She’d dance her bloated hands along her waist while shimmying. She wore vibrant colors, bold patterns, giant earrings. Rose was brave enough to be big in a world that told women to be small. A good cry is one of the best ways to flush the system, she assured me.
#The rumpus movie#
I sometimes found her with a box of tissues and an empty movie theater-sized bag of M&M’s, sitting in front of the television in the dark. She cried easily, at sad movies about lost dogs and sappy commercials for car insurance. I didn’t know yet how many ways there were to break a girl. She told me, I f someone is going to hurt you, they will have to get through me first. Rose was a pillow of protection I could press into.
#The rumpus tv#
I pressed my finger into her stomach like I’d seen the Pillsbury Doughboy do on TV and she squealed like he did. Rose was soft, in every definition of the word. I knew this was true because she told me it was. I was her and she was me and we were going to be together forever. It was always hard to know where she began and I ended. When she leaned down to kiss me goodnight, I slipped inside her through her deep, brown eyes. It was our schtick, we were the only audience that mattered. What did she see in me that I couldn’t see yet?Ī childhood ritual: Rose singing Me and My Shadow to me every night as I followed her up the stairs to bed, working hard to stay in step. I wanted to be like my mother in every way but this one. I remember how the shame flushed my face. She signed off not with advice, but with a premonition: Most importantly, be careful of eating too much food when you’re sad or lonely or angry, because then you’ll be left with two problems - the problem you started with and the problems that come from eating too much food. She told me to call my friends when I felt sad because they weren’t mind readers and that I should consider being a lawyer, or even a judge because of my commitment to fairness.
#The rumpus how to#
Rose left me instructions on how to be a person. I knew this was the kind of letter a mother writes a daughter when she’s dying.
She licked the glue to seal it shut and left a smear of red lipstick behind. The letter had been placed inside a blush-pink envelope she’d sprayed with Anais Anais perfume I’d bought for her on Mother’s Day. Before she left for the hospital, she slipped a five-page letter she’d written in perfect teacher’s penmanship under my bedroom door. On the morning of my eleventh birthday, Rose had her first mastectomy. I was desperate to be included in the darkness she loved swallowing. I was jealous of the strangers who needed her to talk them out of jumping off the Indian River Causeway and angry at how much her mood would change after she’d hang up, matching all the pain she’d absorbed. She took on the feelings of her Overeaters Anonymous friends who’d call her on the edge of a binge, hysterical at a payphone outside of a McDonald’s and from the callers who anonymously rang the crisis hotline she manned every Friday and Saturday nights. She was exhausted from watching the evening news whatever was happening in the world, good and bad, was happening to her. She was on her own frequency, able to tune into all the beauty and pain of the universe at once. Her larger-than-life personality was built with equal parts love, rage, and empathy. I’d become as fat as she had been, and then, I’d have her back. What I would do was raise my mother from the dead. I grew up in constant terror, always wondering: What will I do when my mother dies? My mother had been sick almost my entire life. In the year after she died, I gained a hundred pounds. My beautiful, powerful, and very fat mother, Rose, died of breast cancer when I was twenty-two.
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