Sis and I are sitting at the kitchen table smoking Pall Malls and I tell her about the parent-teacher conference but not about the other night with Rick Snyder. There is a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts open on the table—lemon and vanilla filled—but neither of us touches them. We haven’t had our morning smoke and so we settle into our chairs and get busy. I pull hard on a Pall Mall and blow out the smoke with gusto. Sis crosses her legs and waits for me to begin.
“I come in, sit down, and she says so you’re Eugene’s mother, what a special boy, yadda yadda yadda—and then she gets real serious and asks me do I sleep with Eugene.”
Sis raises her eyebrows.
“I say well I suppose we do fall asleep together in the same bed once in a while if that’s what you mean. And Sis—Sis—you should’ve just seen her face. God, she didn’t look a day out of high school.” I shake my head. “This girl gives me this smile, and she’s all slant-eyed like she doesn’t believe me and she’s waiting for the truth.”
“Oh they’re all that way, all that way,” Sis confides, and shakes her head. “What did she say?” asks Sis.
I clear my throat, and stab my cigarette into the air for emphasis. “She said considering Eugene has special needs—”
“Special needs!” Sis scoffs, though this is true.
“—his special needs, and the fact that he is eleven years old makes it inappropriate to sleep with him. I mean, even by accident I guess.” I grind the Pall Mall into the ashtray and sit up. “I’m his mother, for chrissakes, I know what his needs are, I’ve known from day one.” I sigh and pull a fresh cigarette from the package. “I hate all these teachers,” I say, “they go to school for a few years and come out telling me how to raise my kid. Do they have children?”
“Few do, few do,” murmurs Sis, and holds out a light.
“Does little miss know-it-all know anything about Eugene’s special needs? I don’t think so.” My legs are crossed, and when I stop talking my left leg bounces in the air as if struck by a hammer.
Sis makes a noise of understanding and gives a few sympathetic shakes of the head. She has been coming over every morning for about two years now, bringing her cigarettes and the occasional box of doughnuts. Sometimes she brings a jigsaw puzzle and we sit at the kitchen table and gab all morning, working over the puzzle and smoking our Pall Malls and drinking coffee. The kitchen window looks right into the backyard so we can keep an eye on Jake and Monnie, Sis’s youngest. Sis has an older son, Marcus, who is in junior high, and she has Tina, but Tina lives in an apartment downtown with her boyfriend, which is another story altogether. As for me and Eugene, that is all there is to that story: me and Eugene.
Sis is still shaking her head and smiling her little sympathetic smile, when she stops and looks at me. “Wait,” she says, and the look on her face is the same as when she misses a punch line she should’ve got right away. “Do you sleep with Eugene?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and tap the cigarette on the golden lip of the ashtray. “Like I said, sometimes, accidentally.” She doesn’t look convinced, and so I hold the cigarette out and cry: “What? You’ve never slept with any of your kids before? Jeez, you never cuddled?” For some reason this part about cuddling embarrasses me and I look down at the doughnuts.
Sis says, “No.”
“No? I can’t believe that,” I say.
“Nope,” Sis says, and takes a matter-of-fact drag on her cigarette. She looks out the window and squints. “None of my kids were the cuddly type except for Jake, and we had to nip that little affair in the bud directly.”
“Why?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
“Because,” says Sis, and touches her black hair at the temple where it’s feathery. “We can’t have Jake turning into a mama’s boy. Kids need to be tough this day and age.”
Sis is right. Soft boys get noticed real quick in this neighborhood. “Still,” I say, “Eugene’s different.”
“Autistic?” Sis says. She always says Autistic cautiously, like she’s going to pronounce it wrong.
“If he has any special needs,” I say feeling clever, “it’s more love. Eugene needs to be loved on. He’s always had to. Ever since he was a baby.”
“Well all baby’s do,” says Sis. “But Eugene’s eleven. He’s a big boy now.”
“He’s Autistic,” I say.
“He’s still going to be a man someday.” Sis avoids my eye. She smokes and looks outside again.
“Well anyway,” I say to change the subject, “this teacher just has it all wrong.” I reach for the Pall Malls, but I don’t want a cigarette. I toss the package back onto the table. I cross my arms and stare at Sis, who is still looking out the window and smoking.
“It’s just when we read,” I say: “I read Eugene a long story, and he just falls asleep. He weighs ninety pounds! I can’t lift him up and cart him to bed—are you kidding? And so I just turn out the light and that’s that.” I throw my hands in the air, then cross my arms. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
Sis looks drowsy. But then she pipes: “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and reaches for a doughnut.
I was about to say “Of course I’m right,” but stop myself. Sis smokes in silence and I reach for a Krispy Kreme, vanilla filled. “Mmm,” I say. For a moment I lose myself in this simple pleasure. “Just what the doctor ordered,” I say.
• • •
Sis and I are best friends, but we are slippery operators when it comes to sharing men. That is why I told Sis about the parent-teacher conference but not about a night with Rick Snyder about a week ago. We have dated the same men—our town is not that big, and the pickings are slim. Thankfully our tastes differ, but there is slight overlap and that’s where it gets tricky. Close as Sis and I are, we have never addressed this situation directly. Sis dated Rick Snyder for about two months last year and there was no dramatic parting of the ways, but I feel like it would be rubbing her nose in it if I were to mention our going out. Besides, Rick and I were a one-time-only deal, and it ended badly.
He asked me to come over to his place, and when I told him about Eugene he said to bring him along. Which was a grand gesture I thought, and even gave me hope, a bright painful feeling under the ribs. Rick lived in a small one-bedroom apartment and he had made dinner—ordered pizza, actually, but we ate on plates and drank coke out of glasses. Rick reacted well to Eugene, better than most. He ruffled Eugene’s hair, and was only slightly put off when Eugene reared back and made a high warning sound in the back of his throat.
“He’s not used to anyone touching him but me,” I said.
“And what is that like?” Rick Snyder asked, and smiled wickedly. Fresh, but not exactly unwelcome.
After pizza Rick and I settled on the living-room sofa with Eugene at our feet, sprawled on the floor. The lights were off, a Disney movie played on the television screen, and Rick Snyder got down to business. He put his hand on my knee, with intent. When I reached up and placed my hand on the back of his neck, his hand moved up my leg in the dark. My fingers held the base of his skull and crept up into his hair. We wrassled around on the couch until Rick got desperate and rushed to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a bowl of ice cream. He set it in front of Eugene, who half sat up and didn’t give one thought before diving in.
I avoided Eugene’s eyes as I walked into Rick Snyder’s bedroom. I don’t know if he looked up as I left, or not. Behind the door, which wasn’t even closed all the way, Rick had my blouse off in less than a minute and was exalting over my breasts. I tried to enjoy myself, but I was worried about Eugene, about the things that could go wrong. I tried to get Rick Snyder to be quiet. “He’s right outside,” I kept saying. “Please could you be a little quieter.” But quiet, it seemed, was not Rick Snyder’s style. On his bed he wasted no time—I blinked and his prophylactic was on—and I have to say it had been so long that I focused on the man inside me for just one pure glorious moment, and cried out even as he did—and then there was a gigantic crash outside in the living room. I pulled Rick down hard one last time before I pushed him off me and leapt from the bed, shooting through the crack in the door so expertly that I swear a part of my brain must’ve memorized it. Rick stumbled after me, crashing into a table. The living room was full of blue shadows from the television screen. I jumped when I saw a man in the center of the living room, standing perfectly still and staring at me. And then I realized it was Eugene. “Eugene,” I said.
“What the hell,” Rick said, and turned on the light. That’s when I noticed the broken glass in the carpet, and the ice cream smeared and dripping from the television screen. Eugene was heaving like a bull in the ring, his eyebrows drawn down low. He stared at Rick.
Rick stood off to one side of the sofa with his hand over his mouth, surveying the mess. I suddenly realized that he was in his underwear and I had no shirt on at all, and crossed my arms over my breasts.
“Oh shit,” Rick said. “Shit.”
“At least the TV’s not broken,” I said. “And please would you not cuss around my son.”
Eugene made a high sound in the back of his throat, and started to flap his hands beside his ears. I looked at him, and felt nothing.
“Great,” Rick commented, waving a hand in Eugene’s direction. “This is just fuckin’ great.”
“Rick,” I said, wanting a cigarette. “Eugene,” I said, “honey, it’s okay.”
Eugene, though, leapt and rammed into Rick’s side. Rick was taken off-guard but easily recovered, and popped Eugene in the left jaw. Eugene’s expression was very clear to me at that moment. He was surprised—he blinked and fell backwards, his legs kicking up in the air. A great pain seized me then, as I witnessed him wheel backwards, his mouth slack. I came to my senses.
“Oh my God!” I cried, and rushed to Eugene’s aid. I held my hands over Eugene’s ears while I spat a few parting words to Rick Snyder, then pulled Eugene to his feet and toted him home, his arms around my neck. Thank God I had enough presence of mind to collect my blouse—it was Sis’s that she loaned me ages ago, and it would’ve been pure hell trying to explain where it had ended up.
• • •
So maybe this makes me hard up. Maybe it’s true. I can’t really deny it. If I’m lucky, I am sexually gratified a couple times a month, and that’s by myself with my own shameful tactics. Maybe I gave the impression that Sis and I date a lot; this simply isn’t true.
This morning, along with a jigsaw puzzle and a box of Boston crèmes, Sis brings a vibrator. She whips it out at the kitchen table and nearly gives me a heart attack.
“I thought vibrators were not our style,” I say, but take a long look at the thing.
“Maybe they’re not your style,” Sis says, and beams, “but this is something I can definitely live with. Look; watch this—” She presses a certain button on the underside of this thing and it not only vibrates, it pumps up and down, grotesquely I think. Sis is enthralled.
“Where did you get that?” I ask.
“Never mind,” she says, and tucks it away.
I decide to come clean then and there. “I slept with Rick Snyder,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “Do you have any Pall Malls?”
“How do you know?” I ask, then say: “You know where the Pall Malls are.”
Sis lights up, and I say, “It was just sex, it was just a one time thing.”
“I don’t care,” Sis says, and I believe her. “It was just sex with me too. But I got two months of it.” She smiles and I see her teeth, stained but perfectly straight.
We sit, and I think of how sex has become for Sis and me. We don’t even date when we do date, really, when you get right down to it: we just meet for sex. All over town this must be happening, I think, all over the world: people who don’t even know each other’s middle names meet in rooms familiar or no, and get down to business. If it’s good you make a polite comment, if not you keep your mouth shut and put on your socks. This is what it was like for Sis and I. “Boy, where’d the mystery go,” I say. Sis slowly nods her head.
A little later, I decide to tell her the rest of it. I say, “He hit Eugene.”
Sis stops the cigarette on the way to her lips and looks at me. “What?”
“Rick hit Eugene. Popped him in the jaw.” I lift my chin to indicate.
“That bastard, I believe it.” Then: “You took Eugene along?”
“What else was I going to do with him?”
Sis doesn’t say anything. Then she says quite severely, “Good God,” and takes a long drag on her cigarette.
• • •
I’ve been sleeping with Eugene since—forever. Is it a secret? He sleeps with his back to me and I wrap my arms around him and we spoon into the daylight, if you want to know the facts. He warms my belly, he’s the substance I cinch my arms tightly around, my comforting burden to carry into sleep. Of course, it would be nice to hear words, too—and you probably think I make him say things, I am probably a confirmed criminal in your mind. But I don’t—I could train him to say things to me, it wouldn’t be hard, but I refuse to make him a parrot in this way. I wait until he’s asleep. Then I raise up and whisper into the delicate coil of his ear how much I love him, and that I will never leave him. I wait until he is asleep before I say these things; I’m not a psycho. I just have a great need to tell tender things to someone. Is this so wrong?