Ode to Janet Planet

Photo by Mostafa Elmi on Unsplash

Cicada summer nights when you can't sleep, but really you just miss your mom. Everyone at camp hates you, so you make up a tragic story to get out of camp. Suddenly, because of your fake tragedy, girls your age are paying attention to you.

But they've already disappeared; they've spontaneously combusted while caught in the powerful pull of you toward Janet Planet.

Your mother Janet is a beautiful magnet.

But she doesn't think she's beautiful. You compete with her boyfriends but never win– but always win. Because when the boyfriends flame out, you're still with her in bed, where you cup her face, and finger a single strand of her iridescent hair. Her skin is the map of a galaxy you want to study, if only she'd stay still.

On the crazy couch in your piano teacher's home, you wait for your lesson taught by the owner of this couch, a white-haired woman who hasn't smiled with her whole face in 17 years but probably doesn't wear underwear.

In the corner of the couch, you find a fabric doll. Like you, the doll represents youth; she has the same hair as you, orange and made of yarn. She wears a skirt too full of something underneath, so you pull up her skirt and what should be her legs is–

The body of an old woman!

The old-woman-fabric skin is the same as the young-girl-fabric skin. But because she has grey hair and glasses, the old woman represents age. When you flip her upright, and pull her skirt down, her secret legs are the body of the young girl.

You're only eleven but you're prone to observation, maybe because of your enormous eyes and your fantastic gold glasses, so you don't stop examining the doll. The old lady half wears a bonnet. Like the skirt, the bonnet is too full and lumpy– there is something in the bonnet.

And it feels inevitable, like something we've known about our mothers since the dawn of time, that not only do they hide, forever, under our skirts, but lurking on the backs of their heads is a wolf, a big bad wolf who, in the story, eats the both of you– but let's not forget that depends on whose version.

The summer lasts forever and you're at a performance portrayed by a cult your mom's friend is in, but they call it a service; it's held in a forest overflowing with zucchini.

Afterwards, you're fresh from the shower, and mom's combing through your wet hair, talking to you about cults and communes, should you join and what happens if you do? when she finds something stuck to the back of your neck.

What is it? you demand, your voice like a siren all of a sudden, but she doesn't answer, she won't say it because she's off looking for her tweezers. In her absence your eyes are brimming in the mirror, sending smoke signals, but you know she'll come back. She does.

The tick is now crawling on the floor, not dead. Mom lights a match and holds it near but not near enough, so you grab the tiny handle of the tiny flame, a scale of object you can understand, and you flambé the insect precisely. Die, tick, die! you exclaim, solving the problem with a decisive vengeance your mother can only witness.

We are certain you will never join a cult.

When we talk about mothers, what are we even talking about?

Mom's friend asks, high on shrooms but maybe not, maybe just high on pondering men and meaning; high from recovering from the cult leader with a low ponytail/thin hairline who is insidious and soft-spoken, charming because he's a cult leader, but he comes back two-fold.

Janet cannot trust herself, even as she keeps the planet spinning.

It's surprising, then, when in bed together as you often are, you ask your mom if she would be disappointed if you asked a girl out. She is not disappointed or surprised, she says. Why? you wonder. Because you have a ruthlessness, she says, a directness, or something like that. And she doubts that quality of yours would work with a man/cult.

It's a relief Mom has no doubt about that.

But you still have questions, and probably– as you watch your mom line dance with shifting strangers, smiling as their faces change, at the end of this particular summer, this short, bullet of a chapter, not a bullet but something soft that hits you hard– you will ask those questions she never did. And you will find new answers.