“A locker room is a lawless space,” they say on the news.
Mom and I are on our separate corners of the big brown couch—
the one that Eric brought three years ago when he moved
in.
It is the kind of leather that
sticks to your thighs
even in the cold of December,
and makes you wonder if it is actually
leather
at all.
It is a lot like Eric.
Uncomfortable and
never
quite
fitting in
to this house
with its yellow flowered curtains and
overstuffed armchairs.
It is a little like me
too
right now
not quite sure how I fit in
here
with them.
Or anywhere
with anyone.
While we watch, Eric
plays some card game on his
phone
at the kitchen counter,
and I stitch a dress into a T-shirt, gathering and snipping thread and
reimagining who I might be
in it. The dress was too short, the kind of thing I wore
before,
but I miss the lace sleeves and the pale stripes and
how soft it was on my skin.
“Always thinking you’re some
fashion designer,” Eric
mumbles from the other room
like always. “Some famous
insta-whatever
girl.”
I look for Mom to correct him and tell him to
shut up,
or at least tell him that the dream isn’t
as ridiculous
as his frowning mouth
and rolling eyes
seem to suggest.
But.
Mom
is just
watching the news.
“Walter Bruce wasn’t just talking in a locker room,” the lawyer with the short, neat haircut
says.
“Walter Bruce was on his set
and in his hotel rooms
and in their trailers
and in dark corners
at parties. And he wasn’t just
talking.
He was
assaulting—”
“We’re talking today about the comments
captured on tape,
the evidence we have,
the things he said that we have proof of. In the locker room,” the reporter says.
She is blonde;
her mouth is tight.
Mom keeps calling her
a bitch,
which doesn’t seem very helpful
at all.
And Mom’s never called anyone
a bitch
before.
(this isn’t quite exactly true
because
once she called me
a bitch,
but we are both trying to forget
that day, we are both trying to
forget a lot of
days)
“Hey, isn’t that the guy you did the movie with
once?” Eric says,
wandering in from his spot in the kitchen,
sitting between us.
His legs slide apart,
his elbows find the tops
of the cushions.
I hate them there
and everywhere.
He shifts
and it’s an earthquake
and it makes my needle slip and poke my thumb.
I gasp,
but no one hears.
I have been sewing my whole life—
outfits for dolls and stuffed rhinos and
now outfits for me.
And someday
someday
outfits for other people who can’t decide
if they want to stand out or blend in—
other people who like loud patterns all mixed together in ways that could seem wrong
but that I make right. Other people who
want their dresses to be the main event
and not
ever
what’s underneath.
I have been sewing my whole life, but still
sometimes
I poke myself with the needle or make the wrong stitch in the wrong place
and Eric always
notices, like he is adding up all the reasons I won’t ever be
special.
“That’s him, that’s the guy,” Eric says again and Mom
shakes her head.
Not as an answer
I don’t think
more just a general
no
to it all.
She was an actress
once
but not now
and she doesn’t like to talk about it, which he should
certainly
know. There is a long list of things
Mom doesn’t talk about.
“And you believe a locker room is a lawless space,” the lawyer on TV repeats,
like she wants the anchorwoman
to hear herself.
“So the things he said there, the way he spoke about
those young girls,
isn’t anything to—”
“It’s not illegal to call someone
hot,” the anchorwoman says with this
smirk. “Some of us
even
like it.”
My needle finds my thumb again.
I want to turn the TV
off.
I don’t want to hear those words
in this living room
with these people next to me. I decide to add a turtleneck to the dress
and another inch to the hem.
Mom’s thighs unstick from the couch
loudly,
then re-stick.
They unstick again
louder.
“Oh my god, I hate that sound,” I say
to no one,
really.
“Women have come forward,” the lawyer says. “I am in conversation with many
women who have come forward.”
“Anonymous women,” the anchorwoman says. Like anonymous means
fantastical;
like it means
paper-doll women made of cardboard.
She is not much of an anchorwoman,
really.
I don’t think journalists can look so
smug
or draw so much attention to their
hotness. She is always wearing shirts that
hug
and
dip
and I know a lot about shirts that
hug
and
dip
and how careful
you have to be
about what people will
think.
(right now my shirt is
l o o s e
but light
which is also sort of
bad
because when your body is like
mine
and Mom’s
and that reporter’s
you are really mostly always a little bit
bad)
“It is what it is,” the reporter says. “We can’t police
lawless spaces.”
The couch squeaks and
squitches against my thighs
when I try to get up from it,
like Mom’s did,
the sound I hate but can’t get away from,
and even just
here in my own home
I wish I could
quiet
my
body
and the way it
makes itself
known.
“Our bodies are lawless spaces,” Mom whispers,
the only thing she’s said
in ages.
She says it
right to me,
making sure I’ve heard her.
Her shirt dips
low
too. It always
does.
I heard what she said but I ask “what?” as if I haven’t.
Eric
looks
down.
“We are the lawless spaces,” Mom says
like it’s the truth
she’s been trying to tell me
all
along.
This notebook is blue
and inside are three poems
about me
in my mother’s curvy, swervy handwriting.
It is the beginning of something that she gets to
start and I guess it’s my job to
finish—which is
the story of myself, or at least the story of
right now.
“Here,” she says. “Happy birthday.”
It is not a gift wrapped in silver paper,
it is not the things I wanted—
gold eye shadow and a ring light
for doing live posts.
It is just itself.
Soft-covered and lined,
crisp paper;
a lot of it. The poems she’s written about me are
short
and mostly about who I was
when I was little and we were
close. I guess she doesn’t know what to say about me
now. I guess I don’t
either.
“Oh, right,” I say. “These notebooks.”
“I know traditions can be…” Mom sort of trails off. She hasn’t been great
at traditions.
Unless her going out to dinner with Eric
and not me
for her birthday is a tradition.
Unless her open-mouth kissing Eric at New Year’s
is a tradition.
Unless Thanksgiving at Eric’s mother’s house
with Eric’s mother’s friends
where Eric’s mother asks him why he can’t find a woman
with less baggage
(I am the baggage)
is a tradition.
“Mimi?” Mom says. “It’s your birthday, so
you can be part of this
if you want.
Do you want it?
The notebook?
You remember about it,
right?”
I remember a lot of things:
tea parties with Mom in the attic, surrounded by notebooks
and the promise of some special day where I would have
notebooks
too. But instead there’s this
non-moment
and Eric’s footsteps echoing above
telling Mom to hurry up
and get this part of the day
over with.
Eric is
the kind of guy Mom thinks is
romantic
for wanting to move in after two months
and for touching her ass
in public.
“Happy birthday, Mimi!” he calls
now
from upstairs
where there used to be an aquarium
filled with tiny blue and green and gold fish
whose tails moved like
wind
and who were always in a sort of
beautiful
chaos.
Mom and I used to sit on the floor
and watch them
and wonder if it was all some sort of choreographed
dance
just for us.
Like maybe
there was magic
right in our own home.
But now there is a collection of weights
and a patch of fake
grass
to fake-golf on,
which is
basically
the most depressing thing a house could have in it
aside from
a mom who doesn’t care
much
about you
and a live-in boyfriend she loves more than you,
which is also pretty
fucking
depressing.
Mom didn’t even put up a fight
when Eric said we needed to get rid of the aquarium.
“But we love it,” I said, in a whine I knew she hated but I couldn’t
help.
“I love Eric more than those fish,” Mom said,
and I didn’t know how to say
couldn’t say
was too embarrassed to say
that it wasn’t the fish
I loved
exactly
but those hours on the floor,
wondering.
I don’t go in that room anymore.
“So I like, write poems?” I ask. Notebooks filled with
my mother’s handwriting
and her mother’s
and hers
have always been
around
in the attic with the now-empty
aquarium
and Mom’s old headshots
and newspaper clippings of things
people said about her when she was in shows and
movies. They are alongside all the things I used to wear but
don’t,
now that I know
what people think when you wear something that cuts
low
or hugs tight
or rides high on your thighs.
They are there in the attic,
the notebooks
with the other versions of ourselves we used to be but aren’t
now.
I don’t go to the attic
ever;
it’s cold and also sort of
alive.
The boxes of notebooks
seem to hum.
I guess now that I think about it
there’s a lot of places I don’t go
in this house.
(and a lot of things we don’t
say)
“It’s what we’ve always done,” Mom says. “The girls in this
family. When we turn sixteen—”
“And now I’m sixteen.”
“And now you’re sixteen. We’re all connected. All of us. You’ve seen. We look—”
“I know how we look.”
On the mantel
above the fireplace
in the living room
is a row of photographs. They are all
black-and-white.
They are all
the same rectangular shape, framed in the same
gold frames that stand like soldiers saying
yessir, this is who we are.
The photographs are my mother and her mother
and hers and hers,
and all of them look
a little bit
the same with
golden-blonde hair and a body that is too
much
while also being too
little.
We are short and we have
curves—the kind people are comfortable commenting on
right
to
your
face.
There is a threshold I’ve found—
a type of body that is up for public discussion—
and it is mine
and my mother’s and my grandmother’s
and her mother’s too.
(they think their words are
compliments:
you are so tiny! but also so
…
…
…
buxom)
“Well, so, we have these photos and we have
the notebooks
and that’s our history,
that’s
who we are.” Mom’s voice is
too quiet
and a little
shaky—
the way I sound
answering questions in class
about the Revolutionary War
or
chemistry. Maybe she doesn’t quite exactly know
who we are.
“We have to take your photo,
too,
so we can make one of these for you.”
I don’t want
to be up on the mantel, looking like an inevitable
destiny. I prefer
the photos I post online,
with no ghosts
around,
no ancestors
putting me in some
category that I never asked to be in.
“Okay,” I say, though, because what else am I going to say? I don’t know how to say
anything
to my mother
lately.
And besides,
saying no would make her
confused. You love taking photos of yourself, she would say.
But that’s not it,
really.
I like being
the idea of a girl online
and not actually
this girl
here
in the kitchen
with a mom who keeps looking at her phone
instead of at me.
Online I do not have history. I only have
followers,
so many that a tampon company
wants me to do an ad for them.
Online
I am not
4' 10". Online
I do not have
breasts so big my shirts
strain. Online I have
friends and a really fun mom and hundreds of feet of space between me and
everyone else,
which is how I like it, or how I’ve
learned
to like it.
“So we’ll take a photo,” I say now, though.
“And I’ll write in a notebook. Poems, apparently.”
“When you want to, Mimi.”
“I’ve never wanted to write. I want to make clothes and I want to
move somewhere far away where no one knows me except as
the girl with the cool account with the amazing clothes. That’s
what I want.”
“Well, your cool account has a lot of writing on it,” Mom says. “You write all kinds of things there.”
And I’m about to tell her that’s
stupid
because captioning one of my posts online
is hardly writing,
but what I mean
is that captioning one of my posts
isn’t writing about anything true.
Not true the way it is
true
that Eric sometimes forgets to mention me
when his clients ask about his life.
Not true the way it is true that Mom asked if I was okay with him moving in
and I said no
and he moved in
like
a day later.
Not true the way it is true
that I made my mother a skirt
from soft yellow material I thought she’d love
and
later
it ended up in the pile of clothes we donated
to make room for
Eric
and I never said anything because I knew
she’d forgotten
I’d made it at all.
Not true the way it is true that Mom looks out the window
or at her phone
or at Eric
when I talk
and never
at me.
So I guess I need
a notebook
to tell things to
because she’s not listening
anymore. ...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
