At this time of the morning Winona can often control her dreams. She falls into them like falling into a stage set, but once inside can walk around, pick up and move objects. She has freedom because she hasn’t been trained in the customs of each dream world; each one is different and ready to read, by only her. This is the way she felt when she was really acting. Even if she was only an extra, swaying, trancelike, in the background of her high school’s musical theater productions.
But today the mother is there too, and the setting is partly Tennessee Williams, partly the same old Kansas City, Kansas.
She hears the heels of her mother’s shoes clacking not along wood porch, but cold kitchen tile. She tries to melt them with her dream powers, sees them puddle and smoke, deflate and shrivel like the wicked witch’s feet in that scene from The Wizard of Oz.
“Oh,” she says out loud, puncturing the air. She is hurting her mother. She’s awake—and there is the knock. It makes her jump and the little dog too, her little Toto, who sleeps at the foot of her bed and is dying of cancer. He falls and lands on the ground with a thump.
“Dear, are you up?” her mother asks, her voice splintering wood. She looks down at the dog—for a moment she hopes he’s finally dead.
“Yes,” she says, short and clipped.
“Don’t forget Riley’s pills,” her mother says in her irritating Doris Day–like way, the way Doris would talk to someone below her. Not unkind but firm, with an unconscious easy power, an overabundance of capability. The heels click away, recede, and Winona bends down toward Riley. She scrapes her fingers around his oily belly, lifts him, kisses his forehead, the only place he doesn’t smell of matted fur, rotted leaves, and medication. She puts him back on the bed. Riley is dreaming of nothing.
Winona moves into the bathroom. She doesn’t look at her face in the mirror except in furtive glances, as if someone else were in the room—a presence partly her mother, partly her father, partly her church, and partly the psycho killer from American movies who kills the vain girls first.
Instead, she practices what may be artistic minimalism. She has rules for herself. She’ll not brush her hair out fully, just a few strokes to keep in most of the frizz, and no makeup. Doesn’t think she needs deodorant—doesn’t smell her armpits to find out. She’ll brush her teeth, try hard to make it to twenty strokes, pee, wipe, but won’t flush—it wastes water, and she’s heard something about the dye on the daintily printed toilet paper her mother buys, something bad it does to the environment—although she’s not sure what that is.
When she finishes non-cleansing, she allows herself to look in the mirror. The mirror, after all, is a beautiful antique from her mother’s side of the family, so old it’s almost human. It was her grandmother’s, then her mother’s. Spots of rust bloom up to the surface like sprigs of bloody baby’s breath, and sometimes her reflection looks blurred, as if the mirror has taken a deep breath and stretched her out along its surface.
Recently Winona glued wampum beads around the carved coils and gold leaf of the mirror. She did this in rebellion against her mother who laughed when Winona asked if the family had secret Native American lineage. She said, “We gave you a Native American name because we were hippies, darling.” And Winona, who had lately felt a quickening anger, and a desire to direct it toward something specific and culturally agreed upon, felt a part of that anger, a shard, an arrowhead, break apart and lodge itself in her mother’s side.
Today Winona, the firstborn, places her head amid the speckles of blood and becomes a martyred saint. This year, her junior year of high school, she’s switched her fascination from Joan of Arc, to “Princess” Aracoma of the Shawnee, to Greta Garbo. Garbo may not have been a saint but she was definitely a martyr. A woman who lent her body to America and let them partially, but not completely, remake it into their version of beautiful.
Sometimes Winona will look at the pictures of Garbo in a book she borrowed from the drama department. She’ll wonder if Garbo was ever able to enjoy her beauty, or if it was always work, along with the anxiety of losing it and getting older like her grandmother—a real wicked witch, who has had so many plastic surgeries she’ll stick to the bottom of the incinerator if she’s ever finally cremated.
She sits on the toilet and flips through her book. Looking at certain pictures, she feels a frightening and exciting rush of recognition. There’s something about the arch of Garbo’s eyebrow, or the long thin nose, that she sees in herself. It’s hard to tell about the eyes. Garbo’s eyes were always elsewhere, heavy lidded and obscured by those curling eyelashes.
Lately Winona forgets that she has chosen not to be beautiful, that it’s dangerous to be looked at too much—by Milo, her younger brother, by men at the gas station. Sometimes she forgets her theory that Garbo ran away because she was evaporating, changing to semisolid water and then to air from all those looks. Her physics teacher has told her that molecules change shape when they’re observed, and although she seems outwardly aloof, even a little rigid like her mother, she is secretly very soft inside.
Riley heaves in the bedroom. Winona tries to visualize the tumors inside him, change them into the sharp smooth crystals growing in the dark of a geode before it’s cracked open. She hates to extend Riley’s death with painkillers, to put two kinds of killers into his body.
But her mother says, “A drugged dog is a happy dog.”
A drugged dog is like the drugged grandmother, Winona thinks, hooked up to tubes in the fancy nursing home—a drugged dog does not have to be dealt with. Her mother thinks she’s doing her a favor by letting Riley live on in her care, and the more Winona lets her think this the more it becomes true.
Winona observes Riley in a concentrated way. She focuses down to the molecules. She observes that he’s dreaming now, dreaming of fast-motion films, of flowers blooming and decaying and blooming again.
2.
In the kitchen Winona’s mother Franny has forgotten there is a dying dog and a dying grandmother, but she hasn’t forgotten, exactly. She remembers everything with her body—the dog, and her mother’s judgments. She carries them physically, in edema, an extra layer of water that makes her always feel slightly off, displaced, like a figure that’s been erased and redrawn, half an inch to the left. Lately she’s been feeling that the displacement not only keeps her from her better self, but that it keeps her from Winona, who is drifting away from her, who has lovely and dangerous new friends.
She works her way through the kitchen, stiff and tall, with crisp jerky movements to compensate for her lack of place. Her hair rests in a neat silver bowl, with razored edges, over her head. She’s never been comfortable in the kitchen. She had maids when she was growing up, the counters were high, white, and pristine, and when she entered through the swinging doors she felt she was trespassing into someone else’s space. Here, her kitchen feels miniature, pretend, and inadequate, and she doesn’t know what to do with the ugly metal knobs of the sink. The water is running, but she forgets how to turn it off—she turns one knob to the left and scalding water shoots out. She turns the other handle and the water gets hotter. Her hands are following the wrong pattern. Is it the one from the master bathroom? She’s lived in this house for fifteen years. She has run it, and suddenly she forgets.
Today, in this kitchen, she has to be careful about the way she sets the coffee down on the table in front of her husband and son because she cannot seem to make the contact between the mug and the counter soft and loving. She tries this morning and her hand shakes, hovers an inch above the table, and hot coffee splashes onto her skin.
“Oh, honey,” her husband says.
“Oh, Mom,” her son Milo says, always trying to gain points by imitating his dad. Milo jumps up to hug her with his chubby body, so stupidly good-natured and unrestrained. It comes from her husband’s side of the family, she thinks—that wild openness of under-breeding which was so charming in her husband when they first met, back when they were hippies and it was a political statemen
t. Now she sees that this friendly exuberance allows both father and son to get away with not seeing her enough to know how to really help.
For example, despite Milo’s hug, her hand is still covered in coffee; neither of them offers her a napkin. Norm has returned to his newspaper, benevolently oblivious. Useless, Franny thinks. But then there is Winona.
Winona appears at the kitchen door, takes a rag, and wipes the table where her mom has spilled. Winona! her mother sighs—she is her disheveled angel. Winona is the only one who understands her silent demands, and won’t make her say things out loud. But when Winona gives the rag to her mother, she doesn’t wipe her hand.
She says, “Here, Mom,” but tenderly and as if in apology.
Franny has noticed, has tried not to, but here it is again: Winona will not touch or come close to her, unless she does so first. Still, a bit of her has relaxed from Milo’s hug, as if the pressure inside her body were not water, but air, as if a little bit of air has been released and transferred to him, making him even fatter.
Pshhhhh.
Winona moves into the kitchen, turns on the tap. Franny is stuck again; she has stepped into a puddle of thinking. She has come to the point where she thinks, it’s not fair, she didn’t intend to become the ruler of the house and she didn’t intend to pass this burden on to Winona, who is already at work cleaning the breakfast dishes.
In the beginning, the managing of lives was a joy to her, a challenge, a way to prove that she wasn’t a spoiled rich girl—that she could care for her children without the help of nannies and servants. But there was always more to do, things that Norm could never see, and these things multiplied and she kept lists of them in her journal, which she left open on the nightstand, so that Norm might catch a glimpse and decide to participate. There was her part-time job outside the house, and the way she felt herself at the center of a web on which their lives hung like little trembling dewdrops, vulnerable, always about to grow too heavy at the bottom, to slip, to flood out of her control. She had to cook the right food, schedule the right doctor’s appointments, and make sure each child progressed morally, physically, and steadily through multiplying stages of life.
For Winona there was Bluebirds, Girl Scouts, Junior Assembly, and Cotillion. There was track or swim team every year, acting in church productions, participation in youth groups and church activities. For high school, she knew Winona should take at least two years of Spanish, physics, and calculus, all honors classes, belong to several student organizations such as Students Against Drunk Driving, and volunteer in the community, in order to be accepted into the small private and exclusive New England college where she had met Norm. But it’s not as if she’s controlling. Winona can do whatever else she chooses, when she has the time. And even though she’s nervous about Winona’s interest in theater, it’s not as if she is trying to erase Winona’s individuality. She knows and loves Winona’s weaknesses: her pigeon-toed walk, her lack of coordination, her concentrated look of putting too much effort into moving, her thick ankles and calves. Secretly, she likes Winona’s flaws because they echo the flaws in herself. They’re imprints and marks of ownership. They are also secrets they share that can be used against her.
For example, last week when Winona arrived home late from an outing with Angela, Franny asked about her day and noticed how Winona said all the right things, in a list, all the things Franny already knew, in that crisp manner, so much like her own that it felt like mocking. So as Winona walked away she offered something more intimate, said, “I’m sorry you inherited those thick calves from me,” and Winona, who always wore long flared pants in an attempt to disguise her ankles, stopped as if taking a blow to the stomach, and walked quickly out of the kitchen.
Yes, Franny can see it now—she is what some people would call a bitch. She is the reason the family does most of what it does and the reason they don’t do it very enthusiastically.
And now she’s breathing faster as Winona’s new friend Angela pulls into the driveway. She can hear her music, “ba boom, ba boom boom,” from the breakfast table. Winona quickly looks up at her. “Angela’s picking me up so we can study after school.”
Franny is suspicious—Winona usually tells her these things further in advance.
Norm, who hears only half of what is said, is suddenly alert and serious. He says, “You’re not going in my car,” because his cars are his love affairs: shiny, voluptuous, and guarded. Because Franny and Winona drive his cars, which he repairs and later will sell, he makes them mark down the gas mileage on grid paper every time they go out, and he believes that because of his system they drive no farther than is necessary. Franny notices Winona stiffen at Norm’s remark and knows she’s been slipping out of the grid. Norm, of course, doesn’t suspect this, Franny thinks. He has very little imagination.
“Hello, new friend,” Norm says as Angela comes through the door, and, jolly and detached, he goes back to his toast. Franny shoots darts into Norm’s soft flesh. Now she must be friendly too.
She looks at Angela, with her bumper-sticker-covered backpack and safety-pin earrings. She says, “Well, you girls are just so avantgarde,” and reminds herself that friends are another item on her list of things that Winona should have.
As Angela saunters into the living room and sits on the couch, Franny is watching. She watches from the kitchen as Angela eyes her eclectic but expensive arrangement of knickknacks on the coffee table—a mix of Native American artifacts and Victorian-era antiques. She picks up a glass paperweight and places it on top of a tintype photograph of a Shawnee woman so the woman’s face is suddenly stretched and magnified, haloed by the colored butterflies in the glass. Angela leans back and looks at it, satisfied. Franny, who is proud of her decorations, which are much more artistic and liberal minded than those of other mothers, has noticed that every time Angela leaves a room something is changed—a vase is turned upside down, dried flowers are poked behind picture frames. Franny is afraid that Angela is making a comment on her lack of whimsy. So as Angela steps into the kitchen, she catches her.
“You know, Angela,” she says, “I think you must be a genius.” Franny puts her hands on Angela’s shoulders, smiles triumphantly and ironically, and says, “Yes, Angela, a genius.” Angela looks startled, but manages an “OK, Franny, sure.”
Franny regrets it—it was a bad move. Is she so pathetic that she has to resort to intimidating teenagers? And it’s not that she lacks whimsy or spontaneity; it’s just that her whimsy has changed. When she was younger she was like Angela, she thought spontaneity existed in the moments when a true self flashed through all the undeniable false stuff, made a question mark out of peas at a stuffy dinner party like George Emerson in that Forster novel (or was that the movie?). Now her moments of spontaneity involve the false stuff. Now, her spontaneity requires analysis.
There was the other day. She had asked Norm to take out the trash, and when he did it without complaining, and the bag split and the trash spilled all over the yard, she laughed loud, hard, spontaneous laughter. Was she pleased that he was unsuccessful? Pleased to have proof that she was the one who kept things running? Norm had looked sad. Had put on his I’m-too-helpless-to-help look. His I-have-a-heart-condition look.
Bitch, she thinks. Perhaps it serves her right that Norm is the one the children look to for fun, to goof off with, even if it’s just to reassure them that he is not going to die.
She hears the front door open and calls out to Winona, to catch her before she leaves, and her voice is too urgent.
“Did you give Riley his medicine?” Franny asks.
“Yes,” Winona says with a tinge of annoyance, and the usual two pecks, one on each cheek. But Franny can’t rest—she follows the girls to the door and notices Winona’s hair. She’ll only comb it out halfway, and the frizziness, this unkemptness, her loose men’s shirt and baggy cotton pants, make her look odd, unsettling, vaguely sexy. She reaches out and puts a hand on either side of Winona’s head, and Winona freezes.
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She says, “Oh, honey, you’d look so much more attractive with hot rollers.” Winona stands perfectly still, as if concentrating. Angela looks at Franny over Winona’s shoulder, shakes her head, and smirks.
3.
Today Winona is getting a tattoo after school with Angela. Angela’s tattoo will go all the way around her upper arm. Winona’s will be a shooting star that will hide at the base of her hip bone, barely an excuse for a tattoo—from a distance it will look like the shadow of a scar.
Inside the tattoo parlor the walls are full of art, dragons with blood-red eyes, hundreds of bare-breasted women floating on miens of their own hair, skulls, and motorcycles. As she lies down on the padded dentist’s chair, her eyes catch on the word “Mom,” inscribed in a heart, and she quickly closes them and tries not to feel the small twinge of disgust for what she’s doing, the same twinge that makes her close off her body when her mother is around, or when she finds herself looking at the backs of her mother’s knees—a bas-relief of raised streaks of blue—or at the hard ridge from her nostril to the corner of her mouth like a brace holding it down. Her mother has not gotten soft and loose like other mothers, but too hard.
The tattoo artist opens two fingers and presses them down on the spot at her hip. Then he puts a finger on the space in between his fingers. He’s an ordinary boy with dyed black hair, but he’s exotic and sexy to Winona, and she’s afraid that she could too easily fall in love.
The boy says, “You picked a good spot. I can feel your pulse right here.” And Winona thinks of her other grandmother, not the one made of plastic but the one who was fast and loose, and now is soft and insane. For a second she appears in a bubble like the good witch, glossy and in the full bloom of her beauty.
She says, “Be where you are, Winona!” and vanishes.
The boy holds the electric needle in his hand and the moment before it touches her skin he says, “Breathe.” All the softness in the world floods into that small space before the sting, shivers and hovers around the room in the dragon’s wings, in women’s breasts, in the silver electric hum of the needle.
Elegies for Uncanny Girls Page 10
