I unsnapped, unzipped, and released a cascade of tummy flesh. It was pale, with red marks where it had fought its restraints. I poked one of the welts, and my finger disappeared to the second knuckle.
It reappeared and made for my mouth. A little ridge of fingernail had grown back over the past day or two. The nail snuggled in between my incisors and severed itself from its fingertip.
It played on my tongue for a minute, then was gone. It slipped past my uvula, then down into my gut, where my digestive juices would break it down into its mineral components. They would ride my bloodstream back to my fingertips and be reborn as fingernails once again. It was very spiritual.
Or toenails. I wasn’t as flexible as, say, Jada, but I could bite my toenails. I took off my sneakers and socks and checked my right foot.
The right pinkie toe produced the highest overall yield. Its nail wasn’t as broad or as hard as the other nails, but it grew quickly, and thicker than the others. I could harvest it nearly every other day.
My teeth came together around it, and the end of my pinkie nail came away gently, as a tulip sheds its petals.
None of the other nine were ready, so I put my socks back on.
Thumbnails were the best, and I tried to keep mine for special occasions. Looking back at the kind of day I’d had, though, I figured I deserved a thumbnail.
My left one had a good six days’ growth on it, a pretty white crescent almost level with the end of my thumb. I bit down on the edge of it and started to peel away the stiff keratin, but I’d bitten too low. The nail didn’t come off smoothly; it pulled some skin with it. I blew on my thumbnail. It stung.
Color values are very subjective. My belly welts seemed bright red before, but now they looked rosy pink in contrast to the deep red line surrounding my thumbnail.
I sucked my thumb until it stopped bleeding.
Beloved of the Goddess
“You are so lucky to be named Myrtle,” Margie opined a few weeks after my first coven ceremony. We were having lunch in the auditorium. We usually avoided the cafeteria and took our brown bags there. I never thought this way about my name, and I couldn’t imagine why Margie did. She told me.
“Myrtle is the sacred flower of the Goddess Aphrodite, and you’re Myrtle: beloved of the Goddess of Beauty and Love.”
“Margie,” I said, “I see things a little differently. Let me give you an example. I just came from fourth-period gym. Miss Lubetsky is making us do folk dancing. Of course, the first thing we have to do is pair up, and I’m standing there without a partner.”
“I know,” said Margie. “It happens to me, too, every time we get to the folk dance unit. Somehow there are always more girls than guys. Did you end up dancing with another girl? That’s what I usually do.”
“No,” I said, “actually, there were four extra guys. None of them would dance with me. I would have been happy to sit out the dance and be in charge of the tape player, but Miss Lubetsky made a really big deal out of it. You know how when she gets excited, her voice gets all sing-songy? Well, she goes, ‘Myrtle doesn’t have a partner. Now who will be Myrtle’s partner?’ Like she was coaxing reluctant puppies or something.
“None of those boys is my romantic ideal, but Brian LaSalle is probably the best of the bunch. We’re in the same econ class, and he seems to have half a brain. Miss Lubetsky goes up to him and sings, ‘Brian, why don’t you dance with Myrtle.’
“Brian looks down and shakes his head. I didn’t think Miss Lubetsky would let him get away with that, but she went right over to Craig, you know, the one who thinks he’s Leonardo DiCaprio?”
Margie nodded and licked her orange fingers. She had almost finished her bag of cheese curls. I took advantage of the pause to unwrap one of my peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They’re perfect for school lunches. They have the same flavor and consistency as pb and j, but without the attendant problem of jelly bleeding through the bread after a morning in a hot locker. On special occasions I make them with a crumbled Hershey bar sprinkled over the bananas.
“Yeah,” said Margie. “Craig thinks he embodies the spirit of the Horned One, Consort of the Goddess.”
“Well, he is conceited, anyway,” I continued. “So when Miss Lubetsky asked him to dance with me, he just shook his hair and said, ‘I’m not dancing with her.’ Naturally this cracked everybody up. I didn’t want to see this go any further, so I said to Miss Lubetsky, ‘Don’t worry about it; I’ll dance by myself.’
“Miss Lubetsky repeated what I’d said at triple the volume. ‘Dance by yourself? I’m afraid that’s unacceptable! This dance requires two people.’
“To which witty Craig replied, ‘She is two people–– weight-wise, that is!’ and brought the house down. Tammy Colter laughed so hard she cried and had to run to the locker room and fix her makeup. The guys stood in line to give Craig high-fives.
“I ask you, Margie, does it sound to you like I am beloved of the Goddess Aphrodite?”
Margie made a sound that could have been the quashing of an incipient laugh or the dislodging of a cheese curl. (I’m sure it was a cheese curl. There was nothing funny about the folk dance unit.) I set to work on my sandwiches. They’re best when accompanied by a carbonated beverage. I had a bottle of Sprite on hand.
“You are beloved of the Goddess,” said Margie. “You are the Goddess. You are a formidable woman. Those boys didn’t want to dance with you because they feared your power. Your size, your womanliness, is something they both yearn for and fear: yearn for because it is beautiful, fear because it is so different from themselves. They cover up their fear with jokes and taunts.
“Don’t let the words of ignorant boys make you feel estranged from the Goddess. Aphrodite is not only the goddess of romantic love; she is Venus, identified with creativity, growth, power, and all the mysteries of the Goddess.”
When Margie said “Goddess,” her eyes popped out a little, a peculiar but effective form of nonverbal punctuation. I imagined a whole temple full of priestesses in ancient times all popping their eyes every time they said “Goddess.” That image and the effervescent soft drink lifted my spirits a little, and I grinned at Margie.
“I can tell,” she told me, “you recognize the Goddess within you. Don’t lose sight of her.”
A Bold Statement
That was the difference between Margie and Jada. Margie thought there was a goddess in every woman. Jada thought that inside every fat woman there was a thin woman crying to get out.
Maybe that was what my nail biting was about: trying to free the thin woman. It was as good an explanation as any, and I’d come up with quite a few: internalized aggression, oral fixation, calcium deficiency. I didn’t know why I did it. But it felt good, and it wasn’t like it was going to make me go blind.
I had tried to quit a number of times. My last six or seven New Year’s resolutions had been to let my nails grow. They never made it past Groundhog Day. I even tried painting them with that bitter-tasting stuff, to condition myself against nail biting. It didn’t work. It doesn’t really taste all that bad, once you get used to it.
But so what if I bit my nails? I wasn’t hurting anybody. I had a pretty little tube of antibiotic ointment that I spread on the occasional infected hangnail. They always healed quickly and cleanly.
They hurt a lot less than my toilet injury. I studied my shin and its oddly shaped bruise. It looked like I’d decided to get a big blue tattoo of Australia. I poked Perth gently. It was tender. I thought about getting a Tylenol. It could do double duty and ease my cramps, too. Margie would not have approved.
I dismantled my fern composition. I would get the assignment done later; now I had other business to attend to. I got my mat knife and a piece of dark blue mat board. I tenderly separated Goat’s page from the rest of the sketch book. I measured, marked, remeasured, and cut.
Sam had barely unlocked the door when I burst into Horton’s the next morning, lugging my portfolio.
“Good morning, Myr,” said
Sam. “You’re looking sunny on this misty, moisty morning.”
“How do you do and how do you do and how do you do again, Sam?” I answered. Sam had on charcoal-gray slacks and a slate-gray shirt. His tie was teal with a pattern of pink and purple pansies. If Margie had seen it, she would have taken it as a sign that Sam was menstruating.
I shook my head to jostle Margie out of my thoughts. Since I had received that last postcard, everything reminded me of Margie.
I hauled myself onto a stool and balanced my portfolio on the counter.
“So?” Sam ran a finger around the edge of the wide, flat bag. “Do I get to see what’s inside?”
I unzipped the portfolio and removed the drawing. Sam was fastidious about keeping Horton’s surfaces clean and dry, so I placed the picture squarely before him on the counter. There was Goat, displayed to advantage against a dark blue border.
“You’re the first person to see it,” I told him.
Sam peered at the drawing. His mustache expanded and spread across his face from dimple to dimple. “Wow, Myr. That is some picture.”
He stared at it some more and finally asked, “Is it for the show?”
I was surprised to notice that my arms were covered with goose bumps. “Yes,” I said, “it is.”
Sam turned away briefly to get us each a big glass of orange juice. He placed mine on the counter, safely away from the drawing. He carried his around the counter and sat down on the stool beside mine.
“That picture makes a bold statement,” he said.
“Oh, you artsy-fartsy types,” I joked, “always trying to read bold statements into everything. How cliché. It’s just a picture of a guy with goat legs.”
“Myr, that is a picture of your roommate’s boyfriend.” Sam kept careful track of his customers. He knew Jada and Goat, and he knew Jada and I were roommates.
I licked my lips. “This juice is delicious. It tastes just like fresh squeezed,” I said.
“It is fresh squeezed,” said Sam. “Don’t change the subject. We need to talk about this.” His mustache sat still and smooth in the center of an earnest expression. “Have you thought about what Goat will say when he sees this picture? What Jada will say?”
I looked again at my drawing. It was more than a realistic rendering of Goat’s well-defined upper body. It showed him in motion, muscles rippling, sweat flowing. Looking at it, you could almost hear his heart pounding, feel his breath panting.
I placed my glass on the counter and grimaced. “This orange juice tastes funny,” I said. “Maybe you should check the expiration date.”
“Myr,” said Sam, “I love the picture. I just want you to be sure you’re ready to display it.”
“Are you afraid it would offend the delicate sensibilities of your customers? Would you prefer that I submit a sketch of a snow-covered administration building?”
“Believe me, it’s not my customers’ sensibilities I’m worried about. There will be enough other stuff in the show to offend them. One guy is displaying pages of the Bible papier-mâchéd into the shape of a giant hypodermic syringe.” Sam chuckled.
“Does the Chamber of Commerce know about your Marxist leanings?” I asked him.
“I think they have their suspicions.” He winked at me and continued, “I’m not trying to censor you. You know me; I’m a big fan of the first amendment. I’m happy to include ‘Opiate of the Masses,’ and I’ll be ecstatic to have … er, what do you call your drawing?”
It worked better written down. I patted my pockets till I found a pen, my pink highlighter. Then I pulled a napkin from the dispenser and wrote down the title. I slid it along the counter to Sam.
He picked it up, read it, and managed to turn his head in time to prevent himself from spraying orange juice on my drawing when he laughed.
The napkin said, “Satyrsfaction.”
Imagine the Carnage
“Hi, Myr, what’s in the bag?”
Jada gripped her ankles and spoke to me from between her calves. This was the sort of thing she did to keep limber. I dropped my backpack and empty portfolio by the door and flopped into the decrepit green easy chair we had sublet along with everything else that summer.
Wrong decision. Now that I was deep in the chair, it would require considerable effort to stand up again, and my backpack, with my Reese’s cups in it, was behind the chair, out of reach.
“Nothing’s in the bag,” I told her.
Jada let go of her ankles, and they slid apart until her legs were flat against the floor. She stretched her arms out and pressed her palms to the floor in front of her. She spoke into the dusty carpet. “Why’d you carry an empty bag around all day?”
“It wasn’t empty when I left this morning. I brought a picture to Horton’s for Sam’s show.”
Jada sat up and turned around to face me. I thought of a llama startled at her grazing.
“You’re going to be in a show?” she asked.
“Well, my one picture is, yeah,” I said.
“Well, that’s terrific news! I always said that if you just put your mind to it you could really accomplish something.”
Jada thought she was paying me a compliment. I was supposed to feel flattered.
“When is the opening?” she asked. “This weekend? Let me put up your hair and do your makeup. We are going to make you look beautiful! Let’s go upstairs and put together your outfit.”
Uh-oh. I knew the look Jada was giving me. It was the look of a llama who wants to give her roommate a makeover. Jada loved giving makeovers. I hated getting them. A makeover was Jada’s way of demonstrating to me how offensive I looked without the cosmetics Jada alone had the expertise to apply. Jada had a fairy-godmother complex, and in her version of the story, Cinderella got a sermon about the importance of good nutrition and the impossibility of her ever finding Prince Charming if she insisted on neglecting her skin-care routine.
I got the sermon regularly, but I’d only gotten a full makeover once. When we had been roommies for just a few weeks, Jada thought that with my mature figure and multiple chins, I could buy beer without showing ID. She put primer, a top coat, and detailing on my face until no one would have dared to ask me for ID. They might have asked for my reminiscences of the Reagan era, but they wouldn’t have asked for ID.
I never got to test the disguise. About thirty seconds after Jada applied the last layer of shellac to my upswept ’do, some floormates and some guys they’d met in the quad whirled in and swept Jada off to a party where there was beer, free beer for the ladies. I wasn’t invited, presumably because they thought I was Jada’s elderly maiden aunt who dropped by for a brief visit.
That makeover taught me a lot. Not only did I learn that I should use a very pale foundation and blend it in using a tight spiral motion, I learned that Jada would harass me into makeovers only as long as no one else was around to provide her companionship. That was why I was suspicious of her latest offer to make me look beautiful.
“Aren’t you expecting Goat to come over pretty soon?” I asked her.
Still seated, Jada struck a pose with her right foot in her left hand and her left hand over her head. This was her version of a sulk.
“Oh, he went rappelling with Seth. They’re camping overnight. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Jada shrugged, broke her sulk, and sprang to her feet. “Actually, it’s perfect timing. You just got into a show! We can have a ladies-only celebration. I’ll make some popcorn. Air-popped, it’s only thirty-two calories a cup.”
The next thing I knew, I was seated on the scabrous gray carpet in Jada’s room while she loomed above me, swabbing Royal Twilight onto my eyelids.
“You’re a winter, so you need to wear deeper colors,” she told me.
“I am not a winter. My birthday is August thirty-first.”
Jada made an impatient gesture with a toadstool-shaped brush. “Please! It doesn’t have anything to do with when you were born. It’s your coloring. Brown hair, brown eyes, fair skin, t
hat’s winter.”
“So, if I got chapped skin and bleached my hair, I’d be a springtime?”
“No! You can’t change your season. Underlying skin tones are constant, and besides, it’s not ‘springtime,’ it’s ‘spring.’”
I knew that. Jada had “done my colors” before, and I knew this was a subject about which she felt deeply. My feigned ignorance of seasonal coloring made Jada cross, but I hoped it would keep her from broaching her next-favorite topic: my weight.
It didn’t.
“This color really brings out your eyes,” she said. “You do have nice eyes, but they’re not noticeable because your face is so full. You’re lucky, Myr; you have classic features. If you’d just slim down, you could be a real beauty. Uncross your eyes! You’re gonna make me mess up your mascara.”
“Sorry.”
“Seriously, though, you act like you don’t even want guys to notice you. Why don’t you exercise a little, let your nails grow, put on some lipstick when you go out, maybe get your ears pierced?”
“Oh, I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
“Don’t worry! When you get your ears pierced there isn’t any blood, and it only hurts for, like, one second.”
“No,” I said, “I mean I can’t stand the sight of blood shed when men fight over me. It’s bad enough now, Jada. Imagine the carnage if I were to lose weight and start wearing makeup and jewelry.”
Jada sat back on her heels, tilted her head, and looked at me. Her ears were small and on the sides of her head, but it would have fit in better with her overall look if they had been on top of her head and able to move independently.
She said, “I’m not trying to be mean, Myr. It’s just, when I see someone with the potential to look good not do anything with it, it makes me think something is wrong. Look at what a little makeup can do for you.”
Some people have big-screen TVs; Jada had a big-screen mirror. It was the size of a small billboard. I had my back to it during the makeover, but, at Jada’s bidding, I turned around to meet the new me.
Myrtle of Willendorf Page 3
