The beautiful doll’s small plastic eyes stared back at me. In real eyes you can see your dark reflection in the pupils, but these were opaque. Beautiful, but dead. Just glass. Miniature beacons in the shadows of my abuela’s bedroom. She wore a pale pink dress, almost the color of my own, made of a fine taffeta covered her white, gleaming figure. I wasn’t really supposed to be there, but when I saw the white peeking out through the dark sliver of the open door while counting lines on the wooden floor of Abuela’s apartment, I could not resist. My parents took extra care to keep the doors in our house shut so my siblings and I wouldn’t get into trouble. I was at the age at which avoiding the exasperated tone in my mother’s voice was as likely as wishes on first stars at night coming true.
Curt limbs at her side, curt limbs keeping her upright against the
bed frame. Dead limbs. Fake limbs. I reached out towards the
doll, but my little eight-year-old fingers stopped just before reaching her
artificial ones. She was untouchable.
-
Nothing seemed to change over the years—Mom still yelled and my
wishes remained suspended in the air. Days, years of gray unchanging.
A change was needed.
I took the vodka with the intention to fill the hole. The
overbearing emptiness in my heart. It didn’t come from a bad break-up; it
didn’t come from the scarlet D scribbled atop my last Chemistry test. The
emptiness simply was. I ignored it at first, when it had started to stretch the
walls of my atriums in sixth grade. Typically wounds heal themselves; I
thought it would scab over. But at seventeen years old, that the numbness
was still there, festering in my veins. I was tired of just being.
I was tired of Friday nights of wondering why stars are and Sunday nights
of wondering why I am and weekdays of
struggling to breathe.
So one Saturday night I grabbed the old bottle of vodka stored
away with the fine Argentinian wines my dad brought from his last trip, stuffed
the bottle into my backpack, and swung my car key around my forefinger as I
climbed up the stairs from the basement. Nonchalance was something I had
mastered over the years. Years of hiding.
“¿Adónde vas, Marisela?”
My father’s voice sounded from the family room. I was in the kitchen,
staring indecisively at the abyss that is our refrigerator. Maybe some of
the leftover alfajores sitting on the top shelf—buttery cookies with a
nectarous layer of dulce de leche sandwiched in between. Snacks
for afterwards. The tapping of the keyboard of his ancient computer
informed me he was working, and thus he did not care as much as his tone
implied. My mother was out with my two brothers, helping them find new
clothes for the winter. One of them had grown two inches taller since last
year, thanks to puberty, and the other two inches wider, thanks to college
life.
“Fuera." Out. The word itself was liberating.
"Elaine y yo vamos a ver una película en su casa." We
had decided that our cover-up movie would be A Streetcar Named Desire, because
1) Elaine did not read the play, despite the fact that we had a test on it the
coming Monday, and 2) Elaine had a bit of a weird crush on Marlon Brando.
She was convinced that had he lived in our generation, he'd totally
go for Asian-American chicks like her. I had already seen it, and I was
glad that we weren’t actually going to do what we told our parents. Black
and white movies annoyed me. Too much gray. The copy Elaine had borrowed
from the library, however, was going to remain in her car the entire night
because we were going to Cody-the-Quarterback’s down on Anchor Place to
participate in the age-old tradition of celebrating the last-first high school
football game we would ever watch as students with sex, drugs, and alcohol.
The Tuckerton High Sharks were likely to get beached by the Neptune
Pirates on the Jersey Shore around the block from my high school, but at least
it was an excuse for Elaine and me to finally say we had somewhat of the
typical high school experience. My dad would not even care if I told him
I was going to Cody's; he would assume that we were in a group project for Euro
or something. He was so pleased with the fact that I worked so hard to
get fucked every night by my homework. The lack of high school adventures
I’d had did not bother me until after I took my final attempt at the SAT.
Experiences and experimentations were miscarriages I didn’t even try for.
This time, I needed to try. Try to be something.
No cookies, I decided as I closed the door. As I walked past my dad
towards the door to the garage, I hitched my backpack up a little higher,
hoping he couldn’t smell the forty-three percent concentrated booze from the
bottle rolling up and down my back. My parents could only handle a glass
of wine a week between them. Would I be any better?
I shut the door, and the night was mine.
-
Abuela’s doll had black lashes that were curled like in make-up
advertisements, reaching up towards the ceiling in perfect form. Not a
single one was out of place. No mascara needed. Painted eyebrows
sat above them, the shade of the coffee my dad drank that morning. I had
tried a sip, but it was too bitter. He laughed and smiled, thankful that
his eight-year-old hadn’t yet been corrupted by adult drinks. My grandmother
teased him in Spanish that was too quick for me to understand. The tea
kettle stopped screaming and she poured the scalding water into the gourd,
swirling the yerba leaves. Aging spots
filled the crevasses of the wrinkled skin and veins on the back of her careful
hands. The supersaturated liquid was
flecked with the green and brown leaves, like dirt. Mate.
The doll's hair was blonde, like the sun suspended high in the sky
overlooking the park we had gone to earlier that week down the street from the
apartment. I breathed out a stream of air like the Pennsylvanian breeze
that had whipped my hair while racing my brothers across the field. The
plastic strands remained stagnant, twined together in tight coils that might
have tickled her elbows if she could feel. I wondered if she was hollow.
Empty. A plastic shell.
I didn’t drink the mate.
-
The whirring of the engine of my car drowned the whirring of my
mind. My headlights illuminated the road, filling the growing dark with
its intense fluorescence. A buzzing accompanied by a series of whoops
notified me that I had received a text. My keychain spun around the
ignition as I hit it while reaching into my back pocket to retrieve my phone.
The trinket clinked an angry metallic tune as it collided with the
plastic around the ignition. It had been a last-minute purchase from the
department store during the road trip to the funeral in sixth grade. The
white stars were imperceptible dots on the royal blue square, white and red
stripes extending from it to form an American flag. It had been the
Fourth of July. We didn’t get to watch the fireworks that year. Too busy at the Spanish mass. Not true
Americans. God isn’t kind to foreigners.
Where are you?/ Party’s star ed. thought yo were co ming. Elaine had an old phone
because her parents still weren’t too pleased with her borderline Bs barely
tiptoeing over the ninety mark.
No. Gotta study for the hell that is Richter’s class. Sorry.
I dropped the phone into my lap, hands returning to the steering
wheel like anchors. The wheels on the asphalt had murmured to me that
maybe I wasn’t so interested in going to the party. Texting while driving
wasn’t something I condoned, but then again neither was drinking, really, and
while I wasn’t going to get drunk with Elaine, I was going to get drunk.
For a moment, I felt alive. Dangerously alive. Maybe the
scattered puzzle pieces in my body would fit again.
The hidden, abandoned road was still there, nearly overgrown with
greenery. I pulled my sedan under the protection of a willow and got out,
backpack in hand.
Some more whoops and vibrations, but I didn’t pull my phone out
again. Elaine was probably pissed at me for ditching her and our plans,
and I felt a little bad for that, but mostly I felt bad for other things.
Regret for leaving her didn’t wring my throat like the overbearing emptiness.
I wasn’t sure if I hoped that Elaine had gotten wasted already or that
she continued to be the cautious, over-analytic girl that I had been best
friends with for years. We were supposed to experience our first drunken
adventure together, but I’d rather not do it at the mercy of uncouth high
school boys and senseless girls. At the mercy of myself.
My definition of partying that Saturday night became sneaking through
the woods my older brother had taken me to a few years back, a secret passage
to the rough, unused side of the beach. Not so secret, though, since his
best friend, who had learned about it from his cousin, had shown my
brother, but secret enough that I was confident I’d be alone. The sun
sang her last notes against the pink sky fading to dusk ahead of me.
Stars cut into my back with celestial knives, reminding me of how small I
was. Insignificant. I trudged through the rough terrain covered in a
blanket of rocks, despite the protest my flip flops were staging. The
trees were thinning, revealing a large body of water before me. The
beach. I sat down with my back touching one of the trees on the border.
The clear liquid dribbled down my chin as I took
my first swig. Wow. Fire blazed down my throat, its
distinctive warmth resonating in my chilled fingertips. I breathed.
-
Abuela was standing in the doorway. I
didn't realize she was there until my ears picked up on a barely audible creak
of the wooden floor. My foot had fallen asleep while I sat there staring at the
doll for God knows how long: my knees scraped against the floor I got up.
More cuts and bruises to add to the collection of scabs tattooed on my knees,
relics of other childish adventures. Adventures I hadn't necessarily been
allowed to go on. Too many enticing open doors.
The light of the hallway illuminated her smiling
face. The gilded cross necklace on her chest twinkled "¿Te
gusta la muñeca?" You like the doll?
"Sí, abuela. Es muy linda."
Yes, it's very beautiful.
"Es como ti. No parece como ti,
pero ustedes son de gran belleza en diferentes maneras. Pero...tu tienes
vida. Vida es la belleza más grande del mundo. Nunca lo olvides, sí?"
It's like you. It doesn’t look like you, but you both are very
beautiful in different ways. But you have life. Life is the
greatest beauty of the world. Never forget it, okay?
"Claro." Okay.
-
The drink undulated in my stomach like the placid
ocean before me that night. A breeze caressed my skin. Cold.
Like Abuela lying on the snowy white velvet in the mahogany coffin—no,
casket, my mother had corrected me when I asked her if I had to look at Abuela
in there.
I had also asked her why it was so cold in there.
La muerte le gusta el frío, Mari, she had answered in flat voice.
Death likes the cold.
I looked at the body anyway. She was like a
doll.
The bark of the tree was pressing uncomfortably
into my back. A restlessness seized me: I got up. A patch of pink
flowers encircled part of the tree, their delicate petals spread like stars.
I picked six. Six for the years she’d been gone. Six for the
hollowness enduring. The world swam before me as I walked towards the
ocean, my bare feet sighing into the sand. Salt water gave my toes chilly
kisses, then my ankles, then my knees. I looked at the flowers in my
hand. Their beauty. Pale pink petals skimming the rolling indigo
surface. One by one, I let them drop, fragile circles floating beside me.
There they remained for seconds, minutes, hours, maybe. I’m not
sure how long I stood there for.
I woke up back by the tree, curled up in a tight
ball. It was colder, darker than before. Sand clung onto the
moisture drying on my shins as I got up; salt stung my nostrils. When I
stepped out into the sea again, the petals were gone. I couldn’t see the
moon.
The emptiness had returned, but without its vivid
presence. It was not filled, but fading. Evaporating. I walked back
to the car, my feet steady now, but tired.
I could be beautiful like Abuela’s doll, but not
empty, like Abuela’s casket now, save for her clothes and bones. Perhaps
filled with some emptiness, yes, but with appreciation as well.
Acceptance. Acceptance of stars and hollowness.
I swore
to the stars sprinkled on my smudged-up windshield that I would leave them be.
Maybe let myself be, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment