately in their rooms or bunched up in a bathroom stall. Never in the open. The norm was beer or swamp punch plus plenty of wine coolers for the ladies.

Spence was more chemically adventurous than most of his brothers, and he didn’t have a regular girlfriend. These things were probably what kept him from being the frat’s president. He dabbled in thoroughbred blondes, but he also went slumming with the patchouli-smelling girls who hung around the theatre department. The “Boho Hos,” he called them, not to be confused with the kind of uptight, bow-headed sorority girls who only did oral. Those were “Bow Hos.” Two syllables. Spence bounced back and forth between these types like the ball in Pong.

Senior year Spence was dating Lexie Pine, a scholarship freshman who lived across the campus in the older dorms. “Dating” was the nice word for it. They were not exclusive. Spence was a BMOC with a high-limit Amex, his dad’s old Jaguar, and a rep for bringing the fun to any gathering. A lot of girls ran around with him. But he kept circling back to Lexie.

She was everything he liked: discreet and sexually adventurous and very, very pretty. She was “skint,” as Spence put it, and maybe he liked that, too. She was also smart as hell and witty, and though these things were not on Spencer’s list, they were probably why he kept seeing her. He liked talking with her almost as much as he liked sleeping with her.

As for Spence, he could be an ass, but he was fun and charming. When he asked her out, she went. He was also generous, and this mattered. Lexie had a work-study job that got her up at 6:00 a.m. to wipe down tables and wash dishes in one of the food halls. Her clothes all had that musty thrift-store smell deep in the seams. She had no car, so she didn’t get to leave campus unless someone took her. Dates were the only time she didn’t eat with the prepaid meal card her work-study provided. She’d wear a cardigan with big pockets to lunch, so she could illegally tuck away fruit and cheese and cookies for later.

Crazy Lexie, Spence called her, but not as a pejorative, or even literally. It was almost a compliment. He’d had non-Greek adventures with girls he’d called Crazy Janie, Crazy Amy, Crazy Lynn. He meant that she was wild, up for anything. Like Betsy had been. This I understood.