Story #3 My Mother's Side Job (Class Workshop)

Danielle Orner
Story # 3
02/27/07
Monologue
My Mother’s Side Job
My mother writes erotica to keep food on the table for my sister and me. My sister doesn’t know. No one else knows. Or at least I can’t imagine who else would know. I am telling you because if I don’t share this with someone then I will go insane thinking I am the only one who can see the clues. You are probably thinking that my mother is one of those trailer trash whores that has lots of gentlemen callers over, reeking with the scent of too many Bud Lites and covered in tattoos of naked women, and has sex with them on the couch while her two innocent daughters sit outside one the porch listening to the noises through paper-thin walls. Or that she is a total hippie chick who doesn’t shave, has long hair with natural streaks of grey, eats tofu at every meal, and believes in free sexuality or whatever. You know the kind that has statues of Asian gods and goddess in kama sutra positions and tells her daughters to explore their beautiful female bodies. You don’t have to tell me. I know that is what you are thinking.
But she is not either of those women. My mom is completely plainly average like dry toast or unsweetened shredded wheat. She is the kind of women you bump into at the grocery store because you truly didn’t see her standing there trying to figure out which brand of ketchup she has a coupon for. The word that best describes her is dumpy. You know short, soft around the edges, mousy hair, jiggly arms, a limp pudgy stomach that never quite deflated after pregnancy, lumpy sweaters with stupid little seasonal pins like a gold Christmas tree or a seesaw with pastel bunnies on it, granny underpants peaking out of her mom jeans, glasses, and a mop of graying hair that never seems to be in any kind of style.
She belongs to that class of middle-aged moms who couldn’t keep their husbands attention and are now divorced. Dad hated that sight of her lumpy figure in boxy, outdated styles so much that he ditched us all. He may have some other woman or a whole other family but I wouldn’t know because we haven’t heard from him in two years. He stopped sending the child support checks last December, just in time for Christmas.
Anyway, I have gotten way off the subject. The point is that my mother is the last person in the world who you would think writes erotica. She doesn’t even seem like a sexual being, just an androgynous bunch of wrinkled, depressed flesh. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother. It’s just that I want you to really get a picture of who she is so you can understand why I am so upset. It’s probably a sin to call your mother an androgynous bunch of wrinkled, depressed flesh so I am sorry for that. Anyway, mom has this job as a checker in at the Albertsons down the street. She walks because we don’t have a car and she wears her stupid blue vest with her name tag all the way there. I am always trying to tell her that she should just carry the vest until she gets inside the store but she thinks I am being to self-conscious like young women always are. What she means is that I still have self-esteem and haven’t completely let myself go like she has. Anyway, she rings up people’s stupid groceries for eight hours every day and still barely has enough to pay the rent on our crummy little two bedroom apartment, to pay for food, and other necessary items. So one day she said she got a raise and took us out to dinner at the pizza parlor and bought new curtains. Like a moron, I believed her. Then the amount of extra money she had to spend kept getting bigger and bigger. I got suspicious. My sister is too young and too self-absorbed to care about these things especially if mom is buying her jeans like the cool kids wear.
Anyway, I went snooping around my mother’s room to see if I could find a clue to what she was up to. I know it was wrong but I just had to know. I had once been in my mother’s room and found her diary. It had all this angry emotional stuff about Dad in it which scared me so I never snooped in her room again. This time I found a bunch of those $1.99 notebooks from the grocery store instead of a diary. There were filled with my mom’s scribbly handwriting. I flipped to a page in the middle and read a paragraph. Now I am not going to tell you exactly what I read but it was explicit. You know whispered dirty words, wet panties, feverish touches, and throbbing members…the whole deal. Okay, sorry, maybe you don’t know but I am sure you can imagine. Anyway, it was detailed and, I must say, pretty good. At first, I panicked because I thought I might still be reading a diary. But that thought soon past. The only places mom goes without us is the grocery store and the library. Books are her only way to relax and I guess dream of a different life. She spends most of her weekends there. Anyway, the thought of my mom at the library made me realize that maybe she was typing this stuff up on their community computers and sending it in to online contests or printing it and mailing it to publishers. I knew immediately that that was where the money was coming from. I thought I might look for the stuff online at an internet café or something because we don’t have a computer at home and I could get caught searching for something like that at school. But then I realized that was a stupid idea because she probably some pen name or something. There is no way she writes erotica under the name Paula Hungal. No one would read it. She must go by Madame Van Wick or Gloria White or something sultry and author-like.
So it doesn’t really bother me that she writes this stuff. It is just that now when I look at her from across the dinner table I know she has all these romantic sex scenes playing in her mind. You know like she is all dumpy on the outside but on the inside she is some princess being ravaged by the stable boy in this medieval castle. And now she has got all this money too. And when people bump into her in the aisles or don’t say hello when she starts ringing up their groceries, she can smile to herself and think that they have no idea who she real is. Kinda like Superman or something.
Anyway, I guess this really isn’t a confession so I should stop taking up your time. It is just that you’re the only person I knew I could talk to who couldn’t tell anybody else and who could charge me for your time. So save your Hail Marys and such for a really sinner. Okay, thanks for listening I guess. Oh, one more thing, I hope you learned something from my story. You know, like you never know what someone is doing with their own private lives. I guess you think twice when you see those nuns now. Kinda crazy, huh?