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Conversation I had while totally naked

Friday, May 18, 2012

“If you like Jackie Collins, you should totally read the Sleeping Beauty series.”

I was slick with sweat in the steam room at King Spa when the woman sat down beside me. I was reading a paperback called “Rock Star,” written by romance queen Collins in the 1980s. I was trying to be Very Casual about my nakedness, and my reading of a tawdry 80s romance novel, which I had ordered from Amazon after seeing it on one of David Foster Wallace’s college syllabus for a class of mass-market fiction.

“I’ve never read her before,” I said. “This is an old book, I think.”

“I know, I read it when I was 18!” She laughed. Do I need to mention she was totally naked? It’s a funny thing to have a conversation while nude, because even if you are Very Casual, you can’t help but zero in on the soft mound of the breast, the pale white skin on the belly that never sees the sun. Women’s bodies are fascinating.

“Have you read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?” I asked her, because – I mean, why not?

“I’ve heard it’s amazing,” she said.

I’ve heard it’s terrible, but also kind of amazing.

I returned to the book I was reading, whose pages had become crinkly with steam and sweat, and which contained this line: Her breasts strained to escape the confines of her bra. But he teased some more, playing with her swollen nipples through the material, tracing intricate patterns of intent.

I had come out to King Spa to stop thinking for a while, to tune down the anxious noisemaker in my brain. So far, this book was just the trick.

“Have you read ‘Story of O”?” she asked me.

I had not.

Her eyes grew wide. “A classic. You have to read that.”

“I totally will.”

I spent a lot of my 37 years avoiding romance novels and avoiding situations that required me to be Very Casual about nakedness with another human being, and I understand completely why I did that.

But I’m glad that era is over now.

Mothers.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

My mother kept a journal when I was born. On August 26, 1974, it begins in her familiar scrawl, “A very good baby!” But that is one of the only entries, suggesting that either the converse was true or that all relevant ground had been covered.

I found this journal while I was in college, sorting through dusty old keepsakes in my parents’ garage: A story I typed at the age of 7, a horror tale about a mother who gives birth to a devil child and must kill her, which I wrote in the seventh grade, shocking everyone (particularly my mom). I began writing stories as a little girl, partly because it was a language of comfort, and partly because my mother liked them. She never wanted us to buy her presents. “Make me something,” she would say in the days leading up to Christmas and Mother’s Day, and as a result she acquired an endless supply of woven God’s eyes, coupon booklets and questionable poetry.

My mother kept nearly everything I wrote growing up, which is common among parents, who tuck away little scraps of the child’s imagination as it blooms. But to me, this act was big, because it meant that someone out there wanted to listen, even before I had much to say.

Anyway, that journal entry of my mother’s became a joke between my college best friend Julie and me. “A very good baby,” Julie would tease me sometimes, patting my head when I did something clever, like spilling cheese pizza down my shirt. Julie was like my mother in those years, and I mean that in the sense that she looked a bit like my mother – a natural beauty not quite aware of her own radiance – but also that she took care of me. She drove me places. She lent me money when I needed it. It was her sink I threw up in when I was too drunk. I have always been drawn to women with a maternal streak. Teachers. Colleagues. Friends. Maybe it’s because I see my mother in them. Or maybe it’s because I like being mothered. (I am not certain those are different things.)

Sometime around the age of 13, I got in a huge fight with my mother. We did that back then. My rage was atomic, and as a way to exact revenge, I ripped up a binder full of these stories I had written her, and I threw them in the garbage. I take it all back. The look of anguish on her face when she saw those stories in the trash – well, I still think it might have been one of the meanest things I’ve ever done to someone. That night, I stayed up late wiping off coffee grounds and scotch-taping the pages back into place, trying to piece together the brokenness I had revealed in our lives.

Even now when I mention that binder, a shadow crosses my mother’s face. I have never known exactly why it makes her so sad. That I destroyed something so precious to her? Or that in order to get back at her, I would rip up parts of myself?

I can’t remember the last fight I had with my mom. Mostly what we do is talk, and laugh. There are so many details about her I find amusing. Once, when I was in college, I said, “Are you OK right now?” but I speak so fast she thought I said, “Are you a carrot now?” and so when she sees me looking blue, that’s what she asks me: Are you a carrot now?

A few years ago, she learned a handful of Spanish phrases, and ever since then, when she leaves a message for me, she says, “Hello Sarita. This is your mamacita.” I have told her that “mamacita” is how certain dudes refer to hot women. Hey, mamacita. What’s shaking, mamacita.

“I didn’t know that!” she said, but she keeps using it anyway. I laugh every time I hear those voicemails. I make faces like, “Isn’t she adorable?” even though usually, no one is around.

“I think Mother’s Day is hard for people,” my mom said the other day. She was sitting on my bed, and I had just tried on a dress I was wearing to a wedding that weekend. “I think it’s hard for people who don’t get along with their mothers, or who want to be a mother and can’t be.”

My mother is often thinking about other people. I inherited this from her. Sometimes what I feel most about my mother is guilt. Guilt that other people don’t get moms who are as kind and fully available. Guilt that I still have my mother when other people do not. Guilt that I will never live a day in my life wondering if she loved me. On the way to the wedding this weekend, I was reading Emily Nussbaum’s profile of “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, and I underlined a passage in the pages of the old crinkly magazine: “I’ve only recently realized that I have a radically different relationship with my parents than a lot of people,” she says, telling me she related strongly to memoirist Emma Forrest’s description of her mother as “the love of my life.”

I have never written a story about my mother. I don’t think I know how. Where would you start? Where would you end? It’s like writing a story about water, or air. You can’t say anything, because you want to say everything. She is a very good mother. I guess that covers the relevant ground.

Afraid of the telephone

Monday, May 7, 2012

A few weeks ago, I posted a request for readers to email me about the places they lived. It seemed like a good idea in the moment, but I almost instantly regretted it, because I was worried nobody would email anything, and I’d be left feeling foolish and a little bit sad. I pretty much feel that way about everything I do, by the way. I regret the story I just wrote. I regret the conversation I just had. I regret the email I wrote two hours ago to my friend in California who is having a hard time. It’s hard for me to do something without also wishing I could have done it better, and the best way I have learned to resolve this is to just keep slugging away. There is a weird comfort in volume.

Anyway, the experiment was not a failure. People did email me, and I had lovely and unexpected conversations about towns in Colorado and the upper peninsula of Michigan and Alabama and British Columbia and Florida. All these corners of the universe I never would have thought to visit where I now have friends. So first I want to say thank you to those people, for not making me feel like a fool in her party dress waiting for people who never arrive. And then I want to mention that my friend Jennifer recently engaged in her own scary experiment, and it inspired me to write a piece for Salon about how we use cell phones and communicate. You can read it here.

I picked the wrong day to quit watching cat videos

Friday, April 27, 2012

Holy guacamole, this is adorable.

Nostalgia for the person you once were

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Mary and I were at the mall on a Friday, so this story is already awesome. We were going to see a movie, but also grabbing something to eat, and also screwing around, like we always do when we’re together, and as I sat down in a booth with my gourmet taco in the food court – resplendent with teenagers and natural light – I wondered what my New York friends would say if they knew I was eating dinner 20 feet from a Glamour Shots.

But part of being a good suburban American is that I feel comfortable in malls, especially this one, which is much fancier than most, and part of being 37 is no long worrying (except for a flash) what other people think about what you’re doing. What my New York friends would think is: Man, that’s why I’m never moving to Texas. What my New York friends would think is: Hell yeah. What my New York friends would think is: Who cares? Where did you get that sweet Boston T-shirt?

What a good question. I was wearing an old 70s baseball T hot-ironed with the logo for the band Boston, which I bought at a vintage store during a month when the song “More Than a Feeling” became a kind of fever for me. Growing up, I never liked Boston – theirs was an edgeless guitar rock played on classic radio, impossible to dance to. But in the past year I had become besotted with a certain late 70s aesthetic – latchhook rugs and old beige corduroys handed down from my mother and Dr. Pepper flavored Lipsmacker and aviator glasses. Hair in pigtails. I listened to ELO and “Off the Wall”-era Michael Jackson and Queen and the Bee Gees. Anything you could play in a roller rink – that was my jam.

It was a curious nostalgia. A nostalgia for an age I had just missed. I wasn’t actually remembering these bands so much as I was still discovering them. I grew up wearing more makeup than a Real Housewife. I wanted to paint the world hot pink. I listened to Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Madonna, all the pop stuff that came in reaction to earnest bands like Boston. Music videos featuring a tiger. Everyone in Wet N Wild eyeliner.

Back at the mall, Mary and I had to walk through Macy’s to get to the movie theater, and we were struck by the junior’s department, filled with leopard-print and chintzy Southwestern mesa design and torn neon shirts that really are the kind of crap I wore back in those days. I hated it. I would have happily dive-bombed that store.

“Why would anyone want the 80s to come back?” Mary asked, but of course, none of the girls shopping here would have been alive in the 80s. That is the funny thing about nostalgia – it’s not a direct line. It skips generations, the same ideas recycled for a new audience.

But then other pieces of my past I cling to with an irrational love. We passed by the low-rent spangle of Claire’s (one of the most successful mall ventures of all time, by the way. I have never seen a Claire’s outside of a mall, and I have never seen a mall without a Claire’s. One day, I’ll write about this for the New Yorker.) And I made Mary come with me into the store, because (gasp) she had never been. Never been to Claire’s! My God, there should be a nonprofit for these sorts of lost souls. Her ears aren’t pierced, and in some outrageous miscalculation, she understood that store to be mostly earrings, which it certainly is not.

Here are other items Claire’s sells: Tiaras, Lipsmacker in rainbow flavors, a ring watch, a purple glitter clamshell phone that opens up to reveal a palette of shimmering eye shadows. A Justin Bieber alarm clock. A Justin Bieber pillow. I took a picture of Mary holding that last item. She is a sport, that one.

Claire’s is a candy store for tweens, basically, and in my heart, I suppose I am still one, too. Every time I hang out with my friend’s daughter, who is 5, I am reminded that she and I share the same passion for wigs and bedazzlement. “Oh, I have that,” I think when I see some pink poofery in her room bought at Target. And then I think: Why the hell am I buying the same stuff as a 5-year-old girl?

This resistance to aging feels emblematic of my generation, who grew up marinating in the corporate hatred of Nirvana and the romantic arrested development of movies like “Slacker.” Nobody wanted to grow up. Nobody ever does, but we didn’t have to. “Grups,” Adam Sternbergh called us in a classic New York magazine cover story about a generation of parents who shun the signifiers of mature adulthood. Recently, while visiting Williamsburg, I saw a mid-40s mother wearing black sparkly leggings at 9am, and I thought: Wow, really? And then I thought: Wow, impressive. I mean, if you can do both things at once – be a mom and be a kid, be responsible and be hot — why wouldn’t you?

Recently, Mary heard someone take a swipe at a 40-year-old woman in pigtails. Not any specific woman, but this person used it in a casually derisive way, shorthand for trying too hard, the way I might take a swipe at a dad with an earring. You know: Give it up. And I am aware that my 70s Love’s Baby Soft pigtail aesthetic leaves me open to ridicule. I have the Facebook messages to prove it. But here is the thing: I don’t care. I am just as much a stupid cliché as the guy who is getting his self-esteem from tearing down a 40-year-old woman for the way she wears her hair. None of it matters. What matters, I swear to you, is not giving up. Why do people say things like, “Give it up”? I gave it up for a long time. It was not a trip I would recommend.

The movie Mary and I were seeing that night was “Bully,” a documentary that follows a handful of school-kids living in the vise grip of cruelty and ridicule. Those are brave kids. I had complicated feelings about the film, which I basically thought was good, but what I really felt was: I would not go back for a million dollars. I would not be that person again, the person who flinched all the time and was afraid to speak for fear that whatever came out of her mouth would be wrong. The person craving attention and fleeing from it at once.

People often say we’re a youth-worshiping culture, and it’s true. My friends talk about wrinkles and Botox now. Body parts sag in unfortunate ways. But I would not go back. Not to my 20s, when I was sad and lost and drunk, and certainly not to the age of 13, when relief came in the form of a store like Claire’s, or the fantasy of some soft boy with swooshy hair and Top 40 hits, or the promise of glitter makeup and a freaking ring watch.

But I also thought: I am that person, still, in so many ways. 5 and 13 and 37 all at once. Mary took a picture of me in Claire’s, wearing a “Sweet 16” crown, and I think the title for that picture should be “Count the levels of denial in this picture.” It is a ridiculous photo, an intended satire of sorts. But it’s also me, as I really am. That’s all I can be, I suppose. One day, when I’m 45 and wearing split-crotch panties to the grocery store, I’ll be nostalgic for this moment, too.