The Symptoms of My Insanity (2 page)

“Izzy, does it fit? Is it too tight? Is it pressing on your
shoulders?” Mom is determined that I be well supported. Before I can respond, she and the Russians start conversing about my breasts as if they’re having a deep political discussion.

I watch my mom nod her head at the Russians while checking out her nails in the fitting room mirrors. I try to focus really hard on taking what my art teacher Miss S. calls “mental snapshots.” She says we go through life so fast and that a good way to remember stuff is to try and take pictures with our mind. Lately, whenever I do something with my mom, I feel like I’m back at summer camp and it’s the last day when everyone’s all sad and thinking things like,
This is the last time we’ll eat lunch at the mess hall, this is the last time we’ll hear the announcements by the flagpole,
which is so stupid because this is not the last time I’m going to go shopping with my mom. She’s not dying or anything, she’s just sick.

Not that you would know it by looking at her. My mom is really good at hiding things. She can wear tons of makeup and make it look like she’s not wearing any at all. She’s also really good at keeping herself immaculately put together at all times. Her shoes always match her shirt, her shirt always matches her purse, and her nails always match her shoes, shirt, and purse. Her lips are always perfectly lined, her clothes are never wrinkled, there’s never anything hanging out of her nose, and she always makes sure that she has no food in her teeth before she leaves the house, even when she’s just getting the mail. I can hardly wake up with enough
time in the morning to brush my teeth and make sure I have on matching socks.

“I still think you are sisters every time I see together.” Svenya looks from Mom to me and back again.

Mom waves a hand, trying to eat her smile. She’s in her forties but doesn’t look a day over thirty, so I hear this “sisters” thing all the time. But honestly, I really don’t see how anyone could possibly think I’m my mom’s daughter, let alone her sister. My older sister, Allissa, is the one who looks like Mom. They both have light brown hair, blue eyes, no curves. I have jet-black hair, dark brown eyes, and—according to my mom’s friend Pam, who swears it’s another compliment—“God-given birthing hips.”

Mom says I take after Dad’s side of the family. Which is just great because that means I might have inherited my dad’s mid-life-crisis chromosome. Like one day when I’m forty, I’m going to move across the country and marry someone half my age. Yay.

Mom’s always saying how I look just like dad’s mom, Grandma Rose, when she was sixteen. She dug up and showed me an old picture of her and, she’s right, I do. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that now Grandma Rose is a four-foot-ten-inch-tall, eighty-three-year-old woman with gargantuan breasts that take over her entire bra-less body. Really, I should just bolt out of Lola’s Lingerie right now. What’s the point of spending money on bras when I’m going to end up a short, eighty-three-year-old woman with dangle-boobs?

Mom’s still fielding compliments from Svenya, who’s clicking her tongue against her teeth and shaking her head. “You too skinny now. Never have the weight put on. Every time you here, you look like more skinny.”

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mom demurs, stepping away from the mirror. Svenya gives her a “whatever you say” shrug and leaves the fitting room to dig through the old-lady bra bins for my size. Mom is digging through her own pile of merchandise.

“Look what I found out there, Izzy. Isn’t this cute?”

She holds up a cream-colored, floor-length, flannel nightgown decorated with pink bunnies, as if to tell me that although I may have the body of a grown woman, I’m still going to dress like a six-year-old.

“Mom, no. I’ll never wear that.”

Twenty minutes later we’re leaving Lola’s Lingerie with six new double D underwire bras and one floor-length, bunny-covered, flannel nightgown.

There are four seasons in Michigan. Winter with snow, winter with rain, summer, and winter with falling leaves. This is one of those uncomfortably cold, winter-with-more-winter kind of days.

Mom and I are now standing in the parking lot of Lola’s Lingerie, and she’s reapplying her lip gloss in the car’s side mirror with one of the fourteen shades of pink she bought today. Just when I think she’s done, she takes out another tube of pink from her purse.

“Can’t you put that stuff on inside?” I ask. “Gimme the keys.”

“Hold your horses,” she manages to say while using her lips to blend.

For my mom, going out in public with un-glossed lips is like wearing dirty underwear or forgetting to put on deodorant. Once I tried to count the number of times she reapplied her lip gloss in the course of an hour. I got up to seven before realizing that collecting lip-glossing data was not the most productive use of my time.

“I think this shade of pink is more festive than this one,” she declares, holding up both tubes of gloss like they’re paint chips.

“What?”

“For the Dance for Darfur centerpieces. See the difference? This one, the festive pink, is more what I had in mind.”

“Yes, yes, let’s talk about it in the car.”

Mom is one of the co-chairs for the Dance for Darfur Holiday Ball happening at school right before winter break. I think it’s great that all of our school dances are combined with fund-raising, but it’s not so great when your mom’s in charge. My freshman year was the Children’s Literacy Luau. I was forced to collect donations from my classmates in giant pineapple-shaped bowls and wear so many layers of leis, I looked like I had on a fake-floral neck brace. So fun.

Mom finally puts the glosses away and checks her lips one last time in the car’s frosted side mirror, but then she pauses, catching my reflection.

“Why did I buy you that nice winter coat if you’re not going to button it up?”

I’m not in the mood to tell her that my bionic boobs have already made it impossible to keep my coat closed.

“Did you wear that sweater to school today?” she asks with a sigh so big, it smokes the winter air.

No, Mom, I changed outfits in the girls’ bathroom before you picked me up to go shopping. It’s all part of my master plan to never wear the same outfit for more than six hours.

“Yeah, I wore this to school. Why? What’s wrong with this sweater?”
Can you tell my right breast is frighteningly bigger than my left?

“Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s cute. It’s a little suggestive, but cute.”

Suggestive
is my mom’s all-time favorite word, and due to the arrival of my newly measured 34 double Ds and my God-given birthing hips, I have learned two things: 1) Everything I wear looks suggestive, and 2) When someone looks “suggestive,” the thing that they are suggesting is sex.

So yeah, I’m not surprised my mom’s calling me suggestive in a strip mall parking lot while we inexplicably stand outside the car in the freezing cold. I hear it all the time. I hear it in the morning before I leave for school:

“You can’t wear that to school. It’s suggestive
.”

“Mom, it’s a button-down shirt
.”

“Well, you should have bought a large
.”

“This IS a large
.”

I hear it at night before I go to bed:

“I really hope you don’t plan on wearing that tiny little suggestive T-shirt anywhere but to sleep
.”

I even hear it in Yiddish:

“Izzy, what is that?!”

“It’s a tank top, Mom
.”

“Well, take it off. It’s suggestive. You look like a
nafka.”

Nafka,
by the way, is Yiddish for “a loose woman.” When I was little, I thought my mom was fluent in Yiddish. Turns out she was just using the same seven words over and over
again. This is her Yiddish vocabulary:
chazzer, nafka, mishigas, vildeh-chiyah, meiskeit, bissel,
and
shpilkus
. They mean (respectively): a pig, a loose woman, craziness, a wild animal, really ugly, a little bit, and nervous energy. I’m waiting for the day she uses them all in one long, ungrammatical sentence: “Ugh, Izzy look at that
nafka
over there eating that donut like a
chazzer
while her
meiskeit
, tattoo-covered
vildeh-chiyah
boyfriend drinks that large coffee and really, I don’t see how he stands it—even a
bissel
coffee in this
mishigas
mall gives me
shpilkus.
”

I hold my coat closed with my hands. It’s starting to snow now. Doesn’t she understand that my body is noticeable no matter what I wear? And no matter how I walk? Once my mom told me that she thought I
walked
suggestively, that I stuck out my chest too much, which was just asking men to look at me. But I swear I just walk like any other person.

“Mom, it’s not my fault my sweater’s suggestive.”

“Izzy, people don’t see things that aren’t on display.”

She punctuates that sentence with the same facial expression my sister, Allissa, uses when she thinks she’s tapping into the depths of my psyche and telling me I need therapy. (Allissa’s in college and she’s really into her Abnormal Psych class, so she thinks she’s really cool when she says things like,
“You need therapy”
or
“Your behavior is way too self-reflective.”
I’m not a big, important college student or anything, but I always thought that self-reflection was the whole point of therapy.)

My mom’s still giving me her Allissa-Psych-101 face, even
after I tell her that I’m not trying to be on display. “Why would I want to be on display?!”

“I’m not saying you
want
to draw negative attention to yourself,” she explains. “I’m just saying that unfortunately you can’t get away with wearing just anything like other girls your age. Your body delivers a very specific message, whether you want it to or not.”

Oh God, not the “message” talk.

“Fine Mom, I’ll just lock myself up at home and never leave the house.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I just want you to be aware. That’s why we did this today.” She smiles at me proudly. “Once they’re supported properly, you won’t draw so much attention to yourself. You’ll see.”

There are so many things I want to say back to her, but I can’t. I’ve lost the ability to argue with my mom. What if I end up saying something really overdramatic and awful, like scream out “I hate you!” and then she dies and that’s the last thing I ever say to her? Not that she’s dying or anything. I just hate that she thinks I want all that attention from guys. Because I don’t. I just want to be left alone.

“What are you doing?” I ask when I see Mom still hasn’t unlocked the car door and instead is leaning against it rummaging around in her purse. It’s snowing harder now, making her black purse fabric look white and fuzzy.

“Forgot we have to stop at Arbor’s and get my medicine,” she mumbles, nodding across the parking lot to the drugstore. “Aha,” she says, pulling papers out of her purse. “Two
new prescriptions, one refill.” She hands them to me. “So while you take care of that, I’m going to run next door to Farmer Jack’s and get milk. Oh, and toilet paper. Oh, and shampoo. Oh, and we need chicken, ice cream, fruit and …” She continues rambling off a giant shopping list as she walks back across the freezing parking lot to Farmer Jack’s Grocery, turtling her head down and pulling up the collar of her coat to protect her hair from the snow.

I head over to Arbor’s Drugs. This is what I do: prescription pickup/drop-off. Broomington isn’t exactly a huge town, and although my mom is anything but antisocial, she doesn’t like people knowing her personal business. I always tell her that I don’t think it matters which one of us goes, since I doubt Mr. Neil thinks I’m the one taking the estrogen and calcium and the heartburn stuff, and the tons of other pills that have names I can’t pronounce and that Jenna says go for more than two hundred dollars apiece “on the streets.” I don’t really know what “streets” she’s referring to since she’s never left the suburbs, but she does watch a lot of
Law & Order.
Mr. Neil’s been filling Mom’s prescriptions for years, from when she first had all her hardware taken out—ovaries, uterus, all her tubes, the whole factory—and had to go on hormone pills when I was too small to remember. All the way up through this past summer, when she had her big stomach surgery for the slow-growing cancer they found. Mom tells me that of course Mr. Neil knows all the medicine’s for her. That’s why she doesn’t go in, so she doesn’t have to answer any questions.

I drop off the prescriptions and wander over to the magazines. I grab one and remember that I need to get a new math notebook since I spilled orange juice all over mine this morning. So I’m thumbing through some celebrity tabloid and walking down the aisle, which is probably why I totally collide with someone. The magazine flies out of my hands, does a sideways dive into the shelf, and there’s a huge clatter as products rain down around me.

“Sorry,” I mumble, squatting to collect everything. When I look up, I’m staring at an epic and very familiar jaw—square, slightly stubbled, with a tiny chin scar-dimple on the lower left side. It belongs to Blake Hangry.

I stand up slowly, and place three overturned boxes of anti-diarrhea pills back on the shelf.

“Hey! Izzy! Aw man, did I get you? Sorry!” Blake smiles at me, takes a swig of what’s left in his open bottle of Gatorade, and gestures to my neck and coat, now covered with sticky electrolytes. Then a Celine Dion ballad starts playing from inside his coat pocket. “What the—I’m gonna kill those guys,” he says, rolling his eyes and pulling out his cell. “Hey,” he says into his phone and then turns to me with another smile and one finger up, as if to tell me to hold on for a minute, like the two of us have more to say to each other.

Blake Hangry and his dimpled jaw are smiling at me. Again. For the past few weeks, I’d been thinking of reasons why.
He’s thinking of a funny joke in his head,
or
He’s looking at someone right behind me,
or
He’s spotted half my lunch stuck inside my teeth
.