Dirty

“Yes, you.” I put the doughnut back in the box and snagged the last éclair. “And you’re dying to tell me about it, so stop wasting time and get to it before someone else comes in and we have to pretend to be talking about business.”

Marcy laughed. “I wasn’t sure you’d like to hear about it.”

I studied her face. “You think that about me, don’t you. That I don’t like sex?”

She looked up from her gooey plate, her smile sincere, and something passed over her expression. Something a little like pity. It made me frown.

“I don’t know, Elle. I don’t know you well enough to say, really, but you act like you don’t like much of anything sometimes, except work.”

Hearing something you already know shouldn’t ever be a shock, but it usually is. I wanted to answer her right away, but my throat had closed and my eyes burned with tears I blinked against to keep from falling. I put one hand on my stomach, which had lurched at her words in recognition of the truth of them.

Marcy, despite her appearance and occasional dumb-blonde performance, is anything but stupid. She reached at once for my hand and closed her fingers over mine before I could pull it away. She squeezed my hand and let go fast enough to keep me from startling.

“Hey,” she said softly. “It’s all right. We all have buttons.”

Right then, at that moment, I had the chance to make Marcy my friend. A real one, not a business acquaintance. I have stood on the edge of so many things, so many times, and I most always back away. If there is a time when telling the truth will open a door, I lie. If a smile will forge a connection, I turn my face.

But this time, surprising myself and probably her, I didn’t.

I smiled at her. “Tell me about your date last night.”

She did. In detail enough to make me blush. It was the best lunch I’d ever had.

When it was time for us to go to our separate offices, she stopped me with another squeeze of my hand. “You should come out with me sometime.”

I let her squeeze my hand because she was so earnest, and we’d had such a good time. “Sure.”

“You will?” She squealed, the hand squeeze turning into an impromptu, full-length hug that made my entire body stiffen. Marcy patted my back and stepped away, and if she noticed that her embrace had turned me into a wooden effigy, she said nothing. “Great.”

“Great.” I smiled and nodded.

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and it had been a long time since I’d had a girlfriend. Any sort of friend. I caught myself humming later, at my desk.

Euphoria doesn’t last under the best circumstances, and when I pushed open my front door to find the light on my answering machine blinking steadily, mine vanished.

I don’t get many calls at home. Doctors’ offices, sales calls, wrong numbers, my brother Chad…and my mother. The red number four mocked me as I dumped my mail on the table and hung my keys on the small hook by the door. Four messages in one day? They had to be from her.

Hating your mother is such a cliché comedians use it to make audiences laugh. Psychiatrists base their entire careers upon diagnosing it. Greeting card companies stick the knife in further by making consumers feel so guilty about the way they really feel about their mothers, they’ll willingly pay five dollars for a piece of paper with some pretty words they didn’t write, echoing a sentiment they don’t feel.

I don’t hate my mother.

I’ve tried to hate my mother, I really have. If I hated her, I might be able to put her out of my life at last, be done with her, put an end to the torture she provides. The sad fact remains, I haven’t learned to hate my mother. The best I can do is ignore her.

“Ella, pick up the phone.”

My mother’s voice is a nasal foghorn, bleating her disdain as a warning to all the other ships to stay away from me, the reason for her disappointment. I can’t hate her, but I can hate her voice, and the way she calls me Ella instead of Elle.Ella is a waif’s name, an orphan sitting in the cinders. Elle is classier, crisper. The name a woman called herself when she wanted people to take her seriously. She insists on calling me Ella because she knows it annoys me.

By the fourth message she was detailing how life didn’t seem worth living with such an ungrateful excuse for a daughter. How the pills the doctor prescribed for her nerves weren’t working. How she was embarrassed to have to ask Karen Cooper from next door to go to the pharmacy for her when she had a daughter who should be quite capable of taking care of her, but for the fact she refused.

She had a husband who could go for her, too, but she never seemed to remember that.

“And don’t forget!” I jumped at the suddenness of her voice ringing out from the small speaker. “You said you’d visit soon.”

There was a brief moment of hissing static at the end of her message as though she’d hung on the line, convinced I was really there and ignoring her, and if she waited long enough she’d catch me out.

The phone rang again as I looked at it. Resigned, I picked it up. I didn’t bother to defend myself. She talked for ten minutes before I had the chance to say anything.

“I was at work, Mother,” I managed to interject when she paused to light a cigarette.

She greeted my answer with an audible sniff of disdain. “So late.”

“Yes, Mother. So late.” The clock showed ten after eight. “I take the bus home, remember?”

“You have that fancy car. Why don’t you drive it?”

I didn’t bother to explain yet again my reasons for keeping a car in the city but using public transportation, which was faster and easier. She wouldn’t have listened.

“You should find a husband,” she said at last, and I bit back a sigh. The tirade was close to ending. “Though how you ever will, I don’t know. Men don’t like women who are smarter than they are. Or who earn more money. Or—” she paused significantly “—who don’t take care of themselves.”

“I take care of myself, Mother.” I meant financially. She meant spa treatments and manicures.

“Ella.” Her sigh sounded very loud over the phone. “You could be so pretty…”

I looked into the mirror as she talked, seeing the reflection of a woman my mother didn’t know. “Mother. Enough. I’m hanging up.”

I imagined the way her mouth pursed at such harsh treatment from her only daughter. “Fine.”

“I’ll call you soon.”

She snorted. “Don’t forget, you promised to come visit.”

The thought made my stomach fall away. “Yes, I know, but—”

“You have to take me to the cemetery, Ella.”

The woman in the mirror looked startled. I didn’t feel startled. I didn’t feel…anything. No matter what my reflection showed.

“I know, Mother.”

“Don’t think you can weasel out of it this year—”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

I disconnected her, though she still squawked, and immediately dialed another number.

“Marcy. It’s Elle.”

Marcy, bless her, revealed nothing but pleased surprise at my desire to take her up on her invitation to go out after work. It was exactly the reaction I needed. Too much enthusiasm would have made me rethink; too little would have made me cancel.