American Innovations

by Rivka Galchen

  The visit cost me $215. I appreciated that she had taken the time to really talk to me.

  Spring came around. Flowers, I suspect they were daffodils, made their pronouncements. What were maybe dogwood blossoms decorated neighborhood trees. I started craving fruit popsicles. One evening, on the street, I by chance met a woman I had known back when I was in high school. She had distinctively large and wide-set eyes and had never seemed to have reached puberty; it might have been a medical thing; anyhow, it made her easy to recognize. She was in town to help design a duck pond for the campus, or really it was a sort of goose pond, she explained, a place to encourage Canadian geese to rest during their annual migrations. What a treat to see you, she said. You know, I wanted to write to you, she went on. To make sure you were OK. But I didn’t want you to feel singled out in that way. I hadn’t talked to you for so many years.

  Don’t worry about it, I said. I’m just happy to have run into you.

  I had no idea what she might be talking about. That evening I went ahead and investigated myself on the Internet.

  Someone, probably one of the GRLZ, or one of the GRLZ’s friends, had pinned one of the more casually striking photos of my “condition” onto her Pinterest, which had gone to a number of other Pinterests, and Tumblrs, and other places I didn’t know about, and those images had synapsed and traveled and collided with other images, and commentary, and eventually become a Buzzfeed, yoked alongside what must have really driven the traffic, a photo of an actress from a remake of the movie Total Recall; the woman—she played an alien or something—was three breasts across and wore an outfit that offered coverage of those breasts only via a strap across the nipples. She was fairly inarguably hot. Although somewhat arguably, as manifested in the comments sections. However, the majority of the censoriousness, ridicule, and loving support was directed not at the altered beauty from a fictional dystopic 2084 in a red dress and thigh-high black leather boots but, rather, at me. I was an ugly who needed to get over herself, or someone bravely making my own choices, or a fourth-wave feminist, or a symptom of fakesterdom, or a rebel against the tyranny of the “natural,” or a person who really, really needed help … It was unclear what I would learn if I read more, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn it. Though I did like one comment, in which someone wondered whether this was “a difference that made a difference.” He/she posited that that was what knowledge was: a difference that made a difference. The next comment compared me with eugenicists. I stopped reading. I wrote to administrators of the first few sites I had come across, in the cases where I was able to find a contact address; I asked, politely, if my photo could be taken down. It was, after all, a photo of me, an ordinary citizen who had not put herself forward. Only one person wrote back to me. He expressed understanding. He said he admired my courage in making a physical “statement,” and he invited me to participate in an interview series he curated, American Innovations, on his YouTube channel. There were freedoms from and freedoms to, he said. That was what made this country great, he said. Past participants had included the celebrity underwear designer Lorna Drew and the winner of Survivor Panama Aras Baskaukas.

  I had once seen a hog at a farm. That hog must have weighed near on two thousand pounds, and she was in a little pen—not the worst conditions, merely depressing ones—and there were sores near her tail, which seemed to have been clipped off; the sores had attracted flies; she had many nipples, and they also looked like sores, and might have been cohabiting space with sores; her babies were not with her; she was quiet in her pen. I describe this because that was how I felt. I came across stories connecting soy consumption to extra-mammary development; another story of a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles who combined belly button removal with breast addition in a package deal. In Germany, some male soldiers were developing enlarged breasts from the repetitive recoil of shooting rifles. I’m not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be. I didn’t call up my mom, or my aunt, or my previous boyfriend, or any of the boyfriends before that, either. I didn’t make a Facebook posting on which others might comment with generous sympathy. But I did feel very feminine. I went out and bought a mod kind of dress, sort of like a shift.

  WILD BERRY BLUE

  This is a story about my love for Roy, though first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonald’s every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig his extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers. My dad drank from his bottomless cup of coffee and read the paper while I dipped my McDonaldland cookies in milk and pretended to read the paper. He wore gauzy striped button-ups with pearline snaps. He had girlish wrists, a broad forehead like a Roman, a terrifying sneeze.

  “How’s the coffee?” I’d ask.

  “Not good, not bad. How’s the milk?”

  “Terrific,” I’d say. Or maybe “Exquisite.”

  My mom was at home cleaning the house; our job there at the McDonald’s was to be out of her way.

  And that’s how it always was on Saturdays. We were Jews, we had our rituals. That’s how I think about it. Despite being secular Israelis living in the wilds of Oklahoma, an ineluctable part in us still indulged certain repetitions.

  Many of the people who worked at the McDonald’s were former patients of my dad’s: mostly drug addicts and alcoholics in rehab programs. A few plain old depressions. An occasional paranoid. The McDonald’s hired people no one else would hire; I think it was a policy. My dad, in effect, was the McDonald’s–Psychiatric Institute liaison. The McDonald’s manager, a deeply Christian man, would regularly come over and say hello to us and thank my dad for many things. Once he thanked him for, as a Jew, having kept safe the word of God during all the dark years.

  “I’m not sure I’ve done so much,” my dad had answered.

  “But it’s been living there in you,” the manager said. He was a nice man, admirably tolerant of the accompanying dramas of his workforce, dramas I picked up on peripherally. Absenteeism, petty theft, once a worker ODing in the bathroom. I had no idea what that meant, to OD, but it sounded spooky. “They slip out from under their own control,” I heard the manager say, and the phrase stuck with me. I pictured the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind.

  Sometimes, dipping my McDonaldland cookies—FryGuy, Grimace—I’d hold a cookie in the milk too long and it would saturate and crumble to the bottom of the carton. There it was something mealy, vulgar. Horrible. I’d lose my appetite. Though the surface of the milk often remained pristine, I could feel the cookie’s presence down below, lurking. Like some ancient bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side of its head.

  I’d tip the carton back slowly in order to see what I dreaded seeing, just to feel that queasiness, and also the pre-queasiness of knowing the main queasiness was coming, the anticipatory ill. Beautiful, Horrible: I had a running mental list. Cleaning lint from the screen of the dryer—beautiful. Bright glare on glass—horrible. Mealworms—also horrible. The stubbles of shaved hair in a woman’s armpit—beautiful.

  The Saturday I was to meet Roy, after dropping a cookie in the milk, I looked over, up at my dad. “Cookie,” I squeaked, turning a sour face at the carton.

  He pulled out his worn leather wallet, with its inexplicable rust stain ring on the front. He gave me a dollar. My mom never gave me money, and my dad always gave me more than I needed. (He also called me the Queen of Sheba sometimes, like when I’d stand up on a dining room chair to see how things looked from there.) The torn corner of the bill he gave me was held on with yellowed Scotch tape. Someone had written on the dollar in blue pen, over the Treasury seal, “I love Becky!!!”

  I go up to the counter with the Becky dollar to buy my replacement milk, and what I see is a tattoo, most of which I can’t see. A starched white long-sleeve
shirt covers most of it. But a little blue-black lattice of it I can see—a fragment like ancient elaborate metalwork, that creeps down all the way, past the wrist, to the back of the hand, kinking up and over a very plump vein. The vein is so distended I imagine laying my cheek on it in order to feel the blood pulse and flow, to maybe even hear it. Beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t know why but I’m certain this tattoo reaches all the way up to his shoulder. His skin is deeply tanned but the webbing between his fingers sooty pale.

  This beautiful feeling. I haven’t had it about a person before. Not in this way.

  In a trembling moment I shift my gaze up to the engraved nametag. There’s a yellow M emblem, then “Roy.”

  I place my dollar down on the counter. I put it down like it’s a password I’m unsure of, one told to me by an unreliable source. “Milk,” I say, quietly.

  Roy, whose face I finally look at, is staring off, up, over past my head, like a bored lifeguard. He hasn’t heard or noticed me, little me, the only person on line. Roy is biting his lower lip and one of his teeth, one of the canines, is much whiter than the others. Along his cheekbones his skin looks dry and chalky. His eyes are blue, with bruisy, beautiful eyelids.

  I try again, a little bit louder. “Milk.”

  Still he doesn’t hear me; I begin to feel as if maybe I am going to cry because of these accumulated moments of being nothing. That’s what it feels like standing so close to this type of beauty—like being nothing.

  Resolving to give up if I’m not noticed soon I make one last effort and, leaning over on my tiptoes, I push the dollar farther along the counter, far enough that it tickles Roy’s thigh, which is leaned up against the counter’s edge.

  He looks down at me, startled, then laughs abruptly. “Hi little sexy,” he says. Then he laughs again, too loud, and the other cashier, who has one arm shrunken and paralyzed, turns and looks and then looks away again.

  These few seconds seem like everything that has ever happened to me.

  My milk somehow purchased, I go back to the table wondering if I am green, or emitting a high-pitched whistling sound, or dead.

  It’s not actually the first time I’ve seen Roy I realize back at the table as, with great concentration, I dip my Hamburglar cookie into the cool milk. I think that maybe I’ve seen Roy—that coarse blond hair—every Saturday, for all my Saturdays. I take a bite from my cookie. I have definitely seen him before. Just somehow not in this way.

  My dad appears to be safely immersed in whatever is on the other side of the crossword puzzle and bridge commentary page. I feel—a whole birch tree pressing against my inner walls, its leaves reaching to the top of my throat—the awful sense of wanting some other life. I have thought certain boys in my classes have pretty faces, but I have never before felt like laying my head down on the vein of a man’s wrist. (I still think about that vein sometimes.) Almost frantically I wonder if Roy can see me there at my table, there with my dad, where I’ve been seemingly all my Saturdays.

  Attempting to rein in my anxiety I try to think: What makes me feel this way? Possessed like this? Is it a smell in the air? It just smells like beefy grease. Which is pleasant enough but nothing new. A little mustard. A small vapor of disinfectant. I wonder obscurely if actually Roy is Jewish, as if that might make normal this spiraling fated feeling. As if really what’s struck me is just an unobvious family resemblance. But I know that we’re almost the only Jews in town.

  Esther married the gentile king, I think in a desperate absurd flash.

  Since a part of me wants to stay forever I finish my cookies quickly.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  “Already?”

  “Can’t we just leave? Let’s leave.”

  There’s the Medieval Fair, I think to myself in consolation all Sunday. It’s two weekends away. You’re always happy at the Medieval Fair, I say to myself, as I fail to enjoy sorting my stamps, fail to stand expectantly, joyfully, on the dining room chair. Instead I fantasize about running the french fry fryer in the back of McDonald’s. I imagine myself learning to construct Happy Meal boxes in a breath, to fold the papers around the hamburgers just so. I envision a stool set out for me to climb atop so that I can reach the apple fritter dispenser; Roy spots me, making sure I don’t fall. And I get a tattoo. Of a bird, or a fish, or a ring of birds and fish, around my ankle.

  There is no happiness in these daydreams. Just an overcrowded and feverish empty.

  At school on Monday I sit dejectedly in the third row of Mrs. Brown’s class because that is where we are on the weekly seating chart rotation. I suffer through exercises in long division, through bits about Magellan. Since I’m not in the front, I’m able to mark most of my time drawing a tremendous maze, one that stretches to the outer edges of the notebook paper. This while the teacher reads to us from something about a girl and her horse. Something. A horse. Who cares! Who cares about a horse! I think, filled, suddenly, with unexpected rage. That extra-white tooth. The creeping chain of the tattoo. I try so hard to be dedicated to my maze, pressing my pencil sharply into the paper as if to hold down my focus better.

  All superfluous, even my sprawling maze, superfluous. A flurry of pencil shavings—they come out as if in a breath—from the sharpener distracts me. A sudden phantom pain near my elbow consumes my attention.

  I crumple up my maze dramatically, do a basketball throw to the wastebasket like the boys do. I miss, of course, but no one seems to notice, which is the nature of my life at school, where I am only noticed in bland, embarrassing ways, like when a substitute teacher can’t pronounce my name. The joylessness of my basketball toss, it makes me look over at my once-crush Josh Deere and feel sad for him, for the smallness of his life.

  One day, I think, it will be Saturday again.

  But time seemed to move so slowly. I’d lost my appetite for certain details of life.

  “Do you know about that guy at McDonald’s with the one really white tooth?” I brave this question to my dad. This during a commercial break from Kojak.

  “Roy’s a recovering heroin addict,” my dad says, turning to stare at me. He’s always said things to me other people wouldn’t have said to kids. He’d already told me about the Oedipus complex, and I had stared dully back at him. He would defend General Rommel to me, though I had no idea who General Rommel was. He’d make complex points about the strait of Bosporus.

  So he said that to me, about Roy, which obviously he shouldn’t have said. (Here, years later, I still think about the mystery of that plump vein, which seems a contradiction. Which occasionally makes me wonder if there were two Roys.)

  “I don’t know what the story with the tooth is,” my dad adds. “Maybe it’s false?” And then it’s back to the mystery of Kojak.

  I wander into the kitchen feeling unfulfilled and so start interrogating my mom about my Purim costume, for the carnival that is still two Sundays, aeons, away. The Purim carnival is in Tulsa, over an hour’s driving distance; I don’t know the kids there, and my costume never measures up. “And the crown,” I remind her hollowly. I’m not quite bold enough to bring up that she could buy me one of the beautiful ribbon crowns sold at the Medieval Fair, which we’ll be at the day before. “I don’t want,” I mumble mostly to myself, “one of those paper crowns that everyone has.”

  Thursday night I am at the Skaggs Alpha Beta grocery with my mom. I am lingering amid all the sugar cereals I know will never come home with me. It’s only every minute or so that I am thinking about Roy’s hand, about how he called me sexy.

  Then I see Roy. He has no cart, no basket. He’s holding a gallon of milk and a supersize Twizzlers and he is reaching for, I can’t quite see—a big oversize box that looks to be Honeycomb. A beautiful assemblage. Beautiful.

  I turn away from Roy. I feel my whole body, even my ears, blushing. The backs of my hands feel itchy the way they always do in spring. I touch the cool metal shelving, run my fingers up and over the plastic slipcovers, over the price labels, hearing every nothi
ng behind me. The price labels make a sandy sliding sound when I push them. He’s a monster, Roy. Not looking at him, just feeling that power he has over me, a monster.

  My mom in lace-up sandals cruises by the aisle with our shopping cart. The lighting seems to change. Able now to turn around, I see that Roy is gone. I run after my mom. When finally we’re in the car again, back door closed on the groceries—when I turn around, I see celery stalks innocently sticking out of a brown paper bag—I feel great relief.

  I decide to wash my feet in the sink; this always makes me happy. On my dad’s shaving mirror in the bathroom, old Scotch tape holding it in place, is a yellowed bit of paper, torn from a magazine. For years it’s been there, inscrutable. Now I feel certain it carries a secret. About love maybe. About the possessed feeling I have because of Roy.

  It says And human speech is but a cracked kettle upon which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that—

  Next to the scrap is a sticker of mine, of a green apple.

  I look again at the quote: the bears, the kettle.

  Silly, I decide. It’s all very silly. I start to dry my feet with a towel.

  For the impending McDonald’s Saturday I resolve to walk right past my tattooed crush. I’ll have nothing to do with him, with his hi little sexys. This denouncement is actually extraordinarily painful since Roy alone is now my whole world. Everything that came before—my coin collection in the Tupperware, the corrugated cardboard trim on school bulletin boards, the terror of the fire pole—now revealed supremely childish and vain. Without even deciding to, I have left all that and now must leave Roy, too. I commit to enduring the burden of the universe alone. The universe with its mysterious General Rommels, its heady strait of Bosporus. I resolve to suffer.