You, 2007

Ladylike

 

One boy with a gold watch too big for his wrist. Another with a gold chain around his neck that may or may not be fake. The third, much shorter than the others, with sunglasses sitting on his head, tucked in his hair. On top of an overpass.

From the rocky ground below, you watch them wave their arms around at cars driving underneath them, like air dancers outside of cell phone shops. The motion is silly, but also almost welcoming in the way that addressing someone by name is. The tall boy’s wristwatch is stuck in his relentless motion and reflects like a mirror when the streetlight hits it just right. The boy flashes the gap between his front teeth when he opens his mouth. He resembles a horse when it neighs.

The other boys continue to wave around him. You notice his blue jeans aren’t zipped, and though you aren’t surprised, your whole vision splits like light has cut your eyes. Don’t do it. The boys all laugh—they can’t be older than fifteen, and they’re acting out of their own troubles, you know, but watching it makes your breath shallow and stilted. You feel angry, but tell yourself that you can choose how you respond. You just want to break something. You try killing the urge to destroy.

Be a lady they say.

You take a tube of sticky cinnamon gloss from your pocket and slather it on your lips. You like the way it burns.

You start walking up the ramp, towards them. They don’t seem to notice you, even though you’ve been watching them for at least ten minutes. You can’t help but wonder who waves around for that long, except for asshole teen boys making fools of themselves.

Above you, the summer heat presses against the citrine sky. A jet rips through the inky colors and across the half of the sky that has already turned to night. You notice how far the space between the concrete bridge they stand on and the expressway below them, fast with cars, is. You want to close that distance.

You walk the ramp so you are on the bridge now too. You yell hey to the boys and decide they ignore you. Nothing stops them from waving at passing cars beneath them. You yell hey louder and the horse boy finally turns to look, his eyes all big and black. A boy who hasn’t turned yells from the side of his mouth, “Go home!” The horse boy cackles and turns back to the auto-river below him.

The windshield of someone’s car reflects the last bit of sun sinking under the horizon. You cover your eyes with both your hands.

When you remove them, you see that the boy with the chain has moved closer to you, and all you can think about is pulling so hard on the necklace that he can’t breathe.

“What are you doing?” You ask the boys. You shrink the space between you all as if you are not scared. The wind up here starts pressing your skin, filling your ears. The boy’s sunglasses start falling forward, but he catches them before the crash.

“Leave us alone.” It’s a chorus. All three boys have agreed.

“Fine, if you won’t tell me, I’ll just wait,” and so you sit on the ground, your blue jeans rubbing against the textured concrete, snagging in a spot you don’t notice. Your legs crossed as a lady’s legs should be.

Horse Boy with the watch groans. One of the others, you aren’t sure which, says, “If you’re going to stay, you could at least take your shirt off.” You realize it’s the boy with the glasses, because the one with the chain high-fives him. You consider it for a second, taking your shirt off to reveal your bare skin, then wrapping the fabric across their mouths until they choke.

They glare at you when you blink three times at the light caught in your eye again. The cars swoosh, the wind whelms, and you continue staring, expecting the boys to do something.

“Weird,” Horse Boy says, and you notice they’ve finally stopped waving around.

“Let’s just go,” the boy with the necklace says. You imagine him still unable to breathe.

“Yeah.” The boys don’t say goodbye and while barely keeping their pants up around their hips, they march off in the opposite direction from which you came. They must be going home. Might be spending the night together. What a life a boy must have. Do they do the things girls do at sleepovers? Do they tell secrets and share each other’s beds?

The day has turned its light off and the citrus twilight is undeniably night now. For a few seconds, you watch the final shapes of their silhouetted figures dissipate into the fresh, endless darkness. No more glints from the boys, but you still want to take all their possessions and destroy them.

The vehicles racing below you are lit by headlights. Splintered colors streaking. They can’t see you up above, hidden in shadows. No one knows you’re there looking down, watching all of them. You think of the horse boy, his watch, and how it hugged his wrist. You wish he was still next to you, all lank and no muscle, all grin and no bite. You think of smiling soft, at your feet, then at him, then lifting your t-shirt with just your bitty fingers, like you’re going to show him what the boy asked for. Then you think of your fingers sliding through his hair, knotting it in your knuckles, and wrenching him to the ground. You dig your heel into his wrist, his watch, the face fractured, pieces of glass buried in the sole of your shoe.

That would give them something to see.

You don’t know where anyone below you is going. They’re in front of you, then behind you. Swooshing as they pass. Like all the times men drove by before, but you didn’t know their destinations. You won’t know, never will. They are usually driving a pickup, sometimes a four-door sedan, rarely a van, but they all sound the same. They crack your sense, pull you out. You never ask, just a small slit down your day: a honk. They pull your thoughts, they spill over you, soften against you, a stain, and then they are gone. They always think their honks say something, but all you hear is the spin. All the men make you spin into something they can hold. All you ever hear is the spin, and the honks always stain. You have thought of saying, Unless you’re going to stick around, quit honking at me and leave me alone, but your voice doesn’t sound like a revved engine, so they won’t know it. These men are consumed with some kind of ending, but you don’t know what it is. You do know, however, that one day the boys watching cars from an overpass will be the men driving the cars below.

You reach into your sweatshirt pockets, which are just big enough to hold the rocks you grabbed from the ground before you walked up here. You think you hear a distant voice saying something about being a lady. You don’t have permission to do that. You hear the boys say, Weird, take off your shirt, let’s go, and you wish you’d done everything you could to hurt them. You feel stupid for talking yourself out of it. You sense the weight of the rocks, heavy in your pocket, and take them out to cradle them in your palms.

Do it, you say, because the boys won’t say it. Or any men. No one’s going to give you this permission but you, so you do. You say it and then stand on your tiptoes to reach over the bridge’s wire fence and drop the first stone. It falls on the hood of a black Ford Focus, landing like the angel in that most beautiful suicide picture from LIFE magazine. The cars swerve as you unload the rest you’re holding onto.

There are no boys cat-calling you or men honking, just the symphony of destruction around you. You hear it, luring you in a way those guys never could, and you find this moment rather comforting after all.

 

 

Crystal, 2005

First Date

 

One of the men I’ve dated has a wooden cross erected in his front yard, and another guy drives a minivan. So as I step away from the high-top table I’m sitting at to use the restroom, my mom who’s at the other end of the bar with her third Jack Daniel’s stops me to say that this guy who’s an actuary and has bought me a drink is a clear step up. She says at least he’s got a job and it pays well. It’s hard to disagree. She tells me don’t fuck it up. He orders another round of drinks while I’m gone and asks the bartender for olives, and then he hands me a martini when I return. I ask how he found this place because it’s small and local and no one outside this city knows it. He says he’s in town for work, so he pointed his finger to some spot on the map and decided to go there. I guess Bullwinkle’s Saloon was the spot. He’s in a tailored suit that men from here don’t wear, and his short, straw-like hair is combed to the side. He seems like the men in books I’ve read. Old-man Jim, the only person other than me on the night’s lineup, starts playing his guitar on the small bar stage, and then the man in front of me holds out his hand. He asks me if I’d like to dance, and of course I can’t say no. I ask him what his name is and he tells me Scott. He says he loved the way I played guitar earlier, the way my delicate fingers pulled the strings with intention in front of an audience. He says he could tell I know how to perform. He asks me how long I’ve been playing as he spins me in a circle and I can’t help but think, nearly my whole life. I tell him, for an audience, maybe five years. He seems satisfied. Scott asks what other talents I have and I tell him that I also read palms. He asks if I could read his and I say yes, even if I am uncertain. He doesn’t remove it from my hand as he guides me around our table, but without even looking at it, I know this: I could tell him one thing, or another, and my reading would be just as successful either way. I should tell him that I’m actually more interested in the things that convince us something is true even if it isn’t. But I don’t. My mom, on what looks like her fourth drink now, winks at me from across the room. She nods her head.

 

 

You, 2004

Something Worth Idolizing

 

The magazine had a photograph of Lisa Kudrow in a black, crushed velvet dress with long sleeves on the red carpet. You ripped that page out and put the mutilated magazine back on the busted metal rack at the front of the grocery store. You have taped two other photos of celebrities in velvet to your bedroom wall and you can’t help but obsess over the idols you see them as.

 

For weeks you have been dreaming of all the ways you could transform yourself, each new variation pulsing like some sort of heartbeat that keeps you alive, though you’re not sure which version you’d choose if you could. But as you stand in the thrift store now, pushing hanger after hanger of tropical button ups, lace tank tops, and vintage nightgowns further away from you on the rack, you can’t help but pray for the image that wins to be cheap.

Before you look, you smell her manufactured bubblegum spray. This makes you turn. A woman with a big triangular nose and an entirely pink dress gets too close to you, pushing each hanger even further away from her, almost immediately after you. You say, “Excuse me,” even though you have no need to be excused. She just nods. She must be your mother’s age, although with her moisturized skin and painted blush, you can’t be sure.

When she doesn’t move, practically remains a statue, you say, “I’m sorry, I’m still looking at these.”

The woman says, “Listen, you have no need to apologize.”

You consider telling her what you meant was, Would she step away? You don’t.

She has synthetically curled hair. You notice that she’s styled the curls so they stay, even though they’re thick. If her hair wasn’t brown, you might have wished yours looked more like it.

As you stop, she stops, and for a moment you two are caught staring at each other. She has gold, chunky earrings that hang halfway down her neck.

You return to pushing and searching when you finally get to the dresses. They aren’t ordered in any special way, not by size, shape, or color, which makes things difficult to find. You are looking for something in particular, after all. Still, each item you touch, the woman touches next.

Maybe ten dresses in, you stop when you find what you’re looking for: a velvet dress. It might be floor length depending on the wearer’s height, but it’s a halter and navy blue. The woman, a knockoff Barbie you’ve decided, has also stopped, almost in wait.

“That’s a little too old for you, hun,” she says. Her arms folded at her chest.

The dress you’ve found is not the same as Lisa’s dress, but it’s the only reproduction here, so you go pay the three bucks at the register. You do not notice the way it’s faded in the center from some old, washed-out stain. You do not know what happened to it in its former life. You do not realize that no one will like it, which is true. No one will like it. You will want to wear it to your first party, but then don’t because it’s lame. No one will watch you. No one will talk. No one will idolize you.

 

 

Lena, 1992

Stolen Names

 

We’re in the guest bathroom cutting our hair like we’re shedding something of ourselves. I’ve got a fistful of Andi’s in one hand and industrial shears in the other as we face the mirror. Some toothpaste spit fogs the reflection a little, but otherwise I can see us head-on. Like we’re clear. For the longest time, before this moment, it had mostly been me and her, but then she tells me in a fake-diamond type of way that she’s thinking about how nice it’d be if our parents got married, because then the loneliness would all be over. We’d be real sisters. A loose piece of her hair falls somewhere on my skin. I stand above her sitting on the toilet as she imagines this other world where Dad and I need someone, but she’s wrong. We don’t need anyone stealing our names. The back of Andi’s neck feels tender from how often she uses conditioner. I stroke it with my thumb as we stare at ourselves, looking at who we are. I ask her if she’s ready, but before she says anything, I slice her long hair in half. The cut’s not straight. Her mouth splits into a snarl that looks the same as the cut I just made, and I drop all of her wiry ends on the floor. Sometimes she forgets things are temporary, so she’s screaming, like some wild animal, that with hair like this now, she’ll always be alone and, I don’t know, maybe she’s right. Or maybe we all will.

 

 

Kia, 2005

Pouring Perfume

 

Tilting geometric glass bottles upside down so one-hundred-dollar perfume streams out. Surrounded by tangerine, pomegranate, pulp. Who does this woman think she is? Then brown bottles, warm with gold rims and balm that smells like wood, violin strings, classic. I pour, I smash, I listen to each bottle split into shards I’ll leave on the curb at the end of the driveway. I will store their leftover bodies in the sewer where I drop them. A little boy walks by and his nose folds up, wrinkled. He says, “Hello,” through his furrowed face. He stops to repeat himself. “Hello.” I swivel my legs so the last drops of perfume don’t hit my skin. The little boy says, “Goodbye,” and I understand. I’ve become good at goodbyes. Distracted by the boy, I force the last bottle into the ground with a strength I can’t seem to control, a splinter thrust in my finger. I pick it out with my teeth, fresh blood on my tongue. I spit the drops down the sewer too. They disappear immediately. I don’t understand how she doesn’t realize what I’m doing, my stepmother. She asks the household where her perfume goes. My dad tells her he doesn’t know. I say, Weird, I just saw them. And actually, Dad really doesn’t know, but he doesn’t buy her new bottles anyway. I can’t tell if it’s boys, men, or self who have been hurting women all along, although it might not matter. I stare at the puncture left on the tip of my finger. The way the blood keeps surfacing. I stop trying to lick it off because I realize it will keep returning.