Last summer you squirted Sun-In all over your head not to become blond so much, you know that's impossible, but maybe just not to be so dark. No one knows how to express how unlike them you are, so they call you smart. They think that is a safe word to name you. They say, your mother must be paying you a million bucks for the marks you earn. You've learned, after a couple of embarrassing homerooms in sixth grade, to fake sick on report card day for fear that Chad will, again, snatch your grades out of your hand and run around the room hailing you a genius of our day, but not in a nice way. You agree with their idea that you must study very hard, and bury the truth of school and studying being every bit as obligatory for you as it is for them. If you must deign to be smart, at least be agreeable. Anything to keep them from staring at you, and from you wanting to die. Right. Now.
A couple of years ago your younger stepsister moved back to Texas, her father having left your mother quite literally for dead. Divorced Again. Or maybe, Divorce, Part 2. This is all like a movie, a romantic comedy, because everything tragic that happens won't be tragic as long as you can make witty jokes and laugh about it. So, Brooke, make a funny joke. Learn to say fuckety-fuck just as much, no, more than the boys. They will be scared of you and you will love it. So instead of thinking about your mom, half dead and alone in a hospital bed, her husband tucked away in a bar, in his solitude and near-widowerhood, poor little soldier, how pure he is in his weakness, other women might say, in place of these things, think of Ricky Sears. How his finger got chopped in half last summer in his father's garage, and how ironic that is since he was always giving everyone the bird. Still too tragic? Think again of the Sun-In, the orange scarecrow it turned you into, how mad it made your mother, your so-alive mother who it's become increasingly difficult to look at. To come close to her means touching death, so it's best to keep distance for awhile. Remember instead how just a few months ago you ate cookie dough with Heidi and laid out on her roof to tan, and how you pretended to agree with her that the dough could probably bake a cookie inside our stomachs since it was so hot out and we were so close to the sun, even though you knew that was bullshit, but what you knew even more than that was you don't disagree with friends who are prettier and dumber than you are, because the mathematical equation of them equals better. You can't beat pretty. Still, ugly is funny. Dumb is really funny.
Something that still makes your mom laugh: at six you shared your first Christmas with a sibling, your stepsister Dezi, who like Athena springing from Zeus's head, was simply here in front of you one day, fully formed and blue-eyed and perfect. Camcorders had only recently been born, just like Dezi, so that Christmas will live forever, as will you in your horizontal stripes, Brooke. In the video you cannot be consoled. Outwardly there is no reason for you, at six, with a world of potheads and winos who view your presence as nothing but great fun, to be mad about. But there's that scowl--do you remember it? Mom calls it one of your fits, but we remember the truth: though empirical evidence existed to prove there were many children in the world living concurrently with you, they were never in your purview, so you were safe. It was like not having to travel to the moon to know it was there; at nighttime you just craned your neck up. But suddenly this moon of a child clung to your belt loop. She was shiny and everyone wanted to pick her up and see her, the discovery. And you felt like one of the fossils you were beginning to collect, dusty and old. Part of your scowl, then, was your idea that you were at once a mother, and at the same time having to compete for the affections of your real mother, who had a socialist's idea of love: it's all equal. Thus the scowl. You were beginning to learn, thankfully, what by now you know so well--what it means not to have what you so desperately want.
Don't forget also that you were born, Brooke, do not forget the miracle of that event. Your mother once thought, in the tense days before you were ever spoken of but still existed, no bigger than a fingernail, that your dad wouldn't want you. That he would take you for a mistake, that he might treat you like the fingernail you sort of were, and just chew you off, so to speak. Wait awhile for another one of you to grow, once a better time rolled along. But no, your dad wanted and wanted you so much in those early fingernail weeks, so much so that in two years he couldn't really take you anymore. Always love, though, from dad with cigarettes and the Memory game and Little Golden Books, and from mom with friends and cigarettes and stiff curly hair and always beautiful. Even now the smell of AquaNet is enough proof that your mom kissed and hugged you and was alive with you.
Somewhere along this way you've stopped understanding what it means for a human--for you--to love yourself. And though you test your fingernails to their pink, meaty limits, you as a human are all claw--no one gets close. Friends think they do, and you allow them to believe it, because this is what it means to be normal. It's one of those unspoken rules you sense that you must allow someone in this life to love you. But you and all your friends are masters of deception, already at twelve, and it's fun to write and say BFF and not mean an initial of it. As soon as a boy neither of you truly care about, but think maybe you should, enters into the frame, the F (forever) will turn to N (never). And all will be as before: pink, meaty nailbeds, the thickness about your face and thoughts.
What I'm saying is you don't need to smile at this camera, or any other, if you don't feel like it. Maybe lunch today sucked, maybe algebra was a drag. Certainly your life is a series of flash cards you've got neither the time nor inclination to study for. You don't need to curl your eyelashes, even though mom taught you how, and you don't need to talk so much, though that's something girls do. Maybe you're about to open your mouth to say something profound about the twelve years of pain--and yes, ecstacy (though neither us will be able to recall that for awhile)--of being Brooke on this planet of so many more meaningful things you want to cry for so frequently, so selfishly thinking of your own being and name. It's possible you're going to tell the picture-taker how lonely you are, how you're scared your mother really will die so you want to stay far far away from her, how every face you look upon seems glacial, even hers, the beautiful picture-taker's. Or that maybe it's your face, you, that you feel so far away from. More likely you're going to say the obvious: don't take the picture! Don't remember me! But eighteen years later here you are, in horizontal stripes and maybe not so sad as I'm thinking of you.
But really, I know you are. And I'm just saying, it's okay. I've heard these things come out in the wash.
Brooke, this is publishable, I think. Seriously -- awesome. Happy Thanksgiving. Keep writing. I think this is just amazing.
ReplyDeleteYou looked adorable, smart, provocative,pretty and all-knowing in your horizontal stripes
ReplyDeleteG