Oola

by Brittany Newell

  “Tropical Topical?” I prompted.

  “Uh-huh,” and she gave me a thin smile.

  At a particularly dull Christmas party thrown by my godparents, someone walked in on me. I whirled toward the door, jumbo tub of vitamin D in one raised hand. I had just sprayed myself with what I thought was cologne but was actually bug spray, and the prickly odor filled the room. I locked eyes with a nondescript man, a colleague of my father’s, the professor of a language no one spoke anymore, the perfect spokesperson for erasure with his graying comb-over. A smile spread across his pasty face. “Uh-oh.” He sidled closer, locking the door behind him. “That makes two of us. Searching for the good stuff, eh?” He rapped his finger against the tub. “Don’t bother.” He thrust a hand in his jacket pocket and produced an orange container of little blue pills. His grin pinged off the bathroom’s reflective surfaces. “Beat you to it. But, hey.” He shook out three pills and proceeded to crush them under the heart-shaped soap dish. “I can share.”

  I smiled back, gingerly replacing the vitamins on their shelf. “What is it?”

  “Klonopin.” He took out his credit card and proceeded to cut two lines. “Also stashed half a bottle of Oxy, but I’m not coughing that up.” He cackled. “Here, go on.” We did our lines side by side, he with particular flourish and a resonant snort. I suddenly recognized him as the man who’d giggled during the toast. “Ah!” he said, wiping his nose. “This night just became bearable.” His laughter propelled him out the door, leaving me to my ointments and troubles, which never matched up, once again.

  Even now, what I’m giving you of her seems paltry in comparison to all that I had in my attic. I hope you know that. Words cannot compare to my bounty of pistachio shells, my exhibit of hotel shampoo bottles from inconsequential weekend trips that she’d only used one squirt of. Words cannot compare to the bacchanal of our daily encounters when I came down the stairs around lunchtime and found her, still undressed, finishing her toes.

  I would stare at her, and she would stare back, and despite, at this point in time, being the other’s best and only friend, there would be a tense pause where neither of us knew quite what to say. I felt like a deer in a Walt Disney cartoon, tremulous and dewy.

  Look, I might say, pointing to the kitchen counter. Grapes. Just to have something to say, to let her know how ecstatic I was to be near her, near enough to look at the same bunch of grapes, which bore witness to our floundering.

  Yeah, she’d mutter. We were like kids on a first date, flummoxed by the haveability of the other’s body. What’s for lunch? she’d eventually ask, and the generosity of this question, plus the variability of its answer (Let me think!), would allow us both to relax and remember, piece by piece, all the things we’d planned on telling the other in the quiet of the rooms we’d just vacated. By the time we’d got the water boiling, we were in love again.

  Perhaps the true privilege of being a wealthy white male is having a say in how you are violated, in who or what breaks you, when the mood is set and the time is right—like Oola in bed, fingering the scars on her thigh, asking me to call her a bad fuck, a fuckup, to say, You don’t deserve nice things, and I wanting nothing more than to flee, to cry mercy. What do you do when the sex winds down but love remains? Perhaps it was the sudden domesticity of our setup in the woods, or perhaps we’d blazed through the so-called honeymoon period, but shortly after going west, we stopped having what most people would call actual sex. We found other ways to freak, of course. I could have grocery-shopped with her forever, laughing at the way she pushed aside cartons of milk with the flats of her hand, at how seriously she considered corn versus flour tortillas. “What’s so funny?” she’d ask. I couldn’t explain it. “Take your time,” I’d say earnestly. Costco was our kingdom. We had all day. We went once a month to the strip mall an hour away, to stock up on coffee and ramen and matches and soap, and sometimes those six-packs of gray underwear. I ate myself sick on cheap frozen yogurt. Such were our pleasures; such were our pains.

  While I worked in the attic, I could feel her heat through the floorboards. This awareness of her presence was an ineffable comfort, like that of a dog who you love most intensely only after it’s died, whose bumps in the night you don’t realize you count on. I watched her, true, but she watched me back; with her nose in a magazine and the Carpenters blaring, she was somehow watching me. Whether I was cooped up in my attic-cum-lab or trailing her scent through the rooms of the cabin with all but a tinfoil hat, she hung over me, extraterrestrial in both omnipresence and the ability to give me chills. She made crop circles in the bath mat. She gutted the bread box, like Martians do cows, leaving behind only yellowish crusts. I made this connection long before she stopped sleeping, before the caterpillars began piling up on the porch. There was always something supernatural about her.

  Later, I studied her bottles of nail polish and committed to memory their colors, whose names seemed to prove that she did indeed live a life slightly elevated from the rest: Midnight, Eel, Rendezvous. My personal favorite was Rapunzel, a greenish-pink like how I imagined the inside of an atom. Come nightfall, I would sieve the floorboards for her toenail clippings, exactly like a crackhead in pursuit of one lost line. I hunted the translucent C’s and, like a little boy in a myth, stored them in a jar. Oola saw the jar once, when I’d left it on the kitchen table. She examined its contents with a neutral expression. “What’s this for?”

  “My character study. What else?”

  She shook it like a salt cellar. “You could plant these.”

  “In the garden?”

  “Sure. That’s how babies are made.”

  “I’m taking note.”

  “Of course you are.” And off she went to wash her hair.

  Her personal hygiene—never either of our strong suits—gradually took a turn toward the manic. She painted her nails, brushed her hair daily for the first time in her life, and was always experimenting with new skin remedies. One time she stuck her cupped hand in my face. “Eat it,” she demanded. I obliged. “It’s my face mask,” she said. “Oatmeal, soy yogurt, and honey.” I watched her slather it over her T-zone and cheeks.

  “When you wash it off,” I said, “don’t flush it down the drain.”

  “I know; it clogs.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that.” I grinned. “I’m still hungry.”

  “Oh God.” Rolling her eyes, she scraped the goop into my waiting mouth fifteen minutes later. The difference in texture and taste was sensational.

  She took hours to bathe, first in the tiny mint-tiled bathroom, then in the wooden washtub she’d found on the side of the road and converted to look more Japanese. She hooked it up to the garden hose and found a way to heat the water using solar panels she’d found in the basement. “You crafty bitch!” I cried upon encountering her ingenuity. She smiled modestly and went about applying baby oil. Towel spread on the grass and magazine propped open, she was like a teenager in her pursuit of the perfect full-body tan. Perhaps she envied my sense of purpose, my ability to jump for joy when I stumbled upon a rain-ruined receipt.

  “I knew it!” I hollered. “I knew you liked Skippy!”

  “It’s not a secret.”

  I consulted the list.

  “Why don’t you use shaving cream?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a rip-off. I just use soap.”

  “So that’s why it always runs out so fast.” The revelation caused me to throw my hands in the air.

  She shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. “I thought this book of yours was supposed to be interesting.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “It gets good.”

  I tapped on the glass of her privacy, a kid at a zoo. She stared back at me with yellowing animal eyes.

  Animals ourselves, it didn’t take us long to form a routine. We had to, all by ourselves in the flush of Big Sur, the hills spreading around us like a childhood memory, half real, half imagined, like the face of your first crush: never the same
the next day, but always there, shiny and tan, irreparably lodged in the tissue. When I drank my coffee on the porch at 5:05 a.m., certain phrases would snag on my semiconscious mind, like the fat of the land, which, when gazing out at the leavened hills, grass the color of butter, suddenly struck me as sinister, or God’s eye view, which was a term I’d never liked but immediately applied to our cabin that first evening when we drove up the driveway, carving the lawn with our lurid headlights.

  We moved in in early June, and for a while it seemed like it would never stop being June. The sun agreed with us. We slipped and slid in time as in a too-big dress (a checkered sundress, I might venture). We let it overwhelm us, until we lost all sense of our true proportions. We got fat, then skinny, or perhaps vice versa. Big Sur time hid us from our withered shanks by making us feel lanky. Our limbs ranged across eras, didn’t fit into bathtubs, punctured the space–time continuum. More likely, we fucked and then forgot to eat. Later we might binge on rice and Sriracha, the only things in the cupboard, and play Twister on the porch by starlight. The redwood trees in our canyon, the view of the ocean, the somehow buxom sky at noon—all of this was certain, yet fluid, like the furniture in a haunted house. Come night, ghosts might rearrange the kitchen chairs, or leave the hot-water tap running, or not do anything at all; the only constant was that they, like our blackened redwoods, or the fresh-baked hills with shin-length grass, would find you in the morning, and you them. We needed our routine. We needed it like a girl needs standards when faced with a hotshot (Oola’s metaphor).

  In the beginning, we tried to keep up with friends. We went out on the weekends, to stay with people we knew in San Francisco or Santa Cruz. Sometimes we went to the local watering hole, a dark bar called Fernwood, where Oola was swarmed by deeply tanned men. They bought her beers and told her stories about their wild days, partying with Henry Miller, while I fed the jukebox change. “I wanna learn to surf,” O would slur on the ride home. “Rocko told me he used to surf with the dolphins.” I fought back the urge to shout, “I’m a great boogie boarder!” and focused on the road. But the weekday schedule was fixed: hungover or no, we kept to it like children who don’t yet realize they are free.

  In the mornings, I studied and puttered in my dusty crow’s nest.

  In the afternoons, I shadowed her. Writers have a natural terror of the afternoon, and so I let Oola dictate mine. This terror is least defined in the morning, when the world is hushed and manageable, the body limp and emptied, while the night at least promises morning’s return. The afternoon, on the other hand, is an armpit. One never knows what to do with it. Is it funny or neutral or a little bit sexy? It never feels quite right. In high school, I attempted to keep a journal for a week. The results were devastating in their dullness. Hour-long meals flanked solid blocks of nothing. I got stoned and picked up books. Between the hours of 4:30 and 8:00 p.m., I held my phone in my hand and waited for someone to want me. The proof was in the pudding: I put on clothes to take them off. Whether I removed my jeans for a small and intoxicated audience or with tittery assistance made a difference, of course, but did not erase the fact that every pleasure I partook in or honor I received was a distraction from my life’s true occupation, which, according to my field notes, was sliding my hand, inconspicuous yet driven, into the perfect groove between my waistband and hip bone when I had finally run out of excuses to move and could rest my barely weary bones on a bench I’d not soon vacate. Happy as a pedophile with a playground view, I smoked the hours away before I’d even taken up smoking. Only my youth made it less depressing: At least I looked pretty in my hour-long sulks; at least the thoughts of sex that crowded my mind were, if not feasible, within the realms of possibility.

  As it turned out, Oola was no different.

  From the time we finished lunch, usually around 1:30 p.m., until the time the sun scraped the line of the ocean, I followed her as quietly and diligently as I could. I watched her while away the most loathsome hours of the day with the same ease that one might blow an eyelash off a thumb. She didn’t do a lot, my love. She read her magazines. She made the bed and played with Theo. She did one hundred curl-ups every day, whose ghostly end product, etchings along the abdomen, I’d later trace. Between you and me, even more precious was the tiny bloat she sometimes had, a hard and warm hello I liked to fit into my palm.

  Even when exerting herself—cooking a meal or searching for socks—the great effort seemed to be in coordinating her limbs, identifying the muscles that needed to flex and those that could thankfully slacken. She would make a coffee and drink one sip before forgetting about it. She made strange combinations of food, which she ate standing up, then abandoned after two bites. Bowls of brown rice with mustard, or kale leaves dabbed with Tabasco, were like points graphed according to some mysterious equation, tracking her circuitous path through the cabin. She herself laughed about her inability to finish anything, lying facedown on the lawn and smelling slightly of horseradish.

  “I’m Californian” was her only explanation. “We’re all kitty cats. Programmed to lie in the sun.”

  I never saw her practicing. She was careful to only do it after dinner, when I went for my run. She didn’t really like talking about music, unless it was to describe in merciless detail the people that she’d gone to school with. “The sopranos,” she railed, “were default sluts. Impossibly busty homeschoolers who lost God once they found manga. I’ve never met a flat-chested soprano worth her salt. Such a fondness for bodices; bitches lived for the Renaissance Fair. And the oboists—literally translucent.” Even these reminiscences were rare, prompted by a certain tune on the radio, served up to me sans context.

  “Do you keep in touch with anyone?” I’d ask, frothing for more. “Do you ever miss music? Do you want to go back?”

  “Nah,” she’d say, and I could practically feel the winds change as she refolded this past self, tucked her away with the piles of sheet music now basically garbage, memories of pre-recital nausea and teachers who’d once called her gifted, the eeriness of nights spent in a practice room with phantom trumpets leaking in—and of this, I’m only guessing.

  It was clear, however, that she was a musician in the way that she sat in the sun. Chin inclined, eyes unfocused, or, rather, focused on the invisible progress of whatever song she deciphered from the slant of the second hand as 4:00 p.m. neared. Sometimes she smoked. “At conservatory, even the dorkiest dorks smoked,” she said. “It was the only reason they ever went outside. They would have their pizza delivered to their practice rooms. One kid even made his own catheter so he wouldn’t have to get up.” Her eyes narrowed. “Billy Lang. My greatest rival. Smelled like a preschool, played like a god.”

  Watching her, I often thought back to something that Tay had said when we were eighteen and he was trying to quit smoking. I personally found it admirable that he’d even become addicted, since everyone I knew only smoked when drunk or milling about in large groups and was forever afraid of being called out for not really inhaling. Somehow, Tay looked as sexy jittering from withdrawal as he did when chain-smoking during lunch with the back window cracked. “The hardest thing,” he sighed, rapping his nails against the dashboard, “is the loss of an excuse to go outside at a party.”

  I laughed out loud. “Are you serious?”

  His rapping intensified. “Now I’ll always have to pretend to be talking to someone. No one lets you just have a minute, you know?”

  I patted his arm and gave him a poet’s advice. “You can always go hide in the bathroom.”

  Oola was a similar kick, in that I developed habits around her and used her as an excuse to sit still, empty-handed, for hours on end. We were both preoccupied, in our quiet, inexplicable ways. Music was forever moving her, with the tininess and regularity of an internal organ. The oven dinged, or someone coughed, and her dutiful gallbladder went shooby dooby doo. Love had given my sadness structure, like the boning of petticoats in the books I used to read. Oola herself gave my idleness a formidable sha
pe, my time diagrammed with the exactness of a grass-stained T-shirt laid out on the bed, while the body it remembered banged her knee and screamed, “Fuck it!” from the adjoining bathroom.

  “The years before I was in love, I was boring,” she once remarked, out of the blue. Perhaps these were the lyrics to whatever song she was listening to, pulling out from the sheen of the leaves all around us. “I got sad about war or what I ate for dinner. I had no pizzazz.”

  I nodded my agreement. “Love gave me a hobby.” I was thinking of a TA I’d loved furiously for a semester, a rail-thin international student who buttoned her cardigans all the way up but wore nothing underneath. She scrawled across the tops of my papers: needs to be fleshed out. Activated by longing, my boredom became prismatic. When I stared out the classroom window, I now fantasized about writing the fleshiest paper possible. I listened for the snap of her nicotine gum.

  “Love made me an asshole,” I told O. “It triggered a stutter.”

  She nodded sagely, flicked her cig. “I practiced conversations alone in my room. Then, in the moment, all I could say was, What’s up?” She laughed. “In fact, I’d repeat it three times.”

  “I made special playlists, titled with the first letter of my crush’s name, to play while I jerked off.”

  “I had special underwear,” she countered. “The kind I knew he couldn’t resist.”

  “And what kind was that?”

  She chuckled. “The only pair I had that wasn’t period-stained.”

  This merited an inspection of her current underwear: faded pink, patterned with purple hearts and splotches that had faded to a similar hue.