This Is Where We Live
By Jeff Landon.
Everything is normal, almost boring—it’s a pool party, but our neighborhood is cluttered with pools, and tennis courts, and dazzling teeth, and coke, and white wine, and botox-punched faces. This is where we live.
Mom comes outside in her new bathing suit, peach-colored and barely there. Her junk would be hanging out, if she had any junk, but she’s so skinny. Not scary skinny, treadmill skinny, fruit salad skinny, coke skinny.
My friends and all the neighborhood dads go weirdly and bonerly quiet, checking out mom. She stands under the hum of the mosquito zapper, hidden from view by a Japanese-looking shawl, or cape. Neighborhood moms go back inside for more dip, more pretzels, more wine: they hate my glowing mother, but they only see the body, and the men, their paunchy men, gaping, wishing, sucking in their guts and slapping on cologne.
Mom bends down to brush crumbs off the strip of putting green where dad practices beside the pool. It’s true: we all golf. We have good hair and good manners and if you’re the jealous type, do not gaze upon our shoes.
We know what people think. They think our lives are jet planes and silk underpants and champagne on the terrace, and it’s all true, but what they don’t know is that the silk is rare and imported from an island with no name, filled with little dark islanders with only one purpose: cultivate silk for our bed sheets and underclothes. We pay them well.
“I would so do your Mom,” Tom Nelson says to me. “I would treasure that body and light her up like a lamp that just got turned on.”
“Tom,” I say. “This is an uncomfortable topic for me—please try to understand.”
He does not understand. He is rich, but mediocre, and his similes lack brevity.
Mom floats by with a drink cart that also seems to float. The cart is tiered like tiny bleachers, and filled with jumbo shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, and strips of tiger steak because we, the rich, hunt, kill, and eat tigers. In the jungle, given the chance, they would eat us.
The circle of life ends, here, in our smooth and lovely hands.
My mother stands by the edge of the pool, laughing on the telephone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Landon (pictured above with his daughter Emma) lives with his family in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at John Tyler Community College. His stories, online and print, have appeared in Mississippi Review, Crazyhorse, Another Chicago Magazine, Other Voices, New Virginia Review, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, FRiGG, Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, Quick Fiction, Phoebe, and other places.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, October 30th, 2009.
