Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  The songs’ fully engaged effort toward life presses on me. By that I mean it leaves an impression. They have fists and heels and tiny lungs, too. They’re bad-ass like babies ’cause they have to be—if you’re gonna leave inertia behind, you gotta be ready for forward movement.

  So I sit on the edge of the tub and marvel at all the fists around me, inside and out, pummeling the universe into a shape that suits them. It’s vivid.

  Pregnant or not, we are going to make a record, in the spring, with Ivo’s money. The contracts are signed; we have to make a record in the spring with Ivo’s money. “Damn straight!” said Dave when we got our copies in the mail.

  Tea beamed. “If we can make a baby, we can make anything!”

  “I think it’s against the law to fire a band just because it’s pregnant, anyway,” added Leslie.

  So even if Ivo flies over here and isn’t fooled by my little fat kid act, we’re gonna make a record called Throwing Muses—it’ll be an eponymous debut. We won’t name it ’cause we figure we can’t add any more syllables to that: you say “Throwing Muses” and you’ve already talked enough. Ivo agrees.

  I’ve wrapped my head around it: who quits their job ’cause they’re gonna have a baby? Who can afford to? The baby-class yuppies, I guess, but they don’t count; they aren’t human.

  “They’re normal, Kris,” said Dave.

  “You didn’t meet them,” I answered.

  ♋ juno

  now I can be balancing

  We’re in a freezing loft in a building somewhere across town, which is exactly where we expected to be shooting a video—something we swore we’d never do ’cause videos are so lame. But these filmmakers told us they needed help fighting their good fight against all their corporate suckiness, so what could we say? And listen to this: the song they chose for the video is “Fish,” so they’re gonna cut in footage of fish they shot at the aquarium! The aquarium we just went to. We’re so happy about this.

  “We were at the aquarium!” we squeal, as if this is an impressive feat. “We looked at fish!” The filmmakers nod, smiling patiently, while we gape at them. “Fish live inside the water!”

  We aren’t lip-synching; we’re playing the song live over and over again. One song all day long, with cameras up our butts. This is really, really, really, really hard. I don’t mean it’s difficult—it’s upsetting. “Fish” isn’t scary, but it’s intense. I try to pretend it’s a fake song, but that’s like trying to pretend a person is a mannequin.

  Fish Jesus floats around the room and Napoleon’s apartment moves across its walls, lit by blinking Christmas lights. I see the smoking donut shop women, feel the invisible Animal . . . and “Fish” is mostly green and blue, so everything glows greenish-blue. It’s like the world is suddenly dreaming around me. And mothers can’t disppear, so I gotta watch every color, see every face, feel every moment. It’s too bright, too much.

  I talk and laugh with my friends between takes, but during the performances, I have no choice but to be present for the song, to see the dreaming over and over and over again. It’s giving me an ulcer. It seems to be taking its toll on the band, too; they’re getting edgy.

  “Where’s that girl with my twig tea?” asks Leslie when we finish playing the song for the hundredth time.

  Sitting down in front of Dave’s kick drum, I point. “She’s in the corner, holding a bunch of coffees.”

  “Crap,” says Leslie.

  The guitar on my lap starts to buzz because it’s so close to the amp down there on the floor, so I turn down the volume. “Twig tea’s schmanky,” I say. “It was maybe a little over her head. Or over the diner’s head.”

  “Oh,” she says, disappointed. She’s about to ask for one of the coffees when a voice yells, “Places!” Leslie’s open mouth forms a silent scream.

  After this take, one of the directors, a woman named Lisa, takes me aside and asks if it’s okay with me if I look pregnant in the video. I look at her, surprised. “I was gonna ask you the same thing.”

  “Well, I think ‘Fish’ is a sexy, life-affirming song,” she says, “not sexy flirtatious, but sexy strong. It’d be great to have such a healthy female image in the video.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say.”

  “So we can shoot your body?”

  “I’m proud of this gut,” I answer. “I worked hard to make it wonderful.”

  “Good for you!” she says, and runs back to the crew to tell them to shoot my body.

  ♋ fish

  stares out of a block of ice

  with one melting eye

  About a thousand takes later, this day finally ends and we all leave the loft in a van with the crew and our equipment and their equipment. This is a lot of people and a lot of stuff; we barely fit. People sit on amps and each others’ laps. It’s pitch dark out, but I don’t think it’s nine o’clock yet, so before I get in, I ask the driver to drop me off at the health food store. “If it’s still open,” I add.

  He looks at me, nervous. “Are you sure you’re okay to walk home?” he asks. “It’s dark and you’re . . .”

  “Yeah, I can walk. I do it all the time.”

  When I climb in, he carefully pulls away from the sidewalk. Squirming past bodies and into a small space between some lights and an amplifier, my guitar case blocking my view of the people around me, I listen while they discuss dinner options one word at a time: “Italian?” “Burgers.” “Mexican?” “Pancakes.” “Pancakes?”

  When we pull up outside Bread and Circus, I can’t stand up; I’m stuck. “Just a minute!” I call. Two open hands appear next to my guitar case. I grab the hands and heave myself into a crouching position, then scramble over elbows and knees, trying not to hurt too many body parts. “Sorry! Sorry!” When I hop out onto the sidewalk, more helpful hands lift the guitar case and push it out the door. Then, as the door is closing, about fifteen more hands wave goodbye. Then the van pulls away in the dark.

  God, it’s cold out here. It’s nice that I can feel cold now, but . . . god, it’s cold out here. I hurry into the warm store, trying not to bonk my guitar case or my belly on the swinging doors. Luckily, I’m not gonna face anything as difficult as food shopping today; I just need some prenatal vitamins.

  On the way to the vitamin section, I see a rack of dingy, purplish-gray lollipops that’re probably dyed with beets or spinach or something ’cause they look moldy. I feel a wave of sympathy for the little hippie children who get these in their bag lunches when the other kids at their lunch table are eating Twinkies—I know your pain—but I grab a fistful for the band anyway, ’cause they need treats. I know for a fact that none of us will ever, ever want to play “Fish” again.

  When I’m ready to pay, the hippie chick who tried to sell me leopard steak is at the cash register talking to a heavily pierced guy about natural ointments for piercing-related infections. “You have to leave it on for, like, twenty-four hours and it smells like crap,” she says cheerfully. When she sees me, she claps her hands and gasps. “Hi-ee! How’re you feeeeling?!”

  “Great! How are you?” I put my guitar on the floor and my vitamins and lollipops on the belt.

  She rolls her eyes. “Double shift! Would you believe it?” I shake my head. The infected pierced guy watches dully. “Me, neither! It’s almost over, though.” She picks up a lollipop. “These are awesome!”

  “Oh, good.”

  Turning to the guy, she says, “Have you tried these? They’re awesome.” I try to imagine him eating a lollipop. “Eleven dollars and ninety-five cents.” She sticks the sad lollipops in a miniature paper bag with the vitamins while I dig into my coat pocket for some money. “Do you need help carrying these groceries to your car, ma’am?” I look up. Her hands are over her mouth and she’s giggling. Crazy hippie chick. I laugh mildly as I count out my money. “How’d that protein powder work out for you?” she asks in a baby voice.

  I smile at her. “I ate it.” She claps her hands again. “You have a good memory
,” I tell her. “Do you remember what everyone buys?”

  She nods, looking frightened. “I could work for the government or something!”

  “That’s true,” I say. “You should work for the government.”

  When she hands me my bag, she says to the pierced guy, “Look at this baby ready to have a babeeeee! Isn’t she sweet?”

  The pierced guy nods at me in acknowledgment and I wave to them both as I walk out. “So this crap smells like crap . . .” she’s saying when the doors close behind me.

  ♋ moan

  in the deep cold

  you can’t be brave

  The walk home is cold but head-clearing. By the time I turn onto our street, “Fish” is gone, swept away by freezing wind. As soon as I can make out our house in the dark, though, I realize that the dripping tree guy is on our front steps again. Damn it. I almost turn around and walk in the other direction, but I have no idea where I’d go—Bread and Circus is probably closed now, and it’s too cold to walk anywhere else. I shouldn’t live anywhere, I think, I shoulda kept moving. He watches me approach, but when I get there, he says nothing.

  Putting my guitar case down on the sidewalk, I look at him. “How ya doin’?”

  “I’m alright.” He’s hunched in the cold, perfectly still, and I can’t get around him.

  He’s definitely got a creepy vibe. Not a put-on one either. He’s dirty. He’s really dirty, inside and out. I know how that feels, but I don’t wanna get any closer to it right now ’cause I feel like dirty is dangerous. Like it might hurt the baby. I try to gauge how strong he might be in case I have to force my way past him. He looks like he could be pretty strong in a wiry sorta way. The only thing I have going for me is that I’m stronger than I look.

  “How’re you?” he asks.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say. I have no idea why I say this. I don’t know whether I think being pregnant is a defense or a weakness. Probably just losing patience with him.

  Suddenly, he stands up and walks down the steps. I take a step backward. What the hell? I’m afraid? I’m not scared of things. Maybe ’cause the baby’s sticking out in front of me. He holds out a postcard and a chrysanthemum. When I take them from him, he walks away.

  I watch him go, then pick up my guitar and walk up the steps. Looking at the postcard in the light, I see that it’s a picture of Boston Common. On the back, he wrote, “the next time we sleep.”

  What?

  I decide on the spot to move back to the island for the baby’s sake. I earned the rats this year; I wear song tattoos proudly—badges of evil. But evil isn’t clean, the air isn’t clean, grime is seeping under my skin and creepy is starting to make sense. I’m used to dirty and I don’t want to be used to it.

  When the time is right, I’ll go back to the ocean.

  ♋ pneuma

  pneuma and pollution don’t confuse me any

  A girl across the school yard screams. We look at each other, imagining all sorts of wonderful things happening to make the girl scream, then race toward the sound.

  It’s a foot. Well, a paw. A little black paw, sticking out of the snow in the corner of the school yard. All the kids who own cats start crying.

  The wise old fourth grader digs around the paw in the snow and reveals a whole fox. It’s incredible, perfect, and frozen stiff.

  We all stare. The fourth grader stands back, his hands on his hips, and sighs. “He shoulda kept moving.”

  Gary’s making me dinner because I promised to let him record me playing songs solo acoustic in his apartment if he fed me. “You can sing for your supper!” he said gleefully. Recording alone with Gary looking at me sounds pretty uncomfortable, but I’ll do just about anything for calories these days. I’m starting to miss the VIPs and their bottomless expense accounts. I actually dream about items I saw on menus months ago—so much free protein . . .

  So I ring his bell in the exhaust-infused dark and cold and he lets me into his warmly lit, steamy, lovely apartment. I look around me, stunned. “How did you do this?” I ask him, admiring the beautiful furniture, books and paintings. And the fact that the place is so clean. “Everybody else here lives in shit.” He takes my guitar from me and puts it in his bedroom while I hang up my scarf, hat and coat. Coat hooks!

  “Shit is a choice,” he says as I follow him into the kitchen. He picks up a big wooden spoon and stirs a pot of something with it.

  I sit down at his kitchen table to watch him cook. “I guess so.”

  “No, it’s true. People either don’t notice the shit or they think it gives them grit cred, but at some point, they make the shit choice.”

  “Maybe they’re poor.”

  “Some of ’em are poor. Generally not the ones you’d think.”

  “Really.” Gary has a bookshelf in his kitchen. Books are everywhere in this apartment: in neat stacks on coffee tables, on shelves lining the walls. I grab one about architecture and leaf through it.

  “Yep. ’Cause the actual poor like to keep up appearances. You don’t wanna know how many trust-funders’re masquerading as us.”

  I look up from the book. “They could give their money away and then they’d be us.”

  Gary turns off the stove, then pours pasta out of the pot and into a colander in the sink. “They don’t resent their money, we do.” He is enveloped in steam. “Do you want a drink?” he asks through the steam. “Everything I have is alcoholic.”

  I laugh. “Well, then, no, sir. No, thank you.” The light sources in this apartment are all beautiful antique lamps. I tell him I love lamps.

  “Don’t you love lamps?” he says, shaking water out of the colander. “I’d rather sit in the dark than use an overhead light.”

  “I only have one lamp, so I do sit in the dark. Overhead lights’re nasty. Light shouldn’t shine on everything; it should shine on one angle of a few select things.”

  “You’re right.” Expertly, he flips the pasta into a wooden bowl. “Let’s get you another lamp so you can put it next to something you like and angle it to shine on your favorite part of it.”

  I laugh. “Okay.” Next to the sink is a little rubber monster, its mouth open in a silent roar, its arms raised in the air. “Nice monster.”

  Drying his hands on a tea towel, Gary looks at it. “Thank you. Roaches pour out of its mouth every morning.”

  “Oh my goodness. Is that bad or cool?”

  “Mostly bad. A little cool.” Gary stirs the pasta, then spoons some onto a plate. “Not cool enough.”

  “We have roaches, too,” I say. “But they aren’t in anybody’s mouth.” He places two beautiful plates of food on the table and sits down across from me. “Gary, this is so nice of you.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  I put the book I’ve been looking at on the shelf. “I’m always hungry.” Sitting back down, I reach for my fork and realize it’s lying on a cloth napkin. “Oh my god.”

  Gary stops eating. “What’s wrong?”

  “You have cloth napkins.”

  “Is that bad?”

  I shake my head at him. “You’re wild.”

  “No one’s ever called me ‘wild’ for having cloth napkins before.”

  “That doesn’t make you any less wild.” I glance out the window. Snow is falling. It looks very beautiful from in here. “It’s snowing.”

  Gary watches the snow fall for a minute, then looks back at me. “I have to show you a photograph after dinner,” he says. “Remind me.”

  “Okay. Hey, did you know we made a video?” I remember we’re supposed to be having dinner and try the pasta. It tastes like something from one of the VIPs’ restaurants: very schmanky. “This is great, Gary.”

  “Thank you. I thought you said videos were lame.”

  “They are. That’s why we made it.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “We’re helping the filmmakers fight suckiness,” I explain.

  “If they can’t manage it,” he says, “you could always take your name off the
project.”

  “Sure. And take my song out of it. And my face and my body. They shot my body, Gary.”

  “Ow.” I nod. He pushes pasta around on his plate. “This isn’t al dente. I’m sorry. I was thinking about shit and lamps. Your fault.” He looks at me accusingly and puts down his fork. “It seems to me,” he says, “that music has been in film for such a long time, it shouldn’t be such a leap to imagine that film images could also serve music. Without sucking, I mean.”

  “That’s pretty much what they said. And fish’re gonna swim by. That should be cool.”

  “Really? That sounds . . . silly.”

  “It does. But fish aren’t silly. I bet the fish’ll pull it off.” We watch the snow fall out the window.

  “Remind me to show you that picture,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  The snow is falling slowly, gently rising on wind currents and floating down past the window. Then the wind picks up. Flakes in chaos create patterns in the air, flying up, then coming together—schools of fish—crashing into the building, tearing down toward the ground.

  “And we’re gonna make a record,” I say slowly, mesmerized by what’s outside.

  “I heard.”

  “Thanks to the Gary tape.”

  He looks at me. “You made that tape, not me.”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t do anything but hang with rats and eat Froot Loops.”

  Gary leans over and turns off the lamp on the table so we can watch the snow fall in the dark. It’s like being in a movie theater.