Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

Susan focuses. She tries to center herself in the present, at the kitchen table, while her brother flits around the kitchen offering “coffee, water, wine?” Her eyes land on a row of her brother’s photographs hung along the yellow ocher wall.

  They’re images of cow eyeballs with the long nerve still attached. Her brother collected the eyeballs at butcher shops, placed them on copper emulsion plates, and let the images develop from the eyes’ juices. Eyes so potent that even though the nerves were severed they left an impression, leaked out rings of orange and green phosphorescence—left a chemical spill.

  They’re fossil eyes, Susan thinks, poisonous and trapped in their old ways of seeing.

  When she’d first seen them, she’d dismissed the photos for being weird for the sake of weirdness. But she’d seen them alongside some older images. The ones in which Alex had pierced his collarbones, draped a Superman cape from the piercings, and photographed himself looking like an ambivalent golden boy—the blood from the piercings still trickling down his chest. “Oh, the martyrdom of the white male,” she’d teased him. He’d laughed a little and said something about being in art school and what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t exactly make empowering art about his vagina.

  But now by themselves the eye prints are different. Beautiful, actually, like flying over salt flats and marshes; the cornea is an island in a swirling salt sea.

  Susan tries to remember the theory behind them. She drifts off when her brother explains his theories, which usually seem a painful reminder of how she once sounded, and maybe still sounds—strivingly pretentious in a way they both thought would impress their father. Their beloved father who was gentle and kind, but who spent a large portion of their childhood grading papers and sealed in a bubble of seriousness.

  Looking at the eye prints she thinks she should say something, give a compliment. In fact, had she ever complimented Alex’s work?

  Alex comes to join Susan at the dining room table, proudly carrying a tiny cup of espresso on a saucer. As he sits down Susan notices a Native American dreamcatcher hung on the wall behind him, probably not authentic—the kind of white-person appropriation you can find at any gas station in the Southwest. She smiles wickedly and says, “That must be Melinda’s.”

  Her brother turns his head to look at the dreamcatcher and then smiles back at her.

  “You know Melinda’s a little nervous around you,” he says.

  And Susan, caught off guard, doesn’t believe it.

  Susan is in no way better-looking than Melinda, nor is she in any measurable way more accomplished. Susan has lofty-sounding goals; she wants be a poet-scholar. She wants to travel and give readings, to finally find a volumizer that will allow her to flip off witty comments as she flips her wild mien of poetess hair. Susan wants to pass the theory phase of her orals, to fucking finally understand Derrida’s semes, Freud’s overdetermination. (She’s nailed Barthes, however, and will probably end up reading about his starry open texts for comfort, after she obtains her PhD and is living in a homeless shelter.)

  Melinda, on the other hand, has a job, a house, and her brother.

  And speaking of the yogi, Melinda suddenly appears in the frame of the small arched door, slipping off her shoes, placing her yoga mat under a low bench. She deposits her keys with a jangle, as if to clear off Susan’s bad energy, into a scalloped metal bowl.

  Melinda, Susan thinks, has the power of those people who don’t announce themselves, upon whom your gaze happens accidentally, so you’re struck by their self-containment, by the way they don’t need you to exist. Susan wonders where Melinda found her internal ruler because she doesn’t seem to measure her actions against others. It’s a ruler that’s implanted in her spine—her posture is stick straight.

  She moves toward Susan. She hugs her warmly, looks her in the eyes and, smiling, says, “I’m so happy you get to visit us. How long can you stay?” And as quickly as she asks this she separates and returns to her business about the house, as if Susan has created nary a ripple in the smooth surface of their lives.

  “I’m just staying one night,” Susan says, watching, wondering how her brother ended up with someone so weird, or, more accurately, so unlike either herself or her mother.

  And her mother, Susan thinks, as she watches Melinda glide around the furniture, her mother has donated more than the kitchen table, where she sits at this very moment. The kitchen table with the familiar scratches. She hovers her hands over it now as if guiding a planchette along a Ouija board. Items like the old sewing machine, the rocking chair, items that would normally be donated to an oldest daughter, are emerging in the room like large rocks in the shallows. Her eyes bump up against them and they make jarring unattached thoughts.

  Susan presses her hands firmly against the top of the table. She tries to center herself, to be centered like Melinda, but instead she remembers her hands running over her mother’s stomach as it grew thicker and harder, became occupied with her brother. Her mother’s radical change happened when she was four. It must have become clear then that her mother was a separate person, not Susan’s constant background, her soft cushion with breasts. Her blanket, or bigger version that she could fit snugly inside.

  Her mother is bursting. Susan puts her hand on her stomach. She feels the new hot of her skin and knows that ground shifts, that flesh splits—and although inside her mother’s belly she knows that her brother is really only as big as her head, she understands volcanoes, and earthquakes, and that the earth is attached to a string, suspended and spinning.

  Or, her mother is lying in bed, sweaty and a little sick, and Susan wants to help, but the mother is the unhelped helper. The primary source. She leaves the drinks Susan brings untouched on the nightstand.

  Melinda opens the refrigerator. She takes out a blue bottle, a mango, and settles down between Susan and Alex at the kitchen table. Susan has to admit, she likes that Melinda doesn’t try to serve them, doesn’t offer anything from the refrigerator. Her mother did this compulsively, especially on Susan’s visits home from college, and Susan thought it was a kind of apology for no longer being close, and that if it was an apology, it was also a way of staying separate, a way of maintaining her own bubble of domestic control.

  Melinda, Alex, and Susan sit at the table, and the sun is hovering just above the sliding glass door, lighting up the chips and scratches on the table where they once sat as children over large bowls of cereal. And Susan can’t control herself. She turns to Alex and says, “When you were born, I didn’t want to share Mom.”

  Melinda looks up from her mango, but not suspiciously, like Alex. Just curious.

  Alex laughs and says, “How do you even remember?” He says, “I think you’re writing a story.”

  “No,” says Susan. “That’s why I was so mean to you.”

  But Alex rolls his eyes, and looks toward Melinda. He says, “You weren’t that bad.”

  “But maybe that’s why we’re still so competitive,” Susan says. “Don’t you ever have that feeling, like we’re stuck together on a teeter-totter? If one of us is sailing up, the other is watching—sinking from below.”

  “What?” asks Alex, shaking his head. “Are you saying this is why you missed the wedding?”

  But Susan pushes aside his incredulity. His question too. She feels a memory coming on.

  Susan remembers that once her brother came, she felt she had to move on, away from her mom, and that made her feel very small at first. Her hair looked so thin in the mirror in her mother’s bathroom, a mirror the size of the huge landscape paintings at museums. Her mother had finally shown her the mirror when she lifted her onto the counter to tie large felt bows to the ends of her braids for a family picture. The bows immediately made the braids look as thin as toothpicks. Her mother chuckled at the disproportion—loved the awkwardness of her children, loved them most, Susan thought, when they didn’t understand things, looked silly, or needed her help.

  And of course, Susan didn’t want to be a baby or a clow
n. She knew that although her mother said she could help with her new baby brother, it wouldn’t be true. She suspected her mother and her brother would be one person until her brother was at least three, and by that time she’d be seven—practically an adult.

  Susan remembers working hard on being independent, on strategies for making herself into her own landscape, house, or womb. She remembers her friend from down the street who played by putting dolls under her dress and tucking the dress into her underwear. But she didn’t want to be only a mother—she wanted to be mothered, too. She wanted to be wrapped in layers and surrounded by something bigger and more beautiful than herself, but that she’d created.

  She learns how to climb up into the cherry tree, lie in the crooks, and let her thoughts reach out like branches, and bud into capillaried walls.

  Or, she brings flashlights under the covers when she’s supposed to be sleeping and learns to read inside the stomach of her orange felt blanket. Each word is a pulse. If she doesn’t know it, she makes it up, quickly, so as not to skip a beat.

  Melinda floats through her routine like a planet on a mobile over a crib. Susan wonders if the brother is rendered docile by Melinda’s steady orbit, so different from their mother’s—she always hurried and bumped into furniture, sometimes injured herself trying to keep the house clean. Susan sips her coffee.

  She’s pissed that her brother implied she was writing a story. “So what if I’m writing a story?” she says aloud. “According to Zola a story is a scientific experiment, it’s a hypothesis—it tests an idea.”

  “Whatever,” Alex says, and then, “I think you should test a story through multiple points of view.”

  “Like yours?” Susan asks.

  “Yes,” says Alex, “and Mom’s.”

  “Oh, I think I know Mom’s point of view,” Susan says.

  But then she immediately realizes that this is the heart of the problem: of course she doesn’t.

  Beside the dreamcatcher Melinda has hung a painting of a newborn baby. Susan finds the picture startling, and the newborn ugly and unhappy-looking, with his eyes squeezed shut, a hospital bracelet cinched around his wrist, and little fists like prunes held up to his face. The paint around him is smeared, as if he’s emerging from dust, or exhaust. She wonders how Melinda doesn’t see the pained expression on his face. At the same time, she admires Melinda’s ability to know her wish and to hang it in the center of the wall.

  Susan stares at the painting and then back at Alex. She points to it and raises her eyebrows as if to say, What does this mean?

  Alex stares back at her. “Melinda put that up because she’s friends with the artist.” Susan narrows her gaze and looks at him.

  “Oh, and I think it’s very beautiful, don’t you?” Melinda calls out from the kitchen.

  Susan smiles at her brother, who has dodged her question: Does Melinda want a baby?

  She knows he’s scared. For the moment, she’s won.

  The sun is now burning a bright seam along the metal rim of the sliding glass door. It casts a reflective light across surfaces, burns them out. Susan walks into the living room and runs her hands along the soft nubby walls. She likes the eclectic nondecorating decorating style. It seems familiar, similar to her own attempts to be both domestic and not. The room, though, is definitely tinged with Melinda. On the bookshelves are funny Dadaist knickknacks like a log wearing a sweater, mixed with what are probably expensive crystal wedding gifts from the wedding she didn’t attend. There are old gas station signs and a couple of large salty-looking crystals. And it all begins to blur. It’s as if all the objects are hanging together on one web, on Melinda’s dreamcatcher. At least from the outside their lives are already like one of those double-image pictures that change depending on your angle of vision; their lives seem inexplicably intertwined. And Susan begins to give in, to let go of her resistance. She’s going to be an aunt. Probably. Isn’t it just like a bitter older sister to try to unravel a brother’s happiness? To criticize and poke holes? Shouldn’t she hope that somewhere in this vivid, clunky web, there will be a space for her?

  The irony is that Susan didn’t, at first, care to be loved by Alex, nor did she notice his love, except as an annoyance, or a constant background, like a wall painted yellow that bleached to electric white during adolescence but would blossom brightly on their returns from college, and then bleach back out again, after a couple of days, to an annoying hum. From a certain angle, her brother’s love was great and undeniable, as obvious as an amaryllis bloom. But she’s been having to read Plato and Lacan, and is half convinced that Alex’s love came mostly because she was so busy without him. She half believes that all love comes from a desire to fill a perceived lack in oneself, a something missing that her brother, for instance, thought she had.

  Another irony is that even though she probably seemed full to Alex she was in fact overcompensating for the lack she felt in relation to her mother. She was always busy making things for the mother, trying to show her she was separate and fully grown. She had factories—salt-dough ornament factories, Shrinky Dink factories, painted egg factories, and origami assembly plants. She wanted to be independent but also wanted her mother’s approval. Here, at least her brother’s love was useful; she let him be a helper, sometimes even a partner if he let her dress him as a girl.

  Or, “let” isn’t the right word. He liked to be dressed as a girl, especially when they organized shows for their mother, when they went into her makeup bag, sat before the big mirror, and unzipped the mother’s secret factory of pink and coral lipsticks, silvery gray eye pencils, and blush in pots shaped like seashells.

  Susan pushes a chair to the counter and tells Alex to climb up. They sit cross-legged with the cool Formica against their bare legs, tingling all over at the thrill of invading their mother’s space. This time she’s gentle. She tells her brother not to be afraid, because she isn’t sure about how to apply the makeup. She tells him to stop moving, places one hand on his forehead, and presses the back of his head against the medicine cabinet. His eyes shiver, are separate little organisms, and he lets out an “ah” at the pressure of her hand, but Susan is transfixed by the tiny lungs of the iris, their feathery expand and contract, the mucous-tipped end of each tapered eyelash, all of them embedded in a perfect row. And she is equally entranced with her mother’s tube of mascara, with unscrewing it, and the small pop of suction it makes when the brush comes out of the tube. As she brings the wand down to the base of the lashes Alex blinks, and the wand ricochets down his cheek. Susan says, “One more time,” holding his head back, and “One more time,” again, until her fingers are pitchy and his eyes are swirling black storms.

  Susan picks up a glass prism, a knickknack off the coffee table, and sees her own eye enlarged, as opaque as a cow’s. She feels a flood of affection for Alex—who stayed still for the torture. Did he stay still because she was finally looking at him with the interest she gave to her projects or books?

  There were things that she hadn’t seen about her brother.

  “Your brother wanted to be like you,” her mother liked to say. “And he had such a hard time with reading, you know. We had to get him tutors. He needed extra help.”

  Susan did remember Alex’s trouble with spoken words, how they came like twitches, how they came like small explosions from caps—the plastic rings filled with powder that he would take outside and hit for hours with rocks.

  But she also remembers how many of her brother’s tics were also, annoyingly, hers. There was the compulsive eye twitch she developed in junior high. Her brother developed a stronger case of it after she’d gotten over hers, and she would cry “Stop!” when she saw him, sure that it was contagious and that she would be reinfected. And she was hypersensitive to his chewing, and to the strange way he had of breathing and talking through his extra-large retainer, like a miniature drooling Darth Vader. Her father, she remembered, had laughed when Alex learned to take out the retainer and set it next to her dinner plate,
dripping with saliva.

  And yes, she’d been mean to him. Because all their faults seemed horribly interconnected, as if he were her dark shadow, or ghost in the closet. Their quirks and compulsions repeated themselves on each other’s bodies in only slightly different ways.

  And Susan suddenly loses her balance on the high countertop, and Alex rolls away from the medicine cabinet, is tipping, falling over the edge, and here comes her terror, and the pang; there is her bruised love for her brother, rising up in the panic. She wonders if, now, she can come out of memory, ready to love her brother in the present, but her brother is screaming because he’s hit his head on the toilet and is stuck in the garbage can, and their mother is rushing into the bathroom and pulling him out in one mighty swoop, grabbing Susan at the top of her arm, the root, and pulling the two of them together. She’s found the mascara wand—she holds it up and says, “You cannot use this on your brother. Look at him. Look. You’ve hurt his eyes.” And Susan, who was hoping her mother would appreciate the subtlety with which she was going to apply the mascara, sees that Alex is really fine, feels her pride push up, and says, “I like him better as a girl.” Her mother, shaking, says, “You’re not the center of the universe.” She says, “Someday he’ll be bigger than you,” and Susan feels the earth shifting, thinks of buildings falling down in slow-motion films. Somewhere, amid the rubble, her mother is saying, “Someday, much later, you’ll want him as your friend, and he won’t have forgiven you.”

  Susan is back in the living room. She could at least tell Alex that she likes his photographs. But their mother is there too. She’s in the furniture, in the air between them, in a way that seems to push all other relationships out.

  Susan asks instead, “So, how is the art going?”

  And it’s the wrong question.

  Alex deflates and puffs up at the same time.

  “Great. Great. Fine,” he says. “This LA art scene, it’s all about who you know.” He leans back in his chair, props his feet up on the table to display his orange leather bowling shoes, and tries to look intense. Susan wants to ask him, But are you actually working? She wants to make a comment about the importance of daily hard work over being charming and making connections.