When I wore a strapless bra for the first time, my mom told me I was a sinner because God made breasts to be lifted from above like ascending angels. I’d gotten a spaghetti-strap tank top at the mall, using the money I made selling my porcelain dolls at our yard sale. I was trading in my dainty girlhood to become a grown lady whose shoulders needed public attention. It was time—my hips had expanded to the point that I could no longer fit in my hiding place between the side of the sofa and the base of the staircase.
But all the bras I owned undermined the debut I craved for my shoulders. They covered the skin I wanted to show, while letting everyone know I still wore sports bras, even though I’d been kicked off the softball team for spitting a loogie into the little yellow coin purse my coach took with her to the laundromat. I had no choice about that loogie. Coach laughed along after Wendy B. said I looked like a wobbly bar stool when I was at bat, instead of letting Wendy know that wasn’t a very nice way to talk.
There wasn’t enough yard sale money left over to buy myself a strapless. I got only $25 for my dollies. I should have gotten much more—there were twelve dolls in my collection and each one was in pristine condition. I never took them up trees, struck matches on their cheeks, or bit off their fingertips the way I wanted to. I respected them as a collection. I dusted them on Sundays. But the first woman who came to our yard sale offered $25—even though I had them marked at $115—and Mom told me it was a sin to haggle, especially with my elders, who’d been alive long enough to know about the true worth of certain objects. So I had to watch this person wearing a Tasmanian Devil t-shirt wrap all my dolls up in the deflated kiddie pool my mother had the gall to throw in for free, while knowing that she was walking away with damn near $100 of my mall money.
Grandma Cleo took pity on me and my shoulders and gave me the old strapless bra she had worn to her prom. (Grandma Cleo spoke to an easier, friendlier God than the one my parents consulted. They held hands in the pews at her church across town. Grandma’s God could take a joke, where my parents’ God demanded to know what, exactly, was so funny.) The bra was stiff and lacy—more restrictive than supportive—and it smelled like a musty, colorless yearbook. But the bra didn’t show a bit under my tank top, so I would wear it out.
“Can I go out?” I asked my mom, three days before my strapless bra debut.
“What? When? With who?”
I knew there would be a lot of questions. Other than school, I’d never gone anywhere without my parents. Mom had attended all my softball practices, sitting in the bleachers under her sun hat, yelling, “Look alive, ladies! It’s important to stay in ‘ready position’ even when the ball is heading the opposite direction.” And Mom’s elbow touched mine all through the Westgood Mall—dressing rooms and check-outs were no exception. She even double checked the math on my receipts. And when our family went to the fabric store to buy supplies for the preemie quilts Mom donated to the children’s hospital I wasn’t allowed to peruse the yarn or the beads in further aisles. “You’re just the kind of girl a kidnapper would love to take away forever.” I didn’t ask what qualities I had that made me that kind of girl, or why they petted my hair so lovingly after they said it, like being highly kidnappable was a trait they admired about me and made them especially proud to call their own.
I had never before asked my parents to go out, because I knew their answer would be, “We would let you go to the movies but, the thing is that we really want to see your face again, so the answer is no.” There’s no good retort to that logic, other than knocking the merits of my own face—pointing out the asymmetry, the weak chin, the avalanche cheekbones. But ever since I was no longer able to wedge myself into my hiding spot—a spot that never failed to help me feel right and simple, like a complacent stack of meat and bones—I’d gotten a new sharp edge about me, and I wanted to cut my parents with it. Along with sunshine on my shoulders, I craved discord.
But my mother quickly warmed to the idea of an outing. Apparently, she’d been preparing for the moment when I would assert my right to separate, and had only been waiting for me to ask. She laid out two options for activities I was allowed to do, unsupervised, with my school friends. She said wholesome teens could go bowling (but not form leagues) or they could ride paddle boats (but only in calm, still water—boating over waves was too provocative).
Both options had the potential to thrill me. I’d done nothing, I wasn’t hard to thrill. My wildest private daydream was to walk down the aisle of fake flowers at Joann Fabrics, alone, imagining that the plastic flowers were catcalling me while demeaning me passive-aggressively, like those golden afternoon blooms from Alice in Wonderland. I would have loved the chance to bowl or paddle without my mother there scanning our surroundings to point out who, exactly, would kidnap me if given the chance. (Once, in a miniatures museum, she accused the man transfixed by the teeny three-story log cabin inhabited by clothed possums of being “the ‘napper among us.” I recognized this man as my bus driver—a person who could easily take me and my backpack home with him on any given day.) Yet I balked at my mother’s pre-approved activity options, calling them lazy and sinful, words that made very little sense when applied to our conversation, but were nevertheless the most condemning adjectives in her vocabulary.
“Plus we already decided on go-karts,” I told her, which was the first time I said the word “we” to my mother instead of about my mother. I have a context outside of your reach, old miss.
Mom looked like she wanted to pull my hair or shove my face into a holy text, but she only nodded at me while maintaining a level of eye contact that made my burgeoning sharp edges gleam.
“I don’t know how I feel about go-karting, Lydia. Do you happen to know the shape of the track? Is it one big oval? I’d feel more comfortable knowing you’d be making sudden turns every so often, so the vibrations and curves won’t lull you into forgetting your morals.”
I saw a wobble in her eyes, that my challenges were causing my mother to lose a small percentage of her certainty. “Do your own research,” I told her as I headed toward the mirror in my room. I was eager to see if my haughty tone had brought out any new symmetry in my face. “Pull up an aerial map and take a look.”
***
On tank-top go-kart day, Mom made her quip about the angels who wanted to hold my titties, but otherwise let me out the door without making dire threats or clipping a long leash onto my belt loop. But before I hopped into Andrea’s mother’s car, she called out, “If you find yourself locked in a trunk, remember to kick out a brake light and wiggle your fingers out the hole to alert other cars that you’re being held against your will, possibly across state lines.”
Andrea was wearing a tube top, so right away I was beat. Outranked and outshined. But still, I said, “Hey, thanks for the ride, you look so cute, your car is so clean,” which was too many things to say at once. Feeling outdone makes me babble. When we pulled up to Randi’s house, I was pleased to see her exit wearing an oversized v-neck t-shirt. I’d try to stand next to her once we were in public, so I’d look hot and free by comparison.
Andrea, Randi and I were not really close as friends. We hadn’t been BFFs since Elementary. We didn’t share clothes or have inside jokes. What happened was that our gym teacher paired up judo matches based on weight, and the three of us, being the same size, ended up spending a lot of time in each other’s armpits and ponytails. Plus, we’d all been denied entry into the upper-echelon of girls—the ones who walked around with their foreheads facing forward instead of down—which forged an understanding, if not a camaraderie.
***
I let my mother believe Andrea’s mom would stay at the track with us the whole time, even though Andrea had told me all about the drop-off plan. But once I was being dropped off, I felt unsure. Also a little naked. Did I have enough money? Who would point me toward the bathroom? Would Randi and Andrea talk to me as we waited in line, or would I have to stand silently, trying to look as happy about the top half of my outfit as I had hoped to be? Was the sun brighter than normal? Were Randi’s teeth sharper than before? Did that lady just growl? When Andrea’s mother drove away, I wanted to hop in her trunk for safety. I’d be a good passenger, kicking nothing, giving all her music choices an approving thumbs up from my safe spot in the dark.
***
The building Randi, Andrea, and I entered smelled sweet, almost like pixie sticks, plus there were body smells (sweat, breath, pee) mixed with the scent of hot plastic and warm plugs—machines at work. The chaos came from all the smelly bodies—in lines, in circles, weaving and leaving—and from flashing lights, electronic sound effects (dinging, ka-powing, a bass beat) and layer upon layer of human sounds (laughter, chatter, “Hey, Jason.”)
Randi looked like a person capable of processing all the movement and smells around her. “Let’s do the laser tag maze first.”
“Then the rock wall.” Andrea was placidly watching a child attempt to pry the purse from his mother’s shoulder.
I pulled my bra back into place while trying to make it look like I was only giving myself a small encouraging hug. “I… thought this was a go-kart place.”
“This is an entertainment complex.”
“Yeah, it’s called Mondo Amusements. Go-karts aren’t mondo on their own.”
Andrea and Randi walked ahead while they said the things I should have already known. I quickly followed, so that I didn’t get swirled away into a group of friends who liked me even less, who’d never been flat in the gymnasium with a mouthful of my hair.
“I only brought ten dollars,” I told them. “I can’t afford to do all this other stuff.”
We walked by signs that said GEM MINING // FOAM FIGHTS with an arrow pointing left and ESCAPE ROOM // FLAME VORTEX with a right-facing arrow. I was relieved that my friends didn’t turn and hoped the straight-ahead activities were more like PILLOW DEN or STATIONARY CIRCLE.
“Oh my god, Lydia, haven’t you been here before?”
“Didn’t you look at the website?”
No, I hadn’t. I wasn’t allowed to use the computer without Mother at my elbow, nodding or shaking about where I wanted to point my cursor. Didn’t she check this place out before giving me permission—at least ensuring the sharp turns she wanted to keep me on the straight and narrow? I felt certain that my mom would have revoked her permission if she knew about the rock wall. “And then they’ve got you right where they want you, Lydia—fifteen feet off the ground and tied up with the rope of their choosing.”
We stopped at the entrance for the laser tag maze. The sign told us laser tag cost $8.99 and was a “great team building exercise!” Randi and Andrea paid using their phones and I dug my single ten-dollar bill out of my pocket. My friends’ money was faceless and untouchable, and mine harbored germs and long-dead eyebrows.
I said, “I can only afford to do one thing” and put my shameful handheld currency back in my pocket.
I was ready to tell them I avoided all mazes after the skinned knees I’d earned doing a three-legged race with my mother through a hay bale maze set up in a church parking lot—but Randi and Andrea were already making their way into the small room ahead of us, joining a group of people, circling around a woman in green shorts giving safety instructions. The woman stood in front of a wall rack of black laser guns, all aimed at the floor. “The first rule of the laser tag maze is to have b-i-g mondo fun! The second rule is to keep both feet on the floor at all times: no climbing, no skipping, no hopping. Now, raise your head if you’ve had aneurysms or a recent surgery.”
“There’s an observation deck.” The man my friends paid to enter was pointing to a railing high above the maze I was trying to avoid. “You could help your little pals, warn them what’s around the corner.”
I didn’t like this man pointing and suggesting where I should put my body. It was my mother’s fault, I knew, that I suspected him of setting up some sort of trap for me in the observation deck, that I worried I’d never return to my set life course if I climbed up there to tell my friends to make two rights and then a left toward freedom.
“No thanks.” I backed away and made a quick turn around the corner, toward the foam fights. I stood against the wall and pulled my grandma’s strapless back up over my breasts. Once I felt reasonably sure the laser man was no longer looking at me, I slipped into the midst of a large, loud family. The parents and three children were all talking at once, recapping the putt-putt experience they just shared. The only family member who seemed to be doing any listening was the preverbal baby strapped to the father’s chest. I maneuvered closer to the baby, who smiled at me—perhaps because I wasn’t making it try to comprehend any of my words.
I stayed with the family until we reached the familiar territory of the entrance area. I found a bench and decided the room’s commotion was easier to handle sitting down. I wished I had enough money for a snack. I smelled meat and cheese, and maybe waffle cones. My mother should have considered that without proper energy, I’d never be able to outrun a man with a lasso or a huge net.
Only groups of people walked by. No one was alone. No one was stationary. No one had goosebumps down their arms where their sleeves should be. The longer I sat watching people trade their money for twenty-minute thrills, the madder I got at my mother for allowing me to sit there, and then the madder I got at myself for voluntarily putting my life back underneath my mother’s control while I was experiencing my very first freedom.
A woman walked by pushing a double stroller. Perhaps those twin toddlers were heading to the batting cages. When the woman was just past me, she stopped pushing to wade though her purse. She pulled out a package of tissues and used one to dab at her side-by-side offspring.
“Excuse me?” I felt 80% sure a woman with two young children would not have the energy to kidnap a scraggly, asymmetrical thirteen year-old.
“May I have a tissue?”
She handed me a tissue without curiosity or sympathy, probably assuming I was old enough to be sitting alone anywhere. Even on a pier. Even in an alley. Even in a mall dressing room with three to five tank tops, or near the base of a man-made rock wall surrounded by the swirl of entertainment commerce. I thanked her and she nodded before pushing her babies toward the game room. Perhaps those twin toddlers were going to expertly dance-dance along with a video game screen.
I pulled apart the tissue layers and put the two thin pieces over my shoulders. For warmth. For protection. To replace my friends, to form a new group. I wondered how much longer Randi and Andrea would be navigating through the laser maze. I wondered if they teamed up against the ten-year-old boys they entered the maze with, or if they instead turned on (and shot at) each other right away. I wondered, too, if they’d even bother to look for me before moving on to the next activity, which I couldn’t afford anyway. Doubtful, my tissues and I agreed.
Eventually I stood up, just to prove to myself I still had some control over the situation. When my shoulder tissues fell to the ground, I left them there.
I scanned my surroundings for someone non-threatening. Nope, he has mirrored sunglasses on top of his head. Secretive. Deceptive. Wolf-like. Not her, she’s over thirty and wearing a belted dress. She’s probably jealous enough of my enviable youth to belt me to a bike rack and leave me there, hoping my pert skin will soon become weather-beaten. No, no, no, no—a row of children who look like they know how to skateboard. They could team up and wheel me off.
The next person who walked by was wearing a shirt my mother owned—a brown button-up blouse with black flowers. The silky shirt really needed another color, a yellow or white to dampen the drab. But still, a known shirt. I moved closer to it.
“Uhm, do you know where the go-karts are?” The woman in my mother’s shirt stopped and turned her whole body toward mine. She came close. “Are you okay, honey? You look upset. Do you need help?” She put her warm hand on my upper arm, calming the goosebumps there. “Would you like to use my phone? What’s your name, anyhow? Let me walk you to the…”
I seized up, closed my eyes, put my hands over my ears. I wanted simple directions, not to shove myself underneath the crushing force of a mother’s concern. I shrugged her hand off and ran past her, further from the entrance area. I heard her calling out directions to the go-kart track, but I pressed my hands harder into my ears—creating suction—until all I could hear was my pulse and the creak of my own force. Eyes closed, ear’s pressed, I clearly understood: My mother didn’t care if I was dragged into the woods, weak and hungry. She was concerned about my soul, but my body was the part of me she could boss around. She only hyped up the world’s danger in order to control me, used fear as a weapon against the lure of ungodly influences and against the forward momentum I was born with.
I squeezed past a group in neon green “Mason Family Reunion: It’s Every Mason for Themselves!” t-shirts to find the door to the outdoor activities. I pushed the door open with my side, then took my hands off my ears. Relative quiet, fresher air—I was so thankful that the sky didn’t flash and the trees didn’t beep.
There were go-kart motors in the distance. All I had to do was move toward the noise without being struck by a putt-putt ball or getting myself stuck inside a batting cage. Easy, surely. I felt the sun on my shoulders and regained some sense of purpose. I was out. My bra was not showing. My mother was elsewhere. My dolls were sold off. Not one person was luring me into their van. The go-karts were right there, straight ahead.
The teenager with the “Billie J” name tag said, “That’s $8.99 for you, but passengers are free.” I held my arms out and spun myself around, a gesture I hoped conveyed the same I got nothin’ as turning your pockets inside out. Billie J took my ten dollar bill and handed me a few coins.
“Aren’t there helmets?” I asked.
She mocked my spinning gesture—do you see helmets?—so I went past her and got in line for the course. The line moved quickly, meaning I’d just paid $8.99-plus-tax for one of the briefest thrills Mondo had to offer. Two slices of pizza would have thrilled me for at least seven minutes.
Riders rushed by us, enjoying their short stints, while the girl behind me asked to cut in front of me in line. “It’s pretty much an emergency.” “How so?” She was small, maybe six, easy to look down on, easy to demand explanations from.
“My mom said she’s pulling out of the parking lot in ten minutes, with or without me.” She was wearing a purple jumper while hopping up and down. Instead of bending down to her level to whisper that she had been dealt a bad, irresponsible mother, I decided to pretend she no longer existed.
When I turned back, a boy my age was stepping out of a go-kart, leaving it empty for the next person in line, which—while I’d been denying the eager request of a small child—had become me. The motor was still running, so I lowered myself down into its dark-colored humming and put my hands on the wheel. I wished I had thought to paint my fingernails. Gripping black foam with red nails would have made me feel all the more out-of-the-house.
I wasn’t sure how hard to push the gas pedal—I’d never even ridden our lawn mower. I wanted to get used to the feeling of sitting in the machine before engaging any gears. This humming is the baseline.
“Just go!” The little girl had stopped hopping to rush me. Hellion. I stomped the pedal, but looked straight ahead instead of at the child, so I could pretend it had been my own idea to get going. The go-kart jolted forward, but I kept control and took the first turn easily. Once I got going, the speed was not a threat but a realignment. My body could finally keep pace with my mind. No lag, no push/pull, I was a unified bullet cutting through the wind.
The course was all curves, an oval that had been left out in the sun to wrinkle like a raisin. From above, the track must have looked like a splat, or an amoeba. The sensation of going as fast as I wanted was even better than my wildest daydream—though I did (as an inside joke with myself) imagine a chorus of artificial flowers singing “look at you go, you lousy hussy” while their stems twisted around and through the chain link fence.
As I took the final turn of my first lap, I noticed that I could feel wind on my stomach. When I looked down, my bra (and the top of the breasts it was struggling to contain) was fully visible. The speed I made had blown the loose neck and thin straps of my tank-top down until it was even with my armpits. I yanked my top back up, thankful that no other rider was close enough to get a real eyeful.
Right then I passed the line of waiters. The line had grown but the girl was gone. I ran through the possible reasons for her absence—a turn, a mom, a napper—but since my top had already blown down again, I was more focused on staying decent. I sat up straight and pulled my shoulders back to become a wider mannequin for my shirt, hoping that if the fabric were pulled taught, there’d be less flapping and flashing. That strategy didn’t help, so I pulled the neck of the shirt up and held it in place with my chin. This pull made my stomach poke out the bottom, so I ended up outshining Andrea and her tube top after all.
I slowed down a bit, since it was harder to keep my eyes on the track while craning to use my chin like a chip-clip. I still enjoyed my ride, even reigned in and bent over. The turns felt predictable. I had grown used to the wind. Other riders passed me, but I don’t think they meant anything by it. On the section of the track closest to the building, I scanned the milling crowd for a purple jumper. No sign.
In the foreground, the flowers I’d imagined in the chain link fence had been replaced by real-life hands, as a row of onlookers watched the go-kart action with their fingers poked through the fence. Soon I was passing them, only feet away, and a man attached to a set of hairy fingers was looking right at me and laughing. Meanly. Mockingly. A threat. It was hard to get a good look at him, but he appeared to be older than a high schooler and younger than my dad. He looked exactly like a person I hated.
I sped back up, refocusing with each turn. I hated the little girl for making me worried enough to look anywhere other than the road ahead of me. Turn. I hated the drivers I was easily passing. Turn. I hated my friends for leaving me alone and for having parents who took them to Mondo on a semi-regular basis. Turn. I hated my mother for not letting me out before that day and also for letting me out that day. Turn. I hated those twins who still got to be pushed around by their mommy. Turn. Then it all felt bad, the angry turns, but also the tone of the past six months. Before then, I had never understood the word “fuming.” Before then, I hadn’t spat into any coin purses. I was sweet, more or less. I was kind, here and there. I had positive interactions. I decided how I felt; I wasn’t so reactive. I trusted people. Was part of becoming a woman learning to be on high alert for when you’ve been wronged and then diligently keeping a tally? Or was this new capacity for pure hate the last gasp of my little girl self, like a final tantrum? I resented both thoughts and my neck hurt like hell.
I’d done a full lap of fuming by then, and was close to passing the man at the fence again. My whole ride would be over soon, so I lifted my head to let the wind do what it wanted with my clothing. Fly, bra. Fly, shoulders. The exposure became a choice as I decided I would ram right into the fence instead of going on by—scaring him, stopping him, showing him—and I didn’t waste any time debating whether that kind of premeditated crashing was the act of a thoughtless girl or a vengeful woman. I simply gave myself full permission.
Janelle Bassett‘s writing appears in The Offing, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, VIDA Review, and Slice Magazine. Her story collection THANKS FOR THIS RIOT was a semi-finalist for the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize in Fiction. She lives in St. Louis and is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine. More of her writing can be found online at janellebassett.com.