We Don’t Do Plastics

“Come on in,” he said, an octave too high. He wiped away the empty space with a graceful arm and welcomed her into their home. A green butler, stilted, awkward, and unsure, but in his head was only poise and grace. Appearances were crucial. She could not find out it was him. 

This was a fair fight.

She did not know him.

He did not know her.

For all she knew, he was always this calm and hospitable. Unflappable. Forged in tougher stuff than she was. She was a bad mother, and her child, Grace, was a little asshole. Who cares what she does for a living? Who cares that it's “cooler” than being in-house counsel at a plastics company? They made the same amount of money, kind of.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” he said, closing the door with a soft, composed click.

She thought about it for a moment and continued taking in the entryway. She was leaving him there in it, hanging on her response. Not to say he wasn’t proud of the job he and his wife and their interior designer had done. He had weathered the compliments and the drool at the house warming. The foyer looked austere and devoid when they first closed and was now completely transformed. They had unearthed the potential of the clerestory window, and there was an undeniable amount of moment to the space, but he knew she didn’t care. This was performative. An attempted leg-up. An abuse of the space.

“Sparkling water?”

She said it with cold authority as though this, unbeknownst to her, was the four hundred and twelfth time she had made that specific request, and with that experience came a delivery removed and expectant, and just so fucking, parvenu. 

“Bottle or can?” he said, leading her into the kitchen. 

“Glass?” 

“We don’t do plastics in this house,” he said impatient and offended. 

“Mountain Valley?” she said, her hand placed annoyingly so, perched perfect and supported on the strap of her Los Feliz leather tote. 

“What else?” he said with a smile even he felt was too Stepford. 

Reel it in. 

“So,” he said, sliding the bottle over to her. It scraped gracefully across the jet black soapstone. She cracked open the top and began gulping from the frosted green glass as he raised his glass to cheers her. She saw him lower the bottle bashfully in her periphery but did not give it her attention. She kept drinking despite the sting in her throat. 

What a wretched-

She let out an oxygen deprived sigh and capped the bottle. 

“So good,” he said. 

“Delicious.” 

He cleared his throat as the silence soaked back in between them. She grinned at him. 

“So…” he said. 

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” she said, narrowing her focus. She leaned in with a hydraulic smoothness. She was terrifying. 

“No p-”

“I spoke to Mrs. Ellis about Grace and Mattie’s little dust up.” 

“I assumed you might.” 

“She said that you had a different take on the events which isn’t surprising,” she said, unscrewing her cap again. She drank as he mounted his defense. 

"Well, I think the girls give us different versions of what happened, and you know…” 

“Right,” she said, leery and mocking. 

“We trust our girls.” 

“We trust our girls.” 

“Right,” he said, taking an anxious sip. 

"Right, well, it’s not so much the girls I don’t trust because, you know, they’re six year old children. It’s the adults in the situation I don’t tru-” 

His lips had vacuumed into the opening of the bottle and he hurriedly plucked them out. He needed to cut this off at the pass.

"Right, but your daughter’s a monster though, right?” he said, proud and quietly enthused at the landed blow. She sat there looking back at him. It was these silences he didn’t know what to do with. These silences that lulled him into disobeying that old axiom about the power of two ears and two eyes and one something or other. “Because your daughter has attacked my daughter twice now, right?" Because your daughter has yanked my daughter’s hair and sm-” 

“When did she do that?” 

“Do what?” 

“Yank Mattie’s hair,” she said, relying heavily on air quotation. 

"Oh, she did it.” 

“When? Where?” she asked in quick succession. 

“I didn’t look at the fucking security tapes.” he said, heating up. He often got like this at home. There was no valve in his professional life. No fault line to burp. He was most often in life, synched tight.

“Well I wasn’t called.” 

“You weren’t called because you paid for the fucking theater."

“Okay.” 

He held up his hand and waved across the affixed bronze sign. 

“The Gleeson Center for Performing Arts: A Free Pass.” 

“Do you know who drew the pentagram?” 

He came back down from the performance and was rooted. 

“Sorry?” 

“The Pentagram.” 

He swallowed. 

“Sorry?”

“Again?” 

“No sorry,” he punched his chest, feigning something to dislodge. “Did you say pentagram?” 

“Awww,” she said, taking another sip. 

He stared down at her, basking as though she'd figured it out. 

“Oh I see.” 

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, the most power accrued since she walked through those doors. 

“You think I planted the pentagram on your evil daughter.”

“Interesting how many steps you bypassed there.” 

“Well, I mean, I’ve heard the rumors.” 

‘Oh you have?” she said, with a kinked neck and a pissed smile. 

“I have yeah.” he said, returning fire with a kink and a grin of his own. 

They both returned to a resting position and gathered themselves for the final round. 

“I will admit something,” he said. 

“Oh joy,” she said, posturing. 

“When I heard, that the teacher had found a pentagram on Gracie’s desk…” 

She folded her arms waiting patiently for what she suspected would be a turn. 

“I thought, God that is so awful.”

“Me too. Awful” 

“No I mean it. I thought, the embarrassment that that little girl must be facing, what with her peers teasing her about worshipping the devil and what not and I thought... but you know what?” 

She took another sip of her sparkling spring. “Excited,” she said, almost to herself. 

“It makes perfect sense that she would have a pentagram on her desk.”

“Okay,” she said, gathering her things. 

“Because she’s goddamn demon.”

She stood there with a smile and took the rest. 

“She attacks my daughter again and I’ll see to it that she’s thrown out of the fucking school.”

She nodded and pursed her lips downward. A sardonic drip. 

“I don’t care if you paid for the fucking theater. I don’t care if you’re producing Star Wars or whatever the fuck you do, you’re hades spawn cannot lay another finger on my child or she’s gone.” 

She took a final sip of the sparkling water and placed the bottle and cap gentle on the counter. 

“Done?” 

“Yes,” he said, almost heaving. 

“I know it was you.” 

“Knew w-”

“My turn.” 

He shook his head. He was exhausted and frustrated that she had so much left in her reserves. She had played this wisely. A true samurai. 

“I know it was you. You, a forty four year old father of two… in house counsel at Formosa,” she said it with an acridness that sat on her tongue. Once said, it was as if her faced relieved, grateful to be rid of the pathetic details of his life. As she spoke and illuminated to him the opposition research her assistant conducted - a type A Malaysian MBA who she was certain had to be gay - she could see him seize. She had faced down opponents more unnerving than this puddle of a man before her. She had faced down Redstones and Gianopuli, people with power and influence, not some fucking rat. She leaned in with eyes only. Semi circling in on him like a mean zoom function. 

“I know it was you who drew or had your daughter draw a fucking sigil of the church of fucking Satin and plant it on my daughter so that her classmates spread rumors that she fucking bloodlets sparrows and it pains me to know that there is nothing I can do to prove that.” 

He swallowed. 

“But trust me, I will do everything I can, given my schedule and the things that I prioritize in my life, to make your life considerably worse. I will never put my campaign against you over my work, my time with my little Satanic daughter, or picking up my dog’s shit but when I have free time, when I’m at the soccer field on a Sunday and I see you just across the way and am reminded, I promise to think, brainstorm, invent and execute ways to make you unhappy.” 

He swallowed again. 

“Thank you for the water.”