by Emma Forrest
Even before Mom started to leave, cinema was nurture as well as nature. I saw things on screen and saw my future. ‘One day I will say that line.’ I constructed events in my life so that I would have an excuse to repeat what had already worked for Molly Ringwald. What would Molly do? She’d say ‘Screw it all’ and go to Paris to make a film with Godard. I lived my life so I might be lit in the style of French New Wave. Even if it meant being less happy, I wanted sad lighting because happy lighting is so ugly. Happy lighting makes me feel ashamed to be American.
‘Dees Breakfast Club is European in tone,’ nodded Liev, putting on A Bout de Souffle to prove his point. And I wondered, ‘Does everyone who watches French films grow into a pouting enigma?’ Yes. Of course. You learn to pout, you learn to evade questions. It seems worth it for the longest time. Until you realise how long it’s been since your pouting lips were kissed by someone who didn’t smell of sulphur and sour defeat.
Are people who worship cinema scared of real life? Yes. Of course. Everyone is. But we’re brave enough to try and do something about it. Life is terrifying and we will seek not to cross uncharted territory by never saying anything that has not already been said by someone more beautiful, someone more dead. Someone who had their back teeth removed so their cheeks might appear more sculpted on screen. Now that’s entertainment.
‘She’s a perfectly awful little girl,’ I overheard someone say at one of our dinner parties, ‘spoilt rotten,’ which made me laugh as hard as I cry because, as Liev said with indignation, ‘Who is there here to spoil you?’ He got angrier and angrier. ‘Children should be spoilt. Little girls and boys, babies should be spoiled rotten, until their ears grow weary of constant demonstrations and declarations of love and adoration. That’s how it works where I come from.’
Since I was schooled at home, I didn’t really have the opportunity to play with little kids, to wear Band-Aids over grazes and pin the stupid tail on the stupid fucking donkey. I never had a chance to give head to a grateful teenage boy. By the time I met men that way, by the time they were passed to me, they weren’t grateful at all. They were spiteful about the sex act, expected me to be grateful that they deigned to put their dicks in my mouth.
My parents thought that school would stifle my freedom and natural curiosity. They took me out of school because I was reprimanded for a drawing I had done of a park. Ripping up my paper, the teacher scoffed that the sky wasn’t green and the trees weren’t blue. It’s like they were trying to keep that from me. My parents were furious. They said that my art had gone over the teacher’s head. From that day on, I stayed at home. My mother taught me how to read and how to write. Then she taught me how to stare, absent-minded, out of windows, at nothing. It wasn’t until quite recently that I figured out what we were staring at. The last Russian doll after the smallest one has been revealed: the one so tiny that there is nothing there at all.
Liev has always meant so much to me because young girls remember the first person who tells them they are beautiful. The first person who isn’t your parents. My father didn’t say it. I think my mother didn’t say it because, after the I’m-the-winner incident, she didn’t want it to shape my notion of myself: that I ought to be beautiful. Liev thought I ought not to be so beautiful. He said it would have made things easier. I believed everything he said and for three months I was a glorious knot of arrogance, my pre-teen body so tight with pride, I all but bounced off the walls. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been so beautiful, so fresh and clean stepping out of the bath that night, if he hadn’t have been the one to catch me in his arms and wrap me in the towel? He might not have wondered, alone at night after putting me to bed, appalled at himself, dreaming of holding the towel again, until I couldn’t bear it any longer and took things into my own clammy hands, dry champagne in my belly.
But of course it was him. In the preceding weeks it had only been him, more than ever. Before Liev existed in my life it wasn’t as if my parents were there in his place, dominating my world. I did not look to them for help or understanding. They did not give it to me. Neither did they give me any unkindness or cruelty. We were all just in a different movie, my mother, my father and me.
My father, briefly, found life in Lila. My mother embraced, with the passion and tenderness of an ingénue, the slow death of life alone in bed. I found life in Liev. He found life in me. One of us thought very bad things, something we could go to jail for. One of us thought something the world could never ever understand, but excused because of youth, because they could not bring themselves to believe that the very young could want such a thing.
The world cannot bring itself to believe that the very young can want. Like that. With full tummies and eyes half closed.
The physical image, which my mother had so often encouraged me to pretend did not matter, did matter. It may have been her greatest failing as a parent. Things would have been very different if it weren’t for the distance between my eyes and the fullness of my mouth. In time, my eyes would move closer together and my lips lose their cushioning, like air leaking from an inflatable sofa.
If I hadn’t have been so beautiful, I wonder if he might not have left. After he did leave, after he stopped writing cards and we never heard from him again, that’s when I started to wish I were ugly. But it wasn’t until after my mother died, and I legally emancipated myself from my father, that I started putting my wish into action.
out of cash
I was lying in bed, dropping ash on myself, crying because I didn’t have enough money for a new roll of toilet paper. I had just spent $60 on Vicodin and another $50 on a bunch of Quaaludes. My drug dealer surveyed the room, littered with new clothes I hadn’t even taken out of their wrapping, clothes I hadn’t even liked when I unhooked them from the boutique rail and dropped them on the till. Items I felt such indifference toward that I hadn’t bothered to pretend to the salesgirl that I wasn’t going to treat them like shit.
Strapless sequined tops labeled ‘dry clean only’, peach suede hipster pants, a gossamer bra that tied at the front with electric blue ribbon. No one could wear such a bra under clothes, because it bulged and bulked beneath the fabric. And it didn’t look good by itself either, anathema to the contours and curves of my body, which oozed above and beneath the cups like Play-Doh. The only place that bra looked good was on the floor. I had pulled up the carpeting because I felt the shiny wood surface better framed the clothes I dumped there.
Labels, labels, labels, which I ripped from the necks of my purchases because I knew how pointless that rendered them. I’d pick fights with the frightened outfits. Ha ha ha, you’re stupider than me: a Prada sweater with no Prada label in it, castrated cashmere. I tortured my clothes thus, as though plucking limbs from a daddy-long-legs. You used to be a high-price Helmut Lang dress? Well, you’re mine now, bitch.
My drug dealer looked around the room and decided that he couldn’t let me go on like this. So he called up the deli and had them deliver toilet roll.
‘A four-pack,’ he said grandly, ‘of extra soft,’ putting his arm around my shoulder.
John doesn’t take drugs at all. He doesn’t drink or even smoke. He’s doing this to put himself through med school.
‘John,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve got a headache. I mean a toothache. And I hate my knees touching. I hate the feel of my hair falling on my face. My eyelashes are scratchy. I … I … my life hurts.’
People of an especially tough disposition are often described as being ‘thick skinned’. I think I am a skin too thin. I cannot be here now. I cannot Be Here Now. While I’m on the phone to someone, crying, I’m always flicking through my address book and trying to get off the phone so I can ring someone else and cry all over again. I always stall on C.
Sebastian Chase: home number, home address, work number, fax number, number at mother’s, address at mother’s, e-mail and cell. I’m waiting for the day when I realize purely by chance that all of Sebastian’s numbers are out of date and I didn’t know
because I haven’t used them in so long, or even stopped to look at them. I started to cry, but John didn’t notice because I hadn’t stopped.
I know in my head where the tears start and stop. Liev would know, by instinct. Sebastian learned to figure it out, after I promised not to talk about Liev or my childhood, my father and my mother, not to talk about Brooklyn anymore. Sebastian tried so hard, so fucking hard. If he didn’t want to hear about Liev, then I would just talk about Liev to myself. Sebastian tried to help, as best as someone who was there to work for me could help. He did well. You have to really understand me to decode the flood of tears that supplanted recognizable emotion a long, long, time ago. He didn’t understand. But he tried. Happy tears? Sad tears? Pain tears? Sebastian would tilt his head, tilt my head, touch the tears, lick them and respond accordingly.
‘Baby’s got nothing to be frightened of’ or ‘Baby shouldn’t keep getting tattoos if they’re going to itch her all night.’
He was right. I can take the pain. Easily. I just can’t take the itching. I have no pain volume control. ‘A mosquito stung me! Dear God, put me out of my misery!’ I can put needles and knives in myself, but I am horrified by an itch on my foot, or by my period, which brings wild terror to my eyes because I never invited it and it’s not just in my house, it’s in my body. My period never feels like a visitor from nature. It feels like sexual harassment.
I like the cuts – they comfort me – I can’t lie. My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that come close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines. Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar. The tattoos came because, as angry as I was, I was also tired.
Every now and then I’ll be so sad and so lazy that I’ll pay someone to interpret it all in needle and ink. ‘Do what you like,’ I say, because the eventual pattern is irrelevant. I just want to feel the needle and see, next day, next week, forever, the reminder that it really happened, that I really was that sad. Because when I’m on the upswing, manic as anything, I can’t imagine that I will ever come down.
Everyone asks how I’ll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: ‘I’ll like them.’ I’ve always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans. I like Brigitte Bardot now, petting stray dogs and sitting in the sun, skin getting more and more leathery. I was trying to be a ruined beauty then, at twenty. I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn’t think they’d ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.
Even with my arms covered so you couldn’t see the scars, the high-maintenance hair color told everyone on the set of Mean People Suck that I was damaged, demanding, fragile and fake. They only had to put a prop in my hand, to fit me for a costume or hand me my morning coffee, to see that. On a bright morning, as all mornings on the set invariably were, the blue of the sky bounced off the white of my hair in such a way that you couldn’t really see me at all. I was the girl beneath the hair and the sky. I started to look forward to long interior shoots, three days in a classroom, in a broom closet. I loathed the exteriors.
It was Sunday morning, my first break in a while, and I was hanging out with my dealer, who soon left, having installed the new toilet roll in my gray marbled bathroom. I swallowed a Vicodin and started to feel better. Drawing back the blinds, inch by inch, I surveyed New York Street Scene No. 1: another glare day, when people scrunch their pretty faces ugly in the sun.
‘I can’t die,’ I reminded myself, ‘because tonight I have to be in Brooklyn, where the dining room will stink of cats and Grandma Yetty will again note how much weight I’ve lost since I stopped seeing Sebastian.’ Grandma Yetty is a grandma, but not mine. She used to babysit me when I was a little girl.
When I first told Grandma Yetty I was seeing Sebastian I said he had an English literature degree from Harvard. Then I told her that he was black.
‘White-black, I presume?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know, like a white South African. As opposed to a black South African. Is he a white-black?’
‘No. I don’t think there are any white-blacks, Yetty.’
‘Oh,’ she said dejectedly, ‘well, is he black-Jewish?’ Her voice grew more hopeful: ‘Like Sammy Davis Jr.’
‘No. He’s not like Sammy Davis Jr. Um. At all.’
My mom, I remember, believed in intermarriage. She told me such things from the time I was tiny. Perhaps she was trying to cram in as much as possible, whether or not it was appropriate for a little kid, whether I asked or not, because she knew she wouldn’t be here when it was appropriate. When I was seven I asked her how babies were made. She told me, truthfully, zestfully, as though reciting a wonderful family story she had been aching to repeat. Then she asked if there was anything else I wanted to know. I asked her, ‘How do lesbians have sex?’ And this she told me unabashedly too. ‘Sex toys’ were mentioned as an option and from that day forth I associated lesbianism with theme parks and petting zoos, somewhere fun to visit for a day.
I remembered very clearly that she thought Jews and blacks were a great combination. ‘Marry out, marry out!’ she directed one evening, as she scrubbed me in the bathtub, rubbing soap behind my five-year-old ears.
I loved Sebastian and I loved going to his mother’s house in Jersey. I loved traversing the boardwalk, in the wrong shoes at first, but they became righter and righter the more I walked. After we broke up and he broke down and I broke in two, I would go back and walk. Maybe I was hoping to bump into him. No. I was hoping to bump into his mother. I wanted to tell on him and tell on myself. I did a bad thing, Mrs Chase. I’m a bad person, Mrs Chase. OK, I’m not. I’m glad you said that. It means a lot. Yeah. He’s OK. He’s seeing other people, Mrs Chase. Oh, he hasn’t told you about them? Then I guess they don’t mean that much, these new girls.
I rode the train to Jersey, to the boardwalk, but I never saw him and I never saw her. I just saw myself. In the sea, in the shopfronts. I saw myself reflected in things that don’t reflect. The wood beneath me, the splinters in my soles bore my face. Discomfort is worse than a wound. At least you know where you are with blood. At least other people can see it.
‘You’re looking thin,’ said Yetty last time I saw her. I really wasn’t, but I deserved to be: for those last few months, all that I’d lived on was blow-jobs and cigarettes. If it had worked for me as it had every other heart-broken girl in New York City, I would have turned my diet into a book and topped the bestseller lists. Yes, you too can achieve your target weight in less than a month, or your money back.
Don’t look at fat dead Mom. Or cold living Dad. It’s not my family’s fault I’ve had such a bumpy ride. Yes, I’ve cried and cried because my mother is dead and because she did it all by herself, without the aid of cancer or heart disease. But still, I have never cried as hard as when Liev left. Or as hard as I did when I knew he was not coming back.
After Mom was gone, I started to hate Dad less. He became so tiny and ridiculous. And then, as soon as I emancipated myself from him, he no longer had to feign the slightest interest in me and, once that happened, he began to find me a more intriguing proposition. He would actually ask me what I thought of his latest exhibition or protégée. I would tell him and then leave, because I did not like being around him as he began to humble. When he started to care, I could barely tolerate him or his house or neighborhood.
It is worth visiting Brooklyn to see Manhattan. It’s worth living in hell to get a better view of heaven. That’s stupid. Brooklyn isn’t hell. It’s just where my family comes from. Manhattan is where I made myself. Los Angeles is where they took me because they liked what I had made. Manhattan
is where I returned to be disassembled. Smiling and fresh-faced, unaware of imminent implosion, I bought a Greenwich Village apartment, and met Sebastian the same week. By the time we broke up, I barely knew my own neighborhood. So I went back to LA, to auditions, to Scott, to quasi-auditions and quasi-Scotts.
Working on Mean People Suck I was forced to reacquaint myself with my lovely apartment on its beautiful block. I hated it.
‘Excuse me. Where is the mail box?’ I’d ask, only to be told that it was on the corner of my street. I’d go and try to mail a letter to an ex-lover in LA, but I’d get distracted and end up leaning on the letter box until a teenage girl asked me, ‘Are you her, or do you just look like her?’ I couldn’t answer myself. That’s when I first met the kids next door.
The kids next door are twin sisters from Queens. One twin has red hair and one is blond. They told me their names over and over, without offense taken, but it still took me a while to process. I noticed, in order of recognition, that both sisters are snappy dressers, heavily accented, fun, smart and very kind. When I realised how central the last attribute was to their outlook, I felt ashamed that I had been so bowled over by their clothes.
They were the first girls I knew of to wear pants under a skirt. They never wear make-up, unless they are bored, and then, contrary to the belief that makeup should enhance your beauty, they paint a green strip above each eye or add a dash of hot-pink rouge until they look like punk-rock dollies.
The Red twin found me sitting on a bench outside the nail salon, waiting for my nails to dry. I had been there an hour, staring at the tiny pink heart painted in the upper right corner of each nail.
Do my nails love me? Do I have a heart beating under each finger, each with the ability to function alone from the rest of me? I wanted to be alone from the rest of me, too. From the hair that fell on my face, and the knees touching each other, the scratchy eyelashes and toothache. From the certainty that I was failing Sean and that if I wasn’t failing him, he was surely failing me.
