Green Girl (9 page)

She would regard them coolly. I know not what thou sayest. Sometimes American customers would be shocked to discover that she was one of theirs, presuming that her soft careful accent was in fact English. But you don’t sound American, they’d say.

But you’re obviously American, Natalie cried in confusion, when Ruth mentioned this to her. Not all Americans are the same, she insisted, annoyed. Ruth’s accent had morphed and changed until it was not quite American and not quite British. Since she had come to London she was now from nowhere. And when she returned (if she ever returned?) she would be from there, not here. Tourist. She was not a tourist. She was something in-between.

Since fragrance was at the front entrance, Ruth often had to play tour guide. She was always hasty to correct. This is the ground floor here, not the first. It’s Zed, not Zee. A lift, not an elly-vader. These common errors made her twinge with impatience. Sometimes Ruth remained closed-lipped around Americans, when they asked for directions on the street, clutching their foldout map. Then, she would nod and point, preferring to pass, preferring not to invite the inevitable exchange.

Sometimes older Brits would feign interest in her whereabouts. Where are you from, dear? they would ask. From the States, she would say. If they didn’t already know. Oh, that American girl, that American girl. At first they pretended not to understand her and so she was forced to repeat herself, you must speak up, you must annunciate. Which cements your status as child. The perpetual annunciation, my cipher dressed as the Virgin Mary. My stone statue of dove-gray.

She is probed for specifics. Aah, they would say. Chicago. Very cold, is it not? Yes, it is quite cold there, Ruth read from her script. Although most people assumed the United States was one singular group of people. They didn’t understand nuances of city and country and north and south and red state or blue state. They didn’t get that not all Americans are born-again Christians. They didn’t get that America is in the midst of an ideological civil war.

Ruth was on neither side of the war. Yet oh, to be born again. This is what she desires, and every new purchase, every new boy, all of which she imbues with magical properties, a way for her to look at herself anew in the mirror. Like those rebirthing ceremonies in which estranged children, heated pins of violence, are rolled into blankets and the adults sit on the child, simulating a rebirth. That’s how Ruth feels. She feels all this pressure, like she is supposed to be born again into this world, and I’m bearing down on her, and nothing is coming out yet. Not even her violence, which she swallows inside. She senses this world infected with godlessness and emptiness and hollowness. She senses the despair. She would like to run down the street naked and screaming, but she can’t. It would be terribly impolite and improper.

So she swallows it all. She swallows it all deep deep inside.

Filing into lifts to go to the tube, the squealing sound. Cattle being led to slaughter. Ruth’s nervous deer heart beats inside her pale-girl chest. Pushing, Pushing, Pushing. A labor. The lift is a mother-grave spitting out bodies. What if, what if there was a fire or if it got stuck or or…Ruth’s mind imagines all sorts of calamities. But still she remains unlined, frozen. The occasional gasp. They are sardines in a can glaring at each other. At this time Ruth resists the urge to yell Fire! Fire! Fire! The evacuation of the scream stored deep inside. The crowded theater of her mind.

The train roars by, shaking her as she stares at her reflection in the steel rumbling past. Doors opening.

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there was

A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain

Its past, enlightened to perceive

New periods of pain.

— Emily Dickinson

End of an eternal shift: she is laid out in her tiny bathroom her cheek making love to the linoleum floor. Headache again. Body curled like a paralyzed fetus in a porcelain womb.

The green girl likes to watch herself suffer. My icon of ruin.

Dark sets in, dark and blank and cool. Her body a thing. She steels herself from the crash and roar of the train pain shuttling through her brain. Surrendering herself to the sudden suck of nausea, the swims. From the ceiling she watches herself, watches the floor turn.

Don’t move. A whisper. If you move it doesn’t hurt as much. She fights down the words circulating around her skull like a bee. A brain tumor probably a brain tumor she has a brain tumor. Thirty days a month a week twenty-four hours. An aneurysm maybe an aneurysm just like her to get an aneurysm.

Shut it out. She shuts the words out, the unrelenting monologue. A whisper. Play dead and they won’t hurt you. Play dead. She forces her body to go limp, to make herself go blank inside. More words. A line from somewhere. “Pain has an element of blank.”

The words. She is immobile to their force. Around and around in her head. She is dying she will be dead soon. No one will find her for days. The Housekeeping voice the first to break in, dismayed to find a holocaust of dirty towels. They wouldn’t know where she came from she kept to herself mostly she was sometimes with that girl with the red hair, the Australian. She would be buried in an unmarked grave for American tourists.

Or.

She would be sent home a solemn casket a symbol of grief. An open casket, perhaps. So young, so lovely. It’s Best to Die Young and Leave a Beautiful Corpse. Hopefully tasteful hopefully she wouldn’t look too dead or too clownish, like those airbrushed photos at the mall. Whispers at the funeral. So sad So tragic So sudden. And her mother, and her mother, did you hear? Too much loss, she couldn’t take it, died from grief. HE would be there, his eyes swelling with tears, tears she never saw fall on real skin. HE would regret that HE had spurned her, a realization too late, that HE had loved her, that HE had always loved her. Stifling a desire to throw himself in after her, an infatuated suitor once more, to follow her underground, into death.

Speaking into the ground a sort of impromptu eulogy:

It was mutual, you know.

I wish we had known each other.

I wish I had let myself love you.

A love deferred. Now aborted.

It would not have been this thing.

It would not have been so terrible.

But then I would have to lose you now.

The words die, fluttering around her like blank strips of paper. All is a hush. The faucet whispers her name in rushing succession, waking her from her morbid obsession. She returns to her body, to the linoleum’s cold hard cruelty, to the banality of her dormitory surroundings. The lowest of moans barely registered amidst all the chaos of outside. It is Friday night. Friday night. Date night. Hate night. The rituals of busied femininity, the elaborate cleaning and preparation of the body. The removal of stray hair of stray thoughts of stray red offenders skirting about on carefully camouflaged faces.

Ruth is not like them. Ruth can still be saved. There is that glimmer in her of something, a sensitivity to this world, maybe too sensitive for this world.

Mind the gap.

That day a group of American girls had exploded through the doors, their laughter ringing. Ruth had recognized them from her floor. She froze, although they tore by without noticing her, scurrying up to the counter stocking French perfumes, with which they proceeded to baptize themselves hysterically. The gaggle of girls. The giggle gaggle. Alone they stare to the ground, their hair hides their eyes—as a group they are protected. The ravishing Spanish girl, a dead ringer for Ava Gardner, attended to them patiently. Ruth your tribe has arrived Elspeth called out. Ruth smirked at her, not thinking of anything clever to say. The smirk was barely noticeable, a slight ripple on her face. The girls around them snickered behind polite hands. Except Ava Gardner, who would never laugh at anybody. She was too kind. Ruth wished they could be friends, except she could never understand anything she said.

Ruth’s saliva spools onto the white squares outlined with dirt.

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble…

— Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own

Sometimes on her breaks Ruth strolls in and out of the counters of the grandiose hall of the makeup department. Past glistened women desperate for any eye contact, holding jars of miracles. She catches glimpses of herself in the mirrors.

Her eyes feast on the rows and rows of color, like a neatly ordered painter’s palette, the pyramid of tubes of lip gloss, gilted compacts bearing a prism of tiny mirrors. Occasionally she would smooth one finger over a glittery palette of eyeshadows with enigmatic names. Types of flora and fauna. Names of movies stars, presidential wives, ordinary girls. Marilyns and Audreys and Sophias and Jackies and Julies and Kathys.

She watches rows of women propped up on chairs, being powdered and glossed and soothingly lied to.

The seductive salesmen with slicked hair and shiny faces preen over them, a flurry of brushes drawn from the tool belts slung around their slim hips.

The frosted lilies working behind the glass counters ignore her when they see that she is not looking to buy.

The tricks are translucent but still you must submit to the ritual.

The eternal question: Would you like to sit down? Do you have time?

They flatter you. They are your friend. You are the sole object of their attention for those minutes. They are like gigolos and confidantes and fairy godmothers all wrapped up into one. They can play straight. They can play gay. They play to your vanity. They worship you. They tell you that you have nice skin. They guess your age much younger than you actually are. You sit greedy for attention, gobbling it up. You are meek, suppliant. You wait patiently as they dab, smooth, pat. You offer up your face to his gaze. He paints on a surprised expression. You look downwards. You look upwards. You are a good girl.

Make me over into someone new, someone who doesn’t think such things, someone with memories wiped clean.