Page 8 of Spectacular Things
Mythology
Eight years old and still tasting blood, Liz Lowe hopes her parents remember her tooth after their night out with the Sweeneys.
She tucks it under her pillow and prays they are too drunk to notice which bill her father withdraws from his wallet in the dark.
They gave her a dollar the first time, then forgot twice, but then last time they slipped her a twenty during the power outage, which is why Liz has taken the initiative to unplug her Rainbow Brite night-light.
Her parents are very generous when they can’t see what they’re doing.
In Highland Acres, a leafy suburb outside of Richmond, Virginia, cars are never locked.
Sidewalk chalk rolls between driveways on windy days, yielding only for the front wheel of a tricycle or the wet nose of an inquisitive doodle.
This is the land of full-time nannies and white-collar salaries.
Here, neighbors volley complaints about delayed flights and the criminal price of boat paint as they wheel in their trash bins.
After their night out with the Sweeneys, Liz’s parents do indeed forget to leave her money from the tooth fairy.
“Is it because you hit the bottle too hard?” Liz asks the next morning, parroting Mrs. Sweeney, which makes her father laugh and her mother moan before they send her downstairs to fetch the pill bottle with the blue label.
When they are still asleep at noon, Liz makes herself a cheese sandwich and presses her tongue into the space where her tooth used to reside.
Across the kitchen, the wall calendar celebrates what she already knows: only one week until she leaves for overnight camp.
Up until now, Liz has spent every summer at the Highland Acres country club pool, under the heavy-lidded gaze of her mother and her mother’s friends, who flip in unison from their stomachs to their backs every twenty minutes like a spit of rotisserie chickens heavily marinated in baby oil.
Lenora, Liz’s mother, is the unspoken queen of the club; her status is earned and maintained in the seamless fit of her red swimsuit.
Unlike some of her less disciplined friends, Lenora has bounced back from maternity in record time, thanks to a strict diet and Jane Fonda’s Workout VHS tapes.
Lenora’s favorite compliment to receive is the one she most often repeats to her husband over dinner—that even in a tiny bikini, she still looks like she’s never had a baby at all.
“But did you?” John Lowe asks every time, pulling his wife onto his lap at the dining table, both of them oblivious to their child poking at her green beans.
Liz, like everyone else at the country club, knows her mother is unapologetically “one and done” with children.
It doesn’t matter that John still wants to try for a boy, Lenora tells her companions poolside. She wants her life back.
When Liz first hears her dad, a commercial real estate agent, explain “buyer’s remorse,” she immediately thinks of how her mother stares at her when no one else is around. Like she is last season’s must-have accessory but in the wrong color and size, which, in a sense, sheis.
A baby girl. Worse, everyone notes how Liz, tall and blond, takes after her mother. “Only without a single wrinkle,” Lenora is quick to reply, swinging her daughter’s hand with a glitchy smile.
“I look ancient compared to you,” Lenora says most nights as they stare into the bathroom mirror, mother and daughter, side by side.
Pulling the outer corners of her eyes up toward her hairline, Lenora adds, “And I’m supposed to just accept that you’re the new version of me.
” Although Liz tries to sidestep the long shadow of her mother’s ever-cooling interest, it only becomes more and more difficult.
She cannot wait for camp.
A week after school ends, Liz finds an empty seat on the yellow school bus that will take her a hundred and fifty miles away from Highland Acres.
She watches as the driver loads her steam trunk full of bathing suits, Jelly sandals, and mosquito repellent to fortify her for eight weeks in a forest. Other kids Liz’s age—the youngest accepted—only attend for two-week stints, but Lenora submitted a special request, along with a financial supplement generous enough to earn the Lowes a plaque in the canteen.
As the bus merges onto the highway and heads west, Liz has no idea what to expect, but never in a thousand years does she anticipate falling in love before entering the third grade.
This, however, is precisely what happens.
It is there, in a clearing between the woods and the lake, that Liz Lowe discovers soccer.
She is drawn to it instantly and intensely—the physicality, the team mentality, the pending glory of a goal scored.
But more than anything, it’s the consistency.
While her bunkmates change over every session, and her mother’s communication vacillates between candy-filled care packages and radio silence, the game of soccer—with its rules, refs, and clean lines—remains the same, day after day, week after week.
Throughout the summer, the counselors watch Liz with awe and whisper among themselves.
They assert she is a natural and even sign out the camp camcorder to tape her.
Liz hears them on the sidelines, shouting out names that do not belong to any of the campers—names like Pelé and Maradona—whenever she has the ball at her feet.
On the last day of camp, several young adults wearing red lanyards and fresh hickeys around their necks go out of their way to introduce themselves to John and Lenora Lowe and tell them of their daughter’s potential.
“She’s the most talented kid I’ve ever seen—and this is my fourth summer,” one redheaded counselor says to Mr. Lowe’s tassel loafers.
It is there, standing in the gravel pen of the camp parking lot in late August, that Liz finally feels the coveted warmth of her mother’s gaze.
It’s a sensation akin to riding a dolphin or scoring a goal at the buzzer.
It feels like blossoming inside of joy itself.
“She could be a star athlete,” Lenora tells John over dinner that night, her eyes bright with the possibility.
Liz wordlessly navigates her plate of swordfish and snap peas, remembering that this is what family dinners are like—her parents speaking around her, even when it’s about her.
She already misses the sloppy joes and mealtime songs of camp.
She longs to cannonball off the dock at sunrise and walk with friends to attend the weekly bonfire.
But above all else, Liz needs to play soccer again.
Under the table, her legs twitch at the thought.
Biting into his second ear of corn, Liz’s father nods in agreement with her mother.
“Of course she could be a star—she has our genes.” Lenora tilts her head, puckers her lips at him.
John wipes his butter-greased hands on his napkin.
“Sign her up to play this fall,” he says, leaning back in his chair.
And then it dawns on him, the second-best option for a father without a son: “I’ll ask around the office about travel teams. From the get-go, she should play at the highest level if she’s going to be the best.”
As Liz grows up, her reputation as a soccer phenom expands across the state, then the region, then the country.
Lenora and John gladly pay for the private training sessions and the elite tournaments and the summer showcases.
Busy as they are with their own lives, however, the Lowes themselves rarely attend these matches, which so often conflict with their social engagements.
But Liz knows that if she scores enough times, her father will learn of it by the second hole, and her mother will grin as she insists to her tennis partner, “But I told her to go easy today.”
Or rather, the Lowes are too busy until Liz becomes too good, the glint of her rising star too blinding to ignore.
When the mayor of Richmond stops Liz on West Cary Street to congratulate her most recent hat trick, John and Lenora reconfigure their schedules so they can attend their daughter’s games.
Lenora dutifully writes down the time of every match and tournament on the kitchen wall calendar as soon as they are announced.
She uses a black Sharpie so thick-tipped that there isn’t space to write anything else.
Before Liz’s sophomore year of high school, Lenora buys her daughter enough red ribbon to wrap around their entire town.
“No one can miss you now,” Lenora says. “Only the best player on the field can pull off a red ribbon.” And although Liz has become increasingly aware that her relationship with her mother is, at best, complicated, she rolls out a fresh piece of ribbon before each game, tying it into a bow around her high bun.
On Halloween of that same year, three girls from the neighborhood ring the Lowes’ doorbell in their matching Umbro shorts and jerseys.
“You’re soccer players!” Liz says, bending down to give them each a high five with their fun-size Snickers.
She volunteered to stay home and hand out candy since she has a game the next day.
Most of her teammates are drunk in the woods right now.
“We’re not soccer players!” the smallest trick-or-treater shouts, spinning around to show Liz her red ribbon. “We’re you!”
The following year, Liz hands out candy to at least a dozen miniature versions of herself.
A group of moms geek out and ask for her autograph when she answers the door.
“You’re the next Mia Hamm!” one of them gushes, pushing past the kids she’s supposed to be chaperoning.
“I was in Atlanta for the Olympics last summer and I swear you are totally the next Mia Hamm.”