Mom?
I turn to see my handsome son, aged considerably but still recognizable. Someone visited this morning, a stranger to me, left abruptly when I didn’t recognize her. When I wouldn’t play along. A brash, unreasonable woman.
How were your exams? I ask.
My what? O, yes, they were good. They went well.
I’m not your professor. You don’t have to be afraid I’ll flunk you.
I’m a little . . . nervous . . . when I visit. I never know how you’ll greet me.
You’re my son.
Mark.
Yes.
Do you remember my last visit?
You’ve never come to see me here. No one has.
Mom, that’s not true. Fiona comes several times a week. I come at least once. But last time you told me you never wanted to see me again.
I would never say that. Never. No matter what you’d done. What have you done?
Never mind that now. I’m glad it’s forgotten. You weren’t exactly . . . sympathetic. But all is well now.
Tell me.
No. Let’s move on. Glad to see you’re in good form today. I wanted to ask if you remembered something.
Remember what?
Something that happened when I was around seventeen. Certainly older than sixteen, because I was driving. I’d borrowed your car to take my girlfriend out to the movies. Remember Deborah? You never liked her. You never really liked any of the girls I dated, but Deborah, my girlfriend throughout high school, you really hated. Anyway, you had a bunch of boxes filled with stuff. Deborah began rooting around in them. Just curious, or maybe it was a malicious kind of curious, because when she found it she was positively gleeful. A plastic flowered pouch filled with what Deborah said was very expensive makeup.
Makeup? Among my things? Seems unlikely, I say.
Well, I don’t know the names of all of it, but I did recognize mascara, lipstick, a powder compact.Various brushes. Deborah said it was all well used. She showed me a tube of magenta lipstick, half worn down. I nearly swerved off the road. I’d never seen you wear any makeup. Not a scrap. And yet here was this tube of magenta lipstick.
Magenta is for people with no taste. I would have been, what, fifty at that time? This is sounding increasingly implausible, I say.
Yes, I thought so. It totally disconcerted me. Like finding Dad prancing around in one of your dresses. I realized you had secrets. That there was this side of you that none of us knew about. Where you wore mascara and magenta lipstick and needed to please in that way—a desire we’d never have attributed to you.
Oh. Yes.
Now you’re remembering.
Yes, I say, and am silent. There was only one time I tried to please in that particular way.
Well?
How old were you?
Like I said, probably seventeen.
Yes. That was around the time I shifted offices—they built the new facilities on Racine and I cleaned out my filing cabinets, my desk, threw everything in boxes and into my car. Probably all sorts of odd things in there from previous lives.
Is that all you’re going to say?
Yes, I think so. Just history. Prehistory, as far as you are concerned. Nothing to be said about that. Now I’ve come up with something. My turn. I’m also going back to around that time. When you were seventeen. Same girlfriend. Deborah. The peddler’s daughter.
Yes, that was your charming name for her. Because her father owned a gourmet cookware distributorship. And I know exactly what you are going to say.
No, I don’t think so.
You caught us. In flagrante delicto.
Well, it would have been hard not to! Right in the middle of the living room, clothes everywhere, the noise! But that wasn’t what was important. What interested me was that when you heard my footsteps, you turned around, almost as if expecting me. You had a look of intense satisfaction on your face that quickly changed to disappointment, before the more expected embarrassment.
Your point being?
