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THE MATCHMAKING MOM
July 7th, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

The Matchmaking Mom

Story fragment by Clark Humphrey

7/7/99

Charisse was, if anything, personable and persistent. She would do anything for her son. Well, maybe not everything–one thing she never did was consider whether her son’s brooding, carefully-constructed “loner” stance was a rebellion against her own gregariousness.So when she decided to break her son out of his self-imposed social isolation, it would be with her own well-honed social skills.

Teaching her skills to him proved ineffective this time, as it always had. She took him to assorted wholesome family-type gathering spots, paraded him before families with teenage girls, and did everything she could to make him open up, shed his inhibitions, and become more comfortable among new acquaintances.

None of it worked.

He was the only person on whom her instant-friendship techniques never worked. He’d spent his entire life, at least since toilet training, making sure they never worked on him.

Video-game parlors, barbecues, softball games, family reunions, church potlucks, monster-truck shows, the town’s annual carnival. Nothing Charisse dragged her son to ever excited him enough to widen his eyes or perk up his spirit or persuade him to say or do anything more than he absolutely had to.

Her next scheme was, if anything, ingenious. She took him to the hippie country fair, held every summer at a private campsite in the woods just out of Salem. She promised him the event would be full of tolerant, laid-back people who’d never put him down for being intelligent but quiet. Nobody there, she tried to assure him, would demand he be anything but the beautiful, smart, centered young man he was.

They went. She had a good time, except for her constant worries about how he was having a dull time.

But her own personability paid off when the asked a group of teens heading to the camp site’s swimming hole to ask him to come along with them. She knew it was they who had to ask him. They did ask him. They refused to accept no for an answer. Some of the youths literally grabbed his arms and pulled him away toward the secluded river bend, away from the craft booths and the drum circle where he could at least be anonymous among a crowd.

Charisse smiled as her son disappeared down the trail with the other teens. Charisse knew this would be the first time her son would be naked in front of girls; and she was also pretty sure it would be the first time her son would see naked girls in person.

She also knew, having staked out the site earlier that day, that there was a brush-obscured spying spot on the other side of the river. She went there to monitor what, she was certain, would be his at-last breakthrough out of his personal prison.

She saw and heard the girls and boys laughing, splashing, telling dumb body-part jokes, mildly roughhousing, making just-a-joke passes at one another, sunning on the rocks, drinking beer and smoking pot. Charisse was glad to see her son politely decline to share in the beer and the pot. She was disappointed to see her son politely decline everything else. He didn’t laugh at the other teens’ jokes and, when asked, tersely said he had no jokes of his own to tell. After repeated, increasingly insistent pleadings from the other teens, he eventually did undress, wade into the water, splash some of the water over his head, and return to the shore.

Even from a hiding spot across the river, Charisse could tell in her son’s facial expression and his posture that this was just another instance of her son doing as little as needed whenever she or others would try to force him to have fun.

But Charisse, as any good social butterfly would do, perservered. She employed the next phase of her scheme, involving a digital still camera she pulled from its discreet spot at the bottom of her canvas-mesh bag. Within a week, she’d made one close-up shot of her son on a color inkjet printer.

The week after that, she was at one of her regular round of coffee-klatch visits at the home of a neighbor; a neighbor who happened to have a teenage daughter. As she’d done once or twice before, Charisse told the neighbor mom what a cute couple the neighbor mom’s daughter and Charisse’s son would make. As had happened once or twice before, the neighbor mom expressed discouragement, accurately noting that Charisse’s son had never displayed any particular interest in persuing even the most aloof of social ties with the neighbor mom’s daughter.

This was Charisse’s cue for secret-weapon time. She took a manila envelope from her canvas-mesh bag, then opened the envelope to pull out the color inkjet print of her surreptitiously-photographed son. Before the neighbor mom could turn her head away in feigned shock or embarrassment, Charisse perkily explained how experts are now in agreement that a teenage girl’s early sexual experiences form such an important role in developing her adult personality. A rough or abusive introduction to sex, Charisse expounded, could scar a girl for life or at least force her into years of therapy. Best to create a situation where the girl could feel in charge, where she would do the seducing of a nonthreatening, beautiful boy. Note, Charisse said, the air of stillness in her son’s face, so deep and potentially servicable. Note, she said, the boy’s physique, slight yet muscular enough in the arms and thighs. And, yes, Charisse asked the neighbor mom to examine Charisse’s son’s penis, so pretty and so delicate-looking in the photo yet of sufficient length and girth as to undoubtedly ensure any lucky girl a pleasantly memorable rite into womanhood.

And, Charisse added in an aside, her son had great work-study habits and was a sure thing for a great scholarship offer.


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