Marge walked around the kitchen in her old blue bathrobe, tattered for the wear, but comfortable and familiar; she used it every morning to start her day. Her house slippers, green fuzzy things that had been given to her by her kids a couple of years ago, made swishing sounds as she shuffled from the counter to the refrigerator to the table to the sink and started the routine of her morning "chores" - cleaning up the war zone left by a parting husband and two kids.
She smiled to herself as she thought about it, trying to recall what it had been like before - what it had been like when her world consisted of chores, scheduled around her favorite TV soaps, with the occasional outing to the grocery store. She remembered how the highlight to a week might have been a trip to the mall where she would have walked among the store fronts and looked at the plastic people in the store windows, draped in fashionable clothes that she would never dream of wearing. But all that had changed.
Having put the kitchen in order, Marge moved from bedroom to bedroom, making beds and picking up dirty clothes which were always deposited more or less in the same place each morning. Since her husband was able to find the same spot to drop his dirty underwear in every morning, day in and day out, she wondered why that spot couldn't be the clothes hamper just outside the bedroom door? And he'd been drinking last night; the bed 'smelled' of it - reeked would be more like it, she thought with disgust.
Idly, she moved around the upper floor of the house, wondering when their bed had become another negative in their lives. She searched for the moment as she pulled discussions and memories out of the closet that she kept her life in, turning them over and putting them on like a homeless person trying on clothes at the Goodwill. They all seemed shabby, and nothing fit quite right so she shoved it all back into the closet and firmly locked the door. No, she decided with resolve, not today. Today was one of her special days, and she wasn't going to let it be ruined by aimless wanderings down memory's dead-end street.
Her daughter's room was a stark contradiction to Marge's. As she made the bed and dusted the furniture, she was watched by gaudy, full color posters that covered most of the wall space - longhaired rockers with anorexic bodies poised over guitars as they stared out, inviting her to come along for the ride. Their only redeeming feature was one that spoke of prowess - imagined or real - the bulge in their leather pants. Walking around with a duster, she flicked here and there, trying to set things in place and put shoes back into the closet. How could her daughter do it, Marge wondered as she turned the four-inch spikes with ankle straps upside down and put them on the shoe rack at the bottom of her daughter's closet? If she only knew what those things were going to do to her feet by the time she was 30, maybe then, she'd spend more time in her Nikes. But then, the Nikes wouldn't go too well with this, she guessed as she picked up a red leather mini-skirt that was barely as wide as a belt.
She and her daughter weren't talking much these days. It had all come from that fight three months ago when Marge had found the thigh highs tucked away in her daughter's bottom dresser drawer. She wasn't really sure what they were at first, but pulling them out and looking at the lace top a few seconds, she'd figured it out. The following Saturday, she'd studied her daughter a little closer as she'd run back upstairs to get something she'd forgotten before going out, and there they were, just under the edge of her skirt - the lace top of her thigh highs. Monitoring her daughter's shower, she had finally put the routine together. The lacy thongs that scarcely covered seemed to be for school during the week, but the weekend produced no damp panties hanging on the inside of the shower door so Marge figured thigh highs meant no panties.
It brought new meaning to the lecherous smiles that her boyfriends always seemed to have as they waited in the foyer for Vicky's appearance before leaving for a 'concert' or 'movie'. Right, Marge thought, and I'll be having tea with the Queen.
A few more weeks passed before Marge finally decided that she needed to talk to Vicky. If nothing else, Marge owed it to her daughter to try and save her from a life of regrets - something Marge knew all too well. She knew the drudgery of marrying too young; she had given up the last two years of college for the dream of a marriage she had witnessed in her parents' lives. But in her own marriage, the dream had always seemed just out of reach. Just one day, she wanted to keep Vicky home from school to have her pick up her father's dirty underwear and to make the bed that stunk of whatever he'd been drinking the night before when he was up until all hours, shut up in his study.
She wanted to shake her daughter and say, 'there's more to it than this', but when Marge tried, one Saturday afternoon over coffee, to make her daughter her friend, the only reaction to her attempt was a defiant stare. Then her daughter had told her that 'sixteen was the time to live', and she had to do it now because 'she was sure she'd end up a frumpy old mom just like her'. Sitting across the table from this stranger, dressed in a mid-drift top, her nipples hard and pressing against the fabric, her jeans molded to every curve and crack of her ass and thighs, it hadn't been the words that had hurt; it had been the defiance. It had been in the body language and the look that had said 'look at me, I'm hot' while you're nothing but a 'frumpy old mother'; what do you know anyway?
Then things had become heated as they often do when two generations suddenly find the chasm between them entirely too wide for crossing - when the only thing left is yelling at each other from opposite sides as they slowly drift farther apart. And all that time, Marge had been watching her daughter whose body language oozed sex in a well-developed 'cum fuck me' faΓ§ade, and she worried. 'You're just jealous', her daughter had finally intoned as she pushed away from the table and strode off, her ass moving with the same hypnotic sway that movie starlets often had to practice to get right.
Later, Marge had reflected on her own life and wondered if she was angry because her sixteen-year-old daughter was probably having sex at her age or that she was having more sex in a weekend than Marge did in a month.
Closing the door on those memories, too, Marge moved on to her son's bedroom, 'a chip off the old block' with his dirty underwear and wadded up socks; video games, stacked and strewn around; and dirty balls of Kleenex thrown under the bed. At fourteen, he seemed to be living the transition from games to girls, indicated by the pimples and the Playboys she'd found stacked in his closet between his gaming magazines.
Her life had become bathrooms and beds, she thought as she finally finished the upstairs. She planned on making quick work of the rest of the house; she had things to do. This was one of the special days, and she didn't plan on being late.