short story

ALL IS WELL*

by ronaldo duran**

The telephone and the doorbell both ringing at the same time. What a pain! The father had to haul his butt out of his comfortable bed. He had to answer both of them, because he was the only one at home. He got up, dragging his body that was weakened by a flu he'd caught a few days ago. The doorbell was his daughter, home from college. It was 10:45 p.m.

The mother, a teacher in the public school system, invariably turned up thirty minutes later. The telephone – I'll eat my socks if it isn't the boyfriend in a big rush.

Wincing from the jostling he'd gotten yesterday, the father steps aside when he opens the door.

His daughter, like a bullet train, shoots towards the kitchen, where the telephone had just stopped ringing. Right away she rings up Ângelo Guimarães, the boyfriend, to tell him the details about her class, her comings and goings, and a lot of other tiresome drivel.

It was becoming a routine, the jealous father growled to himself. He turned his back. Closing the door, headed back to his room.

He had to go through the kitchen to get there, but he didn't dare attract his daughter's attention for whatever trivial reason. Why bother? She would pretend not to hear him so she wouldn't have to answer. He couldn't compete while the two lovebirds were talking before saying goodnight.

A couple of young lovers. The same old story. Passion that strikes and makes a fool of whoever falls into it and annoys those who know better.

Kelly Renata had had several boyfriends. If she hadn't slept with them it was her mother’s doing. Maria Antônia lived in fear of the risks, especially an unwanted pregnancy. The cost of living in Recife was terrible. Imagine carrying a child, without graduating from college, homeless and unemployed. It was the dread of the middle class.

The pill and condom lent a sense of perversion to the whole thing. The first sexual experience always comes wrapped in romantic dreams, like a fairytale. What could be less romantic than a woman waiting for her partner to put on a condom? And what if his member is stubborn and he has trouble getting it in, and then when he does it either hurts her or goes flaccid? Trauma like that can destroy a couple’s faith.

Kelly, after three months of dating, confronted her mother’s fears, and her own. She had given herself to Angelo. Wanting to feel that eternal empathy between mother and daughter, days later she told her what had happened.

Stunned by her daughter's endless praise of the boyfriend, and a bit hurt by all the attention she was giving to Angelo, the mother muttered,

_ All right, maybe it's like that at first. But later on...

_ With him it's different, Mom. We really love each other.

_ I know…

Her ironic tone sometimes pushed Kelly Renata away from her mother. After all, who likes to have what they believe in denied? She was sure that the love she felt was real, unequalled.
Renata's instincts were right. There are no equal loves. The one happening now is the most important one. You have to believe that it will last for a long time, perhaps forever. To believe otherwise would be foolish. If a person believes that it's no different from the last one, then passion is inconceivable. We fall in love with someone who seems unique, special and rare.
But this doesn't stop a person from falling in love more than once. So then the mother was also right when she said her daughter’s new feelings were a repetition.

Marcos, Diogo, Mauro, Guilherme and the one before, Carlos, considered boyfriends and not just playthings – the fashion of 1990’s youth.

After Guilherme, who was a bit older, Kelly Renata Mitra started going after younger boyfriends. Carlos was two years younger – she was sixteen, and he fourteen.

The young lovers spent all their time in their bedrooms. Sleeping over at his house or hers. Their parents had to keep an eye on them. The young girl fought heroically against the boy's advances, and against her own female instincts, to keep her virginity intact during the sizzling encounters. They'd get together when Carlos’ father, a butcher, didn't need his son to help him.

The exes all had telephones, and the parents were annoyed by this new habit. Angelo, a high school student a year younger than Kelly, didn't have a phone and hardly ever a phone card, so he'd call her collect from the payphone on the corner near his house. The telephone would ring. As soon as she picks it up, the line goes dead. This is the signal for her to call the payphone. Of course the calls were cheaper than calling long distance. And so on they went, talking endless nonsense, sorry....about important things to fire up their relationship via Embratel, the local phone company.

The parents had to be patient.

Besides the phone calls, there was something else that was more disturbing. Kelly Renata and Angelo's embraces, two blocks from home, in front of their neighbors' doors. One of them, a retired man, offended by the scene, couldn't wait to tell Mrs. Mitra. They were touching and kissing each other, sitting on the sidewalk, both dressed in the uniforms from the supermarket where they worked.

Next came the phase of long nights out on the weekend. They'd spend all day Saturday or Sunday with each other, and sometimes both days. They would go to his parent’s house, and rarely remembered to phone her parents.

Mrs. Mitra didn't appreciate these absences at all.

The parents justified their concerns. Depending on when it was, their warnings were more or less tyrannical or democratic. Thanks to the violence that stalks Brazilian cities, the mother had an excuse to keep her daughter at home more.

_ But Mom...., Kelly would say, not willing to follow her advice.

Then destiny gave Mrs. Mitra a little helping hand. An attempted robbery had frightened the girl. Kelly Renata was coming home from the mall with a shopping bag. A couple of mean looking girls followed her up to a few blocks from her house. They went up to her and told her to hand over the bag. She managed to trick them and ran for it.

_ I worked hard to buy that outfit, she said to justify her escape, even though she'd risked her own skin.

_ You crazy girl!, the mother yelled, scared half to death, fearing the worst.

But that wasn't the end of the story. The two bag thieves, when Kelly ran off, went after her. Before she could reach the gate to her building, they tried to grab her. But she pulled away and ran into her friend Marisa's trinket shop. The two girls stood on the sidewalk jeering, waiting for the scaredy cat to come outside.

She asked the shop owner for help. Marisa went out and faced the two robbers down. Finally, Kelly ran home. But the two girls still spread their poison around the neighborhood, swearing that they'd get even if they ever ran into that skinny bones hanging around the street again.
The mother managed to persuade her daughter to come home earlier from her visits to her boyfriend’s house.

A maternal victory? Not really. Then the second phase began: time for Angelo to spend more time at Kelly's house. If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad goes to the mountain. It would have been worse to expose the poor girl to danger.

The bathroom floor is the only place the two lovebirds didn't go to make out. In the kitchen, in the pantry, on the porch hammock, on the living room or den sofas, in her brother’s bedroom, in her own room – no place was safe. There was only one time when Mrs. Mitra caught them on her own double bed, watching TV. As politely as possible, she ran them out of there, and so far it hadn't happened again.

As if it wasn't tiring enough watching these scenes every evening and on the weekends, imagine when the teenage couple quit their jobs at the supermarket after giving some lame excuse.
There was only one thing they'd miss about the Farol da Barra supermarket: it was the place where they'd met. After two months of working at the supermarket as a cashier, Angelo, the recently hired stock boy, caught Kelly Renata's eye. Liking what she saw, since he was her ideal as far as looks were concerned, she went after him.

Beyond trivial concerns such as fidelity and love (the meat and potatoes for a monogamous relationship), each woman demands that her partner have something special. For some, it’s money, wealth. For others, it’s knowledge, being well-spoken. For still others, it’s physical beauty. For Kelly, it was the latter.

There was a reason she'd decided to speed up her conquest. At the time, she'd been with Guilherme, the big fool, and he'd had asked for some time to think things over. And he'd been avoiding her. Well, she's human, she needed to bolster her self-esteem. “If he doesn’t want me, there's someone else who does,” she blurted out.

She sent the young man signals, showing she was interested in getting to know him. Alone at the time, a shy, inexperienced boy, Angelo started hanging around her. Inviting her to join him at the food court in the mall worked. It was the beginning of their relationship.

Months later, alleging incompatibility with their supervisor, they gave their notice. They threw away their right to more than a year of registered work.

_ Such stupidity, said her angry mother.

It wasn't because of the money that would be missed; she didn’t need her children’s money. What they earned, they spent on themselves. It was their apathetic attitude which bothered her, as well as knowing that now they'd have more time on their hands.

Luckily for Kelly Renata, when she finished high school she passed her College Board exams to study chemistry, the subject her mother taught.

But the couple got closer and closer. Just enough love and spite to make for a lasting relationship. Love reinforced by the fact that together they had discovered sex for the first time. Spite is more difficult to explain. It translates into resistance to the mother’s evil eye, the father’s, the brother’s, and anyone who says that it was no more than a flash in the pan that would end any day.

One day, the mother, fed up with the endless hugs and kisses going on all afternoon, blew her top.

_ You don’t have time to do the dishes…you'd think your arm would fall off. But you have plenty of time to hang around groping each other.

Another day, right in the middle of lunch, hurt by her daughter’s harsh words, she said,
_ I want to see how far this relationship goes.

_ We’re going to get married, her daughter retorted.

_ I’ve heard that before, with Guilherme, with Carlos…

_ You’re unbearable today...

They lost their appetites. Lunch was over. In a huff, the girl ran to her boyfriend’s house.
The endless telephone conversations continued.

Back in his bed the father philosophizes to the walls.

_ The boyfriend is a intruder. With or without our consent, he takes away the daughter we spent years bringing up. Sometimes we just get the leftovers, but sometimes things actually work out, and a family comes out of it. It’s the game of life.

* Portuguese original "Tudo Bem", translated by Amercian Journalist Amy Duncan.

** Novelist, he writes chronicles to Brazilian newspapers every week. http://www.ronaldoduran.com/