Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  4.

  Franny has not wanted to have sex with Norm for a year now, but she does anyway. He pinches her while she’s cooking and puts wet lips on the inside of her neck. She says, “Norm,” and is suddenly angry. The children could be watching and she doesn’t like the way he always draws attention to the rigidness of her body, or the way she has to tell him, “No,” and, “Sit,” like a dog, and the way he so easily obeys. Tonight after the kiss he slinks back to the couch, winks, and whispers, “Firecracker” to Milo who has already begun to construct an image of his ideal woman. She will be proud and stiff like his mother and Winona, and will wear shirts with crisp sleeves, and swishy long peasant skirts and pants that never say sex, only hint at it in their exotic patterns and loose movements.

  Tonight, after he kisses her, Norm sits with the two children, watching reruns of Saturday Night Live, their favorite show. Franny doesn’t find grown people imitating other grown people funny. Tonight they’re laughing at the family of coneheads. Franny finds the coneheads’ nasally voices and robotic movements both familiar and offensive—but as she passes through the living room, she tries out a laugh anyway. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” They look up, startled. She steps outside her laugh and hears it, and she is startled too.

  She doesn’t know how it happened. This stiffness. This horrible laugh. When she was young, she thought she was in her body—she had her passionate stories, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. She fell in love not with the difficult, cruel men, but with the heroines, wild and fighting against their personal oppressions. She wore her hair long and stormy, and smoked cigarettes. But what was there to be angry about, really? Her mother told her it was absurd to be angry when you had money—it was even in poor taste.

  But she is angry. She’s angry with Norm, who sits on the couch comfortably with the children and comfortable in his body despite its folds and creases. She hates that Norm, like a child, or a biology teacher, is able to see his body as amazing. It’s fascinating to him how the aspirin, nitroglycerin, and beta-blockers, three small pills, support and oil his miraculous machine of blood, electricity, and oxygen. Franny knows Norm loves her when she administers his pills in a Dixie cup, like a nurse—setting it down on his bedside table. She knows that as a young man Norm didn’t think he would live past twenty-five—the age at which his father died. She knows that ever since boyhood he’s held his breath while passing cemeteries in order to gain extra years. He has tricks for outsmarting death; he has faith in Franny, and modern medicine.

  Franny is not sure she believes in herself, or modern medicine. There was the young surgeon who advised her to get rid of two olivesized growths in her left breast. He said the fibrous growths were not cancerous, would not likely increase the chances of cancer later on, but if left unchecked, in some women, grew to the size of tennis balls. He gestured excitedly when he said this; with his fingers he made a circle the size of a grapefruit. Her operation left her with a smaller left breast and a white moon-shaped scar around her nipple. And last month, at a routine mammogram, the nurse who struggled to fit Franny’s tiny breast between the machine’s cold plates, listened to Franny’s story and was startled. Fibrous tissue was simply fibrous tissue, she scolded. Some women had it and some did not. She mumbled something about surgeons, overzealousness, and the cutting up of perfectly healthy women.

  Franny drove home from the mammogram remembering the two days coming out of anesthesia, trying to find her body under the bandages, hearing her heart beat strangely like she was listening underwater, like it was someone else’s, someone right beside her.

  And besides the surgery, Franny feels she now has to manage her body in ways she didn’t have to before. New parts are forming and dividing where there was once one smooth surface. Now her cheeks form triangles like the tips of arrows pointing down, and she buys not one face cream but a separate eye cream, and an intensive repair serum for night. When she remembers to look at her body as a whole and from a distance she’s surprised to find a tall attractive woman. It’s a habit now to look at her body in sections, to take it apart.

  As she gets ready for bed, Norm shuffles into the room. He sits on the edge of the bed contented with the meal that he was served, the fat-free pudding for dessert, and from laughing hard and through his belly with his children. He touches the leg of her cotton pajama pants, and his body, porous and folding, softens and blends into the bedsheets, into the blended smell of himself and her.

  Franny feels all her edges pushing up and rubbing together. She remembers an exhibit of Picasso paintings she once saw, the weeping women. As Picasso got older his women multiplied into more and more cubes, grew fangs, and became monsters. She thought this was a result of Picasso growing old and mean and not getting any sex. She still thinks this, but she thinks too that the women had truly begun to feel like monsters, fractured and jagged. Tonight she’ll not be able to close her eyes and enter into her favorite fantasy, that she’s Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and Norm is a paying customer. She rolls away and doesn’t let him rub her leg until he becomes an anonymous man, until her eyes glaze over and she’s in a hotel room. Tonight he is Norm, and she is a wicked weeping woman. She can’t shake the feeling that he, in his simple happiness, in his not seeing her sadness, has betrayed her.

  5.

  Winona covers her tattoo for two weeks. Then it turns to hot summer weather, and she uses a Band-Aid. Out by the swimming pool Milo marches in with his gaggle of boys—outside of the house Milo is, surprisingly, a leader. The boys wear neckties, no shirts, and sombreros. They pick flowers from people’s lawns, ring their doorbells, and serenade them with original songs and a bundle of their own uprooted flowers. Today, a woman yelled at Milo for picking her tulips, which would now die, very quickly, inside her house.

  Milo is the true extrovert in the family, and to counter the jealous shaking of the family’s heads at his social outings and faux pas, and to hide his real nervousness, he acts even more extroverted and absurd than he is. He plays himself, so that their judgment will soften to laughter.

  Milo carries a wilted tulip for Winona, and when his friends have left he is struck by the sight of her. He lies down next to her in the deck chair at the edge of the pool, puts his arms to his sides, and kisses her cheek. She doesn’t move because she likes his attention—he releases pressure in her body she didn’t know she had.

  Pshhhhh.

  She kisses him back, and remembers not to laugh at him. She doesn’t need to laugh anyway, now that the pressure is gone. Sometimes, although not today, she’s uncomfortable with Milo’s exuberantly physical attention. And it’s true that Milo has recently started to notice his sister’s body, its shadings and light, her armpit stubble, belly button. He sneaks touches of these places one by one, instead of pressing his whole body against hers as he used to in an innocent nonparticular hug. Now, he looks down at the shadow between her thighs and the slight rise up over it. What is underneath is not like the pictures in his friends’ magazines, but innocent, like a pile of leaves that might smell damp and sweet, like rolling around in soft dirt under a honeysuckle bush at his grandmother’s house.

  He knows that Winona is too good to really be an object of desire, only bad women are sexual objects—although it’s confusing because her breasts are full and so are her lips, and her teeth are large and white like polished stones. Still, Winona keeps her mouth closed, not parted, and looks at things sharply, and often out of the corner of her eye. She’s the best one in the family, the only one his mother will let help in the kitchen, and she is the protector of Riley, the guider of his passage into death. Riley will not move from her bed, even though Milo and Riley used to be best friends.

  Today Winona hugs Milo, kisses his forehead, and suddenly thinks of the boy. She sits up and says, “I want to show you something, but you have to keep it a secret.” It’s only a tiny star, she thinks. And lately she’s felt beautiful and like sharing; lately she has been channeling not Garbo full of sadness, but Garbo full of light an
d humor. Sitting at the bus stop, she put down her book, swung her legs, and tilted her head up at the sky. She made a perfect stranger smile, someone she hadn’t felt looking, a man with a deep resonant laugh. And there is the boy in her church choir who she stands beside, who has a creamy baritone voice. They went to Mexico together to help build a church with her youth group—she sees flashes of his tanned hands lifting white blocks of stone. She imagines there is something holy and purposeful about her attraction. Could they move to Mexico and adopt Mexican children? Could she be like Georgia O’Keeffe, and paint pictures of the bleached bones of seagulls that lie along the shore? She could get another tattoo, one of the boy’s fingerprint, a copy of the time he touched her on the inside of her elbow.

  She peels back the Band-Aid at her hip, but as she bends over Milo catches sight of the pink ring of her nipple peeking out from her bathing suit. He also sees the tattoo but isn’t sure which one she’s showing him. The two overlay in his mind so the shooting star turns into a vine inching over her breast, circling it, copying a photograph of a naked woman from one of his friends’ magazines. This woman’s tattoo ran all the way across her stomach, down to her vagina, which was shaved bare. Milo had wondered if she used the pink stuff that he’d seen Winona use on her legs to dissolve her hair—he’d tried it once on his own pubic hair when it came in only a year ago, but could only remove a couple of strands. Now his body gets confused, his pulse quickens.

  Winona turns and looks at his erection. She gets up off the lounge chair slowly, as if it’s a rattlesnake, so as not to make any sudden moves. Milo screams and swats at it.

  “Oh, Milo,” Winona moans. “Please pay better attention to your body.” She turns and walks to the house and leaves him alone on the deck chair.

  6.

  During the summer Norm finally has time to work in the garage on his newest car. An activity more leisurely, but no less absorbing, than teaching high school biology. He likes to remind his family that his expert work at the old auto body shop helped support his mother, after his father died. Now he can finally buy his own broken-down cars, classy and rare models. He keeps the cars in his garage where no one is allowed without permission. He not only repairs all parts and does electrical and body work—he polishes and pampers the cars, smooths the leather seats with the best oil. Norm has told no one that with his newest car he’ll attempt to master the flame job! The most delicate art of setting fire to metal—masking off the slick red and orange paint, so it curves with convincing felicity around the fender and fin. He has rented an air compressor, and a delicate metal airbrushing instrument he must hold in his hand like a lady’s pistol. His plan is to surprise his family. He knows they think of him as distinctly unartistic.

  It really isn’t so. When he opens the hoods of his cars their shiny insides remind him of fine things—jewelry boxes, clockwork, human bodies. Cars are full of delicacies and complexities that he can fix, restore, get to purring. He’s never told Franny that he set his sights on her because she reminded him of a white Firebird, long and lean and Grace Kelly–like. Virtuous, strong boned, and well bred—not too exotic, but definitely regal. When he was small a connection formed in his brain—he thought that his family’s being poor was related to their poor health. His father died young, and his own eyesight went bad at age twelve. His love for Franny is real love but it’s also a love that has lifted him up and strengthened the gene pool of his children. He thinks of them all in a row, tall, with smooth flesh and bright eyes—he fits in that row now too. Franny, he reminds himself, was a good investment. She may master him day by day, but over the long haul, she will have served him well.

  7.

  It’s Milo who, coming back from a late-night romp around the neighborhood, sees Winona and the boy in the hot tub, after her parents have gone to sleep. Winona has looked in her mirror tonight, and on nights preceding this night, because she thinks she’s changing into someone else. It’s as if all her discipline and denial, her not looking in the mirror, washing her face, flushing, or combing her hair, has given rise to its opposite effect—to someone who is beautiful. She’s allowing herself to accept this person, to be curious and playful with her, to comb her hair out fully.

  Her hair is dark and rising, filled and curling with humidity, and her skin is moon-pale but plumped up with the moisture from the swimming pool. Her body prepared for this arrival by making an unexpected trip to Walgreen’s for a Wet and Wild, ninety-nine-cent lipstick, a detour she wrote down as a field trip for her photography class in her father’s mileage book. Now she colors her lips in like an actress in a play and walks out to the deck and sits with the boy on the top step of the swimming pool where the water laps up along the bottom edges of their bathing suits. Angela has just left with her boyfriend Arturo and Winona thinks they are probably having sex in the backseat of one of her father’s cars, probably the one parked under her parents’ bedroom window. This would normally worry her, but not here in her space of half dream, with freedom from judgment, where the dream seems to be mostly in control.

  She thinks of Angela, how the wet strands of her hair dangled down to her breasts, how they left the boys in the hot tub and wandered off to the bathroom. She sat on the counter while Angela peed, and Winona asked her if she’d had sex with Arturo. Angela stood up without directly answering the question, and read Winona’s mind. She said, “Do you think your choir boy would do it?”

  Sometimes Winona objects to Angela’s always getting at what she really wants to say, which in her family is considered rude. But tonight she says, “He might.” For advice, Angela stands in front of Winona and pulls down the top of her bathing suit. She laughs and says, “Show him your tits.” Winona fights off a gasp; Angela’s are beautiful—full as the base of a teardrop, and with the large dark nipples Winona imagined a woman only achieved as an adult.

  Now, sitting in the pool, Winona thinks this is surely a boy she could marry—if it ever came to that. He’s kind and gentle, a little nervous. And didn’t her mom sit on her bed, crisp and ironed for a serious talk, and much to Winona’s horror pull condoms from her pocket and ask her if she knew what they were used for? When Winona said yes, her mother had said, surprisingly, “I would prefer you wait for marriage like I did, but I know things happen.”

  Out by the pool the boy puts his arm around Winona’s shoulder, and she moves it to her knee. She wants to know what it feels like to have an orgasm. She’s come close, touching around that place in bed, but then there is Riley, who every now and then lets out an annoyed squeak, as if to remind her to be respectful of the dying. And once she thinks of that, there are noises outside her door: her mother or brother who always want to know what she’s doing. There are too many presences and needs in this house. Too many presences for which she feels responsible.

  With her legs submerged in water, she knows the night air will soon get chilly. She has decided that in the world of a martyred saint, there are only brief windows for pleasure, so she moves the boy’s hand up to the cotton crotch of her bathing suit, and it sits there motionless.

  “Come on,” she says. “We’re not going to have sex.” But when he asks, “Can I kiss you?” she says nothing. Kissing takes more skill than rubbing, and the last time they kissed it was too wet. She wants to hurry things up so she pulls down the top of her bathing suit, as Angela did. She moves out of herself again. She likes how her nipples look darker and soft in the moonlight, but is annoyed that the boy can barely touch them. His hands hover; they hover like her mother and brother. She rolls the bottom of her bathing suit down and twists it off, takes his hand and moves his fingers for him; she presses his middle finger into her, and thinks she can do it, split open, like a geode—she feels the little pinpricks like crystals all along her butt, running down the backs of her thighs. She lets the boy rub on his own now, looks up at the sky, but she can’t slip away from him. She knows he’s worried, there’s something mechanical about the way his hand moves, too careful—she knows he doesn’t
want to be doing it but does it anyway. And this is when Milo steps on the dog toy in the bushes.

  It lets out a long spindly squeak, the sound of pressure being released through a tiny hole.

  Pshhhhh.

  The boy jumps back and Winona pulls on her bathing suit. “I’m going in now,” she tells the boy. She doesn’t offer to walk him to his car and as she tries to dress she puts her leg through the wrong hole of her bathing suit so one butt cheek is exposed. She walks backward to the house. When she gets to the back door the boy is still standing there under the sycamore. She yells at him, “Leave!”

  8.

  In the house, quietly, Franny is dreaming of Catherine Deneuve. A whip cracks. Milo is shivery inside. Wrapped in the cocoon of his bedcovers he thinks Winona is the only girl he has ever loved, and she may be the only one who will ever love him back in his chubby body. Everybody loves Milo in general, it’s common knowledge, but nobody loves Milo in a specific way. He doesn’t fit in the special circle of intensity in which his mother loves Winona, carved in stone like a saint; his father loves his mother, like a Grace Kelly; and Winona loves her father, perhaps by default—because he’s the only one who will conduct his business while she’s around, who has business that is more engrossing than she is. But Milo loves Winona without being specially loved back. He is hers, she needs him, she just doesn’t know it yet.

  He thinks of how happy they are when they sit together on the sofa, how it is he who makes her laugh. Yes, she laughs at their dad too, but never because he’s tried to make her laugh. Norm laughs at the TV and mostly at the same jokes—stuff like John Belushi crushing a can on his head, and anything that involves a fat man falling down. Milo tries to make her laugh and succeeds. Milo puts in the effort. It is for her that he sings like Tiny Tim, like Elvis, often switching between the two in a single song.