Flannery (4 page)

4

It's a Thursday evening and Miranda and I are in the mall parking lot. That's as far as we've got.

I've turned the truck off but my mother's fingertips are still pressed against the dash, as they have been the whole way to the mall, as if to keep her from flying through the windshield.

There is no need for you to look as white as a piece of paper, I say.

Have I mentioned, my mother asks, how much I hate shopping?

You don't have to shop. Just wait for me to shop, so I don't have to get the bus back. And you've said yourself that I need the driving practice. You can take your hand off the dash now, by the way. I've turned off the ignition.

I'm just waiting for my heart rate to go back to normal, she says.

So I had to slam on the brakes a few times. How was I supposed to know the guy in front of me was going to stop like that?

The stop sign, Miranda says. Is a good clue. I don't like the mall, have I mentioned that?

You've mentioned, I say.

Have I said that in North America we search for meaning in our lives through conspicuous consumption? We spend, therefore we are. This behavior is akin to spiritual annihilation.

You've said.

Have I told you about how when I was sixteen, not so very long ago, and when I did shop, I went shopping with my girlfriends? It's a thing you're supposed to do with your girlfriends. Not your mother. Have I mentioned that?

Yes, you said, “That's what you have girlfriends for.”

Absolutely. That is the job of girlfriends. And I've indicated that I am not a girlfriend. I am your mother. Mothers cannot be girlfriends with their daughters. They are mothers. I mean, maybe later in life, when the mother is an old lady and she has a little cloudy glass with her dentures in it on her bedside table and the daughter has six daughters of her own, maybe then they can be friends. But not when a daughter is only sixteen. When a kid is sixteen, a mother is a mother. I'm sure I've explained this.

This won't take long, Miranda.

I don't want to go in there, Flannery.

We enter the mall, I say. I buy the bathing suit. You sit on a bench or browse in the bookstore. You wander the food court. I come out of the bathing-suit store with my purchase and we exit the mall. Resume our driving lesson. Is that asking too much, Miranda? Can you help me here?

Miranda says, It is unnatural. Have I said that? Mothers and daughters shopping together. Completely unnatural.

It goes on like that. She won't get out of the truck. The thing is, according to Miranda, all single mothers hate the mall. She says malls were invented to make the single mother feel bad. She is
the single mother
. She's still got her seatbelt on and she's viciously scratching her wrist.

See, she says, holding out the reddened wrist for me to examine.

You are not breaking out in hives, I say.

Yes, I am, she says. Look.

Okay, Mom. Fine, I say. I only call her Mom when I'm really annoyed.

She sinks her chin down into the collar of her coat, which is a voluminous faux-leopard-skin number, a true find from the Sally Ann back when she was in art school. (My mother calls all her clothes “numbers.”) Right now her shoulders hunch in her leopard-skin number and she's frowning and pouting and her brow is wrinkled up.

Don't do that with your forehead, I say. You'll need Botox.

Miranda begins to hum something under her breath. It might be Nirvana's “Come As You Are.”

Look, I say. Do you want me to take Felix swimming while you work out or not? That's why I need the stupid bathing suit. My old one doesn't fit and it has see-through patches from the chlorine. I don't have enough money to get the bus back, and besides, I need the driving practice. If you want, you can stay in the truck. Wait for me in the parking lot.

But I know as I'm saying it that Miranda will never go for that. She hates sitting still, and the only thing worse than the mall is the mall parking lot.

All right, my mother says. You asked for it. She flicks open the glove compartment and rummages around inside. Pulls out her tiara, jams it on her head all askew.

She flings open her door so it bounces back on the hinges, her seatbelt slithering up like a rearing snake. She's out, striding across the parking lot. The red lining of her leopard-skin number flaps around her knees.

Maybe I should have left Miranda out of this after all? But I'm out of the truck too, running to catch up with her.

I leave her at a booth with a very petite Korean woman who does manicures and has a display of false nails with teensy false gems and paintings of palm trees at sunset and ones that have fluffy kittens.

Miranda's face lights up. Flannery, look. Little masterpieces!

Unlike my mother, I actually love it here at the mall. Some of my fondest memories happened here.

When I was twelve, we all used to catch the bus to the mall and hang out. Miranda thought I was at art class. Miranda did not believe the mall was a healthy, creative environment for girls or young women.

My mother, Miranda Malone, believes that we have a duty in this world to live creatively.

If she only knew how creative we were at the mall!

We bought Krazy Glue at Walmart and glued condoms to the floor. We tied a piece of fishing line to a wallet and hid behind a pillar and whenever someone tried to pick up the wallet, we gave the fishing line a yank. We all squashed into the photo booth and hooked our index fingers into the corners of our smiles and pulled them wide and crossed our eyes. Every third picture, our eyes were closed because of the flash.

We'd go to the food court and drink milkshakes, too weak from laughing to lift the cup off the table, so we'd slouch over instead and lower our lips to the straw, sucking back hard to make very loud straw-in-the-empty-wax-paper-cup noises.

And Christmas. The loud crowded mall at Christmas with big bulbs hanging from the rafters and new leather chairs at the Second Cup and Muzak carols and Chris Moose — the Christmas moose who trots around the mall in his big furry suit, a basket of candy canes dangling off his front hoof. We'd run around playing hide-and-seek, the whole gang of us — Brittany Halliday and Brittany Bishop and Amber and Elaine Power and Jordan and David and everybody. Running from the security guards, who didn't want us loitering. Or, if the security guards were on a break, we'd just give in to being lazy, half-blinded from coming out of a matinee movie, and we'd slink into Sears and squirt perfume samples — we didn't care if they were for men or women — on each other's wrists. Scents with names like Irish Tweed, Truth, Midnight Poison. Spraying until we couldn't smell anything at all.

That is the mall when you don't
have
to actually buy anything. A shopping trip for a bathing suit is an entirely different matter.

Buying a bathing suit is a traumatic event if your boobs are big enough to require the term voluptuous. The whole enterprise is bringing back some not-so-wonderful memories of my childhood visits to the mall. Like coming here with Miranda to buy my first bra.

The saleswoman asked Miranda how old I was. I was eleven.

It's the milk, the saleswoman announced for everyone in the store to hear. Hormones in milk and beef. Children are developing too fast.

I had specifically asked Miranda to not ask for help.

Can I help you with anything, ladies? said the woman.

Oh, yes, please, Miranda cheeped.

The saleswoman had silver hair, a fountain of curls scraped into a big pompom on the top of her head. Her own breasts looked pointy and cone-like, and her eyes, sleet-gray, bore into me. She came at me with the measuring tape that had been dangling around her neck, pulling it taut between her hands, making it snap several times.

Let's see what we're dealing with, she said.

I don't think that will be necessary, I said.

Hands up where I can see 'em, she said. I raised my hands in the air. She leaned in and reached around my back with the tape, drawing me close to her. She brought both ends of the measuring tape together at the midpoint between my two breasts. Then she looked shocked by the information the measuring tape had revealed. She clucked her tongue and shook her head, as if I had grown voluptuous breasts on purpose.

I have to wear my underpants while trying on the bathing suit. And here I am in purple Lycra that looks like a sausage skin, my white cotton underwear hanging down below the bathing suit's high-cut hips and the thin little shoulder straps are as weak as over-boiled spaghetti.

But the next suit, a hot-pink number, is not too bad and it's on sale.

And then I'm out of there with my new suit in a plastic bag, looking for Miranda.

She's not at the manicure booth anymore.

Finally, I see a blur of leopard-skin print in the crowd ahead of me. I elbow into a loose circle of people and there's Miranda in the middle, standing under a huge flat-screen TV. She twirls around on one heel and she's clutching a remote in both hands, her arms out straight, and it's pointing right at me. Then I hear a loud buzzing and something smacks hard against the top of my head, and there, also, is the top of my head on the monstrously big flat screen.

It's a toy helicopter drone with video capacity, whizzing up now through the mall rafters, the images on the screen rocking wildly from side to side, the tops of people's heads, walls tipping, the escalators seeming to swing left and right like hanging bridges. I see the display stack of all the drones in boxes with plastic windows on their fronts reflecting the fluorescent ceiling lights. They are piled very high in two pillars behind Miranda.

The salesman in charge of the display is saying how you can record with your phone and live stream all over the world, even as you shoot.

The drone is zipping down and juddering up and spinning, as Miranda sways the remote above her head and circles her arms and swings it to the left and right in violent sweeps. The video on the flat screen shows people jolted up and down as though in the middle of an earthquake, ducking out of the helicopter's path.

After several twists and pirouettes, the helicopter zooms directly toward Miranda's own face, full speed ahead.

There's Miranda on the screen, laughing, gasping for breath, her wild blonde curls loose all over her shoulders, the big grin with the gap between her two front teeth, and her freckles. Her tiara glittering, shooting out spears of pink and blue light. And then the picture freezes — just Miranda's tiara up there, enlarged, big as an iceberg and she ducks and the drone hits the display pillar behind her and boxes topple all over the floor.

Everyone begins to clap.

Miranda straightens her tiara and gives a little curtsy. She hands the remote back to the salesman, who is bent down, picking up the pieces of the smashed helicopter. The little engine cuts in and out, buzzing and choking and finally going quiet.

That was so much fun, Miranda says as she strides out of the mall. And I managed to get a picture of the tiara up there on the screen, did you see that? Did you get your bathing suit?

Miranda calls the tiara her thinking cap. She wears it everywhere. My mother has agreed to take part in a conceptual art project. She has to wear the tiara for at least a little while, every single day for a year and take photographs of herself in different locations. Six women from six different continents are taking part in the project, each woman wearing a tiara every day for a year and taking a daily photograph.

Miranda read about the project in the back of a feminist magazine that they sell at the health food store and applied to be the subject from North America.

Miranda was chosen, she says, because of her feminist ideals and because she is a single mother and for her talents as an artist, her ambition and creativity and her commitment to the environment and because, I have suggested, nobody else applied from North America.

They don't have anybody from Antarctica, though I also suggested they probably could have found a talented, ambitious, pro-environment feminist penguin if they'd looked hard enough.

We're hurrying to the down escalator — it's almost six-thirty, time to pick Felix up from his karate class — and there are a bunch of people in front of us and Miranda is grilling me, sort of loudly, about the bathing suit. How much did it cost, and did I get one I liked with lots of support, and she hopes it doesn't have underwire because she's heard that causes breast cancer, and just when I wish she would stop saying the word
breast
so loudly in public, I catch a glimpse of a certain jean jacket with a Clash patch sewn on the back, riding the up escalator. My heart does a leap like the gazelles flying through the plains of Mongolia that I watched on YouTube last night when I was supposed to be doing math.

I almost shout out to Tyrone — we
have
to talk about our unit for the Entrepreneurship project. The proposal is due at the end of September and it's already September 19th. I've Facebook-messaged him and tried his phone, but he hasn't answered me back and he hasn't been in class all week.

Then I notice a girl on the step right behind him. The girl is wearing brown suede moccasins and a vintage patchwork suede coat. She's beautiful, with all this tumbling hair, dyed like a parrot, streaks of orange and magenta and pink, and is she or isn't she with Tyrone O'Rourke?

Meanwhile, Tyrone and I are like ships passing in the night. I crane my neck all the way around, and Miranda is going on now about how she's been to plenty of topless beaches where all you needed in the way of a bathing suit was a little bikini bottom which is sensible, because then you get a tan on your breasts, but nude beaches are even better, because then you can tan your buttocks, and I'm trying to see if this beautiful girl is
actually
leaning against Tyrone, which it sort of looks like, and she's chewing gum and blows a giant bubble and Tyrone turns, because she's nudged him with her shoulder to show him the bubble, and without a word but looking straight in her eyes, he pokes his finger into the bubble.