Etude #1
Friday
Anita stopped telling people about the time she had been Freaky Fridayed a little after she turned thirty, feeling it undignified to keep clinging to an ancient anecdote. She had been embarrassed about the incident at first, when the principal players were still participants in her daily life, but in college, five years past the Friday and eight hundred miles away from her mother, recalling it was like looking at stars through a telescope. The story became a charming icebreaker at parties, some outrageous bullshit to argue about at the lunch table, an all-purpose conversational theme on which one could improvise any number of variations when there was nothing else interesting to say. Interesting, yes. That was the word. It made her interesting. Even if her interlocutors did not truly believe that she and her mother had Freaky Fridayed, that she at age 14 had spent a day working as an executive at a major fashion magazine while her mother had to fill in for her at the quiz bowl tournament, it was very interesting of her to make such a claim. Even if they thought she was a liar or insane, she was interesting, special, magical, different, freaky.
At 30, though, it was embarrassing again. All her friends had heard the story a million times, and, after nearly a decade of regular employment, the prospect of a day spent working a real grown-up office job in a real grown-up office building was no longer an exotic misadventure nor grist for dorm-room anticapitalist rants: it was just life. Anita found it was more interesting to hold on to the story as a secret, something to tell her friends not to tell anyone else about, something to pointedly avoid talking about if brought up at dinner parties, something to only ever allude to as “a freakish day in my past” or “a Friday I would never forget” without giving further detail, even if pressed.
(The incident had actually taken place on a Tuesday, but the reference point was familiar and explanatory in itself.)
So when she turned 40 and realized that she was now older than her mother had been when they had Freaky Fridayed, she had no one to tell. She lived alone. No husband or children of her own with whom she could Freaky Friday.
So she called her mother.
“You never call me,” Anita’s mother said, instead of saying hello. “I’m dying and you never call me.”
“I called you three days ago,” Anita lied. “Don’t you remember?”
Since her mother’s diagnosis, Anita had taken to lying to her. It made everything easier.
A pause, and then, “I know! I remember. My friend Jen’s son calls her every day. Sometimes twice a day.”
“I’m not your son,” Anita said.
“You’re still my baby,” she said. “You don’t understand because you’ve never had kids.”
Anita had once brought up getting Freaky Fridayed at a group therapy session for newly-out girls. They had been jealous and had begged her to tell them what it was like. She had tried to explain that it wasn’t a very “gender” experience for her, because she didn’t become “a woman”; she became Mama. She had been primarily invested in making sure her mother did not embarrass her at the quiz bowl tournament, and even after she was back to normal, her thoughts lingered on whether or not the existence of Freaky Fridaying also implied the existence of God, not the appreciation of her mother’s feminine mysteries. She had, frankly, found the whole thing unsanitary. She always felt disgust when the other girls described having worn their mothers’ and sisters’ clothes as curious teens, offended not by transgression but by contamination. The idea of wearing anyone else’s underwear, permeated with the essence of shit and piss and pussy-sweat, no matter how many times they had been washed, no matter how edifying it might be to see a girl in the mirror, was absolutely vile. The Freaky Friday had been like that but moreso, trapped in the body of another filthy animal for a whole day, covered in her sweat and stink and shit and flesh. To the extent that the incident had influenced her gender, it was a revelation of the profane. After Freaky Fridaying, she was more aware that her own body was that of a beast, and so she decided she might as well make it a little more to her liking, because it was a vulgar thing to begin with, not something to be precious about.
“Are you still with that man?” Anita’s mother asked. She said the word man too sweetly, as if to smother her disdain in treacle. She did not like him, her on-again, off-again Otto. They had both always hated each others’ partners, most especially Anita’s father. Her mother and he had already divorced when they Freaky Fridayed, and after, having spent the hours between the end of class and the beginning of the quiz bowl tournament alone with him, Anita’s mother had taken him to court for sole custody and the termination of any visitation rights, the kindest thing she ever did. But once, she had said that Otto was just like him, and Anita subsequently went three months without speaking to her. It was true that Otto and Anita’s father had a similar charm to them, but Anita didn’t like to think about that.
“No,” said Anita, as they were off-again at the time.
“I want you to bring a man to my funeral. Don’t come alone. I don’t want it to seem like I raised some lonely spinster.”
“You’re not dying,” Anita said.
“I am dying. The doctor said my case is terminal.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then what did he say, Miss Smartie?”
“You have a condition. It is going to progress over time. But you’re not dying.”
“My brain is rotting. Turning to mashed potatoes. My brain will rot and then my body will rot and I’ll die.”
Anita’s mother had always been dramatic. She was not lying, but she was dramatic.
“You still have a long time left.”
“I’m going to die young.”
“You’re already too old to die young,” said Anita. She winced, realizing it was meaner out loud than she intended. But Anita’s mother laughed, like always.
“You’re still young. You don’t understand,” she said.
“I’m not young anymore. I turned forty yesterday.”
“And you didn’t call?”
“You didn’t call me. I was waiting for you to call all day. You never call me.”
“How was I supposed to know it was your birthday?”
“It’s been the same day the last forty years.”
“Okay, Miss Smartie,” said Anita’s mother, and she began to sing “Happy Birthday” off-key, almost sarcastically.
Anita’s mother had never understood her. The Freaky Friday had left both with a strong desire to be better but had provided no material solutions to the problems they faced as mother and child. In the months that followed, both grew to resent the mutual failures of compassion, the paucity of understanding, the grotesque stinginess that each demonstrated to the other every single day. It was worse than before, as if each expected the other to split their life in half and share it without reciprocating with half of their own life. She has witnessed my suffering, they thought, more or less. She has heard how people talk to me and seen how I must struggle, and she treats me like this? Anita, at least, still tried to be better, but did her mother ever notice? Of course not.
“You should wear a dress to my funeral,” Anita’s mother said.
“Don’t be morbid.”
“I have a dress you should wear. It has black feathers on the collar. It’s very dramatic. I want someone to dress up at my funeral. Someone should look interesting. Your cousins are going to dress like slobs in sad little suits.”
Anita laughed. “I’ll inform them that the dress is cocktail, not business casual,” and then she added, “You’re not going to die.”
“I will.”
This was true.
“Not soon.”
This was not a lie.
“Jen’s son is gay,” Anita’s mother said. “He visits her every weekend. You should come by. You and he would get along.”
“Are you trying to set us up?”
“I think you would get along. If something came of it, that would be nice. A single forty year old can’t be picky anymore.”
Anita did not believe that her mother truly accepted her or appreciated her own feminine mysteries. She would often comment negatively on her clothes, saying she needed to dress “like a woman” more. She did think that most women Anita’s age needed to dress “like a woman” more, and that Anita’s problem was not an absence of femininity but of confidence, that she was just following the herd instead of letting herself be interesting, and she was not entirely incorrect, but Anita felt it was a terribly insensitive thing to say to her, given her circumstances. She was sure that, more than anything, her mother just wanted her friends to think she was a good person who was kind to her transsexual daughter.
“I don’t fuck gay men.”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“Sorry. I don’t kiss faggots.”
Anita winced; her mother laughed. They shared a sense of humor. This was the only trait that Anita acknowledged they shared, and she thought it was unfortunate. Her mother had always been so good at bringing out her worst self.
“You should come visit me anyway. I haven’t seen you in months.”
“Soon,” Anita lied. “I’m busy with work. You don’t understand how busy it gets.”
“We can get sushi. Remember when you were little? I don’t want it, Mama. It’s raw! Daddy makes hot dogs! I want Daddy! And now Miss Smartie is so fancy, so cosmopolitan. You should thank me for introducing you to interesting food.”
Like her mother, Anita had loved her father more than anyone or anything in the world before she hated him. But she didn’t like to think about that.
“Please. You still won’t eat Indian because of a stupid thing you saw on the news in the 80s.”
“All that spice is bad for digestion. They did a study.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“They did. I saw it on the news, Miss Smartie.”
On other occasions, when she was feeling poetic, Anita’s mother would admit that she did not eat spicy foods because she did not like the way the burning sensation seemed to trace a path through her insides, making her aware of all that disgusting viscera. She likened it to pregnancy. Once, Anita had said that comparing a little vindaloo with the gestation of a child was ridiculous, but Anita’s mother had told her that she didn’t understand because she didn’t know what it was like to have a uterus. Anita had said that she did, though, on account of the Friday. Anita’s mother had said that she didn’t really know, though, since Anita would never have children, which was true.
“I started a diet where you only eat crunchy foods,” said Anita’s mother. “The crunchiness tricks your brain and you get less hungry.”
“Diets are fucked,” said Anita, who still resented the yogurt and rice cakes of her childhood and was currently on keto and intermittent fasting. “If you’re really that sick, you shouldn’t be on a diet.”
“Miss Smartie,” said Anita’s mother. “Why didn’t you become a doctor?”
They only talked a little longer, until the conversation was no longer interesting.
“I’ll call you again soon,” said Anita. Although Anita had called to remind her mother of their Freaky Friday, but it felt childish to bring it up now. As if she were still upset about her mother losing the quiz bowl tournament. As if being a middle-aged woman was still something unfathomable. As if that day was still their only moment of meaningful connection. But without that Freaky Friday, well, was there anything interesting for them to converse about at all?
“We just started talking,” said Anita’s mother.
“It’s been almost 30 minutes,” Anita lied.
“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” said Anita’s mother. “You’re going to wish that you spent hours and hours on the phone with me before I was a vegetable.”
“Don’t be dramatic. I’ll call you this weekend.”
Back when Anita was in the habit of telling people about it, she often had to explain to people that her primary reference for being Freaky Fridayed was not the original 1976 movie or the popular 2003 remake, but the mostly forgotten 1995 television movie with Shelly Long, which came out at the perfect time for her to appreciate as a child. Unlike other versions of the story, the Friday in this film is motivated not by the desire of mother and daughter to be understood by the other, but by a melancholic envy, the desire on one hand for the carefree life of a child and on the other for the power and freedom of adulthood. A subtle but meaningful difference. The desire not for empathy but for escape. But of course one finds oneself caught in a cliche like a mouse in a trap: wherever you go, there you are, and there you are. The doctor had told Anita there was a test she could take to see if she was going to get sick when she was old, too. She had declined. Wherever you go, there you are. But you wouldn’t understand because you’ve never Freaky Fridayed with your mother.
And one of them said, “Don’t forget.” And the other lied, “I won’t.” And that was that. With nothing else interesting to do, Anita opened the group chat and told everyone that Mama wasn’t doing well, so that her friends would think she was a good person who was kind to her dying, dementia-ridden mother.