And Baby Makes Two - Dyan Sheldon [7]
“How about Sunday?” he whispered when we came up for air. “I’ve got to work Saturday and Sunday night, but we could do something in the afternoon. After lunch.” He stroked my hair. “If you’re not busy.”
He had to be joking. I would never be busy again in my life.
She was waiting up for me, of course. She’d ruined the first part of my birthday for me, and now she was determined to ruin the last part as well. She must’ve sensed I was having a good time somewhere. I always said she was a witch.
She launched herself from the window as soon as she saw me come down the street and popped out of the living-room like a cuckoo in a clock as soon as I stepped into the hall.
“I’d like to talk to you,” she said in this dead flat voice.
She was a bit drunk. Alcohol’s meant to make you jolly, but she always gets really earnest and serious when she has a bit to drink.
I didn’t meet her eyes. I wasn’t going to let her spoil what had turned out to be the best night of my life. I was going to go to bed and pretend that Les was beside me, holding me tight, telling me how wonderful I was.
I locked the front door and marched past her.
“Lana. Did you hear me? We need to talk.”
I opened the door to my room. “Talk to yourself,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’m your mother,” she said. No one could ever accuse Hilary Spiggs of being original. “I think I have a right to know where you’ve been all night.”
“Selling my body,” I said. “Where else?”
I would’ve slammed the door in her face, but she’d wedged herself against the frame.
“Lana, look, I know I overreacted—”
She touched my shoulder. I jumped as if she’d stabbed me.
“Get your hands off me,” I ordered.
She got her hands off me. She must’ve been more drunk than I thought, though, because she almost looked like she was going to cry.
“I’m sorry, Lana. I don’t want things to be like this.”
Maybe if I hadn’t had the best birthday of my life, and maybe if I hadn’t realized I had enough power to make her cry, I would have broken down then and said I was sorry too, and everything would’ve been different. That’s what I think now, at any rate. But it’s not what I thought then. I didn’t care that she was sorry. I was chuffed I could make her cry. And I didn’t give a stuff what she wanted. I was like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, standing on the yellow brick road with the Emerald City shimmering in front of me. Only it wasn’t the Emerald City I saw, it was my future. It was nearly six feet tall, had a tongue like a lizard’s, and drove a Ford.
“Well, that’s the way they are,” I told her. And I gave her a shove that knocked her against the wall and slammed my door behind me.
My mother always told me that love wasn’t like it is in films and songs and stuff like that. Meaning that it wasn’t like that for her. Charlene and Dara’s father died when they were little. Hard though it was to believe, the Spiggs had been madly in love with him. She married my father because he was the best she could get with two children and cellulite and her lousy personality. Charlene and Dara’s father was God’s gift to the earth; mine was a reminder that God likes to punish people.
“You don’t just meet someone and BOOM, you’re in love,” my mother had told me. “Real life isn’t like in films.”
I didn’t believe her when I was twelve, and now that I was fifteen I knew she was lying. She wanted me to have the same miserable life she had, that’s why.
Love was exactly like it was in films: BOOM.
One minute you’re just an ordinary person, waiting for something great to happen, and the next minute – BOOM – something great has happened. You feel happier than you’ve ever felt before – than you ever thought you could feel.
I’m not sure if I fell in love with Les when he kissed me, or if it happened before that, when we were talking in McDonald’s. Not that it mattered. I knew that first night that he was the man I’d been waiting for since I was born.
After she stopped shouting at me through the door and finally staggered off to her own room, I put a Celine Dion CD in my Discman and lay on my bed, staring at the