Wonderland Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing Stephen McCauley, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts by Arianna Arguetty May 2021 Copyright by Arianna Arguetty 1 I was lounging on the sofa in the laundry room, wearing a two thousand dollar cocktail dress and watching YouTube. My last days at university had come and gone. Exams were over, and I’d secured a job as an entry-level marketing assistant at a nearby firm. Once I earned a couple of paychecks, I’d be all set to get a place of my own. I’d even found that once a month in Fort Lauderdale--which wasn’t exactly close to my mother’s house but not terribly far either--a certain club met. In two weeks, I would go and take the chance to explore a nagging interest of mine. For now, all I had to do was walk across a stage, shake a few hands, and secure my degree. It should have been exciting, but I was preoccupied with my insecurity. I’d graduated from high school in a pair of bedazzled bootcut jeans I’d gotten myself at Target and a boxy t-shirt two sizes too big that my high school had given out after some trip. The shirt had covered the fake gemstones entirely which may have been a mistake because my old English teacher couldn’t have complained about my “horseback riding outfit” if she’d seen them. I would’ve replicated the outfit for this ceremony, but I wanted to prove I’d changed, gotten stronger. Surely, I’d matured enough in the last four years to be able to stomach a dress in public. I’d put it on about two hours before, but since I’d unfortunately glimpsed myself in the reflection of my brother’s 86” TV, I’d retreated to my actual room--the laundry room--where there were no mirrors, TVs, or windows. A blurry, distant image of my bulging waistline protruding from the sides of my polka dot dress was haunting me. I’d averted my gaze before I could see more. Still, even brushing by that image in my brain made it clearer. The grotesque curve of my stomach hanging out in front of me, casting a shadow just underneath it. The redness of a would-be pimple shining brightly on 1 my forehead and in a trio on the left side of my mouth. The patch of flaking skin around my nose. I was pretty sure I’d heard a degree could be mailed home. Something like that. It was too late now to request that, I suspected, but maybe the ceremony would suddenly be mysteriously cancelled? I skipped the ad on the YouTube video. “You have one loop at the end of your starting chain. For that last one, use a half-double crochet,” the woman on the video said, and I watched carefully as she weaved what appeared to be a mess of knots. I was good at tangling things up. I’d never done it on purpose, but crocheting was something I wanted to eventually try. I watched instructional videos for fun. “Alexandra,” my mother said from down the hall, and I frowned, paused the video, and turned. Pressed against one wall of the laundry room, there was a sofa and a dresser just barely squeezed in so that the drawers faced the rest of the room. On the opposite wall, there were three small closets for the laundry machines, storage, and a toilet. The third wall was bare. And the fourth wall did not exist. In its place, there was a tall bookshelf, a white grid-like thing filled with beige fabric bins and the occasional decorative book or bauble. It left only a small section, slightly bigger than a standard doorway, for people to pass into and out of the room. An original Britto vase--a mix of brightly colored lines and bulbous protrusions--sat in one of the largely empty cubbies, and when my mother passed behind it, it made the already impressive muscles on her bicep bulge like they belonged to a steroid user. In my mind, the blurry memory of myself in this damned dress tried to creep into sight. “Let me see you,” she said, her looks so at odds with my own. Her wavy, blonde hair just brushed her bronzed shoulders, while my stick-straight black hair fell limply down by pale back. 2 My gaze flickered from the paused video to her and back. The image of rolls of fat in a polka dot dress sharpened, brightened, tried to draw me in, but I stood for her. She smoothed down the skirt of my crinkled dress while I stood stiff, the backs of my knees pressing against the bare sofa. I’d been staying in my brother’s room lately, so the sheet that usually held together the two seat cushions was absent. Behind her head, the laundry machine was thumping and buzzing, thumping and buzzing, like it might just buzz right out of its spot. The housekeeper had started it up an hour ago, forcing me to switch to earbuds. "You look beautiful," my mom said. She had said such things before. It rarely took her a full day to tell me the exact opposite. In much more elaborate and creative words. I didn’t smile. “Thanks.” I sat back down. “I got you a present for graduation.” I looked at her again. In elementary school, when birthday parties were nothing more than a field trip for the class, I’d received many presents. “Thank you,” I said as I took it. It was a jewelry box--jewelry was yet another facet of dressing up that failed to appeal to me--but I tried to hold on to positivity. Inside was a pair of earrings. Diamond studs with gold backings. I reached up to touch my empty ears. I realized I had taken my only other pair off two weeks ago and forgotten to put them back on. These were pretty. It was a nice gesture. “They are beautiful.” “Do you want to wear them today?” “Sure,” I said and reluctantly stood again so she could put them in my ears. 3 “They look so good. I’m so proud of you, my beautiful girl.” I started to sit, and she continued, “Aren’t you going to look at them in the mirror?” I tried my best to smile as I reluctantly opened the door to the small bathroom to see my face in the small mirror. “So pretty,” I said and continued to stare at them, trying to block out the rest of my reflection. My gaze kept slipping, though, cataloguing all the flaws of my face. I turned my back to the mirror before my gaze could slip below the neck, and I kept up a steady flow of “okays” and nods as she explained our plans to get to the ceremony. We would be taking her car. Because of the timing of things, I needed to make sure everything was ready by 3:35, at which time she would call the valet to bring out the car, and we had to call the elevator at 3:41 at the latest. The ceremony started at 4:40, and we lived a whopping ten minutes away. Maybe twenty in heavy traffic. During this conversation, I stared at the custom-made jewelry resting delicately on her exposed collarbone. It was a thin gold necklace with the diamond-studded word “trust” hanging vertically, dipping tastefully into her generous cleavage. After she left to touch up her gold eyeshadow, I made sure that the mirror was trapped behind a shut door and walked back to the sofa. My cat appeared soon after, having been too busy inhaling her food to join me until then. I hit play on the YouTube video as she settled up against me, the comforting weight of her butt partially resting on my shin as she began her grooming routine. It was a shame, if not a surprise, that looking at myself continued to elicit disgust and nausea. Sometime just before my high school graduation, a teacher had asked the class to write down our greatest wishes and our greatest fears. 4 I couldn’t remember my greatest wish, but my greatest fear had always been strong enough for me to name, despite the careful way I tried to bury it. Would I ever find anything about myself to love? *** The ceremony was long and boring. The valedictorian--a guy I’d never seen around campus--gave a fifteen-minute-long speech, which included extensive and painfully-detailed tangents about his love of golf. At some point, the host of the event tried to cut him off, but he was too polite about it. The student nodded like he got the hint and flipped through a couple of pages before he continued for another five minutes. I couldn’t bear to consider how long the speech had originally been. To top it off, with a name like Alexandra Baker and a relatively tiny graduating class, I was stuck in the front row, where using my phone was not an option, not even to read the texts I’d received from my friend Ellie. I hadn’t actually checked what caused my phone to buzz so many times in quick succession, but I was sure she wanted to talk about the incident she’d seen in the parking lot.