by Dana Spiotta
“It used to be a mirrored wall when this place was badly updated in high ‘modern’ style. Then it was a restaurant, and they kept it that way.”
“Because who doesn’t want to watch themselves eat, right?” her father said.
“Right! Luckily, with most of these changes, they didn’t bother tearing stuff out, they just covered things. I tell you, it was a big surprise to discover this mural when we removed the mirror. It was painted in the 1930s.”
“It’s beautiful. I love that WPA style,” her mother said.
“Like Diego Rivera,” Ally said.
“Yes, exactly. That’s very impressive,” Joe said, smiling at her. His attention was like a drug.
“My mother steeped me in all the standard lefty icons,” Ally said, and Joe laughed. “The icons of iconoclasm.” He laughed again, looked at her, clearly en-fucking-chanted with her. Which was crazy, but she could feel it, knew it, even though she had no experience whatsoever in these kinds of moments. She had read books and seen movies, but still, the feeling was unmistakable, like a damn airlift to adulthood and all its promised possibility. She had a sense then that her own taciturn, miserable teendom was about to open on something much, much more suited to her. And so it had.
The funny part was that the mural, which her mother described as beautiful, was only beautiful at first glance, or if you looked at it in an ambient, roundabout way. The colors were earthy brushed browns and soft, warm golds. The figures in the composition were pleasing. Crowded but bountiful. The technique too, the hatched rays of sun, the lines and shapes. But the subject, a history of Syracuse, was Podunk for sure. It was treated in a kind of medieval primitive put-everyone-in-time-all-in-the-same-room way, with varying planes of perspective applied, depending on the story being illustrated. Here were some unfortunate Iroquois, assigned to the margin, of course. And here were some canal-digging immigrants next to a white-sashed suffragette by some other loud-faced women. Behind them, the early spires of Syracuse University. And, rather prominently foregrounded, a Black man in shackles (!) with some white men towering over him with concerned faces. Ally said nothing about it at the time, but later she was not surprised when guests objected to the shackled figure. So controversial that the hotel had to post an informational plaque next to the mural. This was Ally’s suggestion to Joe, and he took it gratefully. It explained that the depiction was of the “Jerry Rescue,” a historic incident in which Syracuse abolitionists defied the Fugitive Slave Act. Locals used the city’s centrality and its commerce lines (the railroad, the canals, the wagons) to spirit escaped enslaved people to Canada.
Such activism required money, you know. They were disrupters, like Joe. But the mural was still a problem because the image made the enslaved person—Jerry—look too passive and the white men looked more like owners than liberators. The solution Hilton ultimately decided on was to hang a small curtain over the controversial image. Was it a failure of the viewer or of the painter? Ally wasn’t sure.
Meeting Joe in New York was a huge escalation of what they were doing. Because things intensify, don’t they? Nothing stayed where it was. And she knew she could pull this off too. There was a summer YAD conference in the city. Of course, it was highly chaperoned. But there was some free time. After bed check, she snuck out. Annie, her roommate, did not know everything (like who Joe was exactly, or that he was someone known to all of them through YAD), but what she did know she would not tell anyone. It would be their secret.
She told her mom nothing; she told Annie some things. Well, not at first. At first it was Joe and Ally only. Later she hinted to Annie that she had an older boyfriend and that they had sex. But no one would know about the photos. He would have her photos, she would have his age: a perfect détente. “Détente” was another word she had learned, but in history, not YAD. It technically meant relaxation, security. But only via the tension of “mutually assured destruction.” What a concept! When she sends him her first naked pic, she will make a joke about it, that he now had something on her, so they were taking equal risks. Feminism—liberation—to Ally meant figuring out how to make the power and the risk equal.
She pressed the camera button. She sent him a photo of her pinkie, as requested. But pressed between her pinkie and her next finger was Ally’s pink, puckered nipple.
Three
Sam
1
Watch the mothers: blotchy in stretched-out yoga pants, faded, bloated versions of their lithe, vivid daughters. What happened to them, Sam wondered. Weight creep (since the pregnancies, since the divorce); perimenopause; thrombotic, spidered blood vessels (too much chardonnay); patches of keratosis; a general slackening. Ugh, the duration made ruins of every beauty, even these spoiled suburban moms. But even worse? Watch the other mothers: gleaming and brutally taut in boots and skinny jeans, picking up their blotchy, bloated daughters, lumpen versions of their mothers.
Either kind of mother—any kind of mother—was awful.
Sam was lurking at the suburban Y, where Ally took tennis lessons. Sam drove all the way out there to lift weights, but she also hoped for a glimpse of Ally. Lessons got out at six. The mothers steadily streamed in to collect their daughters, which did not help Sam’s emotional state. Sam ruthlessly scrutinized the women and girls, guessing who belonged to whom. It was not hard to pair them off, which made her feel a closing in her throat, a welling in the corners of her eyes. She could cry or scream for virtually any reason these days. She ignored herself, but she felt removed from these women, different in her fasted, adrenalized, unmade-up state, with her spiky, razor-cut hair making conspicuous the lines across her forehead and at the corners of her eyes. The mothers and daughters (some had two daughters, even, the greedy pigs) were quickly off to their evenings together, doing what families with teens do. What was that again? It was what—two and a half months ago, but it felt like another life. Driving. (Can I drive, Mom?) Going to Wegmans. Eating/not eating dinner. (Don’t diet/restrict. But you do it.) Checking their phones. (Laughter. What? Nothing. Or she takes pity and shows you the meme.) That was all: a series of ordinary, unconscious life details. Not trivial even if it seemed that way. Tender feelings for those moments, my god. Why was so much noticed only in the breach, in the loss, by the regret-filled longing for what was left behind? The mothers and the daughters left together and they slept under the same roof without even realizing how lucky they were.
No sign of Ally. She had vanished. Sam looked at her phone: the green square with the white talk bubble had no numbers on it to indicate unread texts. She pressed it anyway. She scrolled through the texts she had sent Ally over the past ten weeks and saw all the blue bubbles stacked on her side, nothing on the left, no gray bubbles from Ally. One response, that would be nice. Mustn’t ask for it, must not be needful of her attention or response. It never, ever worked to show them your need. Not that she knew anything about the lives of other mothers and daughters. But of this she was fairly certain: it never worked for her to show Ally her need.
Not hearing from you is killing me.
Can you please just respond?
r u trying 2 make me feel sorry 4 u?
Well, yes, and so?
No, that wouldn’t work.
Sam pushed the phone into her gym bag and stopped creeping on those poor women and their children. So what if the moms had some cult shade of hipster nail polish that matched their skin tone so they appeared to have mannequin hands? So what if they had blond highlights, a cool ash or a warm honey that perfectly complemented their complexions? Because all of them were with their daughters, weren’t they? Because clearly Sam’s mothering had been a disaster—and the shame of that returned to her now. Sam hadn’t handled things the way she wished she had. Their estrangement seemed to have happened so fast. But it began a long time ago, she knew, when the beauty Sam had always seen in Ally became visible to the world in a new and potent way. It first struck her when Ally
was newly fourteen.
2
Ally had pounded down the stairs, in a rush to get a ride to the mall, where she could hang out with her friends. It was the first time with no parental supervision, just twenty bucks for food at the food court with all the other teenagers. She burst into the kitchen, where Sam sat. Ally wore a little kilt that hit mid-thigh and a little sweater with a V-neck that revealed the peach-white curves of her upper breasts. A pendant hung between them—a puffy red enamel heart dangling from a gold chain. A vintage necklace Sam had bought, and she got a little familiar jolt of pleasure whenever Ally wore something she had given her. Pathetic, really. But there it was, and so Sam started with a compliment: “Oh, you are wearing the heart necklace!”
Shortly before Ally had gotten her period, her body had changed dramatically. From her childish androgyny emerged long, elegant legs, a tiny waist, and high, small breasts that required a bra. Her skin never had a blemish. And no weird adolescent awkward nose, just a luminous, poreless doll face, still round and babyish, but attached to this new body. What had been childish became suddenly nubile, suggestive, sexual. This combination terrified Sam.
“Honey, I can see your bra with that sweater,” Sam said.
Ally sighed. “No you can’t.” She pulled on the shoulders of her sweater so that the V covered more. “And stop looking at my chest!”
What could Sam say to that, really? “You need to put on a cami or a tank top under that sweater if you want to wear it to the mall.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Ally, the tight sweater and the booty skirt send a message to the world that you are…looking for attention,” Sam said. “To your body,” she added and then regretted the addition.
“Then the world is perverted. How is that my fault? Should I be ashamed of my body?”
“No, of course not,” Sam said.
“Then why should I cover up?” And it was a fair point. Why should she accommodate the leering of men? Why was it her problem and not theirs? Could Sam tell Ally that Ally had not landed on her outfit choices in a vacuum? That how she thought she ought to look, that the skirt and that low-cut sweater had been thrust on her from cultural corners that commodified misogyny into mall-rat aesthetics? Sam could not.
Sam tried out another tack, though it did sound undeniably retrograde as it fell from her mouth. “In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and you don’t realize how stressful it feels to have men hit on you.” Sam sighed. Ally frowned at her, her arms folded in front of her chest.
Sam tried again, although more talking seldom led to a good outcome with Ally. Sam couldn’t stop herself from believing that everything could be talked out. “Remember I said either the top or the bottom can be revealing but not both? Remember? But the combination of the booty skirt with the tight, low-cut sweater…will attract not just the attention of boys your age but men your dad’s age, and it isn’t always easy to handle.”
“Eww. Just stop, okay? I’ll change my sweater because the world is full of pedos, I guess.” She stomped upstairs. “Why don’t you just buy me a burqa?” she shouted from the second floor. And: “We’re going to be late now!” Also: “It isn’t a booty skirt. That isn’t even a thing.”
Sam had hated this whole exchange. That she felt the need to cover her daughter up. Because Ally didn’t yet understand how unsafe the world was for her. But mothers must operate from realpolitik, not ideology. Just as when Ally goes to college, Sam will tell her daughter not to get drunk at a frat party and to have a buddy system. And if that makes it seem like the potential victim needs to adjust her behavior instead of the boys, so be it. The system that makes sexual predators and encourages grown men to leer at fourteen-year-old girls should change. But Sam had no control over frat boys looking for the drunkest girl in the room. Sam had no control over grown-ass men at the mall. Sam only had control over her daughter. A mother cannot take chances with her daughter. Mothers cannot afford to be sentimental about how the world should be. (Sam tried not to think about her memories of going to the movies with her friends when she was Ally’s age and how, after her mother dropped her off, she put on eyeliner and removed a bulky sweater that had covered up a tight bodysuit that both held and revealed the shape and details of her braless young breasts.)
Ally came back downstairs wearing a totally different shirt, a ruffled sleeveless white blouse that was not low-cut but was actually see-through. You could see her bra. Fuck it. Sam said nothing and drove Ally to the mall, dropping her in front of the multiplex entrance where her friends were waiting. Then Sam drove to the back of the mall, parked, and surreptitiously headed over to the multiplex side, where she proceeded to discreetly follow Ally and her friends around. Yes, she did. For hours she tracked them, staying far enough back that she was not seen. She pretended to be a person absorbed in her phone, but even then she had suburban female invisibility, and no one noticed the fifty-ish white lady lurking about the kiosks, pillars, and fountains. She glimpsed Ally laughing, unaccosted. Only looking at Ally from a distance, estranged, did she see how not a child she was. She had an ease, too, on her own, with people her age. It felt terrible, wrong, to spy on her daughter like this. But she made no move to stop. She didn’t know what else to do.
3
Sam walked back to the free-weight section of the gym. She had given up on spotting Ally, but she still intended to work out. Loading on the weight, pushing herself up hard.
She had made a lot of stupid errors. The upsetting thing was that her instincts were all wrong, obviously—look how it had turned out. Yet if she had to do it all over, she might do it the same way. No, not all of it. Some of it was plain wrong in retrospect.
The times she tracked her daughter via Find My Friends on her phone. She discovered her daughter’s passwords. She lurked and stalked and checked various social media accounts, her email, her friend lists. She had finally stopped, turned off the phone tracker, resisted clicking on Ally’s Google account when it came up below hers on her email sign-in. It felt creepy. But the terror of not checking, especially when Ally started driving, got to her, and then she would panic, weaken, and go in. (It was easy to fall back; her laptop “remembered” the passwords—one almost accidental click away with a pre-filled sign-in button—and Ally was careless in those days about her accounts. Or maybe the correct word was not “careless” but “carefree,” a form of innocence she had lost by now.) How to resist after reading some article about a girl hounded by bullies on social media? The stupid parents didn’t know anything until after she killed herself. (“We had no idea she had followers and that they had piled on.”) The kid was an influencer on Instagram but couldn’t take the pressure of likes/not likes/comments. Troll-bullied or something. This other one had a YouTube channel her parents knew nothing about. The message was clear. Kids have whole secret (not that secret) lives online. Some have accounts where they post benign things for their parents to monitor, and then they have secret accounts, under a pseudonym, where the real action happens. It was Sam’s job to discover and monitor these things. But even when she tried, she was too out of the tech/social media loop to be effective. She swore it off until she got worried and couldn’t resist again.
Sam could deadlift two hundred pounds now. One of her powerlifts. (Deadlift! Powerlift! Such dopey terms. “Dude, what is your deadlift?”) Powerlifts were something she had a genetic gift for. Her trainer, Nico, had downloaded her raw data from 23andMe to come up with her fitness plan. A miracle that her body was getting stronger, in some way improving, at this late date. She was breathless, sweating. Why was weight lifting so satisfying? Maybe because you got to rest so often and still be “working out.” That methodical, necessary, pregnant rest between sets.
The last time Sam got weak and checked up on Ally’s online life was two days ago. Ally had turned off the Find My Friends connection to her phone. And changed all her passw
ords, it seemed. She had cut Sam off.
(Still.)
Sam grunted through a very slow rep. TUT, Nico’s voice in her head. Time Under Tension.
(At least.)
Sam breathed in at the top and exhaled as she controlled the return. LUL: Lengthening Under Load. Slow concentric and eccentric contractions.
(Ally hadn’t blocked her.)
Sam paused, rested, waited, as her heart worked to catch up.
4
Sweaty but now in the zone, Sam moved to landmine squats. The satisfying clank of adding plates to a barbell. Her muscles responded and got stronger, but it all still felt like a performance, a weight-lifting cosplay for her own amusement. She laughed at herself as she grunted through the set. Or did she do it to please Nico?
Sam had started training with him a year earlier. Someone had told her about this miracle worker. He had devotees like a cult leader. It turned out that people, especially at certain points in their lives, just loved—craved—being told exactly what to do. At the time, the feeling that she had lost her tether had just begun, and she still suspected that it was something to be solved on the plane of the body: exercise or diet or perhaps some renewing treatment that walked up to plastic surgery but technically didn’t apply. Microdermabrasion or pulsed laser treatments. (Anything outpatient was still somehow a spa thing and not some woefully vain capitulation, not some hopeless and pathetic bid for lost youthfulness.) Some of these processes had some plausible use besides vanity. They remediated sun damage or some such. The argument—although it wasn’t thought out as much as it was a contagion among the women she knew—seemed to point to sex, sex appeal, as the counter against midlife depression or confusion. Sam resisted the beauty treatments and the high-tech improvements. Sex wouldn’t solve much, she knew, as she and Matt had always had satisfying sex, frequent sex. But the training registered something curious in her. (It was Alicia, of course. Alicia, a fellow mother Sam’s age with shockingly cut arms, had told her about Nico.) Nico was twenty-five and in top shape. He was constantly on a cut, or else he was on a bulk. But he always looked the same to her: young, perfect, ridiculous. And he talked constantly about body science and cutting-edge workout theories. As she trained with him (their interactions so bodily intimate and yet almost entirely shallow), Sam developed a fascination for these bro-science types, not the roidy bodybuilders, but the “natural” performance athletes like Nico. When she drove to her boring daily errands or just drove, she began listening to hard-core fitness podcasts in which one bro interviewed another (“Walk me through your bulk protocol”—everyone was always “walking you through” something on these podcasts). She learned about slow regression, pyramid sets, flipping truck tires, Body by Science, (Navy) SEALFIT™ Kokoro Camp, kinesiology tape, Wim Hof (and warrior) breathing, OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), sledgehammers, log PT (physical training that involves carrying, lifting, and balancing a heavy log), rope climbs, wall ball throws, the benefits of hyper-oxygenating or hypo-oxygenating while exercising, kettlebells, AMRAPS (as many rounds as possible), reverse pyramid sets, slow-twitch versus fast-twitch muscle fibers. Was it possible that inhabiting a human body was this complicated, she asked Nico at one point, more or less joking. But humor was lost on him.