Short Story: Happy Birthday Isobel (Part 1)

About a girl growing up in New York City in the early aughts.

‘Union Square Farmers Market’ by Jenn x Studio

Are there support groups for twenty-something year old women like myself, who were nurtured on colors-to-fit-your-karma coloring books, banned from playing with Barbie, raised on a forced taste for tofu veggie burgers? My mother tricked me at such a kindergarten age. Soy protein hamburgers first cultivated into my flavor stream at the impressionable age of five. The sublime irony is that I actually preferred it to the dead beef delicacies dad had inflicted on us during his weekends with us. My brother Delancey, seven at the time, carried a strong liking for New York street hot dogs and other red meat by-products from street vendors. Mom had a problem with his secretive red meat habits. Every hot dog stand we passed by Delancey’s forehead sweated as you could hear the saliva slide past his lips, on to his chin and down to the concrete. Quite cartoonish, he even wanted to one day become a hot dog vendor.

“That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Have my own hot dog stand. Then, I can eat all I want,” he smiled at the thought of life’s plans.

“Why would you hurt mommy like that sweetie?” She replied, slipping an extra granola bar into his backpack. “Delancey, I hope you realize what karma is able to bring back to you. You remember I explained what karma is?” Delancey nodded his head even though it was clear his attention was elsewhere, perhaps the faint staunch of a vendor cart loomed a block away.

Mom is a mixed up woman, for lack of a more suitable phrase. An avid vegetarian since her second year of college, under the influence of Randy, her Santa Cruz hippie boyfriend. He was responsible for mom’s first Joni Mitchell record and the reason she stopped shaving any body hair for three years. They lived in vegetarian heaven, although now in her later years, she is not adverse to the several genuine leather coats hanging in her closet.

Dad on the other hand, has and always will love his red meat and the lifestyle that comes with it. He moved out when I was seven and from that point on, Mom carried full judicial reign of the grocery list. Goodbye The Food Emporium, hello organic market. Weekends with dad were something to look forward to. Friday to Sunday nights, he made us feel non-organic, unnatural and superficially balanced in the norms. Delancey consumed multitudes of hot dogs as he wished. One night dad gave him twenty dollars to suppress his lack of carnivorous frenzy, and with a Christmas morning gleam in his eyes, Delancey took advantage of this with lottery winner energy. He bought 8 hot dogs from Efram, his personal hero and the neighborhood hot dog and pretzel vendor on Houston and Crosby Street. The remaining cash was used to buy a six-pack of grape soda and three bags of Oreo’s.

Dad spoiled us the one way he knew she never would, which was self indulgence. We stayed up late, watched cool shows on cable and ate whatever we wanted. For myself, I received and retreated to the one thing Mom emphatically tried to dismay upon me, a Cosmopolitan Magazine.

‘Barnes & Noble at Union Square’ by Christine Berrie

“I feel like we’re buying your first bra,” Dad said. I had just turned thirteen the day before and part of my birthday present was for him to escort me to Barnes & Noble.

“You know she’d have a fit. This isn’t exactly an independent bookstore,” I replied.

“Izzy, you know I hate the Strand. Way too dusty, it’s like nobody sweeps in there and they don’t sell magazines, not the kind we’re here for. I don’t want my daughter buying her first chick mag at some random stand on Seventh Ave. It’s your special day.” I smiled at him and for a moment being thirteen felt like a breeze. So far an easy beginning of my coming-of-age to society of commercial dollars and pop-culture laced values. It was the exact opposite of everything my mom was. Dad was a weekend J.Crew ad and mom was West Village thrift. Nothing wrong with either, but simply the differentiation between the two people that raised me. He loved Starbucks, she drank fair trade coffees. He was Barnes & Noble, she was the Strand Bookstore.

I caught a glance of the current issue of Cosmopolitan, my eyes fixated on the cover.

‘HOW TO FIRM UP YOUR BREASTS’

‘100 WAYS TO MAKE HIM LOVE YOU’

‘EAT THE POUNDS OFF’

What if mom is right? What if it only costs $3.95 to brainwash the private sectors of a female’s intellectual mind? I hesitated. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“Iz , she’ll never know.” His peer pressuring began, he picked up the magazine and as if it was a brick of gold, placed it slowly into my virgin hands.

“I can leave it at your place right?” The early onset of capitalism was rushing through my newly thirteen year old physical and mental being. His eyes rolled while simultaneously nodding.

“You know one of these days it’ll come to you. That it’s okay to have a mind of your own,” he said. But even in all his freedom fighter glee, he seemed to have forgotten that even with this first purchase of femme fatale periodical, I am still my mother’s daughter. I had already obtained enough background information on Starbucks’ business stratagems along with other venoms of corporate America. Meanwhile, afternoon talk show hosts and their guest psychologists all confirmed a theory that the only concern rotting in a thirteen year old girl's mind should be that of a lip gloss color. I should be one of those thirteen year olds, but I’m not.

That night I locked myself in dad’s bathroom, prepared to ingest all 102 pages of Cosmo. These all-American faces, airbrushed and in compulsory poses, not one of them smiled. An article on how to get a guy to admit his feelings for you. My eyes feasted on every word that begged and anticipated my attention. This was finally what I was looking for, and I thought about Michael McCarthy, my first crush, well not just mine but half the girls at school. The way he looked into my eyes whenever he asked if I’d done my history homework, the honesty deep rooted behind his thick, gorgeous lashes drove me nuts. When he handed back my history homework, the way he never said thank you, but instead lavished me with a smile, it just boggled my sanity. Now here, in this glamour pop printed literature, these people are to tell me how to get Michael McCarthy to say it. “I like you Isobel.” Amazing. I braced myself for the instructions in the article …

Huh. That’s it. Throw appealing glances and invitational smiles, always look highly interested in everything that he says and every once in a while throw your hips from side to side when you walk. And wear a little but not too much red lipstick to make him think about kissing you. I reviewed each one carefully, these were solutions that I couldn’t wait to implement the next time we were in homeroom. The lipstick thing might be tricky, but worth the try.

Why did mom keep all this away from me? Doesn’t she realize that life went by like a car wash and everything was attained in a matter of sub-minutes? If only I had gotten hold of this last spring before summer break, I could have had Michael McCarthy as my boyfriend. My eyes closed to imagine the scenario. I then came upon the health and body q&a where people wrote in with their problematic dilemmas on blemishes and infrequent menstrual cycles, hoping that someone on their writing staff would have an answer to the causes. Suddenly a knock on the door. “The eagle has landed. The eagle has landed.” It was dad in what he wanted so much to be our secret code alerting me that mom had arrived.

“One sec” I carefully shoved my faithful guidebook underneath the sink.

“So, how was your first weekend as a teenager?” She kissed my forehead and brushed my hair back just like she did when I was a toddler. Right then I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her for having kept me in the dark for so long.

“It was good. We went biking around the park,” my voice was unoriginal and disguised. Delancey let out a monstrous burp.

“Delancey!” Mom waved her hand up and down, blatantly disgusted by the foul odor that was his breath. “I don’t think I want to ask you what you’ve been stuffing your mouth with, even though I have an idea,” she exclaimed. With a sharp look aimed at my dad, his hand covering his mouth to hide the laughter, which then only caused Delancey to start laughing. Followed by mom, laughing away at would’ve been publicly embarrassing and rude, it was as if they were all in it together. I watched all three of them guffaw, wondering why my family was so abnormal.

Or was I the weird one? Now that I’m officially in my teenage years, every year would be another attempt to figure out my family’s neurosis. Deep down we, meaning myself, dad and Delancey have always felt that mom held the bizarro torch, loud and at times questionably proud. When I was seven and Delancey was five, mom insisted we wore bicycle helmets every time we took public transportation, particularly the subway. For my seventh birthday, she gifted me a plain white bicycle helmet. Mom never wore one, because she was old enough to know how to not get into accidents, supposedly, those were her words. One day while we were waiting for the 6 uptown train, “Excuse me sir, sir?” Mom grabbed my hand, my hand held onto Delancey’s hand. We were a convoy of fools. “Hi, I wanted to know why you were staring and snickering under your breath when you looked at my children?” She queried with a smile. The man, well into his perhaps early sixties, tried to ignore the question altogether. “Is it my son’s mismatched shoes? He’s colorblind, or we think he is, but he’ll likely grow out of it.” It is a fact that Delancey is not colorblind, never has been as she had hoped. But even she wore mismatched shoes in support of my brother’s supposed colorblindness. Really, it was just because he had wanted to wear both at the same time, he was five, eccentricity doesn’t have to make sense at that age. I’ve watched him color in and outside the lines of his Ninja Turtles coloring books, the kid knew what he was doing. It was almost as if she enjoyed coming up with a fake condition, or maybe she was colorblind herself and needed the company.

The sweat dripped down the side of my face, a side effect to wearing helmets on the subway platform with its balmy temps. Mom was afraid that a random stranger could push me down into the electrical tracks at any time, or even pound my head against the skull breaking steel pillars. The only thing I was concerned about was passing out from the heat and tightness of the helmet. You never know when you’ll get banged around, is what she always said, an incredibly fearful thought to put into a small child’s mind. Finally, I saw the lights in the distance and praised heaven’s high for the train’s arrival. Meanwhile, mom still needed a response from the snickering man who was clearly only minding his own business. His eyes squinted and maneuvered up and down our tiny costume-like statures. The helmets, my brother’s mismatched sneakers and then to mom and her mismatched attributes, and not just the shoes. “Lady it’s everything,” and he walked away quickly from us. Mom gleamed down at both of us and threw a look of ‘I don’t know what that was all about’. She had a way of making everyday conversations into awkward elevator silence. Parent teacher conferences were the worst. I always had great teachers, but somehow after meeting with my mom they turned rigid toward me. Then, I really had to work my ass off for the rest of the year. Teachers never pretended to understand the plastic helmets without the bicycles, or Delancey’s mismatched shoes, and were always hesitant to ask.

Then came eighth grade when the whole world had decided or at least four boys in my class did, that I was in fact a late bloomer. My seventh grade year I had put up with half the girls in my class sporting their cotton trainer bras while I still donned a tank top. Then, poof, like magic in the middle of the night, I awoke to tiny lumps on my chest. Relief should have come over me, but then I realized the worst. She had to take me bra shopping.

“See this here,” her finger pointed to the inner dark circle of her breasts. “These are your nipples.” Mom wouldn’t pull her blouse down until I turned to take a good, stealthy look at her areolas.