Folie a Deux, Episode 05

"Yeah, that was weird," Bob tells us. "Emily had always been the stickler on the kids' curfews, and out of the blue she tells me she's relaxed it for Olivia. No discussion, no explanation. That was completely out of character for her."

"The demands kept on coming," Mike says. "I wasn't making much at my summer job but I was spending basically nothing to save everything for college expenses. Olivia started taking more and more. At first it was a twenty here, a ten there, but within a couple weeks she was demanding a hundred at a pop."

"What was your reaction?" the interviewer asks.

Mike shrugs. "Olivia has me by the balls. I mean, she was doing us a huge favor by not saying anything, so I did owe her. And if she had just said, 'Hey can we work out some compensation here?' I think I'd have been -- OK, not fine with it, but it would have grated a lot less than just demanding money. She barely even spoke to me other than that. It was just 'Give me money.'" He pauses significantly, then adds, "Well, until that one time."

"The next time I caught them was the time I lost my shit for real," Olivia tells us. "It was an evening in the middle of the week. I was in the dining room working on my lacrosse gear and dad was in the living room watching TV. Mom and Mike weren't around, so I figured they'd sneaked off upstairs to be together."

"Did that bother you?" the interviewer asks.

"Yeah, of course it did. They were doing it inside the house, with dad right there. All he needed to do was open one wrong door and the whole family explodes and there's scandal and I can't show my face at school. They were being reckless and irresponsible and stupid, and it it was pissing me the fuck off. I remember I kept shooting dirty glances at the ceiling. Anyway, I ran out of tape so I went down to the basement storage room for more. But mom and Mike weren't upstairs after all. I opened the door of the storage room to see my mother taking it from behind from my brother with her panties stuffed in her mouth."

We see Emily, who is blushing furiously and looking acutely uncomfortable. "That...did happen, yes."

"Why were your panties in your mouth?" the interviewer asks.

Emily looks so embarrassed that she might die. "They were a gag of sorts, to keep me from making my usual noises. We used them whenever we might be overheard. And... my panties were always wet that summer, either from thinking of Mike or from our...fluids. I love both flavors, and being able to taste either of them while making love...enhanced the experience."

Back to Olivia. "I lost it. I lost my mind. At that moment I hated them both. I was just so sick of it, so sick of them constantly going at each other, so sick of it being where they could be discovered, and soooooo sick of it being me that discovered it."

The interviewer asks, "Were you reconsidering telling your father?"

"No! The whole point of my intervention with mom was that I didn't want dad to find out, but they were acting like they were determined that he catch them in the middle of it. They were acting like horny teenagers -- OK, Mike was a horny teenager, but mom was older. She was supposed to be the wise one who could control herself. I had accepted that they couldn't stop doing it, but damn it, they didn't have to do it constantly. Restraint was possible and they needed to fucking exercise some of it or we would all be in the shit."

"Olivia went apeshit," Mike said. "I had never seen her that angry, and believe me, I've seen her angry plenty. She started going off on us about how we were idiots. Which...I mean, that's fair, we were idiots for each other. Love makes you stupid. And then I said something smartassy and she hauled off and belted me right in the face."

"Yeah, I was out of control," Olivia admits. "I don't even remember what Mike said, but it was one thing too many. Anything might have been one thing too many, honestly. I hit him with a right cross. Pow. Left side of the mouth."

Emily again, and it is obvious that this is a painful memory from the hunched position of her body. "Seeing that, witnessing the violence...was like being doused in icy cold water. We had raised our children not to use violence at all. Even when they were little, there was seldom a physical altercation between them. Olivia was...well, lacrosse can be a violent sport and she never shied away from physical contact, but she wasn't a fighter. I had never even heard of her punching anyone. But she lashed out and struck Mike..."

Mike looks grim. "I'm not a guy who gets hit and takes it, but I took that one. What else could I do?"

Olivia is frowning. "It wasn't my finest hour. I lost control and used violence against someone I love. I'm ashamed of it. I was ashamed of it then, but the shame just made me angrier."

"Why do you think you did it?" the interviewer asks.

"Well it wasn't a planned thing. My fist was moving before I knew it. I was just mad as hell and I felt like I was out of options. Talking to mom about it was maybe the hardest thing I had ever had to do in my life. It was so horrible that I stole liquor to spend the rest of the day drunk. I needed that talk to work and it didn't. I was a high school kid. I was a high school kid! I wasn't equipped for that shit. I...I was trying to save the family. I was trying to make them see what they were doing and they just wouldn't. I lost my temper and I did something I regret to this day." She paused, shakes her head, and adds, "But it worked. I finally had their attention."

"What followed," Emily tells us, "was the sternest, angriest lecture I have ever gotten, before or since."

"Man, she was hot," Mike says ruefully. "She called us every name in the book. She told us how stupid and selfish we were being, and then she told us again using different words, then again, then again, and she just kept telling us. And then she told us that either we learned to control ourselves or she was going straight up the stairs and telling dad everything."

"Of course I was abashed," Emily tells us. "My high school-aged daughter was treating me as though I were a spoiled child, but the painful thing was that she was wholly justified in so doing. Mike and I had been conducting ourselves in a reckless and foolish manner and we had to stop."

"Stop?" the interviewer asks.

"We had to exercise greater discretion," Emily corrects. "There was no stopping. Not then."

"I don't know how long I went on, shouting without shouting," Olivia remembers. "I kept raising my voice and then remembering that dad was one floor up and making myself be quieter. I tore them a variety of new ones. I only stopped because I was losing my voice and I ran out of words to use at them. Besides, they had both shut up and were just taking it. You can't stay enraged when someone does that, it gets to be like...kicking a puppy or something. Not that I've ever kicked a puppy, that's not what I mean. It's just when you expend your rage on someone that's just cowering and taking it, you end up feeling sick to your stomach and you just have to quit. I went up to my bedroom."

Mike is looking acutely uncomfortable. "You know how humiliating it is when your bratty little sister points out what a moron you are? Like, what a moron you have been and are continuing to be? And she's totally justified? And all you can do is nod and mumble and realize how wrong you are because you have no defense and no explanation? Fuck man, that sucked." He pauses, then adds, "Real boner-killer, too."

Emily looks distraught. "How could I gainsay anything my daughter had said? I felt so very low. She had used some very vulgar and offensive language to Mike and me, language that I had certainly never raised her to use. She had punched her brother in the face. And we had deserved it. I had deserved that punch more than Mike did. I couldn't even look at my son."

"I made sure mom was alright," Mike says. "Well, neither of us were alright after that, but she fussed about me getting hit and I made sure she knew I was fine. I told her I loved her. Then I told her that Olivia was right and that we absolutely, positively could not do anything ever again when there was a chance we could be seen or heard by anyone who knew us or might figure out she was my mom. We had to be nothing but careful from there on out."

"He was right," Emily concedes. "We had been foolish and we had been far luckier than we deserved. I agreed immediately, and it was an agreement we kept. We were exceedingly careful from then on, which meant we went from averaging multiple encounters per day to averaging perhaps one every several days. For the next several weeks we were back to stopping in time to make certain we could clean up all the evidence before anyone else got home. We went from reckless to paranoid. Which makes what happened shortly thereafter rather ironic."

The screen goes dark again, and this time we see the legend:

August 28

Bob appears. "It was a Friday evening. I had gone out to have a couple of beers with friends after work and got home about an hour and a half later than I normally do. Olivia was gone, out with friends on her bizarrely extended curfew. Mike was out with his friends. When I got home, Emily was sitting in the living room reading on her Kindle. It seemed like any other Friday evening."

"Mike and I had been together that afternoon, in his bedroom," Emily tells us. "We knew Bob was going to be out later than normal but we still took no chances. We finished almost an hour before he got home. We each showered separately. I put the soiled clothes in the washer, and they were drying when my husband returned."

"I remember we chatted about how our days went," Bob says. "It was normal. Nice."

"I told Bob I needed a few things from the basement," Emily says, "and I was about to go get them when he volunteered to do it."

"Down the basement I went. I was passing by the laundry room when I saw them," Bob tells us. "Red lace on the floor by the washer, some of the sexy new panties Emily had been wearing the past couple months.She'd dropped them when she was doing laundry, I guess, so I went to put them in the hamper. My, ah, my hand came away sticky. The crotch was saturated." He looks grim. "I had seen enough cum-filled panties to know one more pair. I knew the semen in question wasn't mine." His mouth becomes a grim line. "And I knew my wife was having an affair."

The screen goes dark.

Credits roll.