Dear in the Headlights

‘Don’t fucking embarrass me’ 

‘They’re my parents,’ I said, lurching forward when he parked the car. 

We were outside Rome Italia, a restaurant my parents liked, palatable for my father, who was never interested in exploring beyond smoked fish, and expensive enough for my mother. 

‘That’s not my point,’ he started, ‘when we had tea cakes with Cath and her gay boyfriend, you forgot to call me your fiance.’ He was childish like this. When I had humiliated him in front of Cath, he laughed, squeezing my shoulders tightly as if to say, I enjoy the playful jabs, when really I knew he was holding me like a stress toy. In the indents he left, he was really telling me, we will absolutely talk about this later, perhaps in the car, or in three weeks when I remember how embarrassed I felt.

‘I didn’t forget, I was joking… and Jason isn’t gay, he’s bisexual,’ I said, leaning my elbow against the seat belt.

‘And don’t tell them I work in theatre, that makes me sound like a light technician, you told them I’m a playwright?’ 

‘I told them it was a creative outlet.’ He whipped his head around to me, a stern look about his face. ‘I’m kidding, yes I told them.’

‘I know you don’t understand how important this is,’ he explained, ‘but this project is everything to me… like Oscar Wilde or Bryon condensed into one work.’ He finished with a long sigh, like a spoiled dog, as if this speech, explaining his artistic integrity to me, was terribly exhausting.

He opened the sun visor and began fiddling with his hair. It always looked better when he wasn’t fussing with it. Each time he ruffled it with his fingers, the fringe got greasier, flopping against his forehead like a dead fish. 

‘Okay,’ I said. 

‘Just don’t joke.’ 

He turned to me, eyes raised, hands open, asking me to approve of his hair.

‘You look fine,’ 

 He was still looking at me, now with a coy expression.. He checked his pockets, then opened his wallet so he had enough to tip the waiters, palming my thigh to look under my feet in case something was askew. 

‘Wait,’ he said. I sat obediently while he reached over me into the glove compartment. ‘You’re parents are christian right?’ He turned back, his face too close to mine, he smelled sickly sweet, like an old woman or a hooker. When I didn’t say anything he opened his hand to show me a little, gold plated Cross necklace. I laughed, covering my face with my hands and squeezing my legs like I was about to piss myself. 

He flapped his hands about like a little girl, and then turned his back to me. At first I thought he was having a tantrum until I noticed his hand holding out the necklace. I helped clasp it around his neck; in a strange way, his sincere uselessness made me enjoy his company, and I liked feeling needed. 

A rather squat waitress ushered us through the restaurant. I was teetering over handbags and long trench coats which didn’t quite sit over the garden chairs. I heard my fiance making tutting noises at people invading the walkable spaces. 

My parents were already sitting at the table. I checked my phone while my fiance checked his watch, something he thought made him more intellectual. We were on time. 

 I sat opposite my mother, my fiance sat in between us. I thought this was strange when there was another seat opposite my father but I knew he enjoyed being coddled where my mother could reach him.

The waitress loitered around for a moment, holding what looked like drink menus but my mother waved her away fussily.  

‘You’re late,’ she said to me. My fiance held her hand, and she held his. 

He spoke closely to her ear, as if frozen in time before a romantic kiss, not the kind I’d give to a grandparent, it was delicate, nothing he ever gave to me unless he had done something wrong. ‘Forgive her, the traffic was terrible.’ 

My mother’s thin lips curled into a cruel, little smile and went about picking a bread stick into smaller pieces before popping them in her mouth. 

‘Yes, yes, well let's get that waitress, we’ve already ordered.’

I sat back, watching them playing with one another. I hated them both as if they had morphed into one singular organism, existing only to mock me. My father sat twiddling his fingers. I tried my best to make contact with him, perhaps to exchange smiles at the cuckold my mother,his wife, made of us but he seemed to stare vacantly at nothing; I hated him. 

When my mother was bored, she turned to me, cocking her head like a dog. ‘I was talking to Carol the other day, you know her daughter is going to Law school in America? Oh what is called,’ she lightly smacked my father, who was sipping on some piss coloured drink. 

‘Harvard–’

‘Yes, Harvard, they’re having a big leaving party next Sunday,’ she placed her hand on my fiance. ‘You two will come?’ 

‘No, we are driving back home tonight,’ I said, which was true, though I had no intention of attending. To this, my mother scowled, like she was sucking on a lemon. 

‘Well anyway,’ she recovered, ‘how is that the law firm you’re working in?’ 

I rubbed my forehead as a terrible pain bulged behind my eyes. ‘I don’t work at a law firm, I had an internship in University five years ago.’ I couldn’t bring myself to look up at her so I looked up at my fiance who, to my horror, had the same ugly expression on his face as my mother would have. I hated him more than anything then, so passionately I thought I was dying,

‘Yes well, why only an internship, honey.’ 

I shrugged and waited for a waitress to take my order. 

My fiance ordered a large Caesar salad, and was pressing on the croutons with his fork until they exploded. I watched him jerk his head around to fit whole leaves of lettuce in his mouth, craning his neck until his cheeks were pink and blotchy. 

When the same, squat waitress came with my bowl of pasta, my mother gave me a look, one that reminded me of how she felt about carbohydrates. 

‘They’re unproductive calories, honey,’ she’d say to me, rolls pinned in her hair, dolled up for another day of domestic nothing. 

I stabbed my fork in as many pasta noodles as it could take, shoveling them in my mouth and chewing as little times as possible before swallowing. They were slimy and overcooked, the tomato sauce was not anything spectacular either. I stabbed another four noodles on my fork and I went about the motion of unhinging my jaw when my father waved. 

‘Those are called fusilli noodles,’ he said, smiling stupidly. 

‘They’re delicious.’ I swallowed them in unappreciative, whole chunks.  

‘Yes well your mother would never let me cook pasta,’ he said, so sadly, it made me grimace.

My mother’s neck swivelled like an owl. Her tawny little nose pointing down at me, and her beady eyes switching between my father and I. 

‘You’re pasta is dreadful, darling,’ she said, still picking away at her little bread sticks. My father just nodded and went about cutting up his lasagna. I looked over at my fiance, who for a moment, I thought would raise his hand like a school boy to interject but he leaned his weight against the table instead. 

‘Well we have a pasta roller,’ he started, ‘I used to use it all the time,’ he motioned to me, ‘but it has since been neglected, you know, we are so busy at the moment.’ 

‘Of course,’ my mother spoke sympathetically, popping another crumb in her mouth, ‘well I’m always of the belief that a wife should use a pasta maker.’ 

I felt another pain now in my ears, I thumped my chest with my fist as it began to tighten and constrict. 

‘Well I’m not a wife,’ I said curtly. 

I felt a wet sensation splash on my face, for a horrific moment I thought it was blood but when I opened my eyes I was met with my fiance’s flushed expression, frozen in terror and his shirt dripping with red wine. His leg was jerked upwards and he slowly lifted a hand to massage where his knee had banged the table. 

‘Oh dear,’ my mother said, dryly. I felt the chunks of wet pasta swimming inside of me. I suppressed a gag with a hard, difficult swallow. ‘Oh darling,’ she said again, though her voice seemed to rise. She reached over to my fiance and began dabbing him with a handkerchief. ‘Let’s get that waitress, where is she,’ she babied, ‘another glass of the red stuff.’

I felt the droplets of wine dribbling down my face like tears, I wiped them with the back of my hand and licked it– it was dreadful and sour. 

‘Unbelievable.’ He was leaning forward with his arms folded on the steering wheel like a dinosaur. His face was bright red and his jaw had jutted forward, sometimes his eyes scrunched closed as if experiencing the moment again in his mind, working himself up to be angry again. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I said innocently. I was leaning against the window watching the droplets of rain racing one another down the glass until they disappeared, holding our ‘to-go’ boxes like a swaddled baby in my lap.

‘No, I’m sorry but, no this is so unbelievable.’ He pointed a hand out in front of him, as if scolding a very naughty child. His shirt was soiled with a deep pink. Though the initial stain wasn’t unforgivable, he had obviously blotched it under a tap in the bathroom, making the tiny islands of wine, now giant, bleeding continents that covered both of his nipples and down to his belly button. 

‘It’s a sexy shade on you,’ I said. 

He growled like a dog, and leaned closer to the wheel. ‘Your mother will never look at me the same.’ 

‘Why do you care? do you want to fuck her?’ 

‘Just don’t joke with me right now,’ he said, though I had asked honestly. He pat down his hair like he was burping a baby, the fringe now in sweaty strands like seaweed on his forehead. 

‘I know you don’t always get it but,’ he bared his teeth and he looked horribly ugly, ‘I told you didn’t I?’ 

‘Yes you did.’ 

The conversation lulled as we drove into the dark, our headlights twitching through the rain drops. I felt myself falling asleep, my head dropped as I listened to the loud huffing of my fiance, waiting for me to turn my head with each, louder, exhale. I didn’t.

‘And you can’t get a guy? Hello?’ I woke up to my fiance yelling into his phone. I sat up, it was still dark and the rain hadn’t stopped but we were parked on the side of the road. 

‘What happened?’ 

He snapped his head at me, he looked crazy; his shirt was dry now, his hair looked static from habitual ruffling and the phone was raised in one hand like he was serving a dish. 

‘The fucking car broke down, these,’ he put his mouth closer to the phone, ‘these animals won’t come, oh and we have disconnected.’ For some strange reason I felt no sensation of panic or urgency, I flopped back down in my seat while he fumbled about. 

‘No I’m sorry but I can’t, it's not right, I have a workshop tomorrow and I need to get back to my notes.’ He said this with a new sense of dignity in his posture, as if his play writing was terribly important and our car breaking down was the universe depriving him of his genius. ‘No, I’m going to go look for some connection somewhere.’ 

‘That’s not how that works,’ I tried to explain but he put a finger up to shush me, his door was already wide open. He looked back at me like a warrior, on the cusp of a perilous adventure, waiting for me to clutch his arm and beg him to stay. When I didn’t, of course, he was too stubborn to change his mind so I watched him, at first, cringe at the wetness of everything, before disappearing into the dark. 

I rubbed my fingers while I looked around inside the car for anything to do. I saw, under the seat, the gold cross necklace. Picking it up, I tried to untangle it, but it was already wrapped around itself into tight little knots and I had a terrible habit of biting my fingernails to have any leverage on them. I thought of my fiance wearing it under his soiled shirt and laughed again at how silly he was. 

I looked hard into the darkness, the rain hammering down against the window and I felt a painful loneliness. My fiance was probably running like a little girl, searching for the last petrol station we passed, or perhaps he was stupid enough to run straight into the woods or try to flag down a car. Despite this, and how cruelly he had treated me, and how much I relished in poking him, I felt the terrible heat of being rejected. 

I remembered how coy he was with my mother, and how he probably thought of her when we had sex, but I didn’t care too much for this rejection, the fact that he didn’t need to rely on me after tonight hurt the most. 

I rested my head against the window, it wasn’t vibrating anymore, though the key was still in the ignition. I reached over and poked at it, for a moment it remained stubbornly in its place, and with a little push, it turned and the car came back to life like the sudden clearing of clouds in the night sky. The key was only jammed.

All the little lights turned back on, I looked back up in case my fiance was waiting by the window, perhaps testing me, but he was not there. 

I hoisted myself up and into the drivers side, covering my face with my hands like I was doing something very naughty. I reached for the wheel when I saw a shape outside the car. I screamed.

Against the two lights, the rain still pouring, a great stag stared at me. Its little ears flickered against the rain droplets and it batted its long, beautiful eyelashes. Its eyes were wide, almost white, like two little moons. It’s legs shook and juddered, shaking the rain into mist.

 For a moment, I thought it would charge its antlers into the window, but it only puffed its chest in a handsome, dignified way before stalking back into the darkness.

I watched it disappear as the car shook awake. I thought perhaps this stag was divine intervention, it’s rectangular, alien pupils boring into me like an omen, or a warning from God to take direction.

I lurched forward as the car began to move, just as I heard my fiance yelling from some place far away, perhaps he was calling for me, perhaps he was being kidnapped by a yeti, perhaps the stag had told him to stay away from me. 

Nonetheless, the car glided smoothly over the wet road and I drove away.