Chapter 3 #2
I led us inside, where we first said hello to my mother, who expected anyone who entered her house to spend at least one minute acknowledging her existence.
She’d told me so repeatedly, that I couldn’t just slink upstairs with a friend.
We found her sitting on the far side of the dinner table, slicing through mail with a kitchen knife.
Even seated, she looked tall, her brown and silver hair in a braid down her back, lighter in color than my own, my dark features having come from my father, who was also tall and who made most of his appearances after dark and over the weekend.
“How’s your mom?” my mom asked Eleanor, setting aside an envelope.
She saved the preprinted return-address labels sent to her by nonprofit organizations seeking donations if they had birds or flowers on them. She threw away the ones with American flags or frogs because she didn’t like looking at frogs or nationalism as a marketing strategy.
“She abandoned me for Chicago,” Eleanor said, which meant her mom had gone away on a brief trip for work.
“You’re welcome to stay for dinner,” my mom offered.
“Then who will eat all my cereal?” Eleanor asked.
She was a real expert at finding ways to say no to people.
Also, she loved eating cereal for dinner.
I knew Eleanor saw the differences between my relationship with my mom and her relationship with hers, but I couldn’t yet imagine that she might resent her mother’s occasional absences in the same way I resented my mother’s continuous presence.
We climbed the stairs to my bedroom.
I had a queen-sized bed, a desk, two wide windows with wood-slat blinds, and a very big mirror on the opposite wall.
I had an orchid on its fifth bloom, which my mother watered weekly by placing an ice cube on top of its soil, the only times I voluntarily invited her into my room.
I suspected she used the opportunity to surreptitiously collect laundry.
Pajamas and sweaters mounded on my desk chair.
On my bedside table sat a lamp with a shade shaped like a cloud and above my bed hung a framed illustration of a pink winged chalice.
“Show me your people,” Eleanor said, which was what we called playing The Sims. Playing The Sims was one of the things Eleanor and I did together when we hung out just the two of us.
I pulled my lavender bedsheet up from its rumple at the foot of the bed to cover the mattress.
Then I pulled my duvet over the sheet and arranged my four pillows into a headboard for the both of us, and we sat on top of the frothy covers.
All my windows were pushed up. The plants outside shook against one another like instruments in the pre-rain wind.
June in Ohio was always either wet or promising to be.
I launched the game on my laptop. A large, multifaceted green diamond spun in the center of the screen while loading messages played: When the reaper appears on the whispering wishing well, you wish at your own peril.
The game loaded an overhead view of my basic neighborhood of houses.
I selected the one in which my Sim lived, a tiny rectangle on a large empty lot.
Another load screen appeared. Eleanor began to braid a piece of her hair.
She pulled her legs up beside her. She didn’t shave them, which I would have considered an almost miraculous act of rebellion except that the hair on Eleanor’s legs, like the hair on the rest of her body, was so white-blond, it nearly disappeared against her skin.
I fanned my fingers over my keyboard without depressing any of the keys for the sake of the satisfying sound it produced.
“Mar probably knows we know,” I said.
“Probably,” she responded, and tilted her head to one side to get a better look at her hair. “But Mar is always willing to act like she’s gotten away with something until it’s been proven to her that she hasn’t.”
I nodded. This was an accurate description of Margaret’s relationship with her mother.
I just didn’t want it to also be how she was treating us.
Everything that had to do with my friends was my business.
I couldn’t imagine why Margaret hadn’t already told us something of such obvious interest. The green diamond continued to spin.
“She still might tell us,” Eleanor said.
I picked up a clear plastic hair tie from my bedside table. Instead of handing it to her, I took Eleanor’s pale braid from between her fingers and tied it off myself, the miniature plaits she’d made perfectly even.
“Do mine please,” I said, and separated a section of hair from the right side of my face, which she wordlessly took.
She had to rise up onto her knees to reach the top of my head. Her chest touched my shoulder. She separated my hair into strands and began to braid, her hold firm and her fingers quick, the sensation familiar. Every time I saw El braiding her hair, I asked her to braid mine.
I went on, “But if Mar isn’t deliberately keeping it a secret, wouldn’t she have already posted?”
Margaret could be counted on to post evidence, however oblique, whenever she did anything fun.
The more fun, the more oblique. The image had to be explicable to her mother under duress, if it came to that.
Of our three moms, only Nancy attempted to keep track of her daughter’s social media use.
My mom believed in the value of privacy, perhaps as a counterweight to her insistence on total honesty and disclosure.
Also, she had no social media of her own and therefore lacked a means of looking.
“Maybe she thinks it’s fun to have done something we don’t immediately know about,” Eleanor suggested.
The next screen loaded, but I paused the game so we could keep talking.
I loved talking to Eleanor like this, privately investigating a topic at hand, with the air full of rain. If and when Margaret hurt me, at least I got to talk to Eleanor about it.
“That doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
“I mean,” she said. “Neither of you ever tells me everything.”
The words weren’t sharp, but I’d never heard them from her before.
As a matter of policy between the three of us, we didn’t verbalize my and Margaret’s closer tie, the inimitable result of a lifetime of friendship.
I realized in my eagerness I’d maybe pushed Eleanor into a painful admission and felt ashamed.
I didn’t know how to ask for forgiveness, however, so instead I looked at my computer screen, where my Sim and her tiny rectangular house were waiting.
“I’m not spending any money on furniture yet,” I explained.
I had increased the difficulty of the game by artificially wasting almost all of my Sim’s starter cash on a set of expensive symbolic objects, which I kept in her inventory where they couldn’t positively affect her mood.
I also refused to use cheat codes, which were an accepted standard of play among the fan base, because I thought they made the game lose its purpose and texture.
Why make my Sim do anything if I could solve their every problem with a phrase?
Eleanor found all this very funny behavior on my part because she treated her Sims as unholy social experiments and exploited every loophole in the game.
When played according to its base premise and on good-faith terms, The Sims was too easy.
You’d get bored in a few hours. Which was why so many people played the game like Eleanor, in pursuit of extremity, or like me, in pursuit of achievement.
Regardless of these differences in gameplay philosophy, we both cared the most about our Sims’ quest for relationships.
You could get a lot done riding on the mood boosts provided by romantic interactions.
You could get your Sim to do all sorts of unpleasant things if their mood was full pink from smooching.
“Ginevra?” Eleanor asked when she saw my character’s name in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen.
“Haha, yeah,” I said. “I thought it was a funny name.”
She didn’t question me further, and I didn’t explain. Her Sims also had suspicious names like Bella Goth the XIV and Dumb Slut of the greater Slut family and Sally Dalloway.
Ginevra had lilac hair and amazing boobs—boobs I had manually adjusted to be not quite but nearly as large as the mechanisms of the game allowed.
This token act of restraint assuaged some of my embarrassment about making a body to play with.
I liked watching her run on the treadmill at the gym.
I thought if I named a Sim after Ginevra the fairy, then she ought to at least have some evidence of physical prowess.
Also I gave her a trait that made her happy every time she went outside.
“She’s a vibe,” Eleanor said. “Should we get her pregnant?”
“I’m not ready yet,” I answered. “I’m not done with her career. She still needs to play a lot more chess before she’s ready to have a baby, okay?”
Playing chess helped fulfill the game requirements for promotion in Ginevra’s career track as a Scientist.
“Okay, I won’t demand we light anyone on fire,” Eleanor countered. “But can we please at least tell Ginevra to go sex a member of the community?”
I agreed that was reasonable. The next question was who. Rather than taking the time to make an attractive Sim from scratch and introduce them to Ginevra, we chose a game-generated citizen of the township with whom she had already established a relationship.
“They’re Very Good Friends, but I haven’t started flirting with him yet,” I said. Meaning I had only used interactions from the Friendly social menu and none from the Romantic one.
“He has a goatee,” Eleanor said.
“That’s true but would not affect their future babies.”