A Teenager’s Christmas in Baltimore, Pt.1
Maternal instinct is funny. When I was seventeen years old, and had just graduated from high school, my mother and baby sisters were visiting me at my grandmother’s house for a couple of weeks. Maddie was 3 years old and Aria was 1 and a half. I remember lamenting privately to myself that while I had spent a lot of time getting to know baby Maddie over those few years, I hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time with baby Aria yet, and I admitted to myself with a smidge of hollow shock that I felt no real connection to her other than knowing that she was my sister.
She was learning to stand, while holding onto things, but couldn’t actually take steps yet. One night as I approached her she was holding onto one of the cushions of the loveseat in the living room and standing up. When I was next to her, she turned to me and grabbed onto my calves and used them to stand, teetering back and forth precariously. She looked up at me and softly sang out, “Cawee…” Carry, she was trying to say. She wanted me to pick her up, I realized with a note of novelty. I reached down and carefully scooped her into my arms and brought her up to my chest. She immediately, without the slightest bit of hesitation, rested her head against my neck and her whole and tiny body against my chest, just absolutely went limp onto me and closed her eyes, trusting me completely. Unexpectedly, I melted that very second and pressed my cheek very tenderly against the top of her head and stroked her back soothingly. I don’t remember how long I held her like that, but I remember thinking, realizing, really, that if anything were to ever happen to my mom, heaven forbid, I would absolutely be able to take care of and raise that baby, Maddie too. In that moment, I knew at the very core of my being that I could, that I’d do anything necessary to care for them, even just a couple of weeks shy of turning eighteen.
Two years and a few months later, when I’d become settled in life with a man and a house, my mom told me that she was making a living will and asked me if it was okay to list me as the legal guardian of both children should anything happen to her. She didn’t trust their father with them, her husband, and he even agreed that he wouldn’t be able to raise them. I agreed, of course, with somber sobriety. Luckily, my mom’s been okay all these years, and the girls are almost grown now. But all of this being said, I probably don’t need to say, but will anyway, that those little girls, well, young women, now, absolutely mean the world to me. So I was so excited about Aria visiting me for Christmas ever since late September, when I ordered her ticket.
Three months passed in one long heightened exhale, and three Sundays ago, I found myself anxiously scanning a crowded descending escalator for a face very similar to my own with a big cloud of dark blonde curls fluttering around it. My heart pounded as I searched for her, and then finally, I saw a red sweatshirt with my own wide cheeks and pensive eyes coming out of it, the mess of curls like mine but in a different color, and both of us began to run toward each other at the same time. I squealed in excitement a split second before reaching her, and our arms and shoulders locked together as we spun around and around from the force of the deliberate collision. I hadn’t seen her in more than two and a half years.
We snagged her luggage off the stainless steel carousel and she insisted on carrying it herself. The smudged black eyeliner around her eyes didn’t really suit her, but was much better than the giant black circles she’d been drawing and filling in every day around her eyes the last time I’d seen her. I remember back then they would smudge and smudge and she would just make the arcs of them under her eyes deeper and wider every couple of hours. Very often the slick atramentous circles/ovals would stretch halfway down her cheeks, and she seemed to spend half of every day just looking in the mirror and recoloring the middles with her black pencil. It looked awful, and she told me one day that she did that to try to hide her eyes and face. She didn’t even take them off to sleep, nor did my mom request for her to do so; in the mornings, she’d try to wash her face around the smeared circles, and some of the black would end up coming off, but never more than half. She’d then get to work re-drawing and re-darkening the middles, and the process never seemed to end. I wondered how the most beautiful girl in the world could believe herself so ugly. I was told by my mom, during that visit to Texas almost three years ago, that she habitually put salt on her forearms and then pressed ice cubes over it, causing awful burns on herself. I saw the big rectangular burn marks on her arms, which she tried to cover up with lots of those black rubber wristbands, and told my mom she should really be in counseling for her self-esteem and self-destructive behavior, before she started doing worse to herself. That time, I hadn’t seen her in about 4 years and was in shock from seeing the happy healthy vibrant fun- and color-loving child turn into someone’s sad lost stripped-off shadow. I loved that she was wearing the color red when I picked her up from the airport almost two weeks ago, instead of strictly all black like before. Red sweatshirt she’d swiped from her boyfriend, with his school logo on it, black leggings, and one dark red and one black boot. When Maddie visited last Christmas, one of her eyebrows was dyed black and the other red, same with each half of her hair.
Aria brought her stuff into the apartment, again not letting anyone help her, and then spent half an hour playing with the ornaments on my Christmas tree. She introduced herself to the cats, and Riley snuggled and rubbed his face against hers right away, and she picked him up and he purred. To my nostalgic delight, she purred back at him, the exact same adorable purring sound that she’s been able to make since she was a small child. I fed her and then she fell right to sleep on my couch, in all her clothes except the boots. I laid my favorite red cable knit throw blanket on her, stepped outside for some exercise to ease some of my tension, and came back in and had a long hot relaxing bath. I checked on her many times, and she was always in deep sleep. Something I couldn’t achieve much of that night. I slept less than two hours, couldn’t ease my excitement or turn off my internal monologue long enough to sleep with any seriousness. I was happy, though.
She woke up at 8 a.m. that first morning and that’s when I gave up on trying to sleep. Made her coffee and tried to persuade her to have breakfast, but she only wanted coffee, so I had breakfast myself, and then we got ready for the day. We put on our makeup side by side in the same mirror, and though I was slightly annoyed at first having very little mirror space, she smiled broadly at me and gushed, “This feels very sisterly!” My annoyance instan
tly dissolved. A few minutes later she looked at me and frowned and exclaimed, “You’re so much prettier than me!” and pouted and looked sad. My mouth opened in utter shock and I told her that was so far from the truth and I didn’t know how she could think such a thing. “Aria, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” I said truthfully, “No girl in the world is prettier than you.” She stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry at me and said her boyfriend tells her the same thing, and that’s what she does to him when he says it too. I began to approve of her boyfriend. I dressed in a long-sleeved light grey bodysuit that very much looked like a leotard and high waisted black jeans. She wore low-rise black moto jeans, a thermal shirt my mom had gotten her for the trip and told her to wear under her clothes, and her boyfriend’s red school sweatshirt. We had lunch at this Irish pub called The Still and she only ate a very small cup of soup, refused anything else. I was surprised because my mom had told me Aria has very healthy eating habits, doesn’t eat too little or too much. Then I remembered my mom’s view of reality has been a bit off for the past few years. We picked out a turkey with William and some Christmas groceries. I told Aria to get some food and drink items she liked and she picked out several different types of juice and a giant tub of organic spinach, which she never ended up eating. I had to take a nap when we got home and woke up two hours later to the walls shaking, and my bones too for that matter, from the loudness of what I could tell after a few earth-rattling minutes was That 70s Show. Went into the living room and found her watching it on netflix with the volume maxed out and William cringing beside her at the computer. Turned the volume down a bit and when I left the room, it somehow magically rose back up. William joined me in the kitchen as I took out the bowl of chocolate chip and m&m cookie dough I’d mixed up the night before and sat it on the counter to get a little bit closer to room temperature. I told him if I wasn’t in the room, he was welcome to turn the volume down if she had it too loud, which he went out and did. Aria ran into the kitchen and stole a spoonful of cookie dough, though I did warn her it had raw egg in it. I asked her if she was hungry a while later and she said she’d eat later that night but never did.
I made cookies and Aria and I got to talking and had a lovely and meaningful conversation. We discovered we both have a nearly obsessive love of the movie Heathers, which I never expected her to have seen, and she wanted to watch it with me, since none of her dipshit friends could get past the opening scene with the song Que Sera Sera playing and their game of croquet. We watched it and Aria sang along with Que Sera Sera and kept talking about how hot Christian Slater was in that movie, and I had to agree. I pointed out a lot of the stylistic details that make the movie unique and we laughed at all of the funny lines. She doesn’t laugh when characters in movies do mean things to each other, and I do. She feels bad for the characters who are innocent or are being manipulated, bullied, betrayed, and I don’t, really; she’s a much nicer human being than I am, in many ways.
Very early on Christmas Eve, she jumped onto my bed and woke me, told me she was so happy to be spending Christmas with me. I was grateful that she didn’t wake me up by rubbing deodorant on my nose, like she always did when she was a younger kid. We laid together for a while talking and she noticed the colored pencil drawing she made for me of a blue rose when she was twelve years old, four years ago, hanging framed on my bedroom wall. I told her I hung it there as soon as I got back from my last trip to Texas, which is true, so it’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, after my eyes focus. She hugged me vehemently and we got up and both ate cereal and bananas. We ventured through horrid holiday traffic to the closest mall, where she spent two hours in Hot Topic looking for gifts for her friends. She bought an oversized black Misfits sweater with purposefully unravelled thread in many spots that hung off of her like a tent. She hardly took it off for the remainder of her trip. She kept trying to buy me things everywhere we went, too, but I told her she’s a kid and I’m supposed to be buying her stuff, not the other way around. We went to The Orient and I was grateful she was finally eating real food. Though half of what she ate were the fried wonton strips placed on our table as soon as we sit down, the entire plate of them, which are much too greasy for me. She ordered lemonade everywhere we went, and I always order unsweetened iced tea, so together, I guess we form an Arnold Palmer, which is, coincidentally, our mother’s usual drink of choice. Ah, genetics…
That night, she helped me bake cookies and we had fun cutting out and decorating the gingerbread shapes. She has a complex about any little scrap of food being thrown out, so she winced and moaned whenever I threw the leftover pieces of dough we’d been working with out after re-rolling and re-cutting the scraps once. She accepted it when I explained that using overworked dough results in tough cookies, and got her to laugh, because our mom always uses that expression, tough cookies. I, personally, use a different word other than cookies to fill in the expression, as I enjoy a little bit of vulgarity. She drew little blue birds on some of the cookies to be funny, referencing the Portlandia sketch I’d shown her earlier that morning, “Put A Bird On It”. When we were done, she tasted her first gingerbread cookie and loved it, and I told her I’d never tasted one until I moved here. Where we’re from, the most common Christmas cutout cookie is the hojarasca, a thick and sumptuous sugar cookie with a hint of cinnamon and the moist crumbly texture of wet beach sand. They’re actually amazing, and I make them sometimes at Christmas, but I wanted to introduce Aria to something new. Made chocolate cherry cookies with her too, and taught her how easy it is to make jellied cranberry sauce from scratch, since she loves cranberries and everyone else in my family seems to be afraid of cooking. I had bought a red stocking and written her name on its white cuff in dripping white glue and drowned the letters in green glitter a few days before her arrival, and hung it up next to William’s and mine. After she fell asleep, I filled her stocking with lots of candy and placed probably a dozen and a half wrapped boxes under the tree for her to open the next morning. Put out all of William’s presents too, and filled his stocking, and brought out some stuff for the cats as well.
Woke up about an hour after Aria the next morning. William already had the turkey in the oven and Aria had been his little helper. Her being occupied with him was probably the
reason I was allowed to sleep in that morning. I remembered we’d bought some nice hearty Jewish bagels the previous day, so I offered one to Aria and was so glad she decided to eat one. We ate bagels with cream cheese in front of the tv and I introduced her to the show Freaks & Geeks, which she kept asking to watch more and more of for the remainder of her visit. When William had his hands free, we began opening presents. We picked an order and took turns opening a present while the others watched. The pile of wrapping paper, tissue paper, and empty white boxes beside us eventually grew over four feet high, and my little cat Pippa, whom Aria had so much fun playing with, kept dashing and sliding through the mountain of Christmas debris in frenetic excitement. Riley joined her after a while and kept stealing bows we were taking off presents and running off with them in his mouth, then tossing them in the air with his mouth and batting them all over the apartment with his white finger-gloved front paws. Cats love Christmas.
I gave Aria lots of artistic little graphic shirts in her favorite color, black, some long sleeved and some short sleeved, some without sleeves, a set of Nest mini perfumes, most of which I am in love with, a set of Benefit lip glosses, some Urban Decay eyeshadows and pencils, a black mesh bodysuit with faux leather patches over the chest, stomach, and bra-line in the back, a fuzzy black monster mini purse with eyes, a crossbody bat-wing pouch designed to hold a smartphone and some cash or cards, vampire teeth socks, an automatic cat-face-shaped stamper, which she kept using to put little black kitty faces all over my arms, a tiger face necklace, hand lotion from Bath & Body Works in Fresh Sparkling Snow (though I wasn’t aware snow had a scent), body wash and body lotion in Enchanted Orchid, my own copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (the book), a few minor things I’m sure I’ve forgotten, and a black sweatshirt with a big tiger face on it and the phrase “Here come the wild ones” and the year she was born, 1997, written across the bottom. I told her I got myself the same black tiger sweatshirt, had cut the neck out all Jennifer Beals on mine, and thought of her (Aria) when I wore it, as I sometimes call her a little blonde tiger. She loves anything with a tiger on it.
Every hug from Aria feels initially like a punch in the face. She flies at me so fast and forcefully that if I don’t briskly lift my chin out of the way right before impact, my top and bottom teeth clank together harshly or the cartilage of my nose goes numb for a minute or one of my cheekbones ends up throbbing briefly or some similar pain. I absolutely love every one of her hugs, and she gives a lot of them. I received a hug just like that after every single gift she opened. She told me at one point that she was having the best Christmas ever.
After presents, we had our turkey feast and watched Bad Santa, which she had never seen before. Again, I was grateful that she ate real food that day. We all investigated our stockings very late at night, and Aria seemed to find it quite novel, as my mom had never done Christmas stockings before. Amongst many other candies and confections, I gave her a giant bag of Pixy Stix, her signature candy since she was a small child. My mom told me over the phone when I called to wish her a merry Christmas that I would end up paying for giving her those, but I didn’t, really, other than the initial monetary amount. Aria started emptying stick after stick into her mouth immediately, just like when she was a little girl, but didn’t really seem hyperactive from them after. When she was a little kid, about 8 or 9 years old, she would empty a few Pixy Stix into a small bowl and then spit out some saliva into the bowl, and stir it with a spoon. Then she’d stand in the kitchen mischievously and offer it to anyone walking by and tell them how good it tasted with her saliva added to it. Then she’d run around acting crazy after eating it. She told me over the phone at age 11 that she’d started using water for that concoction instead of saliva. Now she just lifts her head up and empties several of them into her mouth at the same time. Like a normal person. I suppose that original concoction is still made inside her mouth, naturally, before she swallows.
In the days following Christmas, she wore the shirts I gave her a lot, but would get cold and either put on the black tiger sweatshirt I gave her or the Misfits sweater over them. The weather, which had been uncharacteristically mild for this time of year, fluctuating between the 60s and 40s, dipped back down into the low 30s and 20s, and poor Aria was used to the warm weather in south Texas. Even at this time of year there, during the days the weather is often in the 70s, and at night it may dip into the 50s, and everyone there shivers in shock and brings out the warmest jackets they own, and complains nonstop about how cold it is. Winters in Texas were like early fall or late spring here; I loved them. I lent her my warmest coat, which is usually too warm for me in winter here, because she likes being warm and toasty. She’ll even wear hoodies in the 110+ heat of a south Texas summer, when I can hardly bear to wear my skin. I took her to my favorite creamery in Pennsylvania, and she swore she had the best coffee ice cream of her life. I had a waffle bowl with a giant scoop of chocolate raspberry drizzle ice cream and a giant scoop of strawberry cheesecake ice cream. I could only finish about half of it, though, because it was so big, but both flavors were amazing. She quite enthusiastically wanted to meet my friend Sullivan, because in the past year, when she’s been sad, I’ve told her about the crazy things he’s said and done, and it’s helped cheer her up and make her laugh. We met him out one night and then he came over, and he was on some of the worst behavior ever in front of Aria. Over the course of the evening, he touched William’s ass and grabbed William’s penis over his pants unexpectedly, felt my breasts up in public and made me blush, which I was so mad at myself for doing, became inebriated, used the n-word about two dozen times, kept making awkward jokes about us all having an orgy, talked graphically about having anal sex and having his dick sucked, showed all of us, Aria included, a picture he took on his phone of his naked hairy ass cheeks, passed gas quite loudly, and went to the bathroom with the door open. By the end of the night, I’d had more than enough of him. But Aria thought he was awesome.
I did spend a lot of quality time with my sixteen year old sister, and got to know the person she is now. It snowed one day, and I lent her some snowboots, because we wear the same shoe size, and she jumped around in the snow and made a six-inch snowman. I took many photos of her, and discovered early on that the same camera angles that work best for my face work best for hers too. Most days, she hardly ate a thing. William and I were able to persuade her to eat real food a few times, but then she wouldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day. She doesn’t have anorexia nearly as bad as I had it at her age, but she certainly does have a bit of it. What disturbed me most was seeing the way she crushes herself over and over. I saw in her eyes that she wanted things, like food in restaurants or lovely clothes in colors other than black, that she wanted them intensely. She’d even talk excitedly about them to me and look overjoyed. But then, it’s like a switch was flipped in her brain, and she’d suddenly look despondent and say she didn’t want any of whatever it was, or that she couldn’t wear that color, or something appropriately similar. My heart broke every time, and I couldn’t convince her to do what she’d really wanted to do. William, when he saw her do this, had to walk away, because it made him furious with her and he was ready to cuss her out. I asked him why and he said he didn’t know, but I think it’s because seeing her torture herself unnecessarily was frustrating to him, and frustration makes him feel powerless, and powerlessness leads to anger in him. I made excuses for him and told Aria he had to make some business calls.
Aria’s low self-esteem and how it leads her to act really bother me. I mean, I was anorexic and had my own private self-esteem issues at her age, still do, really, but other than that, I at least had the courage to be who I really was. She bases most of her outward personality on what will fit in with her little clique of friends, and she’s universes more intelligent than any of them. She went through my old clothes that I was going to donate to goodwill and tried on a few dresses that looked so stunning on her. One was baby blue and strappy with little opalescent buttons down the bust. The color looked amazing with her blonde hair and I gushed when I saw her in it. She smiled excitedly in front of the mirror when she saw herself in it and let out a little high pitched squeal. She twirled around in it and giggled, and I thought she looked so much like herself in it, her real self. She’s kind and sweet and so loving and cheery, absolute sunshine. But she got that look on her face again, and I knew what she was about to do. “I can’t wear this color,” she told me robotically. I asked her why. Her eyes clouded up and she said, “It doesn’t look good on me. I can’t pull it off.” I told her that even though black looked good on her, this color looked even better, that it highlighted her brightness, her sweetness, her creative spark. “But I can’t pull it off…I can only pull off black.” “That’s not true,” I pleaded, and rested my hand on her shoulder. “You can pull off any color,” I tried to explain, “because you’re so beautiful, and you have so many wonderful, colorful, gorgeous things inside you, just waiting to shine out for the world to see.” “But I’m comfortable in black,” she pleaded. I said, in as gentle a vocal tone as I could manage, “You’re comfortable only in black because you’re comfortable repressing your real self and making yourself miserable, darling. But you’re worth so much more than that. For someone who wears black all the time, you’re really not that dark of a person. You’re a lot sunnier than me, and I’m not talking about your hair.” She smiled at me, but I saw tears forming in her eyes. She looked away. “What really bothers me is that it seems like you don’t want to wear pretty colors because you don’t think you’re pretty enough for them…” Still looking away, she said, “Yeah, there’s that. I’m really not. I don’t look good in any color. But people say everyone looks good in black. So I look okay in black, just not any other color.” “I can’t be okay with you thinking you’re anything less than beautiful. Everyone else sees how gorgeous you are. You always have been. Since you were born, I’ve always thought you were the most beautiful child I’d ever seen. And now you’re turning into the most beautiful young woman I’ve ever seen.” She hugged me for a long time, and then I insisted she take the dress with her even if she never wore it. Though I told her I wanted her to wear it. I told her it was only going to be donated, if she didn’t take it.
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