Mrs. Fletcher(65)
Donna remained frozen on the screen throughout the entire anecdote that followed. It happened when Margo was in fifth grade, and still thought of herself as Mark. One day Mark pretended to be sick so he could take a day off from school. Previously, his mother, a second-grade teacher, had stayed home to care for him when he was feeling ill, but on this particular day, Donna decided he was old enough to stay home alone, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for. As soon as his mother left for work, Mark went straight to her bedroom and found the blue bathing suit with the ruffled skirt. It was right where he’d expected, in the second drawer from the top.
“I thought I just wanted to touch it. But touching it wasn’t enough.”
Mark was only eleven and hadn’t begun his big growth spurt, so the suit fit surprisingly well, everywhere except the chest, which had a droopy, deflated appearance. It looked a lot better once he stuffed the padded bra cups with paper towels. In fact, it looked amazing.
“I’m pretty sure I hypnotized myself. I must have stared at my reflection in the mirror for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was like I was seeing me for the first time.”
Mark eventually left his mother’s bedroom, but he didn’t take off the swimsuit. He went downstairs, opened a bag of potato chips, and turned on the TV. He figured he had at least four hours before he had to worry about anyone coming home and finding him like that.
“It was such a luxury,” Margo said. “Just being alone in the house. That never happened.”
It was a beautiful hot day, late September or early October, and Mark headed out to the back deck to do a little sunbathing, an activity very popular among the girls at his school. He brought a portable radio and some Bain de Soleil, and he tugged down the shoulder straps of the bathing suit to avoid an unsightly tan line.
“It was so relaxing. The sun and the music. I guess I just let my guard down and fell asleep.”
It must have been a deep sleep, because he didn’t hear the car pulling into the driveway or his mother entering the house and calling his name. She’d been worried about him, and had come home on her lunch break to see how he was doing. What she found was the daughter she didn’t know she had, wearing a matronly bathing suit that did her no favors.
“For a long time, my mother didn’t say a word. She just kept staring at me and shaking her head. No, no, no. I remember how pale she looked, like she’d just received terrible news about someone she loved, an illness or an unexpected death. When she finally did manage to speak, she asked me if this was my idea of a joke, if I thought it was funny to wear her clothes. It’s clear to me now that she desperately wanted me to say, Yes, Mom, it was just a stupid joke. But I was so scared and ashamed, all I could do was tell the truth. I love this bathing suit. It’s my favorite. She ordered me to go upstairs, take it off, and never touch it again. Or any other article of her clothing, for that matter.”
They never discussed the incident, at least not directly; they weren’t that kind of family. But Donna had seen what she’d seen, and it had frightened her.
“She had a code word,” Margo explained. “She called it my nonsense. Whenever my parents left me home alone—and believe me, they didn’t do it very much—my mother would say, You better not get up to any of your nonsense! If she ever caught me looking sad, she’d say, Is this about that nonsense? And when I finally got engaged to be married, she said, I hope this means you’re done with all that nonsense.” Margo shook her head, amazed by her mother’s stubbornness. “Even on her deathbed, after I’d transitioned and was living as a woman, she looked at me and said, Are you ever gonna stop with this nonsense?”
Eve knew it was rude to text in the middle of a presentation, but she couldn’t stop herself. She pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to Brendan.
I miss you.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Margo told the photograph. “I can’t stop my nonsense. I’m your daughter and I love you very much.”
*
I couldn’t wait for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to go home, sleep in my own bed, eat some decent food, sneak onto the golf course with Troy and Wade, polish off a couple of blunts and a bottle of shit vodka, just like the old days. We’d get completely annihilated on Wednesday night and then drag ourselves to the homecoming game on Thursday morning, where we could brag about our hangovers to people we hadn’t seen in three months, though it felt way longer than that. Becca would be cheering on the sidelines—the last football game of her career—and I was hoping maybe I could catch her in a sentimental mood and convince her to give me another chance. I loved the way she looked in that stretchy little dress they all wore, red with a big white H on the front.
H is for hot, I used to tell her.
H is for ho, I used to tell my friends.
The only thing I dreaded about going home was having to talk about my college experience, pretending it was the greatest thing ever, parties on top of hookups mixed in with challenging classes and inspiring professors and lots of cool new friends, when the truth was, it had pretty much all turned to shit in the past couple of weeks. I was on the road to failing Econ and Math, Amber wasn’t responding to my texts, and Zack was hardly ever around. He was spending all his time with Lexa, sleeping in her room, pushing her wheelchair all over campus, like he was her fucking caretaker instead of her boyfriend. One day I bumped into him at the Student Center Chick-fil-A and asked him point-blank if he was pissed at me, but he said he wasn’t. I told him it didn’t feel like that, and asked why he’d never said a word to me about Lexa.