Note: Remember this? Well, now you do.
“What is Dad doing in the basement,” Danielle asks trying to maintain balance on a pile of folded boxes in the middle of her den while her mom sips wine on the sofa.
“He’s taking apart his model train set.”
“It sounds like more than that.”
“We all have our way of saying the same thing I guess,” Danielle’s mom intuits.
“He’s been working on that since I was in fifth grade.”
“And hopefully he’ll have that much time to build it back up again.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Honey, the key to a lasting marriage is keeping some of your shared narratives at arm’s length. Now stop changing the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject,” Danielle retorts, “I’m distracted.”
“Adulthood is one long distraction between two forevers.”
“Who said that?”
“I want to say Brené Brown? No matter. Where do things stand?”
“As to what, Mom?”
“Red or white. Which do you think you’ll end up as?”
Danielle launches an affected huff at the sofa. “I don’t know.”
“Well let’s carry on,” Danielle’s mom continues overlooking her daughter’s routine petulance, “as if you’re white.”
“Why?”
“I can work with it. I prefer it. Each color has its own story but I think white works better for you.”
“Because it’s virginal?” Danielle says with a sneering undercurrent.
Danielle’s mom recoils briefly but noticeably. “Because white has potential, sweetheart. It has the promise of color. Why accept red now when you can have the option of being red later, when you’re ready?”
Danielle shrugs indifferently and takes her phone from her back pocket. Her mom rises from the sofa just in time to stop her from texting.
“I need you to listen to me.”
“Fine.”
“I don’t know what red means exactly. But I don’t like the message it sends about you to your peers … to colleges … to future employers … to your hus—“
“Mom.”
“I don’t like the limitations red sets. There’s nothing to explore. It’s like being put into a box. I mean, life is mostly a series of boxes you get put into, again and again. It’s inevitable, but I don’t want that for you so soon.”
“Boxes?”
“Boxes.”
“Like, literally?”
“If it helps you take this seriously.” Danielle’s mom pauses, considering the endlessly replicating versions of her daughter shaped from any small phrasing she formulates in the next hour. “You have to make a speech?”
“Yes … theoretically.”
“Tell me what you have.”
“I was going to say ‘Thank you’ and walk off.”
“I don’t think you’re appreciating the significance of this platform, honey.”
“The platform I’m on now is gonna break my neck,” Danielle says as she recalibrates her frame to a solid surface.
“Any platform is an ideal platform for saying your truth. Now what are your female role models?”
“What do you mean?”
“Whose example do you follow that helps make you a better person?”
“I don’t know how anyone could think like that, Mom.”
Danielle’s mom sinks into the sofa as if dejection is an invisible hand putting her in her place. Why, she wonders in silence, does her fate feel like the dizzying spiral of a pool slide? She rallies herself back to presence before a terrifying conclusion is reached. “Maybe your role model just hasn’t come to you. That happens sometimes. It happened to me.”
“How do you mean?” Danielle asks with subdued hesitation.
“I thought like you when I was your age. I didn’t think I needed heroes. I was arrogant. But arrogance is kind of like loss in formalwear.”
“How did you find yourself?”
“I didn’t find myself; Jeane Kirkpatrick found me. She found me when I went to bed. She found me when I woke up. Very often she found me in my dreams, as me in her place.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“That’s not really the point. The point is she found me and I had no idea why. But she was always there. So in a sense I was more lost than I was before. But after a time I did find Liz Phair. Don’t ask me how. It’s just that everything just fell into place after that. Jeane Kirkpatrick and Liz Phair, working together to take me on the right course in life. I believe they still do.” She trails off trying to prevent an onrush of tears. “I hope that helps.”
Danielle shuffles silently as she hears what she hopes is the remainder of her dad’s declining miniature society.
“Well, that might have happened but in a weird,” she says hesitating closer to the surface, “in a weird sort of way. Once after school I was going to get something I forgot from my locker. It pass Mrs. Delgado’s class on the way. When I did that time she was still there, sitting at her desk, maybe grading papers or doing a lesson plan. I hadn’t really thought about her before that, never had her as a teacher or anything, but I felt a strange sort of connection. Like this affirmity.”
“An affinity?”
“Whatever … but it wasn’t, like, a commonality. But an opposition. Suddenly there as this person who was everything I never wanted to be. Like she didn’t look especially unhappy. It’s just that I didn’t find her happiness appealing at all. And if I ever became happy like her, I would have failed somehow.”
“That’s very nice, Danielle,” her mom said with a genuine sense of uplift. “I’m not sure how that becomes an essay.”
“Well all I have left to go on, given what I have now, is that, miniaturized mass destruction, or being buried alive. You know: quantity of life stuff.”
“Quality, hon.” Her correction is obstructed by the pressing of thumbs on a repossessed phone.
“How is your wave?”
“I don’t know. Adequate?”
“Maybe work on that for a while. Not everyone is gifted with the gene of poise,” she mutters into her nearly extinguished wine glass, through which her daughter’s glacial gaze of total comprehension cuts through the syrupy smears. “I need a refill,” she says with a musical sigh. “Do you need like a seltzer or something?”
“No.”
As her mom exits to the kitchen whistling some made up composition, Danielle directs a litany of arrow-sharp hexes at her back. Hexes countlessly rehearsed, entombed safely in her mind, and as correctly worded as she needs them to be.