style="font-size:15px;"> I tell her about the shot in the arm, the pain, and the gasping and whimpering, but she won’t have any of it.
She says, “Have you taken serious painkillers?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“Did you wash them down with a glass of wine?”
“No.”
“Drink a glass of wine, let the drugs take effect, soak in a hot bath, eat a light dinner, and be at your door ready to go at seven. I’ll honk.”
I’m too pain-addled to argue.
At seven, I slide into Sylvia’s car and into her not-unpleasant scent of perfume and powder.
“Feeling better?” she says.
“If you call a state of chemically induced relaxation better, yeah. I hope there won’t be any heavy lifting required tonight. Or fast thinking.”
“There won’t be. The most we’ll have to do is take a few tickets and patrol the back halls on the lookout for clandestine cocaine snorting and underage sex.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
“Because it’ll be educational and we’ll collect evidence from which we can extrapolate information about how our own children behave in similar circumstances.”
“But Jesse has no interest in this sort of occasion.”The dear child of my antisocial heart has so far avoided hanging out with girls and appears to care only for rap music, basketball, and computer games.
“That’s what Ben was like six months ago, but when I drove him to the bus this morning, he complained at length about the school’s stupidity and lack of foresight in scheduling a dance for the same weekend as his soccer tournament.”
“Did he really use the phrase ‘lack of foresight’?”
“I think his exact words were ‘the administration sucks.’The point is that by observing the boys’ peer group at play, we can better understand their world and be better parents to their sensitive souls.”
“Uh-huh.” Not long ago, Jesse was a child who gave me wonderful, long-lasting, heartfelt hugs, and walked hand in hand with me in public, and kissed me goodbye in front of his friends. He was an affectionate, loving sweetheart, the light in the window at the end of a long day.
Now, when he speaks to me, it’s to ask for food or if I want to hear a good line from a rap song, a line that cleverly rhymes with pussy, ho, or gun. Or it’s to tell me to stop nagging him about his homework, because he’ll do it when he feels like it and not before. There are still moments when he relates, of his own volition, a heartwarming anecdote about his daily life — like that some girls got into a fight after school and five police cars came, or that one of his friends got drunk on malt liquor in the park, threw up, and caught the barf in his hands. But the sweet, sensitive mama’s boy I cherished seems to be slipping away.
Sylvia pulls down the visor and checks her lipstick in the mirror. “If all else fails, we can have some vicarious fun at this dance, relive a moment or two from our youth.”
I throw her a suspicious look. “Is Mr. Sutherland going to be there?” Mr. Sutherland is a tall, single, said-to-be-straight English and drama teacher at Westdale, a man toward whom Sylvia has on more than one occasion professed lustful feelings. He does nothing for me.
She flips up the visor. “Maybe.”
“And does Ed know you’ve gone out flirting for the night?”
“Ed’s home supervising Kira and a friend on their sleepover, while I put in some helpful volunteer hours at Westdale. And anyway, if it’s just a little flirting, what’s there to know?”
This is one of the many things I value Sylvia for: her ability to provide me with timely reminders about how pointless couplehood can be.
She says, “It wouldn’t hurt you to flirt now and then. Even better, you could actually try to meet someone new and consider dating. Say the word and I’ll find someone to set you up with.”
This is what I don’t value Sylvia for: her desire to pair me up, to convert me to her two-by-two ranks. Why can’t she accept that I’m content with my single lot in life, with the one-person dwelling I’ve built to my own particular and peculiar specifications? Why can’t the coupled-off leave us solo acts alone to live out our solitary, tea-soaked existences? I do not need to be saved.
I say, “You have me confused with someone who doesn’t want to die alone.”
“All I’m suggesting is that you open your eyes to the opportunities around you.” She laughs. “Except for the Mr. Sutherland opportunity. He’s mine.”
The vice-principal at Westdale in charge of discipline, a stocky, short-haired, tie-wearing, shirt-tucked-in man of about fifty-five named Mr. Harkness, refers to females as ladies, whether he’s talking about Sylvia and me, as in, “Thank you so much, ladies, for coming in tonight and helping out,” or addressing the girls attending the dance:“Would you ladies form an orderly line to the right, please?” He doesn’t leer or make suggestive comments to us or to the scantily clad girls, I’ll give him that. But the gleeful gleam in his eye when he picks out for ejection a grade nine boy who, from the smell of him, must have poured one bottle of beer over his head while drinking another, is the gleam of someone who gets off on exercising authority. A type I can’t stand.
“Zero tolerance is our policy here at Westdale,” he says, after the boy’s parents have been called to come pick him up, an incident report written, a suspension promised. Sylvia and I nudge each other at this, though our thoughts probably do not match. The “thank god that wasn’t my son” parts may, but I’m not sure she’d be as quick as I am to classify Harkness as a power-mad asshole.
I position myself at the other end of the ticket-taking table from him, at the hand-stamping station, and try to act cool. I do not display on my face the shock I feel when a boy I know from Jesse’s year, a thin, nerdy kid who always excelled at academics, shows up with his arm draped around a hot-bodied girl dressed like a debauched pop star. I do not tell the boys that they look cute but vulnerable in their pressed khakis and polo shirts or silly and poser-like in their gangster wear. I do not hold my nose at the strong smell of musk-noted aftershaves in the air.
Most of the kids I know seem to appreciate the impersonal treatment, to tacitly agree that, under the circumstances, better to disavow previous acquaintance and avoid acknowledgement of how often I’ve car-pooled them over the years. Except for Spencer McKay. Spencer sidles up to the table with a posse of two girls and three boys, looks me in the eye, and in the ringing voice he used to spellbinding effect in last year’s school production of Romeo and Juliet (he played Mercutio), says, “Hey, Emily. How you doing?”
I take his ticket, check his face, see no obvious signs of inebriation. Spencer is a year older than Jesse and has never been a close friend, but they worked on class projects together in the split grades in elementary school, played on the same teams, and attended each other’s birthday parties before they became too old for such things.
“I’m fine,” I say, evenly. “How are you?”
“Ready to party.” He shoots
