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Act Two
. . .
The only one who peed in front of a live audience was Samantha Rollins-Benson, and she was safely Pampered at the time. Amazingly, Jesse did not trip over her Rapunzel on steroids headpiece, and Tilly didn't get trampled by a herd of hoofing Wednesdays twice her size. Noah did accidentally punt the mannequin hand across the stage, but, conducting himself like a true professional and Broadway star in the making, he incorporated it into his dance, got a big laugh, and became the rockstar of MMH Hall Auditorium, at least for the rest of the routine.
Olivia managed not to snip off any fingers with the wire cutters she used to behead at least a full dozen roses—she'd been going to town on those fake bushes, from what Amanda had seen in her peripheral vision as she cavorted with a cigar in one hand and her baby in the other—and Amanda herself had chewed the scenery just enough to get a few extra seconds of hearty applause during curtain call. Or maybe that was for Baby Fester.
In any case, they were a hit and Amanda felt like some celebratory ice cream was in order. She hadn't reckoned on being gawked at while cramming a baseball-sized scoop of rocky road into her mouth, though. They were kind of noticeable, she supposed, seated around the little parlor table, all of them still in full costume and makeup. But when people started asking to take pictures (not counting the ones who went ahead and did it without permission), she started to lose her patience.
"What are they, paparazzi?" she muttered to Olivia when another grinning couple, this one probably in a similar age bracket to Grandmama Addams, strolled away looking at the woman's phone.
"We are sitting here with a miniature Wookie and a baby who looks like a mushroom dressed in holy vestments," Olivia replied behind her neatly licked vanilla scoop. She rolled it discreetly against her tongue every once in a while, smoothing the melted outer layer. "People are bound to be curious."
Amanda was already down to the waffle cone and she chipped off a piece with her fingers, examining it thoroughly before it went between her lips. "Doesn't bother you? All the rubbernecking?" She munched idly on the cone, but used the pause in conversation to study her wife as she had the waffle pattern. Subtlety was an art and although she didn't come by it naturally, she had picked up some of the shading techniques here and there from Olivia, the real pro.
Make that the master. Olivia cocked a suspicious look at her, obviously aware she was being interrogated. She frowned for a moment, gaze following a couple of passersby over the little hill of vanilla poised in front of her face. Not exactly hiding, and it was probably just an unconscious response to the line of questioning, but her eyes fell back to Amanda for a meaningful glance when the pair moved on. "Not much. We're wearing costumes. I doubt anyone could recognize us. It's kind of like being undercover."
Nevertheless, she let the long wig hang over her shoulders, obscuring part of her face, and took no more than two kittenish licks of her ice cream before overturning it into the trash. She was the first one up from the table when Amanda asked who was ready to head home.
Way to go, Gomez, Amanda thought to herself, balling up two fistfuls of those kiddie-size napkins, covered in colorful smears of every flavor (and some greasepaint), and pitching them in after Olivia's half-eaten cone. You incomparable jackass.
The children seemed to concur:
"I danced pretty hard," said Noah, serious as could be and patting the puffed out Pugsley stripes at his middle. "I think I could fit a few more bites in here. I saw chocolate chip cookies at the counter . . . "
"Winzay wants to dance again," said Tilly, who had yet to conquer certain difficult pronunciations, but apparently knew all about speaking in the third person.
"Heinz vee hi-hi trilobite yik yik!" said Cousin Itt, her yellow sneakers squeaking in time on the parlor floor.
With a bit of effort, they gathered their eclectic brood of goblins and beasties—promises of revisiting the sweets shop again soon and enrollment in pre-K dance classes were made—and piled them into the backseat of Amanda's Grand Cherokee. They were less than two blocks from the apartment when Jesse got curious (a common occurrence) and spoke as herself for the first time that evening. "Is Cousin Itt a boy?" she asked, the strands of her front-facing wig parted like curtains, revealing a window of cute, puckish face.
"Umm, yeah, I think so?" Amanda glanced at Olivia for confirmation, but received an exaggerated shrug and bewildered look in return. The captain had been fairly quiet on the ride home, she thought, although so had the kids as they mellowed out from the rush of performing and too much sugar. They were probably all going to crash the minute they got inside. Tomorrow morning, sporting slept-in makeup and wigs, they really would resemble death warmed over. The Addamses would be proud. "Yeah, he's a boy."
"How do you know? Does he have boy parts under his hair or something?"
"I don't know, Jess, I never looked."
"Mama," the little girl groaned.
"Well, he wears that hat. And the glasses. I just figured him as male."
"But girls can wear hats and glasses, too."
Amanda lifted her hands from the steering wheel in a brief, helpless gesture. The smirk on Olivia's face inched toward a full-blown smile. She always did get a kick out of hearing Miss Jesse give Amanda a run for her money. "They prolly would've given him a bow or something if he was a girl. That's usually how they make those distinctions on TV and in movies."
"Maybe he's nonbinary," Noah offered. "I wonder if his pronouns are they/them? Like that kid Bailey in my class. Some of the mean guys still call them she, but they don't act like a she. They act like a they."
"Are they married? Not the kid at your school. Cousin Itt, I mean." Jesse sounded deeply intrigued by the prospect of her character being not only nonbinary but betrothed. When her brother couldn't provide a satisfactory answer, she turned back to her mothers. "Is Cousin Itt married?"
"I think he— uh, they marry some lady in one of the movies. I don't know about in the old series." Amanda tipped her head in thought. What gender had Itt been, anyway? She genuinely couldn't remember if it had ever been specified. Was he even human, to have an assigned gender or a sex of any kind? And if not, that begged the question: why did a human marry him? What exactly were those Addamses getting up to in their big old spooky mansion?
By the time Amanda angled into a space inside the parking garage, Jesse had also inquired about Itt's status within the LGBTQ community ("If Itt's nonbinary and married to a girl, does that mean they're gay or straight? Is Itt like you and Mommy? Bi . . . bike-sectuals?"), whether or not Pride existed in the Addamsverse, and if she could wear her Itt costume to real-life Pride next June. "I wanna be the same as Cousin Itt," she explained as they boarded the elevator. "Then I don't have to decide what to wear every day, and I can marry whoever I want, and no one will care. I might marry a girl too."
"Did our kid just come out?" Amanda asked when she and Olivia had finally gotten each of the older children off to bed, teeth brushed, faces more or less washed, and pajamas mostly on. (Noah was sleeping in his black and white striped shirt, and Jesse insisted on taking the bowler to bed like a stuffed animal.) Olivia was still transforming Uncle Fester back into Baby Samantha, sponging off what was left of the zombie makeup—much of it was caked into Sammie's knuckles, from rubbing—with sensitive skin wipes.
The view was rather absurd: Captain Olivia Benson in full Morticia Addams regalia, cleaning off their gray baby, who looked up from the changing table at her in wide-eyed wonder. Make that absurdly adorable. Amanda patted the pinstripe jacket of her Gomez getup, searching for her phone, then thought better of it. The sweet moment would probably be over before she could snap a picture, and hadn't she been the one to bitch about nosy people taking photos without permission not two hours earlier? This was one she'd just have to capture in her mind's eye.
"With that particular kid, anything's possible," said Olivia, smoothing Sammie's cheeks dry with a pink terry washcloth. So, so gently. She lifted the baby with the same great care, daubing her face again, this time with kisses. "Although, she did just tell me the other day that she wished Frannie and Gigi could make puppies together and be mommies like us. I think she's in her 'boys are gross and useless' phase."
"Some of us never grow out of that one," Amanda noted, earning the faintest flash of a smirk from Olivia. She had coaxed Sammie's head, no longer encased in the knitted "bald cap," onto her shoulder, a hand at the back, lips pressed to the front. Her deep red lipstick had worn off at the ice cream parlor, otherwise Sammie would need another wipe down. Poor kid was already suffering from a bad case of hat hair, the dark mop flattened in some spots, full of static in others. She looked like she had stuck her finger in a light socket. Ironic, given Fester's, err, electrical talents.
Sidling over to admire her two pretty girls up close, Amanda dropped kisses into her daughter's mussed hair and brushed the strands of the Morticia wig behind Olivia's shoulder. At first the swaying was just a means of rocking Sammie to sleep—her head rested heavily on the hammock of black hair, tugging the wig slightly askew—but when Olivia fell into step, Amanda's arms around her and their dozing baby girl, it became a slow, tuneless dance. Very Junior prom. Minus the acne, braces, and general awkwardness.
"Sorry I sprung that on you at the ice cream place," Amanda said just above a whisper. She probably should have let it go altogether, but it still bothered her that Olivia seemed less talkative tonight. She hated causing her wife discomfort in any form, especially when things had been going so well this past while. With the kids back in school and a regular routine taking shape, they were finally getting back to normal. They were discovering that fun and laughter were still possible. If Amanda would just learn to keep her trap shut, that is.
"Hm?" The fake eyelashes that augmented Olivia's already lovely set gave her a drowsy, come-hither look, like an on-screen siren from the thirties or forties. Or like Morticia Addams, Amanda supposed.
"When I's getting all . . . weird about people staring. Taking pictures 'n such." Amanda pulled a face, tongue lolling from the corner of her mouth. "Shoulda kept it to myself instead of putting it on you."
Olivia's gaze lingered somewhere in the vicinity of Amanda's nose, her lowered eyes giving the impression they were closed beneath the lashes. "You're not weird. Although, it is really hard to take you seriously with that thing on your lip."
Dammit. Amanda had completely forgotten about the faux 'stache. She felt for it with her fingers, picked an end free with her thumbnail, and ripped the whole thing off like a strip of Scotch tape. "Ow," she said, though it didn't hurt. The adhesive was more irritating than sticky, and she twitched her nose and lips to loosen the tight sensation there. She probably resembled her daughter's namesake, Samantha from Bewitched. "Better?"
"Better." Olivia folded her lips together, concealing a small smile, but she sounded sincere. "And you didn't put anything on me. I noticed the looky-loos, too. I guess it just didn't bother me much this time. Like I said, the costumes helped." She stroked the sheaf of long hair that had slipped over her shoulder again, then gave it a backward toss in a dead-on imitation of 1970s televised Cher.
It was a diversion tactic, that much Amanda knew, but she decided to let it slide for now. Olivia could seldom hide her true feelings, at least not for any significant length of time, and she did seem okay. If any moroseness lingered after the Morticia palette came off, then Amanda would allow herself to fret and fuss. At the moment, she wanted to revel in the splendid normality of her abnormally pale wife and daughter.
She also wanted to dance. Scooping Olivia's left hand up with hers and pressing closer at the hips, offering more support to the bundle snoozing at Olivia's chest—a cute little hump of baby butt stuck out over the arm curved under it—Amanda leaned farther into the swaying, urging Olivia to do the same. To her immense delight, she met no resistance, just a subtle rocking that effortlessly followed her lead. Assuring her that whatever life threw at them, they were still moving together as one.
"Maybe we should dress like this every time we go out," she teased lightly. The Gomez mustache was still stuck to her hand and she wagged it comically, as if the dark stripe was a hairy bug she couldn't shake off. When that got a snicker and a roll of the eyes from Olivia, she punched up the antics, slashing the hand under her nose so the mustache was a mustache again, over one eye like an extremely long eyebrow, near her hairline like extremely short bangs, and arching from her open mouth like a horked up hairball.
Oh yeah, dashing as all get-out.
"Don't say that in front of Jesse. We'd have a walking dust mop instead of a child." Olivia exhaled a dramatic sigh, directing the air away from Sammie and disrupting the lock of hair that fell into her own face. "Speaking of which." Carefully, and with Amanda's assistance, she peeled the wig back from her head and lofted it onto the foot of their bed. Her real hair was plastered to her skull under a flesh-toned nylon cap, a complicated network of crisscrossed bobby pins holding it in place. She sighed again with relief.
"Well, now I know what Morticia and Fester's love child would really look like." Amanda stifled a giggle at Olivia's playful glare and helped her roll back the nylon cap and pluck out some of the pins.
They accomplished most of it without missing a beat of their slow dance—it was like that time they overslept and got the kids dressed on the drive to school, taking turns navigating and half-straddling the backseat to aid whichever child they could reach (Noah ended up in Jesse's jacket, Jesse in Tilly's socks, and Tilly's macaroni art project was in the wind)—and with nowhere they had to be tomorrow morning, their baby girl snuggled safely between them, they danced the night away. Or at least the next fifteen minutes of it.
Amanda had just slid under the covers and was about to switch off the light when she spotted Olivia's quirked eyebrow aimed at her from the other side of the bed. Though most of the dark definer was scrubbed off, it hadn't lost its sass, that brow. You could take the girl out of the Tish, but not the Tish out of the girl. "What?" she asked, feeling her face for a stray piece of mustache or some other unsightly remnant of Gomez the cleansing towelettes had missed.
"I'm only going to say this once, then we're going to forget it ever happened." Olivia took a deep breath and gazed up at the ceiling as if she were gathering her strength. "I'm serious. You tell anyone, I'll deny it."
Other than Daphne, there was nobody else for Amanda to tell about her love life, but she thought better of saying that out loud. The really juicy stuff belonged to her and Olivia alone, anyway. And besides, she knew where this was going. She locked her lips together with an imaginary key and chucked it aside.
Olivia cleared her throat, tossed her hair, and leaned in to purr, "Ma chérie," into Amanda's ear. Her French accent was so magnifique, Amanda didn't have to fake the little thrill that went up her spine. There it went again as Olivia drew back, curling a lock of blonde hair behind the ear she'd been so close to. "Je t'aime," she murmured. "Je t'aime, ma belle Amanda."
Near melting, Amanda almost forgot her line. It came to her midway up Olivia's arm, which she was peppering with lots of rapid-fire, smoochy kisses. "Cara mia." Her knowledge of the dialect exhausted, she added the only other Italian-sounding catchphrase she knew, perfectly timed with the ascent to her beloved's breast: "That's a spicy meatball!"
That night, and at any mention of The Addams Family thereafter, their language of love was laughter.
. . .
Fin