When Christopher DeVries arrived home from school, there was a simple message stuck to the refrigerator:
Be here when I get back from work, we have to talk. Mom.
The door had been purged of expired notes and grocery lists to make the message stand out. She had even thought to use the little magnet shaped like an exclamation point to pin it up.
Oh terrific,
Christopher thought to himself,
what did I do?
He racked his brain a moment, which yielded little. Christopher was not the trouble-making type. He tended to be an increasingly lackluster student, easily bored and prone to daydreaming, but they were only two weeks into the new (his last) school year. Finally, he shrugged, and went to his room to lose himself in Zork until his mother returned from work, not, for the moment, overly worried. It might not be about him at all.
About five thirty that evening as usual, Christopher heard the familiar crunch of tires on gravel, soon followed by the front door.
"Chris?", Janet DeVries called, but not too loudly. There was nowhere in a mobile home that one needed to speak much above conversational volume to get somebody else's attention.
"Yeah mom."
"You saw my note?"
"Sure."
"Okay, come on out of the cave babe, we have to talk."
Wow, she isn't wasting any time,
Christopher thought. He sighed (quietly), saved his game, and punched the Stop button on his stereo.
Girls On Film
came to a jarring halt, and he trudged out into the living room to face whatever obviously unavoidable unpleasantness was in store for him.
His mother was slipping off her thick-soled walking shoes, the unflattering but comfortable kind worn by women who spent their working days on their feet. Nurses and waitresses, mostly. His mother was one of the latter. Janet was a pretty woman in her late thirties, smallish, with a compact, no-nonsense, but still distinctly feminine frame. In defiance of fashion, she sported (at the moment, her mood would certainly change sooner or later) a snug, brown pixie cut, which made her look nearly youthful.
"Hi hon. Couch, please." Christopher slumped down on the side near the tv, but not so heavily as to suggest defiance. No point in fanning the flames.
Janet dropped her purse on the coffee table, and took her seat opposite, leaning back and sighing with obvious relief. She crossed her (long) legs, which made the fairly modest pink waitress's skirt ride up a little on her (smooth, taught) thighs with a (to her son) deliciously soft little cotton-against-nylon sound.
Christopher groaned inwardly. It seemed he couldn't help it, noticing these little sensual details about his mother, even under duress.
Now is hardly the time for that,
he told himself.
"So, something that just can't wait, huh?" he ventured, trying to make it not sound cheeky.
His mother shrugged. "No point in waiting. Well, maybe for a minute." Christopher's mother leaned over to open her purse and did something that made her son's world spin wildly out from under him.
Janet pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from her purse. And not just any cigarettes.
These
cigarettes were (to Christopher, for certain reasons) intimately familiar. The overlength, off-white pack with stripes of tan and gold down one side marked these smokes unmistakably as Virginia Slims. The ultimate women's cigarette.
What...the...fuck?
His mother withdrew one from the pack, lit it precisely in the center of her puckered lips. She drew inward, and just before the crest of the deep drag, she snapped the cigarette away between the tips of two long, graceful fingers, finished filling her lungs, then exhaled a long exquisite stream of smoke into the waning sunlight filtering through the window behind them. It was a simple sequence of actions, enacted millions of times a day throughout the world, and burned into Christopher's mind forever. The first time he watched his mother smoke a cigarette. It was a beginning.
Janet looked at her son with a Mona Lisa smile, and gave a little laugh. "Just like riding a bicycle. Oh, I guess I'll need an ashtray." She got up and rummaged though the kitchen cupboards for a few moments before returning with a shallow saucer. "This'll have to do I guess." She took another drag off the long, white cigarette, not as luxurious as the first, but also less self-conscious, and flicked in the makeshift ashtray. She held the cigarette up in front of her. "I quit when I found out I was pregnant with you. Well, that was one of the things I quit. I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed it. " and then to her son, the sardonic smile notched up, "Is my smoke going to bother you, hon?"
It was a teasing challenge, but completely beyond Christopher's ability to process at the moment. He knew something was
very
up though, and replied carefully, for his throat was unaccountably parched, and his heart was hammering in his chest like it wanted out. "I didn't know you ever smoked, mom."
His mother tisked. "Now
that
is a lie, which brings me the the first issue. "Well,", Janet relented, "I guess it's not really too much of an issue. Some mothers might think so. Anyway, I found that box of yours in the closet a couple weeks ago. You know, the one, with all the pictures and stories? Sexy stories about mothers and sons? Cigarette ads you ripped out of my old womens' magazines? Old pictures of me?"
The world shattered around Christopher and rained down on him in icy shards. Liquid nitrogen coursed through his veins. He'd felt light-headed before, but passing out was now a very real threat. A shoebox filled with a painstakingly gathered collection of erotica, as he defined it. Stories of incest, mother and son incest, clipped from underground porn magazines spanning several decades (and Penthouse Letters, of course). His own stories, from his heart to fanfold paper via Commodore 64. Images of mature women, running the gamut from quasi-tasteful Playboy-like spreads to hardcore. Cigarette ads featuring mature female models (Virginia Slims, of course, a particular favorite). And, most damning of all, photos of his own mother from her younger days (a few of which did indeed confirm that she had, for a time, smoked cigarettes). It was a box of dark delights, the distilled essence of the very outer reaches of eroticism, and the center of his fantasy universe.
He had buried it under stacks of old clothes and forgotten comic books. He had been so careful, he thought. So cunning. It had all been for naught. The ultimate Doomsday Scenario had occurred: his mother had found
