We dress up in our best trailer park wear-cutoff denim skirts, tank tops, patent leather heels.
On Wednesdays, they host White Trash Karaoke night. Three or four times a week, I go out with my best friend Lacey to The Uphill. By the end of the dinner, I'm so tense and achy that I wonder how I will muster the strength for the next week's ordeal. While Glenn is across the table awkwardly trying to be my secret lover, Victor is next to me, groping my breast with his arm, sneaking his hand between my thighs, unable to take the hint that if my thighs are clenched shut, they are denying him entry. My mother's not a good cook but she thinks she is so she tries to experiment and thinks she's doing us a favor by introducing us to dishes like Carol's Hot Gazpacho or Beef Tongue Noodle Soup and we all have to sit there, choking down this horrible food because my mother is fragile and needs the reassurance that she is nurturing her adult children well.ģ. Then he'll cough and look up at the ceiling fan, but five minutes later, he'll forget himself again and start the whole thing over again.Ģ. He plays footsie with me beneath my mother's dining room table and stares openly at my rack until my sister pinches him between his ribs. Glenn is about as subtle as a nuclear holocaust. These dinners are monstrous affairs because:ġ. My mother has bad taste in men yet always wonders where I get it from. Sometimes, her loser boyfriend, Michael, joins us.
Afterwards, he follows me around and gets clingy which just makes the workday even longer.Įvery Thursday, my mother, Glenn, my sister, Victor, and I meet for dinner at my mother's house. Sometimes, when he's in his office, sitting behind his big mahogany desk, eating the tuna sandwich my sister has prepared for him, I'll go in there, and take off my scrubs, and tell him to go brush his teeth so I don't have to smell the tuna stink on his breath while we're having sex. I hate listening to other people talk and despite the fact that I am scraping away at their teeth and suctioning saliva and otherwise working in the oral cavity, the patients yap awkwardly, telling me all the sad little things about their lives that they should keep to themselves.Ģ. No matter how tired I am, I am awake at six in the morning, staring at the clock, trying to come up with an excuse to avoid going to work. When I wake up screaming, Victor will groan, cover his head with a pillow and tell me to shut the fuck up. At night, I dream of being trapped in a room of elderly men with halitosis and poor gum health. All day long I have to look and feel inside people's mouths. I work as a dental hygienist, for my sister's husband Glenn. My mother is always telling me I can do better, and now, when I look at my boyfriend I think of all the men I could be sleeping with if I weren't stuck with him and then I think of all the energy it would take to leave Victor and I don't do anything. They call in the middle of the night when I'm trying to sleep and they're trying to get a buzz. Victor mostly deals in ditch weed so his customers are always calling the house angry because his shit doesn't get them high. He's actually paying his petty creditors with a worthless currency, so he ends up owing them even more and then he asks me to lend him a little something until payday and then he forgets he asked to borrow the money but I remember and I get angry.Ģ. They reheat food and the local outlet is always running out of staples like milk or lettuce even though they're at the North end of a Wal-mart parking lot. Applebee's is nothing more than a microwave with a roof. Sometimes, when he owes people money, he'll pay them with stolen Applebee's gift certificates. There is an order to where things do or do not overlap. : a mathematical illustration that shows all of the possible mathematical or logical relationships between things.