A Visit Home

Randall Stiles is a university associate professor who just wants to get his paper published. Who would have thought it would be so hard?

Janet Riley was not Randall Stopes’ girlfriend. For lack of a better description, she was his investor.

It had started with her responding to an advertisement for a proof reader/editor for an academic paper he was writing. They met and shook hands. No sparks flew and romance was not in the air. They got to work.

Whether she really needed the job was an internal debate.

Her trust fund had kicked in when she was eighteen which had gotten her out from under her uncle’s roof. While he and his aunt were decent enough sorts, the phrase ‘Our house, our rules’ came up too often for Janet’s taste. So, when she had her own money, she had opted for her own house (or, at least, apartment) and her own rules.

As her mother has requested from her deathbed, Janet went to college. After her sophomore year, she decided that her love of literature might not be quite up to the task of sitting through two more years of classes as an English major. And her adequate but nor great grades were convincing her that she was not on course to be the next Steinbeck… or even Bombeck. She took a sabbatical to figure things out. She was in the second year of the sabbatical when she decided she wanted a job.

Her trust fund was holding out well but she was bored.

And now, she found her financial future tied directly to Randall’s success. And that success required that he have a strong and emotionally-compelling backstory.

She looked up from her notes and pointed her pen at Randall who sat across the combination of concrete blocks and plywood that served as his work table. “You mentioned that your mother is ill. How sick is she?  Maybe we could use that.”

His look was incredulous. “Maybe we could what?”

Janet frowned, “Yeah… not great wording on my part. Kind of soulless. I get that. But how sick is she? Really?”

Randall’s mouth stood agape and he stared at her.

Since no words seemed to be coming, she continued, “Is it that bad? Is she comatose or something?”

“No, she is fully functional, lives in a house, has a job most of the time, and takes care of herself. But she has severe Bi-Polar Disorder.”

“Bi-Polar Disorder? Everybody has that. What’s the big deal?”

His fists clench. “No. People use it as some sort of punch line but everybody does not have it. And it is a big deal. My mother has to take a large amount of medication to keep her from doing something dangerous and stupid when she is manic or something even worse when she is depressed. This makes her act oddly and makes it hard for her to follow conversations. She seems to be high all the time. She hates it but it beats the alternative.”

“Could she stop taking her meds long enough for an interview?”

Randall’s teeth grind together but he forcibly keeps his voice calm. “If I ask her, she will want to do anything to help and she will know that coming off her medications is the only way that she could give a coherent interview.”

His voice changed into lecture mode, “When she goes off her meds, her body chemistry gets out of balance which results in her going manic until she crashes - unless she does something dangerous in the meantime and gets herself hurt. So, no. Going to my mother is not an option.”

Her voice grew sharp. “You need tenure and you need it now. Without tenure you can’t publish your paper and without the money from publishing your paper, you can’t pay me what you owe me.”

“I’ll pay you back!”

“Not on an associate professor’s salary! I funded your research out of my inheritance and now it’s gone. If you don’t pay me back �" and soon �" then I am going to be flat broke. You don’t have a say in what is and isn’t an option!”

“I do where my mother is concerned. Screwing with her head is off limits.” His voice was quiet �" almost a whisper. In the short time she had known him, she had picked up on his non-verbal cues. One was that, the quieter he got, the angrier he was.

She dropped it.

After a moment, his voice returned to normal. “I’ll speak with Dr. Stanton again in the morning. Maybe he’ll reconsider.”

She shook her head. “When hell freezes over.”

 

XXX

 

“Come in.” Dr. Stanton’s voice echoed slightly within the immaculate office in which he held court.

Randall opened the door and slid through, approaching the enormous wooden desk which was wedged into the moderately-size room. Stanton was Department Head of Randall’s department at the university. This fact was emblazoned on the outside of the door into his assistant’s anteroom, again on his personal office door, and finally on the nameplate sitting atop the mesa-sized desk. Randall did not sit.

The elder man looked up from his computer with an annoyed tone. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stopes?”

“I was hoping to revisit the topic of publishing my paper.”

“My opinions haven’t changed. I don’t believe that you have sufficiently corroborated your source material and I won’t put my name on it.”

“My research is valid.”

“So, it may be. But for my name to be added, then I have to personally confirm that �" which I have been unable to do. Some of your background facts are hard to believe and, with your family history, I have to be double certain that what you claim to have seen actually occurred and is not simply a sign of mental illness.”

Randall fought for control of his emotions. His voice came out agitated, “How dare you use my mother’s condition to try and make me doubt my own sanity!”

"Need I remind you that I am not just speaking of your mother. If you are seeing something that no one else is seeing and it makes no logical sense, then you should doubt your own sanity. You must."

Placing both of his palms firmly on the desk in front of him, Randall leaned forward. It was not a power move to try and loom over Dr. Stanton. At 5’-9”, Randall was not prone to looming. He rested down on his hands and took several deep breaths to get his emotions under control.

He was here to ask a favor and to make a case that his research was valid. An emotional fit would help with neither.

He meted out his words carefully, “My research was funded and I am needing to pay back those funds. And, if someone else publishes this first, then it becomes valueless.”

Stanton started off dismissive. “That sounds more like your problem than mine.” But then he softened his tone, “Randall, you have a good mind and a very promising future. That is why I have submitted you for early tenure. If tenure is granted, then you no longer need my name on your paper and you can publish at your whim.”

“I appreciate that but we both know the odds are long.”

“True enough. The Board has never given a young, single person tenure in my time here. They tend to be looking for someone who is stable and setting down roots. It would help if you were married.”

 

XXX

 

“We’re what now?” Janet was absolutely, positively certain that she had misheard Randall’s words.

“Hear me out. I need to show the board that I’m a family-type person-“

“I’m not marrying you! It’s a lot of money but I’ll live in a box under a bridge before-“

“You don’t have to marry me. Just pretend to be engaged until I get tenure. Then I can publish and pay you back.”

“With interest.”

He nodded. “As agreed.”

 “This is it?! This is the only way?”

“Unless you have another idea.”

She placed her face in her hands. “I can’t believe that I’m agreeing to this.”

“I should probably tell Charley what we’re doing.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

Charley Lee was Randall’s officemate, a complete a*****e, and the closest thing Randall had to a best friend.

“I’m going to need someone on campus who knows our secret so they can cover our backs if needed.”

“There’s no one else?”

“Not really. I don’t have close confidantes coming out of my ears.”

“I hope this doesn’t bite us in the a*s.”

But it would. It had to.

 

XXX

 

“You left your phone here when you went to lunch.” Charley Lee’s voice was strangely nonchalant.

Randall reached into his inside jacket pocket and found it empty. The fact that he had just gone an hour without his phone and not noticed indicated just how distracted he was.

Charley continued. “Your mom called.” The calmness in his voice was now chilling.

Randall tried to match the calm. “Oh? Did she sound okay? Was she on her meds?”

“She seemed fine. Just checking on you. We had a nice talk. I told her you were engaged.” He spoke as if this were not the bombshell that he very well knew it was.

Randall was stunned. “Why the hell did you do that? You know I’m not really engaged.”

“Sure, I do. But eventually it’s going to get out and someone is going to mention it to her. Better me who knows the whole story than someone who thinks it’s real. This was obviously a rehearsed speech to cover up the fact that he just enjoyed messing with Randall.

“You are putting a lot of thought into my life.”

“It’s a lot more interesting than mine right now.”

“Still, you should have let me be the one to tell her.”

“She’s your mother. She knows you. It’s much more like you to forget to tell her and for her to hear it from me. Don’t forget what a dweeb you are.”

“I know what a dweeb I am. But how would you like it if I told your mom that this girlfriend you keep telling her about is actually an old sock you keep in a coffee can in the refrigerator?”

“Mom knows I’m lying and I know she knows I’m lying. So, it’s like not really lying. It’s a convenient truth which allows us to have conversations which don’t include her sighing all the time.”

Randall was no longer listening. Facing something unexpected and outside of academia locked him up. He stood in place looking at his hands while his mind raced through alternative courses of action. Charley cocked his head slightly to one side and watched. 

After a moment, Charley volunteered, “Call Janet.”

Randall nodded and pulled out his phone. Janet was at the top of his ‘Recent Calls’ list and within seconds the phone was ringing.

She answered quickly, “What’s up?”

“Charley told my mother we were engaged.”

The pause at the other end was brief. “Charley’s a dick.”

“True, but irrelevant to the present problem.”

“It’s not irrelevant because it makes me feel better to say it.  Please put me on speaker.” Randall did. “Charley, you’re a dick!”

Charley did not look up from his computer screen. “I love you, too, Princess.”

Randall took the phone off speaker and sat at his desk. “What do I do?”

“You call your mother.” 

“Can you do it, instead?”

“Of course not! I shouldn’t even be involved at first.”

“You don’t understand. One of the symptoms of my mother’s mental issues is that she is incredibly attuned to tone of voice, vocal cadence, and body language. She’s like a human lie detector.”

“She couldn’t do that with me?”

“Not on a first conversation on the telephone.” He was not sure of this but really didn’t want to call his mother.

“If she has this superpower, then the fact that I am making the call without you would probably raise a red flag. You have to make the call alone.”

All logic was against him. “You’re probably right.”

“Would it help if we scripted something?”

“No. I’ve tried that. There isn’t a flow chart in the world that can follow my mother’s train of thought.”

“Then it’s improv. Tell me the storyline.”

“Storyline?”

“Our relationship. Our story.” They had rehearsed this.

“Oh. Well… I hired you to proof and edit my paper. I asked you out. Then we fell in love, and got engaged.”

“Now give me some more detail.”

“You always handle that part.”

“But I won’t be on the phone with you.”

“I think I pretty well covered it.”

“When was the first moment you knew you loved me?”

Randall had seen romantic comedies (although with the exception of Sleepless in Seattle, he had never enjoyed one) and the usual answer was “The first time I saw you.”

He tried it.

“Trite and cliché. Try again.”

He remembered their effort from the previous week-end of practicing a slow dance. “When we were dancing. You put your arms around my neck.”

“Did you like that?”

“It got me a little horny which made me uncomfortable. So, no.”

“You’re the only man in the world that has ever said that. But we can work with it. What did you notice when I had my arms around your neck.”

“Well, you were resting against me and I could feel your…”

“Not the horny part. What else do you remember?”

“I could smell your hair and feel it against the bottom of my chin.”

“Bingo! That sounded almost romantic!”

“And when you stepped on my feet, you weren’t as heavy as I thought you would be.”

“I hate you sometimes. Focus on the hair thing.”

“I could also feel your breath on my neck. That felt kind of good.”

“Okay, hair and breath. And at that moment you realized that you had been falling in love with me all along and just had not realized it until that moment. Now, how did you tell me about it?”

“I didn’t. You told me, first.”

“I told you first?”

“Yes, the woman always says ‘I love you’ first.”

“In whose dreams?”

“The woman is always in better touch with her feelings and the man is trying to hide from his feelings so she tells him first and then he can come to grips with what he is feeling.”

“Where do you get this crap?”

“My mom watches the Lifetime Channel. It’s the plot of nearly all of their movies.”

“Well then, given that your mother is the target audience, we’ll go with that. I told you that I love you over a fast-food dinner here at the kitchen counter. Nothing else was special about the meal or the day. I just blurted it out. And you knew about your feelings for me but were afraid that I would reject you so you had not said anything. Once I told you, you said it back immediately.”

“That works.”

“How did you propose?”

“You’ve told me this one before… We were hanging out in my apartment and I took you outside for a break and asked you to marry me. I could not afford a ring so there isn’t one.”

“There. We have the basics. Anything else you will have to improvise.”

“I’m bad at that.”

“Yes. You are. But there is nothing we can do about it. Call your mother.”

She hung up and he was alone with his plight.

Charley had been pretending to work while he eavesdropped on the conversation. “This ought to be great!”

Randall left the room to make the call.

At this hour of the morning the break room was empty since the coffee machine had been broken since before Randall had come to the university.  Although smoking was not allowed in the building, he smelled stale tobacco and saw the coke cans which had been used as ash trays from those who had worked late last night. He typed I-C-E into his phone.

His mother had programmed her name into his phone under I-C-E for ‘In Case of Emergency.’ She had read that in a magazine article. He wondered what good it would do since his contact information was on the back side of his password protect. Typing in I-C-E revealed her screen and he hit ‘call.’  The phone rang three times and then his mother answered.

There were three options for his mother’s mood.  Over-the-top excitement about the news, angry paranoia about his not telling her himself, and the glazed over robotic neutrality brought about by an increase in her medications.

“Hello, Randall.” He immediately recognized the cold anger in her voice and the use of his given first name rather than one of the myriad of overly cute (and annoying) nicknames with which her manic alter ego addressed him. She was on the down side and the news of his engagement had given the mood focus. This was not going to be a pleasant call.

“Hi, Mom.” He tried to sound upbeat to see if he could make some headway against the mood.

“That little oriental boy you work with told me that you’re engaged.”

“Mom, you can’t say oriental anymore.”

“I can say what I goddamn well please!” This was definitely going to be a bad one.

“Mom, have you been taking your medications?”

“Why do you care? If you don’t care enough to tell me that you’re engaged, then you just don’t care about me at all!” Cracking voice… edge of tears… Yes, a bad one.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Everything just happened so fast.”

“Not so fast that you didn’t tell the Asian boy.” 

“Charley sits right next to me and sees her when she comes by for lunch. I didn’t really tell him, he just sort of overheard.”

“What’s her name?” A step in the right direction.

“Janet.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Alabama.”

“Southern. Is she a racist? You don’t want to marry a racist.” Randall decided not to mention that she had just referred to Charley as an oriental.

“The topic hasn’t come up but I’m pretty sure she isn’t a racist.”

“If she was, it probably would have come up.  Is she pretty?” The conversation was beginning to develop some positive momentum.

“Not really. But sort of.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“If she was too pretty, I would wonder why she was marrying you.” Passive-aggressive zinger. She was letting him know that she was still angry.

“Sure.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a college student.” Technically true although she had been taking a ‘break’ for nearly two years and living off her inheritance.

“What is she studying?”

“English.”

“Oh.” Oh was not good. He did not know why but he needed to move to a different subject.

“She’s helping me with my papers.”

“So, she knows about your research?” He didn’t know what was wrong but the tone of voice made him wary.

“She is helping me make my writing more professional.”

“So, she has seen it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I worry.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

“She might have seen your work and decided that it had possibilities and she is trying to jump on the gravy train.” Technically, this was exactly what had happened. Why is it that paranoid thinking so often leads to the truth? That was something for philosophers to deal with.

Half-truths are the best lies. “Well Mom, that is pretty much what happened and that is why she originally started helping me. The falling-in-love thing came later.”

“What are you not telling me?” Her superpower.

“Nothing, Mom, it’s just awkward talking to my mother about my girlfriend.” He had rehearsed this one in his head. Including using the phrase girlfriend instead of the more stilted fiancé. He felt that it sounded more real. It took a lot of effort to lie to his mother.

“She’s pregnant.”

“What?! God No!”

“She gave you AIDS so you’re stuck with each other.” Things were spiraling.

He paused to take a deep breath. This needed to calm down. “We are both completely healthy and without child.”

 She seemed slightly mollified, “I guess. When am I going to meet her?”

“We are both pretty busy right now…”

“So, it can wait until the weekend. Will you be coming in Friday night or Saturday morning?” With plans in the air, she was going manic.

“Let me get with her and schedule it and I’ll let you know.”

“Call me back in an hour. Will she be staying with you or should I get the guest room ready?” This was a trap question. If he said that Janet would be staying with him, all hell would break loose. The guest room was the basement. It had a pull-out couch. Getting it ready meant getting all of the stuff that was piled on the couch shoved into closets. Possibly some dusting and vacuuming would be done depending on her mood through the week.

“Can I send you a text?” Avoid having her hear his tone of voice.

“I suppose. I will just have to remember to keep checking this thing.”

“I’ll do that. Bye.”

“Bye.” He had forgotten to say ‘I love you’ with the goodbye. That would come back on him.

He walked back to his desk to give himself time to figure out how to word this for Janet. Charley pretended to ignore him as he sat down and stared for a moment at his phone. Randall sighed deeply and thumbed to Janet’s contact on his phone and hit the little phone icon. It rang twice.

“How did it go?”

“Indeterminate. We’ll know after we visit her this week-end.”

“After WHAT?!”

“I have to send her a text and tell her whether we are driving over late Friday night or early Saturday morning.”

“How about neither?”

“Not an option. She’ll come here and there will be no escaping her. It’s always best to go there so that if things get out of hand, we can drive away.”

“How do you mean out of hand?”

“Just out of hand.’”

“Call her back and tell her we won’t be coming. Too busy with your paper. Set up a visit after its published.”

“Won’t work. Like I said, she would be here within a day.”

“Just tell her no.”

This made him laugh. “You’re going to meet her this weekend. Give saying no a shot. Tell me how it goes.”

“What is she? A raving lunatic?”

This brought on a long pause as Randall looked straight at the ground.

He spoke with extreme self-control. “No. She is bi-polar. She is under a doctor’s care and is functional in society. But the disorder still affects her emotional state and her mood swings. As such, special care must be taken in dealing with her in order to minimize those effects. I am glad for you that you have not had reason to understand this. But you are going to have to trust me on this. If we don’t want my mother to get involved and mess up our plan, then we have to play it my way.”

The stilted language sounded like a recital of something repeated very often. Janet felt rebuked. “I’m sorry. Yes. This is your show. Do we go down Friday night or Saturday morning?”

“I usually go down Friday night. Since we have to leave Sunday morning, having only one night there makes her think I am trying to deliberately minimize my stay. I also hate getting up early on a Saturday morning.”

“How long is the drive?”

“About five hours.”

“So, if we leave right at 5:00 PM, we get there about 10:00?” She was deliberately making small talk. She had never heard him get mad before. 

“11:00 local time. Yes.”

“Okay. That’s the plan.”

“I’ll text her.”

The conversation ended awkwardly. Janet put her phone back in her pocket. She felt emotionally bad. Randall was turning from a project into a person. She didn’t like it.

Randall texted his mother the details and put his phone down on his desk. He did not get angry often and still felt lingering after-effects.

Charley spun around in his chair laughing. “Bro, that was priceless.”

“Don’t you have something better to do than mess with my life.”

“Possibly better but certainly not more entertaining.”

“Go screw your sock.”

“Dude, her name is Hildegard.”

Charley laughed again and spun back to his computer. The two worked in silence until after lunch.

 

XXX

After an intense and uncomfortable week in which Janet functionally changed Charley’s name to ‘that son-of-a-b***h,’ the five-hour drive to Randall’s childhood home was uneventful bordering on pleasant. Janet had talked and Randall had listened. Life’s natural order. 

He had found out that just because she had grown up in a ritzy suburb of Birmingham which was locally nicknamed ‘The Magic Kingdom’, it did not mean that she had life easy. She then listed a variety of the hardships of growing up in this suburb. None of them seemed particularly hard to Randall.

He then found out that just because English majors all seemed to dress and talk alike, they were actually very different in many ways. She then listed the ways that she and her fellow English majors were different. None of them seemed particularly different to Randall. He had pointed this out which had caused a cool 15-minute lull in the conversation.

On her side, Janet had found out that while Randall’s personality seemed to lean toward obsequious, he actually was stubborn, opinionated, and had the capacity to thoroughly piss her off.  But five hours of conversation and only making her mad once was better than most of her friends. A lot better than her fellow English majors.           

They exited the interstate. 

“We need gas?” She leaned over to try and see the gage. The steering wheel and his elbow blocked her view.

“No. This is our exit. We’re just a couple of minutes from home.”

She tensed. In five hours, they had not planned or strategized about the first meeting. “I think we should be holding hands when we go to the door.”

“When we get there, she will come running out of the house and meet us at the car.”

“Then we should hold hands while we walk in from the car.”

“I’ll be carrying the suitcases. I won’t have a free hand.”

“Leave the suitcases and go back and get them later.”

“It will be after 11:00 when we get there. I don’t want to go back out to the car.  Also, I am not much into public displays of affection. Mom would think that was odd.”

“Even if your fiancé was needy and demanding and asked you very nicely to do it?” The accent she put behind the words very nicely was not very nice.

“Even so.” He spoke calmly and did not react externally to her tone. “You have to trust me in terms of dealing with my mother. It is very easy to trigger a mood swing. Especially when she’s excited. And meeting you will make her excited.”

“How will I know if she is about to have a mood swing?”

“It’ll be obvious.  She doesn’t have the emotional controls that I have or even you have…”

“Even I?”

“Emotions hit her like a tidal wave and her training in societal propriety is unable to withstand the flood and it just pours out.”

“That’s a little scary. How do I know what might trigger it?”

“You have to feel your way along. Remember when you were a little kid and you would get all excited about some upcoming event like a party or a field trip? You would build it up in your mind to be the most fabulous experience in the world. Then when it actually came, it would not live up to your expectations and you would be disappointed.”

“Okay.”

“Multiply that by a thousand and that’s every day of my mother’s life.”

“So, I have to try and figure out your mother’s expectations as we go and try and steer everything back toward it when I see her beginning to get disappointed?”

“Welcome to my world.”

He turned off the commercial thoroughfare and started down a wide residential street with a cracked and discolored curb and gutter.  The houses were set close to the street and were small and worn. No one would call this a ‘Magic kingdom’. Janet watched the houses flying past and tried to remember the two drama classes she had taken freshman year. First, get into character. She tried to focus on what it felt like to be in love but shied away from exploring that and moved on to a less organic method and pictured soft, understated romantic portrayals from movies she had seen.

She turned and looked at Randall. He was focused on his driving. In a glance, she confirmed that conjuring the necessary emotions for a method acting treatment definitely fell flat. She pictured Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs. No. Way too complicated with too much subtext. Then she fell on Sandra Bullock in Two Weeks Notice. Driven. Dedicated. Goal-oriented. No. But close.

The Proposal - also with Sandra Bullock. That was it. Dominating woman in a superior position falls in love with her lesser. Perfect. She could pull that off. To maintain it for nearly two days under intense scrutiny was going to be tough.

They turned now onto a pot-holed and narrow residential street and then pulled into a short gravel driveway in front of a small single-story house that was set back about 30 feet from the street.  It had aging white Masonite siding and green shutters.  In the lights from the car, she could see peeling paint on the shutters and cracked and missing glazing around the windows.

Randall put the car in park, turned off the key and the headlights. He sat for a moment with both hands on the steering wheel and appeared to be bracing himself.   

The front door slammed open and his mother flew out the door. Although the temperature was just above freezing, the woman wore only a bathrobe. A brisk wind was blowing as Janet got out of the car. She got about halfway around the car as Randall’s mother �" Marilyn, she reminded herself �" nearly tackled Randall as he was still unfolding himself from the driver’s seat. Trying to return the embrace with his foot still inside the car nearly brought them both down but Randall was able to reach out a hand and catch hold of the top of the open door. The result looked like a vertical game of Twister.

Marilyn’s head popped up from Randall’s shoulder and locked onto her. “Janice!”

Before Janet could correct the name, the larger woman had closed the distance between them and was squeezing her in a very tight and very strong embrace. Marilyn leaned down to adjust for the height difference and Janet noticed painfully that she wore old-fashioned plastic hair curlers with sharp little bristles all over them. Two or three of the curlers were being crushed against the side of her scalp. How did Marilyn not feel that? 

Janet pulled away from the embrace and put on her best fake smile. “Hello Mrs. Richardson. I’m Janet.” She tried to put enough emphasis on her name to correct the pronunciation without putting on so much that it seemed like a correction. 

A brief shadow went across Marilyn’s eyes. “Yes, of course.” She turned back toward Randall and headed back around the car.

In that brief shadow, Janet saw that Marilyn had recognized the smile as fake, recognized the correction, recognized the extremely mild annoyance due to the mispronunciation, and taken some amount of offense. Super power, indeed. There had been no offense intended but Janet was certain she had gotten off on the wrong foot. Everything Randall had said suddenly became three dimensional in her mind.  This was his life. 

“Let’s get inside. You two must be freezing and exhausted.” Marilyn then directed Randall, “Randall, get the luggage.”

Janet walked toward the trunk. “I can get my own.”

“Nonsense. Randall was raised better than that.” Slight reprimand in the tone? Staking of territory? You might think he is your fiancé but he is my son. I know him better than you ever will.

Janet’s mind was racing.  So much communication through subtle tone and body language. Randall barely notices when someone walks in the room. She followed Randall inside, certain that she could not fool this woman for almost two days. 

Randall left his suitcase in the short bedroom hallway on the main floor and struggled Janet’s suitcase down the narrow stairs to the basement (or, the “guest room” as his mother would refer to it through the weekend). His mother’s eyes were glassy which meant that she had been having problems with depression recently and her doctor had adjusted her meds.

Behind the glaze, her eyes were also very lively and moving quickly and she was talking too fast without taking quite enough breaths which meant that underneath the thin mask of the medications, she was in manic mode. He also knew that a great deal of non-verbal communication had already passed between his mother and Janet.

Randall emotionally braced himself. Manic mode did not transition to neutral mode (‘neutral mode’ was not a natural state of his mother’s. It was created almost entirely due to the medications).  Manic mode transitioned instantaneously and without warning to angry, paranoid mode and required an emotional explosion of some type to become depressed mode. The medications could then sometimes turn depressed mode into neutral mode. Without the medications, depressed mode would become manic mode with some form of external stimulus and start the process over again. It was possible that the present mix of medications would stave off the explosion for two days so that it would be focused on him alone via phone rather than at Janet. But two days was a long time.

He returned upstairs to find Janet and his mother sitting in the living room holding steaming mugs. “Is that cocoa?”

His mother looked up from her cup. “If you want a cup, it’s in the usual place.”

There was no usual place. Randall couldn’t remember his mother keeping cocoa mix in the house since he was a child. When she said something that did not make sense to him, it usually meant there was some subtext that was intended that he could not grasp. He started opening cabinet doors and looking for the cocoa.

His mother called in from the dining room. “Janice was just telling me that you drove the whole way.”

She had used the wrong name again and seemed to be implying his driving was some large ordeal rather than something he did on a fairly regular basis. The subtext was obvious. He and his mother were a family unit and Janet was an outsider. In terms of her usual barbs, this one was somewhat clumsy. Maybe she was tired.

He found the cocoa. It was with the instant coffee which did make sense. As a fiancé, he would be expected to defend his bride-to-be in the subtextual battle which was raging in the next room and correct his mother’s pronunciation. That would mean accelerating the expected meltdown.

He called over the counter which separated the kitchen from the living room, “Mom, her name isn’t Janice. It’s Janet..” He kept his tone monotonous.  

“Of course, I know that.” Her tones and body language were playing a symphony of subtextual clues. He was too tired to try and decipher them.

It didn’t take long for the water for his cocoa to heat and within another minute he returned to the dining area. Janet was looking down, with her mug in front of her face but not to her lips, and chewing her lower lip. Working his way through the vagaries of method acting as Janet had explained it to him, he sat next to her on the sofa and put his arm around her.

She responded by leaning against him and putting her head on his shoulder.

His mother’s facial expression read not pleased.

“Mom, Janet has been really excited about this trip and she told me she couldn’t sleep last night and got up real early this morning to pack. She’s exhausted and should probably go ahead to bed.” None of this was true. She had still been asleep when he called her a 10am.

Janet nodded against his shoulder.

His mother’s tone shifted but the body language remained defensive, “Of course, you poor little thing. I’ll go down with her and show her where everything is.”

If she went down, it would be at least thirty minutes before she finished talking and came back up. By that time, Janet would be an emotional shambles.

“I’ll show her, Mom. I’ll be back up in two minutes and then we can finish our cocoa.”

Another really bad facial expression.

“Good night, Marilyn.” With escape in sight, Janet recovered her poise. She smiled. “Thank you for the cocoa and sorry I am just so tired.”

“Good night, Janice… I mean, Janet. How silly of me.”

Janet took his hand as they exited from the room and down the basement stairs. She held it until they reached the bottom of the stairs when she gently let go and stepped forward from the stairs, turning around to face him. The lighting in the basement was uneven as his father had been about halfway done with the finishing process when he died. His mother had done just enough to make the basement livable after that time and used it primarily for laundry.

The light hit Janet’s face from only one side leaving one of her eyes and one cheek in shadow. She had a facial expression that he had never seen before. Somehow, she seemed softer and less fierce than was her norm. While she had never seemed specifically attractive to him, he had always realized that she technically had a moderately cute face. Now, for the first time, he himself considered her pretty.

“That was a pain in the a*s!” Her voice came out in a harsh whisper.

Well, there goes that.

“Most people find my mother difficult to relate to for long periods of time.”

“What’s a long period of time? Thirty seconds?”

“Well, the thought that I might be seriously romantically involved with someone is something new. When I bring home a friend, she gets all excited and wants to be their best friend. Until they do something that she considers wrong and then they become her worst enemy.”

“How do you live like that?”

“I live five hours away and she never meets my friends.”

“But you grew up here. What kind of life is that for a child?”

Randall understood that Janet was feeling compassion toward him but her question seemed to say more about her than it did about him. “Life is life. Everybody’s family is dysfunctional and we all have sad backstories. Just watch any reality show on television.”

He continued, “When my Dad was alive, he was able to buffer Mom’s moods by letting her scream at him. It was loud but I was never in the middle. We weren’t rich or even solidly middle class but any worries about money were never filtered down to me. Before Dad died, Mom refused to admit that she had a problem. She felt that people that went to psychiatrists were weak-willed or just crazy. She followed the pattern her whole life of getting a job, doing great at it for a while, and then having personality clashes with co-workers and superiors and getting fired or quitting within a few months.

“After Dad died, he had a pretty good life insurance policy which put some money in the bank, but I remember Mom sitting me down and telling me that she had to admit she had a problem and that she needed to get help. Otherwise, she might spend all our money when she was in one of her giddy moods as she calls them. And she needed to be able to keep a job.

“People would talk but she had to see a psychiatrist because she had to take care of me. She had promised my father that and it was her most important responsibility. We were never rich and Christmas never included a new car and �" even when medicated - my mother has a mental illness but there was never a doubt that she loved me and would do anything for me. So, I don’t have any complaints about my life.”

That was the end of the speech. He had refined variations of it in the weeks and months after his father’s death through seemingly endless repetitions with his aunt, uncles, and grandparents on his father’s side. Good people. Offering to let him live with them until he finished high school. It angered him and he quit seeing or talking to any of them after about a year. They were his family and had good intentions but forgiveness was now out of reach. High school had been him, his mother, and his mother’s medicines against the world. 

 Janet was in her element. Emotions. She knew this scene had reached its end and any further denouement would just water down what had been said. Less is more. “You probably need to get back upstairs or she’ll think we’re making out like bunnies down here.” She smiled.

That is exactly what his mother would think.

Randall said good night and headed back upstairs. His mother was standing at the kitchen counter pouring milk into a cup of what was likely tea. From a lifetime of experience, he immediately processed her body language for obvious warning signs. It was tense and did not bode well for the upcoming conversation. She turned and spoke with a dead calm that indicated an effort to control an inferno of emotions.

“What’s wrong?” She asked.

“Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”

“Something’s not right between you and that girl.” Her superpower.

“I don’t know what you mean. Everything is fine.”

“Did you have a fight on the drive over?”

“No. Not at all. It was a pleasant drive.” They were both standing which made the conversation feel more confrontational. He slid into one of the stools at the counter before remembering that both of them were wobbly. He stood again.

His mother walked into the living room and sat in her favorite chair and looked up at him. He followed her to the sofa so that voices could remain low. It was a practiced scenario.

“You’re going to marry the girl?” Apparently, Janet would have to earn a name.

“That is the plan.”

“But I don’t get to meet her until after this decision is made?”

“It happened quickly.”

“I see. There’s something that you’re not telling me.” 

She could always tell if he was trying to lie to her. She would see through any effort at subterfuge. She was focused.  His mind came up with nothing to say.

She broke the silence, “Can she have children?”

???

“That’s it. Isn’t it? She can’t have children.”

His mind whirled trying to catch up with this turn of the conversation.

“That’s pretty personal, Mom.” Delaying tactic.

Her angry voice. “Too personal for your mother? And her mother-in-law-to-be?”

“I guess not but it is not something we talk about.”

“No children?” 

He did not respond. Silence was his ally.

Then it came. The emotional release that brought his mother back down. “That poor little thing. I am so sorry. Well, she will be welcome in this family. And you must be exhausted. I put fresh linens on your bed. Everything else is as you left it.” The conversation appeared over. He took advantage of the moment and retreated from the battlefield.

He walked back to his room. The sheets were mismatched but clean. The quilt was less clean. He pulled out his phone and texted to Janet:

You can’t have children

He watched the three little dots on the screen as she read his text. The reply came back quickly:

Got it.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he felt a mild form of exhilaration. He had never successfully lied to his mother. Grandchildren = kryptonite? The only possible explanation.

Score one for the home team.

He pulled off his outer clothes and crawled into bed. The quilt smelled mildewy and a little like dog. His mother’s dog had died some months before which provided a clue into how long it had been since the quilt had been washed. 

He went to sleep.

 

XXX

 

As always when he traveled to visit his mother, Randall was physically and emotionally exhausted by Sunday morning. 

Friday night, Janet was not worth remembering her name. Saturday morning, she could do no wrong. The joys of Bi-Polar Disorder. The three went out to both lunch and dinner, which kept Randall nervous remembering significant, loud, and embarrassing scenes which had occurred in restaurants through his life. They tip-toed near the edge a couple of times but got through both meals uneventfully.

The emotional intensity of dealing with his mother had left Janet spent as well. Between that and getting up at 4:00 AM on Sunday to start the return trip, she fell asleep within minutes of their leaving the driveway.

As her breathing shifted into the steady pattern of deep sleep, he thought about that brief moment on Friday night. Standing at the bottom of the stairs in his childhood basement, she had seemed soft and feminine. And he had been drawn to her… attracted to her.

He glanced over at her as she slept. Her brows were slightly furrowed as if her subconscious mind were pondering a riddle. She had not previously seemed pretty to him but, as he looked down at her now, he could see that he had just missed it before.

She was still groggy when he dropped her off at her apartment telling her that he would be by later to take her to lunch. The invitation obviously confused her as Sunday lunches were not a part of their normal routine. But she was too tired to ask questions and stumbled up the steps with her rollaboard. He watched until she was safely inside.

His plan was to go back to his own apartment and catch a nap himself but his racing thoughts belayed that. In the few weeks that they had worked together, he had eaten many lunches with her and an occasional dinner when work ran late. But those were always working meals and invariably fast food or pizza. This was like a date. In his mind, it was a date. And his brain tumbled through scenario after scenario until he decided that he was old enough to pass on the game playing and just ask her if she was interested in changing the relationship from platonic to romantic. The answer would probably be ‘no’ and he would change the topic back to work.

But what if the answer was ‘yes’?

Knowing that a nap or even relaxation was impossible until that question was answered, he went into work and was surprised to find Charley seated at his desk on a weekend.

His officemate jumped when the door opened. “I thought you were at your Mom’s.”

Randall put his backpack on his desk, pulled out the Diet Cokes he had bought at a gas station and put them in the small refrigerator �" pushing aside a styrofoam clamshell from some past meal. “We just got back. What are you doing here?”

Charley shrugged, “I am dedicated to my profession.”

“No. Really. What’s up?”

“You know when I was grading homework on Thursday and Friday?”

“Yeah?”

“I was actually playing Revengers on line.”

“I know. You always turn your screen so I can’t see it when you play Revengers.”

“So, you know that I need to be able to understand what the little b******s don’t understand so I can show them how to do it right by tomorrow. The more important questions is why are you here instead of hangin’ with your faux fiancé?”

“She’s sleepy and I had some things I neededed to work through.”

Charley turned completely around in his chair facing Randall. “And… how did it go with your mother?”

Randall’s laptop was booting up. “Amazingly well.  Mom was a little over the top but within the normal range. Toward the end, they were teaming up against me.”

“Gender trumps blood.” Charley turned his screen away from Randall which meant that he would be winging it in class tomorrow.

.

XXX

 

Finding a parking space for his car at Janet’s apartment complex on a Sunday was a challenge and it was after noon before he was walking up to her door. A small white rectangle was taped to the door just below eye level. When he got close enough, he could see that it was a folded piece of paper with his name hand-written on the outside.

He unfolded it and found two words written in black ink. ‘I’m sorry’. Turning the paper over, there was nothing but his name on the back. A total of three words front and back on the paper. He looked around to see if something might have dropped away from the door to provide more information. There was nothing.

He called her and his call went straight to voice mail which he knew she never checked. Either she was on the phone or…

He called again. And again. And again. He returned to his apartment and tried some more. When he tried one last time at 1:30 in the morning and it still went straight to voice mail, he was sure. She had blocked his number.

He gave himself a week to try and contact her and ask her what was happening. At the end of the week, if she still was avoiding him. He would stop. He wasn’t going to become a stalker.

It didn’t take a week. On the second day, when he pulled up to her apartment, he found a Goodwill truck backed up to the door and her furnishings were being removed by a trio of slow-moving teen-agers. An older woman appeared to be supervising.

He approached her, “Excuse me.”

She noticed him for the first time. “Can I help you?”

“I was wondering if you knew where Janet was. I’ve been trying to contact her.”

The woman shook her head. “Hell if I know. She called me yesterday and said that she was moving. Paypal’d me her final rent and told me to keep her damage deposit and donate her stuff to Goodwill. Those b******s are only taking half of her stuff. They tell me that the rest isn’t up to their standards! I guess its good to be able to be picky about the free stuff people give you.

“Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Nothing. But I got my money, so what do I care?”

That settled it. He was officially ghosted. She must have sensed his thoughts �" probably through dilated pupils or body language �" and run away instead of dealing with him. She either had fear of intimacy issues or she just hated him.

His wallow in self-pity through the drive back to his place was intensified by his empty apartment. She had only actually been there twice but his imagination over the last few days had filled it with her. Her existence as his girlfriend was imaginary �" an artificial construct that was only loosely based on the real person. But he missed her and missed the life that they had shared only in his mind.

Mindlessly, he pulled his computer out of the backpack and began setting it up on his worktable which brought up a real memory of the last time she had been at the table with him. They had been discussing…

S**t!

He not only had lost his imaginary girlfriend but he had also lost his fake fiancé. And along with it any chance of establishing the stability needed for the Board to consider him for early tenure. Since the University had provided the facilities for his research, he couldn’t simply quit and publish at another school without fear of litigation. They had him.

It was no longer stalking. It was business. He had to find Janet.

 

XXX

 

Three months passed. The weather had turned from cold to pleasant to warm and had just started being swelteringly hot. No Janet. No tenure. No publication.

He had continued his search until his application for early tenure had been officially rejected. Until that time, he had done everything including hiring a private detective. The detective charged $100 per hour plus expenses. Randall had asked what she could do in two hours. It turned out that what she could do in two hours was to type up a bill for $220 (apparently, she charged $10 per hour for computer time). Other than that, she found nothing.

Randall continued to polish his paper, teach his classes, and fill out grant applications. Trying to fill his days with the tedium of life while his infatuation with Janet turned steadily into anger and finally hatred.

With his continuing grievance against Dr. Stanton for not supporting his paper, his work drive deteriorated and he learned the exact minimum that he could do without getting fired. That got him back to his apartment after work at precisely 5:15pm every day. He brought his backpack with him but used his computer solely for web surfing, video games, and Netflix (he could only afford one streaming service).

He walked home from the office to conserve gas and was already sweaty and tired when he started climbing the two flights of breezeway stairs to his apartment. He probably should have stopped by the local market but he could scrounge up something for dinner and make it another day.

He found her sitting on the concrete stoop leaning back against his door. As he trudged up the last steps, she looked up but didn’t stand.

“Hello Randall.”

The anger and hatred flowed, “F**k you, Janet.”

“I owe you an explanation.”

“You don’t owe me s**t. Could you move, please? I need to get into my apartment.”

She didn’t move. “It’s worse than you think.” She held out a manila envelope and looked down and away from his face.

He weighed his anger against his curiosity, took the envelope, and opened it. What came out in his hand was a thick galley proof with a check paper-clipped to the front. The check was made out to him on her personal account for seven thousand dollars. He knew what he was holding before he removed the check to read the title and author list. The words were different but it was his research. His name appeared nowhere on the page. He didn’t know any of the listed authors.

“You sold my research.”

She didn’t look up. “Technically, I funded it, so I owned it.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“That’s what the first people I went to said. I told the second group that the research was mine.”

“They had to know that wasn’t true. You don’t have the credentials.”

“They chose to believe what they wanted to believe. My story was logical enough. I couldn’t publish because I didn’t have the credential so I at least wanted to get some money out of the deal. They paid me everything that you owed me plus seven thousand dollars. That’s yours.”

“Seven thousand dollars.”

“It’s the least I can do.”

“That’s the understatement of the century.”

She rose to her feet and brushed off the rear of her jeans. “I was scared. If I lost my inheritance money, then it would mean groveling back to my Uncle and…” Her words trailed off.

He didn’t provide the obvious prompt but only stood and glared.

She cleared her throat before continuing, “I don’t know what you felt at your mother’s house but I was starting to feel things… about you. There was that and your mother and the money. It was all just too much. I had to get away �" get out from under it all. I ran.”

He ignored all that. “When does it publish?”

“It went up on-line this morning. The hard-copies have been mailed.”

“I’m going to sue these people.”

“And you’ll probably win.”

“And you’re going to prison.”

“I spoke with a lawyer. He doesn’t think that’s likely.”

“I’m going to try.”

“I don’t blame you.” These were the last words he heard her say as she stepped past him and exited his life forever �" along with his dreams.