Mother Trucker

#MyWorstDate

I’ve never known how to play house. I don’t know how to be the girl that you bring home to Mom. Luckily, Avery didn’t bring me home to meet his mother, his mother met us at a bar. If I had known, I wouldn’t have drank a 40 in the car in the parking lot of Flint Woods. Flint Woods, where I used to run cross country workouts. It looked so different in the dark from the windows of Avery’s car, like something from a horror flick. I found myself listening intently for the scraping of hook handed men against the car door. I heard nothing but the trap music radiating from Avery’s speakers. Avery threw his can out the window. I wondered which runner would end up with it stuck to the bottom of their Mizuno sneakers come tomorrow afternoon.

If I had known we were going to be meeting up with his mother, I wouldn’t have worn this little black dress, the one that scoops down as low as legally possible. It had never occurred to me that someone would ever think that I was not good enough for Avery, but that is what is happening now, at this barroom table with his mother and brother. I have been napalm ambushed with a family reunion and I am considering crawling out the bathroom window. I am considering faking an epileptic seizure. I am considering stabbing myself with a fork in the hand so badly that I will need medical attention. All so that I do not have to sit here, pretend to be sober, pretend to be normal, pretend to be in love with her son in the light of day, or rather in the light of the neon bar signs. But then his mother, a woman with straight edged bangs and a turtle-like jaw line, starts talking.

“Avery’s friends tell me that you wear sexy little outfits and stick your tongue down my son’s throat in public,” she says a little too loud. I turn beet red. All the blood in my entire body is now taking residence in my face. I wonder how hard I would have to slam my forehead against the table to be knocked unconscious.

“Mom!” Avery says, trying to rescue me from embarrassment. It’s too late, the bullet has already been fired and I know now exactly what this woman thinks of me.

“Well that’s what your friends are saying!” she defends.

I ask myself, if I was a mother, would I want my son to date me? I may dress like a hooker, but I promise, I have a 4.0 GPA and a heart of gold. I don’t say this to his mother, though. I learned a long time ago, that it’s no using convincing people out of what they have already decided to see in you.

“But Avery tells me you’re beautiful and funny and smart,” she’s backpedaling and I squeeze Avery’s hand under the table in gratitude. Although I don’t believe what he’s said about me either. What had I ever said that was funny? I felt like I spent half our time together stoically contemplating why we were together at all and the other half drunk off my ass, trying to forget that we were actually dating. Who even was this girl we were talking about now? I didn’t know her anymore.

“And what do your parents think of you dating this one?” she asks me.

“They’re just thrilled I’ve decided on somebody,” I say, because I have this bad habit of making myself seem even worse to people who have already decided that I am no good. I know I should have thrown together some bullshit phrase about how they’re thrilled that I’m dating such a gentlemen. But the margarita I’m sipping doesn’t need anymore sugar coating to go with it. In reality, my parents will never meet Avery, never know him, never speak to him. He will be gone by the time my mother comes to visit me next. I’m just biding my time until we spontaneously combust. It’s not that Avery’s a bad guy, it’s just that with his Mountain Dew mouth and his day drinking ways, trying to be with him is like trying to squeeze my ass into size 2 jeans. It’s obviously not going to work and some seams about to burst soon. “They think having some stability in my life will be good for me.”

“Yeah, when I met her, she was a hooker,” Avery says, trying to be funny. I slap his hand away under the table and glare at him as if I am plotting his murder, which of course at this moment I am.

“Not funny,” I spit. Avery’s brother looks apologetically at me from across the table, as if he’s watching a python devour a field mouse. Avery’s brother knows more about my past than Avery does, he used to date one of my friends. He knows how rumors like this have dogged me since my corset wearing freshman days. He knows all about my habit of letting people believe the worst. I know that all too often, I am the builder of my own funeral pyre. I can’t seem to stop, even when I smell smoke.

When Avery’s mother laughs at his hooker comment, all I can ask myself is, why am I sitting here? What relevance do I hold to these people? Any people? I have no people, at least that’s what I used to tell myself before Avery, when I was free.

“I’ll be back,” I say, pushing my chair back too loudly. Three men at the bar hear the screeching of its legs against the booze sticky floor and spin around to see what the upset is. Their eyes meet with me instead, little black dress beautiful, and I can feel their eyes crawling from my toes to my eyelashes. I speed walk to the bathroom. Both the stalls are full. I pull the lid off the trash can and vomit my guts, my beautiful, smart, funny guts into the bin. I think about alcohol poisoning and all the celebrities who have ever died from it, Amy Winehouse, Elvis. I would rather pull a Marilyn Monroe in this ladies room than go back out to that table, to that pack of wolves that raised Avery. But I’m not so famous, or so lucky. I wipe the loose mascara from under my eyes, swish out my mouth in the sink, grimace into the mirror and prepare for battle once more.