MIA’S TEENAGE SON, Gordey, came home from work looking super baked and Mia thought to herself: He looks so happy! He loves his job! He’s high on life!
And just like that, Mia turned into her mother.
Gordey was the most exceptional of teenagers, not because of his intelligence or his looks—although he was very smart and Mia thought he was quite good-looking—but because of his kind and gentle nature. He was now seventeen and had almost never given Mia a moment’s worry. He was the unicorn of teenagers: rare, magical, long-faced but handsome, perhaps gifted with the ability to bless people with miracles.
Mia was in the kitchen, opening her mail and feeding their elderly cocker spaniel, Warhol, when Gordey got home from his summer job at the supermarket.
Gordey poured himself a glass of milk and said, “This old lady came in and ordered two individual shrimps—” he worked in the butcher department and claimed that old ladies were the worst customers, always ordering itty-bitty cuts of meat “—and she says, ‘One for me and one for my daughter.’ When I told her that would be forty-two cents, she got this look like she was thinking next time she wouldn’t include the daughter.”
Mia gazed at Gordey, her handsome son with his sleepy smile and bright eyes and flushed face, and that’s when she had that humiliating thought about Gordey being high on life.
This is the start of a story, “Damascus,” and no one seems to be talking about it, although I think it’s the best thing I’ve read this summer.
There was an NPR item this week about how little control we have over a child’s fate; two kids can be raised in one house and yet opt to pursue wildly divergent paths. This is partly what “Damascus” addresses. Mia, the protagonist, had a naughty childhood; she was always pulling the wool over her mother’s eyes. (Mia gave blow jobs to the owner of the local party supply shop, in exchange for free Halloween costumes and paperware. Also, Mia regularly stole from friends and colleagues to fund a coke habit.)
Although Mia has changed her life, she can’t help but wonder if a “party gene” has planted itself within her son (who has always seemed so magical and “good”).
A small secret can permanently alter a relationship; a great deal is at stake here. Mia and Gordey have a rare kind of love; this is demonstrated in a brief work story (“the lady didn’t want to pay twenty additional cents for the second shrimp”) and in an adoring gaze.
The actual reason that Gordey’s cheeks are flushed is like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; you’re hooked in the first sentence, and you’re going to follow that rainbow all the way to its endpoint. (Like Agatha Christie, this writer enjoys a twist; the mystery of the flushed cheeks is not what it seems to be.)
The writer: Katherine Heiny. The book: “Games and Rituals.” I would deliver this door to door, free of charge, if my life circumstances were just slightly different.
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