Lillian was sitting at a plastic picnic table in a backyard, identical to the seemingly thousands of plastic picnic tables she'd sat at before at these birthday parties. With a small sundae cup in hand, she watched the kids run back and forth across the yard, screaming and laughing, eating cake, having the best time of their lives and not even knowing it. Not even knowing that things only get worse the older you get. She sighed and looked down at her shoes, covered in dirt and blades of grass. Suddenly she felt something hit her in the back of the head, and reached up to touch it, turning around.
"Ow!" she said, looking at the fence behind her and noticing Alexis leaning over it, grinning, in her pirate costume; Lillian continued to rub the back of her head and added, "you know, a 'pssst' would've sufficed." "You're not a cat," Alex said, "besides, what're the odds we'd wind up working next door to one another?" "For the sake of my skull, unfortunately not slim enough," Lillian said, making Alex laugh. Just then, Josh also propped themselves up on the fence, waving at Lillian, who blushed and waved back as she asked, "what...you guys are working together today?" "Well, pirates and mermaids go kinda hand in hand, so," Alex said, "Can I have one of those sundae cups?" "...sure, just hop on over here and go to the red icebox, they're stuffed in there," Lillian said, not expecting Alexis to actually do such a thing, and mildly surprised when she did. As she ran across the yard to the icebox, Lillian, chuckling, looked back at Josh, who was smirking as she tossed her hair a bit and asked, "so...what's it like working with the walking equivalent of a construction site disaster?" "Hey, give her a break, she's entertaining, and she's pretty nice," Josh said, "also she looks hot in her pirate costume." "She does look hot, I can't deny it," Lillian said, glancing back over her shoulder at Alex before hearing Josh speak again. "Jealous of her hair, too. It's so bouncy and bright. That's au natural, nothing I can do will ever match that," they said, grabbing their own and touching it gently, adding, "I waited a long time to grow my hair out to this length, and god do I love it, but there's just something that I can't seem to capture that you and Alex get so easily." "Volume," Lillian said, mouth shivering from the sundae, "it's volume. You need volume. Otherwise your hair is flat." "You should come over and do my hair sometime," Josh said, making her blush as they added, "it'll be fun, I'll order pizza." "You sure know how to show a girl a good time," Lillian said as Alexis rejoined them and sat on the top of the plastic picnic table Lillian was seated at. "I had to fight off like 3 other kids just to get this sundae cup," Alexis said, tearing the lid off it and licking the underside. "You didn't actually punch children, did you?" Josh asked. "It's not like any of them were the birthday child," Alexis said, shrugging. *** Maddie was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich for lunch and reading a book she'd gotten from the library while her mother, Jessie, was making something for her father, Phil. Despite all the work she had to do now around the house, despite the reasons for why she had to do all this new additional work, Maddie couldn't help but notice that her mother was humming a lot lately, specifically while cooking. After a bit, Maddie put her sandwich down, bookmarked her page and looked at her mom. "Is dad gonna be okay?" she asked. "He should be, yes, he's getting better day by day, and it's been over half a year now, so," Jessie said, "hopefully soon he'll be able to go back to work and and stuff." "I don't want him to go back to work," Maddie said, "I like it when he's here. He was never here before." Jessie put her stirring spoon down and looked over the counter at Maddie, unsure of how to respond to this. She sighed and pulled her hair up into a bun, tying it down. "...we haven't been around enough, we know that. We know we fight a lot. We know that isn't fair either. We both feel terrible," Jessie said, "but we both have very high paying jobs and with those comes a lot of stress, but you are never the problem, you know that right? In fact, you're the only good thing in our day to day lives." "If that's true, why don't you guys spend more time with me?" Maddie asked, and to this, sadly, Jessie didn't have a response. Maddie picked up her sandwich and her book and went to finish eating in her room, while her mother went back to cooking, quietly crying to herself as she did. *** "My mom let me grow my hair out real long in high school," Josh said, "like, long long, and it was awesome. Course a lot of people thought I was a hippie or a surfer, but still." "Mermaids are kinda like surfers," Alex said. "The Surfin' Mermaid would be a great name for a Tiki Bar," Lillian said. "It so would! Oh my god!" Alexis said, making Josh laugh. "Anyway, I appreciated it, because it made me feel more comfortable in my own skin. Unfortunately, my father didn't. One time, in junior year, my mom went to visit her sister and my dad dragged me into the bathroom and cut all my hair off to the point where I nearly had a buzzcut. I refused to go to school for a week. It was...god it was traumatic. I remember going back into the bathroom that night, after he'd fallen asleep, and looking at all the hair he'd put in the trashcan, just standing there, crying. I'd gone from beautiful to ugly in 10 seconds flat." Alexis sucked on her wooden spoon and then sighed. "That is, bar none, the worst glory days story I've ever heard," she said, making them laugh. "Well, either way now I do whatever the hell I want, and fuck him," Josh said, "I just wish I could get that bounce you guys seem to have effortlessly." "It isn't effortless," Lillian said, "I have to put a lot of time and work into my appearance. I mean, sure, a lot of who I am is effortless, simply because I'm a woman, but a lot of it is makeup, contouring, hair work. It's exhausting being a woman. It takes so much time." "I'm effortless," Alex said, shrugging, "what can I say, I'm perfect, and I'm sorry, but you can't teach perfection." Lillian and Josh laughed again, both appreciative of Alexis being here to lighten the mood. She excused herself for another cup, leaving Josh and Lillian alone once again. Lillian stood up and leaned on the fence, her and Josh's faces only an inch or so apart as she lowered her voice and spoke. "It's pretty cool we get to see one another this regularly," she said, "guess there's perks to working at the same place, huh?" "I've always heard office romances don't pan out, so I don't know about all this," Josh said, smirking, before Lillian leaned in more and kissed them, to which they happily reciprocated. It was new and exciting, but it was something both of them needed, and to hell with anyone who might say differently. After a minute or two, they pulled apart again, both giggling, Lillian blushing. "I think you make a beautiful mermaid, and I think any other girl would be jealous of your hair," she said as she reached up and touched it, playing with it gently. "You sweet talker you," Josh replied. *** "Parents are weird," Lillian told her therapist that week, "like, everyone I know, either who works with me or who doesn't, seems to have pain that stems from some kind of unfulfilling adolescent experience with their parents. This little girl I know, Maddison, her parents are like never home and she's always upset at how lonely she feels and hates how often they fight, and then most of the people in my company hate their parents too. I've been trying to get along with my mother more, but lord knows it's hard." "Parents are tough people to understand," Greg said, crossing his legs, "We want to see them as fully complex individuals, but we can't help but see them as our parents, first and foremost, and as such, we are doomed to judge them based on the actions made as parents more than any others. If we knew them as people instead, perhaps we'd be a bit more subjective, but that's sadly not the case." Lillian sighed and looked at her nails, then started tugging at the knees of her jeans nervously with them. "...I worry that I'm an extension of her worst attributes, and as such, that makes me not only hate myself but hate her even more for making me what I am," she said quietly, almost whispering, "...she put me into these pageants, she made me believe that beauty was important, the end all be all defining trait for a woman, but lately..." "...lately?" Greg asked, raising an eyebrow, as Lillian smiled. "Lately I've begun to learn, thanks to someone I know, that women cannot be defined," she said, "certainly not by their appearance. Femininity is not a strictly defined thing, it's a concept, it's an idea, it's a belief. If someone feels they're a woman, they are. I'm not my mother. I'm me. A wholly different woman than she was, and I think that that's what's helping me most right now." Greg smiled and jotted something down on his legal pad, then let it rest of the desk beside him as he cleared his throat and ran a hand through his pepper grey hair. "...do you ever think about returning to the pageant circuit?" Greg asked, "but as a judge, maybe? Prove to other little girls what it took so long to prove to yourself? Show them that they have more to offer besides their bog standard beauty dictated by society. Maybe this would be a good form of closure, or maybe it'd be simply a new way to make something good out of something that once hurt you." Lillian had never once considered it, but maybe Greg had a point. Maybe she should return to the circuit, if, for nothing else, than to help other little girls not be so ashamed of themselves like he'd said. She knew the damage these things did on little girls self esteem and self worth, and she knew that it was worth salvaging. But god, could she? That was the question. Could she stand to be back in there, amongst those kinds of people, seeing those kinds of mothers pouring their toxic identity beliefs into children who aren't even in 3rd grade yet? "...I never did think about it, no," she finally said, biting her lip, "but now that you've brought it up, I doubt I'll stop thinking about it, so thanks for that." *** "Everything is a falsehood," Lillian said. The party was winding down, the kids parents were coming to get them, and it was just her, Alex and Josh now sitting by the poolside of the party Alex and Josh had been working. Lillian had taken her shoes and stockings off, pulled her dress up and slid her legs into the lukewarm pool water. "Everything about who we are is made up," she continued, "every facet of our personality is decided upon by us because we think it fits who we wanna be. So, for someone to get mad at someone else for not being part of the binary or part of what society might consider 'normal' is ridiculous. A woman isn't a cheerleader all the time. A man isn't a construction worker nonstop. Eventually they take these uniforms off and they go back to being themselves. Those parts of themselves are not their whole. We are all so much more than what our uniforms make us to be. Just a small part of us, honestly." "Deep," Alexis said, plopping herself down next to Lillian and sliding her own legs into the pool as Josh swam around in front of them. "Everyone plays dress up," Lillian said, "Some of us just take it to more extreme measures than others." "Wait wait wait," Alexis said, "you're telling me Josh isn't actually a mermaid? Oh god, my entire belief system is now thrown into question!" Josh and Lillian laughed as Alexis pulled out a package of cigarettes and lit one, taking a puff. "I'm just saying that nobody should be judged for who they are simply because who they are isn't who everyone else is. Unless you're a legitimate horrible person with vile beliefs that's outright hurting others, nobody should be judged for adhering to one social scene over another. We invented the idea of cliques without realizing that it wasn't a joke. We need these characters. We need these roles. They define us, in some small way, and help us feel more at ease with ourselves. I think that's a beautiful thing." "You would, Princess Twinkletoes," Alexis said. "Like you, just because you do drugs doesn't make you an addict, and even if you were, it's not WHO you are, it's just part of what you do. It doesn't define you, nor should it be the singular characteristic others judge you on," Lillian said, making Alexis go pale and stutter. After a moment she softly mumbled 'thank you' and went back to smoking. Lillian looked down into the pool at Josh, who was smoothing their long hair back, and she smiled at their innate beauty; Lillian took a deep breath, then continued, "we're taught to play pretend, to play dress up, and then told to stop once we get 'too old'. But the adults continue to do it. They just have to call it different things for their ego. It's all still dress up." "Deep," Alexis said. "You already said that." "No, I mean the pool, it's deep, see," she said, shoving Lillian into it, making her scream. Alexis cackled as Josh helped Lillian up, the both of them laughing. A year ago Lillian might've gotten annoyed at Alexis for doing such a thing, but lately she'd learned to fine tune her irritants and only be mad when the situation truly called for it. Besides, she knew there was no correlation to the act of treading water and her actual life. She wasn't sinking. She was swimming. And she loved it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About
A young woman named Lilian Phillips, who plays a princess at birthday parties, befriends a little girl who had a child die at her own birthday party. Archives
April 2024
Categories |