Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  According to Matthew there was a reason she got hit. She was “clogged,” he said, not letting her real emotions to the surface. The accident was a warning, a sign from the universe to let go and accept herself for who she was at the moment—i.e., in love with him.

  No, she said.

  She granted him that it was cloudy that day rather than clear, that she often felt floaty and unreal and it was true that she’d recently taken to driving through icy streets listening to her sad pop music, bittersweet harmonies, in order to feel she was going someplace and to get herself to cry. But it was also true that the accident happened after she’d finally faced up to all her unpaid parking tickets. In fact, it happened as she was walking out of the DMV. The sky had opened up—the last thing she remembered was a burst of starlings, dividing, cutting open the clear blue sky.

  No, she told him later. It was random. The hit was no gentle nudge or warning from the universe—it was too close of a call. In a world with a master plan she wouldn’t have almost died at a down time, she would have had a proper ending.

  “You’re a dark girl, darker than me,” he said, which flattered her artistic sensibilities even though she wasn’t sure it was true.

  She thought of death and decay too often, having been carefully raised on ways to avoid it—on drink your milk, look both ways, brush and floss your teeth. She was pretty sure this only made her neurotic in a typical way. Of course, she also thought of death at all the happiest moments of her life because at those moments she wasn’t scared of it. She could face it. Things had worked out, wound up, had found a well-deserved ending, and at those moments perhaps death was preferable to moving on; because a happy ending meant there would have to be another beginning, another exhausting struggle and search for closure.

  And she doesn’t, even now, remember the accident. She remembers waking up in the hospital to a nurse who rolled her eyes when she asked what had happened, and later discovering she’d already asked, several times, each time forgetting the answer. She remembers looking at her face in the bathroom mirror and discovering that no one had wiped off the blood, thinking she should be disturbed but noting how it made her appear eerily glamorous, and wondering if the experience would give her more edge. She remembers feeling strangely uninhibited, wanting to have sex with the CAT scan technician who called her “sweetie.” She remembers the tepid feeling of the sheets against her skin, as if they were partially alive after having been soaked and washed through multiple cycles of sweat, shit, blood, and amniotic fluid, and wondering if now she could really be an artist, if in coming close to death she’d crossed a barrier. Might all the ideas, words, and images be held inside those trembling sheets?

  But the next day a doctor told her she’d be fine. She’d have a bruised face, achiness all over, a blank space of one-half of a day—the actual accident, her near-death experience, was gone.

  And now here was Matt, rumpled from sleeping in the waiting room, high on his imagined rescue and gazing into her face, which was swollen enough to give him the satisfaction of feeling what she thought might be real pity and fear.

  She said, “Please, don’t think you’re in love with me because I’m wounded.”

  But he stayed anyway, and perhaps in punishment for her meanness, his prophecy that something underlying, deep, and structural was wrong with her seemed to come true.

  She remembers her fear of coming home from the hospital and being poisoned both by mold from the leaky ceiling and by peeling lead paint. She remembers remembering her childhood allergy to dust (for she didn’t own a vacuum) and wondering if the allergy had turned to asthma, or valley fever because she couldn’t breathe right, had to think about getting the inhale in proper proportion to the exhale. Had to think about this all the time. She remembers her fear of falling down stairs, and the fuzzy jacket that no matter where it was laid kept turning into a large black bear. She remembers seeing a silhouette of Nosferatu with his pointy ears and evil talons outside her shower door, her suddenly terrifying neighborhood where one murder had occurred, and the children who wouldn’t get out of the way of her car, who sensed her fear, walked slowly and looked at her through the windshield.

  And was she able to write her screenplays right here at the edge like a Sylvia Plath, an Anne Sexton, or Matt’s favorite, Robert Lowell?

  The answer to that was no.

  What it really came down to was that she needed a companion. She needed someone to stay the night with her but to sleep on the couch. Matt would do it. Matt would take his shoes off and sleep in his clothes. He’d tuck his bag in an out-of-the-way place and fold his jacket over it. In the morning he’d be up and the blankets would be folded. She’d be happy to see him and they’d drive to the bakery bused by the mentally disabled, who wouldn’t look at them strangely, as if to ask, “What is this young girl doing with this man who is clearly falling apart?” And they would talk about music and movies.

  Their conversations would go something like this:

  He would tell her that she should finish her degree and move someplace new. Really, she was full of spunk. She needed a change of place and so did he. He could meet her in Colorado or San Francisco, his dream city. She would remind him that he was trying to gain custody of his daughter from his crazy ex-wife, whose craziness she was beginning to doubt. He would smile and say, “Oh, I forgot about that.” Would say, “You know I have a big heart for my children,” to reassure her. He would wink and say, “See, my fantasy girl, see what you do to me.”

  And she would be kind, she’d say, “I can play along.”

  She gave him a Björk cassette. He gave her Laurie Anderson.

  And then the snow had melted and the daylilies were startling, lining the roads as surely as miniature palm trees. It was summer and he was her best friend.

  So the idea crept into her head, because of these things, and because she was sitting in the right pose, in the windowsill of her empty bedroom as he walked by the door. He was helping her pack to move out, was carrying an armful of clothing and had his trench coat on, had that element of detective/vampire with the collar turned up—half comfort, half danger.

  She watched him carry her things, saw how careful he was, and his gesture, when the green silk slip fell out of his hand, his quick bend to pick it up, and to cover it—its green like a papaya, like mermaid skin, like the painted scales on the mermaids in the old movie house. When he set his hand on top of it she called his name and he looked up, embarrassed, and saw her sitting in that position, legs open like a boy’s, elbow on knee. She knew he saw her as smart and sexy, a roundfaced girl with a bra strap showing—a clever Sandra Dee. She knew he paid attention to what she wanted him to see.

  And she was already hot from the sunlit space in the window. He said, “Look at you, you look just like a picture.”

  And she remembers weighing how much she wanted to be touched against not wanting to touch back; although, as she started to peel off his layers like book pages, like dusty bird feathers, she got carried away with the momentum, perhaps carried away with her own bravery. As she peeled, his forty-five years dropped, and he was a child to her, so delicate and white, like parchment paper, like a ghost, like a hospital sheet.

  She remembers:

  She covers them both in blankets and holds him. She guides his hands over her belly and breasts because she’s impatient, wants him to have an erection, and doesn’t think he’ll get one: he’s too cold, and his heart is beating too fast. She works his hands over her body, with her own movement, as if she’s the one who has slipped inside of him and he’s strangely, after all his huffing and monologuing, her puppet.

  When she’s done she doesn’t ask him what he wants. She won’t let him put the green silk slip on his own body. She never did broach the subject of his desires.

  When she thinks of Matthew she thinks of her journey west, of being only twenty-five and wanting to be a cowgirl, riding glamorous and in slow motion on a moving neon sign. She thinks of red lipstick, the tube
s he secretly mail-ordered, how he once asked to watch her put it on, and how she told him no, but that maybe in the future he could get his own vagina. She thinks of black and white. Of curvy ice-covered streets cutting through snow, of all the times her car skidded and slipped and barely missed parked cars, of his own steady driving, of how she admired his pace. She thinks of every kind of disaster—of objects piercing the thinnest of substances, penetrating gauze and silk—of losing and regaining her boundaries. She thinks of his five-page single-spaced and typed letters, in which he said beautiful things, mean things, got carried away in his coffee-and-smoke-induced passion, envisioned her any way he wanted because she wasn’t there to respond. She knows that sleeping with him was selfish. She wishes she could tell him that she believes he did love her. She wishes she could tell him that she had loved him too.

  * * *

  When she thinks of Matthew she hopes his accident had good timing. She imagines he was looking at a hawk flying off along the side of the road, feeling romantic and connected to nature. She imagines that the sky was blue and he was “unclogged,” that his car was warm, and that a pair of his daughter’s mittens from her last visit sat on the dashboard. She imagines he was thinking in his bright metallic words, writing, his mind clicking away like typewriter keys. She imagines he was listening to a good song with a deep bruised voice, and the sudden high rising of jangling guitars.

  Jill, or The Big Little Lady

  The little lady inched open the door of her pickup truck using both of her Barbie-sized feet, and in a grinding effort of lower body strength flung the door wide. She jumped to the curb, barely cleared the gutter, and landed next to a hazy rain puddle—ringed with rainbows of gasoline, studded with sticky blue and pink islands of gum.

  A man standing at the curb smoking dropped his cigarette. He was smitten at the sight of the small figure flying through the air. The lady watched the cigarette fall toward her, a burning timber, imagining how it might ignite the gasoline-infused puddle and burst it into flame. Frankly, she was surprised LA wasn’t full of flaming rain puddles. From her vantage point, the city was always more real and more like a postapocalyptic movie.

  The cigarette merely sizzled, shed a few glowing embers. But the man bent toward her.

  “I have to say … that was a nice parallel park, little lady.”

  “Oh, gee, congratulations for noticing,” she piped up.

  At her hip, the lady, we’ll call her Jill, carried a coil of leather with a tiny grappling hook. It glinted in the sun, blinded the man for a moment. He thought the small woman looked like the adventuress Lara Croft—a half-digital, half-analog version; then again, partly, curiously hologram. She was small enough to have stepped out of a game screen but her flesh was realish à la Angelina Jolie. She had realish vibrating flesh, not only like Lara’s or Angelina’s but like the delicate holographic image of Princess Leia, beamed out of R2-D2. And the man, we’ll call him Phil, who had spent a good deal of his life watching movies, wanted to pick her up and hold her small vibrating body in his hand.

  Jill checked to see that her grappling hook was secure—she used it to scale stairs and to hoist herself onto chairs and tables. Today she had an appointment with a well-known movie producer. She would have to navigate her way into the bar in front of which she’d parked her pickup truck; she’d have to heave herself up the entrance stairs, dodge flat and high heels, and dart past the bouncer. And she would do it. She was begrudgingly ready to risk life and limb—despite or maybe with the help of this man standing before her.

  She paused and looked up at him. He was probably a regular. He had a goatee and messy shoulder-length hair, not merely meant to look unwashed but truly unwashed—for which she kind of liked him. He was very thin and wore thick Martin Scorsese glasses, heavy architecture on his fine-boned face. And he nurtured a drawn look; he had an inward curl to his body that suggested he thought himself too smart for LA but would probably keep living here anyway—advertising his disenchantment and being too sensitive for his surroundings.

  Jill knew that once inside the bar she wouldn’t need him anymore. She’d been to bars like this. Next to fish-thin waitstaff she would expand, not just to her normal size, but beyond.

  “Do you know the owner, Mike Swanson?” the lady asked, pointing to the entrance of the bar—a door arched and scalloped like a seashell, and cut into a slab of white marble.

  “Ha!” Phil replied. It was a response that denoted a relationship, but also a response she didn’t want to indulge.

  She quickly asked, “Will you show me inside?” She smiled up at him, with a slight buzz which signaled either attraction or a coming growth spurt.

  Phil, for his part, was still awash in her resemblances: A miniature Linda Hamilton? GI Jane? Or, oops, his mother circa 1971? He felt at a loss, but came up with, “Are you sure you want to sell your soul?”

  “Of course not,” Jill said. “I want to write and direct.”

  Phil was confused.

  The truth was, Jill had just moved to LA from Iowa with a singular and burning desire to make a movie about tragic merpeople. She’d envisioned a whole extended family. They walked around LA, squeezed into leather pants or fishnets, opalescent leggings, or pencil skirts—the kind of clothing that would remind their legs of their lost fishiness, or fusion. At around midnight in bars along the Sunset Strip, just as the merpeople were getting to know a potential someone, who might kiss them and reverse their exile on land, the skin behind their ears would start to itch. They’d run a finger along this secret pocket and feel a feathering of scales. And they’d know the scales would spread—first cropping up at their elbows and ankles, then crawling along their arms like growing patches of eczema. Sometimes the scales would fall off their bodies as they fled home to underground sleeping tanks. Potential lovers might try to trace a trail of scales, glowing translucent sequins that evaporated on a fingertip like a snowflake.

  The man from the sidewalk extended his palm and the little lady hopped on. She took care to position one prong of her grappling hook securely around his middle finger and pull tightly on the coil of leather for leverage.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  Jill: “Did I offend your sense of chivalry?”

  Phil: “You hurt me. I’m bleeding.”

  “Shall I kiss it and make it better?”

  And then Phil laughed. “You’re funny!” he said.

  And Jill said, “Imagine that.”

  The bouncer at the entrance to the bar had a walrus neck and a bald head that might have contained sonar, for without turning to see the pair approach he asked, “Back again so soon, Phil?”

  “This little lady has an appointment with Mike,” said Phil. But now that the bouncer faced them, he couldn’t find Jill. A crowd of women, all glammed up, with flashing slabs of new white dental work, scurried up the steps. They were clutching small purses and batting superhuman eyelashes.

  “What, where is she?” the bouncer asked, dazed and dazzled in the wake of the rushing women. Phil extended his hand and the walrus man squinted. Jill had the disappointing sensation of simultaneous expansion and dissolution; of slipping off Phil’s hand and landing sturdily on the ground. She felt her fleshy borders slip and wiggle—she was untanned, not-so-sculpted, generally unenhanced. Luckily, Jill had remembered that morning to draw on her eyebrows. She raised one, like an inverted check mark, and leaned in so the walrus could find the focal point. He got it, stood back, and with very little enthusiasm filled the rest of her in.

  He ushered the pair through a velvet-curtained door and down a curving tunnel that grew progressively darker until another curtain was pulled back and they were suddenly underwater. The little lady thought of her merpeople. Her heroine, Violet Fin, would feel at home here.

  The bar walls were all aquarium, where fish made their slow and fast movements; glinting silver darters, flattened tropical varieties, slowly fluctuating. It was the aquatic equivalent of women on poles, swaying as if caught in the t
rance of the water. Even without the women, the dimly lit room held the promise of ease and return to the womb—to sleep and to nothing but the slow fading throb of your own heartbeat. This room was all about finishing, and she thought of all the famous deals that must have gone down here and made men big.

  Yet her merpeople were not ambitious. Or, weren’t they? She wasn’t really sure about that yet. She knew they didn’t want to live in fear of their bodies’ changes, of being stuck somewhere far away from their sleeping tanks, say a taxi at 11:00 PM, just as the gills began to bud and open along their necks. But she also knew Violet didn’t simply want to return to the safety of the ocean. She was half land girl now. She wanted to have the freedom to move between air and water breathing states at will. She wanted to be in charge of her body’s shifting shapes and boundaries. Maybe it was a bit of a stretch, or even really ironic, to imagine that her merpeople could have these things by finding a person with whom to fall in love.

  Jill imagined Violet sitting at the bar, ordering Diet Pepsi, anxiously waiting for someone to look at her with a gaze that neither clutched nor clung, a gaze that caressed and enhanced every freckle and fissure on her sun-dried skin. A gaze that wrapped her in a glowing halo and secretly intuited her fluidness of spirit; that saw in fine detail the complexity of who she wanted to be. Jill imagined Violet growing very impatient. She imagined Violet mid-conversation, saying, “Look, will you just kiss me already?”

  She imagined that Violet, in lieu of the love cure, might seek out shadier options. Jill was only beginning to imagine what those might be.

  Now, as Phil hooked his hand around Jill’s elbow, she realized she’d grown. She was bigger than her baseline five feet three and a half inches, and along with the expansion of flesh came the increase in blood volume and the desire to fuck. Another good and bad consequence, depending on the circumstances, of her continually fluctuating size.