Patchwork People XXII The x factor
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Patchwork People XXI: Full Xanax Moments. free porn video
XXI. Full Xanax moments.
Her heart skipped a beat before her brain was fully conscious of the
reason. There'd been a total communications blackout between them of
several years running but Marcia recognized Claire's old email address
immediately. She remembered, too, clicking open the message, the standard
post-divorce tone of Claire's emails: terse, authoritative, and
demanding.
Then, as now, Claire communicated with Marcia as she would with a
subordinate whose compliance was taken for granted. The imperious email
Marcia received now fit that model perfectly. It demanded immediate
acknowledgement of receipt, a complete explanation as to how and why
Phoebe came to be in Hope Crossing, and a confirmation that Phoebe was on
her way home.
In the exchange of increasingly irritated and unfriendly emails that
followed, Marcia couldn't help but wonder that a woman who'd supposedly
suffered a stroke had made such a stunning recovery to her normal mode of
functioning. When, at last, after venturing several discrete enquiries
after Claire's health that retrieved offhanded and bewildered replies,
Marcia came right out and asked Claire about her stroke, the answer that
came shooting back was no longer a surprise.
"I can't believe Phoebe would lie about something like that," Marcia said
later to Grace. "And then to blame me for not getting upset."
"So Claire didn't have a stroke after all?"
"No," Marcia said, recalling Claire's acerbic email reply.
"The poor girl must be desperately unhappy to make up a story like that
about her own mother," Grace suggested. "She doesn't know how else to
express it, except to try to make you feel some of her misery first-
hand."
"Well, she's certainly succeeded in that. How was I supposed to help her?
She wouldn't let me. She hardly gave me the chance. Unless it was to give
her nineteen thousand dollars, that is. She turned me away at every
attempt I made."
"That might be because there is nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do
to help. Or at least that's what she thinks. That's why she's so
desperate and so irrational. Try to keep that in mind."
"Hmm."
"So how did you leave it, with Claire, I mean."
"She's flying out here in two days."
"I see. Well that's to be expected, I suppose."
"There's a problem, though."
Grace raised an eyebrow.
"I didn't tell her that Phoebe had run off."
"You didn't? For heaven's sakes, why not?"
"I don't know. I just couldn't do it somehow. I was afraid of her
reaction. I'm still hoping that Phoebe will make contact. That things
might return to normal and I won't have to go into it at all."
"So what in the world did you tell her?"
"That Phoebe wasn't ready to return at the moment. Which, I guess, is
technically true."
"Hoo-boy, I see. Now things really get interesting, don't they?"
Yeah, like Doomsday, Marcia was thinking to herself.
At the airport she waited by the rental car counters near the baggage
carousel where Claire would be picking up her luggage. Marcia had already
checked the board in the main concourse. The plane out of Newark, New
Jersey was scheduled to arrive right on time.
I should have had Walt come with me, she thought to herself. He had
offered to come, for "moral support."
"And muscle should you need it. Of course, I'm just joking," he added
hurriedly, when he saw the anxiety flash across her face. "I'm sure
she'll be perfectly well-behaved. If not, the TSA will surely taser and
haul her away. And, voila, problem solved."
"Walt, that isn't even remotely funny."
"I beg to differ," Walt said, laughing.
* * *
Now, standing across from the Hertz rental counter, Marcia felt on the
brink of a major panic attack. Why hadn't she told Claire that Phoebe had
run away? Was it really just that she was afraid of her ex's reaction or
was it more complicated than that? Was it actually possible that a small
part of Marcia wanted to see Claire again? It must be a pretty small
part. Microscopic. As in atomic microscope. See her again? Whatever for?
Perhaps to prove to her that Marcia had done just fine for herself? Was
it, perhaps, a need for closure?
Whatever it might be, Marcia had thought better of it and sent an urgent
11th hour message to Claire, admitting that Phoebe had left Hope Crossing
but she hadn't received a response from Claire one way or another.
Whether Claire hadn't gotten the message or whether she'd decided to
ignore it and come anyway wasn't clear. Perhaps, Claire might even
suspect that Marcia was lying, hiding Phoebe from her. Claire might well
expect such petty-minded revenge. She would have it coming to her, after
all.
In any event, the Wicked Witch of the East would be landing any moment
now.
Well, Marcia figured, jitters aside, it was appropriate that she handle
this initial reunion herself. It was the "adult" thing to do. And Marcia
was trying hard to be an adult about it all. She'd even factored in
Claire's comfort in making her decision to meet her ex alone. Claire
would feel understandably ganged up on if Marcia had brought her friends
along. What's more, she might very well have seen it as a sign of
weakness if Marcia had brought along reinforcements, that Marcia lacked
the self-confidence to face Claire on her own, that she needed Walt to
lean on, which it would undoubtedly have been.
If Claire didn't know already, hadn't seen her last email, Marcia didn't
relish the idea of having to tell Claire the news about Phoebe's
disappearance face to face. She debated with herself when would be the
best time to spring the news. If she told her right here at the airport,
maybe Claire would catch the very next flight back. Marcia doubted that
would be Claire's plan of action, though. If for no other reason than
that of sheer perversity, because it would've been the one that Marcia
herself most preferred.
I should have taken a full Xanax, she thought. If ever there was a "Full
Xanax Moment" meeting your ex-wife at the airport for the first time as a
woman to tell her that the child she's flown halfway across the country
to bring home has run off and no one knows her whereabouts is certainly
it. The half Xanax she'd dry-swallowed upon arriving at the airport an
hour earlier had hardly had any discernible effect whatsoever. Now that
Claire's flight had landed and the passengers were deplaning, the
adrenaline surging through Marcia's system was swamping whatever mildly
soothing effects the drug might have had up to now. Looking towards the
corridor where the passengers were just beginning to appear, she felt a
full-blown panic attack literally right around the corner.
Too late now to take another pill, Marcia was thinking, as her heart
thumped in her chest. Too late to call Walt and admit that she'd
reconsidered his offer of back-up. She felt like she was gulping air
through a constricted straw. Suddenly, she didn't care if Claire felt
outgunned, didn't care if she thought Marcia needed a bodyguard because
she was too scared to face her alone; what difference did it make? Why
lie? Sue me! It's all true!
Marcia wanted to run away; she was seriously considering it, might even
have turned to do so, if she wasn't too paralyzed by fear to move at all.
And then it was too late to even run away. A plump middle-aged woman with
over-processed hair the color of blanched wheat turned from the baggage
carousel with a carry-on strapped to an ostentatiously large and
expensive piece of wheeled luggage. She was already striding purposefully
towards the rental car counter and Marcia, after a panicked hesitation
between fight and flight, felt herself starting mechanically forward to
meet her ex.
Even up close, Claire hadn't changed much in the intervening decade. Her
hair, never naturally blonde, had grown even improbably blonder as she'd
grown older. She'd grown a bit heavier, as well, with age, as if the
years had been pounds. Her face, Marcia noticed, had taken on her
mother's hangdog jowly look. But if there was any really noticeable
change, and all things do change, you'd have to say that Claire had
changed by going further in the direction she'd been going. She'd hadn't
changed so much as become more of what she'd been all along.
Marcia wasn't surprised. She'd seen this coming all along. Claire had
always been more like her mother than Marcia, or even Claire herself, had
ever wanted to admit. Claire's mother was one of those people who never
altered their opinion about anything they deemed important. It was less a
matter of right and wrong than a matter of principle. Constancy itself
was the chief virtue, even if one was dead wrong about the particulars.
Not that Claire or her mother would ever admit that they were dead wrong,
or even a little off, about anything. The very fact that they so
adamantly refused to change their minds was proof enough against any
argument; it was proof in itself that they were right.
It was probably this trait more than any other that prevented the
possibility of any sort of reconciliation between Marcia and her ex. For
no matter how much blame Marcia might have taken for the failure of their
marriage, it never softened Claire's view or led her to take any blame
herself; instead, perversely, such concessions and admissions of guilt
only confirmed Claire's certainty that she was right, that everything
really had been Marcia's fault. Of course, Claire didn't require any
confirmation or confession from Marcia. Her mind on the matter, as on so
many others, was already made up.
If this attitude kept Claire from changing in any substantive way, it
also made it difficult for Claire to understand, or even recognize the
possibility of change, in others. In her view, people were what they
always had been, what they had been was what they'd always be, and that
was that. Claire would have been very pleased to hear that Marcia had
been able to spot her so easily after all this time. She would take it as
a compliment. But that wouldn't be the way it was meant at all.
Claire had weathered the intervening years. It wasn't time that was the
enemy, but the struggle against change that took its toll. Claire had the
hard, determined, shellacked look of someone set in their way, in their
thinking, in their certainty. A kind of rigor mortis of the spirit showed
in the hard look of her smooth albeit lifeless face.
Marcia summed this all up in the time it took to cross the polished
airport floor. Needless to say, conversely, Claire didn't recognize the
woman in the dark sunglasses and polka-dot dress shyly waving and saying
hello. To Claire, the woman was a complete stranger, even though she was
expecting something of the sort (what exactly was she expecting anyway?).
It took Claire a confused and embarrassing interval to put two and two
together.
"Claire, it's me. Marcia."
"Marcia."
Claire's sharp, razor-thin mouth drew that much thinner, that much
sharper, a tiny, momentary twitch in the corner registering her
disapproval. Her ears, above the tasteful pearl earrings, burned bright
pink. Nothing else, though, registered.
"Marcia," she said again flatly.
"Let's go someplace where we can talk," Marcia said, feeling strangely
less nervous, more self-assured. "I have something to tell you."
* * *
They sat at a table in the airport food court, toying with the coffees
they ordered. They avoided eye contact. They avoided looking at each
other at all. It was as if they could only bear the sight of each other
indirectly, the way you were supposed to observe a total eclipse.
Moments earlier, crossing the linoleum floors, Marcia sensed Claire's
annoyance. It took her a few moments to understand its source. She hadn't
hadn't offered to wheel Claire's bags. As another woman, not to mention
one who now outweighed her by a good twenty pounds, there was no reason
for Claire to expect Marcia to make such an offer. Still, Claire had
expected it and the reason was clear. If Claire registered the notion of
Marcia-as-woman at all, it was only as another in the endless list of
ways that her ex had disappointed her. How he or she or whatever her ex
was supposed to be now had proven to be of absolutely no use to her.
Marcia may have changed radically over the intervening years but it was
depressing to realize that the basic dynamics that governed her
relationship with Claire hadn't changed at all. Marcia was still afraid
of the woman who sat across the table from her. Afraid of what, exactly?
Not physical violence surely, but something more subtle and therefore
more insinuatingly dominating for being invisible. Marcia was afraid of
Claire's disapproval; it was, she recognized, a child's fear of a parent
inflated to irrational proportions.
Even now, before she told her of Phoebe's leaving, Marcia felt cowed
under the weight of Claire's obvious disgust. It didn't matter that the
woman's opinion should mean nothing to her, that it hadn't, really, in
ten years. Within five minutes of seeing her again, it suddenly mattered
all over again. On some subterranean level, it had obviously continued to
matter all along.
Claire took the news better than Marcia could have hoped. In fact, when
it came down to it, she didn't have to tell her at all.
"I saw your last email before I left."
"But you came anyway? If you knew..."
"I came to see for myself how things were."
Claire's face grew colder and more set in its disapproving frown, as if
there were really nothing more she could have expected from the useless
dodo who sat before her now--failed husband, failed father, failed
man--than the complete mess it was now up to her and her alone to
straighten out. Didn't her own mother say it would always be this way?
Hadn't all her friends agreed?
Marcia wondered if there weren't another unstated reason that Claire had
come all the way to Hope Crossing. If her ex weren't here, at least in
part, to satisfy her own curiosity. If, in spite of everything, she
didn't have her own need for closure. There was certainly a finality in
the choice that Marcia had made to transition. It was a form of suicide,
a killing-off of her own past identity. Did Claire come here in part to
bury the ex-husband she once had? Marcia felt another of those unexpected
softenings towards her ex. She was a human being, after all, not some
kind of demon; it might help not to forget that.
"When did she leave?" Claire asked tonelessly. "Do you know that much?"
"Three days ago," Marcia answered, apologetically. "I saw her off to bed
the night before. She usually sleeps so late so that I didn't think
anything of it when I didn't see her until I went to wake her up sometime
around noon the next day. I wanted to talk to her. We'd had a fight the
night before."
Marcia realized that she was on the verge of babbling, adding irrelevant
detail, the way innocent but terrified suspects did at a police
interrogations, hoping to curry approval, but in reality incriminating
themselves under the disapproving and suspicious eyes of a superior
authority, acting guilty when they've done nothing wrong. What exactly
was she guilty of? Was her assumption of guilt another way of pleasing
Clare, of doing what was expected of her? Of seeking her approval? Of
saying, "yes, I failed you, I'm so terribly sorry. I throw myself on your
mercy..."
"Well, that's when I realized she'd gone," Marcia said, disgusted with
the sycophantic sound of her own voice. She forced herself to make an
abrupt end of her ingratiating ramble. "She took everything she had with
her, which wasn't much."
Claire took another sip faux sip of her coffee and stared off towards the
busy concourse. "What was it that you argued about?"
"Money"
"Money?"
"She told me she needed it for tuition."
Claire's eyebrows were tinted almost into nonexistence. But these she
managed to raise nonetheless. She turned and, for the first time, looked
at Marcia.
"And she said I sent her to you, of all people, I presume?"
Marcia took her own faux sip of coffee and shrugged.
"You didn't give it to her, did you?"
"I told her I didn't have it."
Claire harrumphed. As if to say, a likely story. I've heard that one
myself.
Marcia said nothing. The fact was that she did have it, she'd lied, and
it was one of the concrete things she did feel guilty about. It was her
money, the money she'd desperately scrimped and saved, the money she was
planning to use to complete her long-delayed transition into a new life.
"What a little conniver," Claire said, not exactly without admiration.
"Did you know that she dropped out of school last year?"
"No," Marcia said, stunned. "Of course not. How would I know? No one told
me."
For her part, Claire ignored the unspoken reprimand.
"Consider yourself told."
"If she hasn't been going to school what has she been doing?"
What Marcia also meant was what have you been doing with the settlement
money that was supposed to go to Phoebe's college tuition? She left the
question unasked. It wasn't one she would have dared herself to ask, not
that she could expect a straight answer even if she had.
"She's been in a drug rehabilitation program. But you didn't know that
either, did you?"
As if this, too, were Marcia's fault, as if she should have known. Or
would have known, by osmosis, perhaps, if only she were as concerned a
parent as Claire had been. If only she weren't instead a selfish,
irresponsible sexual freak, a runaway gender-bender on a solipsistic
kinky thrill ride. As far as Claire was concerned, if Marcia had cared
enough about Phoebe, about their marriage, they wouldn't be divorced and
Marcia would be the concerned parent she'd claimed she wanted to be. If
Marcia had meant what she said, if it wasn't all just talk, she wouldn't
have betrayed Claire in the first place, because it was betrayal that
Claire considered Marcia's chief sin.
"Well, she has a drug problem," Claire said. And d it's all because of
you, she might as well have added, the very tone of her voice an
accusation. "And I've been the one dealing with it. I had her in a good
program. I know the people who run it. I've been using the money that
would have gone to her tuition to pay for it. She seemed to be making
good progress, too. This comes out of the blue, her running off."
"How long since she ran away from the program?"
"Two weeks."
"And you didn't think to tell me?"
"Why?"
"Why? Because I'm her parent, that's why."
"Since when?" Claire snapped. Then, almost immediately, softened her
tone. "Anyway, why should I have alarmed you, bothered you in
your...um...new life. I figured I'd handle it." Like I do everything
else, she implied. Instead, she cleared her throat. "I figured it was
just a lark. She'd walked out on the program before. But she'd always
come back and everything would return to normal. There was no indication
that this time would be any different. Not at first, anyway. Besides, I
never figured she'd come here, looking for you."
"Like I'd be the last person she would come to looking for help, right?"
"Please Mick. Don't start with me."
Whether Claire had used her old name on purpose, it was impossible to
say. She'd always had a killer instinct when it came to knowing where to
plunge the knife. Marcia didn't bother to correct her. If it had been
intentional, the intent to wound had already succeeded, as Claire would
well have known.
Instead, it was Marcia who apologized. "I'm sorry," This isn't the time
for us to start bickering."
Claire nodded. "She must have run out of whatever money she had when she
skipped out of the rehab center and came here figuring you'd be an easy
touch for more. She took off again once she realized you were another
dead end."
As if, Marcia thought, that was all I was good for: easy money. I wonder
where she ever got that idea, Claire?
Then again, maybe Claire was right. Maybe that is all that I'm good for.
Christ, the old wounds never healed, did they, Marcia thought. No, not
when they ran so deep. They were like radiation burns. The damage was
chromosomal. It seemed as if it could outlast generations of lives.
Marcia felt suddenly drained, even of the frantic energy of anxiety. It
was exhausting talking to Claire, having this double-conversation, one
spoken and the other, running concurrently beneath it, unspoken.
"Anyway," Claire continued, "who was right and who was wrong isn't
important. Not at this point. We're not going to get anywhere sniping at
each other. Let's try to get along at least until we find Phoebe."
"Deal," Marcia said.
"We're her parents, after all. The only ones she's got. We may have not
always been the best, but we owe her our best now. "
It was pitiful, Marcia would reflect later, how grateful she felt to
Claire for even these stingy crumbs of recognition. That small pronoun of
inclusion, that long sought-after acknowledgement that they were both
Phoebe's parents meant so much to her. How long and hard and with what
futility had Marcia begged and fought and waited for these crumbs. And
now that Claire had finally sprinkled them on the floor of the airport
food court, how Marcia had scrambled hungrily after them, how grateful
she was to finally have them.
How she must despise me, Marcia thought; and, really, how could it be any
other way, considering how much, at that very moment, she despised
herself?
* * * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
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