Green Girl (16 page)

Trudging home. Buskers at Tottenham Court Road. A man plays the theme song to
MASH
on his synthesizer. Near the stairs for the Central Line, a woman with long red hair and shearling boots pinches the harp to the clang of pence being occasionally dropped into her black case.

HE had always told her his dreams of taking off and playing music in the train stations of Europe. Rounding the corner or descending the steep elevator underground she always half-expected to see HIM picking away at a guitar with a furious expression on his face.

That empty feeling of listening to your own voice on an answering machine. That’s what life is like for Ruth now. She pushes with the push of flesh climbing down the stairs to the platform, slowly moving, milling, careful not to trip.

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being—not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in.

— Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona

The next morning she woke to a wet pillow, her eyes glaring like red light bulbs. Agnes had not come home the night before. Ruth calls in sick to work even though it was the week before the holidays. She knows that she could be sacked but she doesn’t care.

She does not leave the house. She is in hiding. She hides because out there is too intense. The city a cruel hole with too many eyes. She sentences herself to a voluntary imprisonment. Lying on the mattress wanly watching the blur of Agnes’ TV set, drooling catatonic onto her duvet, hand in her pajama bottoms. Making friends with the furballs under Agnes’ bed.

Exclusive video: Ruth self-destructs.

Oh my Ruth how she suffers.

And yet, I am the one who is cruel. I experience joy at her suffering. I want to save her and then drown her like a surplus puppy.

She teeters between awake and asleep. When not sleeping she surrenders herself to a stream of images, festering and filling the room. She is incubating agitation. The weeping is back. The littlest things make her break down. She only gets up to make herself tea and shuffle back to her mattress. She aches terribly. The pain makes her unable to breathe. She cries out to herself in anguish:

I long for you. I can’t stand it. I long for you. This thing inside, I can’t get at it. I can’t claw it away can’t vomit it away can’t drink it away. I want to destroy it. I want to destroy myself if that will destroy this thing inside. I imagine you everywhere. It hurts It hurts It hurts so fucking much this aching, this longing, this thing. And you feel nothing.

On days like this she cannot shower. She needs to collect, to accumulate. She needs to savor in her filmy layer. It is her protection against the world. To shower, a shock or a scream. Everything surrounding her she cannot wash away. To shower would be almost an admittance of a new day. To carry with her the same skin is to allow each day to blend into each other and be one day. The days will never end and neither will she. Days and days. No showering. She builds a protective armor. It’s important, somehow, she knows. She cannot wash it away.

Collapsed on her mattress. She sleeps on magazines stuck to her thigh. She sleeps and sleeps and sinks and sleeps some more. Sedentary. Like grass, dirt, shoveling and shoveling and buried. She grows weak. She feels her muscles start to atrophy.

She eats peanut butter sandwiches. Honey O’s in cereal bowls gather at the foot of her mattress, the milk sour and congealed. Green and Black’s chocolate bars, the chocolate smeared on her sheets.

Agnes returns. Ruth pretends not to notice. She tiptoes around Ruth, quiet so as not to disturb the disturbed, stepping over her, bangles jangling. Ruth prepares her defense in this trial inside of her mind.

I’m not crying over you. Do you think I’m crying over him? Don’t be so arrogant. Do you think you’re anything to me? You reminded me of someone else, that’s all. You reminded me of someone else. I never chased after you, I never tried. I never wanted you. I merely wanted. That’s
the difference.

(Agnes and Ruth on stage, in between them a bemused Olly)

(Bleep) you (Bleep) you (Bleep) you.

Is that the best you got?

You took my man.

He wasn’t your (bleep)ing man, he was nobody’s (bleep)ing man, he wanted me more.

Maybe that’s because you’re such a (bleep)ing slut.

(Ruth throws a chair, Olly tries to hold off a furious Agnes. Bodyguards rush to the stage. The crowd goes wild. Pandemonium ensues.)

She wakes up to find a worried Agnes standing over her. Go away, she mumbles. This is how I choose to spend my holiday. Why couldn’t anybody let her have a simple breakdown?

You need to get up.

I’m in a funk, Ruth explains. Ruth licks her lips. They were dry. (
How is it that the clouds still hang on you
?)

Well, you need to snap yourself out of it.

Agnes still stands over her. Is this about the other night? Agnes refuses to budge. She feels guilty, Ruth realizes with surprise. It was not an emotion Ruth thought Agnes experienced. Ruth looks around Agnes, towards the flickering miniature people on the screen. Liz Taylor as Maggie-the-Cat begging Paul Newman to love her. I’m not living with you: We occupy the same cage, that’s all. She imagines saying that to Agnes: We occupy the same cage, that’s all.

Ruth sighs heavily. She feels deep inside that she hates Agnes. And that maybe Agnes harbors a greater hatred for her, a hate and a love both so intense it confuses her. It’s just the holidays. I’ll get over it.

The next time she looks up Agnes is gone.

I must get this crack mended.

— Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion

She knew what she had to do. Ruth stands in front of the mirror and studies herself.

She feels an immense violence stirring inside of her. She looks and looks in the mirror. She cannot find herself. She feels somewhere deep within a desire to cut through that glass, that image of herself. To explode outside of her small space. To destroy it somehow. To purge herself, cleanse herself, this creation, this product of others’ eyes. To be wiped clean.

That itch, that desire to cut off one’s hair, one’s prize of ribbons, one’s fire escape of femininity.

The green girl needs to externalize her own suffering. This is how she will wear her grief.

Or maybe she is just bored.

Or perhaps I am operating the strings. Perhaps I am directing this scene. Ruth is my silent film star, always silent on the outside even when she is screaming within. She is my Falconetti playing Joan of Arc.

I make my green girl kneel. I am the harsh director. She begs and pleads: Please don’t make me do it but there is a clause in her contract. I am reminded of the Barbie dolls that I played with as a young girl. I would perform the cruelest acts on my lovelies. I would behead them. I would cut off their hair to make them look like Ken. I would sentence their bodies to various torture machines. Perhaps writing for me is an extension of playing with those dolls. Ruth is my doll. I crave to give birth to her and to commit unspeakable acts of violence against her. I feel twinges of joy at her suffering.

She looks at herself in the mirror. She looks at herself. She cannot break through. She stares at the haircutting shears resting at the sink, which Agnes uses to cut her fringe as well as her trim (brown as a mouse). She stares at the scissors and wills herself to pick them up.

Suddenly she picks up the scissors from the sink, grabbing a chunk of her hair. It does not cut as easily as she imagined.

She picks up the scissors and carves away at the girl with the blonde hair in the mirror.

She tears into her hair. She cuts and cuts and cuts. Clumps of blonde feathers come out in the sink. Her gorgeous virgin hair.

Is it masochistic? An act of self-flagellation. There is a finality to it. To cut off one’s breasts in one mean gesture. To surrender oneself to vague and distant eyes. To say. This is the new me. I have been born clean. See my face. I wipe the paint from the mouth of the pretty girl. Wipe the paint from your mouth. This is me. I have no shield of feathers to hide behind. I am ugly and true. I have cut off my lovely, my darling. Cut it off. Cut, cut, it off. I stand a monument to pain. I stand naked to this world.

When Mia Farrow cut her hair off, Salvador Dali called it “mythical suicide.” What happens to a woman when the eyes are no longer on her? Is that in a way a tiny death? Or a sort of freedom? The locks shorn off. Is one unlocked? The rape of her locks.

Now, a close-up on her face. Her face haunting, haunted. The tears begin to tumble out a torrential rain.

Although she is sobbing still she attacks her hair. More. More. After a few minutes of frenzied ecstatic cutting she examines herself. Hanging onto the porcelain sink stained like dried blood with Agnes’ hair dye, which tilts as she leans.

First the dread sets in. She begins to grieve her hair with genuine sorrow.

She lays herself down on her sea of clothes, her own chalk outline. She spreads her arms wide, a banal crucifixion. Oh, she is ugly. She is ugly, ugly, ugly.

O the horror the horror. And nothing to be done.

Then she curiously feels calm. And numb. And her head proud and cold, like a Greek statue. Like she is wiped clean.

Finally Ruth manages to rouse herself. She showers and dresses in an armory of black wilted fabric. She cleans and powders her face and surveys the damage. She combs what was left of her hair carefully. She painstakingly applies her makeup, taking no pleasure, no love, in painting her face. It is her mask to shield her from the day, the world. Two dots of pink blush on each cheek, a stroke of black mascara, a protective coat of pink lip gloss.

Finally she picks up her phone. Almost coolly, calmly. The mask back on. She schedules an appointment with a salon down the road.