American Standard

I don't walk with the other mothers through the park after I take Madison to field hockey practice. I have so little time that I don't want to waste it on an inane conversation. I work, come home, feed us, sleep, and do it all over again the next day. When Madison was a baby, all of my money went to my only daughter's nanny, but once she became a teenager, I began to save it away for college. It's sitting there in a cold bank or on a hard drive - my warm, down-sticky nest egg.

Besides, it's always "my husband did this" and "my husband did that" as if their partners don't have names or faces. As if these women have married into an idea. But what happens if your idea knocks you up in the woods behind your parent's house? At the age of fifteen, I thought I could will my pregnancy away. I couldn't. And the idea of being husband never factored into Rodney Lloyd's take on the matter. And it didn't to single father, Mr. Lloyd who sent Rodney off to boarding school when he realized that the little neighbor girl across the street wasn't just gaining weight.

I kiss Madison's autumn-smelling cheek and wave goodbye. She slides right into her usual pack - Devin, Sarah, Claire, and Valerie, four of the most popular girls in school. Both Devin and Claire still have tans from early vacations in Florida. Valerie wears her chin-length blunt hair full of those chunky, blonde streaks. Sarah is overweight but manages to wear more expensive clothes than I do and have them look better on her than they would on anyone. If they weren't so young, I'd be envious. And honestly, sometimes I am.

A Dad in a Yale sweatshirt passes the group of girls and specifically stares at my Madison's bare legs, clad in thin, blue knee socks, her size eight-and-a-half feet in cleats. His head slowly raises upward, his eyes taking in her short, plaid field hockey skirt and sturdy, white polo. Then he turns around - maybe from the force of my stare - and sees me. I've got my hands on my hips. Yalie Dad blushes and walks in the other direction. I've never understood why schoolgirl uniforms were constructed to be so provocative. It's as if they were designed by a bunch of pedophiles. Maybe burkas aren't a bad idea, I think, recalling a news program I had seen last week about the Taliban's subjugation of women. At least until they are eighteen. Madison's still got two years to go.

She gets a ride home with Devin's mother, an investment banker. As soon as she comes in I hand her a grocery list.

"Moooomm, I'm so tired. I don't want to go back out there."

"Well, if you want to eat tonight, you'll go back out."

"But I got the breakfast." I think back to Madison's morning booty: bagels, cream cheese, fruit salad, potato chips, cole slaw, pickles, and Snapple brought back for us triumphantly as though we were barbarians ransacking the local Einstein Bagels for our sustenance.

"Yes, but I cleaned the whole bathroom at dawn today."

She snatches the list from my hand and turns on her heel, her long brunette hair flapping behind her.

Our lives are a constant battle over who does what. Me: I work the six thirty to three o' clock shift at Kenntex while she goes to school. I imagine that our house is still, the air stale without us. Madison: she goes to school from six thirty to three o' clock and hopefully does what is asked of her. Madison is an okay student, a better field hockey player, and a great social strategist. She'll probably end up an Affiliate Marketer, a West Coast Brand Manager, E-mail Retention Specialist, or some other kind of career that wasn't available when I was fresh out of school. One that only requires good communication and an excellent ability to navigate through social minefields. Madison is popular. So popular it's scary.

At Kenntex I work in what is referred to as "The Autocenter." And like its name what happens here is supposed to be automatic. But it's not because our equipment is outdated. So I do the manual work that the computers cannot, guiding business executives into their telephone conferences by pressing a few buttons. I talk to them when they don't have their conference numbers or moderator's names. I try to help them get through their day. Sometimes they are snippy. But most of the time they treat me like I'm nonexistent, a disembodied voice out there in the stew of wires, lines, electrical impulses, and what not. And that's the way I prefer it too.

The unofficial name for the Autocenter is "The Dark Side." Due to where it is on Kenntex's conference room floor - in a dimly lit, dust bunny roaming area - it is used primarily for gossip and backbiting. Therefore, I get to hear a lot of what goes on between Kenntex employees. Who has had a miscarriage, who is screwing who, who would like to kill Lou Furio, the General Manager.

Monday morning, my co-worker, Tamara, wheels her chair over from the B bridge, plops down, and air swims to The Dark Side. I scoot around to join her, knowing that she's got something juicy to tell me.

"Girl, did you know that Angie slept with Mark after her shift at The Dirty Bird?"

"How do you know? Were you sleeping in there between them? Ménage a trois?" I tease.

"You better shut up!" she says, pushing me playfully. "Gonna ruin my lunch."

"Do you think Deena is on fertility drugs?" I ask. Our conversations are like this, skipping around to each sordid subject as though we were watching our real lives on a soap opera.

"I don't know. Why?"

"Because she's meaner now than she ever was. I heard her talking about her and her husband and how they were going to this "doctor." I figured she's having trouble getting pregnant."

"I don't know how she can even carry a baby. She's so skinny," Tamara says, defacing the Autocenter counter with a pen. I lick the side of my thumb as though I'm licking salt off of it before a tequila shot and erase her marking. "Don't do that." Then I ask, "How is Roshawn?"

"He's okay. The doctor had to bring down his medication." She spins around in the wheeled chair, then stops and inspects a piece of fabric that is unraveling from the rug. Her son, Roshawn, has ADD. I suspect that Tamara has it too. "His teacher called me the other day and said, 'Roshawn is shouting. He's not making sense.'"

"Really?"

"Yeah, I guess he kept saying, 'I got a man on my back. Get the man off my back.'" She begins to chuckle and I do too, but inside I feel sick to my stomach. Poor Roshawn on so much medication that it makes him hallucinate.

True to our daytime dramas, I am having an affair here at Kenntex with a guy named Joe. I've known him for two years before I even noticed him. And the first time I did, he was sitting on the D bridge monitoring a conference. He was hunched over in his chair, his long arms and fingers hovering over the keyboard like an organist. I wanted to tell him that hunching like that would ruin his posture, but I didn't like when the other women displayed their motherly tendencies like that, so I stayed quiet. And then I didn't notice him again for a while.

The next time I noticed him, I could see his interest in me. It was in Kenntex's rarely occupied upstairs mixing room. Sometimes clients asked for tape recordings of their conferences, so Joe has been given the privilege of mixing these tapes to boost the quality. I don't understand what he does to them and frankly, they sound the same as they did before, but I suppose at least the placebo-effect satisfied the clients' need for something professional sounding. Never mind the fact that Kenntex is still using cassette tapes in a DVD world. When future generations are finally communicating with little chips implanted in their heads, Kenntex will still be using rotary phones.

I had gone to the upstairs room to use the fresher smelling bathroom. I ascended the creaky stairs and said hello to Joe, bent over, not the mixer, but a regular PC. He minimized his window, spinning around to face me, but not before I caught a glimpse of the image on his screen, something with pterodactyls and swords. Sneaky bastard. He was up here playing a video game.

I used the bathroom, the air faintly smelling of pot and Lysol. When I exited, Joe was back at the mixer appearing the picture of duty. Even though the Autocenter was crazy busy, I sat down on a stool and swiveled his way.

"Whatcha doing?" Making him nervous, I thought.

"Working on something for Lou." He smacked his gum loudly, another broken rule. No gum.

"You're just the little Kenntex pet, aren't you? Away from the action. All alone."

Joe blushed. Previously I had only spoken to him in a work-only tone. If personal subjects were even hinted at, he became shy and reticent. And now this flirtatious, come-hither voice oozing out of my mouth. Yet, Kenntex was like that. One day you were meeting someone for the first time, the next day you were fucking them. The stress and low pay of the job contributed to these torrid sexual affairs, and only a handful of people were immune, happily married coworkers like Deena and Lou, or the uninterested like Tamara, who commuted forty-five minutes in from St. Louis.

Joe shrugged. "Hey, you didn't see anything right?" His voice was so deep that it cracked.

"That depends," I said. In my mind, the funky-strum of a porno guitar started up.

"On what?" he asked.

"Figure it out," I said boldly. I rose, traced my finger along the counter until both me and my finger were out of the room.

Our low-grade flirtation went on for a few weeks. Then Angie invited a bunch of us out for drinks. Angie worked as a waitress for a strip club called The Toucan aka The Dirty Bird. During the day, she worked on the E bridge at Kenntex where she would inevitably fall asleep, out of the glare of the fluorescent lights and Deena's fertility-drug induced temper. Angie was a runt of a girl, pockmarked and super-skinny, either from cocaine, a bad diet, or both.

"Where are you going?" asked Madison.

"Mommy's going out with the work people."

"I thought you said you hated them." Maddy sucked on the end of a long strand of hair while I swiped my last stroke of lipstick on.

"I do."

After Joe and I had sex that night, I had a far-fetched fear that somehow he would meet Madison and start dating her. But it turned out that he didn't find her attractive at all, and I knew that her tastes ran toward the clean-cut drama club types and Joe was too much of a burnout. But still, Joe was nice to Maddy, treating her like a small child by bringing over bags of those mini chocolate bars for her on our days off. He kept himself at a distance. And when Maddy got all touchy feely as she sometimes did, he would flee the scene as though he had hit and ran over an innocent bicyclist.

Madison is out at the mall on Sunday with Devin and Sarah. I work on her computer, surfing, then poking around her files. I don't find anything besides school papers and bad poetry. And even the poetry isn't juicy or telling of Madison's love life.

But eventually a window pops up on my screen from someone named dr_stylin. "Hey Maddy, what's new?" Dr. Stylin' asks in type. I pause for a moment and know I shouldn't be doing this. I look at the computer's start menu, thinking, I could easily stop right here.

"Nothin' much," I answer.

"I didn't see you at the party last night," Dr. Stylin' says.

"I was home with my stupid Mom," I answer.

"Oh don't knock your Mom. She's hooooooooot."

Nice one, I think.

"Ew," I type.

"I'd do her - LOL!" Dr. Stylin' says.

"Ew. Ew. Ew." I pause. Then I type, "I dare you to."

No answer for a few seconds. Maybe Dr. Stylin' has left the room. But then he writes, "Speaking of moms, did Sarah tell her mom she's pregnant yet?"

I don't know how to answer this one, so I log off. A little door sound follows my exit. I breathe deeply and ponder Sarah's pregnancy - the hows, the whys. She's sixteen like Madison. This could easily be my daughter. This was so easily me. I go into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face, then run it over my hands to stop them from shaking.

Usually on Fridays at Kenntex the sexual tension boils up, then dissipates later in the haze of alcohol and smoke of nightly parties hosted by Angie and her friend Luanne. But on this particular Friday morning, I am dying to feel Joe's skin, to touch his rough cheek, to hear his baritone whisper nasty things in my ear. I take a piece of paper, used for writing conference names and numbers on it, scribble out a message, and pass it to him through a chain of employees. "Meet me upstairs in fifteen minutes," it says. No one ever goes up there except Joe and me.

Fifteen minutes later he walks into the mixing room as I sit on my usual stool. I rise and clamp onto his warm, Tide-smelling body as we tumble into the small bathroom, the door clicking closed behind us. Joe turns the lock, then tests it. I automatically look into the toilet bowl in case there is something left there, but the bowl is clear. Joe plunks down the lid and sits on it. I climb on top of him as he slides my cotton panties down. I raise a foot like a dog taking a pee, and he unhooks the panties off of my leg. He moans and unzips. I feel the cold porcelain of the toilet against my bare calves juxtaposed with the warmth of his lap. It's a wonderful feeling and one you don't expect to feel at ten o'clock in the morning.

I clutch him tighter, draping my head over his shoulder. As he thrusts, I read the brand of toilet - American Standard. Then we hear footsteps and both stiffen. His rigid cock goes limp and slips out. Someone tries the handle. Knocks.

"Just a minute," I say in a shaky voice.

"Oh sorry." It's Lou Furio. I suppress a bark-like giggle. The footsteps fade.

"We should stop," I say climbing off of Joe. I roll off a wad of toilet paper and wipe between my legs. He pulls me back toward him and slips his fingers up under my skirt. I bat his hand away.

"C'mon, I just got dry down there."

"You've got all day to get dry," he says.

Through the thin door, we hear a noise, long and low. A bellow, actually. A male employee's tortured cry. Both of us wait, for it could just be someone monkeying around and then we hear, "Oh dear God. Someone get some paper towels." Something has happened on the Kenntex floor. Joe and I hustle back into our clothes to see what it is.

"You first!" I hiss, practically pushing him down the stairs. "We can't be seen coming out of here together." He jogs down the stairs, dusting off his shirt, perhaps to rid himself of my pubic hair. I wait a few beats, then I descend as well.

In the middle of the Kenntex floor Lou Furio stands, a paper towel pressed to his cheek. Blood soaks through it, making red stripes on its teddy bear-printed surface. Joe is standing there with the whole roll, holding a sheet out for Lou in case he needs more. Most of the employees are standing and watching this scene like me, but some are on conferences, so they are speaking into their headsets with terrified eyes toward Lou. Then I catch a group of women circling a seated Deena. She has her head in her hands and is sobbing. Her floral dress hangs off of her tent-like, her hands wringing in her lap. I beeline over to Tamara who is standing on the boundary of The Dark Side.

"What happened?"

"Deena attacked Lou. Oh man, it was bad."

"What?"

"He barely said one word to her and wham! She just lashed out." She makes a tsking noise with her teeth. "She damn near clawed his eyes out."

I look again at Lou who has lowered the paper towel and is letting Luanne and more of the women now tend to it with antibacterial ointment. There are gashes on his whale blubber skin.

"911 is on it's way, Lou," the day manager shouts from the front.

"Will Deena be arrested?" I ask Tamara.

"Probably. Can't go scratchin' up the boss like that."

"Will she be fired?"

"Shit, I don't know. What do you think?"

I sigh and shake my head. That's my answer.

We find this out later that afternoon: as I have suspected Deena has been taking fertility drugs. While Joe and I fucked upstairs, Lou Furio blamed her for a mistake that had happened, and she snapped. "Flew into a gonadrotropin rage," her doctor had told the Jefferson County Police. She would have been fired, but Lou wouldn't press charges. "Not when she can't have children," he had said. "That's God's punishment enough."

Joe comes over that night because he wants to relive the Deena/Lou Furio scene. I let him in, and he goes immediately to the fridge to get a Guinness because he knows, like one of Madison's friends, that anything in my house is his. He's full of adrenaline, talking high and fast in a squeaky voice. I hear Madison's footsteps on the stairs and then she's in the kitchen and joining us for the conversation dressed only in her field hockey skirt and sports bra. She is drawn to Joe, I think, because he's closer to her age than mine. She leans on the counter, looking at Joe and swishing back and forth, full of more energy than I'll ever have again at seven at night. I excuse myself to use the bathroom, but as I round the corner, I pause and eavesdrop.

"Mom told me about what happened today at Kenntex. That's so wild that Deena went crazy."

"It was wild. I feel sorry for her really," Joe says.

"Hey, can I have a sip of beer?"

"Sure, but don't tell Tracy."

This is all wrong I think - Madison half-dressed slurping beer out of a Guinness can held by my twenty-two year old lover. It's all fucking wrong.

Later in the den after Joe and I share a bottle of wine, I tell him that we have to end our relationship. He doesn't say much, only looks at me sadly as if he's known this was coming.

That night I curl up around Madison as she lies on her bed and watches a horror movie about teenagers being slashed up in the woods. She's so perfectly formed. Even her sighs are pristine - each inhale and exhale. Her manicured toes in flip-flops. I love my daughter so fiercely that I know I could scratch a man's face the way Deena clawed at Lou Furio. I could kill a man over Madison. I've never felt this way about anybody, not even envy compares. And maybe my love is not healthy. But perhaps all mothers feel this lovesick.

I curl tighter around her. If I could curl around her and tuck her back into my womb, I would.

"Mom, I can't breathe," she says, shifting.

I relax my grip and a wave of self-pity courses through me as though I were the lover spurned tonight. Get used to it, I think. Get used to it and then it's gone.