A Selfie as Big as the Ritz

by Lara Williams

  Home was one those un-notable Midlands towns. Important, perhaps once, in the early modern era though now known only for mini-breaks and markets. A maze of riveting cobbled streets, of grainy red brick. Autumn crept in like ivy, infusing the place with crackle, with spirit, with a pinching, thrilling cold that swished out your ears and made you pay attention.

  The city had two colors; yellow and blue. The light shone either a creamy mayonnaise else it was frosted and navy. Both were oppressive.

  At the turn she noticed a blank billboard spray painted over. WHAT DO YOU LONG FOR? it asked.

  It reminded her of a picture Joyce sent when he’d visited Berlin; CAPITALISM KILLS LOVE, over a shop front in gaudy neon.

  What do you long for?

  NO EU, came the response, on a yield sign further down the road.

  She parked and turned off the engine remaining. As the windows fogged she considered all the romantic notions she’d ever had of herself, multiple identities nurtured and unburdened, free to roam, she supposed, wherever.

  She liked the word wherever. She liked its shared e.

  On the radio two biologists talked alternately about the Adriatic Sea and rising tides in Venice. She shut her eyes. She’d never been to Venice. She’d never been to Italy. She’d been abroad once in the past seven years: to Jersey for a wedding.

  It was Joyce’s cousin and they’d spent most of the evening getting stoned in the garden. Her resounding memory of the day had been his uncle expressing a deep outrage that they didn’t serve tea.

  She thought about the wedding; the little lady points of her shoes, how smart Joyce looked in his suit. His uncle smoking outside, saying it was a bastard nuisance it was.

  On the radio someone says in Venice water now covers twelve percent of the town.

  * * *

  Aahna was a dancer. Or used to be. She danced here and there, mostly non-professionally; recently with an amateur dramatics group in the chorus line for The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. “Just a little bitty pissant place,” she sang, breathlessly railing across the stage. “Ain’t nothing much to see!”

  Her day job was in audience development at a theater and dance space; stopping patrons as they left the show, asking whether they’d viewed the performance for “enrichment, entertainment or as a form of escape?” Sipping tea in the wings she’d stare guilelessly at the small expanse of stage before photocopying proformas on community engagement, typing up risk assessments for cocktail receptions.

  “Edible elderflower?!” her manager would scrawl over post-its left on her screen. “Respond with urgency.”

  Lately, she had been dancing less and less. She wasn’t sure why. She had something to articulate but didn’t have the words. Now, Aahna spent her evenings watching rolling trivia on YouTube; performing small rituals, removing all her makeup and nail varnish, meticulously reapplying with a tiny hand mirror then filing her nails into blunt squares. The less she danced the more she followed a routine.

  On her last day at work she sat in the stalls, feet up on the seat in front of her. “If you’ve got something to express,” her colleague shouted up in the circle, “now is the time.”

  She climbed up on stage, delivered an inelegant plié, and skipped to the front.

  “My … CUNT!” she yelled, to an audience of one.

  “I’m a female artist,” she called up, stepping down. “What on earth did you expect?”

  With Aahna moving back home, Joyce had gone traveling. “If we’re giving up the apartment,” he’d reasoned, as if the bricks and mortar of the thing had been all that was holding him back, and Aahna had agreed on the promise of twice daily messages, in the morning and at night. And he would, at obscure times through the day, draft salutations punctuated with a little x; the humble aesthetics of the lower-kiss, his circadian rhythms out of whack with hers.

  Photos of him with impossibly skinny white girls, in string bikinis and straw hats kept popping up on Facebook; but what could one do? There were goddamn whores the world over.

  Aahna stepped into the hallway hearing her mother singing upstairs. A fresh otherworldly remove. A disarming new entropy. Her mother had taken to punctuating melodies with memos. “Take out the washing,” she’d tell herself after a kicky take on Summertime. “Don’t forget to call Sheila.”

  Though her mother was dreamy, she was ethereal; the woman was at heart a pragmatist. A wall of good sense against Aahna’s drama and histrionics.

  Aahna’s mother came rattling downstairs, jazzed and made up, lousy with nerves and sweet perfume.

  “Bob’s taking me out tonight,” she said.

  Bob was her mother’s boyfriend and he was a disappointment. He was a farmer. Posh and dopey. Always wearing tweed. It’s hard to be a disappointment when named Bob. Expectations were already set ludicrously low.

  “It’s been a terrible year for rape,” he’d told her, the first time they met. “But the carrots are doing fine.”

  She sat in the living room staring at the wall. She’d spent her whole life trying to get out of this place but now whenever she left she had this unnameable melancholy. As she drove past the cornfields, the farmhouses on the outskirts of town, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or scream, just a suffocating tug at the center of her chest.

  “Be good, bunny rabbit,” her mother said, kissing her head.

  Her high heels delivered an earnest clip clop as she made for the door.

  * * *

  Aahna ate cornflakes for breakfast. Swirling them about the bowl. Peering for meaning within their sodden hieroglyphics. Her mother joined her on the sofa, holding a cup of tea to her breast like an injured bird. She’d gotten in late last night. Aahna was unsure whether Bob had stayed over. It was beyond imagination.

  “I hope that’s warm milk,” her mother said, peering over.

  She had this peculiar obsession with serving everything warm; milk was to be heated before pouring into tea or coffee, water was to be drunk cooled from the kettle. A kind of cushioning against the brutality of the world. What sort of way was it to start the day, anyway, ice cold milk gulped down before stripping naked and showering? Their world was built on small comforts; a benign padding, a benevolent easing in of things.

  Aahna nodded and yawned. Last night she had stayed up texting old friends. She smoked some pot before giving up and watching a documentary on the different types of whales. She was done, she thought, with the abstract. What she liked now was the assured. Back in the house, she used to regale Joyce with facts while he’d make them dinner.

  No one knows who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. They founded it anonymously.

  No one knows who invented the fire hydrant. The patent was burned in a fire.

  The singer from The Offspring has his very own line of hot sauce.

  She’d stand in front of him like a girl dressed for prom; whaddaya think? He’d pretend to be interested. Deliver a thin smile; all lip flesh and dead eyes. At some point he stopped listening to her facts and talking about where he wanted to visit, his traveling plans that didn’t include her. He was in Cambodia now. He’d taken to wearing a leather necklace and thongs. Christ.

  Aahna sniffled and picked up the remote. She turned on the television. A program about agriculture. Unavoidable.

  Lying back into the couch she studied her bracelet; the tiny slither of it. She missed Joyce, she supposed, in a distant, misted way. Without him, she felt bored, frustrated.

  Sex with Joyce had always been good. Rangey and familiar right from the start. It was like swimming. Afterward she’d sleep beautifully and wake up starving. Though she didn’t so much mind being sexually frustrated. Being a dancer was like being a little bit repressed, always.

  Her mother was fussing around the room; pruning the sofa and plumping the pillows.

  “When’s this audition of yours?” she asked.

  Aahna had applied for a job as a nightclub dancer. The requirements of which were some experience and a twenty-six inch waist.
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  “Tomorrow,” she replied.

  It was her first dancing audition in a year. She thought she was through with it. But this felt like being through with it come one step further. Like she’d completed the circle and gone back to the start.

  “You know you can always give Bob a hand on the farm.”

  Aahna wrinkled her nose.

  “Suit yourself,” her mother replied. She began humming to herself. Soon would come the memos.

  “I ran into your old friend Oliver last week,” she trilled. “He’s just bought a house and I said you’d get in touch.”

  Aahna rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure I’m ready to face the locals,” she said. It was past midday and she was still in her pajamas. A milk stain shaped like an island. She hadn’t washed her hair in days.

  “Well think about it,” she said. “Oliver’s got a cat. That can dance.”

  She stood up and pointed her toes. Warming up in front of the expansive pastoral scene on the television. She tried moving in time with the chug of a plow, the tractor’s dense hum. It was impossible. Capitalism kills love.

  “We sound positively made for each other,” she replied, spinning expansively. “Me and the cat.”

  She sat back down. Her mother came and sat next to her, and stroked beneath her chin.

  * * *

  The awful paradox of dancing. The necessary uninhibitedness coupled with the routine appraisal.

  Dragging out the ribbons within to be told they’re not quite there yet. The hell kind of exoskeletons were dancers equipped with, anyway? How could one flex and jive? The venue was nestled between a model airplane store and a rare books store on the narrow high street. None of the shops here looked like real shops. All prop fronts with nothing inside. Clubs or bars, even chain stores, seemed incongruous; a boom-mic complicating the shot.

  Aahna rippled with anxiety. She hated anxiety. Anxiety was a lousy warm-up. She wanted to cut straight to the depression.

  Approaching the entrance she thought she recognized some women walking past. Their feet gargantuan in Uggs, twisting St. Christopher chains around their necks. Snow boots and Christians and people you half-knew. You couldn’t move for them.

  The venue was dark and sticky. She looked for the woman managing the auditions whose name she couldn’t remember. The sick familiarity of auditions. Stripping naked and seeing if they’re turned on.

  “Where can I set up?” she asked.

  “Wherever,” the woman replied.

  Wherever.

  There were about ten girls at the audition, all in varying depths of foundation; their bronzed limbs smoky under the low blue lighting. She watched them shuck and glide, taking their turn upon the stage. She studied their makeup and affectations. All pageantry and no art.

  Dancing had started to move her less and less. The first time she’d been to a ballet she’d teared up with an emotion she couldn’t really name. Now she counted beats, thought “bad feet.” Now she felt very little at all. Now when she finished stretching her shoulders ached. Now she could use joint pain to predict the weather.

  For the audition she had prepared a short routine. Street dance with a modern flourish. She’d picked a peppy electronic number to back it. Taking to the stage she raised her arms and began.

  She flung back her head and hoisted her legs, manipulating her back and shoulders. She popped her joints and bumped her hips. She spun, counting the meter; a rhythmic tick tock to which she buckled and swished.

  Express yourself!—she thought. Cunt!

  Once, her dance teacher had told her if she was going to make it as a dancer she needed a sense of humor about having no money. “That’s the problem with poverty!” she’d responded. “No one tells any jokes!” Dancing was all about levity and numbers.

  She thrust her body forward, leaping across the stage. She loved the oppressive freedom of dance. The letting go while hanging on. It was dry Ryvita and fresh fruit. It was crunches in front of the training mirror. It was bloodied feet and toenails falling off. Equally, it was transformation. She spun beneath the spotlight feeling all the things at once.

  As the music slowed she wound down concluding with a diminutive curtsy. Her shoulder throbbed. She’d messed up the end but other than that she hadn’t done too bad.

  She paused catching her breath. The air was acrid and dank. She felt woozy. A cold panic gripped her throat. Aahna fainted just once before, though felt she understood it. Fainting felt like the correct manifestation of experience.

  It had been on holiday after her parents had separated and her mother’s settlement came through. They’d gone to Florida. At sixteen, Aahna was a little too old for it; the brightness and pep made her head spin. She felt nauseous constantly, from sugar and corn syrup.

  They’d gone to the Epcot Center which seemed slightly more grown-up, somewhat more sophisticated than the others, though the experience transpired to be singularly nightmarish; plastic and hot, a hellish mesh of caricature and customer satisfaction.

  Weaving through the miniature Coliseum, Aahna’s vision dimmed and suddenly she was falling to the floor, taking a model Julius Caesar and 3D Mona Lisa with her. Disaster. Drama. Drama in the diorama. “Aahna!” her mother squealed. “You brought down Rome!”

  As she fell beneath the studio lighting the image remained, along jagged, flickering thoughts, like an ocular migraine. Something about performance. Something about doing what you are told. She woke up to a crowd, to that same garish reminder of vivacity and color.

  * * *

  A few days before Aahna and Joyce had moved out a pigeon hit the window. They saw it flying straight toward them, clumsy and larger than expected, like a slow-moving albatross. It hit with a thump and fell to the ground. They Googled and rang the RSPCA; became fleetingly, intrepidly fascinated with domestic and feral pigeons. It remained in the yard for hours. They were told birds hitting windows become stunned. It takes them a while to remember how to fly.

  They sat cross-legged, urging it to be okay. It strutted and stumbled but eventually flew. It landed on a tree branch on the opposite side of the yard. Another pigeon landed next to it and they nuzzled and cooed; pigeons are monogamous, they mate for life. Aahna and Joyce jumped up and down like giddy schoolgirls, holding each other’s hands and squealing with joy. Joyce went to the fridge and opened up a bottle of wine. They toasted on the sofa. “I am going to be sad when you go,” Aahna thought, and turned on the TV.

  * * *

  It was Halloween and Aahna’s mother was cooking. She was making pumpkin dahl. Kneading lantern-orange flesh with sage. Warming spices over the stove. Aahna had persuaded her mother to watch The Red Shoes with her.

  “It doesn’t seem very Halloween-y,” she said.

  “Trust me,” Aahna replied. “It’s terrifying.”

  Aahna opened a bottle of wine and they both stood drinking it in the kitchen. Aahna was beginning to enjoy being at home. There were always biscuits in the cupboard, fresh towels on the rack. She was increasingly seeing herself through her mother’s eyes; had started dressing in brighter, more fragrant colors.

  Trick-or-treaters gathered at the front door. Aahna spied them through the kitchen window: Madonna, Cher and Tina. Divas-in-training. Pre-divas. Hunched together in nylon costumes.

  They looked strange in grown-up clothes. All youthful sass and bad posture.

  “Do you like Chardonnay?” Aahna asked.

  She held her glass in the air. Here’s to you! She was drunk.

  The flimsy sequins of their costumes twinkled nervously in the dark. Red toenails peeping self-consciously from their sandals. They popped their hips. Smacked their glossed lips.

  Aahna looked them up and down. Bitches, she thought. Bitches.

  “You look more like Pinot girls, am I right ladies?”

  She held their gaze.

  “You want to see a trick?” Madonna asked, and then she spat on the floor. They screamed with laughter and turned to run away. They tripped and fell into
each other, hysterical and squealing. Children are awful.

  “Hey, that’s not very polite,” Aahna shouted after them. “That’s not very fucking Mother of Jesus.”

  The clip clop of their heels echoed down the street. They whooped with glee.

  “Cher,” Aahna shouted after them.

  “Hey Cher. I’ve got a question for you.”

  They stopped, breathless. Holding onto each other. They turned around and their eyes shimmered with expectation.

  “Oh yeah?” Cher replied.

  “Yeah,” Aahna shouted. “Do you believe in life after love?”

  The girls looked at each other in disbelief. They giggled, giddy and drunk; drunk on this crazy lady, scampering back down the street like wild things into the night.

  “Well do you?” Aahna yelled after them.

  “Do you?”

  Aahna closed the door and went back inside. Her mother was laying the table.

  “Am I a good person?” Aahna asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Am I a good person?” she repeated.

  Her mother patted her head.

  “Good at what?” she asked.

  * * *

  At her mother’s insistence Aahna had agreed to meet her old schoolfriend Oliver. She needed to get out the house. Skyping with Joyce, she had so little to report; “my IBS is back” and “Aldi do kale now” while his anecdotes were conspicuously littered with vowel-heavy girls’ names, a new drag in his voice dense with overstimulated inertia.

  He Snapchatted her a picture of a Buddhist temple and another of his feet in the sand. She’d stared at them listlessly counting down the seconds. Good riddance, she’d think, as they vanished.

  Oliver had offered to cook her dinner. Her mother dropped her off. She paused outside his house arrested by the sight of it; a proper little house, stucco exterior, porch light and a neatly manicured lawn. It looked like a cartoon house. Phantasmagorically domestic. Too good to be true.

  They hovered in the kitchen nervously catching up on their respective lives. Oliver worked for a pneumatics company (“the pressure gets a bit much”), still said “ace” a lot. It was weird seeing his schoolboy face grown old. Like a practical joke. Like he might kick her in the shins and tell his friends she believed him.