Other People's Houses(68)
“OK, no problem. Next week?”
“I’m afraid so. Only five weeks until the end of the season!”
She walked off to meet Annabel, her older daughter, whose face was looking more and more like her mom’s every day. Lucky girl.
Milo flung himself against Frances’s legs, nearly knocking her over. “I’m done! We won!!” He was grinning up at her like a puppy, all skinny legs and bad coordination, hair flopping around, the sweet smell of kid sweat still enjoyable before the inevitable change to puberty and sports clothes that walked out of gym bags on their own.
Lally wandered up. “We lost. I think. Not sure. Don’t care.” She sat on the grass and tugged off her shoes, too impatient to undo the laces. “Can we have ice cream now?”
Bill arrived. “Hey,” he said. “We were thinking of going for an early lunch and ice cream. Any interest?” Lucas was sporting a new Band-Aid, and looked pretty stoked about it. He was limping, but on the leg that didn’t have the Band-Aid. Still, a strong effort.
As the kids whooped and jumped about, Frances nodded and then looked around at all the other families gathering themselves to move on to the next section of their day. She could see Iris and Sara in the distance, she had Bill and Lucas in front of her, and somewhere on the playground were Lilian and Edward. All these families, all struggling against one thing or another, doing their best, or maybe just pretending to be interested, or maybe actively trying to destroy each other, who knew? All of them united momentarily around fucking peewee soccer, brought together by the twin desires for healthy children and something to do on a Saturday. Inwardly Frances shrugged, because it doubtless meant something significant and deep, but all she could think was that the whole thing was incredibly tiring and she needed more coffee. Sometimes life is just what it is, and the best you can hope for is ice cream.
* * *
? ? ?
Back at home, Ava was just waking up. The house was very quiet. It was Saturday morning, so . . . AYSO. That’s right. She turned over, and buried herself deeper in her covers. Her mind flickered to that guy, Richard, the guy it turned out Anne Porter had been sleeping with. She had to admit she’d been impressed, but Anne was good-looking for an older woman. Piper was sleeping with a senior at the local catholic boys’ school, the five-year age difference too big to tell her parents about, but not so big it made him unfuckable. Ava hadn’t met him, but she’d seen his feed, which was essentially the same thing. She’d seen what he wanted to be seen. Piper said he was nicer than that, and Ava certainly hoped so. Too many pictures of his friends, and just enough shots of him holding animals to ensure a steady supply of blow jobs from a girl who only just got her braces off.
Ava hadn’t slept with anyone yet. She’d been felt up the year before, at someone’s bar mitzvah, and the kid had gone for her underpants, but she’d stepped back in time. Her friends told her about getting fingered, which didn’t sound all that good. When you’d watched that same hand slap a dozen high fives and throw inaccurate gang signs with other pubescent boys . . . ew. Also, she hadn’t yet been able to put in a tampon, because it hurt, so presumably getting fingered would hurt, too. Piper had told her if you didn’t want them to stick their hands in your pants all you had to do was blow them, and then “they can’t think of anything else.” Apparently it was the ultimate distraction tactic, but shouldn’t sex be less of a defensive battle? Her mom had given her A Talk that was mostly about not doing what you didn’t want, and feeling OK about wanting to do stuff you did want to do, but it hadn’t been all that helpful as Ava had spent most of the time trying to sink through the floor.
She understood why Piper liked the seniors. Boys her own age had voices that were deeper suddenly, but they still ate sour straws for breakfast and pushed each other for no apparent reason. Older boys, boys her mother called “young men,” were focused on getting into your pants, knew how to get there, and knew what to do once they were there, which was good when you had only the vaguest idea yourself. Sometimes that meant you ended up doing things you hadn’t anticipated, but Piper said a lot of those things were amazing. She also said it turned out you knew how to give a basic blow job all along, it just came naturally. Ava frowned into her pillow, while feeling the increasingly familiar tug of arousal when she thought about sex.
She was fourteen, and she wished she had a boyfriend she could fool around with. The senior boy had a friend who’d apparently seen Ava’s pictures on Piper’s feed and thought she was cute, but now that she and Piper weren’t talking anyway it hardly mattered. She couldn’t approach Piper and say, “Hey, I know we aren’t friends right now because I called you on some shit and you told everyone I hit on you, but I’m getting increasingly horny so I was wondering if your boyfriend could hook me up with someone who would deflower me without spreading it over the Internet?”
She pulled the sheet up over her head and groaned.
Thirty.
The children kept coming in and out, of course, as they will. They genuinely don’t give a shit about what the adults in the room are up to until it gets in their way, at which point they’ll whine about it.
Theo was trying to get Charlie to go outside and play with him, which was causing the usual Gen-X parent cognitive dissonance: I want my kids to have the awesome free-range childhood I enjoyed and develop independence and grit, but I also want them to feel ‘seen’ by me, and not just benignly neglected. However, my fucking life is falling apart here and I might suddenly lose it and run around the kitchen stabbing appliances with a fork, so maybe now’s not the best time to play Frisbee.