They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking.
But they weren’t small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn’t know the first thing about. Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.
You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don’t have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.
So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.
Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners? But.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.
Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith’s, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.
I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.
I would always know what time it was in California.
She never seemed more complete, more sure of herself. Not trying to please anyone anymore. Page 292.
She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there?
Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody’s Daughter.
I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.
Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
I imagined myself a professor’s daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel’s hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance.
I wasn’t beautiful anymore. Now I looked like what I was, a raw wound.
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.
You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you.