I was alone, in a hotel room, when a ghost played a trick on me so niche and inexplicable that even if someone was inclined to believe that I had, indeed, been visited by a ghost, they would not believe what this ghost had done.
For the sake of credulity, I would have preferred to be classically haunted. Bed levitation, underwater foot grabs, demonic dolls, head spinning, phantom choking, projectile vomiting. At least then I’d know what to do—smudge the room, call a demonologist. DM a producer on Ghost Hunters and offer up my tale of vengeful spirits for dramatization resulting in niche viral fame and a profitable career as a ghost influencer.
I was on vacation in Daytona Beach, Florida, with my immediate family. By failing to find long-term partners and produce offspring, my sister, Shannon, and I had inadvertently prolonged childhood into our forties. We were our parents’ grandchildren—they spoiled us with Christmas gifts and funded our annual trips. We went to Disney World, where they waved from outside the Briar Patch as Shannon and I hurtled down Splash Mountain, soaked and screaming. To Colonial Williamsburg, where our mother made us dress up as wenches for an old-timey photo shoot. To Las Vegas, where Shannon passed out drunk on a gondola ride. And now, to Daytona Beach, where my father was having a heart attack.
Later that day, when I approached the beach, I found my parents and sister sharing a platter of buffalo chicken wings and sipping blended cocktails. The sky was a taut cloudless blue. As I reached for a wing, I began to explain my encounter with the ghost, which I was admittedly excited about in the same way Christians are hyped on being chosen by God, so it was an honor, really, but before I could finish, my father gripped his left shoulder and fell backward in his Tommy Bahama chair. His face reddened and a vein popped out of his forehead, as if he was being strangled by an unknown hand.
As the baby of the family, I was often ignored, usurped, and I couldn’t help but smart over the interruption, even as my father convulsed in the sand. I collapsed to my knees and gripped handfuls of scorched shells like an angry toddler, probably, in some shameful yet all-too-accessible corner of my mind, for the attention, acknowledgment. “Dada,” I said, reflexively.
“Paul! Paul!” our mother shouted, a drumette trembling in her hand.
“Oh, my, God, what is Dad doing?” Shannon said, as if a public heart attack was intolerably crass. A Vogue magazine, covered in buffalo sauce, was splayed across her spray-tanned lap. She was using it as a plate.
Crowds ran over. People asked, “Is anyone a doctor?” Absolutely not. Everyone was drunk and nineteen. Or drunk and part of a multi-level marketing scheme. A dubious diet-tea brand was hosting its annual convention at an adjacent hotel on the strip—dubious, I knew, because I nearly shat myself in a yoga class after an old high school classmate guilted me into buying a thirty-day pack of the cursed powder. Eventually, an ambulance blasted through the dunes. The EMTs strapped Dada onto a gurney and loaded him into the back. We did not think to jump in, like they do in movies. Blame a maternal line of bad knees, plus we were wearing women’s bathing suits, which aren’t designed to accommodate pubic hair, let alone appropriate for sitting in cold plastic hospital chairs, and required a wax appointment. When the beautiful Ukrainian aesthetician finished ripping paper strips from my groin, she said, “Butt crack extra twenty.” It wasn’t a question. That’s how they upsell you, by offering a service as a statement that you have no choice but to internalize as a physical defect you’ve failed to notice all these years. I said, “Okay,” and she lifted up my legs by the ankles and spread hot goo between my cheeks. With its nerves newly exposed, my butthole could be felt at all times—responding to the slightest draft, the smallest fart. I did the sign of the cross as the ambulance shrank in the distance, though I did not feel the presence of God, but the presence of my butthole. Months after, in a therapy session, I learned that my butthole fixation was a trauma response (avoidance), as was suddenly calling my father Dada at age forty-two (regression). And also stealing one of those novelty T-shirts screen-printed with the torso of a big-breasted woman in a string bikini from a boardwalk gift shop and wearing it to the hospital (depersonalization).
“He almost died,” the doctor later said, except there is no such thing as “almost dying,” just like there is no such thing as “almost finding a litter of kittens under the hood of your car.” Either you’re dead, or you’re not. Either there is a litter of kittens under the hood of your car, or there isn’t. But reality is emotionally unsatisfying, so we hyperbolize to close the chasm between fact and feeling, which is to say: the following story may not be entirely true.
In 1990, our mother was driving Shannon and me to ballet class. We were changing in the back seat of the car, shimmying out of underwear and pulling up pink tights underneath sundresses, because we were running late—and still are. Time is too slippery a concept for us to take seriously. We’re unimpressed and therefore unhurried by its passage, which has the adverse effect of making us look like failures. Yes, we’re in our forties and without husbands, children, property, or even lapdogs, but the peers who’ve reached those milestones are living our worst nightmare as much as we’re living theirs. At school, they called us the Witches McIntyre, for our long dark hair and sunken, sleepy eyes. When, instead of being insulted, we leveraged the title to improve our wardrobes with black velvet dresses from Contempo Casuals and silver-plated ankh jewelry, they called us the ugly Witches McIntyre. But children have awful taste, no sense of beauty or poetry in their tacky little souls, because Shannon was scouted by a model agent at Spencer Gifts, where we perused the adult aisle of glow-in-the-dark butt plugs and Kama Sutra playing cards while pretending to shop for lava lamps. She soon began appearing in the Macy’s advertisements that fell out of the newspaper every Sunday.
A psychologist diagnosed us with something our mother never divulged. “If I tell you, you’ll live up to the symptoms,” she had said. We were both terribly behaved and a kind of well-behaved that bordered on fundamental Mormonism, in that we’d throw tantrums at the slightest inconvenience—an itchy tag, the wrong brand of cereal—yet would call our parents the moment alcohol materialized at the parties we rarely attended. We preferred our own company. No small talk, no questions. A shared contented silence.
Elton John’s “Rocket Man” was playing on the car radio when we heard the faintest “mew.”
“What was that?” our mother asked.
“Martha?” Shannon offered. She pulled up her tights, then her leotard, and unwrapped a Lunchables, but I had only managed to take off my underwear.
“Martha!” I cried. Martha was our housecat. She was unusually submissive, the Weekend at Bernie’s of cats. I would strap a baby bonnet around her chin, prop her up in my doll’s highchair, and spoon-feed her air.
“Shhh.” Our mother held up a hand to silence us. This time: muffled mews, as if Martha was wearing the lyrics—it’s gonna be a long, long time—as a dark, heavy cloak.
The world felt itchy and unsafe. Martha was mysteriously trapped in the vortex of a melancholy song, and I wasn’t wearing pants. I let out a wail, which startled Shannon and sent her Lunchables tray flying. Cheese squares and ham rounds landed on the crumb-littered car floor, our laps.
“Girls, calm down!” our mother shouted.
Shannon screamed. A performative horror-movie scream. As the older sibling, she was rarely afforded the looseness of emotion that I was as the baby, so she took advantage of the escalating chaos to soundcheck her vocal cords. Meanwhile, our mother was unraveling within the shoddy template mothers reach for, despite their better judgment, in moments like this: desire for control, followed by abject failure, resulting in loss of control, i.e., our mother screamed, too.
“Martha is my baby girl,” I said through sobs. I peeled a sweaty cheese square from my thigh and ate it to comfort myself as mews continued to sift through the lyrics. Rocket mew man.
“Did Martha have kittens and hide them under the hood of the car? I swear to God Paul got her spayed,” our mother muttered to herself. She had begun to apply logic to the scenario, which was promising, but then Shannon rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and, in a droll baritone, shouted, “Martha got fuuucked.”
“Shannon, shut up. Shut up!” our mother pleaded, beating the steering wheel.
Children misbehave, mothers pull over on the highway. So that’s what we did.
Okay, the ghost. In my suitcase, I found two Imperial Dragon pajama tops. Yet no pants. Frightening because I owned only one set of Imperial Dragon luxury pajamas. On my fortieth birthday, I began investing in $250 silk pajamas because they made me feel like a correct woman, as opposed to, I guess, a wrong woman—not in the gender dysmorphia sense but in the life dysmorphia sense, where I believed I deserved to be someone else entirely and needed the right alchemy of consumer items to manifest my real self. I owned multiple pairs in various patterns—English Garden, Abstract Impressionist, and, yes, Imperial Dragon—with no repeats, making the appearance of two pajama tops from the same set not only impossible, but supernatural. What if my sister had been dead the whole time and I’d been hallucinating her? Maybe after our mother pulled over on the highway, Shannon was hit by a Mack truck and died. My sister, now a ghost, was acting in service of the universe’s desire to see me pantsless: in the car, at Dada’s heart attack, and, finally, unconscious, as in asleep but also dead. I would die without pants on.
Except Shannon was not dead. She was an office administrator at a med spa, where, at a steep discount, she received Botox and Juvéderm and lasers that peeled away the top layer of her face to reveal inflamed pink flesh, and thus was always asking men in the service industry to guess who the younger sister was. They always guessed me—not because I looked younger, but because, as the little sister, I give off baby vibes, in that there is something inherently pathetic and helpless about me, an aura of pantlessness, I suppose, which might explain how I got away with shoplifting the T-shirt.
Once the ambulance hauled Dada away, Shannon and our mother hurried to the parking lot to retrieve the car, willing to make do with damp towels cinched around their waists, a necessary sacrifice considering the circumstances, but I stayed several steps behind, as afraid of what lurked ahead as I had been in the car that day: a dead cat then, a dead father now.
“I have to go back and cast out an evil spirit,” I called to them, but they ignored me. “Or it could be benevolent. I don’t know yet.”
“Good idea,” our mother said without turning around.
“Grab everyone a change of clothes,” Shannon added.
I walked along the boardwalk, past the scene of Dada’s heart attack, where another family had replaced ours. A couple, symmetrical in their stoutness, sat in the Tommy Bahama chairs my mother purchased on sale at Kohl’s for this vacation. Their two small children built crude sandcastles at their feet. The beachgoers who had either helped or gawked returned to their sand-caked Bud Lights and Frisbee games. A trio of little girls sat in the swash zone and shrieked in delight each time the tide rushed underneath them. I passed a gift shop called Sunsation and went inside. I admired a glittered starfish ornament, then a pretty pill box forged from an iridescent seashell. I fingered a rack of T-shirts that rotated between themes of sexual harassment and women’s empowerment—For My Next Trick, I’ll Need a Condom and a Volunteer; I’m a Bad Beach; I’m Better Looking When You’re Drunk; Girls Just Want to Have Sun—until I came upon the big-breasted torso. I shook it off its hanger and slipped it over my tankini, which I was wearing not because I was modest but because I had been hiding a Sagittarius tattoo on my pelvis from my parents for twenty-two years. The T-shirt fell just beneath my butt cheeks, like a minidress. I had traded my body for a new one and felt relieved.
“Looks amazing,” the salesgirl, a tanned teenager with brassy blond hair and a septum ring, called from the cash register. “Wait until you see the back.”
I turned around: a pert butt in a thong, complete with a butterfly tramp stamp.
The salesgirl put her hand on her hip and stared at me. “It has body posi vibes.”
“Posi vibes for whose body—mine or the one on the shirt?”
“I don’t know,” the salesgirl said, reconsidering. “Maybe it’s misogynistic.”
“I hate my body,” I said.
“Don’t say that—you have a beautiful body,” she said, before adding, “for your age.”
“But I like hating my body,” I said. “It’s funnier than loving your body, like ha-ha, look at me, I’m so ugly.”
“That’s toxic.” The salesgirl disappeared behind the counter to return something—probably a zirconia Playboy belly button ring—to the glass display case.
“I like this body better,” I said, but she didn’t hear me. Without thinking, I walked out of the shop in my new shirt.
The only other time I ever stole anything was from the woman who kidnapped us, but considering she kidnapped us, it was more quid pro quo. Our mother pulled over on the highway, yes, but she also returned to the road without us—along with my underwear on the floor of the car—leaving me naked underneath my sundress. When an elderly woman saw two twig-legged children hiking up the interstate, she stopped her car and rolled down the window. “Yoo-hoo, girlies,” she said. “Where’s Mama?” She wore a floppy straw hat and a jacquard turquoise jacket over a purple housedress. Too bleary-eyed and bereft to respond, we only shrugged. She reached across the car and swung open the back door of her Chevy Impala. “Chop-chop,” she said. “I’m your new mama.”
A ragged teddy bear hugging a heart was suctioned to one of the rear windows and a miniature disco ball hung from the ceiling. “That’s in case we crash and you boop your head,” she said, pointing to a grease-stained towel duct-taped to the dashboard. “I’m Rhonda.” We never had a grandmother—both of ours died of cancer, one of lung and the other of colon, before we were old enough to remember them. While Shannon remained skeptical, I trusted this woman implicitly—she took safety precautions, had the good sense to decorate her car, and dressed with flair. She smelled like sausages and department-store perfume. It’s impossible not to want to be hugged and fed by a woman who smells like that.
“Where are you taking us?” Shannon asked.
“Jail,” she said, laughing. “To prison we go!”
“We don’t want to go to jail,” Shannon said.
“Well, the ole penitentiary is where you’re headed, girly,” Rhonda said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s where I did time for eating little girls.”
Shannon whimpered, and I patted her leg. Comforting her, as the little sister, gave me a taste of power I had never experienced, so I leaned into it; I tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then kissed her on the cheek.
“Gross,” Shannon said, pushing me away.
“I’m just kidding, stupid,” Rhonda said, cackling. “Too many calories. I usually eat salmon and broccoli. Good for the skin and digestion.”
“See, she’s just kidding,” I whispered to Shannon. “She’s a funny lady.”
“Your breath smells like cheese,” Shannon said.
Rhonda had stuffed the slots of her air conditioning vents with Andes mints to keep them from melting in the hot car. She tossed two to the back seat. We unwrapped and ate them greedily, despite having been subjected to a multi-platform “don’t-take-candy-from-strangers” campaign: at home, at school, on television. She threw the cold Andes mints at us until the vents were emptied and we arrived at her house.
Like Shannon, I was an office administrator. I worked for a cosmetic dentist and, as a result, had beautiful teeth: Invisalign and three rounds of Zoom whitening. “They look like dentures,” Shannon said. “No personality.” She was jealous because the snaggle tooth that was adorable in her youth, glinting like a glass shard from back-to-school Macy’s ads, made her look haggard and unwealthy in middle age. Really, we were secretaries, but the title had gone out of fashion long ago, probably around the time “secretary” became a porno-movie trope. Google “secretary” and you’ll find page after page of horny women unbuttoning their blouses in the vicinity of industrial printers. Secretaries were now managers or executives or administrators, burly, important-sounding names that men didn’t want to put their dicks inside. An administrator doesn’t do doggy style or sixty-nine. They file your taxes and tell you to stop laughing, which is emasculating, and being emasculated makes men overcompensate with sexual harassment—so, secretary or administrator, slut or shrew, a clammy hand will find its way to your knee.
As children, Shannon and I played office—we’d put on our mother’s pantyhose and say, “Hello, this is McIntyre Incorporated,” into a banana—so I was living my childhood fantasy. My terminal complacency was bankrolled by my belief that life could reverse course at any moment—and I was running out of currency: youth, looks, time. While we never pursued ballet professionally, Shannon and I had parlayed our posture, stage presence, and discipline into careers that made use of them: front-of-house staff. I assumed my station would be temporary. Then I turned twenty-nine, thirty-five, suddenly forty-two. What surprised me about aging is that desire has no mercy—mine hadn’t waned or softened in a show of dignity, like I expected; it only dug itself deeper, out of sight, away from shaming eyes, mostly my own. If my desires, as capricious and intangible as they were, could not be tamped down, they could at least be obliterated by something greater than myself, like religion or a cult that sells executive success programs in exchange for your life savings and, if you’re enthusiastic enough, communal fellatio performed on a flossy-haired man. Or, in my case, a ghost.
When I returned to the hotel room, I hoped that I had not been mistaken. I hoped that I’d find two pajama tops, in Imperial Dragon print, size medium.
I remember chintz. Floral wallpaper, floral curtains, floral upholstery—all disintegrating, all clashing. Tiffany lamps on brass-legged tables. A chipped chinoiserie cabinet bowed underneath the weight of an ancient, dusty TV. Thick mauve carpet, a toy Yorkie furiously chasing its tail. The scent of urine with notes of cardamom and something industrial—Glade? Two towering black lacquered bookcases stuffed with porcelain laughing Buddha figurines and silver-framed photos of the Yorkie. An antique baby carriage was parked in the dining nook. Rhonda’s apartment made me sick; not because I hated it, but because I loved it, and I knew it was wrong to love it, though I wasn’t sure why. I had only the vague sense that it transgressed traditional beauty or norms, like being aroused by images of naked Neanderthals in my science textbook, and that what I craved would always reveal me as damaged in ways deep and irreversible. Rhonda’s apartment was, for lack of access to better content, my Versailles.
“Mi casa es su casa,” Rhonda said. She sat down on the sagging floral sofa and ate from a crystal bowl of Jordan almonds on her coffee table but didn’t offer us any.
“Where is our mom?” Shannon asked. We stood in the middle of the living room, swallowed by its ramshackle majesty.
Rhonda didn’t answer. She said, “Get in there,” and gestured to the baby carriage.
Shannon and I looked at each other, confused.
“The little one,” Rhonda clarified. “In there.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. I crossed my legs, self-conscious of my lack of underwear.
“She doesn’t want to,” Shannon said.
“She doesn’t waaant tooo,” Rhonda repeated in a snide singsong tone.
We expect mockery from fellow children, our formless and helpless equals, but there is something uniquely shattering about being mocked by an adult, the first hairline crack in the protective glass dome of your perceived specialness. Once, when I was contentedly sucking my thumb in the back seat of my mother’s car, a grown man in a pickup truck pulled up beside us at a stoplight and taunted me by sticking his own fat thumb in and out of his mouth, miming what I later understood to be a blowjob. Up until that moment, I believed that I was inherently precious, a thing born purely to be loved and caressed to sleep, but that man showed me what a disgusting idiot I actually was, so I wasn’t surprised when Shannon, learning this, too, about herself, burst into tears. I clutched her hand in solidarity over how disgusting we both were, but she wrestled out of my grip.
“Oh, grow up.” Rhonda threw a Jordan almond in our direction, and we swerved out of the way. It bounced off the carpet. “What are you, fifteen?”
“I just turned twelve.” Shannon sniffled.
“Well, you look thirty.” Rhonda got up from the couch with a grunt and approached the baby carriage. “Come on, don’t you want to push Sissy around the neighborhood and show her off like a beautiful little baby doll?” she asked Shannon. Rhonda was a lofty woman—in size, in decor sensibility, in persuasion.
“I’ll go in,” I said meekly. “For a little bit.”
“That’s the spirit!” Rhonda said.
I retrieved a small red step stool by the bookcases and set it beside the baby carriage, that rusted relic with its tattered striped awning, the Yorkie—“Dookie Bear,” Rhonda called him—yapping at my feet the entire journey, which seemed inevitable in a foreboding way, as if my fate was to end up in some random hollow not of my choosing. Rhonda clapped her hands and cheered me on. With the help of the stool, I heaved myself over the side of the carriage and cartwheeled my skinny legs inside, where I landed in a tightly balled fetal position, looking desperately to Rhonda, hopeful I’d given her what she wanted, but she was screeching and pulling at her cheeks; the inner flesh of her eye sockets glistened, and she appeared monstrous.
“Hideous!” she cried. “Just hideous! What the hell is wrong with your mother?
In the maneuver, my skirt had billowed to reveal my prepubescent labia. My heart jumped at the accidental exposure, but I wasn’t ashamed until Rhonda reacted as if a rat had skittered across her bare foot.
There was definitely something wrong with our mother. She had left two girls on the side of the road, and now her nine-year-old daughter had been cajoled, by a compelling though terrifying old woman, into a rickety baby carriage, where she lay shivering not from chill, but from fear, vaguely grasping at something—escape, a dream? No, a thing cold and hard and sharp; it felt like a ring. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked.
I was not mistaken. The two pajama tops were where I had left them, discarded on the bed with a scare. Two pajama tops, I thought dumbly. What could it mean? Abundance? Yes, I decided. I was finally attracting abundance into my life, like Oprah had proselytized from the television as I did my homework after school on so many afternoons. I recalled her advice to keep a gratitude journal and opened the Notes app on my phone. I lay on the bed and typed “vanilla skim latte” (I got one from Starbucks every morning) and “new lamp from West Elm” (I got a new lamp from West Elm), then stopped, because the exercise made my life seem even smaller and stupider, so I scrolled through other people’s lives to make myself feel either better or worse, depending on how debased the day’s algorithm was. On Instagram, a disgraced pop star gyrated soundlessly in her palatial mansion in an endless loop. On TikTok, a ponytailed woman did a dance while telling a story about how she got her first period at Bible camp and, not yet privy to basic anatomy as a result of purity culture, put a tampon up her butt and engaged in a day’s worth of water sports and Jesus-themed crafts. On Facebook, an old high school classmate posted a picture of her young family in their foyer, on the way to some kind of terrible sporting event, hockey probably, and I noted how ugly their home was: tawny limewashed walls like a rustic Italian restaurant in a strip mall. Then I noted how ugly the family was: pallid lumps in drab polycotton blends.
The world was so ugly, and I was so mean. I closed my eyes and scrolled through the internet of my mind—what was even in there? Apparently, the comedian Gallagher smashing a watermelon, then inevitably Carrot Top shouting at an unfunny prop. Next, that mother who set herself on fire in a ravine, her charred body clutching a small tree. Diane Sawyer interviewing a girl who was imprisoned in a backyard shed for twenty years and remarking on how gorgeous her skin looked from the lack of sun exposure. Martin Bashir shopping with Michael Jackson in Las Vegas, how the wan megastar purchased over one million dollars’ worth of tacky gilded urns, which made me think of The Real World: Las Vegas. Shannon and I had both auditioned to be cast members; we were always auditioning for things—fringe theater productions, local commercials, movie extras—waiting to be discovered so that someone else could do the hard work of bringing us to fruition.
Was this all that made up who I was? Like, as a person? My mind was a trash receptacle I carried upon my neck but not without dignity: I was long and slim but because I did no cardio and suspected I had too much estrogen, I remained soft. I had a high-contrast face that grew less pretty and more handsome as I aged. I owned a tasteful wardrobe of contemporary designer fashions from Saks Fifth Avenue that put me over ten thousand dollars in debt.
Before I left for the hospital, I googled every cast member of The Real World: Las Vegas. Trishelle, the gazelle-like twenty-two-year-old, was now married and living in Louisiana.
“See, she’s right there,” our father reassured us, pointing to Martha’s usual spot underneath the dining-room table after we returned home, though I don’t recall how we got there, only that our mother was inconsolable and, for the first time in our lives, he had to ready us for bed. He assumed the role of caretaker like a dramatic reenactment actor—every gesture was more conspicuous and awkward than it needed to be and pandered to the stupidity of his audience: us. He offered us “bear rides” on his back to our shared bedroom, but we refused. “Ever been burritoed?” he asked as he burritoed us into our blankets. He grabbed a book—Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—from Shannon’s nightstand and read it aloud in a small, shrill voice. He blushed at the part where a character ravishes her pillow. We cringed through his father performance, desperately wanting it to end so we could return to our real lives of a mother and her two daughters. It had been a long day of kidnappings.
Finally, he kissed each of us on the forehead. “Try your best,” he said, which is what he always said at departures, though looking back now it’s clear that it was less an encouragement than it was a secret plea that we would not fuck up our lives in the ways we did.
The next morning, our mother toasted Eggos as if nothing happened. It was a Sunday and she left us to our own devices. We ate a fun-size bag of Starburst and watched ten hours of television, whatever was on in those days: movies we had seen dozens of times; shows we loved, like Life Goes On; and shows we hated, like America’s Funniest Home Videos. During the latter, perhaps because it was thematically appropriate, or perhaps because her veil of guilt and embarrassment had begun to lift, our mother explained that the radio station had forgotten to turn off the sound in the studio while “Rocket Man” was playing. The DJs were preparing for their next segment with the local animal shelter, and the meowing we heard was from the litter of kittens they brought in to seduce the community to either adopt or volunteer. “We almost found kittens under the hood of the car!” our mother said, out of control with laughter.
In the hospital room, I took a selfie and uploaded it to an app that describes images with AI technology: An institutionalized woman, grim expression, looking old, long slender face, large painted breasts.
“Do I look old?” I asked Shannon. We were sitting side by side in the only two available guest chairs, leaving our mother to occupy the edge of Dada’s bed.
“I can’t believe you’re wearing that.” Shannon looked at me. “And that you brought us nothing to wear.”
“Girls your age practically play teenagers on Netflix,” our mother said. A nurse had given her a hospital gown to wear over her bathing suit.
“Mom, middle-aged women do not play children,” Shannon snapped. In the harsh lighting of the hospital room, her spray tan looked cheap and blotchy. Dark orange spots pooled between her cleavage, her fingers.
“Remember when you girls used to audition for things? You could have been on one of those shows,” our mother said, cheerfully. “There’s still time.” She moistened Dada’s lips with a sponge pop.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Shannon said.
Dada was in a medically induced coma, and we were each sharpening the blades of our coping mechanisms distinctly. Shannon had become caustic and cruel, our mother had become diabolically serene, and I had become delusional, possibly hallucinatory, and cruel, too, but in my own way. I was fantasizing about the paid time off I might be entitled to and drafted an email to my boss: “Dear Dr. Mann, my father is dying,” it began. “I am devastated. Please understand that I won’t be able to return to the office for weeks, maybe months.”
“Poor Dada,” I said aloud to redeem myself.
“Dada?” Shannon groaned. “You’re demented. You need help.” I could tell she thought I was leveraging my status as the baby to garner attention and sympathy. But I wasn’t. This was a trauma-induced tick that I had no control over, according to my future therapist.
“If they cast real minors, it would be pedophilia,” our mother continued.
Shannon guffawed.
I stared at Dada. He looked not younger but less old and more weird, like a Real Housewife pumped with too many facial fillers, his sunburnt skin eerily smoothened by bloat. Truthfully, his comatose state was symbolic of his waking state. He was always both there and not there. I was seeing symbols everywhere.
“I found two pajama tops in my suitcase,” I said, finally.
“Maybe if I knew what was wrong with me, I’d be famous,” Shannon said, referring to our diagnosis, as she often did. “On TikTok, a woman in STEM with ADHD did a dance about how she’d be a receptionist if she hadn’t had all the special accommodations afforded to her by the literal law. I’m a receptionist.” She folded her arms and turned her body away from us.
“Honey, you’re an executive.”
“I could have been a woman in STEM,” Shannon said.
“And the pajama tops were from the same set,” I continued, before adding, “We got D’s in science, Shannon.”
“Because we have ADHD,” Shannon said.
Our mother waved her hand dismissively. “It wasn’t ADHD.”
“What was it, then?” Shannon pressed.
“Something, something or other—I can’t remember. It had absolutely no effect on your life!” The bed shook with the force of her exasperation, thus shaking Dada, but he lay there as silent and unmoved as he would have been if he were awake.
“But I only have one Imperial Dragon set!” I said, raising my voice this time.
“Yeah, it did,” Shannon said.
“No, it didn’t,” our mother said.
“No one is listening to me,” I said.
“Call the doctor then,” our mother said. “If that would make you feel better about your life choices, be my guest.”
“That psychologist was in his seventies in 1988. He’s dead. His office is a Chipotle now,” Shannon said.
“It was definitely a ghost,” I said.
“Our pajamas got mixed up in the wash, dumbass,” Shannon said.
We had spent the night at our parents’ house the day before the trip so we could all leave together the next morning. Our mother asked us if we wanted to throw in a load of laundry.
“But you don’t have the same pair,” I said, disbelieving. I wanted, more than anything, and like everyone, to be chosen—and if the real world and, yeah, The Real World had refused me, a paranormal realm would suffice, especially one whose ghost had a taste for high jinks and not, say, decapitating me.
“Mom gave them to me for my birthday,” Shannon explained. “She asked me if I liked them and if she should get you a pair, and I said yes even though they’re ugly.”
While I had put over one thousand dollars’ worth of silk pajamas on my Bank of America card, my mother did give me that particular set for my birthday.
“Everything I do for you two and this is how you behave,” our mother said.
“You left us on the side of the road,” I said, joining Shannon in turning on her, because that’s what a mother can be for: projecting a lifetime of dejection onto her every foible, no matter how ancient, until the day she dies, as unfair as it is, but we didn’t ask to be born. “Resulting in our kidnapping.”
“What?” our mother said.
“A crazy old lady named Rhonda traumatized us for an entire afternoon and you never did anything about it,” I said.
“Rhonda, who lived in the cul-de-sac? I haven’t thought about her in years. A funky woman.” When she said “funky,” she did a strange hand dance. “She worked in the garment district in New York City before she moved to our neighborhood to care for her sick mother. And she wasn’t old. She wasn’t even fifty.”
“Whoever she was, she kidnapped us,” I repeated.
“Sort of,” Shannon added.
“I never left you on the side of the road,” our mother said.
“You did,” I said.
“Wait, she was in her forties,” Shannon said, incredulous. She examined her face in her phone’s camera.
“What does it matter now?” Our mother brushed Dada’s thinning hair off his forehead. “You never saw her again.”
“Stop touching him,” Shannon said.
“He’s not a statue in a museum,” our mother said. “He’s your father.”
“I can’t believe you won’t admit it,” I said.
“Don’t be so hard on Rhonda,” our mother said. “She had mental problems, which is why when she accused you girls of stealing her dead mother’s engagement ring, I said, ‘You’re crazy, lady, my daughters are beautiful ballerinas.’ You made me look like a fool!”
“We have mental problems,” Shannon said.
“And now, because of you, I’m a kleptomaniac,” I said, pulling at the boobs on my shirt. “I was never made to account for myself! All I do is google things, or watch women, like nurse practitioners and social workers, do educational interpretive dances about various ailments, all of which I likely have, like Asperger’s and fibromyalgia.”
“Yeah,” Shannon said. “That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time.”
“That’s an awful shirt, honey.”
I wore that ring every day until it somehow vanished, possibly placed on a food tray at a McDonald’s where I accidently dumped it in the trash, like so many of my retainers, and once a beeper in high school. Before I lost it, a waitress at Denny’s approached our booth and told my mother that when she saw the engagement ring on my finger, she wondered if I was a dwarf, or if I had a rare disease that kept me in the body of a small child, until she realized the truth was much simpler: I was an actual child wearing an engagement ring.
“If I take off the shirt, he’ll die,” I said, and left the room.
I collapsed in one of the chairs in the waiting room. My bare thighs swamped out on the vinyl. On the Formica table beside me was a stack of old catalogs some nurse must have discarded on her way into work, thinking what—that product shots of walnut cutting boards and premium pear gift baskets might provide emotionally distressed family members like me comfort? I eagerly flipped through a catalog that sold reprehensible clothing somewhere on the spectrum between vaguely Republican and vaguely New Agey for not women over fifty but a cruel idea of women over fifty. Copy describing floral-print sack dresses, knee-length sweaters, and flowy asymmetrical blouses read, “Add je ne sais quoi to your wardrobe with our Parisian collection.” The models looked happy, smug even. They were smirking and thinking about nothing and wearing clothes with give. When I closed the catalog, I noticed the address was scratched off, though not enough that I couldn’t search it on Zillow. Geneviève Will—the rest of her name peeled away—lived in a $675,000 single-family home nestled in the exclusive Seaside Serenade community. She had a lemon tree. A pond with ducks. Bitch, I thought, and opened my Gmail app to finish my email to my boss:
Dear Dr. Mann,
My father is dying. I am devastated. Please understand that I won’t be able to return to the office for weeks, maybe months. Upon his death, I stand to inherit half the Bitcoin he purchased with my and my sister’s wedding funds. While its worth has declined by 90%, the sale would be enough to cover my living expenses in Paris for a few months. A random woman on House Hunters International moved to Paris and I am a random woman, so why not me, too. The woman said, “I am moving to Paris to start a blog about Paris called ‘An American in Paris.’ ” I, on the other hand, plan to become a model for mature adult catalogs—no, not pornography, but as part of the “advanced age” division of a French modeling agency. So, yeah.
I know what you’re thinking, what the world thinks of me. She’s pathetic. She’s a useless old bag who should give up and die. Model for a catalog? Ha! More like stuff the pages of a catalog into her yapping idiot mouth. Or, better yet, use them as kindling for her cremation, i.e., kill her off already! You get the idea. Well, I’ll never, ever give up, bitch (I mean bitch as in the royal bitch, even though you and Geneviève whatshername are, indeed, bitches). Even when life gets hard and I’m crying and crying like I am right now in this hospital waiting room. I’m crying for everything that’s happened to me but more so for everything that didn’t. I’m crying and hoping we all get a tiny piece of a tiny piece of whatever it is that we want, no matter how foolish or impossible it is. All we can do is try our best.
Many thanks!
Ashley
I blew my nose into the collar of my boob shirt, then discarded the draft. 
Margaret Meehan is from Florida and lives in New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Common, Fence, Joyland, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. Her work has been supported by Tin House and the Hemingway House. She is currently working on a short story collection and a novel.
Illustration: Dylek Baykara.
