I don’t want to sleep on the floor?
He was still staring at the empty text bubble when he noticed that someone was crouching beside him in the aisle. It was the young woman in the polka-dot dress, Eve Fletcher’s employee. She was looking at him with a sour expression, as if he were the troublemaker who was ruining the lecture for everyone else.
“Excuse me.” She nodded toward Al, who was ranting about a man being a man and a woman being a woman. “Could you please tell your grandfather to keep it down?”
*
Eve was trying not to cry; it didn’t seem like something the executive director should do at a public event. It was hard, though—the slide show was breaking her heart, the inexorable progress of a child moving through time, changing with every picture, yet somehow remaining the same person. Mark Fairchild had been a beautiful boy—so confident, so happy, or so it seemed. But there was Margo standing right beside the screen, insisting that it had all been a lie and a more or less constant torment, a nightmare she didn’t know she could escape until much later in her life.
Of course Eve’s thoughts turned to Brendan—how could they not? She was overcome by an almost desperate longing to see her son’s face, to put her arms around him, to hear his voice, to assure herself that he was okay. She’d been a fool to surrender Parents Weekend to Ted, to volunteer for her own deprivation. She could feel her only child slipping away from her, and understood that she’d been complicit in the process. They hadn’t spoken on the phone in almost two weeks, and their text exchanges had been brief and unrevealing, just the usual banalities and apologetic requests for money. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten him, but she had allowed him to fade in her mind, to become peripheral. And it had happened so quickly, with so little resistance from either of them. She’d justified it by reminding herself that a little distance was good, that he was growing up, becoming independent, and that she was reclaiming a little of her own life, and maybe some of that was true, but the expanding lump in her throat suggested otherwise.
“This is my mother,” Margo said, as an old high school yearbook photo filled the screen, a pretty young woman with dark hair and an enigmatic smile. “Her name was Donna Ryan when this picture was taken. A few years later she became Donna Fairchild.”
A wedding-day picture replaced the yearbook photo, the bride admiring herself in an oval mirror. And suddenly the bride was a bald, emaciated woman in a hospital bed, staring at the camera with a bleak, defeated expression.
“If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-four years old. She died too young.”
Donna washed the dishes. She fed a baby with a tiny spoon. She stood beside Mark on the day of his high school graduation. Her head only reached to his shoulder.
“I fooled a lot of people,” Margo said. “But I never fooled her.”
Another picture appeared, this one an overexposed snapshot from the late seventies or early eighties: Donna Fairchild, neither young nor old, standing on the beach in front of an empty lifeguard chair, wearing dark sunglasses and a blue bathing suit with a ruffled skirt. Her face was blank, unreadable.
“I loved that bathing suit,” Margo said. “I loved it a little too much for my own good.”
Donna remained frozen on the screen throughout the entire anecdote that followed. It happened when Margo was in fifth grade, and still thought of herself as Mark. One day Mark pretended to be sick so he could take a day off from school. Previously, his mother, a second-grade teacher, had stayed home to care for him when he was feeling ill, but on this particular day, Donna decided he was old enough to stay home alone, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for. As soon as his mother left for work, Mark went straight to her bedroom and found the blue bathing suit with the ruffled skirt. It was right where he’d expected, in the second drawer from the top.
“I thought I just wanted to touch it. But touching it wasn’t enough.”
Mark was only eleven and hadn’t begun his big growth spurt, so the suit fit surprisingly well, everywhere except the chest, which had a droopy, deflated appearance. It looked a lot better once he stuffed the padded bra cups with paper towels. In fact, it looked amazing.
“I’m pretty sure I hypnotized myself. I must have stared at my reflection in the mirror for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was like I was seeing me for the first time.”
Mark eventually left his mother’s bedroom, but he didn’t take off the swimsuit. He went downstairs, opened a bag of potato chips, and turned on the TV. He figured he had at least four hours before he had to worry about anyone coming home and finding him like that.
“It was such a luxury,” Margo said. “Just being alone in the house. That never happened.”
It was a beautiful hot day, late September or early October, and Mark headed out to the back deck to do a little sunbathing, an activity very popular among the girls at his school. He brought a portable radio and some Bain de Soleil, and he tugged down the shoulder straps of the bathing suit to avoid an unsightly tan line.
“It was so relaxing. The sun and the music. I guess I just let my guard down and fell asleep.”
It must have been a deep sleep, because he didn’t hear the car pulling into the driveway or his mother entering the house and calling his name. She’d been worried about him, and had come home on her lunch break to see how he was doing. What she found was the daughter she didn’t know she had, wearing a matronly bathing suit that did her no favors.
“For a long time, my mother didn’t say a word. She just kept staring at me and shaking her head. No, no, no. I remember how pale she looked, like she’d just received terrible news about someone she loved, an illness or an unexpected death. When she finally did manage to speak, she asked me if this was my idea of a joke, if I thought it was funny to wear her clothes. It’s clear to me now that she desperately wanted me to say, Yes, Mom, it was just a stupid joke. But I was so scared and ashamed, all I could do was tell the truth. I love this bathing suit. It’s my favorite. She ordered me to go upstairs, take it off, and never touch it again. Or any other article of her clothing, for that matter.”