Green Girl (7 page)

My ice girl. I carve her into a swan.

Before getting on the train to go home that evening Ruth stops at Boots. In the pharmacy she picks up a pamphlet for ulcers, stationed next to the pharmacist, as well as pamphlets for: appendicitis, migraines, tension headaches, upset stomach, irritable bowel syndrome, panic attacks, stress, and urinary tract infections. Suffering from ulcers? a drawing of a woman, hand on stomach, doubled over, mouth curving down, the pain drawn in lines on her forehead. Peptic. Duodenal. Gastrointestinal. A burning feeling in the stomach area. A gnawing. A hole.

The train rumbles past, stopping a distance away. Her reflection multiplies endlessly. She sees herself passing by, staring, staring into space.

Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself into an image.

— Roland Barthes,
Camera Lucida

Sometimes after work she takes a bath and watches herself in it. Sometimes she forces herself under water. She pretends she’s dead. She pretends she has drowned. She is Millais’ Ophelia floating down a stream, clutching flowers. The painting hangs in the Tate Britain. Although Ruth has not gone to the Tate Britain. She wouldn’t know the first thing about how to get there.

After her bath she gazes at herself in the mirror. Is this what I look like? She marvels at the stranger in the mirror. The stranger looks so solemn, so serious. She smiles. The stranger smiles back.

I too study her, a curious object. Like a prickly piece of fruit. I experience horror at my former self. Is that me? Can’t be me. Can’t be me. Can’t be. I was never that young. Never, never that young. No longer joy meets my eyes when I gaze into the mirror. That me is no longer. She is dead. Dead and gone. Dead and gone. Gone. Gone. She is gone. I have mourned her. I have murdered her.

Later, when we look back at ourselves, we marvel at our emptiness, our youth. The shiny surface. We forget the confused upheaval stirring deep within back then, a revolution that we stifled daily.

There is some gap in between. Some dark hole in the center of Ruth that is not reflected in this mirror. She mutes this violence and turns it on herself. She resists the urge to peel off her skin. Sometimes she would like to put her fist through a window, but she is too well-behaved.

Everyone always tells her how pretty she is. You’re so pretty, they say. It is a fact. She could be described in the language of growing things. She is a tender sapling. She is green, she is fresh (yet the freshest ingénues can carry with them the most depraved resumes).

Yet to be beautiful, fresh, young is a horrible fate if one feels empty inside. That is why these ingénues try to soil themselves. No one wants to be a cosmetics ad when depressed. When Ruth is feeling her emptiest, the empty compliments keep on pouring in. She craves the attention but grows nauseous.

She is anointed daily with these compliments.

You have a beautiful smile.

Eyes lowered, the modesty of a saint. Thank you.

What wonderful eyelashes you have.

Eyes lowered, again. Thank you.

She is a willing accomplice to this farce. She paints on the smile. She paints on the happiness. She paints on the natural, glistening glow. She blots a pink heart on the tissue—the pink heart that is her heart of darkness.

The awareness on the train, the fashion show. The men are always looking, always looking with their flirty eyes. One can shop but one does not have to buy.

But sometimes life in the spotlight can be difficult. Sometimes she wants to be invisible. Sometimes walking down the street she sends out signals of distress.

Look at me

(don’t look at me)

Look at me

(don’t look at me)

Look at me don’t look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me don’t look

(Look)

(Don’t look)

I can’t stand it if you don’t look

Look

Look

Please

Stop

To define myself in one word: indifference.

— Marina Vlady in Jean-Luc Godard’s
2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle

Ruth is in bed, flipping through American
Vogue
. She gazes at a spread with one of her favorite new models. Recently she has cut all of her hair off which makes her look reckless and free. Ruth has stared at her picture so many times, cavorting on a safari in Africa, twirling around in the season’s new dresses, she feels she knows her intimately, like she is another self, a silent self. It is again the season for a woman with a strong identity, the magazine tells Ruth. Could she, did she have it in her to update her visual sense of herself? She sits there worrying about this, about the face she puts out into the world.

Moments ago she was on her stomach distractedly rubbing herself against the mattress. When she masturbates the face she usually conjures up first is her own. In her fantasies she is beautiful, more beautiful than what youth naturally lends her. But not only is she beautiful, in her fantasies she is beautiful through another’s eyes. Her fantasies are of being witnessed, of being watched. By HIM, the one she must banish from her thoughts but that she allows to star in these fairytales. She can feel his gaze upon her. But today she tries not to think about HIM, she thinks about Olly, with HIS face, or maybe the reverse, trying not to think about HIM so making HIM look like Olly….It wasn’t working. The only way she could get off, could ride herself to ecstasy dry humping herself on her bed was to resurrect the past starring HIM her episodic Lazarus, peeling off the Olly mask, yes it was HIM, HIM, HIM, gazing at her face like it was composed of stained glass, she allowed herself to remember his face, just one last time, but she was having trouble recalling it exactly. And if she remembered his face, if she could only remember his face…

She groans and rolls onto her back and picks up the magazine, lying underneath her.

Knock on the door. Insistent.

Come in. Feebly. It is Agnes, with her red lips still on, wanting to hang out.

They are in Agnes’ room. They sit on Agnes’ bed. Agnes’ walls are plastered with posters of actresses. Monica Vitti. Hanna Schygulla. Corinne Marchand. Anouk Aimée. Rita Hayworth. Agnes’ makeup kit is strewn across the bed. Ruth is trying on a dark blood stain which she thinks with her pale hair lends her a definitive Greta Garbo appeal. She admires her strange red lips in Agnes’ large mirror propped up against the bed, pursing them, pivoting her pale chin from side to side.

What do you think?

A demonstrative head shake from Agnes. Not you.

Ruth sighs, wipes with the back of her hand, and against her better judgment begins to confide in Agnes about the scene with the terrible girls in the toilet.

I mean, do you think I smile too much? She asks. She frowns, then smiles widely in the mirror, showing all teeth. She salutes herself, as she has seen Jean Seberg do in
Breathless
. She waves like a beauty pageant contestant.

Agnes considers this. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.

Ruth is dissatisfied with this answer. She frowns in the mirror, but it is a watched frown, a measured pout.

Anyway, you’re really sensitive, you know. Ruth watches Agnes apply black liquid eyeliner, swooping up like cat’s claws. Glaring haughtily in her compact mirror.

Am I sensitive? I don’t think I’m too sensitive. Ruth studies herself in the mirror.

No, no, you are.

What do you mean, exactly?

Well, it’s like, you feel things really strongly, and you can see it on your face.

Oh. Ruth concentrates on a lip gloss. The same moment of hurt, then smoothed over like a shovel on wet sand.

I mean, fuck, who cares? Says Agnes. Who is now looking at Ruth looking at herself in the mirror.

Are you mad? Agnes asks but the way she asks seems to imply that Ruth should not be mad.

Ruth is pouting with her lip gloss, like behind a veneer of glass.

Agnes (as if in consolation): You know who you remind me of?

Ruth: No, who?

This is a favorite game that green girls play.

Agnes: You know who you so are? You are so Catherine Deneuve in
Repulsion
.

And Ruth has heard this before. In fact, she has heard this so many times before that now she finds herself playing Catherine Deneuve,
her impenetrability.

Ruth considers the mirror again, hair pulled back with her hand, almost violently.

Ruth: Do you just think I should just cut it off?

Agnes: You mean pull a
Roman Holiday
?

Ruth: I was thinking more Jean Seberg.

Agnes: Yeah, that’d be brilliant.

Ruth looks at her slim neck, pivots and turns. She smiles beneath the pages of a catalogue. Agnes comes next to her. On their knees on the bed they pose for each other in the mirror, two pretty girls.

They compete with each other. Each one wonders whether the other holds more allure in the mirror.

They are tremendously vain. They have fallen madly in love with themselves.

You know, when I first met you, I had a massive crush on you. Agnes plays peekaboo with herself in the mirror.

You did? Ruth is not surprised. Agnes was always regaling her with stories of her sexual adventures, like the threesome she had once had with a tutor from school and his wife. Ruth felt, when Agnes was telling that particular story, that she was trying to test the waters. Which she is trying to do now. But Ruth remains blank and impassive. Opening her eyes wide, feeling the eyelashes tickle her eyebrows.