Skin Deep

38

WINTER 1974

Lila did not speak to him for four days. If he walked into a room she was in, she’d leave without a word. When he came home from school, she’d be out or locked in her room. If it was only the two of them at dinner, she’d leave the meal on the stove and eat alone. When his father was around, she’d act normal but would address him with a flat voice and a glacial stare.

The silent treatment went on until she was good and ready to move on. It was her secret weapon, far worse than his father’s reprimands and threats. In fact, he would have preferred those. When she got like that, it was as if she had not only abandoned him but had died and been replaced by some loveless creature in the semblance of her—like a science fiction alien. Desperate to bring her back, he’d swear that he’d be good, that he’d do anything to make her nice again. He even began wishing to get sick so she’d feel sorry for him. But he didn’t. The only way she’d come back was if he’d beg for forgiveness like the Christian penitents she had told him about.

On the morning of the fourth day, he got dressed for school but knew he couldn’t get through his classes with Lila hating him. She was in her bedroom armchair. He could hear the television through the door. He knocked several times, and when she didn’t respond he meekly opened the door. She glared at him. “I didn’t say you could come in.”

But he did and went right down on his knees before her chair. “I’m sorry,” then he burst into tears, begging forgiveness. He wasn’t sure what exactly he had done wrong, but he was convinced that he had forced her into a shameful act that would threaten her mortal soul. He laid his head on the arm of the chair and sobbed, but she didn’t respond—didn’t put her hand on his head and say he was forgiven, that things were normal again, that she still loved him. It was like supplicating to a stone idol.

All she said was, “You’ll be late for school.”

When he came home that afternoon, things were back to normal. That lasted for several weeks. Then one evening when she was to meet his father in Manchester for dinner, she called him upstairs. He left his homework on the dining-room table.

“In here,” she said. She was in the master bathroom. “You can come in.”

Modesty was not an issue with Lila, especially since that Christmas night last year when a barrier had been crossed. But as he approached her bathroom, he had had an uneasy sense another barrier would be toppled. He was right: she lay naked in the tub.

But, to his relief, she was up to her neck in soapsuds. For her birthday she had asked him for lavender bubble bath, which he had bought with his snow-shoveling money. Her head appeared to be floating on a cloud. The surface of the tub was a large lumpy lavender-scented froth.

She grinned at him. “So what do you think?”

“Pretty cool.” He dipped his hand into the stuff and blew off scraps, which drifted down to the berg of foam she lay under.

“It’s the best birthday present I’ve had in years.” She took his hand and pulled him toward her for a kiss.

It was wet from the bath and he sneak-wiped it and started to leave.

“Hey, not so fast.”

“I’ve got to finish my project.” He was doing a science report on the metamorphosis of butterflies from caterpillars.

“That can wait.”

He felt himself cringe inside. She had that wide, dark, spacey glaze in her eyes. Hanging on the towel rack were her black stockings. She and his dad had some business function, which meant they would get back late and probably be drunk.

She pulled up a sponge from the foam. “I can’t reach my back.”

“Do I have to?”

She gave him a hard look. “Yes, you have to.” Then she softened. “It’ll only take a minute.”

She leaned forward so he could get at her back. Reluctantly he took the sponge, a large fat yellow thing, and he began to rub it across her shoulders and upper back.

“That’s not so bad now, is it?”

“It’s okay.”

“That’s my little Beauty Boy.”

He wanted to tell her to stop calling him that, but she’d probably get mad. Except for some freckles on her shoulders, her skin was milky white.

She held out one arm for him to sponge.

“You said just your back.”

“Well, since you’re at it.” She flashed him a smile.

Because she was being nice he didn’t mind, but he was still anxious to leave. When he finished her right arm, she held out her left. A shiny puckered circle he never noticed before sat on the inside of her arm. “What’s that?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, really.”

“Just a little scar that never faded.”

“What from?”

“You don’t want to know.”

It was a phrase she’d use to tantalize him, knowing that she couldn’t hold back.

“Tell me.”

She hesitated for a moment. “If you really want to know, it’s from my daddy. He burned me with a cigarette. He wanted to give me a sample of what the fires of hell are like.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“What did you do?”

“I was dirty.”

That awful word again. He said nothing. He didn’t want to know. She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It’s not important.”

He pondered what she might have done to drive her daddy to do that, trying to imagine the man in the photograph on her shelf actually clamping her arm with his fist, then taking a lit cigarette out of his mouth and putting it against her flesh while she screamed. “Did it hurt?”

“What do you think?” Then her face brightened. “Hey, did I ever tell you that when I was about your age I was voted prettiest girl in my junior high school class?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, I was. And we had a pretty big school in Macon and some stiff competition, ’cause Southern gals are grown real cute. But you know what my daddy said? He said that I’d better grow some titties or the boys wouldn’t take me seriously.” Suddenly she raised her body out of the suds so that her breasts were fully exposed. “You think these can be taken seriously?”

For a stunned moment he just gaped at her large white breasts with two ripe nipples poking up at him like some kind of animal with big pink noses.

“Well?”

He tried to respond but only grunted and looked away.

“Well, there was a time when your father thought so.”

He dropped the sponge into the suds and started out. But she caught him by the wrist. “Not so fast, Buster.”

“What?”

“You’re not finished.” She had that hot flushed look again.

“What?”

“Wash me.”

“What?”

“Wash my titties.”

“No, Mom. Please.”

In a sharp low voice that sounded as if it rose from somewhere else, she spit out the syllables with menacing insistence. “Do as I say. Wash them.”

“No, I can’t.”

She gripped his wrist. Her eyes were like bulging dark marbles. “I’m your mother.” And she thrust her breasts toward him.

His insides clutched. She was crazy again and there was nothing he could do about it or she’d get mad and turn to stone. So he took the sponge and made a quick dash across the top of her chest just under her neck.

“You’re not washing my car.”

She took his hand and showed him what she wanted—to rub the sponge across her nipples in slow deliberate circles.

“That’s better. Now show me you can do it properly yourself.”

He began to do what she wanted. But after another moment, she said she didn’t like him standing over her, that she wanted him on his knees. So he got down on the bathroom rug.

“That’s it. Nice and slow. Just like that.”

As he sponged her, he felt confused and scared. She liked what he was doing, lying back against the wall, making soft moans. But did other kids wash their mom’s breasts? He didn’t think so. At least it wasn’t something they’d talk about. But she had told him to do it, said it was all right; and since his dad was never around, she made the rules.

“You like doing this?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

He didn’t answer.

“What’s the matter?”

“I have to go.”

“You’re crying. What’s the problem?”

For a long moment he could not get the words out as tears flooded his eyes.

“Tell me.”

“I-I don’t want to make you naughty.”

Her face froze. “What?”

“I don’t want to make you dirty. I don’t want Jesus to be mad at you.”

His words hit a nerve, and for a moment her face flickered with expressions as if she were trying to decide the punishment. But she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. He could see her struggling. When she opened them again, she looked at him directly, as if staring through all the shifting rubble of her mind and into his wounded soul. “Then, you’d better leave.” She let go of his wrist.

Without a word he turned and left the room.

Later that evening, she and his father returned. He heard them come in, heard her heels on the stairs and landing like small hammers in the still of the night. Moments later the wall thumped rhythmically. Then the sounds of her gasping. At first, he was terrified that something was wrong, that maybe his father was hurting her. But then he heard her muffled giggling.

When he was older, he would look back to that night—and to others that followed—only to realize that those sounds, which had sent seismic pulses through his brain, had been meant for him. Lila’s sex sounds were for him, not herself or Dad. For him: she was getting back.