In the dressing room of Banana Republic my mother sits on a stool holding hangers, buried under cashmere. “Just try this one on for me,” she says. All three walls are mirrored. I look at me looking at me looking at me and so on. This is what I look like. This is the back of my head. This is one side of my face. This is all I am. “Come on, just try this last sweater on,” she says. “Do it for me.”
Turtleneck sweaters, all of them. One is taupe, another green, another royal blue. I pull one off, ball it up, and hand it to her. Next. She weighs in on each item, inspecting the stitching, the color against my skin, the way the fabric drapes over my body.
“That color isn’t flattering on you.”
“That one goes with your eyes.”
“That one is meant for someone with a bigger bosom.”
“This isn’t my style,” I say of everything she’s picked out. “Well, what’s your style?” Ribbed sweaters, spandex, baby tees with lace collars. I want to go to Urban Outfitters, but she won’t go there because they make her check her purse and she doesn’t trust strangers with her purse. She’s not crazy, she says.
“There is another little store up the street that I want to take you to,” she says. No more. I feel a tantrum coming on.
I once read that before you have a seizure, you taste almonds in your mouth. Not a bitter bilious taste that rises up when you’re panicked or feverish, but something softer, almost a treat.
The salesclerk’s heels appear under the dressing room door. My mother asks for a smaller-sized sweater and opens the door to hand over the larger version.
A mirrored ray of my pale, bird-boned body blasts through the opening.
It is followed by my mother’s schoolgirl giggle. “Oops.”
She runs her eyeballs up my body and smiles, pleased. When she catches herself in the mirror, hunched under sweaters and hangers, she straightens herself up.
“I worked in a store like this once,” she says. “A boutique.”
I know this story, but it’s one I like. The store was called Apples, and when customers would come in, she’d help style them, finding a belt to match the dress they had selected, or choosing a blouse she thought might flatter their frame.
The idea of my mother working exists in a parallel universe. It’s hard to imagine her as someone who stood behind a register in the service of strangers. She has never had a job in my lifetime. She gets her easel out sometimes and paints. She keeps busy. All day she picks lint off the floor, off my sweater, out of my father’s hair. She tightens the sheets. She folds and sprays and scrubs and makes piles.
“I keep things in order,” she says. She never says, “I don’t care anymore.” Never stays in bed and pretends to be sick.
She buys things and then returns them. She paces in the kitchen on the phone. She plans out dinner, vacations, every after-school activity, the expansion of our apartment, our world. “My job is you,” she says.
I once read that manatee mothers are the most protective of their calves. The baby swims underneath its mother’s flipper. If a predator comes between them, mother will offer herself up as prey to protect her baby.
I saw my first manatee on a pamphlet left on a chaise longue by the pool at my grandmother’s Florida apartment complex. It was chopped up evenly into slices by the blades of an engine motor. “Save the manatees,” the pamphlet read, and went on to detail all the brutal ways humans have treated them. In one instance, a mother manatee was skinned, and when her calf was spotted swimming over her carcass the following day, he was captured and skinned as well.
When I returned from the pool, crisp with a sunburn, I sat in my nightgown on the plush ivory rug in my grandmother’s living room. My grandmother sat beside me in her armchair facing Perry Mason, as the horizon of Hallandale Beach turned violet. When I felt something drip in my underpants and down one leg, I ran into her bathroom and saw the thin stream of mucus with red hairline streaks between my legs.
“You’re a woman now,” my mother told me when I opened a balled-up tissue to show her. “Tell Grandma,” she said. And when I did, Grandma laughed.
“Don’t tell Dad,” I asked my mother, though she already had. This is what people talk about when they talk about the anxiety of puberty: the conflict between disgust and elation. Something is changing inside you, which is healthy and messy and bloody. It’s a secret everyone can see.
When male manatees experience puberty, tusks pierce through their skin.
“Get this one.” My mother is holding up the royal blue turtleneck sweater in the dressing room. I hate it on me. It’s saggy and loose and too preppy. I look like a middle-aged yuppie. But if I fight her on it, she’ll want to continue shopping, and I can’t look at myself in the mirror anymore. I can’t see her looking at me in the mirror.
At home, shopping bags in hand, my mother makes me try on the blue sweater for my father, who is lying on the green couch in the library flipping channels. I am of the mind-set that my father doesn’t care about fourteen-year-old fashion, while my mother insists the man should see what his hard work has paid for. So I pull the sweater over my head and present myself. When he sees me, his eyes fill up with blue. “What a beautiful sweater,” he says. “Is that cashmere?” My father brushes my side with his fingers to feel the fabric. I pull away.
“A hundred percent,” my mother says, yanking a tag from my neck.