Prompt Images
Ingrid could trace the idea to her childhood, back to when her mom’s mantra first planted its flag in her mind.
“You should never throw a fit,” her mom said. It wasn’t as much a guideline as an order, delivered in the strictest of terms, her pointer finger always extended to punctuate this little “life lesson.”
It was better to channel any negative emotions into more productive things—school work, sports, hosting dinner parties—than to let them bleed through, or God forbid, to make a scene. It didn’t matter if your emotions were valid, or if the person on the opposite end deserved to receive them.
Stiff upper lips always should prevail. In most cases.
“But Bradley threw his Hot Wheels at the window and you’re not yelling at him,” the five-year-old Ingrid sniffled, as if that could retract the tears her mom had told her never to spill.
“That’s because he’s your father’s son. He has your father’s temper,” her mother said, smoothing Ingrid’s hair with the tip of her manicured finger, the nail always painted a bright, siren red. It was a choice Ingrid would later deem as ironic, considering her mother’s MO was to be demure, and the color was anything but. “You’re your mother’s daughter.”
“But—but aren’t I my father’s daughter?” Ingrid replied, struggling to make sense of what her mother could mean. Was her dad not her dad?
Ingrid’s mother rolled her eyes, as if the question was silly, and should’ve remained unspoken.“You are, but that’s not the same.”
Ingrid’s young mind couldn’t bend itself enough to wrap around the figure of speech, but she thought she understood her mom’s meaning all the same. It was okay for her brother to release his anger, but not for her. While his rage was a Ferrari that people expected to see scream down the highway, Ingrid’s was like her mom’s set of antique pearl and diamond earrings, tucked away in a silk box, meant to be possessed but never used, never displayed.
In retrospect, Ingrid decided this most likely was the first double standard she encountered, a foundation laid for other fallacies to sprout and take root. Early ones survived, thrived even, with the watering of her mother, and Ingrid’s constant thirst to please and shape herself into whatever form her mom wanted to be. But as Ingrid aged, the fallacies began to wilt. The forms her mom wanted didn’t fit Ingrid, either swallowing her in the enormity of all she couldn’t be, or constricting her in the stranglehold of all she never would. She tried them anyway, hooked on the drug that was her mother’s approval, while wishing she could kick the habit.
One night, in her twenty-sixth year, as Ingrid’s friends drunkenly stumbled along that line of everything either being funny or everything being sad, she was squat in the middle of both: laughing at how her very act of drinking to the point of inebriation would piss off her mom, and crying at how if her mom saw her, Ingrid would sober up in an instant to avoid disappointing her.
But you know who wouldn’t? Bradley, who was across the room, taking body shots without a care in the world.
The bullshit of it all, she thought. The mothering misogyny.
It was there in the slosh of three Coronas that ideas and resentment finally fermented. Although, who was Ingrid kidding? The resentment had been there for years, she had just bottled and stored it, letting it age like a fine wine, ripening until it was at its peak. And boy, was she ready to pour a glass for anyone who had helped her stomp and cask it into being.
Was it healthy? she asked herself when in the morning sobriety prevailed, so many memories lost but those of her plan. No, not really. But was living life as an emotionally-stunted adult either?
“Hell no,” she said to herself in the mirror before spitting her glob of blue toothpaste into the white basin sink.
Ingrid considered it fate, how easily her scheme came together. She plucked inspiration from the garden of her youth and with it crafted something that would make her mother proud: a dinner party.
After literal decades of watching her mother organize such soireés, Ingrid knew all the points she had to hit: beautiful bouquets of flowers on the table, an array of alcohol for people to sample or slam, platters of crudités, and a hostess dressed in her best: her platinum haired curled and coiffed, her pale pink peplum dress with just the right amount of volume.
“You look radiant, my dear,” her mother said as she walked into Ingrid’s apartment, wearing a black silk skirt and matching blouse. Her father trailed in his gray button down and black pants. “I especially like your nails.” Her mom gestured towards Ingrid’s hand, and the nails painted in her trademark red. It may have been wishful thinking, but Ingrid thought her mother sounded a tinge impressed. “It’s a nice compliment to the lipstick.”
Crimson lips, Ingrid decided, were going to be her own trademark.
“Thanks, Mom. You, too,” she said, and usher them into the living room, where the others awaited. It wasn’t a big party, just Bradley, and his girlfriend, Bianca, and Ingrid’s best friends, Margot and Ralph, there for moral support and for whom she had witnessed plenty of family drama. She didn’t need a large audience for this. Frankly, she only needed one, and she played to her all night—topping off drinks whenever needed, anticipating hor d’oeuvres refills before one could ask, lighting a lightly vanilla scented candle to add to the overall ambiance. Even when Bradley teased her for what he dubbed her “1950s’ housewife minus the husband” look and she had the urge to swat him upside the head, she maintained her composure. Just like her mother had taught her.
After they worked their way through her charcuterie, they settled at Ingrid’s small, antique dining room table. As her father reached for a slice of the bougie pot roast she had made, Ingrid gently tapped her wine glass with the flat edge of her knife.
Five sets of eyes turned to her, four interested, her father still distracted by the beef.
“I just wanted to thank you all for coming tonight,” Ingrid started, the script she had practiced a dozen of times playing in her mind like a teleprompter. “You’re probably wondering why I’m doing this since dinner parties haven’t really ever been my thing.”
“Cooking a good meal has never been your thing,” Bradley joked and Bianca jabbed her below into his side. Ingrid smiled at her, and gave her brother the same, but coated in a layer of ice.
“Thanks, Bradley,” she said. “Actually, tonight has a special theme. One that I’ve been working on for a while.” Her mother lit up with excitement, her eyes flitting around the room as if she could suss out the surprise.
“What is it?” she asked.
Anticipation and yes, a dose of worry, roiled within Ingrid.
“Tonight, I am throwing my first fit,” Ingrid said, splaying her arms out as if she had just revealed they had won an all-inclusive vacation to Hawaii.
Bradley choked on his water. “A fit?” Her father looked confused while her friends hid smirks behind their hands, but Ingrid could tell the word had landed exactly as intended for its target. The smile fell off her mother’s face faster than an anvil off the top of a skyscraper.
“A fit. You know, when you let your emotions, your anger, rather than holding it all in,” she said, receiving a raised eyebrow from him in response. “Or as you call it, a Tuesday.”
Ready for rebuttal, Bradley’s lips scrunched as he pointed his finger at her—a trait he inherited from their mother, who across the expanse of white plates and yellow and baby blue flowers, had her own ready, red nail shining under the single spotlight above them.
“Ingrid, don’t do this,” she said.
“Do what? Express how I feel for the first time in basically my whole life?”
“It’s ruining your party,” her mother whispered, as if everyone present couldn’t hear.
Ingrid cackled. “It’s the point of the party, Mother.”
Anger flashed in her mother’s eyes as she squinted at Ingrid. “It’s not necessary,” she hissed. “Now sit down, and we can forget this all happened.”
Bracing herself against the end of the table, Ingrid leaned over the asparagus and towards her mother, head cocked, expression matched. “You realize I’ve never forgotten anything that’s happened when you’ve told me to? Bradley, he could do whatever, but not me. It just sat here, festered, because I could never say how I felt about it. About anything that could make anyone uncomfortable. Who cares what it does to me? How it makes me feel?”
“How you feel is something you deal with on your own.” Her mother raked her talons through her golden blonde bob. “You don’t need to make a spectacle of it.”
“That’s the thing. I kind of did,” Ingrid said. “Because this is what happens when you bottle something up. It doesn’t evaporate or disappear. It’s the opposite. You’re storing a pressurized version of it, and pressure has to be released in some way in a small puff or a big bomb.”
Implosion or explosion, something is destroyed.
“I bottled everything up because you—” Ingrid shoved her own red-nailed finger out— “told me to. You can be embarrassed, but don’t act like you didn’t play a part in causing it.”
Then, something happened that Ingrid had never seen before: the tablecloth shifted across the table, the fabric bunched in her mother’s palm. Her lips pursed until, staunched of blood, the edges turned white, standing out in contrast to the brightness of her flushed cheeks.
“Don’t you DARE blame this on me!” The command came out of her mother like a roar.
And Ingrid kind of loved it. “Oh, I’m going to!” she yelled back.
Finally clocking what was going on, her father lifted his hands as if to create a barrier between them. “Ladies—”
The red nails turned to him. “Don’t,” both women said in unison.
“Who else should I blame this on? Who else taught me that? It came straight out of your mouth ‘never throw a fit,’” Ingrid said, mimicking her mom’s voice, in a tone that was a bit too high and nasal to actually be hers.
“And straight out of your grandmother’s! It’s all she ever told me, and what her mother probably told her!”
“So this is generational trauma?”
“I’m saying that I was taught it was not polite, and it’s not! We don’t act this way! That’s what your grandma always said. That we’re better than this! This is not us!”’ Her mother’s nostrils flared, her hand slapped the tabletop, the silverware clattering with the impact.
Ingrid’s smile was wide, dripping with glee.
Watching her mother like this was like seeing a Bigfoot step out of a clearing, a phoenix turn to ash and rise again, the Loch Ness Monster poke its head out of the water and look directly at her. Only there were no legends for her to base her expectations on. This was an encounter for which Ingrid had no record, and she was going to take note for every single second she could.
“And yet here you are, and you seem to be liking it, so are you sure it’s not you?” she said, stalking slowly around the table to her mother’s chair. “Doesn’t it feel good, Mom? To let it out?”
“How dare you? Do you have any respect?” her mother replied, but Ingrid could see it in her face, in the glow that had broken through the redness of rage in her skin, and her lips that had unfurled, struggling to break out of their snare, and, maybe, smile, that she was liking it.
“Not right now, Eliza.”
Her mom gasped, and started in again, Ingrid ready to meet her blow for blow.
Around the table, the gaze of their family and friends followed the action, jumping from one woman to another, and most often to their plates too uncomfortable to make direct eye contact. From them. From their outburst. From their fit.
And Ingrid was damn proud of them both.
RELATED
