Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  I canceled the rest of my trip. I was supposed to go to Berlin and Paris by myself, and then meet John up in London for the weekend. The plan is to visit him again in July.

  The antibiotics acted fast, like a shot. By the flight home I was feeling more alive, yet somehow altered. I returned to the green stickiness of North Carolina alone.

  So intensely nostalgic, that throat infection. I used to get them all the time. Being a toxic girl in my twenties and showing boys at bars my massive pus pockets in the back of my throat, like a parlor trick, while I smoked menthols and jammed popsicles down my throat as my medicine. Remembering what it was like to be unsafe and unhygienic and uninsured, almost radiantly fucked up.

  Thinking of the ways nostalgia can also be a disease.

  * * *

  I always confuse Barbara Loden with the character she plays in her film Wanda, and then those two figures with this girl I once lived with in Chicago. The girl I knew was ten years older, so the last time I knew her, she would have been thirty-five, the age that I’m going to be this year. I think a lot about her. Like Barbara Loden, she’s someone I’m always trying to figure out.

  I met this girl while waiting lunch tables one summer at a bourgeois Italian café in Bucktown—the café tried on the surface to be old-world authentic with its grappa selection and gelato case but was really fake, with its faux-fresco mural of smiling waving people. She worked as a barista, expertly making espresso drinks. I was in an oozy dumb period then—I had an older musician boyfriend, we’d get drunk at bars. I worked in a bookstore as well, and would sit and read Kathy Acker at the register and refuse to shelve books. I wore a lot of short dresses then. I remember this one beige and backless cotton dress with red piping and a white slip underneath that I tied in back, like a subversion of an apron. I wore the dress with red platform heels that I paired with everything, that got all scratched up and white in the rubber wedge. My best friend, an art student and hostess at the local pan-Asian place, had those shoes, and I coveted them, and then got my own.

  I was depressed, quite often. Sometimes I would sit in my room and scribble in my journal. But most of the time I just tried not to think about anything too seriously. I remember my youth as a period of vague incoherence and often intense emotional pain that I did not know how to voice. My unhappiness did not yet have a political context.

  * * *

  On one level I think my connection between this girl I used to know and Barbara Loden is the uncanny similarity of their presences—the fine blonde hair, the little fox face, the girlish frame, the soft, nasally voice. As with Barbara Loden’s Wanda, there was something so tragic and passive about my friend, I always thought. How she would tiptoe around the apartment, landing softly on the balls of her feet like a ballet dancer. Like she didn’t want to be heard. Like she didn’t want to take up too much space.

  She had an old-fashioned, mellifluous name, like an expected name change for a player in the MGM factory, an even more old-fashioned nickname. I guess I’ll have to call her something. I’ll call her Veronica, Ronnie for short, as she did have a Veronica Lake quality to her, especially when she would curl her long feathery blonde hair around her to hide within. Except she was closer to the later Veronica Lake, who became a drifter, working as a barmaid at the Martha Washington Hotel in New York City once her movie career was ruined. God. The story of Veronica Lake is so sad. Like Frances Farmer, who also went from movie star to a life adrift and subservient and perpetually boozy, folding towels in a Seattle hotel. Veronica Lake’s multiple arrests for public drunkenness, staying at seedy hotels, madly in love with a merchant seaman, finally a shut-in in Hollywood, Florida (yes), fearful of being stalked by the FBI.

  I’d like to write a book that’s like Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, but about Hollywood stars who became hermits who refused to leave the house, having lost their looks and career and most often money, spiraling, shuttled in and out of institutions, trying to escape from their public and former selves, uncertain of their identities, sometimes paralyzed with rage. Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Gene Tierney, Veronica Lake, Frances Farmer, Vivien Leigh.

  As I am writing this, Shulamith Firestone has just been reported dead. She withdrew from public life after The Dialectic of Sex, which was written in her twenties. And then years later this drifting series of reminiscences, published on Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents, that reminds me of Anna Kavan’s diaristic Asylum Piece. In Airless Spaces Firestone draws from her own experiences being institutionalized to write vignettes of those she encountered who were forgotten by the system, given a diet of pills to control their alienation and violence. In the work the language comes with difficulty—she writes of a character who was reading Dante fluently before being institutionalized, who afterwards couldn’t even flip through magazines. And yet she summons up scenes of this stuck, slow circle of hell. Guards pulling a naked woman into the shower. Hydrotherapy. Bloated bodies. Anorexic bodies. Abject bodies.

  The narrator in Airless Spaces often meditates on losing her looks in the hospital. The back of the small blue book is haunting—Firestone’s visage, looking out bespectacled and eagle-like, her trademark long dark hair almost brutally shorn.

  Firestone lived to sixty-seven—an old age actually for such a life, of poverty, suffering, isolation, decades in and out of institutions.

  * * *

  After only a few months of our working together, Ronnie let me move in with her when I decided to move out of the apartment I was living in with another girl. My friendships with girls back then were like tortured, passionate love affairs, always ending badly and with a spectacle of acrimony. A series of falling out, of falling in, of quick kinships. Then I moved in with my boyfriend, began to work as a writer and an editor, broke up with my boyfriend, went to grad school for a time. Then Ronnie and I didn’t see each other for a while. I moved home when my mother got sick, commuted to the city to work.

  When my mother died, we bumped into each other on Damen Avenue, both of us at ends of situations, me having given up my lease in that doll’s studio in Lincoln Square to move home, first to take care of my mother and then to tend to my widowed father. She told me horror stories of her roommates, messy strangers in Logan Square, she perennially prickled and flustered. We spontaneously decided to move in together again. I liked the idea of living with someone who knew me. After my mother died, I went through a period of not wanting to be alone for long periods of time. I wonder if I’ve gone out of that period.

  At least with Ronnie I knew what I was getting into. In some ways we were intimates. In other ways we were strangers. I was always so tentative with her, me tiptoeing in a way as well, never really pushing her or questioning her. She would just sometimes snap at you. Her quick turns.

  During the inevitable moving out, when Ronnie decided to go live with the girl with the red shoes, which I saw as an absolute betrayal, we each yelled at the top of our lungs that the other needed help. It was true. We both did need help. My parents paid for my therapy for a while after college, but then cut me off. Ronnie tried to get help several times, standing in an eternal line at a public health center, but without insurance, it was basically impossible, or at least it seemed so, at the time.

  The ambivalence toward others in Airless Spaces. Sometimes having a roommate feels like living in a mental ward. Does the outside mirror the inside or reverse?

  When my mother was put in the psychiatric ward, despite stage-four lung cancer, I would visit her there every day. Or whenever I could. Whenever I could force myself. My father and I would sit outside of her room in hard-backed chairs. My brother, sister, sometimes too. She was put in the ward with the old people. Remembering how they would force her to sit in the public area, an exhausted shaven baby, skinny and brown, her hospital gown gaping open, while the demented patients drank juice and played games.

  * * *

  The idea for Wanda came from a newspaper clipping of a woman in England convicted of being an accomplice in a bank r
obbery. She thanked the judge when he sentenced her for twenty years. “That’s what struck me: Why would this girl feel glad to be put away?” Loden said in an interview.

  At the beginning of the film, Wanda is late for her divorce hearing, having to go to the mines in her outfit of white jeans and hair curlers in order to borrow money for the bus from an elderly worker who might be her father. Her estranged husband is already at court with their crying children and the new woman, a substitute nursemaid.

  She has nothing to say as a rejoinder to her husband, who is speaking of her uselessness as she wanders into the courtroom. Nothing to say to the judge. “Your husband says you’ve deserted him and the children. What do you have to say about it?” Throughout the film she often looks like she’s in trouble, aware that she’s being disciplined, but she lacks language. She is muted. “Nothing,” she says, shrugging. Not with attitude. More—numbness.

  * * *

  For years I did not know what happened to Ronnie. A few times I spied her on the streets from afar when I still lived in Chicago. I recognized her by her dainty gait. I thought perhaps she could have been a suicide. Or someone who just faded out, got lost in the system, stuck eternally in some dead-end situation. But I wonder if she thought that of me as well. I mean, maybe she knew I transcended things, became an editor, a writer, formed a lasting relationship. But perhaps she always suspected I would switch back, go back to my real fate of fucking up and failure. Maybe that’s why I write. I’m sure this has something to do with why I publish. To announce to myself, as well as to the drifts of former intimates, that I am still alive. The beat of the heart. Like Esther Greenwood attending her alter ego’s funeral in The Bell Jar. I am. I am. I am.

  The last section of Airless Spaces is entitled “Suicides I Have Known.”

  That other girl I lived with the time before, the psychology major, did kill herself—I attended her Irish-Catholic wake on the South Side years later, even though we had not spoken for years, her bloated in the casket and wearing a flowery dress she never would have worn in real life. In many ways she was more like Wanda than the girl I mix up in my head with Wanda. But I’ve already written about this other girl before. I don’t mean to now. I’ve already summoned her up.

  And yet I’ve summoned up Ronnie before, for my antiheroine Ruth in Green Girl. Once I became a writer, Ronnie became a belated muse for me, of a certain model of alienation. I mythologized Ronnie, like Barbara Loden did with Wanda. Although Ruth was also a young Catherine Deneuve, and also the silent cool blonde girl who lived downstairs while I was writing the book. And she was me of course. They’re always me of course.

  One can become a suicide by being forgotten.

  Something about witness. Airless Spaces is dedicated to “Lourdes Cintron—as promised in the hospital.”

  Eventually, once I read Jean Rhys, I began to think of Ronnie as a character out of one of her novels, not one of her impressionable ingénues but one of her older women, numbed out, who tries to suppress her rage in public, who is frozen by past affairs. Like Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight.

  I never got the whole story of her life before she knew me. I got it in fragmented reminiscences. Ronnie hoarded past memories, especially the bitter ones. The repetition of certain names. I knew the name of the boy she should have married. I perennially heard the name of the boy who almost destroyed her.

  In her twenties Ronnie lived in Detroit, and she would always recall those times with such intense nostalgia. I find myself doing this now with the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, which is where I lived with Ronnie and with many others, knocking around there for a decade. Remembering when you couldn’t catch a cab in the neighborhood, why would you, you’d never be able to afford a cab, this before the valet parking appeared and everyone I knew had to move.

  Remembering that time when your city had possibility, had space, before all the others moved in, before we all moved out, which really is a stand-in for when we had unrealized possibility, the drifting period of our youth. (Of course we were also the others who moved in—those who must move out are erased.)

  * * *

  Afternoons I sit outside on the front porch, Genet curled into me on one of the chairs. To sit and watch and be slow in the heat feels distinctly southern. Sometimes, although not often, I am able to read, and it’s wonderful, to be able to sink into something. I eat too-expensive cherries and reread Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, the reddened tips of my fingers turning the pages. Her dingy world of fuckups trying to escape their stuckness through desperate contact with other people. Her characters caught in absolute tedium. They desire to lay waste to their days. Like the vagabonds in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise staring at a procession of images on the television.

  * * *

  Ronnie and I both worked strings of temporary jobs where we were always quitting or being fired. A few gigs at a time. Mine were mostly in restaurants. Months before I got the café job I had worked at the Hollywood, a twenty-four-hour diner just down the street on North Avenue, a job I suddenly walked away from, during a paralyzingly slow afternoon shift. This was a semiregular performance for me. Just walking out. Some quick glimpse of freedom—although of course I’d always have to find a job that was more of the same.

  It was called the Hollywood, yet there was nothing glamorous about it—the owner, an enterprising Greek man, short and squat with a glint in his eye, had commissioned an appropriately themed wall painting, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, James Dean, etc. The oldies station played all the time. We wore turquoise-green polos with purple collars that said the name of the restaurant in script on the back. I was one of the only girls working there—except the niece of the manager, a beautiful girl who trained pit bulls, who later got into a car crash that fucked her face up and made her a bit off afterwards, or so I heard. The manager was a Canadian guy who would whisper to me about his life as an agent for the CIA. Whenever I came in, he would tell me stories about dressing in drag or jumping out of airplanes—I’m not sure if he thought I believed him, or if he believed himself. He gave me two pieces of advice that I remember to this day: always buy good shoes and premium orange juice.

  To work at the diner I would dress in a costume as well—a variety of bandannas I’d tie my hair back with, dark red lipstick that clashed with the green and purple. We served hipster kids coming in from the bars, cops, workers from the S/M club, the strip club, the tattoo parlor, families who spoke all different languages, construction workers, yuppies, the sex workers who walked up and down North Avenue and hung out at the Home Depot. Sometimes their pimps. The regulars would tell us their stories. When I did the overnight shift, I’d take herbal Ecstasy and drown it in a liter of Mountain Dew from the gas station across the street. I’d sleep the entire next day to recover.

  Ronnie had worked as a house cleaner, as a companion to a female shut-in, in a factory, in telemarketing, at shitty office temp jobs. She worked as a cigarette girl for a marketing company for Camel when I knew her. They hired cute girls to go to assigned bars when they were packed and give out free packs of cigarettes, for giving your information. That was one of the regular things she did—even when she didn’t have anything else going on, she’d go to work at 11 PM. She would return home, drained. It would be difficult to wake up the next day if she had an earlier shift somewhere else. So sometimes she didn’t. She’d often call in sick to her jobs when she just couldn’t force herself to go.

  Capitalism made us sick. Forced us into humiliating roles.

  * * *

  At the beginning of the film, Wanda goes to the factory where she recently worked, her hair curlers and shuffling gait in counterpoint to the brisk models of efficiency making dresses. She asks tremulously about her pay for the last week. She also asks for more work. “I’m sorry, my dear,” the piggy boss man condescends to her. “You’re too slow in our operation, and we can’t use you.” Still, she thanks him, haltingly.

  That flashback scene in Jean Rhys’s Good Morn
ing, Midnight, where Sasha Jensen remembers being fired at the atelier by the boss who tests her on how well she knows German. But in the novel we get the interior monologue of Sasha’s impotent fury, her fury at herself for her passive reaction in the moment, that she still has to go through the motions to try to please this man, a feat that she knows is impossible. In the film we only get Wanda’s blank face, her rote expression of gratitude that is more a stand-in for numbness.

  The factory girls in The House of Mirth. Lily Bart’s vague feelings of philanthropy toward these down-and-out girls with pretty faces. She gives them money, money that slips through her hands. Later in the novel, when due to scandal her chance of a good marriage has slipped away, her well-meaning friends set her up an apprenticeship at a millinery. They imagine her owning a small shop making hats for posh clientele. Yet she is too slow. Her fingers too untrained. She is told to undo simple tasks by the woman looking over her. She cannot exist, working like this, under these conditions.

  * * *

  Ronnie and I both got unceremoniously fired from the Italian café soon after I moved in with her in her one-bedroom apartment, in that dead-end area near the Kmart and the Blockbuster off the highway (the Blockbuster long ago bulldozed to make room for a luxury car dealership), me dragging my dirty futon mattress into her tiny hole of an extra room. We were both fired for the usual bullshit reasons, but really it was because it was the end of the summer and they didn’t need the extra help anymore. She was laid off the day before and then I was the next day, showing up to work, finding my time card not in its slot. So then you knew you had to go see the manager. How humiliating it was to have piggish bosses smirk at you, to have to listen to their assaults on your character, to feel absolutely powerless. They lectured you on how to live your life, as if they knew. As if they had any fucking idea.