Please Read Free

Wasn’t she allowed to get a little upset? They were telling her in the most mincing of terms that her son just wasn’t good enough. That she, as his primary care-giver, wasn’t good enough. No one had told her that she and Keenan were supposed to be cramming every day like he was going to be sitting the bar. Wasn’t childhood supposed to be about playing and having fun? Apparently not.
    The diagnosis of ADHD had actually come as something of a relief. They could put a label on why Keenan broke down in tears of exasperation after two minutes of trying to read the same three -letter words that his classmates could spell forwards and backwards and make anagrams of. They could do something about it.
    Of course, “they” meant Elizabeth. Steve had his job. What Elizabeth considered her job – writing – Steve considered a hobby. His job was what put lamb chops on the table and Baby Gap leggings on Gwen’s doll-sized bottom. Elizabeth’s advance barely covered their annual property taxes.
    So it was up to Elizabeth to meet with the Student Support Team and take Keenan to see the specialists and order books with titles like Learning to Love Your Challenged Child and ADHD: A Naturopathic Approach . The books were lined up on the shelves in her study now, largely unread, more talismans than tools. She could only handle so many pages of some self-styled expert telling her everything she was doing wrong before she gave up. It didn’t help that all the authors contradicted each other, either. What did help, eventually, was cognitive behavioral therapy and Ritalin.
    But Keenan was still a constant source of anxiety and a persistent cause of arguments between Elizabeth and Steve. And unlike some couples who almost looked forward to the occasional fight with their spouse, anticipating the inevitable make-up sex, Elizabeth and Steve didn ’t. Make up, or have sex. Their heated discussions would gradually become tepid and finally fizzle out, leaving them both weary, resentful and in no mood for hugs, let alone licking whipped cream off each other’s inner thighs.
    Then there was Steve ’s job. He’d been diligently working his way up the chain of middle management at Dean Industry and Agriculture for the past ten years. With his latest promotion, he’d crossed the invisible line that distinguished the middle from the top. He was at the bottom of the top, mind you, but suddenly, everything was different. It was as if he’d been admitted to a secret masonic order, with special handshakes, cryptic acronyms and an unspoken dress code. He started wearing suits. Gave up his gym membership at the Rec Center and began playing golf instead. Checked his Blackberry at the dinner table. And he was traveling a lot more. Which led to two more changes: Steve gained forty pounds and Elizabeth’s mother moved in.
    If their sex life wasn ’t already dying a slow death, having a husband who bore more than a passing resemblance to Tom Arnold on doughnuts and her mom cutting z’s in the guest room was like inviting Dr. Kevorkian into their bedroom.
    Elizabeth had read countless magazine articles over the years describing the male libido as highly visual and the female libido as emotional, but either she was a man trapped in a woman ’s body or those researchers had their heads up their collective asses – meaning they were probably men.
    She ’d like to see any woman try to have an orgasm with two-hundred pounds of flab pressing down on her and the sound of an asthmatic bear wheezing in her ear. She got pretty good at faking it, but even better at coming up with excuses not to altogether. And after a few months of steady rejection, Steve all but stopped trying. She still loved Steve, of course, but loving and wanting to make love to were two entirely different things.
    But even if Elizabeth had been able to overlook Steve ’s sudden weight gain, there was the matter of her mother. Connie McCanna got up at 5 AM with a verse from the Bible