How to Wrestle a Girl

by Venita Blackburn

  I don’t suppose you want a snack, Marseilles cooed while holding up a single white pill as if it were a banana or slice of bologna.

  Lorin quickly pulled Nicole out of the house and into the backyard, leaving Marseilles alone in the kitchen.

  What do you do when your brand-new trans roommate moves in and becomes a drug dealer? Panic. Remember the living arrangement, one of support and solidarity, two queers of color in a buddy comedy trying to survive the straight white world. Consider that this could be normal. Maybe this was normal, maybe it was a misunderstanding. Ask what is going on in a smooth nonplussed tone though inside both small and large intestines might release at any moment. Listen to a cell phone ring. Have hope for a resolution because there is an apologetic strain in your roommate’s gelled eyebrows. Realize the apology is for the stranger on the phone. Remember soaking in a tiny bathtub with Dar, her body surrounding you like quicksand as she said how hard it must be for young straight women, the things they have to put up with. Decide to justifiably freak out. Grab head and chest and recall the organs necessary for life, will them into function. Recall the phone message from the landlord, that there will be a bid on rent, an auctioning of your home for eight years to which you would probably have the most laughable offer, meaning no offer. Resign to homelessness of sorts, the artist’s destiny. Try to stop what could be stopped.

  Nicole hurried back into the house.

  You can’t do that in here!

  Nicole shouted but continued to be ignored by Marseilles. Lorin, still on the phone, seized Nicole by the elbow, but she spun in a circle to free herself while hyperventilating for a second or two. Man up, even, she thought, though as a lesbian feminist she remained aware of the sexist rhetoric that often dismisses the power of the feminine in exchange for more patriarchal ideals. Suddenly she appreciated the noncisgender women who had conquered her kitchen and felt an unexpected sense of awe and oppression all at once. Though outweighed by forty-eight pounds, she leaned in to the friend of Lorin’s as she held Nicole’s favorite cooking pot and said, “I will fight you!” And to that she received a smile and brief recognition of her humanity.

  Hush, little goldfish.

  Nicole exhaled and allowed herself to be led outside by Lorin for much-needed clean air and forgot about the previous sounds of a large foreign animal. She ignored Lorin’s grip that was trying to keep her a little farther back and walked forward, arriving face-to-face with an enormous albino male American pit bull, magnificent, deadly. He possessed one blue eye and one gray. With little else left to do, Nicole dropped to the ground on her shins and waited to be mauled by Cerberus reincarnated, no will to resist. A tongue, soft and wet, fluttered on her cheek and then her palms as the animal cleansed the salt from Nicole’s skin, tears and sweat. Lorin picked her up, muscles not as atrophied by hormones as they appeared. Placed her onto the wicker patio love seat as she looked Nicole in the eye and smiled, this time that apology really was for Nicole.

  I made some friends, she said.

  What else was there to do other than nod and laugh and cry and feel the exhaustion of the day all over again? Nicole felt silly and lost.

  I made amazing ramen during the recession.

  It was Lorin’s turn to laugh and cry a little. The dog panted at their feet and for the first time Nicole felt the sense of family she’d been imagining and anticipating for so long.

  But soon the voice came, the obvious, the echoes of a wiser woman with a better vocabulary and more exacting standards of behavior. Nicole said everything to Lorin that her mother would.

  Your father is white and wealthy. Statistically, it is better to be white and wealthy when committing a crime. You are neither. Do you want to go to prison? Your friends are criminals, but they accept you. When they can afford to make you go away, they will. I can survive better in jail than you. They take everything from us there. At least here you can be close to who you are. Dear heavenly father, thank you for the fact that it is not heroin. Amen. We’re sitting together now. Feel beautiful, Lorin.

  Lorin did not reply, but it was still the longest conversation the two had had since the airport. After a few breaths Lorin finally spoke, said people used to throw things at her, rocks, cans, bullets out of guns while on the island. She could’ve gone home where there was no one, but she stayed out with her friends who were like her:

  Magical.

  Lorin smiled her gray smile, then hid it just as fast. Nicole did not want to cry; she became angry, angry at those forces she knew were there but had been partitioned off from her life, that being more invisible than Lorin had allowed her to do— And before she could continue her rant someone opened the side gate to the yard, and Nicole heard footsteps. She and Lorin looked to their right to see a couple, white and cute and hetero as a pair of cotton swabs, edging into the patio, their eyes scanning curiously all around and finally landing on the bench.

  We’ll come back later, the presumed husband said.

  They were too well coiffed to be dope fiends, so they must’ve been potential renters though not confirmed. Nicole wasn’t sure if it was the steely-eyed pit bull, the soft butch lesbian, the transgender woman, or the overgrown weeds that deterred the couple from approaching any farther, but she suddenly had the urge to go to a garden center and buy something purple in a pot.

  The next day was supposed to be one of healing, nothing worse should’ve happened, if life was prone to fairness, an equal distribution of suffering and pleasure at all times, but life is prone to other things.

  American lesbians are raging narcissists, Ree said over the brush between his teeth.

  Yes, but can they legally do this?

  Nicole referred to a letter she held from her landlord. The rent was going up and they were accepting bids.

  Is that even a thing? she asked.

  It sounds like a thing to me.

  Then the set exploded. There were often loud noises in the studio, one can become accustomed to the usual indoor pyrotechnics, but to veterans of the industry a real life-threatening event is easy to distinguish. Ree and Nicole moved to each other and held arms for security while gazing at the ceiling so many stories away and waiting for the ground to stop vibrating. The two of them wandered out of their corner into the mayhem of dust and smoke. Dolls were screaming, gaffers cursed and clutched their gonads for a moment of clarity. Nicole looked around and saw two bodies on the floor and her heart caved. Then Chloe emerged from behind her holding a coconut donut in a bloody hand, her hair was torn off and neck skin peeling from fire exposure enough to reveal vertebrae. She was fine. She was also very young and very new to the world of special effects and thought this was part of the show.

  Are you okay? Ree asked her, Nicole still stunned.

  Chloe confirmed, then took a bite of donut, the white of the sugar and coconut flakes horrifying against the red of her blood-streaked arm and mouth. Eventually she understood, and tears welled when the emergency vehicles arrived, six people hurried off to the hospital.

  We carpooled, Chloe said about one of the dolls who suffered a knee injury during the collapse of the set.

  Nicole felt sorry for Dar even though her own prized finale prop that took forty-two hours of creation was destroyed in the explosion. There was a kind of freedom she had in not being Caesar, especially in moments like this with the republic slipping away so spectacularly.

  I’ll give you a ride, Nicole told Chloe, and drove her to a condo near Highland Park.

  Chloe invited Nicole inside, her roommates all away on the great hunt for food, money, sex, and/or pills. The two of them went into the dark living room and Chloe began switching on lamps with barely any effort. Then she spoke and kept speaking as if everything she would’ve said in the time that Nicole forced them apart needed to be acknowledged. Chloe declared that she wasn’t actually from Brisbane but a town a hundred miles from it; she thought Brisbane sounded like a place people would remember. Her mother called her every day, and she loved her. Chloe wasn’t
her real name either, but that didn’t matter much. Nicole heard her own mother’s voice suddenly from past slightly intoxicated evenings: Your father was a poet. He read William Carlos Williams to me in my ear, and we made love for days.

  Let me help you get all that off, Nicole said about Chloe’s makeup.

  It seemed unnatural for them to be standing and facing each other or being side by side even. They went to the bathroom and Chloe sat on the toilet while Nicole removed her skullcap, which put them both at ease; this was their natural state, to sit and to stand, to touch and be touched.

  Your hair is amazing, Chloe said as if she’d never seen it before. I feel like I know your hands better than I know your face.

  Nicole could feel a sad story coming, rising up and out of Chloe from her sloped shoulders to burst from the crown of her head, and Nicole had an idea for the new rebirth of Maximus Zombicus, a way to fuse the myth of Athena born from her father Zeus’s skull, but this would require a lot of fake brain matter. She was excited, then felt sad again for Chloe for whatever she would soon say.

  I’m going to have the lead in Mermaids from Space 2.

  The lead? That’s great!

  Then Nicole realized the cost of being a lead for Dar: the dating, the selfies, the public show that only occasionally became a vaginal show because there wasn’t much press to be gleaned from actual sex. Dar was more concerned about the illusion of it and how fucking sexy that illusion would be with someone like Chloe at her side. Nicole thought how we sometimes make compromises, invite poison into our lives, and it can’t be helped.

  Oh, Nicole said with realization, and brushed the top of Chloe’s head.

  Chloe turned sharply at Nicole, her first angry face, and Nicole realized Chloe didn’t deserve pity or anger. Nicole remembered the joke she’d made to Lorin when they first met, how she somewhat threatened to kill her roommate before she knew her name.

  Don’t think about it now, Nicole said to Chloe in a tone as mournful as possible, giving way to the space they were in and squeezing out any undue righteousness or pity. Now you get to let your tits out.

  Chloe made a sound that must have been an Australian word for what the hell, then giggled tearfully.

  I meant fins, let your fins out.

  In a sudden leap of gratitude and tenderness, Chloe took Nicole’s knee in one hand, her palm in the other, and kissed the space just above the wrist. Nicole was shocked and pleased and didn’t know if she should make out with Chloe or knight her, but she understood the kind of guilt and joy that comes with being okay and safe when others aren’t and what it means to act rather than let go, be doomed to fail and do it anyway. Dewitt, she thought. She thought about praying for herself, about Dar’s clothes and how she always knew exactly where to find them, and about the accident and how it seemed like chance that she and Chloe were there together but it was intentional, inevitable. Just about all of the horror of the day had been scrubbed off. Chloe’s skin looked raw but warm again with just a hint of the glue and paint like she’d fallen out of a gilded frame. Nicole rubbed at the leftover resin near Chloe’s damp hairline that would not be moved and said at last after Chloe patiently endured being cleaned so carefully that it probably hurt a little, for some response to her kiss, to their future, if a compromise were even possible:

  The rest will come off in the shower.

  Young Woman Laughing into Her Salad

  Time of Day: Sunset

  Location: Santa Monica Pier

  Product: Deodorant

  Close-ups of two attractive women, youthful but not too youthful, as they stroll the boardwalk. Lights of the pier flicker to life in the fading sun. The day departs like a gown dragging across the ocean. Every frame is degraded, imitation thirty-five millimeter, grainy and tingly. The women have heavy eyelids from unnamed personal trauma or illicit substances and their sexiness peaks when they begin to jog to the entrance of an arcade. One is more cheerful than the other, shorter, wider, the accessory to the taller one, the true beauty, the girl next door, eerie in her fuckability, a siren, a sprite, a can with a dent in it. Their lips are full and slick, parted and waiting. It’s warm, the shorter woman removes her letterman jacket, an ambiguous V on the chest pocket. Its leather sleeves contrasting with the heavy fabric of the rest, an enviable symbol of belonging. The true beauty mirrors the motion and removes her jacket, a floral blazer, as two young men join in as validators of being, as audience to their joy, confirming that it is real and remarkable. The women are bare-armed in tank tops knotted at the waist for a sliver of flesh above the waistline. They shoot tiny basketballs—missed and not missed. They play Skee-Ball. They fire at electric aliens. They jump in victory with arms to the sky, hug, and give flirtatious side-eye to their acquired men in the background. They throw cloth sacks at clown heads and toss rings around bottles. They break for snacks—corn dogs and salad, lifted to their face, invisible messes at the corners of their mouths that they wipe with a knuckle and laugh at jokes unheard, secrets not shared, and lean onto each other like sisters or lovers, wearing the young men like perfume in the air.

  Time of Day: Noon

  Location: Urban Boxing Gym

  Product: Athletic Apparel

  Black-and-white shots of feet jumping rope in worn sneakers, sweat on a racially ambiguous woman’s neck, a mouth exhaling, boxing gloves, another mouth cringing in silent pain, two similar-looking women glaring at each other determined, dark eyed, slick. The taut ropes of the ring stretch and contract from unseen pressure. A glove hits a rib in sports bra. Another glove connects in slow motion to a cheek. The sound is thunderous. Water drips from everywhere and everything. The whole world is sweating and exhausted and then the two women collapse side by side on the wall of the gym. One offers to the other a bottle of water dressed in condensation. The drink changes hands like a promise and an apology. They lower their heads in laughter.

  Time of Day: Night

  Location: Dirty Motel

  Product: Antidrug Propaganda

  Two girls lay their heads next to each other, smiling up at the ceiling, giggling openmouthed. They are dirty and raccoon eyed with messy hair. Sounds of an amusement park echo around them as the pillow transforms into a blue sky. They are on a roller coaster. They are on a bed. They are on a roller coaster. They are on a bed. A male hand, monstrous and disembodied, presses into the grimy pillow near the head of the girl on the right. The pillows and their heads rock and jerk to a grotesque rhythm. Their hair lifts into the sky and falls back down onto a grimy pillow. The roller coaster comes to a stop and their smiles fade. A meth pipe appears from the male hand and they each inhale. We follow the hand along a dank motel room. It opens a door and a man is on the other side, headless, a new hand that enters while the other leaves and the door closes again. The new hand moves to the girls who lay on the bed. The hand grips the side of the pillow among faint blue vapors. The sky returns and the sounds of screams as the roller coaster begins again at full speed.

  Time of Day: Early Morning

  Location: A Screened-In Porch

  Product: Yogurt

  Two reasonably attractive young women, presumably sisters, sit on a bench swing and watch the morning unfold. Each dips a shiny spoon into a plastic cup. They exchange snappy banter about outsmarting calorie counts and having a vast range of fruit flavor options in a way that equates yogurt varieties to total personal autonomy and the freedom to do anything. Their history is pleasant and buried. All of the tension and fights and betrayals are forgotten because there is sweet dairy on their tongues and warm natural light around the space. A dog wags its tail from under the bench, a goldendoodle, bred for intelligent and eclectic citizens. Through smiles and a gentle manner, they sit shoulder to shoulder. The women are young but not gorgeous, no eye makeup or sleepy lids. Smart, overweight, carefree, fiscally conservative women should pay attention to these women based on the lighting, based on their friendly but not overly sexy attitudes. Each dips her shiny spoon into the cup again.
After each dip they suck the spoon clean and softly moan in ecstasy.

  Side Effects Include Dizziness, Ringing in the Ears, and Memory Loss

  She forgets

  the number of children she had and that she outlived them all

  what pockets were for

  where masturbation is appropriate

  how to blink with both eyes

  how hard to scratch an itch

  her family

  whole nations

  how the dense pain of childbirth leaves the mind immediately, forever.

  She forgets

  the nature of ordinary people

  that faces of strangers should not be surprising her the way sea urchins or a horse suddenly urinating can be surprising

  what an itch is

  wars

  the lovely indescribable smell of clean women

  space

  the ocean

  Jim Crow laws

  how to avoid the cold: liquor

  her childhood on a tobacco farm with parents who could only afford free labor: her brothers and sisters

  lighting fires between the tobacco rows to prevent frost

  how to pluck her eyebrows into a fine arch

  accidentally setting fire to the tobacco farm

  her mother’s tears in the moonlight as the fields burned and the beautiful smell afterward

  that she’d been in love just once and pretended twice.

  She forgets

  her favorite nephew, a color-blind old man who liked all the same songs and sold pills without a prescription

  Star Trek

  two of her sons ate Vienna sausages until their hearts gave out in consecutive years

  only one of her children died happy

  running away during the fire and losing two toes to frostbite

  that three of her daughters loved men who were no good

  the weight of men who know they’ve been lied to