truth,” Mom muttered. She either agreed she spoke another language or thought it was better to have a brother instead of a drunkard. It didn’t matter; now she was being purposefully ridiculous and found her own act entertaining. I always took my mother’s exasperation seriously, but Brian knew how to disengage in just that way that made her laugh. Watching him interact with Mom was like watching a skilled ballplayer fool his opponent with a head fake.
At home, I took inventory of my old bedroom now that Mom had cleaned. The walls were still pink but for irregular squares of white where the tape from posters had ripped away the surface layer of paint. A crate of Barbie dolls crowded the door. They were, suspiciously, naked. I picked up a Ken doll, considered his hairless, shining perfection. Disturbing that Ken came with underwear drawn directly onto his plastic body while Barbie went commando. Another of society’s provisions for the male sex drive: permanent underwear, impenetrable, to keep Ken’s desires in check.
I reached to place the crate of Barbies with the other dolls that crowded the uppermost ledge of my white bookshelf. The shelf beneath housed boxes brimming with the remaining clutter of my growing up. The one beneath that held two crates of novels. The juxtaposition of childhood play objects and my high school library struck me as emblematic. Dolls to novels: from one romp of imagination to another.
I pulled a heavy sweatshirt on over my pajamas and put on an extra pair of socks before lacing up my tennis shoes. With the flashlight I’d stolen from the kitchen junk drawer clenched between my teeth, I climbed the closet ladder back to the attic and my secret office.
By the watery light of the desk lamp I finished Love in the Time of Massive Diarrhea , systematically chewing the flavor out of the pack of cinnamon gum Mom had put in my Christmas stocking. It was late when I closed the last page. I set the book aside, massaged my jaw. Across the way I could see the neighbor’s television playing in the otherwise dark living room. The commercials flashed on the TV screen, the Christmas lights on the tree beside it chasing one another around the four walls. Together they cast a spinning kaleidoscope of color on the snow where a plastic Rudolph and plastic Santa worshiped a plastic Jesus. Mr. Matlon had passed away while I was in college. I resented the current owners for the garish display they had made of the old man’s house, a reminder that life went on without me in places that I’d once felt I owned.
Without any real purpose, I reread the Things to Do Before Thirty list. My progress had not been good. I had read all of Austen’s novels, but found it unsettling that I’d assigned her name to a list as if she was or could ever have been a chore. No, had not yet skinny-dipped in the ocean.Yes, had kept my own apartment, which had been nice while it lasted, but I was too broke to live alone, much less tour Rome. I didn’t care to take further stock of the remaining ambitions.
Why the urgency to achieve my life’s goals before thirty anyway?
And why was marriage at the end, as if globe-trotting served only as prelude to romance?
My mother had always instructed me to live life before settling down, settling down requiring a seismic shift in one’s energy, from adventure to nurture. The fault in her admonition was the assumption that meeting a man marked the end of the journey. I grew up thinking the single life was the rising action and marriage the climax. Every writer knows climax is followed by dénouement: in other words, it’s all downhill after the wedding
Maybe I would never marry or have children. For the very first time, this future struck me as entirely plausible, if not inevitable. Many women lived alone. I was no more entitled to marriage than the next person. Maybe I belonged to the world of the celibate saint, granted a life of solitude and free to explore the inner world of my
At home, I took inventory of my old bedroom now that Mom had cleaned. The walls were still pink but for irregular squares of white where the tape from posters had ripped away the surface layer of paint. A crate of Barbie dolls crowded the door. They were, suspiciously, naked. I picked up a Ken doll, considered his hairless, shining perfection. Disturbing that Ken came with underwear drawn directly onto his plastic body while Barbie went commando. Another of society’s provisions for the male sex drive: permanent underwear, impenetrable, to keep Ken’s desires in check.
I reached to place the crate of Barbies with the other dolls that crowded the uppermost ledge of my white bookshelf. The shelf beneath housed boxes brimming with the remaining clutter of my growing up. The one beneath that held two crates of novels. The juxtaposition of childhood play objects and my high school library struck me as emblematic. Dolls to novels: from one romp of imagination to another.
I pulled a heavy sweatshirt on over my pajamas and put on an extra pair of socks before lacing up my tennis shoes. With the flashlight I’d stolen from the kitchen junk drawer clenched between my teeth, I climbed the closet ladder back to the attic and my secret office.
By the watery light of the desk lamp I finished Love in the Time of Massive Diarrhea , systematically chewing the flavor out of the pack of cinnamon gum Mom had put in my Christmas stocking. It was late when I closed the last page. I set the book aside, massaged my jaw. Across the way I could see the neighbor’s television playing in the otherwise dark living room. The commercials flashed on the TV screen, the Christmas lights on the tree beside it chasing one another around the four walls. Together they cast a spinning kaleidoscope of color on the snow where a plastic Rudolph and plastic Santa worshiped a plastic Jesus. Mr. Matlon had passed away while I was in college. I resented the current owners for the garish display they had made of the old man’s house, a reminder that life went on without me in places that I’d once felt I owned.
Without any real purpose, I reread the Things to Do Before Thirty list. My progress had not been good. I had read all of Austen’s novels, but found it unsettling that I’d assigned her name to a list as if she was or could ever have been a chore. No, had not yet skinny-dipped in the ocean.Yes, had kept my own apartment, which had been nice while it lasted, but I was too broke to live alone, much less tour Rome. I didn’t care to take further stock of the remaining ambitions.
Why the urgency to achieve my life’s goals before thirty anyway?
And why was marriage at the end, as if globe-trotting served only as prelude to romance?
My mother had always instructed me to live life before settling down, settling down requiring a seismic shift in one’s energy, from adventure to nurture. The fault in her admonition was the assumption that meeting a man marked the end of the journey. I grew up thinking the single life was the rising action and marriage the climax. Every writer knows climax is followed by dénouement: in other words, it’s all downhill after the wedding
Maybe I would never marry or have children. For the very first time, this future struck me as entirely plausible, if not inevitable. Many women lived alone. I was no more entitled to marriage than the next person. Maybe I belonged to the world of the celibate saint, granted a life of solitude and free to explore the inner world of my
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