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continued....
I was close to the hot iron center of activity but not in it. Ginnie kept
me close but she kept Mango closer. They thought they needed me because
I told them my grandpa had sold red Levis jeans to the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
cult and they almost kidnapped me on a family trip out West when I was
a baby for wearing a red jumper. They liked red. I don’t know if
any of it’s true; it’s old family lore. But I was a good organizer.
I knew how to navigate the Internet and the streets and I knew how to
befriend old men with media clout.
But we had time. The destruction of our building was a process; it would
be a year before they evicted us. They couldn’t use machines. Instead
they would have to take it down brick by brick because of the asbestos.
One day I saw Ginnie walking down the street in a business
suit with two tennis rackets under her arm and she looked good, not terribly
sticky like the rest of us. I hadn’t heard of any stunt with business
suits and tennis rackets and I couldn’t believe she hadn’t
told me so I followed her underground with narrowing breath. There was
a swarm of kids in my way and I thought I’d lost her and the train
was coming, but there she was again deep in the subway. Down there, in
August, my ass was always the first thing to sweat. I couldn’t tell
if she knew I had followed her. She always looked at her feet. Or her
breasts.
I leaned against the door and tried to sketch her like that without her
noticing, though I’m not much of a drawer. I had to sketch her because
she moved me then. I don’t know why she moved me; I was supposed
to be angry. She stilled me like a screw.
Her face was sculpted in one plane, in one dimension but none of her features
were flat. Her nose was not pressed or stingy. Her profile was Olympian.
She was a Pantheon statue. But head-on her eyes narrowed and she could
look like a wicked schoolmaster with a wooden spoon in her belt. I hoped
someone would notice me sketching her. Then a kid with a scooter threw
up behind me. Ginnie saw me then and I hid my notebook and sat down by
her and finally noticed Mango on her other side. Ginnie shot me a cutting
smile. Ginnie could produce a nation with that look.
Mango and her flirted and it annoyed me terribly. I’ll bet you ten
dollars, Ginnie said. No. Five? No. One? No. Respect? Respect, OK, if
you’re right. They tried to be witty. Mango was an alcoholic but
if you told her so she’d threaten to pick up heroin. She was running
out of moves. We all were. I felt young.
In the middle of all of this, Ginnie’s brother’s girlfriend
had hung herself. In their bathroom at home. Ginnie’s brother and
mom found her and there was a body print in the bathroom door. I guess
she swung. Fuck. Fuck. Ginnie had met her a few times.
That’s where Ginnie was headed in that business suit, to the funeral.
She said she didn’t know what else to wear to something like that.
I didn’t ask her to explain the tennis rackets. A few weeks later
when Ginnie let me put my arms around her, I said, “thank you for
letting me be there for you, I know there are a lot of people who want
to be there for you.” She chose me. No one knew where Mango was
that week but her disappearance wasn’t surprising. But then we all
drank a lot at a show and I’ve always had a crush on Ginnie’s
brother and he put his hand on my knee and another on the small of my
back that showed when I sat down. Then we shifted around when people got
drinks and Ginnie ended up in the middle of us and I put my hand on her
knee and he held my hand on her leg and I kept trying to shake him off
but he kept squeezing my hand. And then I drank his beer and danced with
him and gave him my number. Ginnie said it was fine because she sleeps
with his friends all the time, but of course it wasn’t fine. I apologized
later. I would have groveled but she would have been disgusted. He never
called anyway.
There were other things on the periphery besides the body-stamp in the
door. Silhouettes. Hazy figures in the distance too far to tell if they
were going or coming. My precise, Jungian observations were almost always
in vain. We couldn’t go back. By the time you notice you are no
longer happy, you are too resentful of having been changed to ever be
happy in the same faculty again. Even if you want to. By the time there
are words for it, it’s too late. Suddenly the figures that were
in the distance were on top of us.
Ginnie’s mom got sick and died and Holly as always sick and died
too. Holly and I went to preschool together and then I didn’t see
her even though she was there and then we were both outcasts and went
to the Appalachian Mountains and held hands and read each other stories.
We were near each other our whole lives until I left. That counted for
something. She was too sick to live in the city. I didn’t know anyone
in the city like I knew Holly. I knew her in her peacock-phase. Everything
was peacocks.
I could have been on Ginnie’s side and she could have been on mine,
but there we were with warring deaths that we carried around in our pockets
and the bags under our eyes. We both looked like death and we should have
done it together. Our hearts were filmy city grime on stranger’s
arms. Heat filth. We were like detaching subways cars. I didn’t
have anything to give her. To her, how could Holly’s death compare
to losing her mother? She didn’t have parents anymore. Her dad had
died when she was fifteen and she was an orphan at twenty-five and being
an orphan is, it seems, like being in the middle of a tunnel that winds
around a mountain so you cannot see the light at either end. And you cannot
see your friends and you don’t have anything, not even a vision
of your hand in front of your face. You have to convince yourself it’s
there, over and over. You have to yell it to yourself. I’m just
guessing, but I can hear her voice echoing a mantra. She says to herself:
Those are my footsteps I hear under my breath.
I lost track of Ginnie. I spent my time with Holly’s
parents in Long Island, eyeing Holly’s red wallet with holes in
the seams. Eyeing the dress she wore to my birthday party. I wanted those
things, but I couldn’t ask. I thought of stealing them, and imagined
they would know and understand, but I couldn’t do that either. We
looked at slides from when she was sick. We looked at slides from when
she was getting better and from when she wore pink. It counted for something
that I knew her when she wore pink, and when she had a strong aversion
to it, and then when she no longer cared. I showed them the film we made
together of us peeling rotten apples naked. I was embarrassed with her
dad there, but they were only looking at Holly’s nakedness. Her
pubic hair and her bloody finger when she sliced her thumb by accident
and laughed. We cried while the ocean was berating the shore outside.
I forgot about Ginnie because I had to. I couldn’t be there. I’ll
never know if she even wanted me.
The last time I saw Ginnie was just before she left the city. The leaf-peepers
were arriving too early for the foliage. We talked about feminism and
other theories but said nothing new and then talked about how we had nothing
new to say on the matter. We didn’t talk about the cult, but Ginnie
said Mango might have figured out how to harvest bedbugs in a controlled
system. Then she told me a story from her childhood about her father planting
a fake spider in her bed and laughing when she screamed and her heart
seemed to stop. I didn’t know anything about Ginnie’s childhood.
I didn’t have room to know or room for the guilt I felt for not
having room.
On the way to the subway, just before we parted, we passed under scaffolding
and were stopped short by a tinny noise and then a thundering sheet of
metal striking the sidewalk in front of us. “Get away from me kiddies.
Get away from me kiddies.” A voiced hacked at us from behind a blue
tarp fort set into a hole in the structure. It came in pairs and there
was a dipthong and a mechanical jump in octave between the words “away”
and “from.” She stuck her matted head out. “You Italian
whore guinea pig!” She called out as we dodged her metal shield
and ran back the way we came. She waved her metal after us. Long after
we were gone she was still waving. The other way was a feces-dodging walk
but less dangerous. We should have laughed. The frightening twins of warning,
“get away from me kiddies” and their metal thunder counterpart
from nowhere – it was like a spook house at a county fair. Ginnie
said she thought the woman looked a little like her mother. But I thought
the woman looked a little like an old Ginnie and Ginnie didn’t look
like her mother. The woman behind the blue tarp was the first person I’d
seen in the city who was alone and wanted to stay alone.
At the subway we parted; Ginnie was staying with an ex-boyfriend. But
we hugged in a one-and-a-half kind of way. We weren’t sure when
to let go, so we let go on the half-beat. But it was a heavy embrace,
our chests pressed together, her weight stamping my necklace into my skin
under my shirt, digging and painful enough to make a bruise, but not painful
enough to let go. I hoped someone would see us together.
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