17 year old Callie is at her lowest point. Alone and depressed most of the summer, she feels fat and ugly-and school starts Monday. Her mother Michelle is about to have a baby, and won't tell anyone who the father is. The reality TV show that Michel...
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Nothing like having to deal with complicated family issues when you are dead tired and eating Japanese takeout.
Michelle sank into the couch, wishing she could crawl into a hole, preferably a deep, warm, soft hole where doubt, and weariness, and the voices and questions and needs of others could not reach her. But Edouard had bought them take out to celebrate the end of the first exhausting day, not something she could really turn down after the day she'd had. Hours of interviews, filming, and those asinine team-building games, all designed to rev up the familiarity of the contestants and to generate reactions, facial expressions, odd comments, inappropriate emotions for the cameras.
And then that scary meeting at the end of the day, where they were asking her to sign her life away. Despite starting the day extra tired and stressed—Michelle couldn't imagine that any of the other contestants had had a baby over the weekend—she kept her guard up the whole time, constantly monitoring reactions—every look, every word—wondering if they could see her secrets, or somehow knew. Beset on every side, at every moment, she felt like a tribal woman who goes into the bushes to have a baby and then comes back and skins a buffalo. Oh, and the Apaches attack at dawn. So be ready for that.
She sat with Callie and Edouard, eating the Yoshi's takeout and watching Night on Animal Planet. The lamp at the end of the couch glowed warmly, the last of the twilight casting a soft, gray light from the big window. She relaxed a little.
"After a day on the set," Edouard chuckled, "Some nonhuman reality TV hits the spot."
He had been very helpful to her today. He'd kept his mouth shut about Callie and the baby, fetched things, been very tender. He thought she was stressed out about Callie, and that's why she looked so haggard.
Michelle said, "I wonder how many takes it took to make that cobra presentable."
"Fer-de-lance." Edouard spoke around a mouthful of, teriyaki, it looked like. "Fergie Lance?" Callie laughed.
"It's the deadliest poisonous snake. South America." Edouard scissored his chopsticks. Just then, the narrator informed them that the fer-de-lance had killed more South Americans than any other snake. Edouard shrugged.
"Very good!" said Callie.
"Oh, he knows his animal planet." Michelle nibbled on her broccoli beef, which seemed gristly and flavorless.
She knew that both Edoo and Callie were waiting for her decision, or decisions, since there were two different versions. To Edouard she had to say yes or no to being on the show, even though her daughter just had a baby. To Callie, she had to say yes or no to the show, and to keeping the baby, and to Callie being the mother. Of course, in a way she had already chosen the rose-petaled road to perdition. She had let Callie lie to Edouard, and had not contradicted her. And she still had not called the adoption agency.
On Sunday, there had been a show on television about two gay men who adopted twelve children. Clearly these men were saints, taking kids out of bad homes and off the streets. The host of the show, a woman known as one of the leading lights of rational feminine humanism and good TV ratings, said so quite plainly. They were warm, generous saints. Michelle could only watch for a few moments, quickly succumbing to a mysterious and virulent anger. Two men? What did they know? What did anyone know? A completely irrational fear overcame Michelle; a fear that her baby could end up in such a house, with two fathers and no mother.
All weekend she'd pondered the question to the point of sleeplessness. Her decision must be the right one, not for her or for Callie but for the baby.
Thus the need for that hole in the couch.
The baby snickered in the bedroom. Michelle went to check on him.
***
Callie became aware of Edouard staring at her. "You're not eating much," he said.
"I have to lose weight." She focused on the TV screen. Callie had never been comfortable with this big mongoose. She was overjoyed that he was not becoming her stepfather. So maybe now she could be nicer to him.
"I didn't even know you were pregnant."
"Really?" She challenged him. "Because I was so fat?"
"No!" Edouard shook his head, and his cheeks waggled. "I just meant, I guess I haven't paid enough attention to you." He squirmed a little, and gave her a phony smile. It was so obvious that he used teeth whitener, and not the expensive kind.
"I didn't make a big deal of it."
"You mean you were hiding it?" He blushed, his moment as Lord of South American Snakes now all but forgotten.
Callie decided to give him a break. "You were all excited about your show and stuff."
"That's probably true. I kindof get wrapped up in my own thing. But you look wonderful now, the bloom of motherhood on you. Beautiful."
Callie studied him for traces of sarcasm, and quickly decided he was just a little slow, not mean.
"So how are you feeling?" Edouard was clearly trying to make up for lost time here, though Callie couldn't imagine why.
"I've got sore muscles from working out. But I'm fine," she said. "It's my mom who's all PPD."
"PPD?"
Callie realized she had made a mistake. She was the one supposedly post-partum, and recovering from childbirth. But she had been lulled into a comfort zone by the soothing voice of the Animal Planet narrator. She needed a brilliant diversion now. "Yeah, you know. Pooped. From all the stress of me having... you know. The baby.
A shadow of suspicion crossed Edouard's face. "Is that what you said?"
Callie shrugged, giving awaynothing "Yeah, why?"
"Oh, nothing. I just... Yeah, she's pretty stressed."
Have you ever told a big, big, really big lie--and gotten away with it?
