Sluts

We’re going on Burt’s boat today and you’re going…no ifs ands or buts about it, “she said.

I knew I would have to go, but I felt there was no reason I shouldn’t show my displeasure anyway. It was stupid. A whole Saturday wasted with some creepy old guy, my mom and dumb little brother.

“Well, can I at least go to Amy’s tonight? Will we be back in time for that, or are we gonna have to sleep out there too?”

She wasn’t listening to me anymore. “Go get your suit on and get a towel,” she said as she padded into the bathroom.

It was embarrassing realty, my mom dating. She was probably in there shaving her legs, or douching or something gross. Whatever women do to get ready for dates.

Burt. We had to spend the day with guy out of all the other losers. Burt was an old guy name. I had seen him once or twice at the neighborhood block parties and I guess he looked pretty normal, but Burt was a name for guys who wore white loafers with plaid polyester pants.

I picked up the phone and dialed Amy’s number.

Hi, Amy. Yeah…I can’t come over today.”

“Oh that’s too bad. Sara’s coming over at noon, and so are Brett and Joel.”

Crap! I was going to miss seeing Joel? Amy liked him, I knew it and now they were going to be together all day? I mean, I was prettier, but Amy was sluttier and guys like sluts. I bet they would be going out by the time I got back tonight.

“Well, yeah. My mom’s making me go out on some stupid boat with her boyfriend. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Okay. Bye.”

Burt pulled up in the driveway pulling his boat on a trailer behind his big maroon Oldsmobile. He got out of the car and walked toward our front door. He didn’t know I was spying on him. I wanted to see him pick his teeth or adjust himself or something, so I could prove he was exactly the loser I thought he was, but he just walked up to the door and rang the bell like any other guy.

“PamSteve!” my mother yelled when she heard the bell, and came rushing to answer the door. She ran into me still standing behind the window curtain.

“What are you doing? Go get ready!”
I started to walk up the stairs, her perfume in my nose. Ew. She had perfume on for Burt.

“Wait,” she called after me. “How do I look?” She was wearing preppy white shorts and bright white Keds. She kept them that way by throwing them in the wash with a cup of bleach every week. They always smelled like chlorine. She had long legs, that luckily I inherited, and they looked tan against her white clothes.

“You look good, I guess.”

I hated the men my mom dated. They were always ugly stupid men. Ron Laetner, that creep. He already had a live-in girlfriend who he wouldn’t marry but he was still after my mom. Most of the time she talked tough about him saying she wasn’t interested in a guy who wasn’t available but I knew she had her hopes up anyway. There were others too, Ben, who had a wife, and John whose wife had died but it was still weird because he was my science teacher in seventh grade.

I climbed into the back of Burt’s car and dug down in my bag for my walkman.

“Hi kids,” Burt said as he smiled wide at me and my brother. “This is going to be a fun day, huh?”

“Yeah!” shouted Stephen. I didn’t say anything. I just put my headphones on and turned up the volume. This day was gonna suck, but at least I could listen to INXS and dream about Joel.

There we were, swimming in Amy’s pool. It was night but the pool lights were on illuminating the surface from below. Amy and Sara and Brett were having a diving contest, but Joel was sitting with me…

No, no…

There we were up at Amy’s house and it was night, and Joel, Brett and Sara were there too. We decided to play hide-and-go-seek in the woods behind the house and Joel was it. I ran and hid behind a big tree. Joel found me first but didn’t want to go find the others. Instead he wanted to stay there with me.

“Brett is going to find Sara,” he said.

“What about Amy?”

“Who cares about her,” he said and then kissed me.

I daydreamed that one a couple of times over while staring out the window of the car. Stephen was kicking the back of mom’s seat and fiddling with the power window switches.

“Up. Down. Up. Down,” he said to himself.

Mom yelled, “Will you stop that, Stephen Edward!” and then she turned back to Burt, who you could tell was trying hard to ignore the fact that Stephen was likely leaving scuff marks all over the leather interior and sticky prints on the door. He was red-faced, but attempting to smile.

“So, Pam, your mom tells me you’re real good in school,” he said.

“I guess so.” What did he expect me to say?

“Well that’s good.” Mom smiled at him and then looked back across the seat at me.

“And she’s a real good swimmer too, right honey?” she said. “She’s even on the swim team.”

“Yeah. I swim the free and fly.”

“Well great! There will be plenty of water for swimming today,” he chuckled. He obviously didn’t get what I meant by swimming the fly. There’s no way you’d swim the fly in the middle of Lake Erie. I didn’t want to swim in Lake Erie anyway. The only swimming I wanted to do was in Amy’s pool.

We got to the marina and my mom, Steve and I stood on the dock as we watched Burt back the trailer with the boat down into the water. He was having a hard time angling the boat just right so that it wouldn’t hit the concrete berms on either side. Since it was July, I wondered why his boat wasn’t already in the water. It was clear he didn’t do this too much.

Finally he had the boat in the water and we all climbed in. My mom carried a cooler full of pop and sandwiches. I sat facing the rear and pretended to be interested in all the other boats. Stephen got into the seat next to Burt and watched him drive. We motored slowly out of the marina and into the open water and then Burt opened it up. He was trying to impress my mom by going as fast as he could and making sharp turns. Stephen was screaming and mom was hanging on to him tight. My hair was flying in my face, but I acted like I didn’t care and just sat there.

Burt anchored the boat a quarter mile off shore from what looked to be a sandy beach. Several other boats were nearby. They were mostly families out for the afternoon—dads drinking Millers from the can and moms watching their kids dive off the backs of the boats and splash around in the Lake.

Except one boat. There were four boys on the boat. Two of them looked older, like maybe in high school. And the other two looked like they were my age. No parents. They were doing cannonballs off the boat and yelling swear words as they hit the water.

“Douchebag!” Splash!

“Pud wacker!” Splash!

“Dickweed!” Splash!

Aw man, and they were cute too. One even looked a little like Joel. I couldn’t believe I was here with my mom and her ugly boyfriend and they were probably going to think he was my dad and see me over here and thing I was a dorky baby to be out here on a Saturday with my parents.

“Do you want an orange pop?” I looked around to see that Burt was holding his hand out, offering me an orange Shasta.

“No, no. I’m not…thirsty,” I said.

“Why don’t you go swimming, honey?” mom said. She was helping Stephen put on his arm floaties.

“No. I’m…cold. I’m going to go lay in the sun.” I heard her sigh. I don’t know what she expected from me. Did she want me to play happy family or something?

I spread my towel out on the flat bow of the boat and laid down on it, closing my eyes. I hoped those boys hadn’t seen me, and if they did, maybe they thought I was cute or something. Maybe I did see the blond one looking at me? Oh but then he would have seen my mom and Burt too, and my brother with diving mask and floaties jumping into the water and doggie paddling around.

I sucked my stomach in to make it look as flat as possible and propped my legs up so they didn’t look like fat sausages. I could hear mom and Burt at the back of the boat.

“I should really watch him swim. The water is deep here,” I heard her say.

“”Just come here. Nothing is going to happen.” Burt was whining.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boys were not sitting on the side of the boat laughing and talking. Were they talking about me? I heard one of them say something like “purple,” and I had a bathing suit with purple stripes on it. I didn’t move. I didn’t want them to think I cared or noticed.

“Pam, come get a sandwich,” my mom yelled.” I heard the boys laughing. My mom was making me look stupid. I tried to ignore her, but she climbed up around the boat’s windshield to the bow and stood over me.

“Come get something to eat.” She was stern and wide-eyed.

I’m not hungry.” I closed my eyes again. She crouched down.

You’re being a little brat,” she said quietly through clenched teeth.

“I am not. I’m just laying here.”

“Exactly.” She gripped my wrist and yanked me up. “Now come and sit with us.”

Burt was tight-lipped and strained to keep a cheery note in his voice.

“Do you want baloney, or peanut-butter?” she asked me.

“Peanut-butter,” I mumbled, just as Stephen spilled Coke all over the floor of the boat.

“Goddamn it!” yelled Burt. He scrambled to grab a roll of paper towels before the pop soaked into the red indoor/outdoor carpeting. “This boat is practically new and it wasn’t cheap either!” he yelled at my mom.

“Here, let me do that,” mom said and got down on her hands and knees and took the paper towels from him. Burt stood up and walked to the front of the boat where Stephen and I were sitting. Stephen was crying. He clutched the remains of his soda in one hand and wiped his nose with the other. Burt glared at us and then looked back to watch my mother who was doing her best to mop up the mess.

I could see that maybe his boat wasn’t cheap, but he had hoped my mother would be and he had little use for the two kids she had towed along. So I stared straight at the back of his head, the whole time silently repeating over and over, you’re an ass, you’re an ass, hoping he would feel those words come out through my eyes and strike his heart.
.
“Let’s just go,” he said and hauled in the anchor.

Everyone was quiet the whole way home. Burt switched on the radio and listened to the Yankees and Red Sox game while mom stared out the window. Stephen was asleep; his head rolled forward and bobbed around with the bumps in the road. I bunched up my towel and wedged it in the corner next to him and then pushed him over so he would lean against it.

When we pulled into our driveway, I got out of the car and ran into the house without saying anything. I was hoping Amy and Sara would still be around, so I picked up the phone to call Amy’s house. I could hear my mom from the kitchen as I dialed.

“I can’t just leave my kids and go off with you Burt!” What was he still doing here? I hung up the phone. I hoped she wasn’t going to invite him to dinner. If that’s what she was doing, I wasn’t going to stick around.

“Come on, let’s just go out. Just the two of us. There’s no reason today should be ruined just because of your kids. They can take care of themselves. Let’s go out and have some fun.” Burt said.

“I think you should leave.”

I heard the door slam and Burt’s car start and pull out of the driveway. I tiptoed down the stairs and poked my head around the corner. Mom had the fridge open and was pouring herself a glass of white wine.

“I can see you,” she said, her back turned to me. I stepped out from behind the wall and sat down at the kitchen table.

“You were a real brat today,” she said.

“Sorry.” I could tell she was mad. I had ruined her date with one of the only unmarried men who had asked her out so far. I wondered if she was going to ground me.

She went to the freezer for an ice cube and dropped it into her glass. She sat down next to me and took a big sip.

“I’m not that mad at you.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I brought you guys along for a reason. I didn’t really want to be out there alone with him. I know you were just trying to protect me.”

“Ha. Yeah.” I stood up to go to my room. I really hadn’t been thinking of her at all. But she thought I had been. I couldn’t believe she was happy I ruined her date.

“Amy called and left a message. You should probably call her back.”

“Yeah. Well…mom?” She looked up at me,

“Maybe we can just all go out to dinner tonight? Just the three of us.”

“Sure,” she smiled.