A Kind of Contradiction

I wasn’t a reckless person until I moved in with my aunt in San Francisco. It was more of an experiment than anything, and Mom decided eight months in that she wanted me back home in Maine. I was allowed to finish my junior year in California, but my flight was booked for the first week of June.

When I walked through the gate with disheveled, fading lilac hair, three tattoos, and nothing like the skinny feminine girl she’d dropped off nine months ago, Mom’s eyes nearly popped out of her skull. Of course, she couldn’t see the tattoos, so I was spared the public lecture on decision making. After picking up a strand of pale hair with a grimace, Mom finally pulled me in for a brief hug.

“Cosima, I barely even recognize you,” she muttered, holding me at arms length. I saw her eyes linger on my hips for a little longer than necessary, but I was going to ignore that.

My mom was a successful woman with little time to raise two kids, but she’d always tried to shape me in her image. So I’d grown up eating salads and sushi, dressing in floral prints and collared shirts, and had the same shoulder-length brown hair since I was eight. Aunt Mel, the complete opposite of her sister, told me to embrace my inner wild child. Since it had been waiting years to be let loose, I started living the way I wanted and hadn’t looked back to the plain and boring girl I’d left behind in Maine.

“What has Melanie been feeding you? Burgers and fries?” Mom asked, pinching my arm. At some point I’d need to educate her on the difference between curvy and overweight, because she considered anything above 140 pounds to be criminal.

“KFC every day,” I joked, and Mom looked horrified. “Come on, you have to admit that I kind of resembled a long-haired twelve year old boy in a skirt.”

“You were very pretty, dear,” Mom sniffed, now being totally obvious about her disapproval of my appearance.

As I loaded my suitcase and duffle bag into the trunk of the Lexus I considered rolling up my jeans to show off the roses inked on the inside of my ankle. Or maybe I could take off my flannel shirt, leaving me in a loose white tank top that showed my ribs, and the geometric pattern running down my left side. Taking my jeans off entirely seemed a little inappropriate in an airport parking lot, so the moth on my thigh was out of the question.

But once Mom had started the engine and was pulling out of the parking spot, I decided that I’d save the big reveal for when she wasn’t driving.

“Why didn’t Danny come?” I asked, leaning forward to change the radio station. Mom only ever listened to the news, which more often than not was focused around boring county politics.

“It’s nine pm on a Friday, do you really think your brother would even be home for me to bring him along?”

Danny, my freshly-graduated-and-going-nowhere brother, had never gone along with what Mom expected of him. The whole reason she sent me away was to focus on preparing him for the future, but it was a doomed mission from the start. Danny and I didn’t really get along before, but that had a lot to do with me being a mini-Mom and telling on him whenever he came home drunk and high at two in the morning. I figured we’d get along famously now that I’d loosened up.

“Have you started thinking about your postsecondary education yet, Cosima?”

Just because I was (a lot) more carefree, didn’t mean I had zero aspirations in life. I wasn’t Danny. That was one thing Mom pushed on me that I actually agreed with. I was smart and determined, and those were two qualities that shouldn’t be put to waste. But while Mom wanted me to follow in her businesswoman footsteps, I had other ideas in mind.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that, actually,” I began, rubbing my palms on my thighs. Mom glanced over, her gaze wavering as it passed over my hair. “I want to be an architect.”

When she didn’t veer of the road, I figured that maybe Mom would actually listen to me on this one. “Is this something you’ve seriously considered?” Mom asked, her grip tightening on the steering wheel.

“Yes,” I answered firmly. “Aunt Mel is friends with the head of the architectural school at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and I showed him some of my work. He sort of started giving me free consultations on how to improve, and says that I have a natural talent. I really like it, Mom, and I’m good. Really good.”

She was quiet for a few minutes. Then, as we pulled up to a red light, she looked over at me. “You still have time to think about your career path,” she said.

I sighed. I hadn’t expected her to give in right away, but I wasn’t going to do so either. I could be just as stubborn as her, I’d just been too afraid to show it until now. For my whole life I’d been pushing aside what I wanted because impressing Mom seemed like the right thing to do, but being away from her had taught me to be my own person.

The remainder of the hour-long drive back to Brighton was quiet, and I could feel the tension practically radiating off of Mom. I made an executive decision to stick to long pants and conservative tops while she was around, at least for the time being. That way I’d preserve her sanity (and my ears) until she’d calmed down from the architect bomb. Since it was summer and going outside during the day in anything that covered up too much skin was just asking to die from heatstroke, I’d have to time my arrivals and departures around Mom’s work schedule.

Mom helped me carry my stuff up to the second floor, where the bedrooms were located. Mine was the first one at the top of the stairs across from the bathroom, and Danny’s room was adjacent to mine. The master bedroom, with an en suite bathroom, took up the rest of the second floor. It was clear from the silence in the house that neither Danny nor Lucia, the housekeeper, was home. I was looking forward to seeing Lucia more than anything, since she’d practically raised me. When Danny and I were in high school, Mom reduced Lucia’s time at our house from seven days a week to three, from Friday to Sunday. Until I stepped foot in the house, I didn’t realize just how much I was looking forward to her huevos rancheros in the morning.

“I have a conference call in ten minutes, so I’ll let you get settled,” Mom said, patting my arm before walking out of the room. I heard her heels click down the stairs and toward her study.

My room had always been sort of plain, with bare eggshell blue walls and boring bedsheets. I couldn’t do much about the sheets, but I had drawings and posters stacked at the bottom of my suitcase, ready to be put up. I’d had the forethought to bring along some blu-tack, and started sticking the posters to the walls. My laptop was open on my desk and playing music softly while I worked, filling a box with all the things in my room that no longer appealed to me. I left it by the door and moved onto my clothes, refilling the closet with flannels, cardigans, jeans, and t-shirts, where it had formerly held skirts and dainty blouses. When I was finished, I swapped my jeans for a pair of sweat pants and wrestled my tangled hair into a bun, then collapsed on my bed with the intention of watching a movie.

At two-thirty am, I was still awake and halfway through an episode of American Horror Story, when I heard the front door slam shut. Mom had gone to bed after her conference call at around midnight, and probably wasn’t woken by the noise. I had a feeling that reuniting with Danny at this hour while he was most likely hammered wasn’t such a good idea, so I lowered the volume on my laptop and ignored the sound of him stumbling past my door.