Valentine

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

My son isn’t as sweet as he used to be. I understand this. He has testosterone. He isn’t a flaming dick or anything, he certainly isn’t mean, he’s just kind of underwhelmed by everything at all times. “It was okay” is his sullen answer to any question. How was the movie? The three-star restaurant? The giant piles of caviar and cocaine? The only thing he really loves to do in life is sit on the couch and watch Charm School (raggedy lasses from your more down-market dating shows not-learning how to be ladies) and some MTV program that is entirely devoted to Your Momma jokes, and then he guffaws and gasps in his confounded hilarity, and comes into my office to repeat them to me, and they are stupid and make no sense. Whatever. Today, my son is 15 years old. I’ve heard it’s a very stupid time.

Since we moved to L.A. from Orange County a year ago, we have new friends who have not known my son since he was a baby. I was single, and too poor for a babysitter (sometimes local musicians would sit for me, and then they’d decline my proffered twenty if we could “take it out in trade”), and so I’d drag him to every last thing, every art opening, every city council meeting, every candidate forum and wacky right protest, every restaurant opening, and every gig. He was a very cultured little boy, once. Musicians would let him play the drums during set breaks. Loretta Sanchez would sweep him up in her arms and waltz him around, before belatedly and embarrassedly realizing he was my son. He was beautiful: melty brown eyes, full pink lips. He looked like Japanese anime.

And he was sweet. He was sweet like you couldn’t believe. He had the kind of big, bloody, sunny heart that propelled him to race to hug anyone the second time he met them, his innocent face right in their crotch. It proved to be very disarming.

“Who will be there?” he’d ask excitedly, before each art opening and protest and restaurant and gig. He would start naming our friends, would she be there? Would he? Nothing made his social little heart happier. People liked me more having met him; they told me so.

Once, when he was eight, on our first monthlong road trip together, we were visiting my old high school friend Jess and her daughter, my goddaughter. They lived in Oregon with Jess’s retired nurse and fireman parents. Jimmy was racing around their wooded yard, in a Lone Ranger/robber’s mask he’d bought from the store with a dollar of his very own, when he stopped short. “Are they our family?” he asked me plaintively. And damned if that manly old fireman (and he was manly; he had carved wooden decor promising mustache rides and back in high school we’d positively marvel at all the happy fuckin’ Jess’s mom and stepdad were doing) didn’t hear him, and start to cry.

The friends we have now don’t understand. They think he’s kind of rude (and he is, kind of, but again not terribly) and don’t see that his mild, snotty slams are attempts to be one of the guys. (I know this is the case, because he never makes snide comments to our women friends, not ever, not once.) They haven’t known him and truly loved him as everyone did, from the time he was a baby on. When I try to explain, they don’t really believe me. They probably think I’m just not really aware, like a Housewife or something. I’m not.

I love my son so much today I can’t stand it. It’s not always like that. Sometimes I tell him, “Baby, shut the fuck up,” that he’s boring me and needs to can it. Last week, I got all schnockered at a journalist party, trying to look cool, and when I came home, I wept at him—sobbed!—that he didn’t appreciate my sacrifices, that I could have been a foreign correspondent. “You don’t understand, I am really an amazingly talented writer! I am the greatest writer in the world!” he tells me I told him. “‘I could be in Afghanistan right now!’” he mimics, before asking me with a pitying sneer, “Mom, who the fuck wants to go to Afghanistan?” It’s an excellent point, and I take it.

I am going to binge-drink less. Oh, dear.

Now he never wants to go to art openings with me, or protests or forums or even parties (he still says yes to restaurant openings), no matter how many old friends I dangle before him. That’s okay, he says, he’ll stay home and watch wrestling. My landlady tells me when I’m gone, she sees him boogieing at the window. He’s still sweet to me, though, and I understand if he’d like some alone time. He worries about me, and cares about my feelings, and when I’m yelling or mean-hearted, he walks up to my side and pats me gently on the shoulder, as if I were a kitten, which instantly disarms me and makes me feel even worse. And I cook him dinner and check his homework (and yell at him to redo it) and call him sweet names and tell him he’s marvelous, and how I love him so, unless he’s watching a second hour of Charm School, in which case, “Darling,” I murmur, “you need to turn off the goddamn TV, it’s making you a FUCKING IDIOT.” And he pats me on the shoulder and tells me he loves me and goes into my office and gets on the computer and a minute later I hear him quietly streaming it from there. 

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