Growing Pains

An hour south of Manhattan is my marker. That’s where we settle in. Drastically less traffic, slightly more middle class. Rita has a place in the city too, with a lobby boy and gold-tinted floors. She makes the gray outside appear glamorous. Here, though, is her home. I’d think she’d have shame about it, but she’s managed to nudge me in the other direction. The road to the beach is shorter every time I walk it. And the house is like a walk-in closet, totally enmeshed in porches and greenery. And somehow, sand. Are the roads dirt, or has the sand drifted from the beach? Was this all once beach? It’s possible, that we are always part of something older, that no matter how much we develop and modernize, a beach is a beach. The earth, the earth.

My mom texts me four days after my last response: “how are you doing? I miss my baby.”

“What a load,” I mutter. I stand over my bed, the charger breaking itself free from its taut chord. Rita sneaks up on me and includes herself:

“A load of what?” She asks, genuinely curious it seems.

“Of laundry,” I say, stone cold.

“That’s not what you meant.”

“What did I mean?”

“A load of crap. Now tell me why,” she demands, trying to play it cool. We are the kinds of people who converse all blasè and confide in each other.

“Diane, she says she misses me.”

“And she means it,” she adds, her voice going softer and softer. She backs away, unbothered, teetering over to the door in yoga pants and an intricately woven tank top.

I sit at the edge of the bed and arch my back over the phone screen, typing, “why am I here?”

The three bubbles appear, drop, then reappear. A short sentence in white: “You hate it, don’t you.”

I rush to the keyboard- “No” then delete it, saying, “that’s not what I said,” pausing, then apprehensively adding an exclamation point.

She types and types, as my patience wears thin.

Her response: You’re there because it will be good for you.

My response:

How do you know that?

Her response:

Because she’s good for the soul.

Mine:

For your soul.

Hers:

And therefore for yours.

I leave it be. A couple minutes pass, and she says, “It’s been a rough year. You need to get away from everything.” I think about the year in question. Not one intelligible thought simmers. Only colors: reds, oranges, and purples. And her name, Bailey. I look down and my phone is covered in palm sweat, my other hand in a fist.

I reply, imagining the panic on my mother’s end of a lacking response: “OK.”

I sit for two more minutes, cracking the muscles in my back and flaring my nostrils. I unlock my phone and add, “Love you.” She returns the favor, echoing the sentiment, and I shut off my phone for good, shortly after tossing it to my concaving pillows.

She’ll be sincere over the phone, when there isn’t speaking involved. She is afraid. She is a coward. No, I am a coward. How do I learn to distinguish or unite these contradictory impressions? Her abrasiveness and her softness two sides of the same coin, a coin that oftentimes I want nothing to do with.

Rita prizes the coin. Where do I draw the line between her pardoning my mother’s irresponsibility and celebrating it?

I saunter over from the bedroom to the front hall, when I see Rita doing a sun salutation fifty feet away on the front porch. Taking a seat on a stool beside one of the towering bookcases, I spy on her.

Loving Aunt Rita makes it easier to dislike her. Loving is the only thing. And we have it, I hope. I just feel a grand space between us, like I could run toward her for miles and never once reach her body.

My mother’s best friend is someone I aspire to be like. This is because she is my mother’s favorite person, and perhaps I want to be that too. It’s quite difficult, though, to emulate someone who you’re not sure that you like. Aunt Rita is many things, but she is not agreeable.

I don’t mean this in the insulting way, really. I just mean that when I’m around her I constantly survey myself. It’s more of a me-problem than it is a her-problem, but I will shirk this responsibility for as long as possible. She isn’t asking me to suck in my stomach, to choose my words carefully. I simply assume that she wants me to be like her since she is quiet, and quiet people seem not to easily absorb the energies of others. I am skilled at making assumptions, but I am not skilled at making them accurately.

Rita is a private person. I don’t like this about her, but it intrigues me. It makes me want to punish myself for being so public all of the time. If she can do it, why can’t I? I don’t mean that I can’t, but that I shouldn’t. I don’t see why one would conceal something when they could include the others. So it feels painfully personal, I suppose. It feels like she is hiding something from me, and not from everybody.

I think back to three years ago, when she stood across from me, naked, in a towel. She had just showered, and she was pruned and shiny. I wondered why I wasn’t as thin as her when she was forty five, and I was twelve.

We exchanged a few words, emptily, and I held on to the hope that she would trust me enough to get changed in front of me. It wasn’t something I actively wanted, but for some odd reason I took offense to her kicking me out. I wanted to feel close to her. She sort of nudged me away, as if I should have guessed that it was time to leave many minutes prior. Rita makes me want to become the kind of person who can read a room like a trashy airplane book. But I can’t read a room when I am around someone who fails to make a room a home, when a living room feels like a doctor’s office.

Rita likes to do yoga in the morning. She often does things without explanation and spends ample time with only herself. Such as long walks, excusing herself to process conversations. She is fragile, but unlike most fragile people I know she feels fully entitled to her fragility. I cannot decide whether to love or hate her entitlement; when does confidence become arrogance?

Right now, I’m avoiding her. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I sit in the wide-seated armchair at the back of her living room, peering through the hexagonal window. She’s on the front patio in downward dog, the sun beating on her upper back.

It’s no coincidence that I find it hard to relate to her, which makes it hard for her to relate to me. When I look at her, I see a woman— a real woman. And then I gaze into the mirror and see something else entirely. What does this mean? Instead of applying a mindset of variety to this concept, I compete with her. I don’t even feel jealousy, I feel… angry. And then I feel angry for being angry.

She doesn’t know what it is like to grow up with wrestler-competitor thigh muscles and swimmer’s shoulders, to feel like a man in a woman’s body against her own will. She’ll never know the sweaty feeling of being warm blooded at all times, even when the wind sweeps your hair behind your neck. This widens the gap, pushing us apart like two front teeth. We’re supposed to be together, but we are not. And the ever changing circumstances keep us that way.

She transitions from downward dog to warrior one pose. I can tell that she knows I am watching, but she is pretending not to care. Maybe she finds me a creep, but she denies and denies and denies because she feels toward me a certain sense of duty. It wouldn’t matter if I were a criminal, so long as I am Diane’s daughter. She is principled, and instead of admiring the quality I question it until it has no base.

Now she rests in shavasana. She could fall asleep like this and totally forgive herself for it. She could lie in the sun until it burns her, though of course it wouldn’t; her olive skin deflects all dangers. Her Iraqi ancestry keeps her safe, keeps her interesting. She is safe in her own body, trusting and in control. I would like to be safe in my own body, but I’m not quite ready for her to show me the way. Instead, I take it to the other side of the house, where inanimate objects call to me.

The tool shed beside Rita’s garage is a library of memories. Rita’s son, Teddy, grew up here. I, on the other hand, grew up watching him grow up here. We did share some of the growing up, however, and it shows in the plastic buckets, the colorful umbrellas, the scattered figurines.

I stand at the doorway of the tool shed, pretending to be a passerby. As I scan the hollowed room, sniffing bits of kids’ sunscreen and unopened beach supplies from the local convenience store, I can’t help but think of Teddy. He is at the center of everything. In my eyes, Teddy has won. He gets to fill that place that undoubtedly earns Rita’s praise, a place that has room only for one. The question nags at me, a scratch un-itched: does he know how lucky he is? Does he experience her the way many of us do, and if not, how doesn’t he notice her coldness toward the rest of us?

Making my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I continue to repeat the phrase. Inside the bathroom, the mirror and I have our daily face-off. In the frame of reflective glass, I spy a girl. She is 5’6 with huge legs, a protruding lower stomach, and tiny white pimples on her upper lip. Her hair is a whitish blonde, it stops right at the shoulders. Her arms are flabby but soundly structured. And she slouches, finding herself lost in her muddy brown eyes. They are small, nose big, lips semi-plump. Obtuse ears, triangular boobs, flat ass. “Hi,” I say to the girl. She says nothing in response.