by Ella Schmidt
I was practicing softness and gentleness in the bathroom mirror, waiting for shame to take hold and make use of me. Jamie called again to allege that I had, in the span of two years, incurred a sixty-dollar fine in his name for failing to return A Dictionary of Color Combinations to the Pulaski library.
I’d been on my knees with a man in the upstairs walkway of a motor inn, making a video on his phone while my friends slept on the other side of the door. We got a room in Branson after watching the horse stunts at Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede Dinner Attraction. It wasn’t shame I noticed when I stood up, but a splinter lodged in my palm; gusts of cold air from the Ozark highlands on what they were calling the first day of spring; the weight of my bladder; crickets singing for a mate. I walked into the room of my sleeping friends, the relief of motel carpet on my feet, the relief of sex being over, of the privacy that returned when our bodies came apart. I felt around for the bathroom light. The mirror was flecked with soap scum and a rim of black rust. I wiped it down pointlessly with a wet cloth, causing streaks to form as it dried. This new composition warped my features, making softness and gentleness difficult to appraise.
Often, in scenes like these, I begin to admire how routine it is, how similar one encounter is to another, how impersonal my desire turns out to be. These men, their boring jobs and long bodies, effete waifish ones or solid, paternal forms. The woman begs and is sated, I think: the partner is incidental. But just as often, I look at the nape of a man’s neck, his dear brown head while he is sleeping, and I need him particularly and completely; I picture us in the morning, when we will put on our clothes to walk the streets like humans and get into the cars that take us apart, and my heart just lies down, a stone. The truth of my body is that it was made for this work. It is soft and small, it yields: rape me. Still, it is a body, hysterical for holding someone.
I told Jamie I would drive back to Pulaski to return the book in exchange for some of the oxycodone he’d stowed away after his girlfriend got her boobs done. In the background, I could hear the girlfriend playing music and sing-speaking the lyrics in the listless way a dancer marks her routine.
“Am I on speaker?”
“No,” Jamie said. “Where are you? Why are you whispering?”
I’d been to a few of their shows. The music was loud, inconsequent, not pretty. Not
supposed to be pretty. Post-post-ironic—a girl in boyshorts with Baby rhinestoned on the ass, my brother in an I Heart NY t-shirt from a kiosk in Times Square. They had no rhythmic talent, if “talent” is something innate to a person, as opposed to skill, which is something learned. They did not have that either. They wrote an original song about Bonnie and Clyde, but before it can be about that, Jamie explained to me, you must picture a pretty woman getting on the nerves of a guy with a gun. Picture her giving him road head. Picture them in love. Picture history as we imagine it: a payphone, bad sex, churchgoing parents, a smoking section. Picture Sisyphus happy, picture our hands groping for meaning in the dark. Jamie was born in 2001.
Outside the first signs of daylight fell. This falling distorted my sense of place and natural law, since isn’t it that daylight is supposed to come up, and darkness to descend—or is it only our language causing things to move a certain way, making the phases of the moon coincide with the movement of the tides and menstruation. I put the question to Jamie, who grew up in a house of girls and had a mind for important matters like these. On the first day, he said, God made language, and language made the rest.
Jamie went to college, but he still believes in God and has a soapbox affection for America, its songs and wars. He is not my brother as much as he is a man I’ve met before; he doesn’t let me understand him and I’m fine with that. I can remember a time I felt close to him, playing and bathing and getting slapped, when we were children crying out like bad art to be loved. We turned the same ruddy pink in the sun, and our faces shared a certain roundness until Jamie started taking T and his body got sharper or harder, the tenor of his jaw becoming pronounced. He spent time on the internet learning about masculinity from incel-types, whose pathological attention to structural aesthetics he credits with easing his transition. He used to talk about joining the army, but that was only a symptom of violence, which is a symptom of something else. The day he got his license, he took me up to the 3-I Unit at Lake DePue for waterfowl hunting, and I recoiled when he made me look at what I’d shot. I think he thought he was being gentle, as tender to me as I tried to be to him. But he always wanted a good fight of four fists. I wanted to be a movie star. Our adult lives are, like most adult lives, loose comedic adaptations of the lives we wanted as children. He goes to college in a city where everyone takes him at his word for what he is. He attracts pretty girls, rich liberal urbanites with a type. They leave when they discover that his Midwestern way of being in the world—his love of the military, a Denny’s on the side of the highway, cold Protestant butter in the fridge—is not ironic, but an earnest case of the modern man. He makes art and shoots ducks upstate on weekends; I sell softcore porn on the internet.
Behind paywalls and graphic content warnings, the body concedes. A small viewership leaves their requests—a household tool, a certain texture, a landline, the carpet, cutting my hair—and I incorporate their feedback into the next work. I do not know the names or ages of my audience, the kinds of clothes they wear, the money they make, the positions they take for sleep.
Or how they watch me: if they sit behind desktop computers in basement cubicles, keeping me as an open tab while they write code and ride the coattails of the dotcom boom into the sunset; or if they lay in bed with their phones while a lover sleeps beside them; or if they show me to the lover, trying to explain this texture, this object inserted into the body of this woman as—not a porn addiction the woman turns for profit—but as the final, terminal stage of human need.
They are jock-bodied boys, tired old guys, the men in between. Against the standards my audience sets for praise and attention, my friends in the material world begin to seem dull and understimulating. Who among them would understand, for example, that I don’t envy their graduate school stipends, their contributions to the literature on late-stage capitalism and the compromising effects of plastic surgery on the ability of the Real Housewives to empathize and emote? That my sole and driving vision for my future was only ever to be beautiful, beauty being life’s one admirable and worthwhile trick? To be beautiful in the way of the wet-lipped stars on TV; in the way of the dogwood that blooms without company or cause against my bedroom window each spring? To be beautiful in the way of breasts; to drape small gold crucifixes between them? To loiter where girls are pretty and stupid under strip mall awnings and movie marquees, lying about their ages, pulling smoke from their lips? That I can only be certain I am a woman by invoking something primal; that I prefer beauty to intellectual inquiry or craft; that I want to watch women get into the cars of bad men in the movies, and men with tempers as thin as the stockings of the women by the road?
“Can you get it done today?” Jamie pressed.
“I’ll Venmo you. How much?” Pulaski was a long drive, and I was still uneasy about the new light, reacting to itself in movements like the movements of the high arts.
“Just return it.” He was not yelling, as I would often claim.
In the mornings of our childhood, we commuted into town together, making up stories of the other lives on the bus, and he stayed on past his stop to see me all the way to the girls’ school without danger. His vigilance made me hostile to the world without him, where I would be molested and, I assumed, taken to a storage unit in the country to be killed. I had seen the faces of missing kids on benches and telephone poles; I had seen Law & Order: SVU when my mom fell asleep in front of the TV. I knew what men did and that they were everywhere. I understood, I thought, why Jamie might want to become one. When school let out, I walked on the side of a highway overpass from Saint Mary’s of the Assumption toward the co-ed school, where he was waiting with a Diet Coke from the Phillips 66 on the corner. Some afternoons I was slow, waiting with the other girls in the schoolyard for the parents and nannies to arrive. You don’t know time until it is compressed into a moment and your brother is angry; the whole world is a bus and the bus gets away.
“Can’t you tell them I lost it?”
“You lost it?”
“I’d need time to look,” I said.
I knew where I kept A Dictionary of Color Combinations. I’d thought of it often in those
years. It was in an unmarked box in a mop closet at my mom’s house in Pulaski, not five miles from my apartment.
“Fine,” Jamie said, and he ended the call. Those three awful beeps and the silence that followed, they reminded me I was alone and would remain so; I had never left southern Illinois and never would. It is almost too humiliating to withstand, when another person hangs up first.
I thought it would be useful to my pursuit of becoming a more discerning person. There are 348 colors named in A Dictionary of Color Combinations, as obvious as Antwerp blue or just orange, and as elusive as vinaceous tawny, fawn, and vistoris lake. You recognize everything, and everything has a name: the St. Louis tarmac, loud cities dotting the coasts, tabloids, the pugilist at rest. Hay’s russet, slate, eosin pink, grenadine. Because the colors were named in Japanese, the English reader gets an imperfect translation passed through many hands. Changes to the process of color printing, zinc plates replacing lithographic stones, transliterated in the printheads of modern CMYK machines, have further undermined the integrity of Sanzo Wada’s original colors. The text is often taught in fashion schools, or cited recreationally by the very fashionable, who have expert eyes and honed palates. And you, the rest of you, hurry toward the end of this life with your small and illiterate sensory faculties, and you expect me to believe that you are happy.
At the end of his life, our grandfather was blind, the irises of his eyes uselessly skimming the wet surface, that alarming blue, trembling like moons on water. When we wanted to play spoons, he gathered up the cards and tapped them square; Jamie dealt and I whispered to him the numbers and colors of his hand. He kept birds—the white-crowned sparrow, the lesser goldfinch—in a cedar shed in the backyard. He brought them water and birdseed and installed screen doors for sunlight but did not set them free. They were still there when he died, or some iteration of them, generations on. Their domesticity had no end, no humane solution but a mercy kill. That’s how Jamie explained it when the birds all turned up dead on the floor of the cedar shed, matted and limp, heavy as black plums that ripened and fell from the branch.
When he finally died, the paramedics carried him out in a flag. He’d spent the first third of his lifetime protesting the draft, and the second distributing agitprop for the Communist Party. If he believed in the Party, it was because he believed in the brotherhood of man, not unlike an army, and the release of men from the labor that shortened and worsened their lives. In the final third, when Jamie and I knew him, he was sick with emphysema, and it frightened us to hear him talk. These are the stories we tell about the dead: a perfect three-act life.
Nobody thought he would have wanted to be carried out in the American flag, but everyone let it happen, and some of the neighbors came out onto their stoops to watch. One man removed his cap as though paying tribute to a casualty of war, which in some way he was. It does not take much for children to get patriotic, and even the adults who knew better could not resist a spectacle like that. Something changed in Jamie then, or some existing thing was confirmed.
In the parking lot under the motel walkway, a pair of children played cowboys and Indians, loading finger guns at each other while the dad packed up the minivan for another day of driving. Their sister leaned against the car, magnificent and cruel, taking pictures of herself. Beside me, a guy my age exhaled plumes of electric vapor through his nose. One brother lunged at the smaller one, who evaded capture, darting quick and low. How Jamie got the birds in his hands I do not know. I imagine it took many tries, though he would have gotten better at it as he went, learning their movements, learning to twist the neck with care and efficiency. It was not the killing but the looking and taking aim that reassured the hunter of his enormity. Finding the bird on still water, getting in position and gearing up to shoot.
I looked at the guy my age, whom I suspected of some ridiculous activity like contemplating nature or the nature of man, but he was watching the boys too, suppressing a smile.
My mother’s house was a prediction of end times, governments conspiring, nuclear blasts. There were no photographs, no proof of life anywhere but in the kitchen, where a single dirty spoon rested in the sink and a collage of Virgo horoscopes cut from newspapers populated the fridge. The most legible instructed the reader to call her power back to her: The new moon marks a new chapter in your awakening. You are reborn as who you were always meant to be: the most embodied version of yourself. The most embodied version—could a person become more embodied than she was before, take a more corporeal form, live inside a more bodily body? It’s unusual, but of course. I took it as a sign, the precise meaning of which I would decipher on my drive home. I had no sense of what phase the moon was in now or if a new one, moon or body, was scheduled to occur as it had in April of 1999, the date of the newspaper clipping—but I suspected I was as susceptible to its movements as anyone; likely more.
I called out for her but got no response. I went to her bedroom to see if she was sleeping. The view from this part of the house was an unexpected one, a bend in the black trees, a streetlamp implied, not seen. The woods sloped where there was a cemetery, or where a cemetery was rumored to be. A wide gravel path where the road receded, a lovers’ lane for high school kids. Sometimes in the warmer months my friends and I would lay out to tan with a bottle of baby oil in the yard as the upstairs tenant of the neighboring duplex watched from a discreet enough place. Sophie was my best friend; in the sun her back was oiled and long and dimpled at the base of the spine. My legs grew faint lesions from an allergy to grass. We were happy, I was pretty sure, with lives broad and cocky and waiting to occur. I pitied my mother, her red hair and predisposition to melanoma, her loyalty to hats and SPF, her ideas about the thinning ozone and nuclear war. At night she treated my burns and I tried to sleep but was far too happy, listening for passing cars, the floorboards, the low, fixed ringing that is general to a place.
A Dictionary of Color Combinations was easy to locate and impossible to part with. It was obvious in the mop closet when I touched its clear plastic sleeve that I wouldn’t be giving it up. I didn’t want to read it or even to incorporate it into my life so much as I wanted to be a person who could. An intricate person, a pious starving girl, something to look at and wonder about.
Our mom had been a dancer, and when her time was up she gave ballet lessons to little girls at the Y. She spent her paychecks on costumes and cool mint vape pens, breaking in the shanks of the older girls’ pointe shoes by striking them against the kitchen counter. When she was caged in the psychiatric hospitals of Greater St. Louis, she called on a series of boyfriends to come and look after Jamie and me. Our grandpa, a good Protestant and a long-haul trucker’s son, found his daughter’s parenting style irresponsible, blaming it for Jamie’s condition, which is what he called it. After a few years he rounded up what remained of her men and took over the house. Everyone who knew her indulged her vanity, because vanity signified low self-regard, and because she was Diane, a local celebrity of functional anorexia and cheap childcare, a woman in a woman’s house, bitterly harmless. They indulged but did not forgive it, and I can’t recall her ever having a friend. But to watch her move, taking the stage on VHS: she danced as big as howling and as small as held breath. It was to witness real beauty, the pearl of her disease.
Sry, I texted Jamie. Looked everywhere. It’s not here.
Before leaving I took $20 from the pocket of my mom’s best coat. I ran a red light listening to Today’s Top Hits on Z107.7 and admiring the eleven-foot smiles of the girls on billboards. I arrived at my apartment with criminal haste. I put A Dictionary of Color Combinations in a Partytime Liquor bag and the money in the toe of a flesh-toned stocking, the stocking into a calfskin boot, and the boot into the closet next to its partner.
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