At this point in the script, the rest of the dealership was supposed to crowd around me, although, as my agent said, they were all men and having them crowd around a young actress as she smiled by the pickup looked like the beginning of some porno movie. But I didn’t say anything about this, just stood there, still smiling and a little out of breath. Then I sat down.
“I don’t really feel it,” his mother said.
“Mom,” Simon Robbie said reproachfully.
“What? I just call them like I see them. Would you buy a car from that girl?”
“Don’t listen to her, Zoe,” he said. “That was great. Is that commercial still on?”
“Uh, no. Although I wasn’t actually pretending to be a salesperson,” I said to his mother. A high-pitched pleading tone surfaced in my voice, the same as it did whenever my agent called with bad news. “I was just advertising their Labor Day sale.”
“Those guys at Ed’s are sharks,” she said. “Don’t you feel bad working with sharks like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice still squeaky.
“I always go to Millingham Honda. They’ve done right by me.”
I stood up again. “I think I’d better be going.”
“You didn’t finish your lemonade,” the mother said.
“That’s okay.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“It’s delicious,” I said. “I’m just, uh, full, or whatever the equivalent of that for drinking is.”
“Hah!” the mother said, then looked at her son. “I can tell she’s lying. She doesn’t like lemonade. Probably goes for the hard stuff. Watch out for this one, babe. She’ll lead you down the garden path.”
“It was very nice to meet you,” I said softly, inching toward the door.
“You aren’t even really his girlfriend, are you?” she said. “You don’t have love in your eyes when you look his way.”
“I do love him!” I whispered desperately from the doorway, all conviction gone. “I love him very much!”
“You don’t even know what love is,” his mother said.
Red-faced, hands in pockets, Simon Robbie walked me outside. We ambled together down the block, until we were out of sight of those staring cats. As soon as we hit the street I’d started to cry, but Simon Robbie didn’t notice at first.
When he did, he nodded his head glumly. “She got to you too,” he said.
“She’s right, isn’t she? You wouldn’t buy a car from me either.”
“That’s the worst part. She only tells the truth. The things that other people think but never say.”
“She’s like a witch.”
“She’s my mother,” he said.
I wiped my nose with my sleeve. If we kept talking about it, I was going to be blubbering like a baby. “You don’t have to buy me dinner this week,” I said. “Okay?”
He just shrugged. I guessed he was used to getting the brush-off after these home visits. “Sorry about my mom, Zoe,” he said. “She does that to everybody.”
I left him at the corner, his yellow T-shirt glowing faintly on the dark street, and started back to my apartment. The whole world was colored in hues of truth. I saw the Chinese restaurant clearly as I passed by: a small, grimy place that wasn’t worth returning to night after night, that didn’t offer any refuge, or even serve decent food. I saw myself reflected in its windows, a girl who was all alone and scared of it, who’d deceived herself into thinking that lying and acting were the same thing. The next day, when I woke up, I talked myself out of this state and got back to the business of living. But ever since then, I’ve looked back on the night I met the truth-teller as the one moment of perfect clarity I ever achieved — a moment when I realized I had no idea what I was doing or who I thought I was. And often I ask myself: who was she, Simon Robbie’s mother? Where did she get her power to speak the merciless truth? And if I ever meet her again, will I still be found wanting?
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to all the editors of the literary journals in which these stories appeared — especially Sudip Bose, Jennifer Cranfill, Thom Didato, and Don Lee — for their support of my work and of the short story in general. And thanks are due, as ever, to Gary Fisketjon, Jenny Jackson, Amy Williams, and my family, who mean more to me than I can say.