Worry

by Alexandra Tanner

“It does. You just can’t do basic math.” Poppy starts walking faster than me, staring at the ground. Now we’re fighting about nothing, about a detail I made up to pacify her. I often find myself in spots like this with Poppy, getting all mixed up trying to pretend we’re more alike than we are.

One of the Mormon mommy bloggers I follow on Instagram posts about having a “mom crush” on her “mini boyfriend,” referring to her month-old baby. He’s like a tiny husband I get to hold on my hip! She asks if any other moms feel this way, urges them to answer in the comments. The filter over the photo makes her newborn’s just-opened eyes an icy, bright blue. We need more blue eyed babies like yours!!!!! someone comments. Amen!! the original mommy replies. Omg, someone else writes, I always want to makeout with my baby boy!!!!! is that weird?, followed by three crying-with-laughter emojis. SICK, another replies. no this is totally normal, it’s a hormonal thing, a different person writes. it’s like how touching your nipples makes you feel homesick

My parents used to make fun of such people around the dinner table; now my mother attends services at a messianic congregation in Boynton Beach with a sign out front that reads Congregation L’Chaim: Where Jew And Gentile Are At LAST One In CHRIST! She told me through tears not long ago, When I was growing up, I always thought Jesus died for everyone but me. And it made me feel lower than a frog. But now I know he died for me, too.

I could tell her that I sometimes get the same feeling when an ad pops up for Endless Shrimp Mondays at Red Lobster while I’m trying to watch the Zapruder film on YouTube; when I see a linen clothing company post about how the “vibrational energy” of linen is 5,000 hertz, which is why wearing linen makes you magnetic to others. Sometimes the things I see on the Internet—even and especially the anti-Semitic dog whistles, the worm-brained sociopolitical infographics, the mommy bloggers salivating to make out with their fauxhawked blond boychildren—feel like holes in the fabric of time only I am special enough to glimpse. If I’m not stoned already, they make me feel like I’m stoned. I can see the end of art and culture and sometimes even human life if I’ve been scrolling through the right pages for long enough. Sometimes I feel like my own ancestor. Sometimes I feel like a Tamagotchi.

“I just—I can’t really, um—think of a protein I’d like to have.” Is this guy hearing the word “protein” the way I’m hearing it, how pink and slick it feels right now, how revolting?

I google sodastream bds and stare at a picture of Scarlett Johansson, dead-eyed, being unveiled as the company’s first-ever global brand ambassador during a ceremony at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The picture is attached to an article in which Scarlett, under fire for hawking SodaStream in a Super Bowl ad, says that SodaStream is a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits, and equal rights.

Shoplifting—being interested in any material thing at all—combined with her move to Brooklyn must be a sign that Poppy’s shaken away the pull of suicide and turned to face her future; that she is even, that she is whole. At least that’s what I tell myself. Then again: who has ever finished a bottle of nail polish?

You’re too old to ask for help. And they didn’t pay my rent, they were just my guarantors, and I had to beg for even that.” I’m lying, so I make things colorful.

If Poppy takes over my old apartment and starts here where I started, she’ll slowly take over every part of everything I’ve ever done, and my experience of the last seven years will not have been what I thought it was, which was my life, but something else: a map of shouldn’t-dos for Poppy, a map she has been watching me reach the edges of in real time; watching and noting my failures, watching and preparing to do it over and do it right.

A girl I went to high school with is Instagramming about mindfulness: your energetic frequency determines what comes toward you. energy is everything. everything is energy. the people and opportunities that vibrationally mirror your unique level of energetic sovereignty are what will come into your life. do not stay bogged down by the same old low-vibe loops. attune your heart to your true energetic blueprint. when you are aligned with your own energy, everything else will arrive. “What do you guys think my level of energetic sovereignty is,” I ask them, unable to say anything meaningful about Sor Juana. They ignore me.

“It gets better in the second season,” Jon says. “Like Community? You know how it took them a while to find, like, the heart—” “The heart of the show,” Poppy says. “Yeah,” Jon says. “It takes every show a while to find its heart,” I say, feeling stupid. “That’s why they’re shows.”

Every time I think of something I want I manage to talk myself out of it. I close my eyes and tell myself to think hard about my deepest wish for my future life. I tell myself it’s okay to imagine; that I’m safe inside my own head; that I can get specific; that my desires are worth considering. Before I know it, it’s morning, and I don’t remember dreaming of anything.

ONE MORE CHANCE TO FUND ABORTION AND GET SWAG, says an email in my inbox from an Alabama abortion fund I donated seventy-five dollars to last year. I’m all for abortion, but the email seems insensitive. I ask Poppy if thinking this makes me a bad leftist. She puts on her deep-thought face. “It doesn’t make you a bad leftist,” she says eventually. “Your issue is with—what?” “With swag,” I say. “It seems casual. And abortion is serious.”

we are good daddy!! thanks for checking in! I write back. It is the joy of my life to know u 2 r 2gether, he says. I luv u Girls. It’s true: all his passwords, I know, are either ILuvPop or ILuvJul. Our relationship’s fairly weird—once a year or so for the last several years, I’ve gone to his office to have him plump my lips and smooth my jawline and fix my gummy smile, which he does while asking me questions like: Now remind me, did you ever watch Breaking Bad? —but I send him back a heart. GO TO TEMPLE, my father texts. FIND A GOOD RABBI. EVEN IF THINGS R SWELL NOW, U WILL NEED ADVICE ONE DAY.

“Radishes in everything,” Poppy says. “I never saw a radish until I moved here.” The language of “moved here” strikes me as odd. Poppy didn’t so much move here as migrate here, drift here. She’s still living out of her suitcases. “Moved here” suggests success, autonomy. I begin to wonder if, by these standards, I have even fully moved here.

“Personally I’d venture that it’s bourgeois and fairly dangerous to structure a kid’s whole life around blocks and not much else for eighteen years, seventeen years, or whatever, but that’s just me. I don’t have a kid. I don’t know how kids learn yet.” “That seems harsh, calling it dangerous.” “You don’t think it’s dangerous to structure a child’s education around blocks?” And now I have to spend my time thinking about this.

“So,” he says, “we got some user feedback this morning that we wanted to talk to you about.” “Oh, sure,” I say, my vulva sweating.

It is okay that I’m here alone. Poppy couldn’t drop me off, but she’ll be here to pick me up. It’s okay to get only half of what you want. Poppy’s job is new and I can tell she doesn’t want to use up her sick days. She wants to prove that she is good, attentive, committed. I wonder why I can never harness this energy in myself; why I always want to do the wrong thing even when I don’t want to. What’s the wrong thing, I wonder. There’s no wrong thing. Life is what you make it.

anne frank, I type, went into hiding from a regime that sought to systematically exterminate her people on the basis of their religion. I’m feeling smart. comparing your situation to hers is deeply anti-semitic. i’d urge you to think about what language like this signals to jewish followers of yours, I finish, knowing this woman has no Jewish followers. Ten minutes later, she writes back a reply written like a poem: I disagree. We will have to go into hiding. Va((ine$ are also a religion. Tell me how it’s different? My son will be killed if he is not hidden? My Jewish Followers get it. Please unfollow my page. Please do not message me again.

Why does every message I send make me sound completely devoid of personality, perspective, intelligence? Why have I decided jkladjflkajsdf is an acceptable replacement for language, for reckoning?

Poppy shrugs. “I’m happy you’re happy, then,” she says. “Or: that you’re going to be happy. Soon. Maybe.” And I’m the cunt.

This is my first son, she writes, and suddenly before me is a picture of a pensive Briana in a hospital bed holding a small purple fetal thing to her chest. It’s enough to make me believe in trigger warnings.

These moments are perfect, but then they’re gone and my tummy hurts. Something in me’s griping: it’s not enough. On the way home from the park one evening, I ask Poppy if things feel like they’re enough for her.

She won’t let me in. I wish I could claw her face off, get to her soul, understand who she is, feel safe in thinking I know her. We grew up together; we were hardly ever apart; we have the same rhythm to our voices and set the table the same way; even our phone numbers are different by just a digit. Still, there are parts of herself she keeps from me. If I were still writing, I’d write a shitty short story about us and what we’re going through and how there are no words for it, and in it there’d be a sentence like: Having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.

There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer. I’ll never blossom into the woman of ideas I like to imagine myself as late at night. It’s not that art is dead. It’s just that I’m not going to be one of the ones who makes it.

My teeth chatter. “Okay, I’m not going to lower my core temperature for someone who throws rocks at animals. I have a dog who I love very much.”

“All dogs are sweet until they maul someone,” says my mother. “But I sincerely hope she doesn’t maul you,” she continues, donning her sunglasses with a little magic in her wrist, “considering your father’s just put so much hard work into your face, and for free.”

“What is it with you being down on my oils? They’re for immune support,” my mother says, “and mindfulness, and they’re making me feel like an entrepreneur, and they’re making me money.”

“Stop it, Mom,” Poppy says, staying planted in her seat. “Don’t defend her just because you’d rather ally yourself with her, because it’s more convenient, because you’d rather be someone else, because you’d rather have an easy daughter, because you’d rather, I don’t know, tell yourself you’re going to be saved. I’d call you a dummy, Allyson”—Poppy stands up and removes Allyson’s plate from the table—“but what you really are is a fucking Nazi.”

from it, right?” “You can come back from anything,” I say, meaning it. “I can come back from anything,” Poppy repeats. She doesn’t mean it. Her face falls into a cry. “Fuck,” she says, wiping away a set of huge tears. “Why do we need her so much? Why do I feel like I need her so much?” “Because all anyone wants is to be mothered. Taken care of,” I say. Poppy sniffles. “Is that what you learned about America this year? From your mommies?” “No,” I say. “It’s what I learned about you, and it’s what I learned about me.”

I didn’t get her a present. I thought we were doing a kind of restorative ironic pagan solstice mental health thing; I thought we were divesting from all religion, ignoring the clamor of capitalism, bringing a tough year to a quiet end.

I yearned for it and I hated it; there were times I could’ve bought it and didn’t and was proud of myself and mad at myself and existential about the beauty of want, about the smallness of objects, and I told myself that I was stronger than want, stronger than objects.