Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  I walked downstairs to greet my husband, who would be home soon. The kids were on their iPads. “Hi, kids,” I said and paused in the entryway to the family room, waiting for them to take notice. The iPads clanged and clicked, the kids’ little fingers racing over the screens. “Hi, kids,” I said again, and they said, “Hi,” without once looking up. I felt let down. I went into the kitchen, barefoot. My husband came through the door. “What happened to you?” he said, dropping his briefcase onto the floor. I cocked my head coquettishly and looked at him. I hadn’t said a word to him about Sally or my experiment. I felt emboldened by his surprise. I liked the way his eyebrows arched up and his eyes went wide. I walked over to him and, using my index finger, tilted his chin downward so his lips met mine. I gave him a kiss, a good kiss, a real kiss, the kind of kiss that a woman with a head full of curls could give. He responded in kind. This kiss went on for maybe a minute. I felt infused. I felt as if we were exchanging vitalities. When it was over we smiled at each other in the secret way that couples do when sex is sure to follow. “I got my hair cut,” I said. “Did you ever,” he replied, and then he said, simply, “Wow.”

  Sally, it turned out, was a find and worth every penny of the modest two hundred dollars I paid her, sum total, once the experiment was over, which it was not just yet. The next week, Sally took me to Macy’s, and I got my face done up at the Clinique counter, where I sat on a high stool and let the lab-coated ladies dab and dress my face, agreeing to buy every product they tried on me. I left with cute little bags filled with still sweeter samples, as well as a big bottle of “Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion” and a serum for the bluish area under my eyes. I got a plum lip liner that, when I used it, announced my mouth, plus a matching lipstick that filled in the announcement and gave it some substance. I liked most of all my nut-brown eyeliner and the silver and almond eye shadow, all three colors working in concert to give me a deeper, dreamier look than I had had before. When we were through, Sally took me to the clothing section, where without any further ado she picked up a black jacket with large silver grommets, throwing it over my shoulders as if it were a cape and saying, “Oh, so you.” By the time we left Macy’s I had several “so you” purchases, a long swirling gray skirt, a peasant blouse with a ruffled neckline, espadrille shoes with straw wedge heels and ribbons that crisscrossed the legs. I had my new makeup and my still springy, sprightly haircut, and the season was changing, the damp, early darkness of winter giving way to a surprisingly warm spring, the rhododendrons blooming early, bursting from their wrapped casings in effusions of purple and red. I intended to wear my new makeup every day, along with the clothes, nice clothes, all of them.

  At first it felt funny, no, it felt hard, to get up each morning and dress up, applying my makeup carefully, leaning in to the mirror to line my eyes and with the miniature pad sweep silver across my lids, taking the tweezers and plucking my brows into slim little arcs. While some women, maybe many women, find it fun to get dressed up, I did not enjoy the process, my head heavy with stone and sleep. It took discipline to do this, like jogging or taking an aerobics class, forcing myself to flick through the new outfits I’d bought and pick one out for the day, doing this even while my insides were dreary and dark. Dressed, I’d make my way downstairs and pour myself a glass of juice.

  After several days of dolling up, I began to notice something strange. After pouring the juice, the pulpless kind, the juice started to shift, the orange intensifying until it seemed to glow in the glass, until it seemed it had been squeezed not from fruit but from gems, the liquid vivid and ice cold even as it flamed at my lips and went down clean and pure. Through the wall-sized windows in my kitchen I started to notice my reflection, my lines leaner and flowing, the skirt so long it puddled at my ankles and swished when I walked, down the hall, into my study. I set the glass of glowing juice on my desk and pulled out my chair to start work. It felt odd to be so dressed because, as a writer, I had no power lunches or afternoon meetings or presentations to attend; it was just me and my word processor. And yet, as the week passed and I put on outfit after outfit, showering, crimping my curly hair, brushing shell-pink rouge across my cheekbones, well, my work started to change. Prior to dressing up I had been a plodding sort of writer, but words were coming to me more quickly now, and characters too, people rising up out of the page and populating my stories with their unique comments and absolutely authentic idiosyncrasies, these fictional characters often accompanied by characters from my past, they too coming back, coming up out of the blank page to meet me because, I could only think, I was finally dressed for the occasion.

  In one week’s time I wrote two short stories and two essays, and I began to realize that if you want your characters to come to you, you have to be appealing. I was giddy. I grew giddy from the fruits of my labor. In the evenings, in the bathtub, my skin slippery from soap, I could feel what hovered just beneath my surface—my tibia, my deltoids, the bands of muscles and intricate bundles of fibers, the rack of my ribs and the tendons taut in my neck, my surface suggesting to me the suppleness and strength of everything it sheathed. I looked up “skin” in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body’s largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just as the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function. When you touch your surface, you alter the entire hormonal environment of the body beneath, touch signaling certain cells to release a hormone called oxytocin, which stimulates feelings of happiness, connection, love, my clothes caressing my body and beating back depression while I drank down the juice of gems.

  Why is it, I wonder, that we live in a culture that so decries the surface on the one hand while emphasizing it on the other, but in both cases misses the essential point? We are told to avoid superficiality even as our culture surrounds us with trinkets and furs, those long coats literally the skinned-off surface of an animal that shares much of our DNA. After two weeks of dressing up and caring for my hair, styling it by crimping the wet curls in my hands after showers, I discovered that what you wear, how you appear when you go to greet the world, is steeply significant not only because the world responds to how you look but, more importantly, because you yourself are altered by whatever mask you make. Wear a tired frumpy face and chances are pretty good that the world will give you its tired frumpy goods, its gray silt and stones, its slow goings and drained days. On the other hand, dress up for the day, insisting on optimism by choosing an outfit that reflects your good taste and, more importantly, your care, and you’ll find that you have more love in you than you knew. My long-lost libido returned, not the full force of what it once was when I was in my twenties; it was more tempered, somewhat hesitant and shy, my husband having now to fumble with the many buttons and zippers and snaps of my new suits, these barriers to bare skin increasing our arousal and pointing to the purpose, at least in part, of self-adornment.

  For the first time in a long time I began to believe in beauty. Not since I was a young teenager had I taken such care in how I looked. I was not able to completely dress my depression away, but when it—Slam! Bam!—reliably returned each morning, it had to tussle with a woman whose heels hoisted her high, who could confidently kneel and cup the faces of her children in her well-tended hands, who knew how to tend to others because she tended to herself, washing my daughter’s bleeding knee with the same cloth I swept each morning across my own dream-creased face, erasing the nightmares of seals and sharks, the cloth now blotting up her blood, kissing the wound and leaving on it an impression of my lipsticked mouth, a mark, a stamp, proof, that not only was I here but that I could also care.

  What I don’t know yet is whether I’ll hold fast to what I’ve learned and continue the discipline of daily care that has, without doubt, given me some great good gifts. Why ever would I not, one might wonder, considering my bountiful yield, bedded by my husband, closer to my kids, word
s coming fast from the tips of my typing fingers. Right now, when I look out my study window, I see a tiny rabbit, a baby no doubt, his fur the color of pearl, his ears pressed flat back against his skull, like small petals that flutter ever so slightly in the spring wind. Are we, I wonder, the only animals who adorn themselves, and if this is so what does that tell us about who we are as humans? There are something like one hundred forty-three types of large land mammals that populate our blue ball, and none of them, excepting ourselves, decorates their bodies, sheathing them in textiles while designing their faces in a range of reds and pinks, blues and browns. That we are the only animal that “dresses up” might suggest that the action lies outside of nature and is therefore somehow twisted, but I doubt this is true. Forty thousand years ago we began to paint on the walls of caves, and shortly after that our earliest human ancestors learned to color their faces with bled berries they found in forests and mashed to pulp in pails. Yes, long before Clairol or Revlon or Clinique stepped onto the scene, the human animal had been driven to decorate his surface, her surface, knowing, intuitively, that our connections to others depend in part on how we look and still more importantly that the sheath we wear suggests the soul beneath.

  It’s too soon to know whether my newfound belief in the power of beauty will result in a daily discipline, a habit. But I can say, for sure, that entering into beauty did not in any way diminish me as a woman, an artist, a mother, a wife. I have been enhanced, the boil on my back long since healed, nothing there but a small, crescent-shaped scar, the outlines of which I can trace with my fingers, some sort of reminder, a stamp set in my skin. Meanwhile, I look more people in the eye. I bathe my body and the bodies of my children. I dream at night that I have grown twelve feet and am as tall as the trees in the nighttime forest I walk through, tall enough to reach through the bushels of branches and find the small bright birds nestled within, creatures I cup and say sing to me. A few days ago a friend suggested we go hiking up Mount Caesar, a relatively small mountain in New Hampshire, not far from where I live. Previously I would have turned down such an invitation, worried that depression would drag down each step, making my ascent too hard, but before I could even consider that as a possibility I found myself saying yes. Yes.

  And so we went, on a Wednesday, smack-dab in the middle of the week, the trail empty of everyone, the summit sky high, huffing and puffing, my pretty clothes far away in my cedar closet, and I, back, for now, in a pair of ratty shorts and treaded sneakers, my curls plastered flat by sweat. But it didn’t matter. In my mind’s eye I was the woman with a head full of swirls, a woman whose heels clicked smartly on the stone floor she crossed, a woman in a peasant top typing words that spilled from fingertips groomed for success, and thus we made it. To the top. Huffing and puffing and streaming with sweat we made it. The wind blew around. There was an old large rusty trashcan and a peeling picnic table and the ground gone gold with pine needles. There was a rocky escarpment we crawled out on and looked down into a lake so pure and blue it seemed to possess some sort of living intelligence, a huge eye of water beaming back at us. “Swim?” my friend said. It was unseasonably warm for early April, the temperature well into the eighties. My friend, who is thin, stripped herself of her clothes and then, suddenly, even though I am fat, I followed suit, because I had some chutzpah now. That’s what it came down to. Chutzpah. Dressing up gave me the confidence to dress down, to strip. My friend dove first and I dove second, feeling my body arc out over the escarpment and sluice through the summery air and enter the water as fast and fierce as a spear driven downward, everything gone green and then finning fast upward and breaking the surface with a gasp and a shout: “Oh my god!” We laughed and laughed. And then we treaded water silently and swam around. I could see the top of the mountain from where I was and also a field of wildflowers, lupines in every imaginable color and great white wheels of daisies amidst emerald spikes of grass, and it occurred to me then that beauty is not outside of nature; it is nature, the natural state of affairs, the way the world is meant to be, and, as for me, because I’m in the world, well, then me too.

  As the sun started to set we climbed onto the shore and clambered back up the rocks, our clothes in sun-warmed heaps. We sheathed ourselves and started back down the trail, towards my friend’s car, parked in the lot. Even though we were sopping wet, we didn’t shiver, our shirts and shorts still soaked in sunlight, the chocolate bar I’d stored in one of my pockets completely melted now so when I thrust my hand in, searching for the necklace I’d removed before I dove, I felt a thick, warm gush and, laughing, I lifted my smeared fingers and licked, and licked, savoring the flavor, grateful I could taste this good.

  18

  The Mud Is in My Mouth

  At some point in my forties, maybe not for the first time and certainly not for the last as that has yet to come, I was walking down a street and saw him, Bad Luck, that is, sitting on his stallion, this in a time of great and personal abundance, or what some might call good luck, writing awards, offers to lecture in Australia, fellowships, and even a lucky lottery ticket for one hundred fifty bucks, scratching away the gold and finding beneath my prize in bold black letters.

  And then, in the midst of my abundance, walking down some street on a day like any other, Bad Luck suddenly appeared. Thinking he was handsome or rich or simply amusing, I stupidly agreed to share his saddle, not imagining for even one second the high price I would pay, the prisoner I’d become. Here’s what happened: Since that day, since that decision, Bad Luck and I, we’ve been going at quite a clip, and I can’t for the life of me get off while galloping. Bad Luck has a black cowboy hat and a five o’clock shadow you can’t help but try to touch, the stubble pricking your finger, that bead of blood always a shock, no matter how often it happens. Am I responsible for Bad Luck, or is he responsible for me? Have we married? Can we divorce? It’s hard to think, what with the sound of these hooves in my head. Ouch. Have you seen me? Look up. That’s not a cloud or a bird or a plane. It’s me. Hanging on hard.

  Good Luck, they say, likes to visit in threes, or derivatives thereof. I’d say this is true. The discovery of my sanity round about the age of thirty set in motion triptych after triptych of success. Previously a mental patient in a johnny, I became, in a matter of a few years, a productive author, a professor, married, a mother. Money came clattering down, as if I’d stumbled across some rigged slot machine in the sky. These were my years of butter, babies, and books. All my gardens grew. I tried to ignore the fact that Good Luck’s gifts likely came with some serious strings attached.

  I won an NEA grant and a Knight Science Journalism fellowship, the prize money totaling sixty thousand dollars. Were these rewards deserved or merely bestowed? Of one thing I felt sure: real luck has to be earned. You can’t simply swallow it like your pills. I pictured a massive collapse, the end of my own personal Ponzi scheme. I celebrated my every milestone with one eye on the second hand of the clock. It never ceased. Time kept moving in joyful circles, like a dog too dumb to know that death is always near.

  Despite my great good luck I had many nagging questions, and these many nagging questions about what I deserved led me to actions that some might call “pushing my luck,” actions that, I guess, made me the cause rather than the victim of a crash. Pre-Prozac, I dreamt of being a writer and worked hard at a craft I could never claim to have mastered with any confidence, despite my efforts. Post-Prozac, my literary posture improved. Slumped words found their backbones, stood straight, and took to tap dancing. My stories stumbled upon voice, pacing, rhythm, and thus stopped stumbling. I discovered in myself a willingness to be honest. I flaunted that honesty, my raw body, the raw form of my work, and while this was partly in response to my writer’s mandate, it was, in equal or unequal parts, a way of testing the limits, only so I could know them, only so I could avoid—or choose—a free fall over that sky-high cliff, thereby bringing my stellar career to an abrupt and nearly coveted close, for I did not deserve these prizes and publi
cations and offers of Australia, and worse, it was corrupting me, the urge to write now all mixed up with the urge to win. I was lost, and found, and lost. I was like a blind man, cane tapping his tentative path, or a geologist, eyes closed, running hands over rock, palms sensing the scripted fault lines: Delve here. No, there.