The New Blond
Oct. 24th, 2005 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWouldn't have thought it was possible for Max to grow any larger, but when he showed up on my doorstep yesterday, he was at least nine feet tall and 500 pounds.
Deep Springs; fall break. Max is spending it at Casa Jemison in Aptos. He says he wants to earn some money to offset his legal bills but I suspect he's revving up for a weeklong dope-smoking marathon with Fletcher. I don't approve but that's irrelevant: he's over eighteen, he does what he wants. Fletcher was never one of the kids I connected with, still less in his current slacker incarnation – what's the deal with the blonde dye job? and why didn't he go to college? but I like his parents even though I can never remember their names; they own a string of successful restaurants in Mountain View so presumably they're in a position to pay off the cops if the need arises.
Drive-by drop-in. I've given up trying to interest Max in my theories on the universe, great art or bad television shows. I'm old; I'm his mother. Look "booooring" up in a dictionary and there's my name. The one thing I do insist upon is that he makes some sort of effort with his little brother. I've begun planning my deathbed scene, picked out the color of the curtains that waft gently in the breeze – a deep royal blue – and the scene they frame: low scrub on a hillside slanting down to an ocean. Max will be on one side of me, holding my right hand in his two giant paws, weeping uncontrollably; Robin, on the other, tears raining down but in no way interfering with his perfect Renaissance beauty, which – fingers crossed! – will survive into adulthood. (The existence of Rob Lowe gives us all hope.) The brothers have to be tight enough so fraternal squabbles don't fuck with my big deathbed speech.
I know, I know. Other women plan weddings…
Max has been pretty good – gotta say – with the weekly letters to Robin. And he showed up yesterday specifically to hang out with Robin. I'm still not sure why the sight of him made me want to lock myself in the bathroom and sob for three hours. What did this big, sarcastic, unruly guy do to that grave, thoughtful child whose blond head I used to rest my chin upon? His right arm looked like someone had taken a filleting knife to it –
"I wiped out on a road going fifty miles an hour," he tells me, deep pride in his voice.
"But you were wearing your bike helmet, right?"
"Well obviously Mom, or I'd be in a coma."
"Well, I want to hear all about your Deep Springs adventures! When we go out to dinner this week, not now though."
In point of fact, I couldn't wait for him to leave. The more I looked at him, the more parenting seemed like some kind of sick biological joke: who was this person? This giant testosterone machine whose footsteps glistened on the ground from an excess of male hormones? There wasn't anything of me in this person. Why had I wasted eighteen years of my life nurturing it?
In other news, the store had a decent though not fantastic weekend despite the fog, which glowered and misted like the backdrop for forty years of Irish famine. It was very odd, a little like living inside the meteorological equivalent of a snow globe – two miles away Mt. Tauro stood agleam in sunny radiance. The beach had some kind of bizarre pollutant, a kind of chartreuse foam that stuck to the tide line and the dogs and I met a crazy man who stalked us screaming, "Hound! Hound!" at Milo. We managed to get the red VeeDub towed to Bill Sullivan's warehouse which was one major check on the perpetually self-renewing To Do list; the other being tracking down the whereabouts of Robin's entertainment work permit. Robin needs a haircut but I'm afraid to get it done; suppose they cast him for his resemblance to an infant Paul McCartney?
Triple A Guy had another one of those bad blond dye jobs. What's with this fashion trend? Justin Timberlake fall-out? Aren't dye jobs meant to be a subtle camouflage of grey? And he yammered on and on about the spider bite he'd gotten last week, and how he lived with his girlfriend and her three kids and their new puppy in an apartment complex in Seaside that was just crawling with spiders and how his girlfriend was pregnant, due in May, and all I could think was how much more entertaining this conversation would be if I could just shave a hundred points off my IQ. It's not like being smart actually does anything for me.
Deep Springs; fall break. Max is spending it at Casa Jemison in Aptos. He says he wants to earn some money to offset his legal bills but I suspect he's revving up for a weeklong dope-smoking marathon with Fletcher. I don't approve but that's irrelevant: he's over eighteen, he does what he wants. Fletcher was never one of the kids I connected with, still less in his current slacker incarnation – what's the deal with the blonde dye job? and why didn't he go to college? but I like his parents even though I can never remember their names; they own a string of successful restaurants in Mountain View so presumably they're in a position to pay off the cops if the need arises.
Drive-by drop-in. I've given up trying to interest Max in my theories on the universe, great art or bad television shows. I'm old; I'm his mother. Look "booooring" up in a dictionary and there's my name. The one thing I do insist upon is that he makes some sort of effort with his little brother. I've begun planning my deathbed scene, picked out the color of the curtains that waft gently in the breeze – a deep royal blue – and the scene they frame: low scrub on a hillside slanting down to an ocean. Max will be on one side of me, holding my right hand in his two giant paws, weeping uncontrollably; Robin, on the other, tears raining down but in no way interfering with his perfect Renaissance beauty, which – fingers crossed! – will survive into adulthood. (The existence of Rob Lowe gives us all hope.) The brothers have to be tight enough so fraternal squabbles don't fuck with my big deathbed speech.
I know, I know. Other women plan weddings…
Max has been pretty good – gotta say – with the weekly letters to Robin. And he showed up yesterday specifically to hang out with Robin. I'm still not sure why the sight of him made me want to lock myself in the bathroom and sob for three hours. What did this big, sarcastic, unruly guy do to that grave, thoughtful child whose blond head I used to rest my chin upon? His right arm looked like someone had taken a filleting knife to it –
"I wiped out on a road going fifty miles an hour," he tells me, deep pride in his voice.
"But you were wearing your bike helmet, right?"
"Well obviously Mom, or I'd be in a coma."
"Well, I want to hear all about your Deep Springs adventures! When we go out to dinner this week, not now though."
In point of fact, I couldn't wait for him to leave. The more I looked at him, the more parenting seemed like some kind of sick biological joke: who was this person? This giant testosterone machine whose footsteps glistened on the ground from an excess of male hormones? There wasn't anything of me in this person. Why had I wasted eighteen years of my life nurturing it?
In other news, the store had a decent though not fantastic weekend despite the fog, which glowered and misted like the backdrop for forty years of Irish famine. It was very odd, a little like living inside the meteorological equivalent of a snow globe – two miles away Mt. Tauro stood agleam in sunny radiance. The beach had some kind of bizarre pollutant, a kind of chartreuse foam that stuck to the tide line and the dogs and I met a crazy man who stalked us screaming, "Hound! Hound!" at Milo. We managed to get the red VeeDub towed to Bill Sullivan's warehouse which was one major check on the perpetually self-renewing To Do list; the other being tracking down the whereabouts of Robin's entertainment work permit. Robin needs a haircut but I'm afraid to get it done; suppose they cast him for his resemblance to an infant Paul McCartney?
Triple A Guy had another one of those bad blond dye jobs. What's with this fashion trend? Justin Timberlake fall-out? Aren't dye jobs meant to be a subtle camouflage of grey? And he yammered on and on about the spider bite he'd gotten last week, and how he lived with his girlfriend and her three kids and their new puppy in an apartment complex in Seaside that was just crawling with spiders and how his girlfriend was pregnant, due in May, and all I could think was how much more entertaining this conversation would be if I could just shave a hundred points off my IQ. It's not like being smart actually does anything for me.
