Laura Nixon Dawson
Tight Pants
She was driving me crazy.
Every day after school it was, "You shouldn't eat all those cookies." "Why don't you go for a little jog?" "Let me take you clothes shopping." "Let me take you to Thelma for a haircut."
"Leave me alone, Momma," I finally said, one afternoon when I came home from school too tired and fed up to deal with her. I was sixteen years old. I had eyes and a mirror. And I knew damn well what I looked like.
"We could go to Thelma's together," she said. "Just us girls."
"Just us girls is all there is," I said. "All there's ever been."
My father never bothered to marry my mother, and left her before I was born. We live in the Hide-A-Way Trailer Park outside of Bridgeville. We've lived there ever since I can remember, and Momma's been on my back the whole time.
"Fine," she said. "I guess I've got plenty to do without your whining." And off she went to the Cock and Bull, where she waitressed during the lunch and dinner shift and drank when she punched out. She was pissed, and I knew that she'd be dragging home some old fart who couldn't be counted on to keep his pants pulled up.
So I went to spend the night at Regina's house, which was a real house and not a trailer, where we could play our tapes and eat what we wanted and not have to worry about Momma.
Because even Regina thought she was crazy. And that's a hard thing, when your own best friend thinks your mother's a nut. But Regina knew the way Momma ran around—hell, everybody did. And Momma could never leave me alone. First she'd be pushing more Clearasil on me, and then she'd be buying clothes two sizes too small for me as temptation to lose a little weight.
"Next thing you know," Regina said, "she'll be taking you to the Cock and Bull and giving you pointers."
Well, that thought nearly sent me over the top. I came real close to putting out Regina's eyes over that one. As it was, weeks went by before I could even speak to her without wanting to slit her pimply little throat.
Momma was always popular. She had more boyfriends than she knew what to do with. Well, I guess she knew what to do with them, all right. She was Homecoming Queen in high school; she still kept the picture in a big eight-by-ten frame on her bureau, wearing a rhinestone tiara with a satin sash across her shoulders. Once, when I was younger, I caught her with the tiara on, staring in the mirror and shaking her head.
I knew the story by heart. How the class had voted for her, how she was escorted to the Homecoming Dance by Tad Rutledge, the quarterback for the football team. How the trumpets from the high school band played as Tad led her up to the platform to be crowned. She carried a bouquet of roses and wore a long gown with lace around the collar. "The biggest night of my life," she always said. "It was like magic."
Momma thought I should be Homecoming Queen, too.
I looked a lot like her when I was a little kid. That's what started everything—the lookalike outfits, the dancing classes, the big birthday parties where she invited just about everybody in my school. She was going to make me popular, too.
Except the other kids didn't agree with her. I got teased for everything—my knobby knees, my grades, the way Momma dressed me, the trailer we lived in.
"Well, you have to show them that you can take it," she told me. "I got teased all the time when I was your age."
But eventually they started teasing me about Momma, too.
"I saw your mother at the Texaco station yesterday," Raymond Spaulding said to me one day on the schoolbus. He grinned at me, like some kind of big old wolf. "Saw that tight sweater she had on. Like to polish her headlights."
And of course he had to sit there laughing like an idiot while he watched my face turn every shade of red there was.
"She is some kind of fine ass," Mike Anderson said. "How come you don't take after her?"
"Maybe she does," Raymond said. "She don't have to look like her momma to take after her."
"What kinda momma you got?" Mike said, putting his face up real close to mine. "I think I might like your momma."
And Raymond laughed so hard I thought he would choke. "Everybody likes her momma," he said to Mike. "And if they don't, it's because she ain't introduced herself yet."
By the time I was in high school, Momma could tell I wasn't going to be Homecoming Queen, and it really bugged her.
It bugged her worse when I started putting on weight, and when my face broke out. She started slipping me diet pills, which I always threw away. They made her so jumpy and antsy—I didn't want anything to do with them.
"What are you wearing?" she snapped at me in the mornings as I left the trailer. "How do you think boys are going to see you in that outfit?"
More often than not, I was wearing a sweatshirt and baggy jeans.
"I don't care, Momma," I always said. Boys didn't see me one way or the other, usually. But they saw her.
"You're a cow, kid," she said to me one morning.
It's better than being a slut, I wanted to say. I don't know why I didn't. She looked the part, and she acted it too. When she took me shopping at the mall, I always saw men staring at her. She wore clothes that showed off her body—miniskirts, tight jeans, leggings. Low necklines. Cowboy boots that made her walk with a twitch. She didn't try to hide anything.
The worst thing was when Regina told me that Kevin McAlister had a picture of her in a bathing suit inside his locker. He'd stolen it from his dad.
I was a sophomore in high school when J. P. moved to town. He was quiet and sweet, and he was my new lab partner in chemistry class. After our first lab together, he asked me over to his house to help him with his homework, and when I left he gave me a daisy, so I knew it had been a date.
"You have a little boyfriend," Momma said when she saw the daisy in my bedroom.
"Shut up," I said. "He's just a guy in my chemistry class."
But then J. P. asked me to the movies. And the next weekend we went to a baseball game. He was just a little taller than me, and he had this fine blond hair that kept falling in his eyes. He held doors open for me, and walked me to my classes. Once he sneaked me a kiss outside the principal's office. I just couldn't stop thinking about him.
And Momma knew something was up when I passed on the potato salad she brought home from the Cock and Bull. And when I wasn't around on Saturday nights anymore. And when six weeks went by and I began to fit in some of those clothes that she bought me.
She knew, and she was just too happy.
"What's his name?" she kept asking me. "What does he look like?" And I slammed the door of my room shut so she would leave me alone.
One night J. P. drove me home after a movie, and as we were necking out by the car, I heard this voice call out through the window, "Why don't you bring him in? Introduce me to him?"
I froze. She was home early. J. P. just stood there, confused.
"I think you should know something about my mother," I blurted out.
He looked at me, all worry-eyed. Like I had cut myself or something. "What?" he said. "Is she in a wheelchair or something?"
"Not hardly," I said.
"Come on!" Momma called. "Bring him in here!"
"Don't you think I should meet her?" J. P. said.
I wished for once he wasn't such a gentleman. My hands were all sweaty. "It's not like that—"
"Are you going to bring him in here, or am I going to have to come outside?" Her voice was all syrupy sweet, and I knew she'd gone and got sloshed. She'd be all teeth and hair anyhow, all made up from work.
So I led J. P. up to the trailer door, and into the little front room where Momma sat on the sofa with her bourbon, all blow-dried and smiling like a soap opera queen. Or worse.
J. P. stuck his hand out, and Momma shook it.
"Momma," I said, "this is J. P."
"Well," she said, running a hand through her hair, "it sure is nice to meet you, young man."
"Likewise," he said, smiling at her.
"So you're going with my little girl?" Momma said. "You treating her right?"
"Yes, ma'am," he assured her. "You have nothing to worry about."
"She's lost a little weight, wouldn't you say?" Momma asked him. "Been dressing a little nicer. I just wanted to meet the boy who's responsible for it all. I'm getting so proud of her. She's going to be Homecoming Queen next year—you just watch."
"Stop it," I said, suddenly.
"What?" Momma said, grinning. She reeked of perfume, and my nose itched. "Can't I brag about my own daughter?"
"Leave him alone," I told Momma.
She sat on that couch, laughing her blow-dried head off. "You two are so cute together!" And she kept laughing even after J. P. left. "He sure is a handy little gentleman," she told me. "I really like him."
"You better call Thelma about that hair," I spat out, on my way to my room. "Those old gray roots are starting to show."
She kept flashing me this little smug grin, and I was ready to kill her.
I knew what she was thinking—that I'd finally come around. Improved my looks and got myself a boyfriend. She probably figured I'd pull out all the stops and be Homecoming Queen after all. Whenever J. P. came around these days, he seemed to get along with her pretty well. She probably hadn't had this much satisfaction in years.
Watching her sway on those stupid high heels, the muscles in her calves standing out like mine probably never would, I was ready to stick a knife in her. Every day, when she got home from work, I watched her mincing little walk, bound up in those tight pants and miniskirts she wore. Still acting like she was in high school. I wanted her out of my life so bad that it hurt me inside.
One night she wobbled in the front door and grabbed my arm, bobbing and weaving. "Make yourself useful and get me some coffee," she said. "I've got a date in half an hour."
Suddenly, before I even knew what I was doing, I shoved her away from me. She fell to the floor, cracking her head on the coffeetable.
I looked at the back of her head lolling around on the rug, glad I had done it. Hoping she was dead. Hoping I'd be left alone.
But she wasn't dead.
Slowly, she turned over, still lying on the floor. She looked up at me and started laughing. "You little bitch," she said. "You fat, ugly little bitch."
I stared at her, but I couldn't move.
"You got yourself a little boyfriend, and now you think you're somebody," she said. She didn't even bother to get up. She was laughing like she was fit to split. "You pathetic little twerp."
"I'm never going to be like you," I told her. "I know that's what you want, but it's not going to happen. I don't want to be Homecoming Queen, and I don't want to be some kind of damn slut."
I began walking away from her, towards my room. She called after me, still sputtering with laughter.
"Don't be stupid, sweetie—who doesn't want to be Homecoming Queen? I know you better than that."
"People laugh at you," I said. "People make fun of you. You're not the Homecoming Queen anymore. You haven't been for a real long time. You're just a waitress who lives in a trailer."
She propped herself up on one elbow, giving her head a little shake. She wasn't going to hear what I was saying—not then, not ever. "Listen," she said, slowly, looking right past me like I wasn't even there. "Just get me that coffee, you hear? I've got to leave soon, and I've got a splitting headache."
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