Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  My burst of self-willed calm and optimism was so inspiring I was moved to paint my toenails. Just for the fuck of it. Who’s the teenage alcoholic now? The girl sitting in a cleanish room, enjoying some fresh air and giving her toenails a little color? I don’t think so. Soon enough there was the sound of pressure against my door, a heaving, creaking sound, and it appeared the rickety door with its globbed-on paint dried in drips and blobs would split down the middle. The thing popped open and Kristy fell into my room. She did not have the video camera. How’s that for turning over a new leaf? For trying to be a humane person in the world? Though what a redeeming shot it would’ve been: me in my cleaned-up room, the beer bottles bagged up and tucked away, waiting for disposal. Me actually painting my toenails, a well-adjusted female activity. The red pooled on the tiny nails and made them look like candy. I imagined feeding my candy toes to some sort of salivating boy who liked girl-feet. Your toes look like Red Hots, he would murmur excitedly. I gave a bitchy glance at Kristy and returned to my feet, shaping the puddles of polish with the brush, stopping the excessive paint from rolling down onto the skin of my toes.

  Wow, Kristy said humbly, and I relaxed. You’re painting your toenails. I shrugged like I did it all the time. If you want, I’ll do your fingernails for you. A manicure.

  Did They Teach You That At The Voke? I asked, and she shook her head.

  I already knew it. Kristy moved to the end of my bed and sat down on it. Many times Kristy has tried to buy my bed frame off me. She’s had jobs forever and has more money than anyone in the house, and she deeply regrets the temper tantrum that caused her own bed frame to crack down the middle, the wooden slats gutting the shabby box spring. She offers me insultingly low prices to part with my bed. I’ll never do it. My primary activity is lying around in bed, so you could call my bed and all its parts my number-one possession. Cash would be nice, but I got by without it. There was always some dried-up ramen bricks in the pantry, waiting to be plunged into a pot of boiling water. I’d never starve. Ma liked to brag about this fact. She’d say, You kids don’t starve. She’d say it like she wanted a prize, like she wanted the mother-of-the-year award for not starving her children. But she was right, we didn’t starve, not so long as the big ramen factory kept slapping up those bunched-up nests of noodle. I bummed beers off Donnie when possible, I didn’t need much. Kristy could buy herself her own damn bed frame anyway, if she didn’t spend her money on endless beauty products and douche-bag clothing from Ohmigod!, but she’s got her priorities, I guess.

  Trisha, what are you going to do? she asked me, arranged on the edge of my bed like a little canary. Her voice had a made-for-television-movie heaviness to it, like I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and she wanted to know what treatments I’d be pursuing. I capped the polish and set the bottle on my nightstand, began wiggling my toes to accelerate the drying process. The last time I painted my toes I didn’t wait long enough for them to dry properly. I put on a pair of socks and then my sneakers, and at the end of the day the polish had dried with the socks stuck into it so they were attached to my feet by these smears. It looked like something horrible and bloody had happened to my feet and I dramatically limped into the parlor screeching, My Toes, My Toes! and scared the shit out of Donnie and Ma. Ma in particular was affected by the joke and seemed to have a hard time viewing my feet as healthy ever sense. She insists I have athlete’s foot and a toe fungus but really they seem fine, just a little peely. I worried that Ma’s hypochondria might be branching out into Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, like Eminem’s mom. And look how fucked-up he turned out.

  Are you going to give me the silent treatment? Kristy asked. Her voice was tender like a Hallmark card. She loves to play Big Sister.

  No, I Just Don’t Know What You Mean, I said, staring at my crimson toes.

  I mean, what’s your plan for the summer? Like, my plan is to work at Jungle Unisex and pass my boards and complete my application for The Real World. What’s your plan? She gave me a sisterly smile. I shrugged.

  I Don’t Know, I said. The plan I’d just made, to find people intrigued by my essential loner nature, seemed both complicated and embarrassing. Like, my plan is to find a friend. God. Kristy shook her head impatiently, making the layers in her streaky brown-blond hair shift and tremble. Kristy cut her own hair, using an impressive configuration of mirrors. She wouldn’t let any of the girls in her cosmo shop do it because she said they smoked too much pot, but I bet she was paranoid.

  No, Trisha, she said intensely. You need a plan. You can’t sit here like this in your room, with those two out there all day. You’ll go crazy. She slapped the bottom of my feet. You need a job.

  Oh, Kristy, I groaned.

  You need to pay attention, she said, and if possible her voice got even more intense. You need to look for all the bits of your personality that are like Ma’s and you have to work against them or else you could end up just like her. And it worries me that you don’t have a job, Trish. You’re old enough. I’ve had one for years. You can’t lay around all summer like she does.

  Our mother doesn’t work. She hasn’t really ever, and her mom didn’t work either. It’s like a family tradition, not working. A few years back she’d actually freaked us all out by going down to Joe’s Club and managing to get hired, and for a minute that was really exciting. Joe’s Club sells basically everything you could ever need, and workers get a discount on the already cheap stuff. The possibility of such material riches almost made me anxious. We could get a DVD player. Cassette tapes in bulk, for hardly any money. Giant-sized bags of potato chips. Oh, the luxury of a giant new bag of chips. One you pull open with a pop, releasing the greasy-salty puff of potato chip air from inside. You can snack ’til you’re stuffed and not worry about leaving enough for the other hogs, there’s just so much. A pirate’s treasure, an endless magical bag of chips. The Joe’s Club thing opened up these wondrous possibilities, possibilities that were then slaughtered because of Ma’s back problems, how the job aggravated them. And the thing about back problems is doctors can’t even say if they’re real or not. I mean, if Ma’s lying they can’t prove it, but they also can’t give her the big Bad Back Award. It’s a weird gray area, the back. Ma brought hers back to the couch and that was the end of my Joe’s Club dreams. I did console myself with one of Ma’s new painkillers, which was sort of nice. Ma had to hike down to the welfare office, all doped up on them, and explain her failed attempt at rejoining society to her caseworker, getting back on track with the flow of paperwork and aid that came regularly through our door slot. I just lay in my bed, feeling heavy and wobbly like a pan full of Jell-O.

  All in all Ma doesn’t have it so bad. I mean, if I’m right, most people work all week to scavenge two brief days of the kind of living Ma has all the time. It’s like she’s on a permanent vacation. I have to admit, this lifestyle has a queasy pull for me, sort of like the last beer or two of the night — I know it’s not so good for me, but I want it anyway. Even the kind of wanting is similar, a sort of familiar and comfortable and even physical want, like I’ve already had it and I want it back, intimate like that. Like that lying-around life or bottle of beer was mine some time ago, was ripped away, and I’m just working to get it back. I know that Kristy’s right to ride her own ass so hard, and that she’s right about me too, but the conversation still shakes me up and makes me sort of frustrated. Because it’s just not that easy for me. I can’t just crash out into the world with a smile and a flip of hair and make shit happen. I don’t know how to be like Kristy, who seems to understand the crucial way to be if you want to get things in this world.

  Kristy, I Don’t Know How To get A Job. Nobody’s Going To Hire Me.

  Kristy’s eyeliner-wide eyes grew larger in alarm at my words. Well, to start, stop talking like that, she hissed her voice like it could put out the fire my negative sentence had sparked. You shouldn’t even think like that, Trish. But you really, really shouldn’t talk like that. She took a breath. Okay, say
this: people are waiting to hire me.

  Kristy, I groaned.

  Say it!

  People Are Waiting To Hire Me.

  That’s good, that’s good, she encouraged. It was nice of her to ignore my tone and the toss I gave my eyeballs. And really I think it’s great that Kristy has this tie to the cosmos, this ability to indulge her hocus-pocus emotions without feeling like a total goon, but I don’t have that power. Even though it was just Kristy, who has seen me naked and smelled my farts, I felt the way you do during those naked-in-class dreams that seem to be a universal human experience. Like she’d lodged a telescope into the parts of my person most hopelessly riddled with loserness. Say it again, Kristy beamed, but really like you believe it!

  People Are Waiting To Hire Me, I repeated. This time I made my voice louder and didn’t roll my eyes. I couldn’t help the tone, though. Tone is generally beyond my range of control.

  Trisha, my sister gasped. She looked like a soccer mom whose brat had just head-butted the ball to glory. Proud. We are going to get you a job!

  Six

  On the morning of the next day, at an hour I usually don’t wake up at without the requirement of school, Kristy was putting the finishing touches on her new project, me. My hair, which she was unable to handle without making intense squeals of grossed-outness because of the dirt, was weaved into some ladylike hair sculpture on the back of my head. It felt heavy and fragile, like a small animal was pinned to my scalp.

  I do believe that in your case, dirt might be working as a styling agent, Kristy mused.

  See? I said. If We Could Find A Way To Bottle My Funk We Could Sell It To Hair Salons And Be Rich.

  Kristy snorted, wiped my organic hair grease from her hands with a dishrag. Hold your breath, she ordered, and I sucked air into my lungs and squished my eyelids tight as suffocating clouds of Aqua Net shot from the giant can and engulfed my head. When she was done, Kristy tipped her own feathery head upside down and blasted a gust onto her own hairdo. Okay! she said proudly, her hair settling back around her face, somewhat stiffer. She plonked the can down on her dresser. Once I watched some girls in the bathroom at school take a lighter turned up high and spray a cloud of Aqua Net at it. It transformed into a swirling ball of fire, suspended for a moment in the air, then vanished. It was maybe the best thing I’d ever seen. I thought of it whenever I saw Kristy’s can, but am generally too scared of burning the house down to try it myself. From what the girls in the bathroom were saying, if you fucked up the fire could somehow be pulled back into the can and explode in your hand and then you’re dead or all burned up.

  I could feel what Kristy had done to me, and I didn’t want to see it. The makeup felt like a thin, cracking dryness on my face, like the time I used Ma’s clay mask, the way it slowly tightened itself over my skin, a shell. My eyelids felt heavy and fragile and my lips felt smeary. Miniature chandeliers of earrings swayed against my neck. If I looked down I could see my boobs, a part of my body I generally like to pretend does not exist. There they were, curving out from the anxiously low-cut and fluttery fuchsia top Kristy had ordered me to put on. The boobs looked, from my rather aerial point of view, like someone else’s boobage. I resisted the urge to run my fingers over the fleshy domes, just to feel the touch and understand that they were mine. I felt disoriented and flushed. Maybe all the hair spray had clogged the flow of oxygen to my brain. I slid off the stool I’d been perched on and picked awkwardly at my bottom half — underwear wedged into my crack and a skirt composed of ruffles that barely covered my wedgie. Air pooled and streamed around my excessively bare legs. It felt like an awful lot of exposed skin. Kristy’s pink flip-flops, made of a thicker cut of foam than my regular flops, the straps dotted with shiny circles, were on my feet. I looked at my toenails. They had started all of this, hadn’t they. They had seen it coming.

  Woo-hoo! Donnie cackled in the doorway. He slapped his hairy thigh, making the stringy fringe of his cutoffs waggle. His grody feet were bare and I imagined he was trailing evil foot problems across our linoleum, shedding general ill-foot health along his way. A transformation! he continued. Kristy, you gotta film that! You gotta do a before-and-after. You gotta put that on your resume!

  Kristy, who like me does her best to treat Donnie with consistent scorn and disdain, allowed herself a little smile, a quick bask in Donnie’s compliment. You’re right, she bobbed her head and snatched at the video camera, flicked the screen open, and hit the button to get it rolling. She scanned me with it, from the tips of my flops to the shellacked braidwork crowning my head. I stared at the camera accusingly, contemplated flipping her off, but instead said People Are Waiting To Hire Me, in a voice dead people would use if dead people spoke.

  Donnie blinked. You’re getting a job?

  Yes! Kristy snapped.

  Well, that’s great! he enthused. It’d be good to get some more money rolling in around here. More money for the bills and the groceries. Kristy glared at him and my stomach sank a little bit, a hot-air balloon that got nipped by a bird and was slowly descending to earth. The idea of having money of my own had begun to grow on me. I’d found myself sliding into quickie daydreams: my own six-pack chilling in the fridge, new flip-flops, maybe a pair of terry cloth wristbands. The thought of having to subsidize Donnie’s ham salad and Ma’s television killed it, gave me a trapped and futile feeling. I thought about how Ma had broken it down for me a while back, how when you work, the government took a bit and then, I don’t know, some other part of the government took another little bit, and then you’ve got your bills and whatever and soon there’s nothing left. It seemed like this was happening already. Already Donnie had his sights on my wages and nobody’d even hired me yet.

  Can we take the car? Kristy asked. Donnie dug into the pocket of his cutoffs for the ring of dangling keys. He tossed them to Kristy with a quick, sharp nod. God, he thinks he’s so cool, it’s really embarrassing. Like, you’re embarrassed for him. He feels no embarrassment, you feel all of it. How’s that for fair? But I guess that’s just one more way losers like Donnie make the world a lousy place for the rest of us.

  Seven

  Back in Donnie’s Maverick we cruised along in the heat. Kristy did scientific calculations regarding wind. Like, would the air blasting in the rolled-down window batter the shape and sleekness out of my carefully sculpted hairdo? Alternately, if we kept the window cranked up tight, would the simmering heat melt the hair pile into a sticky, chemical hairball? We compromised by pulling the window down just a tad, just enough to breathe, to stir the ashes in the Maverick’s ashtray — a busted ashtray, permanently jammed out and piled high with butts and their charred dust. It was so humid inside the car that we fanned the air in front of us, which was better than having the wind gusting in and blowing shit around, causing us to inhale Donnie’s old cigarette ashes. Terrible stuff involving cigarette ash has happened in the Maverick. One time I was riding in the back and Donnie was smoking like he always does — the car was his safe space for smoking; Ma wouldn’t let him do it in the house ’cause of her self-diagnosed emphysema — and he flicked the edge of his butt out the cracked-down window and whoompf, a chunk of ash soared into the backseat and, seriously, right into my mouth. It was hot and it was not soft and powdery like I imagined an ash to be. It was sort of hard and crunchy. I spit as much of it from my mouth as fast as I could, but some of it had just stuck wetly to the inside of my cheek, had dissolved or something, and ugh, it was the most disgusting thing ever to happen to me. My mouth felt burnt and filthy afterward. Thankfully I was in the backseat by myself and nobody saw this humiliation.

  Kristy parked the car expertly in a yellow-lined slot in the mall parking lot. We climbed out and examined each other. You Have Ash On Your Shoulder, I informed her, and dusted off the bunched, sky blue cotton of her T-shirt. She squinted her eyes at the top of my head.

  Oh no, she murmured. She moved toward me, her heavily glossed lips puckering into a blowhole. She started huffing fruity-scented
puffs onto my head, just up from my forehead. The hair there was pulled tight in a side part, secured with vicious bobby pins, creating a sleek plain for the updo to erupt from. Kristy blew and blew onto this one spot on my head, the blows becoming increasing hard and focused until it felt like a form of torture and her face turned a tomatoey red.

  You’re Going To Hyperventilate! I whined. What Is It?

  It’s a big ash, it’s really stuck in the hair, it’s stuck in the spray.

  Just Leave It, I said. I was already exhausted. I wanted to go home and get out of this outfit. The air was climbing up my bare legs and spiraling around my nude arms, skimming my exposed cleavage. The sun was all over me and I could feel it flushing and stinging my sensitive Irish skin. Kristy shook her head firmly. She’s like the only perfectionist in the history of our family. The whole family, the ancestors, all the way back to Ireland. She’s a mutation, a genetic aberration.

  No, Trisha, you don’t go out to get a job with your head looking like an ashtray. Jesus. Kristy started to do that gross thing that mothers do, though our mother never did it ’cause she was too freaked out about germs. She licked her finger and instead of rubbing a bit of smudge off my cheek she got her finger really lubed up with a whole bunch of spit and brought the shining, slimy thing down on my head. Her face was all crinkled, like it hurt her to do it to me. I’m so sorry, she genuinely apologized. I could feel the giant wet drip of her spit plopped onto my head, doing its best to dissolve the ash trapped in my hairdo. This was amazing. This was not a great start to my career in being an employee. If we had belonged to some ancient religion that respected omens I have no doubt we would have known to turn back right then, to clamber into the ashmobile and zoom back back home, perhaps stopping at a packy along the way and persuading an adult with loose morals to buy us a four-pack of weekday wine coolers. Here’s where Kristy’s a hypocrite: she gets all up on my ass about beer, but she just loves wine coolers and Zimas.