Gray
Almost all the tools I use to exude my colors are gray—bleak, cloudy, gray-sky gray—which is the color I feel always unless I allow the others to escape. Here’s a lesson from basic psychology. Let’s say something bad happens to you. You can’t stop the bad thing from happening, because you’re too little, or whatever. You roll up into a ball like a gray stone and let the bad thing happen to you. It’s an ideal solution, because stones feel nothing. (There’s a Simon and Garfunkel song all about this.) But, new problem: How does one become human again after being a stone?
Good Old Days
Once upon a time, I had the luxury of using whatever tools were at hand. Still, one had to be secretive. In the high school bathroom, I took a cheap pink plastic razor, the disposable kind you buy in a six-pack, and smashed it apart with the heel of my sneaker so little plastic pieces went pinging all over the beige tiled floors and the blue stall doors. I was trying to get the blade out, but it was, like, glued in there, and I spent almost all of fifth-period Spanish class standing in a stall trying to peel that silver blade out of the pink plastic head, getting my fingers all bloody in the process, which was not the objective, but not a major problem either. I hope these razor manufacturers have won some sort of prize for durable construction. When the blade was finally free (a little mangled with pink chunks still stuck to it), I pushed it into my forearm one, two, ten times, quick slits, just an inch or two long, gaping like mouths shouting or singing, spitting up blood in red and blue. The feelings that had been trapped under my skin whooshed out of me, dripping down my arm, mixing together in a nice, moody dark purple, like a nightshade vegetable.
Things People Have Taken Away
Razors, knives, and scissors, of course, but also my silver stud earrings in the shape of little skulls, my gray tweezers and my matching nail clippers, my green emery board nail file (but why?), my Tic Tac container of black bobby pins, my brown woven belt with the silver buckle, my pink rabbit’s foot, the lime-green shoelaces from my sneakers, my fluorescent plastic CD cases, even the white points of my fingernails, cut with my own nail clippers into a black plastic trash can under some woman’s desk. They have also taken away the cutlery and have replaced it with bendy white plastic utensils. The plastic knife has a useless serrated edge that just mushes into things, leaving indents in the white bread, which looks like a sad cloud and tastes like air.
Yellow
There is something that feels like an eel when it swims around in my mouth, bony but soft. The boys like this very much, when I let their eels swim around in my mouth. God, do boys exude their own colors at these times! And so liberally too in so many shades of yellow! It’s such a beautiful thing, to find people who know exactly how they feel. It’ll really wear out the knees of a gal’s jeans, especially on those hard-tiled high school bathroom floors.
If there were a boy in front of me right now, I would probably glance down at the ground because I am shy, but if he were in front of me and it was dark, or if I just closed my eyes and let myself float away a little, I would give him whatever he wanted, and I would hope that he would turn electric yellow inside of himself. I would very much hope that whatever insides he wanted outside of himself would come right out.
What Do You Want?
Absurd, but it’s the question this guy keeps asking me, over and over, leaning toward me as if he expects me to tell him an important secret, his black desk chair squeaking while I sit across from him on the hard green vinyl upholstery of this ugly wooden chair. “I don’t know,” I keep saying. There is a whole day outside this guy’s window that I don’t know anything about except for a tiny blob of cloud and an arthritic branch with a few green leaves fluttering off of it. This guy, he has thick black glasses that are too big for his head and slip down his nose until he manages to push them up at the very last second. He pushes them with his index finger, as if he is mocking nerds. He seems to be cultivating an expression of stern boredom, and while I would be very happy to help him feel a little yellow inside of himself, he doesn’t seem amenable. Instead, he wants to know what makes me feel a little yellow inside of myself. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” I keep saying. Jesus Christ, one of us says. Just make up an answer, he tells me. “Cutlery,” I say.
Concentrate
I am humming tunes from grade school that I didn’t even remember I remembered. I hum softly, and just the thinnest wisp of a note echoes off the tiled floor, the plain walls, returning to my ears so I hear it again:
People are dying, children are crying.
Concentrate! Concentrate!
Let the blood run down.
Let the blood run down
and the shivers run up.
We would act out each part, tickling our fingers down each other’s backs to show the blood running down, and then wiggling them up for shivers. We were only children, and yet we were singing such awful songs! Who taught them to us? And how were we to know what we were being taught?
Rainbows
A rainbow is the gill of the sky. The terrible gray cloudy sadness of a rainy day has been slit right open to reveal the colors that have been hiding under there all along. When the sky is sad, it’s because it’s so far away from everything that’s happening, but it knows exactly what’s going on and can’t do a thing about it.
Fun! Fact
A rainbow doesn’t really have bands; this is a limit of human vision. Likewise, there aren’t words for every feeling; this is a limit of human vocabulary. It’s difficult to understand things you can neither see nor name.
Blue
See these slicers, between my fingers? “Taste the rainbow!” the TV in the rec room was exclaiming again and again. I don’t know how anyone concentrates with that thing on. I was trying to read a book, a little Dover paperback of Emily Dickinson poems with pages thin as newspaper, the kind where when you touch the words your fingers come away dirty. For every poem I finished reading, I congratulated myself by rubbing the crack between my fingers swiftly along the page’s bottom edge as I turned it. Soon the pages I’d turned were wet with sad blue blood, and the ones I hadn’t were still dreary and dry, and then I just started to turn the pages—slit, slit, slit!—and the words didn’t matter at all.
Other Things People Have Taken Away
The art paper, the books.
Ocean Life
When I can’t make gills it’s like I’m living underwater but can’t really breathe. What I mean is, the picture is hazy and I feel kind of nauseous, like I’m floating around in slow motion, blug blug, like I’ve been stone-weighted and sunk down to the bottom of something, so I’m half consciously swaying back and forth along the sand with the currents.
People can get pretty angry when they discover I’ve discovered a new way to gill myself up, but these are the kinds of people that don’t need gills to know what they’re feeling, and thus they shouldn’t have the authority to take something so useful away from those of us who do.
Things People Cannot Take Away
My teeth, edges, corners: nightstand corners, bed corners, wall corners. When I bang up against them, I can see a little bit of color pool there under my skin. Not as satisfying as a gill, but it still helps me breathe.
No More Lies
Life is like singing a few songs over and over that you learned when you were young that you can’t stop singing.
This one, for example:
Ask me no more questions
Tell me no more lies
The boys are in the bathrooms
opening their—
Flies are in the meadow,
Bees are in the park
The boys and the girls
are kissing in the
d-a-r-k, d-a-r-k,
dark, dark, dark!
D-a-r-k
Seriously, ask me no more questions. That one’s for Mr. Thick Black Glasses, who wants to know all about the dark, dark, dark. Problem: the things that happen in the dark, they’re all shades of
gray. When I can’t see the colors, I don’t know what I feel, and when I don’t know what I feel, I start to float away. This isn’t just about me: every goddamn girl in this place knows the complications that can occur in the d-a-r-k, d-a-r-k, dark, dark, dark.
Ocean Life II
If enough terrible things happen to me, I will turn into an iridescent fish, and I will be thankful for it. It will be better than being human, because I’ll be silver-gray as well as every other shining, shimmering color. And I’ll have gills! I’ll be very slippery, yes, but also soft and very quick. My brain will be tiny and I’ll act by instinct alone.
Red
This one on my thigh? As you can see, it has been stitched up, and that feeling was stitched right back up inside of me, like a pillow pressing up against my face so I can’t breathe. I did it with a paper clip I found in the hallway. It had shone up at me from the tiled floor with a dot of light like the glint in someone’s eye. Aha! I thought. I bent at the waist as if I was touching my toes, but I picked up that paper clip instead, feeling the cool, curved metal between my forefinger and thumb. Later, in the d-a-r-k, dark, dark, dark, I unbent the paper clip and pressed the sharp tip hard against my inner thigh. Oh that feeling! There is nothing that can compare to letting your insides outside of you! Even in the night, I could sense that the color of my blood was bright red, like a fresh tomato on a very green farm. How could I have known how angry I was until I saw it for myself? My anger felt healthy, meditative. I pulled the gill apart, pressing my fingers into the open cut, letting the warm sting of pain flow through me.
Creative Vision
Imagine this: a rainbow of cuts on my forearm, the arching gills curving at my wrist, each one dripping a different color, the colors cascading into one another, rolling down my arm, pooling in the elbow-bend nook of my arm, and then spilling over the edges, as when tears fall into your ears as you lie in bed crying. Except when the tears fall into your ears, they feel foreign, they feel like someone else’s tears. These tears will feel like they’re mine.
What will happen next? It’s hard to say, but I think perhaps all of these gills will unite in a chorus of song. The song will be so magnificent and arresting that it will replace the memories of all of the songs I have ever heard sung, and it will be the new song I will hum to myself for the rest of my life.
First Aid
I know people think I’m crazy, but I don’t care. I’ve saved myself hundreds of times just like this. And let me ask you: how many times have you saved yourself with just a few basic cuts?
Human Bonding
It was the semester I snorted coke off a toilet, smoked weed in an alley with a homeless guy named Caesar, and was black-eyed by some girl on the street at 2 a.m., somebody’s girlfriend. It was the semester I tripped up the splintering steps of my apartment complex and lay there in my own drool/vomit until morning, when a neighbor stepped on my hand, a story that wouldn’t be worth telling except that the sole of his shoe said SUSEJ, so that he could leave Jesus prints in the sand or wherever he was, like on my hand, where he left one in a diagonal, purple bruise. When I saw him later in the hall I made sure my hand faced forward so he could see what he’d done, but he just looked down at it with a stony expression and then back into my eyes, one of which was greenish purple and as big as an egg. I figured he viewed the Jesus print as some kind of sign from God, and maybe it was.
“Sorry,” I said because I was in his way, though I didn’t move to get out of it.
“You’re a girl?” he asked, surprised, because I have this pompadour hair and a James Dean wardrobe, but my voice is unmistakable. He looked at me for a minute like I was a puppy he’d discovered in a garbage can.
It was also my last semester because I stopped going to the class I needed in order to graduate, and I didn’t feel like retaking it. But before all of that, it was the semester I met Wendy.
I first saw her in a crowded lecture hall, her golden curls shining from the sea of dull hair, a thin strip of pure white light hitting her head so that it looked like she was wearing a headband. Her dress bloomed with violets. I sat down next to her, blocking the sun, and looked over her arm at the bubbly, printed words at the top of the first page of a new notebook, the date and the day’s topic (“Introduction”). Each letter was so defined, so singular, it seemed as if it had its own personality. Seeing them, I felt like a child with my face pressed up against the cool glass of a high-rise city window watching a bright, happy parade go by.
The class, which fulfilled some distribution requirement everyone else had apparently knocked off freshman year, met at an unfortunate 9:00 a.m., MWF.
“This is Human Bonding,” the professor said, extending two hands out over the lectern as if we ourselves were the topic of the class, “but if you came here thinking this class was about sex, then you were more than half mistaken.”
This was only my first more-than-half mistake. My second was asking Wendy to lend me a pen, or maybe that was my third, and my second was sitting next to her in the first place. When I asked to borrow a pen, Wendy, whose name I had yet to learn, nodded without a word, which surprised me. I had expected that squint-eyed scrutiny you often get from the kind of girl who writes down the date in her notebook—like the kind of person who’s forgotten a pen is also the kind of person who won’t return it. Wendy leaned over her backpack and pulled out a pencil case featuring Hello Kitty’s disembodied and mouthless head. She extracted four pens and laid them out on my desk, each one a different color.
“I’m not ambi-ambidextrous,” I said, and she laughed even though the joke was dumb.
“I thought you might have a preference,” she said. A preference! In pen color! I chose the pink one, and watched to see if this would tickle her, and it did, I could tell by her smile. Her smile was wide and forgiving, with deep dimples, but when she started taking notes, her mouth became small and her lips jutted out in a gently pouting kiss.
I copied the date and topic from her notebook on a crumpled piece of paper I’d found in my pocket. I wrote my name at the top, as an afterthought, “CHRIS,” in all caps, as if it mattered if I lost this piece of paper, as if someone could somehow return it to me if I did. Taking notes was a particularly fruitless endeavor—my penmanship was terrible; even I could hardly decipher it. In the whole mess of moving in with my grandparents after my mom passed, I missed the unit on cursive, and now I was too lazy to either learn it or pick up my pen between letters, so my handwriting looked like the EKG squiggle of someone near death.
Wendy had already written down four or five lines of notes, bullet-pointed, including things I already knew wouldn’t be a problem for her (“Late homework = ZERO”). I didn’t feel like copying them, I just watched her arm as it moved back and forth so diligently across the page. That arm was pale white, almost glowing, like a star.
That semester, I woke up in many different beds and in many different conditions, but I would always arrive at class MWF relatively on time. Headached and hungover as I often was, I liked having a destination other than my stuffy apartment, which had no furniture save an air bed and a microwave and made me feel like a squatter in my own life. Wendy was already in class, always, settled into her seat completely, notebook page dated, pens spread across my little beige flip-up desk for the choosing. She was my tour guide through the syllabus (“Short answers due Wednesday,” she’d remind me as we filed out of the lecture hall), my summarizer of readings. Hers was the notebook I’d look to after I’d accidentally fallen asleep or gotten lost in a daydream.
Wendy was different from the women I usually woke up next to. She was fresh and balanced—not chipper per se, but she seemed like she slept eight hours each night and had milk and cereal for breakfast with slices of banana cut on top.
One morning, her dress looked like a garden, and the blue and purple flowers seemed to spring from her very flesh. After my usual hmming bit over which pen to choose, I asked Wendy how old she was. Class hadn’t started yet and students were s
till shuffling in around us. I don’t even know why I asked—I already knew she was a freshman. I had this weird half idea that she might be one of those kids who skipped high school and went straight to college.
She was eighteen, as she should have been. “Is it because of this?” she asked, holding up her pink pencil case and looking concerned. Hello Kitty stared at me with that expressionless face, just two black oval eyes that you could pretend meant anything you wanted.
“No,” I said, waving it away, but that wasn’t entirely true. Of course it wasn’t just the pencil case; it was the whole thing, her ambiance, the floral dresses and the dimples and the way she smiled. I knew things just by looking at her, the way, when people saw me, they knew instantly that I was a fuckup.
I wanted to tell Wendy that she should like what she liked, that not pretending to be the same as everyone else was what made her more interesting than these people all around us. Case in point were two girls a row in front of us with orange-brown spray tans and hair solidified with so much product that it practically clinked as they turned their heads, which they often did at the same exact moment.
Girls of a Certain Age Page 13