I’m anticipating my parents in my new apartment, perched on the futon in the windowless zone between the unit’s two bedrooms. About a year into the pandemic, I moved into a dismembered row house off Knickerbocker in Bushwick, acting on reduced rents I could just barely afford with my new job churning out fear porn for a declining U.S. news magazine. My parents were handling my relocation well enough considering their collective knowledge of North Brooklyn began with the blackout of 1977 and ended with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s.
I imagine they were introduced to the neighborhood by a Reagan-era cable news segment showcasing the worst slum in the country, little more than a collection of fires, crimes, and wooden shanties whose imitation brick siding drooped like the frowns of their underprivileged tenants. Meanwhile, my mother and father were growing up next door to one another in an idyllic redlined suburb, the kind where polite people weighed the merits of state-sanctioned housing discrimination and the War on Drugs at summer barbecues. Nobody could segregate in those days quite like Jersey mortgage lenders. Later, the two of them would start their own nuclear family a little over three miles from their childhood homes alongside other middle-order white Americans. We would move one time when my dad bought my nonna’s split-level on the other side of town.
There are only thirty-five miles between my place of origin and my new chosen home. Even so, word that developers had reclaimed the ungovernable Kings County and repopulated it with adorable non-natives—all vying for titles like Writer and Actor and Digital Prophet—never reached my parents.
A text message interrupts the dissociation I’ve disguised as reading. Today, the day of the lunch date I arranged to assuage their concerns for my safety, I plan to show them all the civic reconditioning that has allowed me to assume the title of New Yorker at a reduced risk.
My slice of the former single-family home that I rented came with an en-suite bath just big enough for a single occupant to turn in place, its distinctive highlight being a plastic faucet and basin ingeniously affixed to the toilet tank. Months into my tenancy, I would learn that the bowels of my toilet sink were infested with black mold as I brushed my teeth with contaminated water.
An unmistakable odor of stray cat urine would strike my nostrils whenever I approached the random door on my room’s exterior wall, a door that probably made more sense from an architectural standpoint before landlords hacked what was once a first-floor parlor into a two-bedroom unit. Though I waged war against the piss with soap, water, white vinegar, and bleach, the smell never failed to return with a vengeance at the first hint of humidity. This is how I learned that moisture reactivates the uric acid crystals in cat urine, and only a special enzyme cleaner can break down its molecules. My mother never liked cats. You can never get the smell of their pee out, she’d say in explanation of her prejudice. Cat people’s houses stink.
I arranged the potted garden that my mother gave me and a sweet little bistro set on the overgrown private patio behind the door. I interpreted the plants as a token of her unspoken support of my independence, despite her general disapproval of all things metropolitan. Maybe she was just glad I was moving out. Regardless, she has always been a thoughtful about gifts. I enjoyed my urban garden for approximately a week before learning that my neighbors had already claimed my patio as their personal landfill. Sometimes I’d come upon treasures like scrap metal or condoms inflated into phallic balloons by the unsupervised child next door. One morning, after having joked previously that I would someday find an entire pizza, I discovered three-quarters of a Domino’s pie with dipping sauce. Someone had snuck through the cellar through an unlocked door in the hall to indulge in a drunken midnight meal.
All this cost me a mere $1,200 a month, plus utilities. Growing up within arm’s reach of New York City taught me enough to know it wouldn’t deliver much value for my money. I knew the so-called City of Dreams didn’t actually want my aspirations at all, nor that of the millions of wannabe-somethings clamoring for space where mostly rats, roaches, and the ultra-rich are allowed to thrive. But it would get me far enough away from the bubble of mediocrity my mother existed within—the one that protected her from the labor of personal growth and a rich lived experience—to hopefully escape the same fate. I was willing to pay a premium to protect myself from becoming like her.
I try to visualize what might be transpiring in the car as my parents cross state lines: My dad, an anxious driver who avoids unfamiliar routes, probably panics as the Holland Tunnel spits out vehicles into Lower Manhattan. The crush of drivers honking and crisscrossing lanes never fails to overwhelm him, which is why he prefers to park the car in Summit and take NJTransit from there, but neither of them knows how to navigate the MTA from Penn Station to Bushwick. It’s best for them to stay out of the entrails that connect the city’s godless provinces.
He will take the wrong lane and head straight down Canal Street, and as its smoking halal carts come into view, they might remind him that he hasn’t had a gyro in ages. He’ll announce the intrusive thought (“I haven’t had a gyro in ages!”) to let my mother know he wants to stop for one of the greasy delicacies on the way back home.
Immersed in her iPhone passenger side, she’ll answer his calls for reassuring chatter with distant mhms through pursed lips. The blocks they pass, alive with people and flanked by vendors hawking bric-a-brac, are not enclaves of history and culture to her. They fall into a category she typically reserves for urban and lower-income environments: shithole.
I expect she will also loathe my new neighborhood and roach-brown tenement, an objective downgrade from our family’s modest split-level home. I moved back into it after breaking up with my live-in boyfriend at twenty-four and stayed there for an unhappy sixteen months. This was a layover necessitated, in part, by the usual troubles and poverty that strike post-graduates with journalism degrees. What really knocked me down, though, was an explosive manic episode. She, on the other hand, might attribute these misfortunes to my being a leech and not the mental illness that dripped down her bloodline to me. Our relationship, historically speaking, is complicated at best, and when things were bad, they were very bad indeed. I may have once or twice described her as the type of mother one looks forward to putting in a nursing home—and worse. While I’d like to tell myself this wasn’t always the case, the facts would suggest that her condition has just become more aggressive with time.
Exhibit A: I received regular vaccines from my sickly, premature infanthood through adolescence. Nowadays, a child born into her care might not be so lucky, as she has ascertained that vaccines are products of demonic influence.
Exhibit B: She merely disliked Barack Obama in 2008, and now he and his lovely wife Michelle are members of a Satanic global network whose purpose is to molest children and drink their blood for something called adrenochrome, according to her sources.
Exhibit C: The earth was most certainly round when I was a child, but that was when she was a globie, and lately it appears she is not one.
In hindsight, there were a few indicators that she would become one of Those People. She always delighted in joking that the dimples on my lower back were marks from when Satan removed my tail and dispatched me to Earth as her daughter. I learned to laugh at this in childhood to hide my hurt feelings and avoid being labeled sensitive. When my sister was born with dimples in her shoulders, she added on to this parochial narrative of hers, declaring that angels plucked out her wings before sending a healthy, cheery infant who slept at night. My opposite.
She vehemently supported the Iraq War, and her taste in media and entertainment seemed flavored by magical thinking going back to the days of cable television. Zak Bagans’ reality TV program Ghost Adventures, her favorite, served as documented proof that demons are among us. Thus I was forbidden from ever using an Ouija board in a serious sit-down talk that other parents might have saved for the birds and the bees. That lecture would come, however, when I was about fourteen, and it began something like, When I was your age, my mother told me, “If you have sex before you’re married, you’re a whore.” I’m not going to tell you that, but…
Then there was the time, shortly after 9/11, I learned the term jihadist when a woman wearing a hijab walked by our front door with her children. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew the way she said it sounded ugly. There was a single Muslim student in my grade, a tall, quiet Egyptian girl with bangs who my mother invited to my eighth birthday party. In middle school, she noticed this girl’s hijabi mother parked in the car line in front of us and shook her head disapprovingly. She couldn’t explain why. People who let religion make decisions for them…they…. I would learn this rule only applies to non-gentiles.
I try not to think about what I may have learned if the same scenario played out a decade later, but I have a pretty good idea from perusing her unabashedly public Twitter profile. The one she created, originally, to promote the small craft soap business she founded and operated from our basement starting in the late 1990s. One day she brought home a soap making kit from A.C. Moore as a craft for us to do together. She melted down a clear glycerin base in the microwave, poured it into molds, and I helped squeeze drops of food dye into each section. The pigments spread out like tiny fireworks in the plastic trays when they hit the hot glycerin, their hues weakening as the dye diffused.
When the liquid cooled and hardened, she popped out solid bars from the trays and decided this would be her enterprise. She named the business after me, her only child at the time. Back then, she was content to spend her days pouring soap into kitschy shapes and concocting bath products to sell on her early .com website. People would order her goods using a new invention called e-commerce, and our hulking white Dell monitor would emit a cacophony of dial up chirps and static as her email loaded. Sometimes she gave out free samples that the other momswould gush over as their sons complained to me about the glitter stuck to their skin.
The early years were the best years. Crock-Pots would melt down massive blocks of soap to 130-150°F on white folding tables lined up across our basement at all hours of the day and evening. She would add color and fragrance and pour the viscous liquid into the dozens of plastic molds spread out on the tables. One-of-a-kind bars would emerge, which she would shrink wrap and package in brown cardboard boxes, the eeeeek of her tape gun announcing another order ready for shipment. She produced more than 1,000 bars a week for the likes of major retailers and television programmers at the peak of her success. I’d tell my few friends that the house smelled like perfume because we had a soap factory downstairs.
She pitched her story of a stay-at-home-mom turned entrepreneur to local newspapers and magazines. One day, The Star-Ledger arrived with a photo of her on the front page of the business section, smiling with her best-selling product, a bar of customizable gold monogrammed soap. The arrival of social media gave her a new platform and visibility, and the internet responded to her witty Twitter punchlines. She was always clever with words and knew how to write a good hook.
The business didn’t grow over time. Everything she made went to taxes and operating costs, she said. Lamenting the decline of small manufacturing in America, her frustration grew as attempts to partner and expand beyond the basement were foiled time and again. The connections she made always turned out to be crazy or assholes. In 2010, I found a Shark Tank application she left on her desk and smiled when I read the part where she asked the Sharks to make her a soap star, a last-ditch effort to realize her vision. Eventually her hands and wrists started aching, and the doctor said she had tendonitis from popping soap out of molds over and over again. Hurricane Irene flooded the basement. Her dreams had already been washed away.
Years after she abandoned her enterprise, when I was a junior in college, she hit menopause. More accurately, menopause hit her so hard she shattered. The timing of her crisis of identity aligned perfectly with that of the United States, and the ascending MAGA-infected corners of the web became her source of meaning. Her Twitter morphed into an engine of egomania and disinformation, and as her following swelled to 30,000 wretched users, everything grotesque and unwell inside her slithered to the surface. Her sense of reality shrank. I was mean and condescending to her. We did not get along.
Even during the Pizzagate is Real stage, I could never have forecasted how her disordered beliefs would come to consume her when her younger sister was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma. The liberal COVID hoax would arrive a few months later to stoke her paranoia, to which she responded by making our shared atmosphere as hostile as possible. Such as when she used the boutique art supplies I gave her for Christmas to paint Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore, with the addition of Donald Trump, onto a denim jacket she would wear on every occasion to go outside. She started inviting random malcontents she met online to stay at the house for Q-Anon theme parties. As far as she was concerned, it didn’t matter that I, technically a paying tenant, didn’t feel safe sleeping in proximity to these unvetted strangers. She was more than happy to banish me while she played Pin the Indictment on the Deep State with her new clique of fellow crackpots.
However, I didn’t understand how dangerously unhinged she had become until January 6, 2021, when she traveled to Washington, D.C. with these new companions to intervene in the certification of a democratic election. That was the same day I saw my doting, confrontation-phobic father reveal his anger over her growing fanaticism for the first time as he threw his arms up and proclaimed, “Even your grandfather thinks she’s nuts!” She never called to tell him she was okay and on her way home. Instead, she walked through the door, crazed, energized by the idea that she was part of something historic. A Digital Soldier who had finally seen IRL action, ready for the next battle. She was infuriated when my dad refused to entertain her delirious tirades.
In the weeks and months that followed her safe return, she would stay up until sunrise, Tweeting with pride about her religious experience at the Capitol. Would not be surprised if I am on news as deranged conspiracy theorist. She insisted she could feel frequencies vibrating throughout her body, an alleged communication from God that the Great Awakening was still on schedule, that her little sister would cure herself of terminal cancer with coffee enemas and medbeds.
I’d cope with the person she had become with my own transgressions, like getting blackout drunk and parking my car on the neighbor’s lawn after driving a half mile to buy cigarettes. Another time, I woke up violently hungover to my parents standing over my twin bed to find out I had vomited all over the basement.
I calculate the minutes I have left until my parents arrive at my door. Fifteen. On the table across from my roommate Marisa and me, the now-wilting flowers my mother sent a week earlier remind me of the note they came with wishing me luck with my Brooklyn lifestyle.
“She must have run out of room to tack on the ‘you whore,’” Marisa quipped after I read the message aloud. I laughed at her shrewd understanding of my mother’s subconscious. A fashion stylist I met on a room share site, Marisa and I bonded quickly over our respective upbringings, each colored by their own unique brands of privileged dysfunction. I appointed her to be the conversational buffer during my parents’ impending visit. She accepted the assignment in eagerness to meet the delusional Q-Amom who participated in an attempted insurrection.
Anxious sweat stings the back of my armpits in anticipation of my mother’s quiet disapproval. I turn to mindless scrolling for a quick neurological high, letting Instagram soothe my worries with contrived aesthetics. The algorithm washes over me, feeding me a steady stream of posts and ads aligned to my values and interests. Cream-coated pasta appears centered in a ceramic stoneware dinner plate. Thomas Cole’s magnum opus, The Course of Empire, illustrates the rise and fall of civilization at New York Historical. The New York Times asks, in text imposed over a photo of an AAPI activist, Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare? A good Samaritan rescues a litter of kittens from a dumpster.
I’m derailed when I scroll to the platform’s Suggested for You, a feature of the app that recommends accounts to follow based on user data, and a curious handle catches my eye: @JoanofArch. The account preview features a profile icon of a pedicured foot strapped into a heel. As I click on it, I gather, regrettably, that it is not a podiatric reimagining of the patron saint of France’s life and adventures. It’s an anonymous foot fetish account, albeit a cleverly named one as far as lascivious Instagram profiles are concerned.
There are no photos of the person attached to the foot, no links leading to more information or an OnlyFans (OnlyFeet?) account. I wonder to myself why the algorithm would suggest Miss Arch, since feet are not my kink, and conclude that someone in my rolodex must not know their clandestine account is synced to the contacts in their phone. Oh, delicious irony! My pupils dilate as I remember all the numbers I accumulated during my penniless tenure as a hyperlocal news reporter. I begin looking for clues as to Joan’s true identity, hoping that the secret freak will be some South Jersey town council member.
The first photo I tap is the same one from the profile icon, an open-toed, faux snakeskin heel filled with a pale foot. The nail paint is, fittingly, the classic two-toned French style. The foot is not young, but not very old, maybe around a size eight with a crooked pinky toe. Size eight is, after all, the most common women’s shoe size, a deduction that does little to help narrow down potentials for Joan’s ID. Still, the footwear tickles me as somehow familiar. I reason that many people within driving distance of a DSW must own a pair of serpentine going-out shoes.
I scroll down to see a grainy photo of the foot in a navy ballet flat, the kind that begs to be paired with capri pants. A blue-hued marbled rug I’m sure I’ve seen before at a Home Goods rests in the background. It looks like a rug I burned a hole in once when smoldering ash fell from a joint I was smoking whilst hammered. This post probably isn’t the type a foot fetishist would prefer since flats censor the toes (the best part of any tootsie, I suppose) and do little to enhance arch appeal. A few libidinous praises from dirty old men appear now and then in the comments: “Pretty feet. On a pretty lady. (Winky smiley face.)”
Overall, the grid of photos before me appears filter-less and unedited, an indication that the individual behind @JoanofArch knows enough to create a social media profile but not to understand the modern art of content creation and online sex work. Joan seems new to this, whatever this is, and perhaps set out for foot fame on a whim.
I move on. Waning sunlight illuminates the foot, now bare upon an outdoor ottoman and draped in a gold chain evoking the body jewelry fad of the early aughts. My spine snaps straight and the blood drains from my face because at this moment, I realize my gift from the irony gods is nothing more than another cosmic joke thrown my way by a cruel, arbitrary universe. Behind the foot, I recognize the backyard of my childhood home. I have indeed seen the snakeskin shoes and the blue marbled rug before. @JoanofArch is my mom, a pale-fleshed size eight, usually pedicured. Joan is the heretical alter ego to her reactionary Child of God alter ego.
Startled, Marisa whips her head toward me, trying to make sense of my distress as I struggle to communicate my unbelievable discovery. I eventually manage to stop sputtering long enough to provide the hideous explanation for my anguish.
“A weird account, a foot fetish account popped up on my Instagram. I think it’s my mom,” I spit out the words like I’ve mistaken a turd for chocolate. “It’s definitely my mom.”
“Are you sure? How do you know?” Marisa leans over my shoulder to see my screen.
“This photo, this is my parents’ outdoor furniture. Then I realized she owns all these shoes. They also used to have this rug in the living room. What the fuck? What the fuck?” I keep repeating the question, knowing all the while that no answer can quell my disgust.
Marisa is equally as unprepared for Joan as I am and therefore ill-equipped to help me decide whether to laugh or hyperventilate. I do both, my breathless cackle sounding more like an injured animal than a reaction to humor. Hot tears burn the backs of my eyes.
The judgment I fear my mother will pass on my shitty apartment and edgy neighborhood becomes my smallest problem as my phone buzzes again. Her text says that my dad just parked the car.
~
I’m operating outside my body, my ears ringing like I’m wading through the slow-motion aftermath of a bomb. Marisa, her role as a social intermediary having evolved into something closer to a human shield, offers nice-to-meet-yous as we greet my parents at the door. I do everything in my power to avoid looking at the ground, where my mother’s feet are, as I usher them both inside.
Dad drops Trader Joe’s bags of miscellaneous belongings I left behind and unwanted pantry ingredients from my mother’s cupboards on Marisa’s underused three-piece dining set. My dad is as enthusiastic about my new digs as my mother seems resentful to be in this devil-worshiping blight on God’s earth. When he defers to my mother—“Isn’t it great, hon? So Brooklyn!”—she does not smile in a way that conveys delight. Raising her eyebrows, she nods as she looks around the place, arms crossed, her trademark silence dripping with disapproval. Mmmm. I know deep down she wants to sound excited for me. With the first awkward pause of the afternoon reached, the four of us set foot for the self-described rustic sandwich shop on Wilson Avenue that I selected for lunch. My mother pulls her disposable blue face mask under her nose in an adolescent display of disobedience.
“Does the restaurant have cheesecake?” My dad asks of the other local culinary tradition he looks forward to eating on excursions to the city. I already made sure it was on the menu.
“I just love a slice of New York cheesecake,” he announces cheerfully.
My mother says nothing on the short walk over, but I know the environment is deeply upsetting to her. The streets are lined with garbage ripped out of trash bags by mutant rats. My dad keeps picking up the plastics and putting them in nearby bins in the same manner he obsessively picks up leaves and sticks from our lawn. Piles of dog shit dot the ground, gifts left behind by apathetic neighbors. We pass a man who, while technically not homeless, lives and sleeps outside a freestanding dwelling packed to the seams with junk he has spent years accumulating. His black van is in its usual spot, also brimming with junk. He is in his usual spot drinking his usual beer, and his eyes light up in recognition and horniness when he sees me. I wave back when he greets me in broken English, and I can almost hear my mother’s inner monologue screaming about illegals.
As we sit down at a table so small we could all touch elbows, her silence radiates at full volume. Her arms are crossed and her mouth turned down. Marisa keeps looking at me like I might implode under the weight of the secret information we now share. Information that I’m trying to pretend I didn’t discover moments before her arrival. Inside, though, I’m frantic and full of questions I don’t really want answered. Does my dad know about her apparent foot work? Is she involved in foot trafficking? Most importantly: For fuck’s sake, why? I want to un-know; I want Joan to not be real.
While my dad decides aloud whether he should have the brisket or braised short rib, Twitter posts witnessed while hate-stalking my mother’s account flash before me in rapid succession. A classic of hers, a picture of Tostitos with salsa and melted Mexican cheese she dubbed Build the Wall Nachos, interrupts my attempts to focus on the menu. I can never seem to look away from the detritus she insists on releasing into the ether of the internet, much like I find it impossible not to pick at a scab. Her online musings are the only real insight I have into her furious mind.
My blood pressure spikes thinking about her preoccupation with sexual deviants when a same-sex couple enters the restaurant. I start to worry she might scoff or glare or mutter something about pedophiles under her breath if she sees the neighborhood gays or theys being too flamboyant for her liking. Preparing for the worst, I imagine how I would chastise her and apologize for her unacceptable behavior before sending her home to Jersey. I imagine declaring loudly in front of everyone that she has no right to judge the way other people express their gender or sexuality when she’s posting secret foot pics all over social media, presumably for the attention of men who aren’t her husband.
I hear my stomach lurch as I remember the album stored in my iPhone labeled Mom is Insane. The cover image is her rear end with TRUMP emblazoned in big, gold letters across the seat of her jeans, the result of a manic 2020 election craft also made with the art supplies I had given her for Christmas. The screenshot exists alongside others of her shaming celebrities over nude photo leaks, mocking queer people, accusing women more accomplished than her of being dudes. The catalog of racism and phobia I could compile is staggering. This foot-focused project of hers is just another contradiction seeping through the cracks of her shame and internalized misogyny.
My indignation fades to heartache and rolls around like a small planet in my stomach. Someone says my name, and the din of getting-to-know-you conversation snaps me back into my body. Marisa is relaying, with trepidation, a past Career Israel internship experience to the unsmiling and passively anti-Semitic @JoanofArch. My mommy.
~
Back in my bedroom, I am desperate to unload the burden of knowing. It is a layer of harlequin skin I must shed before it grows over my eyes and mouth and ears to consume me. I consider calling my sister, six years my junior and the goody two-shoes to my black sheep, molded in our mother’s image and unwaveringly loyal. Past attempts to discuss our mother’s mental health and alarming behavior with her always resulted in ad-hominem attacks and harangues about Freedom of Speech. Instead, I opt for the only person in our family capable of understanding my mother the way I do, her sister.
I always worshiped her, the epitome of a cool aunt who insisted we call her Woo Woo. Standing almost six feet tall, she was large-framed and busty with a wild crown of frizzy curls that she hated. She hated everything about her appearance, in fact, and compensated for her perceived lack of beauty with academic excellence. Even so, her adult life was ruled by terrible men and disordered eating. She eloped in her mid-twenties with a U.S. Army member who married her for the pay increase and relocated with him to Virginia Beach. They divorced within a few years, and she stayed in the sad excuse of a beach town to run her own gift shop.
At twenty-nine she remarried a lecherous, chain-smoking jeweler, twenty-two years her senior, after he bought her a corgi (a gift for his queen) and proposed with an enormous ring. My mother begged her not to wed him, but my aunt’s self-loathing won in the end. I was her maid of honor at the Hawaiian-themed ceremony in the backyard of the tacky home she shared with her new husband, where raunchy nudes, topless mermaids, vulgar tchotchkes, and Swarovski crystal-coated trinkets disgraced every surface. His taste. The pièce de résistance, a massive marble relief of a woman’s bare torso, presided over a conversation pit-style living room from above the fireplace mantle.
They, too, would divorce a decade later, after which my aunt ran away on an impulse to sell jewelry to tourists in the Caribbean. My mother begged her to come back home. She stationed herself there until the cancer came along.
Woo Woo became my confidant and ally in my young adulthood as I watched my mother withdraw into her worst qualities. She knew a thing or two about having a mother with a propensity for erratic behavior and regaled me with stories about my grandmother’s episodes. Soon after my mother entered the Q-era of her illness, a package arrived at my door, and I opened it to discover thoughtfully curated self-help books about coping with emotionally immature parents. I didn’t read them and instead chose the path of non-healing. Something about resenting my mother felt like an obligatory act of political resistance, a way of demonstrating I was on the right side of history.
“Your mom has a way of sucking the joy out of everything,” Woo Woo once announced in a sing-song behind my mother’s back to my sister and me. We were visiting her for the holidays in the Floridian retirement haven she had been sentenced to following the cancer diagnosis. My grandfather lived nearby, and my aunt needed his financial support while subsisting on meager disability benefits. I was surprised when my sister, forever the flying monkey to our mother’s Wicked Witch, couldn’t help but giggle at my aunt’s response to her dourness.
Moving forward with my decision to unload on Woo Woo, I FaceTime her reclined on my bed, and she answers right away with her usual, “Hi, sweetheart!” Her eyes are at half-mast, a side effect of an I’m-dying-from-cancer-strength cannabis product called Rick Simpson Oil. She looks thin and weathered, and the hair she has left is stringy, but dyed blonde and styled. Her skin is tan from the Sarasota sunshine. She is still a beautiful woman, a fact that helps me pretend that she isn’t losing to the rare, incurable tumor on her liver.
I’m not even sure where to begin.
“I’m not even sure where to begin,” I tell her. “So I’ll just come out and say it. I found out my mom is posting pictures of her feet on a secret Instagram account.”
Woo Woo gasps and reflexively brings her hand to her mouth like a scandalized Victorian. I can see the corners of her smile creeping up behind her fingers and in her turquoise eyes.
“Do you know anything about this?” As much as I don’t want to, I’m repressing the beginnings of a smile too. We both explode in laughter. The hot tears are back, this time escaping down my cheeks, propelled by an absurd sadness. I sniff back the runoff from my nose. Woo Woo did not, in fact, know about this.
“What do you mean? How do you know it’s her?” I give her the same explanation I gave Marisa and send her the link to the account. I watch her face as she looks through it and comes to the same conclusion I did.
“I know it’s her. I recognize all her shoes. My parents used to have that rug. They gave it to me as a hand-me-down,” I testify through unrestrained hysteria. “That’s their patio furniture in the picture she took outside.”
“Do you think your dad knows? Do your parents need money or something?” Woo Woo asks, at a loss for an explanation.
“No? I don’t think so? I know what my dad makes. He’s an accountant for Christ’s sake. I don’t see why she would have to prostitute her feet for cash. She wouldn’t even have the skills to make money that way in the first place, as much as she’d like everyone to believe she’s a social media guru.”
I’m numb now, exhausted. The tears stop.
“I think it’s all for attention,” I hypothesize. “Why does she need so much attention?”
Woo Woo can’t tell me why my mother does the things she does. And she doesn’t have the power to wipe @JoanofArch from my mind. As always, though, she has an idea, a place to put my swirling emotions.
“This seems really bad right now, but keep it in your back pocket,” Woo Woo advises. “Because one day, your mom is going to make you madder than she’s ever made you before, and you’ll be able to ask her, ‘How’s Joan of Arch?’”
We devolve into laughter again, the kind that comes out silent, and say our I-love-you-goodbyes before hanging up. I fantasize into the evening about the moment l will drop this bomb on my mother. The satisfaction of knowing I have this nuclear weapon in my arsenal is immense—so much so that I actually come to appreciate that her foot slut alter ego isn’t the most offensive content she’s uploaded to the internet.
I reach for the water pipe on my bedside table and load up the bowl with a serving of marijuana before turning off the lights. I think back to last New Year’s Eve at Woo Woo’s condo, when she and I celebrated the occasion by writing our worries on pieces of paper and burning them in a novelty candle labeled My Last Fuck. I flick on my lighter and bring the flame to the bowl, inhaling a lung-full of pot smoke.
I watch the ghost of my indulgence dance toward the ceiling through the streetlight streaming in through my window.
