Chapter 5: The Accidental Dominant, Part Two
I figured that it would take me a little less than an hour to wash and wax my dad's car to my mom's satisfaction. That would still give me five hours or so to get online and learn everything I could about Mrs. Stone's unusual, er, preferences before she arrived.
That was the theory, anyway. Subtracting the time that my mother insisted I spend mowing our lawn so that it looked nice when Mrs. Stone was going to arrive — arrive after dark, mind you — left me with three and a half hours. Minus the weed-eating left me with two and three-quarters hours. Minus the time it took me to prepare dinner left me with two hours. Minus the time we actually spent eating dinner, during which my mother developed a wholly unexpected and very poorly timed interest in my computer programming skills, which might after all be marketable if Pam Lee wanted to use them at her high school, left me with a little over an hour. And then you have to subtract the time I spent doing the dishes, the time I spent tidying up the den, and the time I spent showering, the only activity of the bunch that was my idea.
"Terry!"
My mother's voice cut through the bathroom door, the sound of the fan, and the towel with which I was drying my hair. I pulled the door open an inch.
"Yeah, mom?" I yelled back.
"Mrs. Stone is here. We're leaving. We'll probably be quite late. So whenever you can tear yourself away from your shower, maybe you can lower yourself to come down and say hello."
My mother is one of those rare people whose sarcasm loses none of its effectiveness when she screams. Bitch.
"Have a good time!" I yelled.
"I'm serious!" she yelled back.
"Me, too."
That one was more or less a whisper, of course.
I wrapped the towel around my waist and walked down the hallway to the window overlooking the driveway. From there, I watched my father, in his tuxedo, hold the door of the nicely washed and waxed Jaguar open for my mother, dressed in a strapless black gown. The car purred down the driveway, and I went back to the bathroom to finish up. I shaved, I blew my hair dry, and then I tried to decide what to wear. What did the well dressed master wear, anyway? If I had managed to get fifteen damn minutes to myself this afternoon, I'm sure I would have found some sort of website. Jeans? Too informal. Sweats? Too high school. A tux? I actually owned a tux. No, too James Bond. She'd probably just start laughing. She was probably down there laughing anyway, come to think about it. I mean, this was a successful business woman down there. After her divorce, Mrs. Stone had started her own interior decorating firm, and currently employed half a dozen people. She was probably waiting downstairs right now to rip me a new one unless I agreed never to breathe a word of what had happened this afternoon to anyone, ever. Damn it.
I pulled on a pair of humble khaki slacks and a nice, freshly laundered button-down shirt, and I headed downstairs.
When I got to the last step, I just stopped and stared. Laura hadn't heard me approach, and was sitting on the couch. She was dressed in a white shirt and a short, plaid pleated skirt. She was wearing kneesocks and a pair of shiny black patent leather shoes. I couldn't believe she had worn that outfit here. Then I saw a little tote bag in the corner of the room, with a pair of jeans thrust into it. That was what she had worn here. She had changed after she arrived.
Even more unbelievable was what she was doing. Her left hand was holding a magazine. I could tell right away that it wasn't one of our magazines, because it had a centerfold. And if Mom ever found a magazine with a centerfold, Dad and I would both be looking for work as eunuchs. Laura's right hand was underneath her cute little skirt. Her eyes were slightly unfocused as she studied the centerfold, and the tip of her tongue was pressed against her upper lip. My tentative conclusion, from all of the evidence in front of me, was that this successful businesswoman had dressed up like a little school girl and was getting herself off on a Playboy magazine. Holy shit.
And then suddenly she looked up as if she had heard me, thrust the magazine under the couch cushions, and jumped to her feet before turning to look at me.
"Mr. Martin," she said. "I'm sorry, I didn't think you were getting home until later."
Later than what? And when did I become Mr. Martin?
She tried to surreptitiously wipe her hand on the back of her skirt, and offered it to me as I walked into the room. I took it, still slightly sticky, and she eagerly shook my hand.
"I'm Laura, the new babysitter your wife hired," she smiled. "Didn't she come home with you? She said she planned on getting a little tipsy to celebrate your new promotion. So what, she was afraid of ralphin' in the car? Did you just get her a room at the hotel and come back to take care of the boys? You could have just called. I would have been happy to spend the night."
At this point in my life, I had never heard about role-playing, and I certainly had never given even the smallest consideration to acting out sexual fantasies. With the damage my mother had done to my psyche, I figured that I was lucky just to have the fantasies. So I was completely mystified by her references to my wife and "the boys." Still, there had been a Playboy involved earlier.
"Um, yeah," I slowly answered the last question that I could remember her asking. "The boys."
"Oh, they're fine," she said. "I put Billy to bed right after his bottle, and little Terry Junior went to bed at his normal time. Well, almost his normal time. We had to have a little discussion first. That's a pretty advanced little ten-year-old ya got there, Mr. Martin. If ya know what I mean."
I had no idea what she meant.
"So everything else was, um, okay, Laura?"
"Oh, yeah," she smiled. "I was just sittin' here, like doin' my homework. Oh God, speakin' of homework. Mrs. Martin said you were like a history major. That is just so amazingly weird. 'Cause I got this homework question, and ya know, like, I could go home and get on the 'Net to find out, but then my mother will hear me, and she'll think I'm in one of those lezzie chat rooms again. Oh, it's not like I'm like that, you know, a lezzie, but the girls there are just real nice, ya know? And God, they know so much. Anyway, I didn't know how else to find out, so if I could just ask you, that would be so cool."
She looked at me expectantly, while I tried to figure out which of her statements had been actual questions and which were just regular sentences that she had ended with a question mark. There were lots of girls at my school who talked just like that. In the meantime, I glanced around the room. The living room was full of books, including two different sets of encyclopedias, that my mother had purchased to make us look intellectual.
"Oh, yeah, books," Laura saw my look. "I just can't do books, ya know. Too big, too old, too boring, too much extra crap in 'em, ya know? So anyway, I know, like, George Washington was the first president, and Abraham Lincoln was the second, but who was like the third? At first I thought it was that guy on the twenty — Jackson? — but then I was like, well, maybe it's the guy on the ten. You know, one, five, ten, twenty? But I didn't have any tens. Do you know? It wasn't Kennedy, was it?"
By this point, I was actually biting my tongue to keep from laughing.
"Um, Roosevelt," I said.
"Cool," she gave me a grateful smile. "Let me just write that in."
She walked to the corner of the living room and dropped to her knees in front of her tote bag, thrusting her butt back at me.
"God, where did I put that?" she muttered, tossing her jeans to one side as she rummaged through the bag. "Was that Franklin or Freddy?"
"I'm sorry?" I choked.
"There were two Roosevelts, right? Was it Franklin or Freddy?"
She was still looking through the bag, and a pair of handcuffs came flying back at me as I told her it was Franklin.
"Oh, God," she turned to me with her hand covering her mouth, her eyes wide with surprise. "God, I'm so embarrassed you saw those. They're my mom's."
She crawled toward me to pick up the handcuffs.
"Your mom's?" I asked. "Is she a police woman?"
"God, no," Laura giggled. "She and Daddy use these when they, you know, do it?"
"The handcuffs?"
"Yeah. I drilled a little hole in my closet so I can watch 'em. Anyway, I was takin' 'em to school to show my girlfriends, and I guess I just forgot they were in here. I'm so sorry, Mr. Martin."
"That's, uh, fine, Laura," I said. "You should be more careful, though. Your teachers could see them."
"Oh, God," her eyes grew wide again. "They would like have a shit fit. Oops, I'm sorry. Except Ms. Lee, of course, she's my French teacher. She'd probably soak one of her little thongs if she saw something like this. I swear, she is such a slut."
"Ms. Lee?"
"God, yes. She is such a cocktease. And she is really pretty. Although not much in the boob department, ya know."
She looked down with regret at her own breasts.
"'Course, some of us got a little too much, if ya know what I mean. I guess it all evens out, huh? Anyway, she would go apeshit for these things. Do you want to see 'em? Maybe Mrs. Martin would like to, you know."
