“Illusion never changed/ Into something real” —Natalie Imbruglia, “Torn”
Dana crouches before a storage bin in a clammy corner of her basement, a glass of Chardonnay weeping a wet circle onto the ironing board cover. It’s long past midnight, and upstairs her two daughters have been asleep for hours. She doesn’t quite know what compelled her to snap shut her laptop and head down here in search of the pair of jeans she’d worn all throughout her senior year of high school. She suspects the third pour of wine had something to do with it, but she knows it’s more than that. It has something to do with her mindset lately: so dreamy and weepy and distracted that if she hadn’t been celibate for the past year and a half, she would have gone out to CVS and bought a pregnancy test.
Like the rest of her home, Dana’s basement is neat and sparse. When it comes to her wardrobe, she has always adhered to Oprah’s command that if she hasn’t worn it for a year, she has to donate it—which is exactly how she knows these jeans, which she hasn’t worn for twenty years, are down here somewhere. Time and time again, while culling her closet through the numerous moves of her young and not-so-young-anymore adulthood—dorm room to Chicago apartment to New York apartment and back to Chicago, into her and Rudy’s first home, then to their second, “forever home”, and finally to a different, rented home when forever turned out to be only a little more than ten years—she’d purposely hung onto them. Or at least she thinks she did: her memory has been for shit lately. Sometimes Dana wonders if it’s the nightly wine taking its toll, or the hundreds and hundreds of sleepless nights—both Leah and Melinda took years before they slept through without waking—or could her mind, at thirty-eight, already be showing the deteriorating effects of age? So when she discovers the jeans, folded neatly beneath a Christmas-themed table runner and still smelling—or is she imagining this too?—of Tommy Girl, she lets out a joyful little yip, her eroded faith in herself briefly restored.
The jeans are light-wash Bongos, size twenty-six, super low rise and bootcut, with rhinestone seaming across the back pockets. Dana is confident they’ll still fit her because over the past couple years she has somehow managed, through a combination of depression and distraction, to become skinnier than she was at seventeen. So she is surprised, when she drops her running shorts and pulls the jeans on, to find that they don’t. The legs, which once clung like onionskin to her plump, unmarred teenage thighs, hang loosely, but she can barely get the waistband over her hips. She has to use force to wrangle the button shut and yank up the two-inch zipper. Her white and puckered belly bulges out all the way around, and she wonders if people still say “muffin top,” if that’s still a thing.
She glances at her phone and winces—as usual, she’s stayed up far too late, and as usual, she’s going to pay for it when her alarm goes off in five short hours. She will battle her way through the chaos of the morning—the spilled cereal and packing of lunches and signing of field trip forms—with ten milligrams of Celexa and half a pot of strong black coffee. She tries not to complain about it, not even inwardly, because this is what she wanted; this is why she fought so hard for near-total custody of the girls. Still, she wonders sometimes, as she’s tearing the house apart in search of a Despicable Me water bottle—the one without the yellow lid, Leah reminds her with a passionate wail—what Rudy and Sofia’s morning routine looks like. Do they languish in their beds, scrolling through the news? Do they make avocado toast? Or do they save their time and energy for the kind of dream-like, quiet morning sex Dana would miss if the Lex hadn’t largely blotted out her ability to achieve orgasm?
Once she’s pulled down her T-shirt and struck a pose in the full-length mirror propped up against the concrete wall, Dana decides that despite her waistline issue, the jeans still look pretty decent. She and her Bongos always made a great team. How many times she’d worn them, complimented by a cheap going-out top with a name brand like Lipstix or Young Hearts or Chica’s Secret, and stepped out into the wild, unpredictable night! With the benefit of hindsight, Dana now sees that her teenage rebellions were mostly conventional and toothless, but at the time they’d felt so exciting, so wild and uncharted. There were always parties, and bars that looked the other way at passed-back IDs, and if they didn’t, she and her mildly delinquent friends could find a way to sneak in. With these friends, all of whom she’s since lost track of, there were intense cross-legged conversations about Bill and Monica, Kosovo, the Chicago fucking Bulls!; there was laughing until her mascara ran; there was bawling into the cordless phone, screaming across a Dominick’s parking lot at a rival group of girls from the grade below her, ducking away from a chucked flask of Rumpleminze at a warehouse rave somewhere in the beige wasteland of unincorporated suburbs ringing O’Hare airport; there was dancing in weed-clouded basements to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, one hand always trailing smoke from a Parliament Light, the other wrapped around a cold can of whatever Joey and his friends had managed to peg at the liquor store.
Dana had loved drinking back then, the way it unshackled her from all of her tedious sensibilities. Twenty years later she still loved it, though of course this was now something that made her feel immature and ashamed. For so much of a girl’s life, she must strive to be fun, until she reaches an age when “fun” becomes a pejorative, smacking of desperation and trashiness, bringing to mind the image of, say, an early middle-aged woman who thinks she might, despite extremely sporadic and not very taxing workouts at her local YMCA, still be able to pull off a pair of super-low-rise jeans.
“Mom!” comes the call from the girls’ room. Dana sighs. She reaches for her wine glass, holds the warmed, oaky dregs in the hot cave of her mouth, then heads upstairs.
Both of her daughters are awake, lying on their backs, their perfect faces upturned to the glow of the dark galaxy they’ve affixed, against landlord rules, to the ceiling of their bedroom. Seeing them there in the dark, waiting for her to come to them, fills Dana with a love so intense it overwhelms her. She senses the folly of pinning all of her joys on these two, ages five and nine, who might one day be sitting around at their own party or bar counter and wave away the offered sweating bottle, saying no, I hate wine, it reminds me of my mother.
But, for the moment anyway, there is nothing to forgive. They are hers. She squats down to place a loving hand on Leah’s forehead.
“Bad dream?” she asks.
“Mo-om!” Mel’s giggle pipes into the darkness. “What are you wearing? I can see your whole butt.”
•
Dana remembers reading somewhere that nostalgia begins to kick in twenty years after the remembered time, and if this is true, it explains a lot about her current state of mind. In the days after she tries on the Bongos, whispers of that particular era of her life begin to rise up all around her, like tongue-pierced, spray-tanned ghosts. One morning she gets in the car to go to work and discovers the radio has been switched from NPR to a station that used to do classical jazz but is now called Y2K FM and exclusively plays pop and R & B from the turn of the millennium. On her half hour drive to the office, Dana hears Ja Rule, Semisonic, Brandy, Natalie Imbruglia, and even that KC and Jojo song that in 1998 everyone pretended to despise but actually secretly loved. The words to all of these songs come back in totality—no worries of lost memory here!—and she finds herself shouting along in the gridlock, unselfconsciously and with real joy. By the time she pulls into her parking spot outside the firm where she works as a human resources manager, she is sweating and pantingly happy, wondering if she’s having a midlife crisis or perhaps experiencing the earliest signs of menopause. Then again, she wonders, why does it have to be a medical or psychological crisis? Is she not allowed to have simple, uncomplicated bursts of happiness anymore?
The next evening, while on a shopping expedition to Nordstrom, Dana and her daughters are flagged down by a gorgeous golden-skinned MAC girl with massive ear gauges and lavender lipstick.
“Mom,” the girl calls, brandishing a contour brush, “a minute of your time?”
Dana hates when anyone other than her children calls her “Mom,” which is even more desexualizing that “ma’am.” But she nods distractedly. She is so tired today, and she has to drop the girls at Rudy’s by six or he’ll scold her like she’s one of his more intractable eighth graders.
“Your features tell the most beautiful color story,” says the MAC girl, whose nametag reads FALCON. “I would love the chance to play around with your face.” This offer sounds so hostile and intimate that Dana finds herself ushered into a black director’s chair without much protest.
“I’ll bet,” Falcon says, opening one of her little drawers and handing over a long glass vial, “you remember this.”
“Wait.” Dana’s voice is hushed as she takes the cool cylinder into her hands. “Is this Lust?”
Falcon nods and smiles, her matte lavender lips peeling back over her teeth.
“They still make this?”
“Limited edition re-release. A few of our most popular Lipglass shades from the late ’90s.”
As her daughters gather around her, Dana submits herself to the tickle of Falcon’s arsenal of brushes, each doing its part to rehab the drab façade of her face. She even agrees, at Melinda’s pleading, to have fake lashes glued onto her eyelids. The Lipglass, the final touch, smells and feels exactly as she remembered it—chemically vanilla and tacky as maple syrup. Joey used to hate when she wore it—it left a mess all over his neck and mouth—but seeing as her kissing days are on hiatus, with no end date in sight, Dana doesn’t see the harm in accepting Falcon’s suggestion of a second coat.
“OMG, Mom,” shouts Melinda as Dana opens her eyes and looks uncertainly into Falcon’s mirror. “You look like a Kardashian!”
Dana smiles. She knows that, coming from Mel, this is the highest of compliments. She buys the Lipglass, along with some waterproof mascara and a criminally overpriced jar of wrinkle cream. “Treat yo’self!” her daughters yell as the purchases are rung up, and, after posing for a picture to appear on Falcon’s Instagram story, Dana and her daughters head for the children’s department, where she proceeds to she buy them outfit after outfit after outfit.
As they’re piling back into the car, laden with bags, Dana’s phone pings. It’s a Facebook friend request, along with a short message, from her high school locker partner, who, like most people she’s not already connected with on social media, is a person whose existence she has completely forgotten. And yet, now that he’s reached out to her, she remembers George perfectly: his green rubber-banded braces, his chin zits, his unexpectedly muscled forearms. His insistence, for a period freshman year when they’d read “The Interlopers” in English I, that people start calling him Georg, using the two syllabled Romanian pronunciation.
“Who’s that?” Leah demands from the back seat. “Is that Dad?”
“No,” says Dana, reading. “It’s an invitation to my twenty-year reunion.”
“What’s a reunion?”
“It’s when a bunch of old people who used to hate each other get together to compare who’s ended up with the best life.”
“But why did they hate each other?”
“Well, lots of reasons. And also, no reason.”
“That makes me feel sad and scared.”
“Me too, kiddo.” Dana tosses her phone onto the passenger seat. She wonders why anyone would subject themselves to a party with people from their past when it’s so much easier to mull over one’s memories in private until they’ve been rendered tasteless and dry as overworked dough. Turning up the radio, Dana pulls out of the parking garage, and as the girls drowse in the backseat, wiped out by their mother’s spontaneous foray into conspicuous consumption, she lets herself remember the joyful searching need of Joey’s hands.
Jessie Ann Foley writes books for young adults. Her latest novel, Sorry for Your Loss, is forthcoming from HarperTeen in June, 2019. Her debut novel, The Carnival at Bray, was named a Printz Honor Book, a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults title, and a William C. Morris Award finalist. Her second novel, Neighborhood Girls, was a Booklist Editor’s Choice and YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults title. Sorry for Your Loss, her third novel, will be published by HarperTeen in June 2019. She lives with her husband and three daughters in Chicago, where she was born and raised.