Paulina & Fran

by Rachel B. Glaser

  It was Fran’s first time in studio since break. She watched Marvin while she stretched a canvas. He sat on the floor dipping acorns in paint.

  “Why acorns?” James asked.

  “I thought the mice would eat them,” he said, “but they didn’t.” Mice had moved in over the winter and lived in the mess the painters made, eating crumbs and construction paper.

  “Why that color?” James asked as he walked by.

  “I have a lot of it,” Marvin said. His curly hair was in a mess over his eyes. “How was Norway, Fran?” he asked. Their eyes met for the third time that day.

  “Pretty,” she said, and her body warmed like she was talking to God.

  “You could never date a boy like that, who lives without needing to know himself,” Gretchen told Fran, but Gretchen knew nothing. The girls walked out of the studios without looking at each other. Both wore patchwork backpacks they’d bought at the hippie store freshman year.

  Fran and Gretchen had become friends in Foundation Drawing one day after Gretchen’s hair elastic flew through the air, narrowly missing the model. Gretchen was understated. No hairdo announced her. She was a graphic design major, which Fran found uninspiring. Gretchen wasn’t free like the others. She danced, drank, and drew, but never gave herself over to it. She never felt the light of everyone’s eyes upon her; nor did she crave this kind of light.

  “He talks in a baby voice,” Gretchen said.

  “No, he doesn’t. He just isn’t listening to how he sounds.”

  “You know you didn’t call me back,” Gretchen said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I had so much to catch up on.”

  “How was the trip anyway? Did you socialize with the enemy?”

  “Who?” said Fran. “Oh, I mean, in passing.”

  At the lecture, Fran and Gretchen watched a successful New York artist strip to her underwear and gnaw on a man-sized piece of chocolate. During the Q&A, students asked embarrassing questions and name-dropped other artists. The questions were met with a collective groan, as if the student body were one body, one that couldn’t accept itself. After, the artist put a curse on them, insisting: “Only one person in this room will make it in the art world.”

  It took a lifetime to walk to SUPERTHRIFT, and much of it was highway. Normally Sadie drove, but she had lent Eileen her car. Skipping ahead of Sadie and Allison, Paulina exclaimed, “I am free! I can fuck anyone I want! I can do as I please!”

  “But you were doing that before,” Sadie said.

  “But this time with the clearest of minds! An available bed, and a purely selfish heart. The things I will accomplish,” she whispered loudly.

  “What are you going to accomplish?” Allison asked dubiously.

  Paulina stopped walking. “Hey! Lay off,” she said.

  After a step, Sadie and Allison stopped too. Paulina eyed them suspiciously. “What happened here while I was gone, anyway? Did the gap close further without me?”

  “What gap?” Sadie asked, though she knew. They resumed walking.

  “Those precious inches between your ass and hers. What did I miss around here anyway? Anything revolutionary?”

  “There was a flood at the Feminist Warehouse,” Sadie said.

  “That guy Fluff sold Eileen cocaine that was laced with something.”

  “Oh, and my boyfriend visited and Allison met him,” said Sadie.

  “He’s great,” Allison said. They smiled.

  “What? What boyfriend?” Paulina asked. Cars sped by like bullets.

  “Eric,” Sadie said emphatically. “Remember? I told you about him before you left and I wrote those e-mails.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Paulina said. She didn’t want Sadie to have a boyfriend because she didn’t want to have to listen to her talk about him. But at least he didn’t live there; at least Paulina didn’t have to see him. “I’m sure he’s great,” Paulina said. The shoulder narrowed and they walked on in single file: Sadie, then Allison, then Paulina. Paulina’s head filled with images of lame boyfriends, ones who wore puka-shell necklaces, Adidas running pants, and shirts with words.

  At SUPERTHRIFT, remnants from hundreds of dull lives hung before them on plastic hangers. Even when the girls found something remarkable, it always seemed like the original owner had misunderstood and squandered it. Every nightgown came with a few bad dreams. This depressive air empowered the girls. Their lives were incredible! When the clothes fit, they felt they’d looted the lame, the poor, and the dead. When they didn’t, the girls dismissed used clothing as gross.

  Besides the clothes, they searched earnestly in the cassette pile, the furniture, the shoe racks. Everything seemed like something they could improve, that no one yet had known how to improve. Allison bought the paintings—amateur still lifes and common landscapes, tacky beach scenes with sponged-on clouds, clown paintings, sadly confident bubble-lettered names—to gesso over in her studio.

  Paulina began a methodical search in Blouses, though she never had luck there. She listened to Sadie and Allison in Skirts, one aisle over. Their voices rose and fell. They were either trashing Eileen’s work or praising it. Paulina lingered a while, wondering, before marching off into Evening Dresses. At first nothing appealed to her. She closed herself off to every option without really considering them. Most of the dresses she’d seen before. Some had sweat or deodorant marks. Many had no inner life.

  The song changed, reminding Paulina that she was free of Julian, and she loosened up. A few items intrigued her and she took some chances, ignoring any indication of size—it’ll stretch, she thought, or I’ll cut it. Once her arm was weighed down with clothes, she walked triumphantly to the dressing rooms.

  “Goin’ in, girls!” she yelled to Sadie and Allison, but heard no reply. She waited, then smiled, knowing they would scamper over. When Paulina found something that flattered her, Allison and Sadie always hovered around to admire her while she pranced in the aisle in front of her dressing room. Sadie had long given up debating—anything Paulina found “fabulous,” Sadie praised as well. But Paulina didn’t just want their approval; she wanted them to be jealous.

  Paulina hung her fur coat on a hook, wincing when the bottom grazed the disgusting dressing room floor. She took off her shirt and pants and piled them on top of her shoes in the corner. It would be nasty to have sex in a SUPERTHRIFT dressing room, but she’d have liked to be able to say she’d done it.

  The first dress was huge and Paulina flung it on the floor. She’d found a nice pair of pants, but before she got too excited she spotted a bloodstain on the butt and extracted herself from the situation. “Sadie!” she called. “Allison!” She wanted to tell them about the bloodstain and show them the jumper she was about to try on: a blue-gray cotton thing that narrowed into shorts. It was the kind of outfit one wore spontaneously, she felt. When she put it on, her breasts swelled out the top. Wearing it, she felt like a provocative babysitter. With the jumper came the promise of warm weather and new love.

  She got very close to the mirror trying to discern the pattern on the fabric. Sailboats? Flowers? Nope. Paisley! Allison and Sadie still hadn’t appeared. What are they doing, she thought, fucking on a used mattress? Until that moment, the thought of anything sexual between them had never occurred to her. She frowned at the idea and made the “gross” face.

  All day, Sadie and Allison had seemed distant. Upon first greeting Paulina, Sadie had made a snide remark about Farm Girl Fashion Disaster, and though it sounded familiar, it took Paulina a moment to decode. They’re jealous, she thought to herself posing in the mirror. She remembered fondly how her old dog, Mildred, had gone crazy with jealousy whenever Paulina had the smell of another dog on her. Maybe she hadn’t fully accounted for the amount of time Julian had taken away from them. Well, whatever, she thought, a girl couldn’t always be with Sadie and Allison or she’d perish! She smiled at herself in the jumper, so cute.

  Where were they? She called out to them again. The jumper began to look silly in the mirror.
Sadie wouldn’t approve, would make fun of the jumper. Also, it was way too tight. It clamped around her stomach and pinched under her arms.

  Then she realized—it was a child’s jumper. Her face flushed. She felt hugely stupid. Sadie will burst out laughing at this, yes, uncontrollably. Allison too. She tried to shimmy out of it, but it shrunk with every movement.

  “Yes, what?” asked Sadie finally. Paulina saw her through the gap where the curtain failed to meet the wall.

  “Oh, nothing. I had it on, but nothing now.”

  “Let me see,” Allison said.

  “No, I don’t need any opinions,” Paulina said, still imprisoned in the jumper. It looked like a doll’s apron. Sadie poked the curtain. Paulina hastily pulled it shut.

  “Chill, girl,” Sadie said. She poked the curtain with her elbow and Paulina flinched.

  “We found a lot of good things,” Allison said.

  “Where?!” Paulina asked. Defeated, she stopped struggling and stood before the mirror, one arm in and one out. Her hair had looked ideal when she left for SUPERTHRIFT, but all order had been destroyed by the wind. Her life felt like a mistake. She looked and felt like a shipwrecked alien whose mission had gotten horribly derailed.

  Art school had been an impulsive decision. Paulina hadn’t really thought she’d get in. Her portfolio was mostly doodles she’d drawn over the photos in her high school yearbook. When she showed up, she found that the other students knew much more about art history than she did. They drew better. They worked harder. After a week, she abandoned her artistic goals. It was preposterous to have “artistic goals.” She cringed at the very words.

  Then she’d seen the Venus Flytrap crack up an entire party with her exceptional laugh. Wearing only a cardboard headdress and Troy’s boxer briefs, the Venus Flytrap danced with total abandon. She trembled and shook, sacrificing her body to the song, letting it fill with spirits. Paulina envied the performance. She decided her personality would be her art and revamped her closet with SUPERTHRIFT treasures. She overheard the disturbing life story of a deranged man downtown and adopted it as her own.

  Paulina’s ass hurt from sitting on the tiny corner seat in her dressing room. With concentration, she finally managed to take off the jumper without ripping it too badly. Then, slowly, she put her clothes back on, as if her existence were futureless and blank, and dressing just an automatic, ceremonial act of the life she’d left behind. She listened to Allison and Sadie try on their finds.

  “Oh my god, those pants rule!” Sadie told Allison.

  “You think? I feel like a tightrope walker or someone,” Allison said.

  “Check it out, Paulina,” Sadie called, but Paulina refused to view their successes.

  While the two of them paid, Paulina moped in the parking lot. She missed Fran, and the feeling was unique, as Paulina made it a rule to miss no one. When Sadie and Allison came out, they barely acknowledged her and continued their conversation. This stung Paulina, but she followed after them, pretending she was an alien sent to study Sadie and Allison’s feeble minds. She thought, My findings are quite abysmal, Rolan, ruler of Rolanzil. Their preening techniques are surprisingly rudimentary. Especially the tall one, whose tresses hang off her head like dead grasses.

  “You’ll be there, right, Paulina?” Sadie asked nonchalantly, like the three had been talking all along.

  “Where?” Paulina asked bitterly.

  “My apparel show!”

  “If I’m alive,” Paulina said, clutching her fur as if it could leave her.

  4

  Julian sat in movie theaters long after the credits. He slumped around the cafeteria. He’d begun school with friends, until one day he realized it was easier to see movies without inviting anyone along, and this turned him into a loner. He completed his assignments mechanically, and the films were dim and infuriating. A salt pile growing and melting. A glove wandering through the grass. When his classmates discussed his work, he could hear the clock ticking on the wall.

  In the library, Julian spied on Paulina and Fran, wondering what was between them. He imagined Blood Axe, muscular and blond, Fran, naked and shivering on a zebra-skin rug, and Paulina, bathing in a claw-footed tub, all of them lounging in a log cabin with crude quilts and knitted things nailed to the walls. At first the story hadn’t made sense, but with every step away from Paulina he’d begun to accept it. Of course it made him nauseous to imagine her with Blood Axe, but almost immediately his mind found refuge in Fran. Just a semester or two before, he had been a virgin too, before Paulina took him home.

  The library was a maze of bookcases and parquet floors. Big windows were covered with dusty velvet curtains. There were few people in the library. Students were clicking away in the computer labs, wasting their eyes in the white light, while the library creaked on without them. A library is like a sunken ship, thought Julian. It doesn’t change as the world changes.

  He walked down the aisle toward Paulina and Fran, scanning the stacks. He took a big book from the shelf and pretended to read it.

  “Hey, Brains,” Paulina said brightly.

  He turned as if surprised. “Julian,” he said, and extended his hand to Fran. Before the breakup, he’d never thought of Fran, but now saw she had her own peculiar beauty. She wore a long knit skirt and a Little League jersey. Between buttons, Julian could see a swatch of her bra and a small triangle of pale skin.

  “I know who you are,” Fran said.

  Julian leaned against the stacks.

  “Your reputation precedes you, Fran,” he said, looking to her face for a reaction.

  “I don’t have a reputation,” Fran said laughing.

  “Really, she doesn’t,” Paulina said plainly.

  “How are things?” he asked.

  “Thingy,” said Paulina.

  Fran studied him. He was holding a book on ancient casting techniques. There was something in his voice, something he had taken from Paulina, or something Paulina had gotten from him. Though Paulina had dismissed him, at some point she had chosen him for herself. Fran tried to see him this way, in Paulina’s high opinion.

  Julian slid the book back into the stacks, stretching this motion out to draw their attention.

  “What’s my reputation?” Fran asked. Paulina sighed loudly.

  “That you don’t refuse an adventure,” Julian said. Fran laughed, but Paulina turned away as if to leave.

  “Until we meet again,” he said, like the heroes of old movies the girls had never seen. Then he was off, ducking out the door, anticipating with pleasure the certainty that they would discuss him. Again, he imagined Fran in Blood Axe’s cabin. There was something peaceful about her nervousness.

  “So corny! God,” Paulina said. A boy glared at them. The girls moved to another row and sat down. They often hung out at the library before their sociology class, lingering in the most boring stacks where they could talk freely. To the girls, a library was a dignified place. Like a graveyard, it made one feel very alive.

  “Have you seen him since the river?” Fran asked.

  “He’s obsessed with me!” Paulina said. She had no idea where he’d been before the library or where he’d go after. It unnerved her.

  “I keep thinking about the river!” Fran whispered.

  “I think a family saw us,” Paulina said, reliving it.

  When Fran went to the Painting Building that weekend, Marvin was the only one there, crouched in James’s studio. “Look at these mouse babies,” he said and held one out to Fran. The captive mouse scratched at Marvin’s fingers. Light shone through its pink, round ears.

  “Oh, wow!” Fran exclaimed. Marvin put the mouse in the fishbowl where he kept his colored pencils.

  “I was going to dip their feet in paint and have them run around on the canvas,” he said. “But first, I wanna put costumes on them.”

  “I have costumes for them!” Fran said, rushing to her studio. “Last semester I got these kids’ gloves with Wizard of Oz finger puppets.” She dug in a
box of corroded paint tubes. Marvin caught another mouse.

  “If you can’t find them, I have pipe cleaners,” he said. Fran threw aside some sketches she’d done of the Norway trip. One of them had her and Paulina dancing on top of a cake. She hadn’t realized its lesbian undertone until her classmates happily pointed it out in crit. I was just being surreal, she told them again in her head.

  “Found them!” Each finger of the glove was a different character. The Dorothy finger had little braids of yarn. The Tin Man had a shimmery metallic hat.

  “These are perfect,” Marvin said. They went to his studio and cut the fingers off the gloves and the tops off each finger. “It’s like a tube top,” he said, forcing a costume on each squirming mouse. Marvin is a natural born artist, Fran thought, everyone else is just a kid at art school.

  “They look amazing,” Fran said.

  “The Dorothy one is ridiculous!” he said. Fran wanted to lean against him. As he scratched his head, Fran could see a few exhilarating inches of his stomach and the hairs that grew there. She wouldn’t have minded being one of those hairs. She would have been good as one of those hairs, she thought. She would have been silent and still, and moved in the wind, and gotten flattened in the shower, and caught in the waistband of his pants, and smoothed by the hand of a girl . . . Fran leaned toward him until her leggings touched his jeans. Inside the bowl, the mice clawed at each other’s costumes. “Let’s give them their freedom,” Marvin said.

  In the field by the canal, the baby mice scurried away in their costumes. “I bet the other mice will worship them,” he said.

  “They will radically change mouse culture,” said Fran. With Marvin, she felt she was playing with the world in the right way.