Free The Stuff That Never Happened by Maddie Dawson Page B

“Yeah.” Then, for the sake of accuracy, I added, “Well, he’s good-looking. But he’s not really that good for me.”
    “You know, even the not-so-good ones have something to teach us,” she said.
    I fiddled with the enormous maroon menu. Nothing in it sounded very good. My mother winked and said she was having a hamburger, to keep her strength up. I finally ordered a bowl of chicken noodle soup.
    “I’m actually seeing someone else,” I said, meaning Grant. He and I had been talking on the telephone at night now that I was here—long, drifty conversations about the meaning of life and how we both felt we were living our lives right now in reaction to other people. He was waiting to hear about teaching jobs, and I was waiting to see what was going to happen with my family. We both felt powerless. That’s what we whispered to each other over the phone line, like it was a secret linking us together.
    My mother beamed at me for realizing that I needed to break up with Jay. “You see? That’s great,” she said. “One isn’t right, and so you move on. Pause, reflect, and get a new lover.”
    I wondered what she would have said if she’d really known. Before I came to LA, I’d been living at Grant’s apartment for five weeks, and he didn’t make a move on me until three days before I left. He’d given me his single bed while he slept on the floor on an egg crate foam mattress, first in the living room and then, because it was too cluttered in there with all the furniture, he’d moved chastely to the bedroom floor. We didn’t even kiss. He was polite and respectful, what my mother—my old mother, at least—would have called “the perfect gentleman.” Then one night he had simply come into the bedroom and sat down on the egg crate thingie and cleared his throat and said, “You know, I’m kind of that way about you.”
    That way . It thrilled me, that understatement. I’d watched as his Adam’s apple went up and down and up and down, powered by nervousness, and I was already a little in love with him just from the way he snored softly at night and how, when my artwork was on display at the student center, he showed up there in a tie and stood for a long, long time looking at my paintings, and then took me out for coffee and told me that he wanted to understand every single squiggle on those canvases. I loved the cheerful tone of voice he had when he said “Good morning” to me each day, and also how he made sure to take all the hairs out of the shower drain and the way he tiptoed if I was studying for a test. He was the nicest guy I’d ever known.
    He said quietly, “You don’t have to have feelings for me. That’s not what I’m asking for …” and I got up and went over and kissed him on the lips and pulled him down on the bed. We made love, and maybe because of all the restraint we’d shown up until then, or maybe because we were already in love with each other, or maybe because, underneath everything, Grant really does have a very high opinion of loving—well, it was just fine. Way better than with Jay. And then after three days of repeat performances, the quarter was over, summer had come, and I packed up my car and moved back to LA, because I had promised myself I would, and also because I had to save my family.
    Which is why I was there, sitting across from my mother. I licked my lips. “So I have to ask you something,” I said.
    “Anything,” she said. “Ask me anything at all!” She took out a pack of cigarettes and held one out to me with a questioning look. I shook my head, and she shrugged and lit it up and took a long, glamorous drag on it. I couldn’t believe she was smoking . “In fact,” she said, “I have all kinds of things I’m dying to discuss with you , too. Things that I would have died before ever talking about with my mother. But first let me just ask you this. Have you ever seen your own vagina?”
    She said this in a conversational voice, didn’t even