Rewriting Us

She rolled her eyes, and let her tongue roll from her mouth. A drawn out groan rumbled from deep in her throat. Her left hand braced her breast bone, and her right held her stomach. She turned away and started hanging her head.

"You can't find it so repulsive, considering the make-out session a few hours ago."

She grunted and then shivered. Finally she froze and gave up the theatrics. She turned to me, and said, "I'm revolted by myself."

I threw up my hands. "Right. Of course you are." Mothers can be real experts at finding the safest dodge. "You know, for that moment today we were following our hearts! You always told me to trust my heart!"

"No. Not like this!"

"Why not?"

"Because it is wrong and we both know it."

"I don't know that."

"Then there is a shit load you don't know, Don! You haven't had children yet. You can't understand the depth and intensity of the responsibilities I betrayed when I gave in to these sorts of feelings."

"Maybe you're right. But it seems to me that your responsibilities are already fulfilled. I am a well-raised, healthy, educated adult. Sure, you may say I'm not so healthy in the head, but what is so crazy? This has been the happiest time in my life. I finally stopped fighting my feelings and accepted them. I have grown closer than ever to my mother, and the love we have always shared is still there. In fact it has deepened and expanded. And another kind of love has also grown in addition to it. Where is this unhealthy or dangerous? Whom have we hurt or could we hurt?"

She seemed to wrestle with this for a moment, but then shook her head. "No! It is wrong no matter how much you talk me in circles. I swear you could talk the devil into giving you his horns."

"Only if it makes sense for him to do so."

She stumbled and fumed for a second. I'd hit her limit. "Enough Don! It ends now, before things go too far."

I could feel my eyes bugging out. I took a steadying breath and shook my head before speaking. "How?"

"What?"

"How? How will you stop seeing me as a man; a man who wants you! How will you stop wanting me? Don't shake your head. We were both there. You want me in the same way I want you. You just sat right there and said we need to start being 100% honest. Don't lie to me now. More important, don't lie to yourself. I know I am done with the lies."

She looked poleaxed.

I thought of how to press further. "Didn't you always say..."

"STOP! Yes, I will lie! I am your mother, and I will lie, cheat and steal to protect you; even from myself. I'll send you away. I'll send myself to jail if it will protect you from..."

"From what?"

"From what's in my head. From what my arms and legs want. What my skin wants. Sure, what I feel deep in my chest."

I reached to embrace her, but she put up her hands.

"STOP! I mean it! I'll lock myself away because a mother protects her son."

"How do you plan to protect me from my feelings for you? Besides, I'm an adult. I can..."

"STOP!! You say you love me. If you do - in any way - stop it now Donovan. Please." She looked terrified; eyes wide signaling fight-or-flight mode.

I sighed. "Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to...I'm just sorry, okay? Let me go make you a cup of tea - ginger with honey, your fave' - and maybe we can both calm down a bit before we continue. Agreed?"

Shaking, she nodded agreement. I left the handful of sheets on the coffee table, the new pages I'd produced while waiting for her to come home from the mall. Then I headed for the kitchen.

When I returned with the tea, I found her stretched out on the couch, reading my new work. She must have heard the tea cup rattling on the saucer as I approached because she didn't look up before she said, "What is this? I don't understand what you're trying to do."

"Maybe we should discuss this later. Maybe over dinner. Or after dinner. Or tomorrow. You know, when you're calmer."

"No, it's okay. Let me have a sip, then explain."

In the new pages the male character, Ken, brings the sandal he'd found on the back porch inside. He looks at familiar stuff in the house on the way up to the female, Jan's, bedroom. The second sandal is hanging on the doorknob of her bedroom. The female's voice sounds groggy on the other side of the door as she calls, "Is that you Ken?" "Yes." "Have you seen my lovely new sandals?" "Yes, I've got them here." "Could you bring them in here please?" Ken goes inside.

Then there is a line break.

Then, in brackets, "[bedroom scene]."

Then another line break.

The next section starts with "Five days later." It shows Ken standing on a lower back porch, looking across both yards at the upper back porch of the identical house on the other side. A woman there is crying with deep gasping breaths.

Then, "End of Part One"

Mom said, "Everything before that bracket thing, I get. But what goes on in this so called 'bedroom scene'?"

I wondered if I heard a flirty tone in her voice, but dismissed the idea. This was too delicate a moment to be flirty with her.

"I'm not sure. Maybe they begin a love affair. Maybe she insists that he can't come and see her anymore. I may have to figure it out before I begin part two, but either way, the last scene is the same."

"But that is the confusing thing. Which house's back porch is he standing on? Is that his mother crying?"

I looked over her shoulder to the diminished light in our front window, and spoke as much to myself as my mother. "They all think that as long as he is with one, he can never be with the other." I held my tongue for a moment to build the courage (or maybe to sink deeper into my self-made trance) to continue. "Wouldn't it be good if there was only one woman? If he went to the back yard, spun around and returned always to the same house and the one woman? But not here. Here he can only choose one or the other."

"Which one is crying?"

I bent down to give Mom a small kiss on the lips. Then I stood up and said, "I guess that depends on how we," I shrugged. "or I if you don't want to have a hand in it anymore; how we or I write that scene in the brackets"

She looked again at the page: [bedroom scene]

"Look," I said in half a sigh. "Between what happened on the picnic blanket, the worrying when I got home, the writing and these conversations I'm sweaty and stressed. I need to go down to the basement and work out and then shower. After that I should be ready to eat or talk or both...or neither if that's what you decide."

I went into the basement. Treadmill. Bench presses. A little bit of light free weights. There were no interruptions.

I went up to the second floor of the house, and saw no one on the way. I showered without interruption.

From there it was only a handful of steps down the hall to my room. On the keyboard of the computer on my desk lay the flower print scarf.

Chapter 8

Was the returned scarf a rejection? Was she returning the gift? Could she have left it there by accident? I decided to bring it down to the living room.

Mom was stretched out on the couch in lamp light with all the pages I'd written so far - the entire first part of the book - in her lap. Her back was against one arm of the couch. I had put my new pages on the coffee table when we'd started our talk late this afternoon. I took a padded chair adjacent to the arm of the couch that supported mom's head. My mother's golden mane was near the fingertips of my left hand, and my left knee was not far from her right shoulder.

She'd covered herself with a blanket, perhaps a defensive position to hide herself if only in a symbolic way. She might have been crying, but it was hard to tell in the dim light. Her voice sounded shaky at first, but built strength as our conversation went on.

She put her hands on the papers in her lap before she spoke. She held every word I'd written from the beginning.

"I've been rereading. Everything seems different...in a new light. At some level I knew, but I refused to admit it to myself. I told myself that it was okay; encouraging you to have a direction and to chase your dreams. The mother character, Irene, shies from physical affection. I worried that you saw me that way - cold and unaffectionate. I tried to counterbalance it with snuggling. But you kept writing her as detached, sending him away...into the neighbor's arms. I told myself that you created a distant mother so I would be okay with the heat between Ken and the neighbor Jan because she looks like me." She swallowed and then continued. "But now - rereading - it's all about the split between my roles: Mother and Woman." I nodded, but she wasn't looking at me, so I doubt she knew. "But you saw through the looking glass, didn't you? Many sons and daughters refuse to see the other side, that their mothers are also women. But you saw it in me."

"Yes" I muttered.

"But none of that requires going as far as attraction and sexual desire!" She turned to face me to make sure I got that part.

She turned back to her lap and spoke at the pages. "Identical women in identical houses, one playing mother the other playing the lover. And you are roaming back and forth between them. But it was always me, wasn't it?"

When I didn't reply out loud she turned to me again. I nodded, looking her in the eye. "No matter which house he's in," I affirmed. "It's about us."

"See, that's where I got tricked. I thought it was about you when he was in the neighbor's house. You looking for a woman like your mother, not your actual mother." Real pain registered on her face, and it held us both speechless for a moment.

"I'm sorry about that. It's just...The cuddling and pillow fighting and tickling. It felt like we were flirting... coming together, at least at some level... as something more than mother and son. I mean you've been helping me make a guy like me seduce a woman like you. The mother was never meant to... I don't know... throw you off any scent. She was there to make the story make sense, y'know? A reason this guy is living in this house and neighborhood. But I guess she has turned into a reflection of my frustration at - yeah, kind of like you said - the roles that keep us from..."

"Fucking?"

"No. I mean not like that. These roles keep us from considering each other in other ways. They refuse us permission to embrace each other in those other ways if we desire it."

"You mean fucking!"

"That kiss on the picnic blanket wasn't about fucking. At least not for me."

She pressed the heels of her hands into her closed eyes and rubbed them in.

Wait a second. "Were you?" I asked, trying not to cry it out. "Were you thinking about fucking when we kissed?"

"Ugh! Sort of."

"Sort of? How sort of?"

"Sucking you, Don. Okay?" She removed her hands from her eyes. "I haven't kissed like that in a long time. I got kind of lost in it. I was sort of just kissing a guy with my son's face and body. Uh! That doesn't sound good either... just... it just wasn't the real you somehow... in my head." She turned back to face my pages and her knees. "And, yeah, in my mind I thought of getting your... you know... in my mouth and looking you in the eyes and taking you all the way into my throat. Then you said that that guy was gone and I realized again our situation. And then we kissed a bit more anyway... and I... I kept thinking about going down on you. So I ran."

Holy shit! Now I was the one who stood poleaxed. I scrambled in my mind for where to go from here. Sure I'd dreamed many scenarios, but only ever half believed any of it could happen. I began to look around the room as I searched my mind. My eyes fell on the scarf in my hand.

I held it up: Exhibit A. "Why did you leave this?"

She glanced over to see what I was asking about, but I think she knew even as she turned her head. "I don't know. When you were in the shower I came to your room to get all your pages. I wanted to read them to try to see if I could understand... all this happening. Somehow it made sense to leave the scarf there in its place. I didn't have a clear reason. It just seemed right." I offered it back to her, but she shook her head. "No. Please hold onto it."

"Okay. Um, what you said about your thoughts when we were kissing...I wasn't thinking those things." She groaned into her hands. "I was very aware that it was you, and I thought I could kiss you like that all day. But I worried that you'd feel tricked if I didn't say he'd gone." Behind her hands I heard a chuckle go off like a distant gun shot. "Yeah. Stupid. Like you couldn't stop and look for yourself. I wish I'd just grabbed you and kissed you until you told me to stop."

Her hands fell back into her lap, and she turned to me. "Aw, sweetie." Was she looking at me like a lost puppy or as a man who'd missed a chance?

This time I was the one to look away. "But I have thought about things like what you were thinking."

"Pshh! I'll bet you have!"

"I've thought about going down on you. Putting my mouth there. Kissing you there. Putting my tongue inside you." She shifted (or was she squirming?) under the blanket. I twiddled my thumbs. "I dreamed about eating you until you blacked out." I heard a small gasp, like someone had opened a bottle of soda right where her mouth was. "I mean, sure, of course I've thought about fucking you like..."

"Stop Don. Stop this second. You did a lot of thinking and planning to get us to this point, to touch me like man and woman. How sneaky have you been? Have you been peeking into the bathroom when I showered?"

I looked at her, hurt by the suggestion. "I've never peeked. I've never even wanted to peek. I want to be welcomed in." Her eyes hardened, but she said nothing. "Okay. Look, we agree that sometimes a woman has to play different roles in different situations. We all do to some degree. And it is possible - but not necessary - for sons and daughters to recognize their mother as both parent and woman. And, of course you're right that seeing your mom as a woman can happen without any sexual tension."

Even in the dim light I could see her relax and sink an inch or two into the sofa.

"I'm not saying," I pressed "that there's anything wrong with that. Those societal ideas don't hurt anyone. But we have a situation that steps out of the norm. I love you as my mother, and you love me as your son. No problems so far. We also see each other as a man and a woman. Still no problem. But there is a sexual attraction here. An electrifying one." Mom stared at me silent and still.

"So now we are suffering. Those societal ideas I mentioned earlier come with an expectation that your roles of mother and lover do not mix. I know you are hurting from this. I can see it.

"It makes me wish I could split into two Dons. That way you could keep the role of mother pure with one of me while I take you as my lover with the other me. But I can't split into two. It is literally. Physically. Impossible. Do you think that you could try to make your two into one?

"Maybe then we could get clear of the suffering and embrace the love.

"Maybe we can be both things - maybe many things - to and for each other."

My mother stared at me. She looked still as stone, but her blanket began to twitch. From beneath, she was tugging it aside one millimeter at a time. After three pulls the curvature of her bare shoulder was exposed. It looked flawless and warm in the soft lamplight.

Twitch, twitch, twitch, and I could see her whole upper arm. Her eyes never left my face. She measured my expression as I watched the blanket's tortuous progress. Five tugs later, the yellow of her dress showed itself. She'd chosen a simple single color piece so as not to distract from the floral print scarf she'd treasured so.

Three more twitches and I saw a flower pattern stitching bordered the collar. She went on like that, slow. So slow, and watching me with a fierceness that would brook no movement from me.

I don't remember breathing.

A lifetime and another lifetime passed. Countless miniscule jerks from beneath, and her upper body was revealed. My heart was thundering, calling me to run; at her or from her, it didn't matter. I was clenching and unclenching my calf muscles as they refused to obey. Hold still. It wasn't just a thought of my own but a clear message from her eyes. The blanket remained bunched at her hips. I could see that her right hand, still hidden beneath, was struggling to get further progress. My elbows bent in tiny increments at the urge to help move things along. Her chin tilted away from me, and her eyes held. No. I was to hold still. The tugging became stronger until the blanket released her. With a rubbing sound, gravity took the rest of the cover from her succulent form. But even that was slow like an overdone death scene.

And there she lay in her simple yellow dress, with her thighs akimbo, but not wide open. Her lips parted to show her teeth still clenched. I could tell from the dramatic rise and fall of her breasts that she was breathing quick breaths.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Let's try a little."

Shaking, I lay across my mother's body and kissed her. The shivering could be heard in my breath through my nose. I felt one of her arms wrap around my torso, and her other hand threaded fingers through my hair. One of my hands kept me steady by holding onto the back of the couch, but the other followed her lead, and stroked her long locks. We pecked. We pressed our bodies against one another with the pressure of fallen snow on delicate flowers. We maintained the gentility until my breathing quieted. Then I felt her tongue on my lips. I opened my mouth to let her in, and tasted her again.

One of us moaned into our shared mouth space, but for the life of me I don't know which of us it was. In any case I felt it; it was open and deep passion without pretense. No trouble-making pick-up-artists on the approach. No danger of polite society catching and seeing and judging. The door was locked. We were alone on our couch. It was just my mother and me about to see how hot and wet things could get between us as the day died and summer arose.

Her hands left my back and scalp to rub my biceps, but her tongue never left my mouth. My arms bulged with the effort of keeping me atop her without crushing her or flopping off the couch. She stroked my arms; upper arms to my forearms to my wrists. Back up to the elbows and on up to the shoulders. They stopped a mere centimeter apart at the nape of my neck. Then they ran down my back in a gesture that seemed take both measure and possession of me. She did not slow at the small of my back. She grabbed my ass with force and pulled me down onto her curve-rich frame. She'd had enough of the gentle play; a sign of things to come.

I released the back of the couch, letting my full body weight push her into the concave true surface of the sofa. She grunted, and shoved her tongue deeper into my mouth. I felt her pelvis tip up, rubbing against my groin. We ground against one another like that for a while; like teenagers.

I had one hand on her chest, over the dress. The other was rubbing her outer thigh under her dress. I squeezed at the bodice without pinching, and slid the grip I had on her thigh up until I hit the hem of her panties. I worried for a moment that she would withdraw and say that I was putting my paws where they oughtn't go. But she sucked on my tongue and thrust her pelvis up. The shift of her hips put her left cheek in my right palm, so my hand was full of the cotton that covered her flesh. I kissed her and groped at her curves and relished every second I was granted this taboo joy.