Carrie
The gaudy gold stripes on my bedroom wall feel like bars on a cage. I despise this wallpaper, the over-the-top crown moulding and everything else my mother insisted on. At least white was in this season, because the delicate and feminine end tables are the one stylistic refuge in this tacky bedroom. I keep all my valuables — my journal, the book I’m currently reading — on the table, trapped in this world as much as I am.
I look to the TV for some further refuge. I want to be anywhere but here. I flick on the morning news to distract me.
I touch the simple white gown I’m wearing for graduation today. I want look pretty, but the more I rehearse my lines for my valedictorian speech, the more Mother’s disappointed look presses back into my memory.
“We are all starting new steps toward our future.” I pause. How can I get my own words wrong? “We are all taking new steps toward our future today.” I start again and then I just sigh. All my peers care about is getting to the bonfire party on the beach tonight, and all my mother cares about is that I’m not going to look like her idea of pretty.
I hear Mother’s heels clicking down the hallway and she bursts in the door.
“That can’t possibly be your makeup!” she shrieks. “You have to do something else with your hair, that’s so boring.” I can tell that’s trying to make me feel sorry for her with her pouty face.
No, of course my high school graduation and my valedictorian speech, they aren’t about me.
“What would you like, Mother?” I ask, making my tone even despite the fact that I don’t care what she wants. Why should I care? I could burst into and she’d bitch about how my eyes were getting puffy. When I picked out this dress, I liked how simple it was. White, elegant even. I felt like I was taking a step toward my future when I tried it on, just like my cheesy speech today. I felt like I got to have one thing that was me.
My mother pulls out a trunk of makeup and hair products and widens her eyes at me like I’m exhausting her. She comes at me with makeup brush after makeup brush, sprays at least three different things in my hair, and I sit there, tuning out the headlines mostly.
I hear something about a billionaire committing suicide. “…In a rising trend of wealthy men who, despite having everything, chose to give it all up…”
I’d say that you can have it all and still not be happy, which is stale and tacky, but mostly I see how my parents clamor for fame and treat money as their god, and I wonder… what else is there? What do I want? Why must the first steps I take toward my future be about what dress to wear? I’m an adult now. I did well in school, I’ve been accepted to several colleges and yet I feel devoid of anything to care about. But you can’t get far by only deciding what you don’t want. Getting anywhere in life has got to involve going after what do you do want, and I still don’t know what that is.
“Turn that off, the news is so depressing,” Mother says.
Something we actually agree on. I turn off the TV.
“Don’t move your face. I’m contouring here, you want your face to have cheekbones, not be a round blob, right?” Mother asks.
I try not to laugh. How did women deal with having faces before they drew lines all over them? It must have been so terrible. But I do actually like the way my face looks when she blends the shades. “That looks great, Mother. Thank you,” I say, moving my face as little as possible.
“I’ve tried to teach you this. You could do it yourself if you pay attention to the things I try to teach you.”
Mother’s eyes narrow when she looks at my speech. She’s not proud I’m valedictorian. “At least you can go to that party tonight and try to make some friends. You need to build a network of important people, you can’t keep your nose in a book. Get a boyfriend. Get girlfriends. Make your life matter!” Mother starts to attack me with a very large makeup brush with white powder all over its tips. I try not to cough at the dust clouding the air around us. “Give me that,” she says, and she crumbles up my speech and tosses it across the room. “No one cares about your speech.”
Mother is probably right. Even I don’t care much about it.
“These shoes have to go. Heels, why is it so difficult to get you to wear heels. Wear flats when you’re sixty, don’t waste a tight young ass.”
I bend and remove my shoes.
Mother produces some incredibly high heels from the pile of things she’d tossed on my bed. “These,” she says, thrusting them forward.
I take them and try not to tremble, standing into them. I feel so small, wearing these towering shoes.
“You don’t have to look like a social failure,” Mother says. I’m pretty sure those words are meant to be uplifting. “Join us in the car.”
I follow her. My father is on the phone and doesn’t acknowledge my presence at all. That’s typical of our interactions, they’re non-existent. I won’t have to be around my parents when I go to college, though. I’ll be glad to be away from them both. I doubt they will miss me, and I know I won’t miss them.