Two #2
Ted and Tammy moved here about ten years ago since their children were grown and Ted semi-retired from his Chicago law practice.
When Tammy moved in, she’d taken one look at our Asian faces and talked loudly and slowly to Mom and me, worried neither one of us spoke English. Mom forgot that. I hadn’t.
“If you join up, I bet you could find a husband, too,” Tammy offers, unhelpfully.
“I’m not looking for a husband,” I said.
“You’re not getting any younger,” Tammy rudely pointed out. “I’m sure you want to be fruitful and multiply like the good Lord wants.” She stared at me a beat. Oscar sighed and hung his head.
“Why would I want to have kids?” I challenged her. “So I can do more than twice the amount of childcare and housework than my husband, but get thirty-one percent less pay at my job year after year and passed over for promotions for the motherhood penalty?”
Oscar glanced from me to Tammy. Tammy blinked at me, unsure how to respond, because she hadn’t minored in women’s studies like I had, and I’d short-circuited her tradwife brain. Then she laughed uneasily.
“You always were a stitch,” Tammy said, dismissing my very real argument as a joke. “But we both know a career won’t be a problem. Not right now, will it?”
Her verbal dart hit its mark. I clutched my fists at my sides.
“Really have to get going, Tammy,” Oscar said, interrupting my fantasy of a roundhouse kick to Tammy’s chin. He started to tug on the door. She scooted back as he pulled his SUV door shut with a sound click.
She lingered on the driveway as he turned the ignition on the SUV and it grumbled to life. He rolled down his window with a warning glance to me, even though Tammy was the one blocking his exit down the driveway, not me.
“But it’s hard, I know,” Tammy continued, “especially after that unfortunate accident at prom.” She clucked her tongue in mock pity.
Oscar warily glanced from Tammy to me and back again.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I ground out, referring to that not-so-magical night, when the class president, Alec Stokes—a year older than me—thought it would be a good idea to try to stick his hand up my skirt during a slow dance without my permission.
I broke his nose with a good palm shove to his face right there in the gym under the glittering disco ball. Considering how much blood gushed onto my silver satin dress, I’m surprised people didn’t nickname me Carrie. Somehow, though, Thin Ice was impossible to shake.
She snapped her fingers. “You know what? Alec is the mayor now. Maybe you two could kiss and make up.”
Stokes—the serial groper and predator known by his signature red hair—should burn. Instead, he went on to inherit his father’s lavish golf course and adjacent resort, and then, despite being accused of assaulting an intern two years ago, he went on to be elected mayor.
Just like his father before him, and grandfather before that.
“I’d rather die,” I said and groaned. I glanced at Oscar. “And you wonder why I hate this town.”
Tammy blanched as if I’d slapped her across the face. “Hate Lake Sanguis?” she gasped, appalled. “How? We’re a delight. We were named the number one tourist destination in Wisconsin behind the Dells!”
“Right. Blood Lake. Exactly where I want to vacation.”
Oscar not so gently cleared his throat to try to get Tammy’s attention. “Tammy, I really need to go—”
“Sanguis means sanguine,” Tammy huffed. “Peaceful and the like.”
I sighed. No telling Tammy that sanguis was actually Latin for “blood.” Lake Sanguis’s founders either were terrible at Latin or meant something else entirely when they’d named this place.
“Lake Sanguis is a sanctuary—folks look after each other here, unlike those awful big cities.” Tammy shuddered.
“That awful big city is the reason Lake Sanguis has an economy,” I felt the need to point out. This small lake town would fall apart without the revenue from Chicago tourists.
Tammy seemed unfazed by this fact.
“Tammy, is that your dog I hear barking?” Oscar said, cupping his ear as he set his elbow on the open window of his SUV and pretended to listen.
“Is it Barry?” Tammy paused to listen for the cries of Barry, a black-and-white Chihuahua and one of the nastiest little dogs ever to walk the earth. If you ever tried to pet him, he’d bite your finger with the viciousness of a piranha. “Oh my goodness. It’s his mealtime.”
“You probably better go feed him,” Oscar said.
“Best be off, then. Barry isn’t going to feed himself!” Tammy hurried away from us, finally clearing the driveway.
“You should’ve let me kick her,” I said.
Oscar sighed next to me. “She isn’t worth it,” he told me.
“Agree to disagree.”
Oscar studied my profile. “She’s older. She’s got outdated ideas.”
“No kidding. It’s still not an excuse.”
“Want to talk about—”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. I didn’t want to talk about how Stokes told everyone after prom that I’d come on to him, that I’d been grinding on him in the slow dance, the same excuse he’d used for the other girls he sent crying to the bathroom at the homecoming dance, and then later at the frat parties at the University of Wisconsin.
I didn’t want to talk about how it was always the women lying, especially the intern who accused him of assault last year.
She was just after notoriety and money. I didn’t want to talk about the Stokes family’s expensive defense lawyer and their connections to the judge in town, and judges seemingly everywhere else, and how all charges against Stokes—every time—were dismissed with prejudice.
Or how most people in Lake Sanguis loved piling on himpathy: Poor Alec Stokes!
What will it do to that poor guy’s prospects!
Real criminals didn’t come from pillars of the community, and they certainly didn’t wear designer polos and expensive platinum watches, no matter how often they were accused of the same crimes over and over again.
We women were just space trash, all gold diggers, floating along in the universe, lucky to get pulled into Stokes’s gravity.
“Oscar! Wait!” Olivia shouted, jogging out of Koi in a hoodie, with her backpack slung over one shoulder. “Drop me at class?” She pressed her hands together in prayer.
“I am never going to get to the station,” Oscar moaned, looking at the roof of his car. “Come on, then.” He tapped the side of his door out his open window. “Get in!”
“You’re a lifesaver,” Olivia said as she stuffed herself in the passenger side.
Mom trotted outside after her, wearing a red sweater and trendy wide-legged denim and carrying a wicker basket filled with some leftover charred banana muffins from yesterday. Oscar was smart enough to throw the car in reverse before she could offer him one.
“Stay out of trouble, Thin Ice,” he cautioned me as he lifted two fingers off his steering wheel and dipped the brim of his hat. “Love you, Mom!”
“Love you back!” she called behind me. I watched his SUV pull out of the drive.
“Now that is a wonderful child,” Mom said, as if we didn’t already know he was her favorite. “He goes by his given name.”
“Ella is my middle name,” I said.
“Yes, but if you’d used your first name, Ophelia, like Octavia said, then maybe you would’ve had better luck with the podcast.”
I groaned. “Mom, I’m not going around introducing myself as Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“It’s a tragic name,” I pointed out. “She had three men manipulating her, and zero personal agency, so she goes insane and drowns herself.”
“She was the most gorgeous character in the play,” Mom pointed out. “And the one with the best heart.” Mom frowned at me. “You haven’t had breakfast. Muffin?”
“Not if you actually want me to eat,” I said, eyeing the blackened balls.
“More for the koi then,” she said, shrugging.
Mom fed Diamond Dave, Joan Jett, and the others our leftovers.
I followed her over to the pond, out of morbid curiosity.
Koi ate anything, it was true, but Mom’s muffins?
This was a stretch even for those bottom feeders.
I watched as Mom threw out a black ball and it hit the top of the pond with a heavy splash.
She side-eyed my stained sweatshirt and uncombed hair. “You should comb your hair.”
“You should stop torturing those poor fish,” I said, watching the black ball bob in the water. Bon Jovi tried to nibble at it, and then ducked away in disgust.
“Ophelia, if we look like garbage, people will treat us like garbage,” Mom said, the same mantra she’d been repeating since we were kids. “You know the world doesn’t like ugly people.”
“You can’t say things like that anymore.”
“Why? Because it’s true?” Mom tossed a second muffin in, even though the fish had left the first nearly untouched.
“I thought koi shouldn’t eat carbs.”
“They’re gluten-free,” Mom told me.
My phone in my back pocket pinged then. It was a Spark message from Spider-Man Mateo, aka HotSpidey, my currently off-again casual hookup who hadn’t messaged me in a couple of weeks.
I figured on-set shooting had gotten busy, or he’d found a different person to hook up with. Or, he, like the rest of the world, heard about my embarrassing demise and decided it was best to quietly exit stage right.
Querida, my Spidey-sense is tingling. And that’s not the only thing…
I blinked at the message, and wondered if he was trying to say he missed me, or warn me that he had an STD.
Everything okay? I messaged back.
Sí! Just want to see you. You free tonight?
I sighed. I guess I forgot to tell my Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man With Benefits I’d left town. I kind of wish I hadn’t. A little roll around in his squeaky twin bed in his closet-sized bedroom might just be the thing I needed to forget my failures as a human.
Sorry! Left Chicago. Went home. Won’t be back for a while.