The next night, after she had returned home from work, she took a small washbasin from under her bed and filled it with warm water from the bathroom sink. She tipped a few drops of peppermint oil, seven dollars at the health food store in Chattanooga, into the tub and carefully carried it back into her bedroom. She took off her shoes and socks, her feet slightly swollen and aching from standing all day long, and soaked them in the tub. She leaned over to open her nightstand drawer and produced a notebook, the front of which simply read Baby in black Magic Marker. She had seen a pregnancy journal at Walmart, but it was eighteen dollars, and so she found a reasonably similar template online and copied it into this blank notebook, saving herself more than sixteen dollars. She flipped through the pages until she found today’s date at the top and then listed all the food she had eaten that day, her weight and waist size, and then looked at the question that she had written in the middle of the page: What were the best things about your parents as parents? Her pen hovered over the page, unsure of how to proceed.
Izzy’s mother had been a beauty queen, Miss Tennessee in 1985; her talent, though she had a beautiful singing voice, was a ventriloquist act featuring her dummy, Miss Tenny C, who told beauty pageant jokes. Her mother was so beautiful in her youth that people would stop her on the street to tell her this fact, but she was also slightly weird, spending a good portion of her free time in high school reading UFO journals and seeking to debunk questionable sightings. She was studying veterinary medicine at Middle Tennessee State University when she and Izzy’s dad, who had been a high school baseball star and was now playing Single-A ball in Tampa, Florida, found out that she was pregnant with Izzy. Catherine, Izzy’s mom, dropped out of college and, as if ordained by god, Izzy’s father tore up his pitching arm and was forced to give up baseball and move back to Coalfield, where they took out a loan to open the market where her father still worked. And in the months leading up to Izzy’s birth, her mother rarely left the house, and started smoking even more, weighed down by a kind of pre-partum depression. After Izzy was born, though, it seemed to rejuvenate her mother, finding a child who might be able to fulfill the dreams she had missed out on in her own life. Izzy’s mother taught her how to read at age three, had her writing complete sentences the year after that. While her father was at work, Izzy and her mother spent the days engaged in a strenuous, though unstructured, lesson plan. Whenever Izzy complained, her mother would kiss her, pull Izzy into her considerable bulk, as if trying to smother her child, and say, “You are special, Izzy. That means life will be harder for you than other people. It’s even worse because we’re your parents and we don’t have much to give you.” Izzy would tell her mother that she didn’t mind, didn’t need to be special, which would make Izzy’s mother grind her teeth and shake her head. “You do need to be special, sweetie,” she would say. “Being special is what’s going to save you.”
Izzy’s mother was working on a vague, book-length manuscript debunking history’s most famous UFO incidents, staying up well into the early morning hours, taking diet pills and amphetamines to stay awake, before she continued her homeschooling of Izzy during the day. Izzy asked to participate in the research, to at least sort the piles of pamphlets and weird photocopies of government documents that came in the mail, but Catherine gently refused, saying this work was hers alone. When Izzy asked why UFOs were so important to her, Izzy’s mother replied, “I don’t like the idea that there are other worlds where life could be better for me. I want to make sure they aren’t there, that this is all I have.”
When Izzy was thirteen, her mother died of heart failure brought on by her morbid obesity and her use of stimulants. Izzy was, thank god, not the one who found her, slumped over her desk, pictures of UFOs taped to the wall. She woke up one morning and her father was standing over her, two policemen and an EMT behind him. “Where’s Mom?” she asked, and not a single one of the men responded.
After her mother’s death, Izzy went into the attic and retrieved Miss Tenny C, who looked vaguely similar to Izzy’s mother when she was a teenager. She would sleep with the dummy, carry it everywhere with her, making it talk, saying the things that Izzy’s mother no longer could. While she and her father would sit in the living room, eating lukewarm fish sticks and watching late-night TV, Izzy would operate the dummy, Miss Tenny C saying, over and over, “You are special, Izzy. You are so, so special.”