Imaginary Latvian Boy Who Wore Five Earrings

in Wendy Brenner's Large Animals in Everyday Life (1996)

It did seem odd that she didn’t date, but by the time I noticed, I was dating, and much too involved to give my mother’s lack of love life a second thought. And by that time, too, she was busy looking after the greasers. The boys I went out with, of course, weren’t nearly as dramatic as the greasers; even then I chose regular boys who wore sweaters and had confidence in their future, nothing for my mother to worry about. Senior year I went out with a Latvian boy I knew from Art Council who wore five earrings and always had some kind of foreign cigarette going when he came to our front door, but my mother liked him so much she gave him one of her homemade ashtrays for Christmas, a turtle with a sly, flirtatious tilt to its head. “There are worse thing than smoking,” she said, and did not elaborate. And the Latvian boy was, after all, harmless.

Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life (1996), pages 75–76