Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Perhaps she would always see that bright light at her mother’s chest and arms, an embrace of flames, when she looked at her mother.

  She remembered her mother’s scarves and the way she used to roll each into a flat band to hold her hair back, a knot at her nape, the silk flowing down her back. Vanessa would take the huge sunglasses off her mother’s face and place them on her own, seeing the world for just a moment veiled in pink: childhood. At the time she imagined that was what her mother always saw too. She remembered Benjamin’s birthday parties, all his friends running through the backyard and she watching with a mix of admiration and envy. Desire? She remembered these purple pineapples on the floors when they’d first moved into the house on Thornapple Street. They had made the rather formidable new house seem friendly and accessible, a place where a child could live. Then one day some man with a huge metal machine came to the home and erased them. Where did they go?

  Where does childhood go? Did it disappear beneath Jason last June or beneath Sean that afternoon last September, or was it years ago, the day the Great Dane came in and bit that blond girl, Trudy what’s-her-name. Or was it one of those nights when her parents argued so hard her father slammed the front door, got into his car, and sped away? Vanessa had this strange and rather sickening thought—more sensation—that people, her parents, had children of their own so that their childhoods would not be lost, but would be carried on, and on.

  Instead of Jason’s Slickee Boys, Vanessa wanted to hear the Carpenters: I’m on the top of the world lookin’ down on creation, And the only explanation I can find . . . To be taken back to being a camper in musty cabins, in fields of blackberries; Herbal Essence swirling down the cement drain, girl feet, girl hands, girl tears; she and Lisa Stern on top of each other, kissing each other’s hand-covered mouth, practicing; sneaking past the night watch and meeting David Sherman down at the lake, the orb from his flashlight bouncing in the dark woods.

  Bee and Heather and Jessica and Vanessa listened to the Carpenters as well. What were they doing right now? Vanessa remembered her foursome in their running shorts and tie-dyes, getting ready for the Bicentennial. They were too old for the neighborhood block parties, but too young, her father said, to go down to the Mall by themselves. (Today? On the Fourth? With all those crazies in town? You must be out of your mind.) Heather’s and Rachel’s parents were going to let them take the brand-new Metro, but Bee’s mother had also said no, so they’d decided to just stay in the neighborhood. Every station was playing Elton John and Kiki Dee singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (I Couldn’t If I Tried!).” Even though they knew they were too old for it, and a little bit because they were way too old, they’d tied red, white, and blue streamers on the handlebars of their bikes at Bee’s suggestion—Jessica and Bee had ten-speeds and she and Heather their old Schwinns—and they rode screaming through the neighborhood. Heather had a little pink-and-green-flowered bell and she’d ring it every time they passed a house they knew, on Underwood and Glendale and Woodbine, including Ed Brady’s house on Primrose, before he was gone. At Rock Creek they’d wended around Beach Drive into the District, to Pierce Mill and then back up Rolling Road and Summit, until dark. Then they’d settled on the lawn at the Presbyterian church on Shepherd Street to watch the fireworks burst over the 4-H Club. Someone had handed them a joint, and Bee had lain crossways, her head on Vanessa’s legs, and passed it back to her languidly.

  Vanessa had wanted to escape those girls, change, try on punk like everyone else, be punk, not just watch it bloom around her as she observed, shifting her feet along the viscid floors of fetid clubs. But did stomping around in boots or shaving your head make you into something? Who were those Brits beneath their pink Mohawks, really? Vanessa saw postcards of them everywhere in Georgetown. But despite a foray into temporary black hair dye and a brand-new studded black belt, she remained the same. Going to shows with Jason and Sean, she spent less time with Bee and Heather and Jessica, becoming keenly aware that most of the kids in this particular scene were not the disenfranchised youth in search of belonging, but were instead the rich sons and daughters of judges and senators and diplomats dictating what belonging meant. In comparison, Vanessa—and even Bee and Jessica, Heather not so much—were far less privileged. Combat boots and ripped black anarchy shirts were stepping out of Mercedes and Bimmers before heading into someone’s basement for band practice. The Tellers played two gigs at Fort Reno, then broke up when the drummer and the bassist went to college in September, to Vassar and to BU. The scene outside of D.C., which she could learn about at Yesterday and Today in Rockville, seemed different, more real—the Cramps, say, and their frenzied blues from New York or the general insane panic of the Buzzcocks, from Britain—but Vanessa wondered even then if that was a matter of proximity. Up close, everything seemed so phoney, and Vanessa wondered, Can you try it on? She would see interviews in Jason’s British magazines, which covered the D.C. scene before any of the U.S. magazines did, and these Georgetown kids were quoted as saying they understood what it felt like to be black in this country due to the abuse they took for their shaved heads and tattoos.

  Were the girls putting on their eye shadow and Orange Crush Lip Smacker and going out to some upperclassman’s party? They were so shiny! Something about the thought of them was sweet, a relief compared to some of the violent shows she’d been to. Kids no one knew were coming in, and the raging circle of boys’ bodies had gotten so big. Where were the female singers anyway? All this just-go-for-it bullshit, anyone can, and still it was the guys she saw kneeling and screaming; she missed the brave, freakish, egomaniacal girls who fronted bands. Vanessa missed drinking warm beer with her friends, talking to soccer and lacrosse players, and getting chased into the woods by the cops for being underage and drinking in public.

  As Jason dodged the traffic lights, perfectly timing the drive down Wisconsin, for a brief moment Vanessa really missed her old version of high school.

  What was so goddamn powerful about the pull of Sean Flaherty? Vanessa didn’t bother to get up and switch windows to get a view of the boys casing the backyard in toilet paper; she knew what it would look like. As they moved out of sight, she thought about what Benjamin would do were he still home. Jason, with his large hands and feet attached to skinny arms and legs, was far less strapping than Sean, and her brother’s strength was also different. Jason held no menace in the way he moved, as if he had not yet grown into his man’s bones, his muscles still struggling to wrap around an adult skeleton.

  The boys tramped beneath Vanessa’s window, making their way from the back of the house, and she dodged out of view. She visualized them at her father’s hammock—how many nights had she looked out from the porch into the backyard, calling her father in for dinner, and seen him only in quick, tight flashes as he swung batlike beneath his cave of trees—and she imagined it now, a wrapped, empty cocoon.

  They’d soon completed their mission, and now Sean and his friends retrieved the skateboards from the edge of the lawn. She heard their voices, then the smack of wood and metal onto asphalt, then the wheels turning along the road, and they were off. She looked out again to see them disappearing down the block until they were completely erased by the mottled suburban street.

  Very early Saturday morning, even before her father had gone out for the Post, he turned to Sharon in the kitchen. “There couldn’t be a worse time to leave for the weekend, you know,” he said.

  Vanessa had just come downstairs, and she threw her overnight bag on the landing, waiting for someone to either register her bag’s ill placement or notice what had transpired the night before. Instead, she watched her mother turn from wincing at Vanessa’s luggage to look at her father. Her eyes turned to slits.

  “But you promised!” her mother said, and Vanessa heard her own young self, importunate about that Barbie head that she was never allowed to have at home. Now she was chastened to have ever wanted such a ridiculous object. Nana Helen had gotten the Barbie head for her and hid th
e outrageously large thing in her closet for when Vanessa came to visit. They’d spent hours lavishing that head with preposterous amounts of makeup and brushing the stiff blond hair into extravagant styles topped by colored silk ribbons and pearly barrettes.

  “Dennis, you did promise,” her mother said again. “We talked about this months ago. In January.” She sniffed. “Months.”

  “I never said I wasn’t going.” Dennis sounded resigned. “I’m just saying I’ve got a lot going on here, Sharon.”

  “Really?” She sounded more guarded now, like an adult. “Like what?”

  “Like a lot is what. Like phosphate exports were suspended last month, did you know that? So this hinders fertilizing on the Soviet end, and yet Canada and Argentina are still supplying them with grain,” he said. “There’s a lot going on because it’s impossible to enforce an embargo. So that’s what.”

  Her mother looked into her coffee cup and nodded. “Well, there’s a lot going on with me too, you know. It’s an election year, my God, do you know how many parties I refused so we could go this weekend? And we all know I’ve lost a hell of a lot of work.” She held up her arm. “I’ve got to finish packing,” she said, climbing off her stool.

  “He didn’t say he’s not going, Mom.” Vanessa knew her mother would never leave packing, even for a trip to the market, to the last minute. She watched her cradling her left arm, which had suffered the worst burns. And I have things too, Vanessa had wanted to say. I’m here too.

  “Of course I’m going to Boston,” Dennis said, sighing. “Like we’d planned, Sharon, don’t worry.” Any day would have been the same: her father kept expecting the embargo to be lifted and, the very moment it happened, to be called back to Moscow for a meeting with shipping agents before he could tell his family dasvidaniya.

  Sharon continued up the stairs. After all the bandages and dressings had come off, her skin had been the most tender along her hand and forearm. She took morphine for the pain, which made her more oblivious than ever as she wandered around the house, her hip hitting tables, her toe stubbing corners. But the scars had turned out to be hypertrophic, which, though hideous-looking, the skin stripped of pores and hair and striated with dark, ropelike scars, was not anywhere near as wretched as contracture scars would have been. These, they were told, created a permanent tightening of skin, which more often than not affected tendons and muscle, limiting mobility. The implications of this on her mother’s life were not discussed, not in Vanessa’s presence anyway, though whether Sharon would need surgery had been much deliberated. When her parents debated this, Vanessa imagined her mother rendered unable to cook, now incapable of whipping cream into mountain peaks or kneading her breads and pizza doughs, her fingers no longer smelling of garlic or yeast when she went to brush Vanessa’s hair out of her face.

  Despite a good deal of concern about her arm, the doctors had been relieved that her head had somehow managed to stay away from the flames. You’re lucky as hell your hair was back, a nurse whispered as she’d adjusted Sharon’s IV. And your face? Whew, you really are a lucky lady. When the nurse said it—lucky lady—it looked as if she were clucking. While Vanessa had pictured her mother’s face burnt as coal-black as her shirt, and beneath that the oozing, red wound, what Sharon seemed to take from this most was that she could have lost her hair. Her hair! And, as the nurse told her, that doesn’t always grow back.

  Her mother’s hair: it was long and fine and even in winter it retained golden highlights. When she cooked, she wore it up in a bun held with a red-lacquered chopstick, or in two tortoiseshell combs.

  Thinking of her mother without her hair was worse than imagining her unable to prepare food. Vanessa pictured her wearing some kind of a wig, but the only wig she’d ever seen her father had found in a trunk in the attic. It had this appalling scratchy mesh that showed through the dark strands. He’d forced her to wear it as part of a costume one Halloween. Her father, who was spastic about Halloween, had insisted she go as a witch that year so he could make a mask of her face out of papier-mâché. She’d lain on the basement floor beneath his towering purple and green sculpture made of the same material—it’s my medium, he’d said as he placed her head on pillows taken from the musty couch. Vanessa hated the basement, covered in a film of dust, and always with some rank, primitive smell that she mostly recognized to be her father’s sweat from his naked sun salutations, which Vanessa had had the unhappy pleasure of witnessing on the several occasions she had been sent to the extra freezer for a can of frozen orange juice or a container of pasta sauce while he was practicing “yoga.”

  She remembered her father breathing heavily as he lay long bands of newspaper dipped in water and flour along her face. Each long piece had been shockingly cold and horribly slimy, and despite the straws he’d inserted in her nostrils, Vanessa couldn’t breathe when he placed the strips over her mouth. After she’d gotten up, dizzy, her mouth filled with the drying paste, her lips crusted with it, he’d fashioned a witchy nose out of crumpled newspaper and attached this to the mask that for a brief moment had resembled her face. Vanessa reached up to touch her cheek, as if to ensure that her face had not been taken. Over the next twenty-four hours her father checked the mask often, tapping it with a pencil to feel for the right resistance, and when it had finally hardened, he cut holes out for eyes and a mouth with an X-Acto knife. She’d put it on only to discover that the holes had been cut inexactly and she could neither see out of the right eye nor breathe from the nose holes. Yet her father insisted on her wearing the mask he’d worked so hard on for her. This mask, he’d claimed as he’d painted the mole on the terrible witch nose, was art.

  Dennis maintained that the wig was made of genuine horsehair, as if this made it a good thing, and that it must be worn to complete the look. With the mask on, she looked like someone else entirely, though she could only truly see this stranger in full when she took the whole contraption off and looked at the Polaroid taken by her father before they stepped out into the night. As Vanessa had stumbled up the block gasping for breath the whole evening, Ben, who wore a cardboard box fashioned into a tombstone, a huge space cut for his face, changed merely by gray Pan-Cake makeup, loped ahead of her with out-and-out disregard. And when she’d blindly held out her bag for candy—candy she would not be able to eat until her father had inspected it for the razors and poisons he never found, not once—she’d been unable to shake the thought that somewhere some poor pony was without his mane and tail.

  When they’d arrived home from the hospital, both her mother’s hands bandaged, she called out from her bedroom. “Vanessa!” she’d screamed.

  This is it, Vanessa thought. She had waited for the moment when her mother would confront her about that horrible night at the party. Vanessa felt she would do anything to the person who came between her and food. She had become in these past few months quite unstoppable. At the Epsteins’, when she’d sneaked into the garden and ripped the meat off the bone, she hadn’t even liked the taste of it. Vanessa didn’t eat meat, which had something to do with loving animals, something to do with politics, but mostly to do with restricting her diet, and she was filled with self-hatred for the way she’d consumed something she so detested. She heard the taunting of the punks: meat is murder! And even worse, she thought of the images of children starving in Africa, their bellies distended, flies swarming around their foaming mouths. She thought of the Russian children living under the iron fist of communism and eating only potatoes and stale rolls, made when they’d had U.S. grain. She thought of the starving, tortured hostages getting typhoid from fetid water, and she thought of powerful punk girls who would look down on her and rub their big black boots in her face, could they see her in this state, the exact opposite of powerful, extremely contrary to Do it yourself!

  Whenever she was finished, she always thought of how mind-boggling what she did was when she knew the world was on the brink of starvation. Night after night her father discussed this impending, global food shortage.
She knew! Your children could go hungry, he’d tell her and Ben. Norman Borlaug can work until the cows come home, but one day, the food will just be gone. Her father swished his hands together. But Vanessa knew this was also a trick to make sure she had been listening closely enough to know that Norman Borlaug was the genius who’d doubled wheat production in Pakistan and India and Mexico and had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. She knew! Her mother talked continually about the quality of food, where it came from, how it was overly processed and refined, how we just ate wheat and not soy, or why we ate corn and not wheat without question. Vanessa had grown tired of so much talk of food.

  As she coaxed what she’d eaten back up, she was forced to endure the same humiliation in reverse, as well as experiencing again the horror of what a little brat she was, a lucky American, a total JAP, and by the time she was done, empty and again laid bare, she was stripped down and small again, with only her little-girl memories. Tatti’s Russian folktales: Once upon a time there lived an old woodcutter and his wife who had no children. On a cold and bitter day in the dead of winter, he went into the forest to chop wood and his wife came along to help him. We have no child, said the woodcutter to his wife. Shall we make a little snow girl to amuse us? Nana Helen’s pointed nails running along her scalp, through her hair. Thoughts of growing up, her fears, the way her body would always betray her, were gone, and for this single instant there was peace, purity, no knowledge of what was to come, of what it will in just one moment feel like to hate yourself so utterly for all the things you’ve had the privilege to do to yourself.