Out on the back deck, I take in the fragrant yard: the chrysanthemums, the slight sweetness of fertilizer, the fall mastery of dying summer dirt. Instinctively, I look around for lightning bugs and feel unending loneliness. I remember . . .
Hot summer nights, at dusk, Dad would shove a Wiffle ball bat in my hands and show me how to smack the hell out of lightning bugs. A direct hit, he said, was rewarded with a splattering of neon goo. He called it Goo Ball. I always knew he wanted a son, but it was never more obvious than on Goo Ball nights. (I usually missed on purpose, poor things.)
And there—on the far right-hand side of the yard—the detached garage. I smell cheap beer and turtle wax. So many memories of my father washing and rewashing his precious, never-used motorcycle while Mom and I listened to records. And the old College Couch, which, like me, has been hauled south. I turn back to the house, thinking about the last conversation I had on that couch. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to find more mischief than cotton tucked inside those plaid cushions.
Back inside, I peer at the door to the basement: tall and weighty, like a prison gate in some medieval movie. And its lock, forever broken, hanging there like nothing ever happened. Like my whole world didn’t fall apart down in that basement. Beyond that door, there will be no aromatic reminiscing.
Deep breath. And again. Now walk.
I head for the other staircase, the safe one, the one going up. Fourteen steps, just like I remember. At the top landing, I duck to avoid the slanted ceiling, pass the crawl space/storage closet (a nook I once sleep-pissed in), and walk straight into my old bedroom. I absorb the curled edges of the wallpaper, and the browned bloodstain in the corner (my first period). My unnecessary bunk bed is gone. My debauched Titanic poster is gone. My typewriter, my futon, my vinyl collection, my lava lamp—all the stuff is gone, but the essence of the room is the same. At least, to me it is. I saunter, I ponder, I inhale. The scented recipe of my room is equal parts Neutrogena, salty tears, and awkward self-discovery. I remember . . .
In eighth grade, Tommy McDougal dumped me by the tetherball pole. (The one with no tetherball.) He said I looked like a boy. He said I didn’t have breasts. He said I was a nerd. He said he didn’t want to go out with someone who used bigger words than he did. I said I hoped he was prepared to copulate himself for the rest of his life, which I’d hoped would work on a number of levels, but as he didn’t understand the word, only worked on one: making me feel even worse. That night I locked myself in this room and sobbed, alternating between Elvis (circa Heartbreak Hotel) and Elliott Smith (circa Either/Or). I did the same thing when Erik-with-a-kay dumped me, and the same thing when the fights got loud, and the same thing when I just needed noise to drown out the factory of my insides. It’s sad really. I poured out a lifetime of tears in the springtime of my life with no one but my musical anomalies to feel my pain.
Moving on.
Down the hall, I walk inside my parents’ bedroom. It is potpourri. It is perfume. It is ratty slippers. Like a lost little orphan, Mom’s vanity sits alone in the far corner, the only piece of furniture left in the house. Impulses screaming, I walk over and pull the war paint from my pocket.
This is it.
Ground Zero.
My mother’s lipstick. My mother’s bedroom. My mother’s vanity.
I wonder: What would it be like if she walked in the room right now? If she found me painting my face like some politically incorrect Cherokee chieftess? What would I tell her? The truth, I hope. That in my longing for originality and relational honesty and a hundred other I-don’t-know-whats, this action, while strange and socially awkward, makes more sense than just about anything else in my world. And even though it’s cryptic and more than a little odd, sometimes cryptic and odd are better than lying down for the Man. Maybe I would tell her how the war paint helped get me through a time when I felt like no one else cared about what I wanted, or who I was. Maybe I could muster the courage to speak those words so few people are able to say: I don’t know why I do the things I do. It’s like that sometimes.
Maybe.
I twist the last bit of lipstick from the tube and stare at the reflection of my mother’s room behind me. In my mind, the dream is still fresh: our old feet crossing the room slow as a freighter; our lipstick the paint, our face the canvas, we get to work; time and time again, we draw, but nothing sticks. Nothing except the war paint. Our only color.
It’s a narrow place, where Mom ends and Mim begins.
Only a single letter’s difference.
“How fitting,” I say aloud, raising the war paint to my left cheek. The two-sided arrow is first, headed straight for the bridge of my nose.
At that moment, from the depths of his canvas tomb, Stevie Wonder interrupts my proceedings with a wail. I pull the cell phone out of my bag and silence the ringer. “Give it up, my man. It’s unrequited.”
I return to the mirror, ready for the stroke across my forehead, the bridge connecting both arr—
“I thought I might find you here.”
Hand to face, I am frozen. “What are you doing?”
A phone slaps shut. “Mim, I’m—”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Nice, Mim. Real nice.”
Motion returns. Without bothering to remove my unfinished war paint, I spin around and face my stepmother head-on. Actually, the war paint makes perfect sense.
“Fuck you, Kathy.”
She smiles, and her eyes fill with tears. With one hand, she rubs circles across the very slight bulge in her stomach, up and down, round and round. I can’t help but wonder if little Isabel can feel her do this. Minding her own business, swimming along in the muck of her pre-birth—does she know there’s a whole world outside, just waiting to love her, ruin her, disgust and admire her, disappoint and awe her? Does she know about us? Probably not, seeing as how she’s about the size of a mango. God, if only she could plant those tiny little feet in there, just grab hold of Kathy’s uterus with all her might, and make that her home sweet home. I’m sure it’s tight quarters, but blimey, it’s not much better out here.