Fantasy. Baby.

Your Mom’s Bookclub is reading The Meaning of Mariah Carey this go around. Honestly I hadn’t given Mariah a second thought beyond her impossible high notes being the soundtrack to every horny, and excruciatingly awkward, middle school moment ever. If you piped in Sun-Ripened Raspberry and Fantasy to my room right now, my teeth would start aching from my teal and purple braces AND straightup preteen angst. 

Nothing played Mariah’s crystal clear, sugar spun perfection like a 90s boombox. Boom. I’m back in Allison D’s room. Her dad’s house. We’re working on our Bible Class project, which is a video (or tape?) of us singing “Sacrifice the lamb, c’mon” to the sound of “Celebrate good times, c’mon”. I don’t know how to touch that story. Annnyway, Al had just gotten her hot little hands on Mariah Carey, Merry Christmas, and as soon as we finished the strangest school project ever, we creaked open that jewelcase, pushed the disc into her boombox, closed the lid, and hit play. Instant sugar rush. 

That CD booklet and the one for Rainbow are absolutely seared in my memory. Mariah was capital W woman to my teen mind. That rainbow across her chest, white undies, and then the back. Rainbow on her cheeky undies and a heart lolly in her hand. She was everything. Perfect skin, little nose, big boobs, skinny legs without the giant ski/run muscles that hung over my knees. Those boobs. Those were the boobs that could change my life. 

“You don’t want them. You’d never be able to run fast with big boobs!” My mom’s ever logical voice. The same one that vetoed every ‘chintzy’ Deliah’s “ski sweater” because “those are synthetic kleenex-thin-California sweaters, you need wool! We live in Massachusetts!” And every Christmas despite circling the 70s knockoff bellbottoms and “chintzy” rainbow sweaters, there’d be a box from The Ski Rack under the tree. Again, she was right. But I was 13, not 31, and showing up in my real wool baselayer to my pathetic teen life wasn’t helping my chances at getting real rack, not a ski rack.

Sure boobs, they’d be more baggage to carry on my mission for course records, but I’d be busy doing other things than memorizing cross country tangents if I had Mariah boobs. I’d be kissing boys! Or, I don’t know, laying on my fuzzy heart shaped bed propped up solely on my pillow-soft giant cleavage, tiny ankles criss-crossed behind me seducing gangly teen boys over the phone line. My perfect mood-changing polish manicured fingers coiling the phone cord. 

Or I’d at least be getting phone calls. At. all. Those boobs were my ticket to liiiiife. 

Allison had the boobs and the big incredible curly hair. She had full autonomy to her boombox, TV and refrigerator at both her mom and her dad’s houses. She also had her period. In other words, she had it all. 

I had a body made of elbows, straight blonde hair with bangs that always flipped on one side, and braces plus headgear that weighed more than me. I was given CDs once a year on Easter from a catalog that outlined which Christian artists you’d like if you liked <insert what every teen was actually listening to>. So, if your kid likes Mariah Carey but you don’t want them to grow up to have a rainbow airbrush-painted across their perfect boobies, here’s a Christian knockoff. 

I had loopholes though. I couldn’t watch MTV, Friends, or even The Simpsons. But no one bothered policing my books. Helllooo Danielle Steel. And The House of Seven Gables. Listen, no one said I wasn’t also a huge nerd by choice. Movies were somewhat fair game too, if a group was going. And I would record whatever was on the radio to a tape that I’d then pop in my walkman to listen to while I ticked off the miles on my training plan. It was the music I liked, it was also the music I needed to memorize so I could blend in on some level at Knights of Columbus hall “dances” when a beat would drop and every girl would have that knowing look cross their face like clouds on a puddle, find their BFF and start singing every word. 

I missed sleepovers, dances, parties when they were too close to big meets. The one the night before States Cross Country where the boys came over before the sleepover and everyone watched Dumb and Dumber. The years would be punctuated with quotes from that movie that would fly over my head. It was easy knew when to laugh though or fake that I saw the latest episode of Friends or whatever was needed. Plus I did great at States. Until I graduated, I was always asleep early, Varsity letters and college coach letters in a shoebox under my bed. My tickets out.

At 24, after graduating on what ended up being a very partial running scholarship to CSU thanks to three meniscectomies in as many years, probably the same age Mariah was when posed like the definition of sex like candy, I was walking through lower Manhattan on a scorching August day in a short purple dress and strappy sandals. A construction worker catcalled me, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about! A nice wholesome girl!” Even my catcalls were like someone had handed him that Christian swap catalog. If you want to yell “nice tits!!” but she doesn’t have any, you can yell “wholesome girl!” Like either one has anything to do with the other.

I’m at the part of the book where Mariah is defending Glitter and her ‘breakdown’. Both events I didn’t know much about. Not only because TRL was something I had to sneak at a carefully orchestrated homework visit to someone else’s house but because I’d checked out, uninterested in any scandal, especially the one where she sang off key a couple years ago. Earnest (failed or not) singing in public humiliates me to no end. I have always kept Mariah the fantasy of the 90s. She is not the same animal as me, and as heredity would have it (because that’s where boobs come from, not desperate teen prayers) I am still mostly elbows and off-beat interests.  She is cotton candy melting in my mouth on a humid beach day. Spin the bottle and holiday dance infused crushes. Fantasy, trilling over every teen moment real and imagined.