Chapter Fourteen Augusta #2
“The last straight generation?”
“Yeah.”
“What does that even mean?” Augusta smiled in what she hoped seemed a friendly way.
“Millennials still have so much baked-in prejudice. People my age are just more open and willing to be honest about their identity.”
God, when did everyone become so obsessed with the idea of “identity”? The concept hadn’t crossed Augusta’s mind until suddenly it was everywhere. “So really everyone is gay, just people my age don’t admit it?”
“Some people are just straight.” Zoey sighed impatiently. “But it’s telling that among your parents’ generation like three percent of them say they are queer while among people in Gen Z it’s more like thirty percent. Once the stigma is removed, more people come out as bi.”
“Hmm.” Augusta pursed her lips thoughtfully.
Of course, she knew most people weren’t 100 percent gay or 100 percent straight.
Her brother, Eben, had dated plenty of women before he came out.
She had always assumed that for Eben it was one of those “about the person” things.
He met someone, he fell in love, and that person happened to be a man, so he was gay.
It was like a soulmate thing, or something.
Augusta herself was straight-straight. Probably in the 99th percentile.
She liked the most traditional aspects of men—she liked that Colin was taller than her, that his sweatshirts were so big she swam in them, that he could drive a stick shift, that he could circle her ankle with his thumb and index finger.
And Colin was the 99th percentile as well.
Every woman he had ever dated was so feminine—Amy Sheffield, the girl he took to prom, was a tiny field hockey player with rosebud lips and long, auburn hair she curled every morning.
Rachel Gold, Colin’s college girlfriend, was a slender Jewish girl from Santa Barbara who founded an organic snack food company and spoke in a baby voice. They were girly-girls, all of them.
“Let me guess, your generation also thinks marriage is outdated,” Augusta said.
“Not really. I’ll probably get married someday.”
Augusta felt somehow validated by that, and then embarrassed for feeling validated by a teenager who had very recently been caught having sex on her sofa.
As Augusta drained the last of her wine, she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway and darted to the window just in time to see Colin climb out of an Uber.
Thank God he was back. They could make it to the restaurant in time for dinner.
He didn’t even need to change out of his work clothes.
But where was his car? Had he left it at the train station?
Had there been an accident? As Colin crossed the grass, she saw he was stumbling, and when he reached the porch he held the railing to steady himself on the steps.
He was drunker than she’d ever seen him.
Augusta opened the door to help but when Colin saw her, he froze, and he looked at her with such pain that in that moment Augusta knew.
Understanding crashed down on her like a wave.
Those early days of their relationship, when she and Colin had stayed up late talking at night, when he had peeled back the veneer on his teenage years with Eben—the beers at the concert, the dent in the car—had he peeled it all away?
What if there was a whole other layer beneath that?
A layer Colin hadn’t shared. A layer where Colin loved Eben and Eben loved him back.
Augusta saw it in his face. So, it was true.
The story was true, and Augusta was a fool, and everything they whispered in the tent was real, and the ground that held her and the life she knew collapsed into dust.
Mushroom In The Rain
Colin moved out the next day. They told the children he was traveling for work, and he stayed in a corporate apartment by his office. On weekends he would come and take the kids to the orchard, to the museum, or to House of Pizza for lunch, but he wasn’t to set foot in Augusta’s house again.
Augusta’s mother thought she was being extreme, thought she should give Colin the chance to explain, but Augusta greeted the suggestion with disbelief. “When Dad had an affair with his colleague’s daughter, did you give him the chance to explain? I don’t think so, Mom. I can’t trust him anymore.”
Eben called and left her a voicemail, asking to speak, but Augusta deleted it.
She knew she couldn’t divorce her own brother, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to listen while he tried to justify lying to her for a decade and then gaslighting her into thinking she’d been the bad sibling.
There were moments when she wondered if she was overreacting, when she thought maybe she should have heard them out, but then she would see Colin in her mind, kissing Eben, pressing him to the bed, and she would harden her resolve.
It was embarrassing to know that everyone in Greenhead was talking about her, but Augusta refused to stay home and hide.
She wanted, years from now, for her children to look back and see a mother who had remained stoic in the face of humiliation, like Princess Diana going off and walking in fields of land mines after Charles dumped her for Camilla.
Augusta signed up to direct the kindergarten play, Mushroom in the Rain, and arranged twenty costumes—bunny tails and fox ears and little yellow sparrow beaks on elastic—and while it wasn’t Angola or Bosnia, Augusta still felt a certain level of dignity when a class full of children sat neatly in a circle and watched her demonstrate proper scampering.
She didn’t want to show favoritism, so she assigned Charlie to be one of the eight mushrooms, letting Fran’s son Hale have the fox. Charlie was happy enough and the night of the play he put on his gray pants and gray T-shirt and preened around the house and asked to have his picture taken.
Zoey came over to babysit the girls, and when Augusta arrived at the auditorium, she saw there was a huge turnout and was surprised to realize she had butterflies.
The hot mom, Alexia, was there, Fran and RJ were seated right up front, and even the cool dad in his Green Day T-shirt seemed to be caught up in the night’s festive spirit.
The audience applauded as Augusta and the first mushroom took to the stage.
“Once upon a time there was a mushroom in the rain,” she narrated.
The piano tinkled out a few droplets and the mushroom grinned excitedly and waved to his mother.
“The rain was soaking all the animals in the forest. Along came an ant, looking for a place to stay dry.”
The piano made some ant noises and a little girl in red with pipe cleaners affixed to her shirt skittered onstage. “Can I come stay dry under you?”
“YES!” shouted the mushroom.
“As the rain fell, the mushroom expanded and grew bigger,” Augusta continued, and a second little child in gray clomped out from the wings and joined the first mushroom, holding hands to form a pretend awning for the ant.
Next came a butterfly looking to dry off, and the pianist made some good butterfly music. Augusta felt herself relax and start to enjoy the evening. The children were performing beautifully, and both the ant and the butterfly were crouching relatively quietly under the mushroom.
“Everything was now very wet, and the mushroom was growing and growing,” Augusta intoned. She heard a giggle in the audience. The piano player had different little tunes for each of the children, and the sparrows joined, followed by another mushroom, holding hands with the others in a circle.
“The mushroom grew and grew, getting huge! It was so big and wet!” The giggle Augusta had heard earlier turned into a series of muffled whispers.
The parents were snickering, but there was something about it that seemed strange.
They weren’t laughing at the sweet bunnies or even the sparrows crouching on their toes.
Augusta couldn’t figure out the joke, but she pressed on.
“The bigger the mushroom got, the more the animals loved it—” A full-on peal of laughter from the audience startled her.
She guided the final mushrooms to the stage, but it wasn’t until she announced the fox that it all suddenly clicked.
The wetness, the big throbbing mushroom.
She was basically narrating kindergarten woodland porn, erotica for forest-dwellers.
She wanted to die, but she faked a smile for the final lines and clapped as the children took their bows.
It was humiliating. Augusta, the virginal moron, misses the plot once again.
But also, what the hell was wrong with everyone?
It was a kindergarten play! Were they all so obsessed with sex they had to see it everywhere?
Maybe this was on them, those parents out there in the dark theater who wrung their hands over “correct anatomical language” and then giggled like fools about a minor innuendo.
Augusta collected her things backstage and ushered Charlie out the door to the parking lot, not stopping to say goodbye or even thank the piano player.
As she buckled Charlie into his booster seat Fran came jogging up. “Hey, are you okay? Why are you leaving?”