Oola

by Brittany Newell

  Her first experiment in crime was underlining a sex scene in a library book; there were words she needed to remember to look up (among them, undulation).

  Her first experiment in cruelty was passing a note to Catalina, rumored to be bulimic, on which she’d written: You smell like fish & chips. That was what the school cafeteria served for lunch on Mondays. “That’s not so bad,” I said. “Come on.” Oola shook her head and sighed. “I wrote the note on Tuesday. And, goddammit, it was true.”

  Giving herself hickeys was her first experiment in masturbation and arguably in self-harm. “I’d do it without thinking, like a tic,” she said. “My teachers thought I was being abused. They couldn’t figure out why my arms and legs were covered with bruises. I thought they looked pretty. ‘I’m tie-dying myself,’ I told them. Wasn’t that clever of me?”

  I was her first experiment in monogamy. “Real monogamy,” she stressed, “the whole no-excuses-I-was-drunk-forgive-me type of thing.” The closest she had come before that was a long-term Internet relationship with a high school boy (or so she was led to believe) living in rural Slovenia, screen name BadBoiSquishMe666 (“No comment,” she sighed when I asked for more explanation). She’d lied and said that she was eighteen when really she was twelve. “The most shameful thing we did”—she shudders—“is exchange poetry.” When I asked to read some, she slapped my hand. “Absolutely not!” This from the woman who’d eventually let me sample her pee.

  It’s sometimes hard to think concretely about our being together, as in woman plus man, one body plus another body of roughly equal size. It sometimes felt like I had not yet been myself, that thing privileged by adjectives, until she came along and picked them (bony, zitty, shy, intense), or that I was previously a jumble of light particles and Oola was the one who saw this fracas as an object, although which one (rock, paper, scissors, slut) I could not contest. She was the language through which I explained myself to myself; her reactions to my stories yessed and or no’d my suspicions as to how I should feel. Like, I’d never thought my relationship with Tay was odd until she squeezed my hand and said, “Oh, babe.” She massaged my traumas into shape. And, likewise, she said that not only had she never found her knees attractive until I’d kissed their every contour, but she rarely thought of them at all: “I couldn’t picture them. Like, maybe dimly as two garlic cloves. They might as well have not existed.” I licked them back to light. We filmed each other day to day and replayed the footage when we fucked. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  Especially in Big Sur, where we’d eventually land: There, it often felt as if we’d been eating the same subpar breakfast in the same set of socks in the same shaft of light for twenty-two years. She had Raynaud’s syndrome, which meant her toes would turn blue if she didn’t wear socks, the mountain climber’s thick wool kind. This made it hard to hear her coming. I especially relished when she unveiled her extremities like tiny, ugly works of art. Pre-Oola, I was like a hole, approximating hunger, until she read me as a mouth. She deemed the gash significant. One kissed and listened to it, duh. Oh, listen to me go. I’m just a mouth to you, aren’t I? And O, a burst of noisy blonde, plus ten periwinkle toes.

  Everything that happened between us began in earnest at the beach house, after Europe and so many cities, where the plan for Big Sur first took shape. We’d been at the Orbitsons’ for two and a half weeks, after just over three months of traveling together. Summer was coming. We had no plans for the future, no ambition beyond brunch. “It’s weekend world,” Oola slurred. I tore off her pajama top and used it to mop up my spilled wine. No one ever seemed to notice the messes we made, the traces left behind; I suspect the owners of these houses weren’t there long enough to care. By then our love felt certain, the only constant in a groundless life so often spent in transit, cramped and soda-high, or using other people’s silverware. The more bad things that happened in the world, the more inalienable our union seemed; when we walked past a tent city of refugees camped outside the airport and were just an hour later eating peanuts in airspace, we gripped each other’s hands, eventually nodding off that way, abstractly ashamed of ourselves and of this worthless display of affection but still not letting go, afraid that if we did, the world we knew to be dissolving, in fantastic Fukushima swipes and bureaucratic countdowns, would pick up the pace at which it dwindled and we’d be ass-up in the air.

  When I got the call from my mother, it felt as if a fluorescent light had been switched on. O and I had been so long in this dimness, this limbo, that I’d forgotten how terribly bright it could be. My mother, sun goddess, matter-of-factly presented the next move. “Your great-aunt is in hospice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We barely knew the bitch.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “What? She’s been holed up for the past twenty years in a cabin in Big Sur. She’s in a bad way. Cancer of the thingamabob, you know, that little thingy that secretes stuff. Her place needs looking after indefinitely.”

  I was alone in the kitchen. The Orbitsons were due home in just a few days. I stared at the phone in my hand and imagined where Oola might be at that moment. Probably fishing for crawdads in the neighbor’s stream, taking care not to rouse their rottweiler. She’d be torn to shreds if it caught her; she wore nothing more than a star-spangled bikini that I’d always suspected was a relic from her youth, until she admitted to having shoplifted it from the juniors’ section of Target. It was summer then, and I saw her toes often. I didn’t think she’d want to come with me, to put on clothes that fit and short-circuit her days in the sun.

  “I’ll call you back,” I told my mom. “I need to sleep on it.”

  “Vite vite. C’est la vie!”

  “Très bien, Mom.”

  “I try, dear.”

  “Everything good with you?”

  “Oh, peaches, dear! Peaches!”

  I took this to mean yes.

  I found Oola on the porch. “How’s your mom?” she asked over the top of some outdated design magazine she’d found in the bathroom. “I’m researching the rich and famous. Such risqué interiors.”

  I described the cabin, looking wistfully over the Floridian sand dunes. “It’s a former artists’ retreat,” I explained. “My great-aunt kept living there even after it closed. Probably still haunted by poets and under-loved drummers. RIP, Ringo. RIP, me.”

  “It sounds gorgeous.” She didn’t look up from her magazine.

  “Sure. I suppose it is the perfect place to take my vow of celibacy. And so begins my slow erasure of the Kneatson name from Planet Earth.”

  “How boring for me.”

  My feelings were hurt by her nonchalant tone. “Well, just because I’m holing up doesn’t mean that you have to go home yet. It’s only for a couple months. I could see if my parents have other friends in California.”

  “What?” She dog-eared a page. “I meant how boring for me if you’re gonna do the whole monk thing. I can’t pop down to the bar for a quickie, now, can I?”

  “You want to come?”

  She snorted. “Where else would I go, Leif?”

  “Well … anywhere you wanted, really.” I tried to sound casual. “I don’t wanna contain you.”

  She set down her magazine and inspected my face. Her tone softened when she realized I was serious. “Why wouldn’t I come with you?”

  “Well…”

  “Do you think you’d get sick of me?”

  I spoke honestly. “Never.”

  “I’ve always wanted to live in the woods.” She half-smiled. “Big Sur. Sounds like an adventure.”

  Yes, the cliché sent a thrill down my spine. “I suppose.”

  “We’ll find ways to stay busy. You’ve got your writing. And I can … I don’t know, commune with the deer. Learn German. Collage. Maybe I’ll have an eco-feminist moment.”

  “Maybe they’ll have a piano.”

  “Maybe.” She thought for a beat. “You could do that thing you wanted to do.”<
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  “What thing?” The sun was in my eyes and I had to squint.

  She shrugged. “Write that book about me.”

  “I guess I could try it.” The sun moved to my gut.

  “There aren’t enough books about women,” she said, “especially not women as foul as me.”

  “It’s a twenty-four/seven affair,” I faux-warned her, though my bowels were already brimming with hope. My toes tingled as I imagined hers often did.

  “Knock yourself out.” She returned to reading, then, after a beat, looked up with a wry smile. “You might see a whole new side of me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  She nodded, still smiling. “You might live to regret this.”

  And she turned back to her rag with a sigh.

  I stared at her profile, ears suddenly ringing; already a lush picture of our future was taking shape. It would be like the Orbitsons to the nth degree, with swapped oceans, less old people, and superior weed. We’d leave that kiddie game with the nylons behind us. I had my writing, she had her music, we had each other and nothing but time. Quiet evenings, beans for dinner, Oola in long underwear, borrowed books, a radio, Oola’s wetsuit hung to dry, while rats ran rampant in the rafters and the sky broke out in stars. A radical boredom that was ours to embellish. I could garden, she could quilt, we could do drugs and tread on the rutabaga and shit on the blankets and return to square one in the hyper-bright morning, still reeking of rosemary, burrs in our pubes.

  Standing naked on a half-swept surface, she did 360-degree turns in my mind’s eye, holding her hair (longer, blonder) away from her neck. Ticks? she asked impatiently. Do you see any? Check the folds. No, no, that’s a mole! Noted—one more asterisk for my diagram. Semicolons stood for freckles; for fun, her belly button was a pentagram. At twenty-two and twenty-five respectively, our bodies were home enough (high ceilings and hardwood, I hear her joking). It would be an experiment, this cabin in the woods, just one of many projects that defined us to the people we made believe were always watching.

  And so allow me to reiterate: Oola gave the word.

  We slid into the pickup truck, didn’t wear our seatbelts, and bid the Sunshine State so long. Theo rode on Oola’s lap, making her bare thighs sweat. Eleven hours in, we took a wrong turn off the highway and ended up circling a solidly middle-class suburb; we passed house after house of pastel stucco and off-white trim, and when she turned down the radio to suggest, “Let’s pick the plot on which to rot,” and pointed out her favorite, a lemon-yellow split-level with a tire swing in the yard, I felt bone-sure of her consent, her desire to fester with me, drink buckets of tea, retell old stories, will our semi-young bodies to hush up and hang tight. New entertainment waited, on the frayed edge of the world.

  * * *

  OOLA, THE STARLET, WAS A worm under light (picture a long, lanky woman in a tight pencil skirt). She thrashed and evaded. Like the best storytellers, she was usually quiet; eyes averted, she took her sweet time when at last she spoke up. But I was there to listen to it all, to document each wriggle, sonograph each twitch. What she left unsaid, I wrangled out. The best listener is one with his scalpel raised. I would bisect her, and when each half grew a new lovely head (one with blond braids, the other shower-wet), I was ready and willing to play host to both. In this way, our Big Sur house became a harem, the little wood cabin filled to the brim with my Oolas—fake Oolas; fresh-baked Oolas; ill Oola, so sleepy and weak in our bed, without even the energy to disguise her main self, much less its many iterations, who borrowed jewelry or lounged bedside in a manner I was not yet equipped to foresee as ominous. Instead, the house felt exciting: When I went to the general store to buy groceries or cash checks, I hobnobbed with the other men, the ones in work boots and stiff jeans whose knees creased at right angles, and I felt like I could understand their Protestant-cum–Clint Eastwood platitudes regarding family.

  A full house, one might sigh. Best thing to come home to is a house full of little ones. A sock over the radiator makes me tear up. And at night, it’s never silent, not even out here, because you can hear each of ’em sleeping. That’s what I love best.

  And I would nod, thinking of my flock.

  Still, one shriek was all it would have taken to call the whole thing off. One hey, that hurts! to put a bad boy in his place, to hit refresh, delete.

  And believe me, I was listening. I had my ear to the ground, ass in the air. I came to California with antennae erect. The earth turned on its axis and Oola turned in her sleep, and I didn’t get so much as one single wink that summer, autumn, hateful winter in Big Sur. Some nights in the cabin, once settled in, I pulled up a chair to the foot of the bed so that I could watch. Her body betrayed nothing but a tendency to sleep diagonally, seatbelting the bed, one half of an X awaiting its foreclosure. My eyes adjusted; I was a cat in the dark. Theo sat in my lap, a little put out. My mouth was not as big as Oola’s. I could only get as far as his whiskers.

  In the master bedroom, we three became jellyfish. We circled in quiet pursuit, not necessarily of each other but of some humanoid form. It was quiet but for the gnash of her molars. “You grind your teeth,” I told her when she asked why I looked tired. “It wakes me up sometimes.”

  She traced her jawline with mystified fingers. “Shit. I didn’t even know that I did that.”

  She did. If for nothing else, trust me. She did.

  Big Sur

  And so began the days of weird weather. These were the days of research, of study unhinged. The project governed our lives, but discreetly, like an illness; we never mentioned it outright except when Oola would ask lightly, “So how goes the writing?” and I’d shrug, “Oh, you know,” and sneak away, a plumcot she’d bitten into wetting my breast pocket.

  I devised a makeshift office in the attic, and Oola knew to leave me alone up there. She thought that it was where I wrote, where the rubber met the road, when in fact, in the many hours I spent holed up with the crown of my head grazing the diagonal beams and the porthole window flung open, I did nothing more than pick her cigarette butts out of the abalone-shell ashtray I’d filched from the porch. I turned them in my hands, like pearls still gritty from the surf. I tried to smoke a few, reduced to an uncool teen as I puffed on chemical aggregates and leftover spit. Some were dabbed with bits of lipstick, which I pressed to my lips with especial conviction.

  Do not mistake this for a writer’s idleness or excuse to nip at gin at noon: Magic was certainly happening, on some subliminal level, within my rathole, as I ferried one more object up the stairs each day to dissect and hold up to the light (which flung itself, amber and angular, across my desk like a javelin’s spear). I presented my artifacts to this strange spotlight: Her hairbrush, still nettled with fuzz. The shirt that she wore to Tay’s party, armholes browned like apple cores because I’d stolen it before she could put it in the wash. A weather-beaten album of baby photos. Half-drunk cups of takeout coffee, the cups’ bottoms stained and eventually caving, leaking fluids anatomically over my desk.

  I prided my collection on its variety and innovation. A Curtis sweatshirt that she always slept in, for no obvious reason, preferring it to breezier garments or the lingerie that she’d received as gifts from distant female relatives. There was a Rorschach test in its sweat stains, something Freudian in the way that it crumpled. Anything she wrote on: receipts with song lyrics scrawled on the back, Post-its reminding her of appointments come and gone, envelopes on which she’d written her name over and over and over again while stuck on the phone with somebody boring. I’d hunt this somebody down if I could, withstand their nasal aloha! or tangent about Trump, if only to know what they’d talked about once. A wad of hair scrounged from the drain sat on the edge of my desk like a displaced sea anemone. In the spot on my desk where other people might keep a framed photo of their sweetheart, wearing a bikini or ball gown, I kept a used Q-tip from the same golden era.

  I emptied her pockets: sand, tampons, dental floss, ticket stubs worried to colorful pulp
. I could picture her hands moving in the darkness, stilled only by the first burst of music and subsequent applause. Gum modestly pinched into bits of straw wrapper, fossilized into nubs that still smelled like spearmint. Dead flowers, which I’d never noticed her pick.

  What flotsam we live amid, I found myself thinking, what a totalizing trail of shit. The random scraps of one’s existence, piling up in manila folders and the bottoms of purses whose patent shine has rubbed off and, surprisingly or not, the corners of bathrooms, like so much dirty snow. My tongue was extended: I was chasing the flakes. It was overwhelming how much I could find, even for someone as distracted as Oola, who came to the cabin with two duffel bags. I had a bad dream where some past lover of hers—a blind date named Henry, who was actually blind—followed the trail of XL-clothing tags and HIV pamphlets (always handed out at street fairs) that led to our door, never locked out here in the boondocks, to demand from her a good-night kiss. I did! Oola cried, for some reason wearing a man’s hunting cap. Not on the lips, he shrieked, and Oola glumly confessed, I kissed him on the chin; I thought he couldn’t tell. We three sat down to discuss the offense. Oola whipped off her cap to reveal a shaved head; Henry groped his way across the table and kissed her on the crown. I sat back like an umpire and counted the follicles.

  Oola wasn’t shy about her body; she spoke openly about her constipation and went through a phase of having me scour her back for zits every night before showering. If I found one, she braced herself.