How We Are Hungry

SHE WAITS, SEETHING, BLOOMING

SHE IS A SINGLE MOTHER and has no interest in any men but her son, who is fifteen and has not called. It is 2:33 am and he hasn’t phoned since 5:40 that evening, when he said he’d be eating dinner out. And now she is watching Elimidate, drinking red wine spiked with gin, and is picturing hitting her only son with a golf club. She is picturing slapping him flat and hard across his face and is thinking that the sound it would make would almost make up for her worry, her inability to sleep, the many hundreds of dire thoughts that have torched her mind these past hours. Where is he? She doesn’t even know where he would go, or with whom. He’s a loner, he’s an eccentric. He is, she thinks, the sort of teenager who gets involved with deviants on the Internet. And yet somehow she knows that he is safe, that he is fine but has for whatever reason been unable to call, or has not even given it much thought. He is testing his boundaries, perhaps, and she will remind him of the consequences of such thoughtlessness. And when she thinks of what she will say to him and how loudly she will say it, she feels a strange kind of pleasure. The pleasure is like that enjoyed by the passionate scratching of a body overwhelmed with irritation. Giving oneself up to that scratching, everywhere and furious — which she did only a month earlier when she’d contracted poison oak — that was the most profound pleasure she had ever known. And now, waiting for her son and knowing how righteous will be her indignation, how richly justified will be anything she yells into his irresponsible face, she finds herself awaiting his arrival in the way the ravenous might await a meal. She is nodding her head. She is tapping a pen against her dry lips. She tries to order her thoughts, to decide where to start with him. How general should her criticisms be? Should they be specific only to this night, or should this be the door through which they pass in order to talk about all of his failings? The possibilities! She will have license to go anywhere, to say anything. She pours more gin into her tumbler of merlot, and when she looks up, at 2:47, his headlights are drawing chalk across the front window. This will be divine, she thinks. This will be superb. It will be florid, glorious; she will scratch and scratch and bloom. She runs to the door. She can’t wait for it to begin.