Donna Farmer

“He’s making shy.”

One of the employees brought her baby to work. They are all cooing over him, propped up on the lunch table in the back storage room, pushing his rocking seat. I’m on the outskirts of this love in, a temp on a job that will probably be over in a week. I glance over from the make shift table I put together from boxes filled with tampons. I stop chewing on my cold homemade sandwich every now and then to listen to the comments being made to a tiny little person who is being held captive. “He looks like you,” says one of the women. Susan, I think. I can never remember their names, and they never remember mine. I return my full attention back to my lunch, keeping them in my conscious periphery.

The day ends with me chasing the manager down to fill out my time sheet. He asks me to come back next week, and then smiles, like he’s doing me a favour, like he knows I’m desperate and the crumb he is offering somehow will earn him some kind of sainthood somewhere. I smile back, and then think about the whitening pack I put into my bag and left off the inventory count.

“Maybe it takes more than just once.” It’s Friday night, and I’ve decided to spend some time with my friend Karen.

“Probably.”

I’ve already whitened my teeth twice since I’ve been home. They say only once a day on the instructions, but my teeth are really yellow. Karen goes on and on about her asshole husband and her messed up teenage daughter, sometimes her son...I think she has a son. Apparently, her daughter drinks and smokes pot already, kind of what we’re doing now. Except for the pot, it makes me turn inward, and that’s a direction I try hard to avoid. “She calls me a fucking bitch.” Karen will sit for the next hour and complain about her daughter. Personally, if I were her daughter I’d take any substance around to avoid dealing with her domestic reality, and as for Karen being a bitch, well, if honesty is a sign of maturity, then this kid is ready for adulthood.

I can feel the alcohol do its business. Quickly removing any signs of common sense, allowing me to see through all the hatred and grab on to all the possibilities my sober self knows damn well are out of reach. Karen encourages every ludicrous piece of crap that comes out of my drunken lips and I, in return, tell her what a great mother she is, which even in my most inebriated state don’t believe. We laugh and encourage each other’s versions of reality, ignoring our death march towards half a century of failure.

“Let’s go out.”

We are now drunk enough to think this is a good idea.

We cab it to a drinking hole Karen suggests. The bar is crowded and filled with under aged children dressed like hookers and gangsters. Everyone seems to have mixed the last four decades together, wearing bits and pieces of fashion they’ve torn from my past. Their youth sobers me up, making me feel like a senior citizen who has lost her way.

“Come on.”

Karen grabs my arm and pulls me to the bar like a lamb to slaughter, a really old lamb, not sheered, marked with a red dot. She is laughing and drunk enough not to notice the stares being given, the whispering and laughing. I want to pull away, run, go home, but that would draw even more attention. She orders some drinks and now I feel stuck. She will guzzle her drink, yell at me to dance and pull me onto the pre-school dance floor. I am having high school flash backs, all the pretty girls, all the pretty boys...and me. I can feel someone standing behind me, but I don’t turn around, I’m focused on Karen’s awkward display of flirting with the bartender. She’s so old looking, tired, like me, slurring God knows what to this kid while he smiles a smile I recognize from the attendants at the nursing home where my father lives.

I wish they’d turn the lights down, give us a chance to hide.

“Mom?” The body behind me finds her voice.

Karen turns around, allowing her fake laugh to disintegrate. “Sweetie” She jumps off the bar stool and lunges at her daughter standing behind me. “What are you doing here?”

“I always come here, you know that.”

“Do you?” Karen holds onto her daughter’s shoulder, trying to camouflage the need to balance with an awkward expression of affection.

Her daughter doesn’t even try to make eye contact with me. She is in full bitch mode and is currently totally immersed in her own nightmare. I kind of share that feeling at the moment, but for different reasons.

“Get out.” Her daughter takes Karen’s hand off her shoulder, and Karen falls back towards me. I grab her hand and place it on the back of my chair, anchoring the drunk.

The movement and the words seem to take Karen by surprise; like this is the first time her daughter has treated her like a bag of shit. I know this isn’t true, but to see it in person reminds me of the cruelty of girls, the mean spirited stupidity that comes with an odd sense of entitlement when you’re pretty.

“You can’t talk to me like that!” Karen has decided to yell. I can tell by the look on her face, she has made the decision to take a stand, now...drunk...in the middle of a crowded bar. “I said, you can’t talk to me like that!” Karen wobbles up to her daughter regaining confidence in her balance with the encouragement of a few testosterone filled boys in the back, chanting the word “Fight” over and over. She grabs her daughter by the shoulder and spins her around. “Apologize,” she yells, feeling the support of the group behind her, but the support is in the drama of the moment, not the cause. Karen’s daughter just looks at her and laughs and walks away. This is a train wreck that started with a train wreck. “Why don’t you love me? I’m your mother.” Her daughter has left the bar, leaving Karen with nothing to bounce her anger off of. I want to go up to Karen and guide her out of the bar, but I want to give a bit of time for her daughter to get a head start. Karen is now sobbing to the beat of a disco song that has been pulled from the seventies and remixed. The kids are now giving her a wide birth and the chanting has stopped. They are not empathetic, just bored. I finally walk up to Karen and take her arm, guiding her back to our seat. I’m not embarrassed anymore. All these kids will soon be me, or some pathetic version. Someday, they will be working a shit job wondering where it all went wrong, or like Karen, wondering how someone you love so much can hate you so much. “Let’s get drunk.” Karen offers this idea like we’re not already there.

“Sure.”