I swallow, swallow, breathe.
mindthegap: Found it yet?
Another message blinks to life.
mindthegap: That’s probably not what you look like at all. I don’t know why, I imagine you really tall. With sort of a brassy voice. Like, Amazonian. lol
I laugh a little, head swimming.
missabyss: Why my hands?
mindthegap: You wrote me about your artist’s block, remember? You said you hadn’t been able to draw anything new for months.
A pause, and then:
mindthegap: How is that going, by the way?
missabyss: A lot better.
mindthegap: !! Can I see your stuff?
I rub my eyes, look at the clock. I have my meeting with Marcel in less than nine hours.
missabyss: Soon. I’m going to have a gallery show. I’ll send you an invite.
We bid each other good night/morning, and I drop the phone onto the duvet, stretching. I should try to grab a few more hours of sleep if I’m going to be halfway coherent at this meeting. But instead . . . Morgan turned, slowly, just in time to see a flash of rippling blond hair as Howie dove beneath the water. She froze as he stroked powerfully to where she stood. She closed her eyes, feeling a gentle caress on her ankle.
I glance around the room once more, out the window at the lightening sky. A few more minutes can’t hurt.
The doorbell rings at two that afternoon, and I jump to answer it. I’m dead on my feet, but I’ve cleaned, bought flowers, replaced two of the dead light bulbs in the kitchen. Which is to say, I’m adulting one hundred times harder than ever before in my life. I even folded the end of the toilet paper into a neat point, the way they do in hotels.
Marcel follows Mother through the doorway of my apartment. Contrasted against their immaculate bodies, everything seems grimier. I am suddenly acutely aware of the soft swell of stuffing leaking out of the sofa. But Marcel goes directly to work, greeting the paintings with cautious delight. “Nice,” he murmurs. “These pieces speak to the Hole in a way that—yes. Yes.” He draws his hand through the air in front of the mouthless maid. “We can work with this. What am I missing? by the girl with the Hole in her middle. The media will adore it.”
Mother puts her phone away, pausing behind me to grip my shoulder. She smells like plumeria and hints of musk—Kali Girl, or Destroyer of Dreams. “It’s awfully negative,” she says, glancing around the room with distaste. “Couldn’t we come up with something a little more—affirmational?”
“I was thinking about incorporating the concept of extras, too, maybe,” I say. I’ve been carefully rehearsing all morning. “I conceived this series as a conversation between longing and otherness.”
Marcel is nodding, but not listening.
“What am I missing?” he says, suddenly, as if reading from a catalog. “The piece challenges the viewer to engage with this question as intimately in their own life as the artist has in hers. The progression of images, ailments more and less visible, provoke feelings of discomfort—no, no—provoke uncomfortable truths as Stone confronts the—no, no—juxtaposes the hegemonic discourse of the body with the inescapable concept of absence.” He pulls out an iPad, starts jotting notes as he drifts into the kitchen. “Something along those lines—I’ll have my assistant draw up the copy.”
His art-speak is impeccable. Mother looks displeased, squeezes my shoulder again, harder. I lift my torso, straighten my posture.
“I’ve been imagining it displayed along a hallway—the first few pictures you see are pretty ordinary-looking, but as you go on, the erasures become more and more apparent. Then right at the end, I hang a self-portrait. You know? As if to say: Compared to all of these other people, what am I missing, really?” I look at Mother, who’s wearing her polite face. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few days, and—”
“A mirror,” Marcel says.
“What?” I ask.
“Yes,” Mother says.
He planes the air with his hand. “You want the show to move beyond you. It should be provocative, challenge your audience. The hall idea’s nice, but when the viewer comes to the end, they should confront themselves, hence the mirror. It will drive the question home. Not ‘What am I missing?’ but what are we missing? What are you missing?”
Marcel shakes his head, his black hair catching the light and holding it, effortlessly.
“Trust me,” he says. “This is the show you want for your debut. People love themselves. Don’t make this about you. Make it about them.”
Mother reaches for her phone. “Perfect,” she says, crisply. “I’ll have someone pick out a mirror by the end of the week. How large are we thinking?”
“Vanity,” Marcel says. “No—strike that. Let’s go oversized floor mirror, subtle lights. I’m thinking an antique frame. You want that nostalgia angle. We’ll play up the lost childhood thing.”
“Stop,” I say.
Mother crosses her arms.
“Morgan,” she says, “you’re a public figure now. We want to spin this to your best advantage. Marcel has years of experience. Maybe once you’re established you can have a little more artistic freedom. Trust me,” she says. “Marketing can make or break a brand.”
“I’m not a brand,” I say.
“Of course you are,” Mother says. “You want to be successful in the commercial art world, don’t you?”
“Do I?” I ask. “You’re the one who bought me a gallery. And a manager-slash-babysitter.”
Mother drops her phone in her bag and stares at me, arms crossed. I hold my back so straight it aches.
“I finally found something that I really want to say. If you don’t want me to say it my own way, fine. Give your gallery to someone else. I can recommend some very talented fan artists on the Internet.”
Mother lowers her chin. Marcel shifts, ostentatiously checks his watch.
“Not to be a pill,” he says. “But I’ve got a meeting at three—”
“Go,” Mother says.
The Stone women face each other, alone. Even the air shrinks away from the outline of Mother’s body.
“Morgan,” she says, “you will do this show.”
“Will I?”
“We’ve already sent out the press release.”
“So unrelease it.”
She pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs.
“Your father’s coming,” she says at last. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d kindly make it look as though I haven’t been a complete failure as a parent for the last seventeen years.”
My heart fumbles on its beating path.
“I’ll pick up the mirror by the end of the week,” she tells me. “Up your iron intake; you look peaked.”
She leaves before I can read any more of her face.
33
I sit on the couch thinking, Dad, Dad, Dad.
I have two memories of my father. The first is the look of terror on his face the day he left. The other is a riddle.
There are two knights racing on horseback. But there’s a twist: the man whose horse crosses the finish line last will win.
Yes, I was three. Yes, I was far too young for logic puzzles. But I struggled with it for years. I turned it over in my mind while waiting at doctor’s offices and stranded alone in front of the television and in the bath. It seemed impossible. How do you win a race by losing?
I figured it out, years later, stumbling over the answer randomly while waiting in line at the DMV to take my driver’s test. It had bloomed there, or grown there, while I wasn’t looking. Just waiting quietly for me to understand.
I remember the riddle, but not the telling. I have to invent my own memory, largely constructed from Mother recounting it to me: the time I got held up at work and your father had to put you to bed. It’s her four-cocktails story abo
ut Dad. Five Manhattans gets me the time he left me in the back of a taxi on vacation and Mother called every company in New York in a rage. (I had fallen asleep in the back seat, and was discovered when the cab was flagged down by an austere woman in minks, bleeding from the forehead, who was trying to get to the hospital.) Six Manhattans gets me the day they met. She usually falls asleep in the middle.
(Do you want to know the answer? The knights switch horses and then race.)
(. . . yeah. Try wrapping your mind around that at age three.)
When Mother tells this story, it’s as evidence that my father never understood children, was never cut out for parenthood. But to me, the story is this: my dad sitting at the edge of my bed in the dark, tired and loose-muscled at the end of a long day of meetings, putting me to bed with ice-cream kisses. His voice unwinding around the two of us, while outside, the remnants of the day drain away.
I slump on the couch after Mother has gone, feeling heavy all over. It is as if I have spent my life with hollow bones and now they are filling up all at once.
I text Howie.
Still up for that road trip?
Half a minute later, my phone lights up. What about your gallery stuff?
I respond: n/a
There’s a pause, and then he calls me. I wonder if we’re allowed to just call each other first, or if texting is a necessary protocol. There are so many rules to being friends with boys.
He says, “What happened to the gallery?”
I say, “I’m out.”
“Oh man,” he says. He sounds genuinely wounded for me. “They canceled your show? That sucks.”
“No, the show’s still happening. The show must go on.” I can’t bring myself to talk about my dad. “I just don’t really get to have a lot of say in stuff.”
“Oh. Is that normal?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask about normal.”
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
There’s a long, awkward phone pause, the kind where both people are thinking, Maybe I should just say how awkward this is to defuse the tension! and then, Ugh, but wouldn’t that just make it more awkward? and then Shit, what was that, five seconds? Now it’s even more awkward, and the tension reaches a critical breaking point, and there’s nothing left to do but pray for a dropped call or the Rapture.
“This is awk—” I start.
“How about going to the fair?” Howie asks at the same time.
“What?” we both ask. “No, you first,” we both say.
We laugh, harder than is necessary.
“Seriously, go ahead,” I say. For the love of God, please.
“What about the State Fair?” he asks. “This week is the closing weekend. It’s so obvious, I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before. We don’t have to go on a big Tour de Freaks road trip at all.”
“The fair?”
“Yeah,” he says, assuming a barker voice. “Meet the Amazing Lizard Lady! See a two-headed cow! It’s Harvey, the World’s Smallest Horse! Et cetera.”
“I thought the fair was just rides,” I say. I step out our door and into the building’s stairwell, pacing.
“You’ve never been? Weren’t you ever a child?”
“You fatally underestimate how much I hate fun.”
“Forget fun,” he says. “They have fried Snickers bars. Also, really big pumpkins.”
“Well, shoot, mister,” I say. “Sign me up.”
I can hear a smile in his voice. “Great,” he says. “How about Friday? I’ll pick you up.”
Turning to go back inside, I see a note propped up by the key bowl. I pick it up: Me and Todd are going out this weekend for our 2¼-year anniversary. Please don’t lock the deadbolt. –C.
I brace myself for a wave of irritation—who celebrates two and a quarter of anything?—but it doesn’t come. Instead, I slip the note into my pocket, feeling almost tender as it nestles comfortably next to the warm promise of my tomorrow.
I wake too early and stare at my closet in dismay, wondering what one wears on a date-that’s-not-a-date, or a date-you-kind-of-hope-is-a-date-but-only-if-the-other-person-thinks-it’s-a-date-too, and then wondering when in history clothing got so complicated, the simple business of covering our nakedness so nuanced and political. When Howie texts that he’s here, I’m in jeans and a cowboy shirt with pearl-snap buttons and yesterday’s scarf. It’ll serve.
I pull my scarf up to hide my face as I hurry across the parking lot, trying to avoid the photographers who lurk in the meager landscaping. The landlord has taken to leaving notes on the windshields of their cars, pages torn from spiral-bound notebooks and scrawled on in red Sharpie: PaRKING IS 4 RESiDENTS + GUESTS ONLY!!!!! Passive aggression litters the bushes.
“Miss Stone,” Howie says, “what a pleasure to see you here.”
I am the World’s Most Mortified Cowgirl. “You read that story, too?”
“What story?”
I buckle my seat belt, feeling warm and overly aware of my face. “Nothing.”
Behind us, car doors slam—four, possibly five. The entourage for our soon-to-be-public date. I cool my cheeks with my hands. “I should have snuck out the back.”
Howie checks the rearview mirror. “Don’t mind them. They’ve been camping out at the hotel, too. I met one of them last night at the ice machine, Dev. He’s not a bad guy. He got laid off; always loved photography and decided to make a go of it.”
“Can’t he photograph something else?”
Howie shrugs. “Everyone’s got to eat,” he says.
I feel depressed again by how nice he is. Sometimes I just want a partner in grumpiness. Someone who won’t make me feel like a monster for shouting at those damned kids to get off my lawn. Howie’s lawn would be full of French bulldog puppies and adorable tots setting up lemonade stands. Caro’s, too. How did I end up surrounded by so many obnoxiously well-adjusted people?
As we drive we talk about the fair, the people we might meet there. We delineate our standards: no self-mutilators, feat performers, or survivors of accidents or illnesses. We are interested in natural deformity—people who cannot help the way they are. Animals, too, don’t interest us: the world’s biggest pig, the six-legged dog.
“I’m honestly not expecting too much,” Howie says. “We can treat it like a training run for meeting the Angel next weekend. Worst-case scenario, it’s all a wash. Then we just eat fried things on sticks and watch duck races.”
“What about the best-case scenario?” I ask.
Howie shrugs.
“We find an answer.”
Howie buys our tickets (is this a date?), and we slam headlong into the overstimulating and overstimulated wall of humanity that is the State Fair on its final Friday of the year. We’ve arrived just as schools are letting out, and although I eye the flood of people anxiously for familiar faces, the October day is bright, and everything seems oversaturated in color and promise: Fried Mac-’N’-Cheese! Tilt-A-Whirl! Guess My Age, Win A Prize! Howie’s hand hovers on my elbow as we navigate the dusty pathways. I am stunned by everything, bumping into strollers and small children and the milling, obese families who halt in the middle of traffic to point to every shining thing: elephant ears, the sky ride, stuffed Tweety Birds larger than the fat toddlers whose mouths pucker around their fists. Overhead, in the distance, the Mega Drop and the big Ferris wheel loom polychrome on the skyline.
“What do you want to do?” I ask. A group of girls in old-fashioned dresses bumps past us toward the Village of Yesteryear, and we are suddenly toe to toe. Everything smells like cake.
Howie grips my arm. “Stay on mission.”
I nod. “Right,” I say.
We pick our way through the crowds, finding the freak shows in small, gemlike clusters. We reject the Incredible Mongolian Sword Swallower, decline to see Samson, The World’s Largest Hor
se. But Howie pauses outside Lovely Lela, the Living Mermaid.
“A real, live mermaid!” bellows a recorded voice from speakers outside her tent. “Pearl of the South Pacific!”
There’s a painting on the left side of the tent flap depicting a buxom mermaid beckoning from a tank. On the opposite flap is a photograph of a woman, presumably Lela, winking over the top of a full-body x-ray. It’s ordinary from the waist up—human ribs, neck and spine—but extends downward into an incredible fusion of bone: her spinal column stretching far below the pelvis, which is narrowed and feline. Delicate bones extend from the tip of the tail, needlelike toes suspended in the shadows of fins.
I chew my lip. Beside me, Howie looks similarly dubious. We’ve both seen our share of strange x-rays.
“Fake,” I say.
“Only a dollar to find out,” Howie says, reaching for his wallet.
“Hey!” a voice shouts behind us. “It’s them!”
I turn to a flashbulb and blink. “Howie,” I say, warningly. We’ve attracted a crowd, and a crowd will attract the press. I can already see the headline: Freaks at the Freak Show.
“Direct from the South Seas!” the recorded voice booms on a loop. “Half-woman, half-fish! She talks to you! A real, live mermaid!”
Howie tugs me toward the tent flap. “Come on,” he says.
The bouncer-slash-ticket-taker crosses his massive arms and scowls at our unwanted entourage. “No cameras,” he grunts. We shove two dollars into his hand and duck inside while behind us, photographers scramble with camera bags and excuses.
It takes a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dusky interior of the tent. There’s a second flap of canvas, and then a small, dark room. At its center is a dimly lit aquarium behind a wall of chicken wire. Lovely Lela sits in it on a large concrete boulder, immersed to the waist in green-tinted water.
She’s a deeply tanned, tattooed woman of maybe forty, wearing a clamshell bra and shimmery blue eye shadow. The water bobs at her waistline and is slick with seaweed, obscuring the place where the tail merges with her torso. Even so, it is easy to see that she is a fake. The silver scales strain across her thighs, revealing a seam. Her fins twitch back and forth on wires, stirring the murky water.
Hole in the Middle Page 20
