Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

New Writing

Robyn is putting away clothes, separating the whites from the darks, when she finds condoms in Tyler’s drawer.

They’re hidden behind socks she’d carefully folded together. Lifestyles, the box reads. ‘Ultra-sensitive, almost like using nothing at all.’ It contains 12 premium lubricated condoms. Robyn always thought they came in rounder numbers than that – a box of 10 or 20, maybe – but it’s been so long that she doesn’t remember.

She picks up the box and a strip of three condoms lands on the clean socks. She looks down at them for one long, silent moment. The foil is black and blue – similar, oddly, to the logo of the university where she’s a classics professor. If three are left, that means he’s already used nine.

She slips the condoms back in the box and tucks them deep into the sock drawer. Then, like shovelling dirt over a fresh grave, she places a new row of clean socks on top. She somehow knows she’ll never see the condoms again. Tyler will sense from the shift of socks that the box has been discovered, and it will be moved to another hiding spot, creating another layer between her and the real Tyler.

Tomorrow he will be 17. She’s holding a party in the garage. It has a Hawaiian luau theme, with leis and grass skirts and a piñata in the shape of a tropical fish. She’s left the guest list up to Joey, Tyler’s best friend and Robyn’s main touchstone to her son’s everyday life. She told Joey to invite 20 of Tyler’s closest friends from high school. She hadn’t even known there was a girl in the picture.

She sets the clothes basket on Tyler’s unmade bed and makes a pile from the freshly-washed T-shirts. For years, she washed his clothes and left them folded on the bottom stair for Tyler to take up and put away himself. But lately they sit there, untouched and unnoticed, as Tyler takes the steps two at a time to get to his room and shut the door.

Robyn takes another look around the bedroom, searching for new details. A Star Wars poster hangs on the wall where The Simpsons one did when he was a little boy. Watching The Simpsons was their ritual. They hunkered down on the soft sofa every Thursday. Robyn made popcorn – no butter, no salt, all organic – and they giggled at the antics of Homer and Bart. Robyn considered the show the most highbrow thing a little boy was likely to enjoy. In each episode she noticed political and social statements, and an innate gender balance where Marge always came out victorious.

She looks at the closed closet door, then takes a deep breath and opens it. Inside, his shirts hang loosely on hangers, some sliding partway off. Her hand hovers over one to straighten it. She stops herself, closes the door and leaves the room.

Tyler comes home at 4 pm, throwing his backpack at the couch and flopping down next to it. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asks.

‘Vegetarian chilli,’ Robyn tells him, leaning against the door frame to the kitchen as the pot bubbles on the stove behind her. It’s been two weeks since Robyn has eaten meat – two weeks since watching a documentary that showed pigs screaming on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. She initially planned to have tofu-burgers at Tyler’s party, but she knew Tyler’s friends would never go for that. They come from households with two parents, and male father-figures, and hamburgers made from actual beef.

She wonders, watching him turn on the TV, if she should have the sex talk with him. It seems prudent. No one ever gave one to her. Her mother found birth-control pills in her room and left them out on the dresser. Something about this placement seemed accusatory. The little plastic days-of-the-week wheel faced defiantly skyward. Pregnancy, it turned out, was never a concern. The only time Robyn got pregnant was when she was artificially inseminated.

Tyler rests his feet heavily on the coffee table. Robyn resists the urge to protest. They have thorough sex-education classes now, don’t they? There’s also the internet. No one is really ignorant any more. The presence of condoms shows that Tyler knows what he’s doing. He no longer needs to be walked to school. He doesn’t need his clothes picked out for him. He doesn’t need instructions for his sex life, as painfully inappropriate as it feels as Robyn stands there pondering it.

Tyler’s eyes still gleam with childish excitement when he looks at the TV. His jaw is still soft, his hair still refusing to lie flat. He looks up from the TV. ‘What?’

It startles Robyn out of her reverie. ‘Dinner in 10 minutes,’ she says, and heads into the kitchen. ‘No snacks until then.’

As she stirs, she remembers when Tyler was eight. She took him to a Christmas event at the women’s shelter where she volunteered.

The other children ran around, squealing at the gifts donated by the community. Tyler sat next to her, pressed against her side, afraid to play.

‘What a mama’s boy,’ one of the women said, tapping her nicotine-stained fingers on the table.

‘Nah,’ Robyn said politely. ‘He’s just my date. Aren’t you, Tyler? You’re my little gentleman.’

Robyn stands across the garage from the blare of rap music and watches one of Tyler’s friends beat the piñata with a baseball bat.

She bought it for Tyler. She expected him to swat at it with a giant smile on his face, pleased with the irony of a kids’ game at a teenage birthday party. Instead, a boy with a ring on every finger thumps it like a punching bag. Candies scatter across the concrete floor like ants.

Tyler doesn’t seem to notice. He sits in the corner by himself, quiet since Joey left an hour earlier. He keeps his chin down with his eyes on the entrance, perking up every time the door opens. When it swings shut, he thumps back in the lawn chair, barely holding his glass of fruit punch. Robyn checks her watch: 11.40 pm. If this girl is going to show up, she only has until midnight. That’s when the party ends.

Robyn drifts in and out of the doorway as she watches the party unfold. One boy dangles a lei from his open zipper, swinging it like an elephant trunk to the laughter of the people around him. Condiment bottles sit opened on the tables. Empty plastic punch glasses roll across surfaces and hit the ground. Robyn looks over at Tyler, who looks away, a flowered lei still around his neck. He’s barely spoken since he blew out the candles.

Party-goers begin filtering out in clumps of two or three, paper hats on their heads. Robyn watches the lei boy stoop and fill his pockets with candy.

Robyn begins collecting cups, stacking them on the freezer by the door. More teenagers shuffle past her, including the little redheaded girl Robyn liked at first sight. For a while, she thought the redhead was Tyler’s condom girl. She had glasses and an ornate crystal hanging around her neck, and a T-shirt that read ‘This is what a feminist looks like’.

Joey bumps the redhead as he rushes into the garage, car keys dangling from one finger. He clutches the hand of a slender blonde girl. Her breasts are round and forced into a shelf under her collar bone. She wears tiny jean shorts. It strikes Robyn then who she looks like: a junior version of Pamela Anderson, with the same powdered face but without the knowing smirk of self parody.

‘Hey, Mrs H,’ Joey says. He has always called Robyn ‘Mrs’, even though she’s never been married. ‘This is my girlfriend Lauren.’

Lauren’s smile is shy, her voice quiet. ‘I’ve only been your girlfriend for the last hour.’ On the inside of her wrist, Robyn notices, is the tattoo of a daisy.

‘Seventh and Main,’ Joey says. ‘We’ve been together since the intersection of Seventh and Main. Tyler’s mom is a professor. She studies... um... What is it again? Something to do with hookers.’

Robyn smiles patiently. ‘Ancient prostitutes of the Mediterranean.’

Lauren shuffles from one shapely leg to another, pulled against Joey as he kisses her forehead. The contact is new, Robyn decides. She can tell from the look in Lauren’s eyes: not quite happy, not quite settled, but excited, as if she’s a new toy about to be played with. One day, Robyn knows, this girl will have a child of her own. She will be 19 or 20 when it happens, working at a menial job. She will breed, and she will love whoever her Joey is.

‘There’s cake left,’ Robyn says, nodding back to the picnic table where their Volvo is usually parked. She spots Tyler in the corner, perched forward on his lawn chair, and that’s when she notices his face.

She saw that face when, as a little boy, he walked around the back of the house to see that the bird he rescued drowned in the water dish he provided. She saw that face when they passed a cat on the road once, still twitching with its last nerves as its head bled brains from being hit by a car. She saw it at a school Christmas concert as he stood in a ring of children, all accepting praise from fathers who stood an arm’s length away, providing a type of encouragement Robyn tried at but could never truly match.

‘Come on, Ty,’ Joey says. ‘We’re going out cruising. You wanna come?’

Robyn makes eye contact with her son, who looks back as if he wishes he’d never found the bird.

‘We have to be up early in the morning,’ Robyn says. ‘I think maybe he’d better call it a night.’

Joey shrugs. ‘All right. Happy birthday, man.’

Lauren says it too, but her chirp is lost in the din of a truck passing outside, and the dull remnants of rap music on the stereo. The door slams behind Joey and Lauren and they leave mother and son alone.

So it’s the blonde, Robyn thinks. The token porno-body blonde. The one who is not what a feminist looks like, who pushes her breasts into balloon shapes, and who already has a visible tattoo.

Tyler slumps back in his seat, staring at the candy-covered floor. Robyn knows better than to ask if he had fun. What is there to say, really? That he is OK? That he will survive? That this is all part of being a boy – a normal, complex boy who occasionally likes science fiction and eats fast food and spirals helplessly into cliche?

Robyn shuffles the candy into a pile but leaves it on the floor. ‘You want to watch The Simpsons?’

Tyler shrugs and hauls himself to his feet, moving in the house with a heavy, begrudging shuffle. They watch a new one – ‘22 short films about Springfield’ – and the episode is in some ways strange, and in some ways exactly what she has come to expect.

SAMANTHA CRAGGS lives in Ontario and works as writer and web editor for Brock University. She volunteers at a women’s shelter and fundraises for an event where men walk a mile in high heels. As a child she wrote stories about her dolls. More recently she came third in the 2011 Toronto Star Short Story Contest.

This story has been selected from the Mslexia archive. For the latest on the writing world, publishing and creativity subscribe now. To sample more Mslexia features or to find out about the latest issue click here.