Oola

by Brittany Newell

  “Pop the little bitch,” she demanded. “Thought he could get away from me. No, sir.”

  It irked me that an anonymous series of doctors, somewhere, had intimate knowledge of her bloodstream, of her bodily fluids’ tang and hue. When I half-jokingly pressed my ear to her chest and asked her to cough, I gleaned nothing more than the smell of her sweat (faintly garlicky on some days, sweet like bread dough if she’d exercised, weirdly sharp if she’d done drugs); when this unknown doctor did so, he or she basically entered her. No more. I would be the cartoon explorer to navigate her ovaries.

  There were her high school yearbooks, which she stored in a plastic portfolio and carried around in her duffel bags. When I asked why she traveled with them, she shrugged and said, “If I left them at home, they’d just get thrown out.” I pored over not just her photo (underage Oola wearing a choker) but the photos of classmates and the notes that they’d written—what was her relationship to Dean, Most Likely to Die Young, and what had he meant when he scrawled, You’re the shit? What did she think of his freckles, or freckles in general—it was a topic that we’d not yet broached. As I unwrapped segments of her life, my questions mounted like tissue paper torn from a gift box, thrown over the shoulder in my trivia binge. I heard them settle lightly but distinctly in the corner: Where did she like to study? Was she competitive with Jenny, a track star whose long limbs and lazy grin, to the untrained eye, might resemble Oola’s? Had she known all along that Federico had a crush on her? It was clear as day in his parting note: your one of the coolest girls i’ve ever met. remember Chem? i’ll never forget when you used a bunsen burner to lite a joint. i hope you never change. We’d gone over the big things, had the do-you-believe-in-God conversation on an overnight bus and addressed the prison-industrial complex on a defunct trampoline, and yet thumbing through photos of bland teens at recess, I pined to know which she preferred—pizza bagels or bagel bites? During all the time we’d spent together, how could I have forgotten to ask her favorite ABBA song?

  It was dizzying to think that the shitty, sticky world contained within these (also slightly sticky) books had happened not so long ago, and yet in the half decade that had passed since she’d eaten a McMuffin in her best friend’s minivan at 7:55 a.m. while blasting the soundtrack to Les Misérables and spritzing her armpits with Old Spice (“we thought it smelled sexy”), enough had happened to make this eggy angel an almost total stranger to the girl who used my toothbrush (“oh, please, don’t tell me you’re squeamish. What’s the point in having two?”) and whose earlobes, once adorned by tiny silver daisies, I’d molested, gently scraping the scar tissue from her holes with my front teeth. It felt a bit seedy to think about seventeen-year-old Oola, and yet she still hung around, under the Oola-I-Knew, forever readjusting the knot of her halter top and making eyes at policemen, just to see what would happen. Oola summarized her teen years as “the height of my twatdom” and “three years of coordinating my underwear with my bra, because some bitch told me that was class.”

  I was lucky that she was so young, dropped straight from university. There was less to lose track of when scanning her past, this narrative of silly parties (she dressed as mad cow disease for Halloween) and high school hookups, a past rather tidy in comparison to mine of twenty-five slippery years. Sometimes I look back on decisions I made when I was younger and am stunned by that stranger’s audacity. Maybe this book will one day sound great to me; after a decade it will become one of my favorites, because another person, not the tube of longing I know myself to be but someone discrete in familiar clothes, wrote it.

  In eighth-grade physiology, my teacher brought out a length of PVC pipe. She pointed to the opening at the top. “Your mouth,” she said. She pointed to the opening at the bottom. “Your anus.” She gave the pipe a hearty shake. “More or less, the human body.”

  I was crushed. This was the year I was fourteen; I hadn’t yet grown out of feeling like an imposition on the world. After class, I trooped out back behind the gym, where the bad kids smoked cigarettes. I was friends with a lot of them, but no one was around. I stuck a finger down my throat and made myself throw up. Vomit splattered the stucco wall, lumpy and beige-colored. I stared at the mess and made myself recite aloud everything I’d eaten in the last week and a half. Then I went back to class, stopping only to stuff my sweatshirt inside an empty locker.

  I don’t recognize my current self in these memories at all. They are stored in my brain, like drugs held for a friend. Likewise, pre-me Oola seemed to be a wholly different beast. For practice, I forced myself to picture kissing the person in every photograph I found. I tested where my ethics kicked in. I felt pervy when I found her prom pics, though I knew that that Oola, taller than her too-cool date, would have loved to kiss a man my age, especially at prom. As it was, her date looked at least twenty-one, some new wave Nosferatu. Considering her beglossed smirk, I could almost taste the Smirnoff Ice he’d surely bought for her. She’d written his initials on the back—Oola + LR, 2012—like a clue for her future self. But I focused on her, the frangipani braided into her hair, the strappy white sandals cutting into her flesh, rather than this dark stranger in slick suit and tie; it was an oversight that would soon haunt me. A Polaroid of Oola sitting on a giant plastic mushroom was where I had to draw the line; eleven at most, she wore jelly shoes and no bra. Still, a dark part of me was curious when I flipped through her baby photos. Not aroused, mind you, but curious. Oola was in there somewhere, a bean within a bean. Why did this knowledge make my stomach hurt? Even the idea of a chaste peck upon the chubby cheek undid me. These limits were not up to me. I hurriedly moved on.

  I found women’s magazines immensely educational to my project, with their fondness for categorizing all parts of the body. Some were mailed to the cabin, uncanceled subscriptions for old Auntie Kneatson; some were bought in bulk by Oola on our forays into town. Was her complexion snowy, peachy, toasty, or cocoa? Were her highlights honey-colored or more in the goldenrod range? Was she a sexpot or a sweetheart? Oily or dry? Oozy or red? Banana, apple, Asian pear, baked potato–shaped (God help the sad spud)? The canned language of women was beautiful in spite of itself. They spoke in codes: Musk went with jasmine, coral with ash, united by the flirty, the flaky, or sometimes pizzazz. Cute was a euphemism for the malformed. Sporty girls got yeast infections; cum tasted like popcorn and/or a kiss. If I found a descriptor that fit, I would cut out its accompanying photo and tack it to the wall, like a Pantone paint swatch, and squint at it from a distance. Where was Oola in this exclamation, this sex-positive swirl? I tried to take my cues from the pages she dog-eared, but knowing Oola, she was just as likely to remember a page for its funny use of the word creamy as for its guide to keeping guys wondering (#1 tip: Mix perfumes).

  At times it seemed that the motes that drifted in my sole shaft of light were not dust but dried skin, flakes of past liaisons, of handshakes and the backward grope of one unclasping her bra, arms chicken-winging and that inevitable pause despite having done this twice a day since eighth grade, hanging now in the air. This was one of the earliest ways that she entered me, via my lungs. Between 6:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., I was surrounded by the airborne remnants of my favorite body, which settled on flat surfaces, mingling with the pollen from nearby and the chemicals from afar, becoming one with the fluff of factory-made sweaters and the stuff of my own muffled sneeze. It was as if she were already dead.

  Fiberglass particles, or the rumors thereof, also floated in the air; the attic was condemned, as my mother never tired of telling me, her voice dropping in and out when I got good enough reception to call her. “There’s a reason nothing’s up there!” she whinnied. I accepted asbestos in pursuit of deep love. I made it up to my lungs by jogging in the evenings. On weekdays, it was the only time I left our property. “Fare thee well, fatty,” O called the first night I left for my run, dangling over the gate like a war-torn bride. “Without you, I’ve only field mice for friends.” And though I knew she was joking, some part o
f me, the same part that rejoiced at peeling the sleep from her eyes, felt like she was truly sad to see me go, even if only for an hour. If I’d any notion of how quickly this would change, I might have bought a treadmill and refused to ever leave.

  I beaded along Route 1 in black sweatpants, so close to the cars driving north to San Francisco or south to L.A. that I could hear the songs on their radios, three seconds of lucid, full-bodied singing, of baby or won’t you or a drawn-out hello, until the sound warped, changing pitch to match the rushing air, and whipped away mid-sentence, mid-wail. Love was doubly unrequited, left in the lurch by its grammar out here in the sticks. Invocations hung in the icy, slightly fishy air. I breathed these down readily, filling my lungs with as many oh Gods as oxygen. Perhaps this is why I preferred the highway to the redwood forest or the charred hills for my jogging; I didn’t feel quite so alone. The car radios reminded me a bit of our game from the beach house, with the drinks and stockings and Janis Joplin. The promise of our new nighttime ritual also hung in the air, like a big meal might for other men; I pictured Oola and was sped along of course by arousal but also by responsibility, as if she too were an unfinished sentence, one that only I could diagram and, in the thin hours of morning, put an exclamation point on.

  My heart would surge when I caught sight of our mailbox, its red flag raised in a futile salute as it slanted toward the road. From the highway, you couldn’t see the driveway that wound up to our cabin; the road was swathed in poison ivy, half-buried by landslides. Our truck had cut a meager path through the undergrowth, but it still wasn’t visible unless you knew what to look for. I skipped up this path like a drunk college boy. I didn’t have to see them to know that Oola had all the bottom-floor lights on. I would feel the windows’ yellow glow in my belly before I rounded the driveway’s final bend and saw them, floating in the Big Sur dark. I sometimes thought about sneaking up to the window and scaring the bejesus out of her, but by the time I reached the garden gate, I was always too excited to stop myself from flinging it open and sprinting the final yards. Oola would look up from her book. “Ah.” She’d mark the page and smile vaguely. “He brings home the bacon.” At first I didn’t notice her mussed-up hair; I didn’t notice the disturbance of dust over the piano, its keys newly wiped and strings reverberating in inhuman lows.

  Here is an equation: If one subtracts bits of herself by doing so much as sighing oh jeez, how much does he who breathes in deeply gain? How much of his weight is hers? Should he breathe in through his mouth, like when terribly hungover, or in through his nose, like a very old woman in the garden of her youth?

  On our first night at the cabin, I did a lap around every room in the house. I tried to imagine how our presence would change the place, where exactly our coats would come to be draped and which corner of the rug would mysteriously collect all our crumbs. It was a big house, with high ceilings and uncurtained windows that let in gratuitous amounts of light, a hodgepodge of furniture, no TV, a 1950s-esque pink-tiled kitchen, and a battered baby grand. I found Oola in the last room that I walked into, what was to be our bedroom, testing out the four-poster bed’s ancient mattress. We would only later discover that it was stuffed with goose down, when we started spitting up feathers, pearly ones no longer than our pinkie fingers, or found them wedged in the folds of our groins. It should go without saying that I’d collect the ones that Oola pried out from between her teeth, storing them in an old matchbox, and in the beginning we both laughed whenever I’d extract one from her pubic hair, the gray fluff a strange reminder of this blondie’s grisly fate. The room had two large windows, one facing the ocean and the other the woods, with furniture from a different time—a three-hundred-pound oak wardrobe, a writing desk with inkwells, a fainting couch of navy velvet with patches rubbed sky blue. “You look a bit like an exorcist,” she remarked to the ceiling beams, “inspecting the house. Are your hands clasped behind your back?”

  I released them. “Goddamn you.”

  “Don’t say it in vain!” She lay diagonally across the once-white duvet; as soon as she got up, I would take off my shoes and assume the same position, trying to fit my body to the indents hers had made. We were the same height, but her torso was shorter. My legs would dangle off the bed, bare feet poking toward the empty center of the room in a manner somehow gauche.

  Sometimes it stunned me, the fact that she and I were living together. If she wasn’t in the room with me, I began to doubt that it could really be true. At parties—when we still went to parties, taking speed mostly to stay awake on the long drive to and from the city—I’d get panicked if I lost sight of her. She’d turn a corner in some noiseproofed loft and be lost to me forever. Getting ready to go out, I begged her to wear bright colors, the easier to track her with.

  “If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist,” my mother used to tell me when I had bad dreams. Her voice sometimes returned to me when I surveyed the property, circling the uncut lawn and peering down over the canyon’s edge. Quiet, honey, I heard her say. Let it fall away.

  I was one of those children who read too much, from reviews of R-rated movies to the history of the former Yugoslavia. When I couldn’t sleep, my mom sat on the edge of my bed, stroking my hair with her cold child’s hand, eager to return to her cocktail. “Think about Mommy. Not about Mayan sacrifice. Not about Bosnia. If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist.”

  Perhaps this is why I always thought about Oola. I kept her on my mind for fear of the moment she might disappear. This is not as obsessive as it may sound. If I ever get a good idea for something I am writing, I whisper it to myself until the moment I can write it down. Only words are real to me, and I know that words aren’t real.

  Moreover, the more I studied Oola, the more often I got the creeping feeling that she’d never actually existed. Stricken in the attic, I’d have to sit, very still, until I heard a disembodied cough from three floors below or the chime of her voice as she lectured Theo on chemtrails. Still, the proof of her was faint as background TV-noises. I experienced something similar in college, when I would walk my bike back to my dorm in the quiet hours between classes. As I walked across the empty campus green, following the path that I’d taken not only every morning but also many times when blackout drunk, a strange feeling would rise up in me, gradual as the urge to sneeze. Had I really been in the library for the past three hours? I had no witnesses. I tightened my hold on my bicycle handlebars, testing their physicality. The more I looked, the more I got the sense that everything I gazed upon was vaguely propagandic—that the grass was someone else’s notion of green, and that I was a young man in necessary but imperceptible italics. I could easily picture the photograph being taken of me as I walked along. The only way to return to normal was to select a still point, most often an acquaintance’s face when we stopped to chat or share a spliff, and study it until I was convinced that it really was real. His skin was skin, and that was the limit of my knowledge; perhaps, post six-pack in a dim frat-house courtyard, I could touch it, press down upon his down and circumnavigate his backne, but even that was unlikely.

  I noticed, but never mentioned, a similar disconnect with Oola. She had a habit of touching herself. I first noticed this when we started to travel together but chalked it up to paranoia, assuming she was tapping her passport, wallet, strap of purse, to ward off pickpockets. I became doubly aware of it once we moved to Big Sur and she continued to touch, despite having nothing to protect herself against except the longness of the day. She tapped herself often, random parts of her body, an elbow or nose tip, as she moved about the cabin. When I mentioned it once over dinner, she stared at me foggily. “Is this a masturbation joke?” she asked. “I don’t get it.”

  It was not a gesture of vanity, like when other people stroked their biceps, but rather one of reassurance, her fingers lingering only as long as it took to ascertain that, yes, that kneecap was intact. Whenever I watched her, a childhood ditty popped into my head, an old campfire sing-along about Tony
Chestnut, where one touched toe knee chest nut (here meaning head, unfortunately), until I couldn’t see her wipe her nose or adjust her underwear without hearing this tune in my head, the soundtrack to her tic, my postmodern cover girl, running fingers through her hair to make sure it was still there.

  I too was just making sure she was there.

  Once, age nineteen and home for Thanksgiving, I walked in on my father sleeping. It was one in the afternoon, and he lay on top of the sheets, wearing just his boxers and an immaculate undershirt. I’d never seen his thighs before and had nothing to compare these flabby, hot dog–colored, strangely scabby shanks with. They reminded me of the baby pigs I’d once seen stacked into the back of a truck somewhere in Chinatown, their pale bellies loamed with frost and their nipples at right angles. To make the story sadder, the only reason I was in my parents’ room was because I was looking for Vaseline. It was three hours until Thanksgiving dinner, a meal differentiated from a million others shared between us only by the papier-mâché turkeys that squatted next to each wineglass. I wasn’t horny so much as bored out of my skull. I needed to jack off to burn calories. As a last-ditch effort, I’d decided to look in my parents’ medicine cabinet.

  They had always interested me, and this one especially: the mirrored lockbox where, like a brain, a lifetime’s desires are lined up, the expired ones confined to the top shelf but never tossed out, the pertinent ones dripping. I’ve never been to a Catholic church, but I imagine a medicine cabinet being similar to a confession booth, that narrow space where one’s sins congeal upon being named. Zit-shrinking cream, unused Trojans, scented sanitary napkins with the mystifying badge Clean-smelling! Words like Extra, Jumbo, Super, Max pumping you up about your downside. At parties, I was often to be found in the bathroom, pawing the host’s deodorants, inspecting cans of unidentified gunk. Makeup never failed to interest me, in its post-crime-scene scatter all over the countertop and its inexplicably literary names: Naked Lunch for beige powder, Feminine Mystique for pink lip stain (a strong woman needs a stronger smile!), Blue Velvet for a curled wand whose use I couldn’t fathom. I spied on the soaps of femininity, even sampled those with the prettiest packaging. “God,” my date once swooned when I returned from my snooping, “you smell nice! Like, I don’t know, a mojito.”