“A spoon has many lovers. Baptized in hot water each day, it rises from the soap bubbles, purified.”
Strangers often assume our heroine is fourteen or fifteen. They see her petite frame and stick figure limbs, her small, pale face, her warmly receptive brown eyes, her round cheeks and her upturned nose sprinkled with freckles, and they address her as though she is a child. When corrected, they apologize and assure her that she will be happy when she is older, that she will look twenty when she is thirty, but our heroine knows they are wrong. She is certain she will look like a little girl until the day she dies. And since she looks so much like a little girl, people treat her like a little girl—even people who know her—even her own parents! And now she is so accustomed to this treatment, she often forgets to be an adult, forgets that she can drive and vote and make her own doctor appointments.
The pool is so blue she can almost taste it, and it tastes like a blue popsicle, like summer. It is summer, but not the summer of chlorine and sunburn and mosquito bites and melting stickiness and September ever looming. If it were, she would go to camp and dance with a boy and tremble when he touched her waist and wait to be kissed for the first time. She will always eat popsicles, she will probably continue to suffer from sunburn and mosquito bites and the sting of chlorine in her eyes, but for the first time in her life, looming September no longer requires a return to the comforting confines of academia.
After years of avoiding the future, our heroine is finally forced to make an attempt at adulthood. She envisions her adult self living in a sophisticated apartment in the city, writing important and provocative literature, but first she needs to determine whether she is capable of writing anything important or provocative—or at least capable of writing anything that might sell, and therefore maintain her imagined urban lifestyle. Our heroine’s parents, eager to assist their daughter in her silly dreams of literary significance, have agreed to continue supporting her for the duration of the summer. She will spend the next few months writing, or attempting to write. Instead of a sophisticated city apartment, however, she has settled for a small house in the suburbs, where she lives with three other girls: the Bitch, the Slut, and the Virgin. “Housemates” sounds cold, so she calls them her friends.
The house is modest, but just large enough for each girl to have her own bedroom. Our heroine loves the lemony, buttery color of the painted wooden siding and the stark white trim, which give the house a sunny air and help it to stand out against the otherwise identical houses on either side—one a muted gray-blue and the other a rusty beige. The house is old and a bit shabby, the cheerful yellow paint is chipping, but there is a real white picket fence and a row of rosebushes right up alongside the sidewalk. There are three squatty pine trees scattered in the backyard, and a tall oak tree in the front. It is a very house-like house, like a toy, or a perfect idea of the notion of “house.” It strikes our heroine as quaint and romantic, so far as possible in this sterile suburban setting.
She looks up from the sink to see the Slut strut by, towel swinging, string bikini clinging. The Slut is not beautiful but she is very tan. Her already oiled skin gleams invitingly, tempting the sun. There is something vulgar in the way she walks, the way she slinks and sways across the lawn. The younger girls glare, threatened by the Slut’s superior command of lip-gloss and eyeliner, as she stretches herself out on a pool chair. Carrying her curves with seductive ease, skillful in the art of presentation, she works hard to construct a more appealing version of herself. Her wavy caramel hair shimmers with golden highlights, her stomach is perfectly flat, her legs are toned, her fingernails are long and always polished. But there is an absence somewhere in her face, a lack of sensitivity that cannot be painted on.
The phone rings and our heroine answers reluctantly, knowing it is not for her. She opens the window and tosses the phone outside, where the Virgin is watering the daisies and daffodils she has planted in a neat line against the front of the house.
“You haven’t a mouth, only lips. And that is why I despise you,” she murmurs, but the Virgin does not hear.
The Virgin is kind and honest, with a face like a Disney princess, her purity almost tangible. Her features are soft and willing, almost too perfect. But she is boring. And she is dumb. And yet swarms of admirers find her fascinating. They gaze longingly into her watery blue eyes and yearn for them to widen with exhilaration. Yards of white lace would fall to the floor, revealing a smooth expanse of porcelain skin, and one lucky pioneer would run his fingers through her honeyed locks of pure silk, so long they reach the demure indentation at the small of her spotless back. Her shallow breaths would quicken and her pliable body would surrender to the inevitable.
Our heroine plunges her hands into scalding, soapy water. She lost her virginity at seventeen, a perfectly average and appropriate age. She does not regret it. But she throbs with a confusion of jealousy and begrudging admiration as she stares out the window, acknowledging the Virgin’s simple appeal.
The Mailman arrives, reading their love letters and driving ever so slowly over the rosebushes. After drying the last of the dishes she wipes her hands on her jeans and turns to him for an embrace. His bear hug lifts her in the air and she yelps, “Harder! Oh, please, harder,” until every vertebra in her spine cracks in rapid succession, loud and satisfying, like an expertly shuffled deck of cards.
Her neck and her jaw and her knees and her toes and her ankles and her elbows and especially her back almost always ache and it is unbearable sometimes but she does not know why. As a child she lay awake at night, stretching and moaning, and her mother told her they were growing pains. But she is twenty-two and clearly through growing and the pain continues. The Mailman calls her Rice Krispies because she snaps and crackles and pops, and he tells her to go to a chiropractor but she never does.
The Bitch strides into the kitchen, angry at the Mailman for the damaged rosebushes. Everything about the Bitch is pointy. Sleek, impossibly shiny black hair cascades on either side of her skinny face, ending with the slightest flip at her collarbone. She is frightening and gorgeous, or frighteningly gorgeous. She is naturally thin, but without muscle, the type of thin that implies a strict diet of cigarettes. She has tawny skin and a vaguely exotic implication in her coloring, like a distant descendant of Cleopatra. With green eyes that snap threateningly and those high cheekbones and her strong, square jaw, she has the bone structure of a supermodel, if she were only two or three inches taller. Even without those extra few inches, she towers over our heroine. She curves open her narrow red mouth and angry red words come out. If the Virgin is all lips and no mouth, the Bitch is all mouth and no lips. But the Virgin is quietly resurrecting the flattened flowers. When the Bitch sees this, she leaves the kitchen with a shrug of her angular shoulders. The Mailman makes an apologetic face.
“She eats one cup of moisturizing lotion every day in the hopes that her insides will soften. So far, no success.” Our heroine squeezes his hand reassuringly, but the Mailman does not seem to appreciate her wit. He has more letters to deliver, so he kisses her and drives away.
1 comments:
I love this! Such imagery, it is at the same time new and instantly recognizable as the competition that has been going on between women since the beginning of time.
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