Speak of Me As I Am

by Sonia Belasco

  I think you would say this isn’t art. That’s what you always claimed—that you weren’t an artist, not like me. You’re free to be what you wish and do what you want but I hope you know how beautiful this is, Melly. How beautiful you are and how talented. You are so talented and so beautiful. I wish I had told you that more.

  We are very different, you and I. Maybe it’s been hard for you sometimes, having a mother like me. Dad tells me I can be kind of a lot and I know he’s right.

  The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. I used to be more scared and quiet and sad. Maybe it’s hard for you to believe that, but it’s true. I spent two years in college pretending I was going to major in business because my parents wanted me to do something practical. Those years weren’t wasted because later I would use that knowledge to help your father open a restaurant! But they were sad years. They were lonely. And so I made a different choice.

  It wasn’t that simple. It never is. But I know you can do it. You’re brave.

  The thing about knowing you’re dying is that it puts everything in perspective. It makes you think: What matters to me? What do I care about? When I found out about the cancer I knew I needed to make art and be with you and your father. That was what mattered to me. It still is. I’m so grateful for this life. I’m so grateful for you, Melly.

  I don’t think you need my advice because you are already so wise, but I will leave you with this: Don’t hide the things that matter. Let yourself be seen. Let people know you. However you do it is up to you. But just don’t hide. It’s so lonely, and the world is so big and beautiful. Let yourself explore and be as big and beautiful as this world.

  I know you will be okay after I’m gone because you’re strong, but please, please know that you’re not alone.

  You are not alone.

  I will say it again: You are not alone.

  And as long as you remember me, I will be here.

  I love you, sweetheart.

  She signed it big and dramatic like always, all flourishes and twists: DANA.

  The first thing I think is: What am I supposed to do with this?

  I put the sketchbook back down on the bed and close it. My hands are shaking.

  I go down into the basement because I know it’ll be dark and quiet. I nearly stumble down the stairs before I remember I should probably turn on the light. I want privacy, not a concussion. The light flickers on, illuminating my mother’s reconstructed studio. There’s paint everywhere, drying in open containers, flaking off the sides of cans and gunked on brushes, color streaking every surface because Mom wouldn’t have it any other way. It looks like she could come back at any minute, show up and pick up a brush and make something beautiful.

  I run my hand over the surface of one of the tables. The pad of my finger catches on a splinter of wood. I wince, bringing my hand to my mouth and sucking away the tiny dot of blood. It tastes bitter and salty, like sweat.

  I flip through her open sketchbook spread out on the table. It’s filled with figure drawings: a few of neighborhood children, some of Dad, some nudes Mom probably did at the community college when they had models. I turn the page and there’s my own face staring back at me from a series of colored pencil drawings. I’ve never seen them before. My hair is a smudged red while the rest of my face is etched in black and white. It looks like my hair is on fire. In one sketch my hair curls upward as if windblown, tendrils flying everywhere, a messy burning halo. Mom must have done it within the last few months. My hair hasn’t been red for very long.

  I used to be the girl who blended in with the cinderblock walls, who people sort of liked but who didn’t really register, who got along and put up and shut up. Now I’m a tattoo—scarred, scary. I’m a fluttering touch that’s become a brand.

  But even in the costume I’ve created, stitched together from patches of my sanity, I’m still working backstage, still trying to blend into the scenery I help create. I’ve never wanted to be in the spotlight, never considered what it would be like to be watched with such intensity and focus. My mother got up in front of a class and taught. She put on art shows and left it all out there for people to see. I lurk in the shadows.

  Let yourself be seen.

  Today Damon was the one up on that stage, being watched, playing the part of the horror-stricken fallen warrior. All that talk of losing and grief, and somehow I forgot—forgot what it means that Damon has lost someone too.

  Was. You said he was.

  Carlos and his camera, Carlos who got Damon in trouble. Carlos with the winning smile in that photo Damon gave me. Carlos who would have liked me.

  Your words and performances are no kin together, Roderigo rails at the crafty Iago. But I’m beginning to wonder if Damon’s are too much kin, if Othello’s grief is melting into his own.

  We all act out our parts so people don’t see the tricky, knotted-up mess inside of us, but sometimes we don’t do such a flawless job, and the messy part peeks out between our frightened fingers.

  He’d said: You don’t understand.

  What don’t I understand? What don’t I see?

  I trace one finger down over the page, following the vapor trails left by my mother’s pencil. The paper feels smooth under the pads of my fingers. My tears are coming faster now, coming and coming and coming. I lift a brush from one of the glass jars Mom used to house them and unscrew the top from a jar of red paint. Both brush and paint are not quite wet enough, but they’re sufficiently liquid for me to spread the red over the drawing in broad, swirly shapes.

  I paint and cry and cry and paint until my face disappears from the page.

  • • •

  That night I lie there on my soft cotton sheets with my eyes closed, trying to think about nothing, but my mind insists on repeating one line from Othello over and over like a mantra:

  Man but a rush against Othello’s breast,

  And he retires. Where should Othello go?

  Around 4:00 a.m. I give up on sleep, fumble for my cell phone and turn it on. I turned it off when I left rehearsal, not wanting to talk to anyone, especially Damon. I still don’t know what to say to him, not yet.

  Sure enough, it beeps to indicate I have a message, and I tap my screen to get into my voice mail with trembling fingers.

  It’s Tristan. His voice is high and tight with worry.

  “Melanie, are you okay? I went to look for you at rehearsal and you were gone and . . . whatever you need, just—just call me. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night, call me. Whatever this is, I don’t want you to be alone with it.”

  I don’t think; I call him. Tristan picks up on the first ring.

  “Talk to me,” he says.

  It should be easy in the way that it’s always been easy for me to talk to Tristan, ever since we were little and used to sit around building castles out of Legos and discussing the houses we wanted to own someday. Tristan wanted a house made of windows. I still remember that, now, because it was so quintessentially, perfectly Tristan. He never thought he had anything to hide.

  “Tell me about Bryan,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”

  There’s a startled intake of breath, then rustling. I imagine Tristan shifting in bed, getting comfortable, nestling under the covers.

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Mel.”

  “Anything,” I say. “Tell me anything.”

  He sighs. The phone fuzzes over with static.

  “He’s scared,” Tristan says. “I’m scared too, but I’m not as scared as he is.”

  I gaze out the window at the impenetrable dark. The sun will rise soon, peel these shadows off like old skin.

  “You can’t be with someone who’s more scared than you are,” Tristan says. “I think that’s what I’ve figured out. You can be scared together, but only in equal amounts.”

  God, that’s it. We’re
both so scared, but we don’t know how to be scared together.

  “Damon and I had a fight,” I blurt out. “I don’t even know what it was about, but it was . . . bad.”

  “Bad how?” Tristan asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I said some stuff that I shouldn’t have.”

  “He’s been having a lot of trouble at rehearsal,” Tristan says. “He freaked out last week, you know. Basically collapsed in the middle of a scene onstage.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say. “Today too—he couldn’t finish a scene.”

  “Oh man, really?” Tristan says. “That’s awful.”

  “Damon’s not really—open with me,” I say. “I mean, sometimes he is. But sometimes he isn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, I hate to tell you this, Melly,” Tristan says, “but you’re not exactly an open book yourself.”

  I stay silent.

  “He probably doesn’t want you to worry about him,” Tristan says. “He seems like the kind of guy that doesn’t like to cause a lot of trouble for people.”

  He tried to tell me this time. He wanted me to know—

  I think of Damon sliding the photograph across the table in the diner.

  Sometimes it feels like he’s . . . watching. Like he knows what’s going on and wants to be a part of it. You know?

  I think: Push me, push me, but that’s so unfair, so wrong, to want Tristan to extract this information from me. It’s not his job to do that.

  “You can talk to me, you know,” Tristan says. “Whenever you want, about whatever you want.”

  The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that Carlos was Damon’s Tristan.

  How do you even quantify a loss like that?

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “No need to thank me,” Tristan says. “Like you said, we’re BFFs. It’s part of the package.”

  I find my mouth trying to turn up at the edges, lift into a smile.

  “I know you were really into Bryan,” I say. “I thought maybe it wasn’t serious, that it was just because he’s a hot soccer player and stuff, but . . . I saw the way you looked when you were talking about him. I’m sorry, Tristan. About everything.”

  I deflate, feeling winded. I make a looping gesture with my hand that I realize too late he can’t see.

  “Man, Melanie. I . . . I’m not even sure what to say.” Tristan clears his throat. “I liked Bryan, yeah, but I think I liked him more than he deserved. I liked sneaking around with him. It was sexy, having that secret. But secrets aren’t sexy forever, and he would’ve been happy keeping me a secret. There’s a fine line between having a secret and being ashamed.”

  I wish Tristan was here, right now. I want to press our hands together, a hand sandwich. It’s something we’ve been doing since our middle school did Romeo & Juliet and Tristan was Romeo—for saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. I still love how smooth Tristan’s palms are against mine, how his touch makes me feel safe. Tristan will always feel like home, no matter how far I run and where I hide.

  “I will miss this thing he did with his tongue, though,” Tristan says thoughtfully. “It was, like, this twist—”

  “Tristan, I love you,” I interrupt him, hiccuping out a laugh.

  “I love you too,” Tristan says. There’s a touch of laughter there, but I know he means it.

  “You’re amazing,” I say.

  “I know.”

  • • •

  I wake up the next morning, glance at my calendar and realize it’s Halloween. Halloween doesn’t mean the same things it did to me as a kid—too-sweet candy corn, costumes, pumpkins, monsters jumping out of the darkness, scary—but it feels timely. Halloween is supposed to be about exorcising demons, about bringing the bad to the surface, and Lord knows the demons in my life have come out to play.

  That night I meet Tristan at his house at dusk and we wander around our neighborhood, admiring the jack-o’-lanterns with jagged mouths and slits for eyes, the sticky cobwebs clinging to doorways, the rickety skeletons dangling in windows. Kids tromp by in costumes, toting plastic buckets and bags, giggling and hyper, trailed by parents too tired to attempt discipline.

  Tristan and I started doing this four years ago when we declared ourselves too old to trick-or-treat but didn’t want to get conned into handing out candy either. We’re not quite celebrating the holiday, but we’re participating, observing. It’s a little creepy, maybe, but it keeps us busy. Tonight we tramp through the leaves, wet from recent rain, and stuff our hands into each other’s pockets to keep them warm.

  “Do you wish we could trick-or-treat?” Tristan asks, shuffling over the sidewalk in an awkward hybrid dance that resembles a two-step/Lindy-Hop combo, lots of twisty flips of the ankle. “I still think I would have been an awesome Marilyn.”

  I shrug and push my hair behind my ear. “I used to like it. Dressing up. Campaigning for candy.”

  “But now you dress up every day, freak show,” Tristan teases, nudging me with his shoulder. “I always felt like there was a competitive edge to the whole deal, a viciousness to the candy economy. Very dog-eat-dog. Everybody obsessed with material gain. That’s not healthy.”

  I laugh, but it stings, a little. You dress up every day, freak show. Costumes. Playing parts. Secrets. Secrets are one step away from shame. I can’t help it: I think of Damon. I think of him on that rooftop, and him on that stage, and how these people are the same person, but not the same at all.

  All I want is to be able to see him more clearly, to bring him into focus like one of his photographs, like that photograph of Carlos he gave me months ago, because he wanted me to see what he had lost.

  I take pictures ’cause it makes you look close, Damon had said.

  But Damon is no photograph, no still image frozen in time. Damon is not going to open up like some kind of spring flower if I just wait long enough.

  I need to look closer, and I need to show him what I see.

  “Hey,” I say. “Let’s go to school.”

  “Just for fun?” Tristan says. “That may be the lamest idea you’ve ever had.”

  “I have an idea,” I say. “I need to look at the scenery for the play.”

  “The scenery for the—” Tristan stares at me. “Did you forget your meds today?”

  “C’mon,” I say, and tug Tristan along.

  To his credit, Tristan only resists a little. Or a lot, but he gives up eventually, once it’s clear that I’m not listening.

  “If I get expelled for this, you are the one who’s going to explain it to my dad,” Tristan says as I pick the old lock on the crumbling back door that leads into the gym.

  “We won’t get caught,” I say.

  “You say that,” Tristan says, “but you always used to lose at hide-and-seek, so—”

  “Then stay here,” I say, and take off across the gym.

  “I like this plan,” Tristan calls out. “It gives me plausible deniability.”

  “You don’t even know what that means,” I say.

  “Whatever, I watch TV!”

  I don’t mind—I know this is something I need to do alone anyway. When I round a corner and push open the doors to the theater, my breath catches. It smells musty, as if the ghosts of past productions linger in the air, characters reincarnated, brought to life, then abandoned like old clothes to collect mothballs and memories.

  I’m backstage in seconds, standing in front of the scenery. Cyprus looms before me: the inside of the castle, a lot of gray and black and square angles. Outside the castle there’s nothing—just a lot of empty, undefined space.

  I had been so eager to tell Damon what the play means. I should have told him this instead: You are not Othello. You are not him, because Othello has nowhere to go.

  Damon does. I need t
o show him where.

  I examine the backdrop, let my eyes skim over the images until they cohere into a full picture in my mind. Then I pick up a brush, dip it in green, lift it to the border, and begin to paint.

  DAMON

  Dude, no. No way.

  Why not?

  Because she’s ugly.

  That’s fucked up.

  I’m not saying I—

  You think there might be girls talking shit about you, like, Oh, Carlos, that fool looks like something exploded on his face—

  Whatever, man. No girls say that.

  How do you know?

  Because I’m in their bedrooms at night.

  Every girl in the world? You’re in the bedroom of every girl—

  Shut up, dude.

  I don’t even know why we’re friends.

  I ask myself this every day.

  Right?

  Every fucking day, D.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Melanie’s not at rehearsal the next day—none of the set crew are. Before rehearsal begins Mrs. McAvoy takes me aside and asks me if I’m okay.

  “If you’re having a hard time, there’s no reason to put yourself through this,” she says quietly. “Theater is supposed to be something you enjoy, Damon. I cast you because you seemed right up there, like you understood Othello. But I realize understanding Othello isn’t easy and probably doesn’t feel easy, and this makes it even harder to play.”

  Mrs. McAvoy probably thinks I understand Othello because I’m black and have experienced racism, and though both of these things are true, they have so little to do with anything that I feel like laughing. Sure, I’ve had people look at me funny on the street and in stores. Crew, really? Theater, really? Black boys don’t do that. Straight boys don’t do that. But I don’t know anything about living in the kind of society Othello lives in.

  Come to think of it, Shakespeare didn’t know anything about that either, did he? He wasn’t black, probably didn’t even know many—perhaps any—black people. Shakespeare didn’t understand that side of Othello on any kind of authentic level, but he understood jealousy, obsession, and guilt. He understood grief.