by Michelle Tea
You’re cold, Kristy said. Hard.
Don’t Blame Me, I said. Blame The World.
Three
The Square One Mall is our mall. If you think about it, it’s a crummy name for a mall. Like, “back to square one.” It’s where you go when your really big, visionary plans don’t work out. What I really like is that at the side entrance there’s a great, lit-up neon sign propped above the doors that glows, “MALL.” It’s generic, yet glamorous. Square One’s got the regular things that most malls have. There’s an Ohmigod! and then stores that sort of aspire to be Ohmigod!, places like Eternally Eighteen and Tight Knit. These stores should be embraced for generously offering cheaper versions of the crap on sale at Ohmigod!, but everyone is so frigging self-loathing it’s some sort of social crime to buy the cheaper outfits.
There’s a Lotions & Potions for natural skin stuff and a Dark Subject that sells clothes for kids who want to make you think they’re really dark, scary people with tortured inner lives. There’s a bunch of other weird places I’m not really interested in, like a hobby store, stuffed with miniature vehicles, that I’ve never seen anyone go into. Sometimes a Mr. Rogers-looking guy with a button-up sweater stands at the edge of this shop and peers out into the greater mall. A little track of scalp is displayed by the side part of his neat, nerdy hairdo. He looks like he time-traveled into Square One from some gentler year. He stands before his hobby shop and looks over at the giant video game store where all the boys are having a big testosterone fest trying out various games in which they street fight, run over hookers, and in general make some mayhem. His little ships and gluey planes are no match. It’s too sad, really. There’s a craft store where mom-looking women shuffle around putting bouquets of plastic flowers and pipe cleaners into their shopping baskets. A dull bookstore. They have a giant shelf when you first walk in, all the covers are every different shade of pink, from the faintest fingernail-pink to a more brassy, unnatural fuchsia. Those are books for females. They have pictures of high-heeled shoes on them, or caricatures of little dogs, or ladies holding teacups or martini glasses, and the pink is whimsically accented with bits of lime green or jolting orange.
There’s a food court in the middle of the mall with a lot of top-rate crap-ass options. There are carts throughout the place that sell really useful things like cell phone covers that have pictures of girls who look like Kim Porciatti in Budweiser bathing suits, or miniature wigs you somehow stick into your hairdo for maximum hair effect, or imitation designer pocketbooks that don’t fool anybody and still cost a bunch of money.
I went to the mall on the evening of what should have been my last day of school, to assist Kristy in the scoring of a job at Jungle Unisex. I’d stayed in my bedroom all afternoon, going quietly crazy in my head. I was filled with rage at my jackass family and also starving, but would not go out into the kitchen and face the torn-open packages of ramen, not to mention the slack, crusty face of Donnie and his concubine, my mother. It’s true — I laid around and felt very sorry for myself. An activity I could expect to dominate my summer. When Kristy came home from her last day at the Voke we had a gigantic fight. Kristy had been working on the videotape audition that she hoped would get her onto the cast of The Real World. She ingeniously stole a video camera from some media room at the Voke no one even knew was there. She found it while looking for the storage room that held the bulk 40 volume peroxide. So as if life isn’t hard enough, she’s been sticking that camera into everyone’s face, filming our home, getting every single sick and dysfunctional element onto video so that some stupid MTV person fascinated with white trash people will see that Kristy is the real thing, stick her on the show, and wait for her to say ignorant things to the black person and the gay person. She’d been in my bedroom that morning, taping me oversleeping as a symbol of family laziness. It’s so deeply unfair. I may not have such a clear life plan as Kristy, with her Real World aspiration and cosmetology career, but I am not our Ma and I do not enjoy spending the day in bed. I would have loved for Kristy to wake me up so I could not miss my last day of school, but I guess that didn’t really support the angle of her video: the one ambitious person in a welfare family, please save her.
We had a big fight, and Kristy promised to be more fair and let me speak for myself in her dumb video if I came with her to the mall, because Donnie doesn’t let us drive his car alone. That’s how I wound up in the food court, my ass plopped on a molded plastic bench, getting sort of carried away with my thoughts. I thought, how would I like to be represented in Kristy’s video? Perhaps as a quirky sisterly sidekick. Maybe as a brooding and mysterious person with an artistic disposition. I’ve never done anything artistic, but it seems that being an artistic type can excuse you for being abnormal. I thought that maybe The Real World would enjoy having an actual, blood-related pair of sisters on the show. What a great way to ensure a dysfunctional family-style household. But there’s no way Kristy would go for it. She was trying to escape, after all, not bring a fragment of her own screwed-up family along with her to Los Angeles or Miami, wherever they set up those fancy houses with the pool tables and swimming pools and beanbag chairs for the stars to slump their skinny, hungover bodies in.
Donnie’s car is a Maverick, deep green, the color of the bushy part of a stick of frozen broccoli. I think trashy old cars like that are back in style the same sick way that mullet hairdos are. Like it’s wicked cool and funny to be a stupid moron with bad taste and no money. I’ve gathered this from my limited watching of television and my observations of people at the mall, and I tried for a minute to get into it, having lived my entire life among stupid morons with bad taste and no money: like, maybe my whole life is actually completely cool and I myself am too authentically cool to have realized it. Donnie practically has a mullet hairdo and here he is tooling around in this muscly car. It all fell pretty flat, though. I don’t care how much the world loves the That ’70s Show, that era is over and the only people still living it are too broke or retarded to move on and get with the more contemporary era. People like Donnie, who in real life are not so cool.
In my lawless house, where teenaged children are free to imbibe liquor and slag about without any purpose whatsoever, Kristy is not allowed to take Donnie’s car to the mall alone. I am required to chaperone, plopped in the passenger seat. This is the only real time me and Kristy hang out anymore. We used to hang out a lot but then she became upwardly mobile, what with her plans to look good and make friends with certain people and get into the cosmo shop at the Voke so she could eventually be a hairdresser to the stars — after she becomes a star herself by getting on The Real World, of course. The supposed reason for Donnie’s car law is that it’s somehow safer, as if my presence ups Kristy’s driving skills to a NASCAR level, but it’s just a way for Donnie to get us out of the house at the same time so him and Ma can get romantic in front of the television. In real life it is actually so much more dangerous to have me in the car with my sister, feeling bullied into running her errand, resentment building and cresting into a slap-fight that sends the car careening off the road. Which only happened once and we didn’t actually crash, but still it was scary to feel the general mutual annoyance and frustration sharpen into something that felt so angry and crazy that we’d start slapping each other in a moving vehicle. It was seriously a pretty deep experience. I had told Kristy she looks like our father. I could hardly remember what he looked like, he left so long ago and Ma tore his face out of all the old photos in our thin photo album, but I had some memories and in most of them his hair is too long and needs a shampoo, and his face is sleepy, his skin gummy and slumped on his cheekbones, from the drugs he was on, I guess. Telling Kristy she looked like him was the big-gun insult I always held inside my mouth until she really, really pissed me off. It bothered her more than anything, because she’s so vain and because our father was such a jerk and also not too attractive and really most of all because it’s true: Kristy does look like him, but in that strange way that real
ly good-looking people can sort of resemble somebody very homely. Our father is a ghost that haunts her face. She doesn’t always look like him but his genes flash to her skin’s surface often enough that she knows it is true when I say it and it enrages her. So she swung at me with her thin hand wide open and then I got to tell her she looks like dad but she’s crazy like Ma and then she swung again, wildly, one hand on the wheel, the other flailing out for my face, but I’m part of this family too, I’m part of the whole sick churn and clench of it, so of course I grabbed her hand, and, having two to work with, slapped her back. And I made it, I got her right in her cheek and the car veered off the road.
The whole thing was very disturbing and we sat there in the car for a while, hazards on, Kristy trying hard not to cry, her whole body tense and vibrating with the effort and only because I was there beside her and she didn’t want to crack like that in front of me. I wanted to apologize and ask her if she was okay, maybe cry also, but I didn’t want to soften toward her. What if she stayed hard and took another swipe at me? So I just stayed quiet and swallowed a bunch and waited for her breathing to regulate. Eventually the tears in her eyes dried up and she was able to blink without them rolling down her face. She was able to push her hair back and pull some air into her lungs and get the car back onto the road. While I waited for Kristy to get it together I ruminated on some pretty unpleasant thoughts, thoughts about DNA and about being Ma’s daughters. Daughters. There’s a word. Daughters. It sounds like a deep-fried pastry. Something not too good for you, nuts stuck to it with sugar thick as paste. Something stuffed with soggy fruit.
Ma’s never hit either of us — she’s way too tired for that — it’s the DNA of her mental illness I worry about. If it’s been passed down to me and Kristy, some little viral strand of it. Not her exact brand of crazy, hypochondria, but something else, some tendency toward negativity and brooding and wanting to whap my sister while she’s behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
At the mall, in the food court, I watched Kristy as she walked out from the long, fluorescent-lit hallway that leads to the public bathrooms. The bad lighting flattened her out like a greenish paper doll and it was so weird to see Kristy — who, it is generally agreed, is wicked pretty — looking crappy that my stomach startled me by clenching in worry for her future. I guess I am invested in Kristy and her Real World plans, even though the complete self-obsession surrounding it can get on my nerves. I don’t actually get any happiness out of seeing my sister fail, seeing her stuck here instead of on the television where she longs to live. Watching Kristy swish skinnily down the fluorescent tube, I thought, Fuck, I hope Kristy’s not turning to bulimia or some other tired-ass grasp at beauty-at-any-cost, ’cause her coloring looked a lot like my own does after I pound too many beers in too short a time period. I mean, she looked ill, like she just vomited. But as she exited the weird, tunnelish hallway, the red and purple and electric orange glow from the food court neon lights warmed her back up and she looked pretty again. Her hair was long and smooth and the highlights her cosmo partner gave her didn’t look totally phony, her hair wasn’t flying up with electrocution static even though I’m sure she was just in front of the dull metal mirror in the girls’ room going at it with a hundred brushes. The way she runs her eyeliner pencil over the inside of her lids made her eyes look bright and shiny. She got Ma’s special eyes, the green ones, they look like jewelry her face wears. I just can’t do that with eyeliner, because no matter how much I concentrate and steady my hand and tell myself calming words, my eye thinks it’s going to be stabbed and it blinks itself shut like a clam. A couple tries of this and my eyes become teary and totally useless. I tried to draw the black pencil along the outside instead but it just made my face look clownish and dirty so I gave up. I don’t like makeup very much anyway so it’s no big whoop, though it really bothers Kristy, who is practically a spokesperson for makeup, being a cosmetology graduate and all. She acts like my choice not to wear lip gloss is some sort of sociopathic break from civilization, as if I’ve decided to never again wear a tampon and just bleed all over everything instead.
Fresh from the bathroom, Kristy stood before me, smiling with her glossed-out lips. It’s aimed at me but it’s really for her, a wide, together smile that was a summons for her inner troops to gather and prepare to charge. That smile was a bugle call, da-da-da-da-da-DA! Ready, sister? she chirped. Honestly, I didn’t think that having your makeup-less, super-nonglamorous, actually rather awkward sister trail you into a job interview with a video camera was a great idea, but that’s Kristy’s way. I almost admire it. It’s her strategy to stand out so much that she can’t be ignored. Kristy will be the only potential employee who brings a camera crew to the interview, and this, combined with the natural spectacularness of her personality, will get her the job. Plus, we were getting really crucial, really real footage for her Real World application. Kristy already had way more video of her unamazing life than The Real World would ever need. She’d already made a veritable documentary of herself. I feared that the camera was adding an obsessive focus to her normal narcissism and now she’d never stop talking about herself. It would go on and on and the tapes would pile up, the audition deadline long past. We would forget that there was a time when Kristy was not accompanied by the whirring machine. The video project would slowly be revealed as a mental illness, the magnitude of which our family has never seen.
Get it ready, she instructed me as we moved away from the food court and toward the leafy entrance of Jungle Unisex. Kristy’s shoes made a sharp clack-clack-clack on the mall floor. My flip-flops made a flatter, slappy noise. I pulled the video camera up to my eye and this great thing happened. It was like I wasn’t really there, not anymore. Voom, I’d become the camera. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, but I was sort of dreading going into Jungle Unisex. It’s just not the sort of place I feel comfortable. I appreciate all the big green plants and the stuffed carnival tigers mounted on the walls and the flashy zebra wrapping paper they tacked up like wallpaper — I’m not totally uptight. It is definitely a wild place to walk into, but then you have to deal with all the girls who work there. They’ve got their hair all done up and when they move their hands it’s all flash, a blur of silver scissors and shiny nail polish nails shooting light. They look like comic book superheros casting some sort of power from their palms. They’ve got full command of the space. I’ve walked into the place from the relative calm of the mall, suddenly in some bizarre tropical clubhouse that is really not my scene. The girls looked me up and down. I could just feel them giving me a makeover. Immediately I could feel the exact place that a greasy lock of my very unstyled hair brushed against my cheek, the faint friction summoning a zit from the skin there. My skin suddenly felt like it had a weird film over it, like the skin of a dirty pond. My clothes felt soft against my body in that way that only really dirty clothes feel, like the dirtiness is wearing the fabric thin. This is how I like my clothes to feel, but on the inside of Jungle Unisex it stopped feeling comfortable and started feeling hampery. Needless to say, I do not have a pedicure. I may instead have athlete’s foot, and I’m always in my flops, my peely toes all hanging out. Ta-daa. But, with Kristy’s stolen video camera pressed to my face, it all felt unreal. It was like something I was watching on TV, which was perhaps a good omen for Kristy. An older lady with brown hair, the bangs sprayed up in a thin fan said, Can I help you? She cocked her head and her hair fixture sort of wobbled with the movement, but didn’t fall. She had makeup welling in the creases of her face, maybe a couple shades too dark, triple-pierced ears hung with gold hoops, and a few rows of gold around her neck. She must be loaded, I thought. I made out a charm in the shape of a blow-dryer hanging off one thin chain.
Hello, I’m Kristy Driscoll, Kristy chirped. Her hand shot out toward the woman, who backed away from it before realizing that Kristy was trying to shake her hand and not steal her jewelry. Kristy pumped the woman’s hand while gesturing to me with her free one. I mo
ved in close, making sure I got both of them in the frame. Without that camera I’d have been staring at my flops, but now I was able to really inspect the woman’s face, I could look straight at her. It made me a little giddy and I even hit the slidey zoom lens close-up button till the top of her peacock hairdo got chopped out of the picture. Now she should be on a television show. Who even looks like that? Actually, tons of people around here look like that, but nobody on television does. Which is even more of a reason this fan-haired woman should have her own show. This is my little sister, Patricia, Kristy jabbered on. She’s videotaping me because I’m auditioning for The Real World, do you know that show? The woman paused and turned toward me. The frame became filled with her suspicious expression. She took a breath and held her hand up toward the camera the way that actual celebrities do when the paparazzi charge at them as they’re leaving the yoga studio. Kristy jumped in, It’s a great show, and if I get picked I get to go and live on MTV in another town, and it would be really wonderful for Mogsfield and for the whole region to have a local person on a national TV show, talking about local issues. Kristy nodded, as if the movement of her head could somehow hypnotize the woman into nodding her own head. The producers just want to know what my life is like here in Mogsfield, so my sister is following me around with a camera, would that be all right? Her head was still bobbing but now her face was scrunched too, in that way girls scrunch when they need something. I don’t use those tactics. Or maybe I have never needed anything that bad.
The woman got her hand back from Kristy’s polite grip of death and was fiddling nervously with herself, first touching one of the thin gold necklaces resting on her tan sternum, tweaking a charm, then patting the stiff crest of hair on her crown. I wasn’t ready to be on television, she admitted a bit shyly.
