Chapter Five Fran #2
It had always been this way with Fran’s brothers, their mother looking after everyone while the guys obsessed over football, basketball, baseball—whatever was on—to the point where Fran actively hated sports herself.
Damien and Kon would scream at the TV when the Red Sox lost, would swear and pout when the Pats fell apart in the final quarter.
They would thunder up the stairs, they would slam doors, they would lose their ever-loving minds.
It was beyond normal fandom, it was like a huge dark cloud that hung over their house, the feeling that anger and blistering tempers were entirely out of their control.
The drinking didn’t help their moods, but honestly, they had been like this since middle school, caring so deeply about their teams and letting their emotions run completely wild on the euphoria of a win or devastation of a loss.
It was worse now that they were all older, though, because they spent so much money gambling.
The stakes were higher. The money legitimized their glee and fury.
Kon had a Picasso drawing, a “Pour Roby” worth a couple grand hung in his bedroom, that he bought from betting on the Pats.
Damien had paid for a family trip to Aruba a couple of years ago after a big payout on a Celtics game.
But as much as her brothers loved to talk about what they won off their teams, Fran knew they lost just as often.
When lunch was ready Fran collected her boys from the yard and they all sat down at the table, leaving the game on, but muting the television.
As they ate, her father and brothers staring at the screen, her mother visibly tipsy, Hale dominated the conversation, talking animatedly about cactus bees in his squeaky little voice.
“Cactus bees are solitary creatures. Not like honeybees. Honeybees are social creatures.”
RJ listened to Hale attentively. He was clearly super stoned, and Fran hoped she was the only one who could tell. Her mother hadn’t eaten a bite of her lunch, but her glass was empty, and it hit Fran with a painful zip in her throat.
“Mom, eat.” Fran nudged the rice over toward her, and her mother gave her a quick smile and picked up her fork, moving some lettuce around on her plate, pretending she was going to eat.
This was how it always went. Her mom drank too much.
Her brothers gambled too much. Her dad had his head in the sand.
She was annoyed at herself for letting it go on so long.
For years, Fran had thought her family was rich.
They lived in a McMansion, they drove nice cars, her mother wore neat Coach loafers and pretty gold bracelets.
Sure, her parents both worked, her father for a company that supplied equipment to research labs, her mother for a travel agency.
They were good jobs, but they didn’t make nearly enough to support their lifestyle.
After graduation, while talking to her father about her new 401(k), Fran did the math and figured it all out.
Her parents had nothing to show for the past forty years, nothing but debt, no plans for their own futures, and like everything else in their family, it would be Fran’s job to deal with it.
That was part of why Fran and RJ weren’t married.
They were in a committed relationship, they loved each other and their kids, but Fran wasn’t about to tie herself down to anyone’s finances.
When they first met RJ had $40,000 in student loan debt.
Fran had none. She had gone to Worcester Poly Tech on a full ride, and she’d worked nights and weekends to pay for her crappy off-campus apartment.
She kept a careful notebook of all her expenses and planned to buy a house with the best mortgage rate.
She bought a used car, she diverted 10 percent of her paycheck to savings each month, and even though RJ was inarguably the best lay of her life, she wasn’t about to pay for the four years he spent playing beer pong.
“A swarm of male bees lands on the female bee and they all mate with her at once in a withing ball. Then the female lays her eggs and dies.” Hale was really on a roll now. He had ketchup on his cheek.
“What’s a ‘withing ball’?” asked Damien’s teenage son, Sylvester.
“Writhing, Syl.” London looked up from his burger. “Hale can’t say all his r’s. But he’s talking about a writhing ball of mating bees.”
“Uh, okay.” Sylvester looked around in disbelief, but let Hale carry on.
“A withing ball is different from a queen ball. When the honeybees make a queen ball they kill their queen.”
“I feel like I don’t want to know about this,” Fran’s mother interjected.
“The bees make a vewy tight knot around her and then flap their wings as hard as they can until it gets so hot the queen suffocates.”
“Oh my God.” Sylvester looked horrified.
“And they bite and sting her until she dies.” Hale smiled proudly.
“Hale, that’s really gruesome. Maybe not lunchtime conversation,” Fran admonished him gently, and wiped his cheek.
“But it’s TRUE!” Hale said indignantly. “It’s a QUEEN BALL!”
“Just because it’s true doesn’t mean people want to hear it,” Fran’s mother said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
After everyone finished eating, Fran cleared the table while London followed his cousins off to watch the rest of the baseball game and RJ took Hale to use the bathroom, Hale still chattering away about bees and wasps.
It was incredible how much her kids knew about animals and nature, how curious they were about things Fran had long ago stopped seeing or caring about.
Together Fran and her boys spent long weekend afternoons studying creatures in tide pools, admiring rocks and shells.
They wanted to know why the river was brown (the humic acid from the peatlands), why the beach had high and low tides (the moon’s gravitational pull), what that brown foamy stuff was that formed along the edge of the shore (Fran wasn’t sure but told them to wash their hands after touching it).
It was simultaneously fascinating and excruciatingly boring, depending on her mood, how long Hale insisted on watching a sand crab skitter along the beach, whether or not it was her day to take mushrooms.
In the evenings Fran read them library books about nature, all of them strangely alarming about what it meant to be the female in any species—the female octopus laying her clutch of eggs and then slipping off to a cave to starve, the salmon spawning and then dying weeks later, the mother scorpion giving birth and then passing away so that her babies might eat her very body for the nutrients.
It wasn’t even shocking to her. London and Hale ate off her plate every time they went to a restaurant.
Of course, when Fran had imagined having children, she had wanted to have girls, but it turned out that it was her lot in life to constantly be surrounded by guys.
As the youngest in her own family, Fran had grown up steeped in boy culture.
She had stuffed animals—piles and piles—but it was only at her friends’ houses that she played with Barbies or dressed up in costumes.
Augusta had a huge collection of plastic horses that they kept in a bin and together Augusta and Fran spent hours brushing their manes with pink plastic combs, tying fiddly little bows on their tails.
Bailey had two sisters, and when Fran was in elementary school, going to Bailey’s house was like entering a fantasy land of pink chiffon and watermelon-scented lip gloss.
While Fran lived in a world of nerf guns and football pads, Bailey’s house was filled with magazines—Seventeen and Cosmopolitan—shelves full of Baby-Sitters Club and Nancy Drew.
Bailey had a closet full of leotards and tutus, she had Strawberry Shortcake pajamas and sparkly jelly shoes.
Bailey’s sisters were scary in their own way, screaming at the girls to get out of their rooms or to stop stealing their CDs, but it wasn’t like being at Fran’s house, where her brothers were constantly breaking their hockey sticks in their tantrums and trying to drown her in the swimming pool.
Fran knew that just because she had sons, she didn’t have to recreate her family of origin, and so she made a point to be different.
She talked to her boys about their feelings.
She bought them baby dolls and jewelry-making kits.
She had even signed them up for a dance class in the winter and would have kept with it if they hadn’t tried to charge everyone a hundred bucks for Nutcracker costumes.
She had picked a good man too. RJ was thoughtful, patient, and rarely got angry.
Sure, he self-medicated for life’s annoyances, but the kind of fury and aggression that characterized Fran’s childhood wasn’t part of his emotional vocabulary.
RJ and Fran didn’t even fight. If he got really exasperated, he usually just went for a walk and came back smelling like weed.
He overdid it sometimes—everyone in their circle did—woke up in the living-room chair still holding a can of beer, stayed at the party until 2:00 a.m. then had to be on a job site at 5:00, cut his shin running into a fence wasted on whiskey.
But it was harmless, it was funny, and Fran knew she and RJ would outgrow the wild partying one of these days.
Early on, RJ had tried to convince Fran to get married.
He had proposed to her half a dozen times, but she wouldn’t bend.
Fran had survived life with her brothers by keeping her own counsel, by never letting anyone see her weakness.
And what was weaker than a wife? She would be RJ’s partner, they would one day be buried side by side, but, she gently explained, they didn’t need a license or a ceremony to lock them into anything.
They stayed together every day out of love, not obligation, and wasn’t that actually even better?