In a nice evening,
my husband and I went shopping to not only find something funny but also buy a
bed, tiles for the bathroom or decoration stuff. But my God, I couldn’t
remember the list when Angus’s stinging problem was stuck in my head.
Angus is our
dearest son. He is teenager, the complicated age before becoming a real adult.
We sent him to a Catholic high school because we hoped he would study hard
without being involved in affair. Up to now, our plan has been working well.
Till the evening
we went shopping, Angus had to go to his friend’s home - a new friend we hadn’t
known. A nameless kid dared to induce our son to go out and turn off the cell
phone.
We took Angus to
that friend’s home, and after our car just parked, I was stunned by a girl who
wore a short skirt along with a tiny T-shirt clinging to her chest. I hissed
through my teeth “Oh my dear, I used to have that same kind of shirt in 1972.”
Angus’s face
changed strangely, as he had enjoyed the chocolate birthday cake in his 6th
birthday, or when he had a high fever with 103°F, or as he had received the
enormous gift of Santa Claus under the Christmas tree. In sum, his expression
was mixed moving with stressful.
He flew out of the
car and hugged her. Unlike the awkward type he often hugged me, it was a
perfect tender long embrace with some sweet pats. Suddenly I felt splutter in
my ears as if I had been about to get panicky or stroke immediately.
Till we drove down
the windy road, hidden from the view of that young couple, I began to burst
into tears as I had never cried before. Oh, that pretty hateful girl! I was
dumped due to she stole my beloved son.
She was not the
first girl my son knew (only God realized how much they knew each other). I
could imagine the scene about a group of 7-8 girls had passed by the campus of
Angus’s school. Those girls were teasing and flirting, as if they had combined
sweating smell of boys with their strong fragrance. I was sure that those kids
who were finally teenagers always wanted to gang together and be mincing, as a
kind of rebellion without desire for progress. They just expected to enter Ivy
League college or trivial art schools and with them, “getting married” or
“dating” was the same.
I used to envisage
the type of girls my boy should date. Exactly I had chosen a girl named Zoel,
no, Chloe… In general, her name had “Oe” and she was the counselor for a summer
camp. The girl who was quite cute with red hair was the person giving me a
group of red-haired children, travelling to Alaska and knowing how to deal with
the broken leg after falling from a tree. Generally, she had to be the one I
knew clearly, not an unfamiliar girl.
I couldn’t
understand why didn’t her parents bring her to our home but we had to? Did they
think we were violent to her? Or did they think I would lie on the sofa after a
tiring party at night? Or may they think I will hide in the laboratory and left
kids kiss in private room? I asked Angus and he definitely denied: “No, they
are our neighbor”.
“What, who are
they?” I admitted that in this city, with the clutter architecture and chaotic
traffic as well as handsome guys who were a bit scandalous in the bus station,
they remained distinct and more modern than suburban residents. But now, oh my
god, Angus equated everything.
Angus usually
introduces his friends to me, and he always emphasized a point which partly
drew something strange of me. For example, “Hey guys, this is my mother. She
used to be a comedy soloist.” I was proud of the way he told about me as if he
had been introducing a blockbuster. Yet why didn’t he intentionally introduce
me to that girl? Did he feel ashamed of me? Or was he scared that I would scour
the internet to find her information as I did to his sister’s boyfriends.
In hindsight,
“Like father, like son” might be true. In the 1970s, when I was a high school
student and dated (or tried to have a person to date), I often told my darling
to come to pick me up before 7pm. If he didn’t arrive on time, he couldn’t come
any more, because at that time my father returned home. My father was the
police, so I remembered clearly when he stood in the kitchen in the scary
uniform and with the radio in his arm; he questioned the guy I had just met
about his name, profile and date of birth. After that, he looked up information
of that boy on the computer of his agency while I was grieved about the slim
chance of the second date.
However, now I was
not harsh and impolite like my father back then, right?
