Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 8:47 A.M. EST} A Prelude to My Exile

Gentle Tweeter,

I wasn’t always a great, fat pudding of a child. As an eleven-year-old I was rail thin. A mere sylph of a girl, with a body-mass index that hovered just above all my major organs failing. Yes, I’d once been a willowy pint-size ballerina with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and as such I gave good value. My job was to serve as the child equivalent of arm candy, proof of my mother’s fertility and my father’s glorious genetic legacy, smiling beside my parents in paparazzi photographs.

And then they sent me to live upstate. The distant memory curdles in my brain.

Upstate. Tedious upstate. It’s one of the few places my parents don’t own a home. Picture a million-billion wounded trees weeping drops of maple syrup into the snow, and—voilà—you have upstate. Envision a billion-billion ticks infected with Lyme disease and waiting to bite you.

And not to speak in unkind generalities, but using my mom’s laptop, the eleven-year-old me found a satellite photo of the location. Seen in its entirety, upstate is exactly the same mottled green-on-green as army surplus camouflage. From outer space I could trace the line of State Route Whatever forging a vital transportation link between nowhere and nowhere. I read the names of towns, looking for anyplace famous, and the truth hit me…. There on the map was Woodstock.

Woodstock, NY. Vile Woodstock. Forgive me for what I’m about to admit. For my part I shudder to broach the topic, but my parents first met at Woodstock ’99, where everyone rioted over the price of pizza and bottled water in the center of those thousand noxious acres of overpopulated mud. My mom was just a naked farm girl encased in sweat and patchouli. My dad was a pale, naked dropout from MIT with long greasy dreadlocks, who’d shaved off his pubic hair to look more like the Buddha. Neither of them owned a single pair of shoes.

They fell into a puddle and did the Hot Nasty. His wiener got mud in her woo-woo and she got a UTI, and they got married.

Who says magic doesn’t happen?

Nowadays they tell the story, switching off in tag-team fashion, making strangers laugh at wrap parties and in television green rooms. They stress the mud detail because it gives a self-effacing verisimilitude to the sordid episode.

And, yes, I know the meaning of verisimilitude—I can even pronounce it.

As a Somali maid had packed my suitcases, my mother checked each article of clothing for any dry-clean-only labels. Apparently people upstate did laundry by beating their dirty Vivienne Westwood basques between flat rocks on riverbanks. They didn’t have sashimi, either. Nor did they have Internet access, my mother explained. At least, my grandparents did not. Nor did they own a television. Instead, they harbored livestock. Not animals in some distant, abstract sense, like the downward-spiraling number of polar bears or the baby harp seals that lolled on some arctic ice floe, ripe for the Eskimo clubbing; no, these would be nanny goats and chick-chicks and moo-cows that I would tend as part of a daily chore regimen.

Ye gods.

No amount of pleading could stay my banishment, and I was summarily placed in the back of a Lincoln Town Car and whisked off, the whole of one smallish suitcase dedicated just to carrying my ample provisions of Xanax. That summer, at the tender age of eleven, I would learn to swallow my fear. To choke down my pride and my anger. And that would be the last time my mother could boast a skinny daughter.