Why Moms Are Weird by Pamela Ribon

Author:Pamela Ribon [Ribon, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416510390
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Not Too Good.

The drive home is quiet. I keep thinking of words I’d like to say, but swallowing them. Nothing will change or fix anything. I opt for a sigh.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mom asks. She’s in the passenger seat. I’m sitting diagonally behind her. Beside me, I can feel my sister tense up. Gregory glances at me briefly in the rearview mirror, then trains his eyes back on the road.

“Nothing,” I say, letting the end of the word stress that, in fact, it’s everything.

“If you have something to say, just say it.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

The road hums under us, and the quiet murmur of talk radio keeps the car from utter silence.

“That man didn’t hear us talking,” Mom says.

“Right. That’s why he served us pink chicken he hoped would kill us and then had someone else take over.”

“We didn’t say anything wrong.”

Gregory looks at me again in the mirror. “I’m sorry, Benny,” he says. “I honestly didn’t know they don’t want you calling them Orientals anymore. It’s not like they sent out a memo.”

Mom laughs.

Gregory enjoys cracking my mom up, so he continues. “Is there a book you get in college or something, or a web page with alerts that I can read, so I can follow one politically correct phrase to the next?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, trying to control my voice, making it sound even and levelheaded.

“Because I don’t like offending people,” he says. “I stopped saying ‘coloreds’ when we were supposed to, too.”

Coloreds? What fucking year is this?

“Let’s stop talking about this,” I say.

Mom cranes herself around in her seat, and I know I’m about to be in serious trouble. Mom only turns herself around when she’s had enough. “Well, thank you for deciding our conversation is over,” she says. “And I suppose you’ve decided we’ve been sufficiently chastised as well.”

“I’m not—”

Mom holds up a hand, closing her eyes. She’s in full speechifying mode now. “It’s one thing to inform us when we’re using terms from our generation that your generation has deemed unacceptable. That’s fine. That’s important. But for you to sit there and judge us when we’ve done nothing wrong—”

“He said ‘Chink’!”

“He was making a point. ”

“That he wasn’t nearly as racist as he could have been?”

“You were looking for a fight, and you found it. You waited and pounced, and then made a big production out of a simple question.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I sound like such a baby.

“You wanted to make us feel stupid.”

“I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” Gregory says.

“I’m not looking for an apology,” I reply, to which Gregory shrugs, I guess having exhausted all his options.

Mom is staring out her passenger window like she’s talking to someone in the next lane. “Miss Los Angeles. Knows how to be so perfect.”

Anything I say now will just be taken the wrong way.

Mom says, “Here in the real world we say what we mean. So forgive me for being blunt, but you’ve been behaving like a real snob ever since you got here.

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