Self’s favorite essay so far. She loves the motherly distress over the thought that her 13-year-old daughter receives dick pics from an acquaintance. The mother, a true Mama Bear, calls the boy (whose number she finds from an email on her daughter’s computer — Bad Mama for snooping! Bad!)
“Hello?” says the boy, “warily.”
“Hi! Who’s this?”
“M—-” he says, giving his name. Good Lord, this boy would probably follow a guy who said he had a hurt puppy in his car.
Anyhoo, the conversation never touches on the dick pic, and yet there is eventually a
Long pause. “Oh.”
And I think, he’s putting it together. He knows.
The mother does talk to her daughter about it, and succeeds in being very light. Trusting, you know. She lets it go. But inwardly, she can’t stop worrying. So, some time later, when she and her daughter are “on vacation in the country,” she brings it up again:
“Were you shocked when you saw the picture?”
“Yes.” She’s smiling, but she says ‘Yes’ in the same tone that she might say “Of course” or “Duh.”
“Well, what he did was send an assault, and that’s wrong, and — “
“Bye-bye.” She walks outside. She has always been a private person. She hates Talks.
And the mother is rebuffed. Again. And yet again.
The last image is of the daughter sitting on a swing: she “swings slowly, the wood making little creaking sounds like a sailboat’s mast in the sea.”
How lovely the image!
And a few sentences later, the piece ends.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers.
