“Yay,” she says.
“And Pez for dessert.”
“Ooh. Dispensers? Can we get Hello Kitty dispensers?”
I think of my dad, and how he probably did this in a more normal way. Cheer her up. But at least she’s smiling and not crying. I do what I have to. After all, it’s just me and Mom. We’re all we’ve got. Mom had a brother who died as a teenager, and my grandparents on her side, Pops and Gammie, live in Ogden, Utah, and I get a card from them maybe every other birthday. My dad’s parents died when I was a baby.
“Well obviously we have to,” I say.
Sweeties with my mom is always like taking a kid to a candy store, because it is, in fact, a huge-ass candy store, and she is most definitely a kid when she gets in there. We walk quickly past the sugarless candies — I mean, come on — and she squeals with delight when we see the wall of Pez dispensers, and she goes off on how Princess Leia looks nothing like Princess Leia, and then she grabs two Hello Kitty dispensers as well as four Pez refill packages — one all sour Pez. Then she gives me a mini-dissertation on Hello Kitty and how the thing that is especially awesome about Hello Kitty is that everyone has a fake memory of her as being part of their childhood, but she really wasn’t.
“Tell me one thing you know about Hello Kitty. Was she from a cartoon? No. A movie? No. She acts like she’s Woody Woodpecker or Ricochet Rabbit, but really she’s been superimposed upon all of our collective consciousness as if she was a thing. But she wasn’t. She’s a brand, not something to reminisce about.”
We are pushing our little cart down the aisle where the Whoppers and various other malted chocolates live, and though I barely know Woody and have never heard of said rabbit, I nod. “You’re actually right,” I say, and she curtsies before throwing a red pack of something called Maltesers into our cart.
“Thank you very much. And of course none of that changes the fact that we have to buy two Hello Kitty dispensers. Because Hello Kitty.”
After, she sprints to the car, which is funny because she’s not so much a sprinting type of mom anymore. When she gets to the car, she says, “If you get here in six seconds, you get an amazing, special treat.”
I make a dramatic showing of running, and she smiles wide, and I do too.
In the car, she tells me to close my eyes, and I do. I enjoy the sensation of her making a few turns and not knowing where we’re going, and I resist the urge to peek. When the car stops, I open my eyes. We’re at Zia Record Exchange, which is about my favorite place in the world, and as much fun as it is to go there with Pam and Kayla, it’s never better than when I go with my mom.
“Yay!” I say, and she says yay too.
We go inside and feed our vinyl addictions.
“Oh my God,” she says as she sifts through the “A” partition of the rock ’n’ roll section. She pulls out a rather dull cover with three ’80s-looking guys posing in the bottom right corner. It reads Alphaville in a funny font on top, and underneath, in all lowercase, it reads big in japan.
She holds the record close to her chest, like she’s hugging it. Her hazel eyes are so big and filled with joy.
“I heard this for the first time when Pops and Gammie sent me on this bike trip to France. I was seventeen. Oh my God. We have to buy this. We have to.”
“Clearly,” I say.
She nearly jumps up and down. “You’re gonna love it. Love it. Oh my God.” And then she’s back to shuffling through the “B” section, and my heart feels like it could burst because seeing Mom like Mom again is everything.
We eat our jelly-bean dinner in my room. She grabs a pink boa from my bedpost and wraps it around her shoulders, and she sits down on the red beanbag chair in the corner, picking through the jelly beans carefully and throwing the licorice ones onto the shag carpet dismissively. Even Dorcas won’t eat those.
The Alphaville album is all synthesizers and the singing is that Euro-emo style that would so not fly today. The “Big in Japan” song itself is just overflowing with cultural appropriation that would get the guys flogged in 2019 but apparently was all the rage thirty years ago. She listens, blissfully, with her hands behind her head.
“Oh my God,” she says. “This so brings me back to biking these rural French roads, and the greasy guys at all the hostels. We hosteled for like thirty straight nights all through Brittany — Breh-tahn-yuh, they pronounced it, and the Euro guys were so cheesy. Those were the days.”
I smile and recline too, trying to imagine my mom my age. I’ve seen pictures, but Mom is Mom, you know? She’s not a teenager and she never was, no matter how much she tries to act like she still is.
Then, as the synth-pop assault continues on my phonograph, she sits up. “So what do you imagine?” she asks.
“Huh?”
“Like, imagine. For yourself. As an adult. Where do you live, what do you do, who are you with?”
I roll onto my side and hold up the side of my head with my hand. We’re having one of our sleepovers again. We haven’t in a long while. I kind of love it. Where we just talk and talk and forget about the time. I miss these.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Bullshit,” she says, smiling. “You know. Tell me. Tell me!”
“Well he’s a redhead,” I say quickly, and she giggles.
“Knew it.”
“Yeah, it changes. Like now, we live in maybe the mountains. Near a city because people are cooler in cities, but we’re in a cabin in the mountains, and I write poems and I’m famous somehow, I don’t know. Maybe I write books too. And he’s in finance or something like that where he’s on the computer all day making money, and we design the place so it looks, I don’t know, kind of like this. Like a speakeasy, maybe, and we get our living room featured in some national magazine, and we throw these amazing parties.”
“Oh Jordan,” she says, and her smile is just blissful. “Do all that. Really. Do it. Don’t let people tell you that you have to be anything other than what you are. You’re really such an amazing person, you don’t even know.”
I choke up and have to look away, because am I? But Mom thinks I am, so that’s cool.
You know that feeling you get when you have no idea what you’re doing, like in calc, and then you see your teacher pause while trying to solve an equation on the blackboard, and you realize very quickly that she doesn’t have a clue either?
This is how it feels when I arrive at Jordan’s place at 5:00 a.m. on Thursday. It’s allegedly our fifth day out. In our first four days, I’m guessing we have made two hundred dollars. Well, not made. Not including expenses. Just taken in. I’m the cook; I know how many orders we get. Whatever we’ve banked, it ain’t great. And it’s not including the money he is supposed to pay me, because to this point, I haven’t been paid. On the way home yesterday, he said, “I know you’re owed money. So far we haven’t made as much as you’re owed. I don’t know what to do about that.”
I didn’t reply, and half of me thought, I’m getting fleeced; get me the fuck out of here. All this damn sweating, all this time spent in hell, and nothing to show for it. Cut your losses. And the other part, probably the part of me that Mom raised, has no quit in him. So I’m back here, a day later, hoping we finally take in some money so I can get mine.
Jordan starts loading the truck from the refrigerator and freezer in the garage, and I guess I’m supposed to just go ahead and help, as usual. But instead I just sit on the dirt of the front yard and watch. Watching Jordan move is just — he’s graceful. The way those long, thin limbs break through the air, so effortless. What I wouldn’t give to move like that, to not be so bulky.
For once, I don’t get up and go, take over. I sit and watch. It’s all I can do. This is just … Mom says insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that’s the definition, then we are being insane.