by Dana Czapnik
“Are you kidding?” Violet says. “The first time I got a Barbie as a gift, my mother sat me down and told me that in order to have her measurements, they’d have to surgically remove two ribs from a woman’s body. I was four years old. I had nightmares for weeks.”
“Your mother is awesome.” Max laughs. “Where I come from, no one ever used the word ‘feminist’ without whispering it. Like it was a disease.” She elbows me in the arm and cups one hand over her mouth and leans in toward me. “Poor guy, his wife’s got feminist.”
Violet gets another cigarette from the kitchen. “So what does that have to do with Pepto-Bismol?” She lights one for Max and passes it to her.
Max slowly exhales her smoke over the plate of Pepto-Bismol and watches as it curls and evaporates over the pink liquid. “I want to paint a huge Barbie logo using only Pepto-Bismol and maybe some grape-flavored Dimetapp to outline the letters. I’ve completely cleared out the stores from here to Canal Street of all their Pepto. It should be enough to get me started on the B. I wonder if it’s gonna get moldy. A girl can dream.”
“That’s cool,” I say. Because it is.
“How huge?” Violet asks, and I hear something in her voice. It’s either skepticism or jealousy. I can’t be sure.
“Huge. As big as it can be. I want it to feel like the Blob. Like, if you stand too close, you will be devoured, consumed, suff-o-cated by the pink, the pink, the pink,” she says, breathless and dramatic, with her arms wide open and her unshaven pits in full glory. From my angle, her green irises are translucent in the light, and I can see a warped reflection of Violet in the curvature of her contact lenses.
Violet grabs a heavy roll of untreated canvas from a stash in the corner and begins unraveling it on the floor in front of us. Max dips a paintbrush into the pink puddle on her plate and pulls it out, watching dribbles of goo drop back in and be reabsorbed.
“So,” I say to Max, “I take it you won’t let your kids play with Barbies then?”
“I’ll never have kids,” she deadpans, without looking up from her Pepto-covered paintbrush, as though this decision is as much a fact as gravity.
* * *
The buzzer sounds, but Violet and Max don’t notice. They’re too busy strategizing how they’re going to paint the Barbie logo with Pepto-Bismol without the liquid leaking through the canvas. I walk over to the intercom by the door and press the Talk button.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me. Buzz me in.”
I yell over to Violet, “Some guy is downstairs saying ‘It’s me.’ ”
“Ask who it is.”
“Who’s ‘me’?” I say into the speaker.
“Stop playing games, Vi,” the man downstairs responds, and it sounds like Darth Vader has invaded the apartment.
Violet races over to the intercom and presses the Unlock button. “Come on up.” She checks out her face quickly in the mirror they’ve hung up by the door, and her expression changes instantly. I’ve noticed this before. All people do this when they look in the mirror—they put on their mirror face. It’s funny to watch, the way people change themselves. I probably do it too, but there’s no way to know because the only face I ever see in the mirror is my mirror face. That’s probably why people never think their photographs look like them. They’re so used to their mirror face.
“Oh, god, it’s Shaw.” Max mimes stabbing herself in the neck with a paintbrush.
“Play nice,” Violet pleads.
“There’s no such thing as playing nice with a flesh-eating parasite.”
I’ve never met Shaw but I know a lot about him. He’s a bartender at Violet and Max’s favorite bar, Glasnost. Violet says he’s really a poet. He’s from Wisconsin and is a pescatarian. He gets around the city on a Harley-Davidson but he won’t ride it on the Cross Bronx Expressway because of all the potholes. He has an upside-down American flag hanging in his living room. He has very thick knuckles, which Violet finds unbearably sexy. He doesn’t like putting labels on things. He thinks Violet’s work is brilliant and he’s hung up several of her paintings in the bar to sell. Max thinks it devalues Violet’s work because he’s selling them for less than fifty dollars and taking a 10 percent commission. He plays the guitar and the bass and can play the drums, but not as well. He’s in a band called Numbing Agent. He wrote a song about Violet called “Electric Violet.” Her favorite lyric is “The rarest color found in nature, Now it’s the only color I see, Electric Violet.” She played a dubbed copy of their demo tape for me once, but she’d listened to it so many times it sounded like it was recorded under water, and I couldn’t understand his lyrics. So I have no idea if he’s a good poet.
Violet opens the door just as Shaw arrives on the landing. He’s wearing worn-out black jeans, scuffed-up Docs, a white T-shirt, and a vintage leather jacket. He’s got stringy blond shoulder-length hair that’s parted down the center of his skull and tucked behind each ear and a scruffy blond five o’clock shadow that looks like it took days to grow. In between his thin lips is a lit cigarette. He’s old. Not quite dad-level old—but old. Like, way older than Violet. He’s pretty good looking, I guess, for an old guy. I can sorta see what she sees in him.
“You have to move uptown, to an elevator building. This walk-up is ridiculous,” he says, out of breath, his cigarette bouncing up and down with each word.
Violet ignores his comment and instead introduces me.
“Oh, hey,” he says and reaches out his hand for me to shake. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re like Michelle Jordan or something. We should play sometime—I bet I can give you a run for your money.” His cigarette is still dangling from his lips, and he’s still out of breath, and even though he looks to be in pretty good shape, there’s no way he’d have the oxygen levels to hang with me for even five minutes.
“Sure.” I smirk to myself. “Anytime.”
He pulls out a jar of pickles from his jacket pocket and puts it on the counter.
“I stopped off at Guss’s on my way and picked you up some,” he says to Violet.
“Nothing says romance like a big jar of phallic symbols,” Max shouts from the back corner of the room, where she’s still surveying the canvas on the floor.
“You should talk, man. Every piece of yours is about dick. There’s nothing wrong with you that a good fuck can’t fix,” he yells back at her, rolling forward onto the balls of his feet, extremely pleased with himself for that one. He looks at me and goes, “Sorry,” as if the word “fuck” is an assault on my virgin ears.
Violet mouths the words “stop it” to him, but her face says something else entirely. She picks up the jar and tries to open the top, but she can’t. Shaw takes the jar from her hands and effortlessly unscrews the lid, which makes a nice popping sound that echoes through the empty apartment. “Are they half sour?” she asks as she digs in the brine to pull one out.
“Of course,” he says. “I know how you like it, baby.” And he kisses her. “Mmm.” He holds her face. “You’re like the first T-shirt of spring.”
“Oh, god,” Max groans.
Shaw reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and pulls out a clear marble. He closes one eye and holds it up about six inches from his face and looks at Max through it. He leans in toward me. “Whenever I don’t like my environment, I change it,” he says, his voice quiet. “Here—see?” He holds the marble up to my face. Inside it I see the entire room is captured in miniature, and it’s curved and upside down. He presses the marble into my hand. “Keep it. It might save you one day.”
I hold the marble up again and look at Violet through it. She’s small and distorted and upside down, holding a half-eaten pickle, but I can still detect a smile shimmering across her face.
* * *
For some reason the B train is pretty packed, even though it’s long past rush hour. A guy close to my age gets on right behind me. I turn around to face him so that I can hold on to the pole with my left hand and read the book Violet lent me with my
right. A light-skinned black guy, with sun-lightened short, thin dreads, he’s got headphones on and he’s bobbing his head to the music. There’s a young boy with him, and his hand rests on the little boy’s shoulder. As the doors close, he grips the same pole I’m holding for balance. The car isn’t totally stuffed, but it’s full enough that there are no seats or places to easily claim as your own airspace. With each lurch of the train, his grip loosens and his hand moves closer to mine. We touch and then don’t. Touch and then don’t. Always just barely. I don’t look at him, I just stare down at the top of the young boy’s head. At West Fourth, several other people crowd in and the young man’s hand is forced to rest atop mine. There is nowhere else to go. It feels illicit. Stolen. At Thirty-Fourth Street the little boy looks up at him and says, “Daddy?” which sort of surprises me. The guy removes one earphone from his ear as the train slows to a halt. “Daddy, this is Herald Square, right?” The kid’s voice clear and proud. The young man touches the boy’s cheek with his knuckles. “Yes.” “Are we transferring to the N and R?” The sound of the word “transferring” coming out of this little boy’s mouth destroys me: his voice so tiny, his Rs not properly hardened yet. “What are the real names of those trains?” the young man asks, his voice about two octaves deeper than I would have expected. “The Never and the Rarely.” The boy smiles a nearly toothless grin. Small giggles tumble out of his mouth. “That’s right.” The doors open, and the guy grabs the little boy’s hood and leads him out of the train. He looks back at me for a moment, and we make fleeting eye contact. His face is a secret handshake. I fall in love with him for a second. Just a second. That’s all it is.
The way the young man was touching my hand reminds me of when Alexis and I got our palms read on a whim. It was early July, and we spent the evening wandering and sweating through our clothes. This was before she had a serious boyfriend, so she actually had time to spare. To do nothing. We walked down Little West Twelfth Street and saw a girl in a director’s chair sitting out on the sidewalk, smoking a clove cigarette, on the opposite side of the street. She had a chalkboard sign up that read “Palm Reading $5” outside a narrow storefront with the words “Psychic Spiritual Advisor” illuminated in neon in the window. As we walked by, Alexis grabbed the inside of my arm and whispered, “C’mon, let’s do it.” Alexis believes in hocus-pocus. She went through a phase in the eighth grade when she was into tarot cards and voodoo dolls after she visited an aunt in New Orleans. She tried to place hexes on all the girls who would make fun of us and enlisted me to collect hair samples from the girls’ bathroom, but I never had the guts, so I just gave her strands of my own hair extracted from my hairbrush. Perhaps that explains all my issues. Misdirected hexes. It’s hard to believe all of Alexis’s stories: the Santeria sacrifices in Flushing Meadows Park she claims to watch on late-night walks home from the subway. The corner in her neighborhood that her family thinks is cursed because three people have been stabbed there, each in the same spot—between the fourth and fifth ribs in the back. The next-door neighbor she’s convinced is a member of the Green Dragons. Whenever I voice skepticism—“Now, Lex, tell the truth”—she’ll pat me on the head and say, “Sheltered little white girl.” I’ll always laugh and go, “I seen some shit, Lex. You don’t even know. You don’t even know.” And she’ll smile her huge, broad smile with those naturally straight teeth and pull my neck into the nook of her arm, her gold hoop earring banging against my skull. “You’re crazy, chica, but I love you.”
She gripped my arm that night and pulled me across the street toward the psychic. Told me five bucks was nothing for a glimpse into my future, to unlock my destiny. I didn’t believe it but I thought, What the heck. She went first, her eyes focused, hanging on the psychic’s every word. Then I sat down. Out from the shadows I saw the girl’s face more clearly and saw that she must have been our age, if not younger.
“How old are you? Do you have any experience?” I asked, as if experience mattered when it came to a palm reading in what is essentially a back alley in the Village.
“I’m fifteen,” she said as she took a drag of her clove cigarette, the paper thicker than regular cigarettes so it audibly crackled as the ember burned. “This is my mum’s place, but I’m the real clairvoyant. Trust.”
She had a thick Australian accent, and I asked her if that was where she was from. She said no and didn’t offer any additional information. “Open yeh hand.” I rested the back of my hand inside hers and unfurled my fingers. She pressed her other hand on mine and closed her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose. “Reading yeh energy,” she said. She opened her eyes and began tracing the lines in my palm. I don’t remember the details of what she said. Something about marrying a man whose name started with the letter F and that I had a long lifeline, which took a fork. But I remember thinking how lucky she was, tracing the lines of strangers’ hands for a living. It’s an intimate place, the palm of a hand. No one touches you there other than a lover, I suppose. Not a doctor, not even a parent. And here was this stranger to me, sitting on a chair outside on a sidewalk, running her forefinger along the creases in my hand. The creases that formed in utero. Unique as a fingerprint. With me forever, never changing. Will someone else ever get to know them?
* * *
The car pretty much clears out at Thirty-Fourth and I’m able to grab a seat. My stomach begins to rumble, and I remember a pack of Starburst I have in my bag. I dig to the bottom and pull it out. The first one is a yellow, so I drop it back in. The second one is pink, my favorite. Why can’t you buy a Starburst pack of just one flavor? Why do I have to endure the yellows to get the pinks and reds? I wonder if it’s better to find a guy who loves the oranges and yellows, so that you can each get what you want, or someone who likes the same flavors as you. Which is the better deal? Someone who is just like you or someone who is totally different?
I reread the first page of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was what I had started before that guy touched my hand and I couldn’t concentrate on the words.
Before I left her studio, Violet made me wait as she went hunting through her stacks of books. When she finally found the book she was looking for, she followed me out the door into the stairwell and said, “You want to know what men really think about love? Read this.” Nietzsche is mentioned in the first sentence, and I make a mental note to recommend this book to Percy. On page four I get to the question “Was it better to be with Tereza or remain alone?” I put the book down on my lap for a moment and look up. I accidentally catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of the window opposite me. For a millisecond, I don’t recognize myself. That’s how long it takes before my face changes into my mirror face. I’m sure the book is going to spend 250 or so pages answering that question—but how could anyone wonder that? The answer is it’s better to be with Tereza. Whoever she is. Unless she’s a monster, in which case it’s better to be with someone else. But not alone. Not alone.
On the bottom of the page beneath the text, Violet’s scribbled in pencil: “If you spend your life with your options always open, you’ll never do anything.” I reach into my jeans pocket and take out Shaw’s marble. I roll it over Violet’s words. Any word that comes in direct contact with the marble is magnified, which wasn’t what I was expecting given the optical illusion I witnessed in the marble back in Violet’s apartment. Pull the marble away by just an inch, though, and all the words are curved and upside down inside it. So when the marble is used to look at an object up close, it magnifies it. From a distance, it turns it upside down. Maybe there’s something to be said there about people too. Or maybe I’m trying to find hidden meaning where none exists. Maybe it’s only physics, like everything else. Light is a creature unto itself.
I get off the train at my home stop. I start walking up the steps to the exit but stop for a second and hold the marble up again. In it I can see the entire train station. All the little people walking to and from wherever they’re going to and from, as though the ceili
ng were the floor. Tiny turnstiles rotating in the opposite direction. A packet of subway tokens accidentally falling up, tinkling in the glass. It’s a nice little temporary world, this marble. And here it is. Suspended in orbit on the tips of my fingers.
Time is thin and highly flammable like rolling paper, and we burn it down to a nub against our fingertips. Youth is wasted on the young. What else is there to do with it but waste it? Me and Alexis, trashing time in Central Park. Going nowhere of any consequence. Ambling through what we call Dead White Man Way, formally known as the Literary Walk. Past Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. A German high school tour group wearing neon-blue T-shirts snap photos of themselves in front of a pear-shaped statue of Shakespeare. Runners pant as they race by in short shorts, skinny legs. Their Walkmen attached at the hip. Some old ashtray of a man with a guitar and harmonica and dirty jeans singing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a gaping case in front of him filled with crumpled dollar bills and the velvet blade of lost time, wasted time, time gone by. In front of us a swath of Rollerbladers weaving in and out of cones. Looking good doing spins and tricks by the band shell, like a lost tribe in Joseph’s coat of many colors. Enjoying the attention of the tourists but pretending not to. Stone-faced as they do the serious work of being someone unique. Another Rollerblader who’s electrically charged, wearing acid-washed Daisy Dukes, his impressive ass dimples on display, and a knockoff Georgetown sweatshirt and a huge Native American headdress, holding a boom box on his shoulder blaring Grandmaster Flash, Rang dang diggity dang duh-dang, rolling and weaving gracefully alongside us. It’s an Indian summer Saturday, and the air is burnt, and the park matches the Grandmaster’s headdress: feathery red and orange and yellow and synthetically bright, like it’s been painted in post by the celluloid dreamers of the golden age of Hollywood, before they started making movies that resembled real life. Alexis and me inside the hollow part of day in a land called Oz.
