LCP//MARILYN MONROE & THE POETHICAL WAGER

Colleen Iverson

Long Critical Paper:

Marilyn Monroe & The Poetical Wager

[1]

Marilyn Monroe was an American movie actress. She was born in 1926 and died in 1962. She is most famous in popular culture for her roles as a dumb, blonde sex-symbol. She is also famous for her death at thirty-six, from an overdose of barbiturates, which was determined at the autopsy to be a “probable suicide,” but has in the years since come into question as a possible murder. (That her death may have been an accidental overdose is rarely considered, but never ruled out.)

Marilyn's story has been told many times.

In The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Churchwell studies the various divergent tellings of Marilyn's life and death. Of them, she says: “it is not just the case that biographies of Marilyn Monroe disagree about the answers to charged questions about her life, her character and her experiences. They often do not acknowledge that other versions even exist. Each of Marilyn's many lives asserts as proven fact what another calls a total lie, and presents conjecture as if it were certain knowledge.” (Churchwell, p. 3). She says: “uncertainty is the story of Marilyn's biographical life.” (Churchwell, p. 3).

Uncertainties in Marilyn's story include: her birth name; her birth father; how many foster homes she lived in; whether she was sexually abused/raped as a child (and if so, by whom, and how many times); whether her mother tried to kill her; whether her grandmother tried to kill her; whether she liked sex more than most people, or less; whether or not she had an abortion/s (and if so how many); whether she had lesbian affairs (and if so, how many); whether she attempted suicide early on in her career (and how many times); whether her walk was “natural” or designed; whether she was oppressed by Hollywood or using Hollywood—whether she was a calculating monster/hooker/seductress/bitch or innocent, angelic and exploited; whether she was the most beautiful woman in America or fat and plain and deceiving us; whether she was stupid or brilliant; how many times she was married; how many Kennedy’s was she sleeping with; was she crazy; was she murdered, did she kill herself or was it an accident?

In her book American Monroe, S. Page Baty studies Marilyn's use(s) as a symbol in popular culture. She writes: “Marilyn is a wonderful subject for American cultural memory. Her many contradictory qualities and histories allow for competing creations of the “real” Marilyn Monroe. And remembering is about creating what is real; it is about finding stories to tell ourselves about the past and the present. These stories help us...to know who we are.” (Baty, p. 31).

“Marilyn has gone from sex symbol to symbol of mourning, from a promise of the liberation of sex to a cautionary tale about the dangers of loneliness and spinsterhood...it is the writing and rewriting of her life story that has achieved this transformation.” (Churchwell, p. 4)).

The ambiguities of Marilyn's life and self/persona make her both difficult and fascinating to try to “read.” Because they don't allow her to be read, but the attempt to do so shows us ourselves and our world. In looking at how we imagine her, as individuals as well as as a culture, we can see our own fears and desires. Baty writes: “rememberings of Monroe express an irresolvable tension between the longing for a unitary and stable subject and the impossibilities of same.”

Marilyn once said that “the questions often tell more about the interviewer than the answers do about me.”

Both Churchwell and Baty consider how we tend to literalize the metaphors that we make up to discuss or “explain” Marilyn. Most of her biographers write about her as if she were two separate people inside one body: Norma Jeane versus Marilyn, the real girl at war with the artificial. Often this split is seen as occurring, literally, “irrevocably,” when she bleaches her hair and/or changes her name.

As a culture (as represented by her biographers), a major source of our continued fascination with her seems to come out of this seeming division of inside and outside. Both Baty and Churchwell write that a major theme throughout her biographies is the uncovering of what is real. The promise of finally revealing to us the real woman behind the legend (Baty, p.93; Churchwell, p. 10), or the promise of revealing what really happened to her—a literal murder mystery. (Baty, 115-142).

Churchwell notes how each biographer lets us in on the “great secret” that Marilyn wasn't really beautiful (Churchwell, p. 185). She writes that “the premise that Marilyn Monroe is made up enables biographers to expose the 'shocking revelations' of the reality behind the facade, a reality that they give different names: Norma Jeane, pain, loss, sex, the naked body.” (182)

Likewise, Baty says “desire to turn history into a show is played out in cartographic rememberings as the imposition of narrative plot on the historical real...telling truth means exposing lies—in essence, retelling lies. 'The desire for a show' is consummated in the production of the historical as if it were always ready to be exposed as the product of plot, or fiction.” (124)

She says, “cartographic rememberings seek to recover the real by revealing and fixing its form. Yet this 'real' remembering ultimately leaves the citizen on the terrain of the map itself, a map that has confused the literal and representational, a map that has reworked the very relation between the two.” (125)

We seem to try to freeze her, flatten her, turn her into a metaphor, or a lesson, or simplify and define her into a closed system of symbols.

Baty writes: “We make up stories about what has happened even as it is happening, hoping to somehow “fix” the object of narrative with iconic nomenclature capable of reproducing—and “taming”—reality. Is there an impulse in this remembering of Marilyn not simply to tame her cultural power but to further domesticate and quantify death, to somehow resolve death and its object...?” (Baty, p.176)

Marilyn brings the idea of identity into question by pushing at its limits in multiple directions. Churchwell notices that even as we divide her into real and fake, we say she is both real and fake; she is considered both ultimately, overly natural (an oversexed phenomenon, with no proper limits) and ultimately, overly constructed. “Marilyn Monroe may be a role, but Marilyn Monroe can't play it, she can only be herself. Everyone was always looking for the real Marilyn while insisting that she only did what came naturally.” (Churchwell, p. 43). She both creates and is fully believed to be the constructed identity “Marilyn Monroe,” inseparable from the roles she plays, and is completely disbelieved, so obvious is it that it is a role. Yet Marilyn-the-woman (more complex, intelligent, nuanced, “real”) is still a sex symbol (is the actual sex symbol?). In Conversations with Marilyn, Weatherby writes, “she entered the dimly lit hotel bar in a girlish flutter that suggested shyness at meeting a stranger—was this a role she had given herself?” (Weatherby, p. 55).

Baty says Marilyn is a “beautiful grotesque...she constantly risks making a spectacle of herself even while she functions as the image of female beauty.” (150).

She explains that “'Being a spectacle' is for women associated with boundary-crossing, vulnerability, potential humiliation, and public shame...'the grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world'” (150).

I am endlessly intrigued by the many dimensions of Marilyn Monroe.

[2]

Joan Retallack is an American poet and critic. She was born in 1941, and is still living. She is the Director of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, where she has been the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities.

In her book The Poethical Wager (2003) she discusses her ideas of art, and art/the artists relationship/responsibility to the world. She talks about what she calls “the swerve,” the “sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics” (I). Basically, things that give us new and broader perspectives on reality.

This book looks at the idea of art, and specifically the essay, as a form of life. She likes John Cage's idea that art should not create an image of nature/the world/life, but should imitate its patterns (p.?). She talks about writing as a form of engagement, preferring the idea of writer and reader as “conspirators,” rather than that of the reader being “inspired” by the writer. The former is a breathing together, making the reader an active participant in the understanding of/attempt at understanding the world. The latter has the writer breathing life into the reader, who passively receives the writer's vision of the world.

Retallack talks about the desire to simplify things, and freeze things, as a biologically meaningful response to change, which equals danger (98). This relates to our desire to form the world into stories: “a major source of the practice of storytelling seems to come from the need, first as children, to hear stories that contain the terror, that seduce one in as night tourist only to skillfully deliver us into the daylight on the other side of the door clearly marked THE END...There is as well the crucial impulse to tell one's own story, to exercise for oneself the power to fashion a version of reality that can be exited intact” (Retallack, p. 84). She writes that “everything in mass culture is designed to deliver space-time in a series of shiny freeze-frames, each with its built-in strategy of persuasion. One writes poetry and essays to stay warm and alive and realistically messy.” (5)

[here I need to talk about fairy-tales, and division, and the experimental feminine]

She says that “certain kinds of art help us to live with nourishment and pleasure in the real world, connect us with it in a way that nothing else can, by shifting our attention to formally framed material conditions in ingenious ways” (Retallack, p. 25). She likes Cage's idea, also, that the job of art is to open up perspective. To act as the swerve, in a way. That what matters is the manner of attending, not so much what is attended to.

She distinguishes between what she calls “complex realism,” and styles that create an image of the real. Complex realism is a form that lets in the chaos and complexity and dynamism of life (and so is an engagement with the reader), whereas static realism creates a closed system which convinces readers of it's ultimate truth and reality.

She says that “poetics without an h has primarily to do with questions of style. Style is the manner in which your experience has understood, assimilated, imprinted you...At this point, preswerve, but feeling a distinct surge of power, you exclaim, Ah, I’ve found myself as a writer! Actually your poetics has you in its grip.” (38) She talks about poethics is a means of exploration of “complex life on earth...an exploration of art's significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world” (26). Poethics is an interruption of poetics: “your poethical work begins when you no longer wish to shape materials...into legitimate progeny of your own poetics. When you are released from filling in the delimiting forms” (38).

There is the matter of what art does (or should—or can—do), and there is the matter of how art is (or should, or can) be created. She talks about how, in such a complex world as this, we have no real way of calculating, or controlling, the outcomes of anything. She has a theory that this incalculability means that we can only act based on our ethics. (This is the wager:“When you make a wager you stake something that matters on an uncertain outcome” (21)). For example, if ones ethics call for a non-violent world, one would act peacefully, rather than attempting to create peace by way of violence. She talks about wading out into the mess of ones life, and engaging with it.

Writing can not only be the swerve, but can experience the swerve itself. The writer isn't so much creating (as in designing), as she is exploring the world. She discusses Gertrude Stein, in terms of her writing as being an engagement with the present moment (which she calls the contemporary). One of my favorite essays (The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein) is about Stein's attempt (and failure) to write a traditional, best-seller type murder-mystery. Stein, she says, was too much engaged with the contemporary to allow her to write a normal sentence, let alone a plot.

She talks about Stein's writing as a coastline, an encounter with a border-place, where forms of life meet. She talks about how a coastline can be experienced, but not distilled. “As location of conventional murder-mystery, where all must resolve into a single gory punctum—vanishing point of “the body”—Stein's coastal prose is entirely revelatory in its surprising variations. The more you can't find what you're looking for, the more you're learning about the language coastline itself” (Retallack, p. 155).

[3]

My own mess:

Going back and forth between reading Retallack and reading about Marilyn, certain elements jump out at me as similar, or related, or at least relevant to each other. I notice the ways in which I engage with the Marilyn or how she functions for me as (if I’m understanding Retallack) poethical.

What I initially recognized was a feeling; the feeling I get reading about and thinking about and watching Marilyn is an open, spinning feeling. It's a feeling that in my peripheral vision some wall just cracked open. It's a feeling that life is different than I think it is. She feels wildly magical and deeply grounded. This feeling has always seemed somewhat (very) ridiculous to me (she's dead, a movie star, I never knew her, so many people are obsessed with her, and it's just weird), and has made/makes me nervous because it's something I can't explain, not even to myself.

Marilyn is difficult to write about for the same reasons that she's fascinating. My first idea in writing about her was that I wanted to write about my Marilyn, the one that I imagine, that I have been in a sort of conversation with, or used as a means of conversing with myself, or with the world, for going on sixteen years. The issue I keep running into is the way everything bleeds together.

Retallack talks about the difference between fantasy and imagination, imagination being a playful engagement with reality while fantasy is traveling away from reality, further into ones head (pp). I realize that I engage with Marilyn in both of these ways at different times (and maybe even at the same time). She functions both as escape from the world (when I try to become her) and a way deeper into the world, as someone whose consciousness/perspective/self makes me think about/look at/experience the world differently.

But these two ways aren't even as separate as I’m making them. The mysterious, dynamic Marilyn Monroe that fascinates me, that opens up the world, is the same one I try to escape into. I don't particularly care about the official Hollywood image of her as glamourized, dumb-blonde sex-symbol, except as it relates to the image of the abused/sad/trying-to-be-happy/determined/ lost/confused/brilliant/etc woman “underneath.” Over the years I’ve realized that what I want to retreat into isn't a static image but a sort of sensation, an internal way of moving, an approach to the world. The same sensation/sense of movement/approach to the world that makes my head spin, makes things seem like they're opening up. The feeling I want to retreat into is the feeling of being terrifyingly, spinningly, heart-throbbingly present.

Retallack's discussion of the ways and reasons we seek narrative feels similar to Baty's discussion of how we use Marilyn as a cultural figure, to define ourselves, and create solid cultural ground. It feels relevant to Churchwell's discussion of the many versions of Marilyn's life, and her biographers seeming inability or unwillingness to accept the unknowns and ambiguities.

Likewise, Churchwell's noticing of Marilyn's biographers' tendencies to literalize the metaphors that they themselves create to discuss her, interests me in terms of Retallack's writing about Freudian/fairytale logic. The desire/attempt to create a closed system so as to pin down meaning. The way that that system inevitably becomes useless because, in the fixing of meaning, it loses connection to reality.

The metaphors we tend to employ—specifically, the literalization of the split of Norma Jeane/Marilyn, inside/outside, real/fake, angel/monster, etc., also seems relevant in terms of Retallack's discussion of the trouble we have seeing both the inside and outside of a structure at once, or the masculine and the feminine logics as part of one thing.

All of the ambiguities of Marilyn's life and personality create the effect of complex realism. Or at least complexity through which we have to deal with many uncomfortable things about life. I want to say that her life imitates “not nature, but 'her manner of operation'” (Retallack, p. 189) but I don't have legitimate grounds for this, not knowing exactly how nature operates.

The story of the search for the “real” Marilyn, or what “really” happened to her, or what was the magic, or magic combination of elements, that made/makes her so endlessly appealing to so many people, feels like Retallack's discussion of Gertrude Stein. Her attempts to write a traditional murder mystery, or the experience of/attempt at reading Stein, or the attempt to distill a coastline. Marilyn, and her life, give the impression, the seduction of a murder-mystery, story with a body as a vanishing point/answer to something. But the closer you look the more problematic it becomes. The plot of Marilyn's life, and the “problem” of Marilyn herself, is conceived and solved again and again yet nothing is solved at all:

“There's the particular way the form of any coastline structures an exploration of it. The reader can tramp up and down the shifting coastline of Stein's words looking for the lost object (the victim, the culprit) in vain, day after day not finding it, finding instead a strange constancy in the scene of the absent object, the coastline itself as a pattern-bounded indeterminacy in flux. Even if something as reassuring as a body were to turn up with an explanation tagged to its toe, it could hardly become the focal point of this tidal windblown beach or page.” (Retallack, p. 154)

[4]

My bigger mess:

I began working on this paper with the intention to write about my Marilyn. The idea, or feeling, or image, or mystery, that emerged from the combination of her photographs and films, the books I’ve read about her, that I’ve been in “conversation” with for the last sixteen years.

While reading The Poethical Wager, I kept seeing ways in which this Marilyn of mine seemed to act in her life as Retallack says we should write. She not only functions as a piece of writing, she acts as the writer engaged in the poethical problem; it seems to me as if the world, or her life, functioned as an essay to Marilyn. And in engaging in the conversation, Marilyn functioned as an essay to the world around her. Her early death makes her literally feel like an unfinished thought. Like she was a puzzle that was in the midst of unfolding. “It was like half understanding a sphinx, half solving a complex problem.” (Weatherby, p. 98)

In life we always, inescapably wagers on our ethics, whether we realize it or not. Because we literally, inherently, always live what we believe. Each of us has an uncertain quantity of time here. We necessarily spend this time in one way or another. When you come into this world you come into the game, whether you realize it or not, whether you want to or not. And the stakes are always high because the stakes are life. Retallack says: “to some degree or another this is the work of living in our world that we are all doing whether we like it or not.” (Retallack, p. 29)

I am taking Marilyn's whole life to be the wager. Her movies, and the “Marilyn Monroe” image, are elements of her life. Means of public participation. But I think that the nuances of what is known of her private life are also important. They give context to, and so help us understand the meaning of, her public presentations. They contrast each other creating interesting tensions. I don't know whether Marilyn aimed to enter into a public conversation or was simply having a conversation with herself, negotiating her life. The conversation became public regardless because in her negotiations she became a public figure.

Here I’m writing about my own idea of Marilyn. In my version, Marilyn is aware that she is here, in the game, the stakes as high as they can get. In The Misfits Miller writes that Roslyn (based on Marilyn) has got the gift of life, while the rest of us are just looking for somewhere to hide and watch it go by.

Where Stein's ethics precluded the possibility of not living in the contemporary moment (and therefore made it impossible for her to write a “story”), I think that Marilyn's ethics—her need to “find herself,” whatever the cost—preclude the possibility of residing in image, of buying into false comfort.

She lived her life based on wagers rather than on an attempt to control outcomes. The place her actions seem to point to are into an unknown future, into an attempt at something that was not fame or money or security. She took huge risks for what she believed in. There were many instances in which she chose the truly terrible odds of the gamble rather than the sure thing. The most obvious example was her decision to stand by Arthur Miller during the HUAC trials. As one Hollywood reporter wrote: “One way for an actress to get herself disliked in America at this moment is for her to have any connection with communism—even some remote “guilt by association” is enough. Women's clubs and ex-service organizations would boycott her films. Studios suddenly discover they have no parts for her...It could happen to Marilyn Monroe” (McCann, p.103)

And there are other examples: When she was only twenty she divorced her husband in favor of her dream of being a star. She refused to marry Johnny Hyde though he was kind, wealthy, in love with her, and dying, because though she loved him she wasn't in love with him. When she became famous for being a sex symbol she risked her career by fighting being typecast.

She didn't seem willing, or maybe wasn't able, to “settle.” Retallack says “I suspect it is precisely Becket's refusal to be consoled (a rejection of sentimentality) that allowed him to “go on.” I suspect the same of Marilyn. Except perhaps it was a rejection of easy answers; and maybe it was less a rejection than an inability to accept them, not because she didn't want to (it seems that she may have wanted to, from her pattern of attaching herself fully, if temporarily, to various men (Strasberg, Miller, Kennedy) and their ideologies), but because they wouldn't work.

This is, obviously, different from joyful play/engagement. But it is real engagement, which I think is important. It's the inability/unwillingness to accept a fantasy. Marilyn said “I'd rather be unhappy alone than unhappy with somebody—so far.” Which to me has always meant that she would rather face her loneliness than try to mask it (so far). That “so far” is important. It's a recognition of the choice to face the real as a moment-to-moment decision; a recognition of the real possibility that she might not always think the real is worth it; a recognition of herself as a changeable being, always working with the context of the moment, constantly engaged, not making up a way to survive and hanging onto that. Not deciding she knows what the world is and closing the case.

She seemed to be aware of the beauty within the pain, the need to live joyfully even while in some kind of horrendous pain. Because of how hard she worked for some indefinable thing, which may not even exist. She found joy, delight, humor, even within pain, uncertainty, and doubt. She said: “She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad.”

In her work she was playful. She saw the humor in her image, the ridiculousness, even as she believed in it, and believed she needed it, and lived in it. I think that the combination of these things is important because the living in it keeps it from just being mocking, makes her take the problem seriously, while the ability to see how ridiculous it is opens up the conversation. Retallack says that “great art...reveals what ideology conceals” (Retallack, p. 54). Marilyn's performance of gender pushes at limits. Her performance of identity is taken to an extreme that exposes itself as construct.

The blonde bombshell role, the dumb-blonde-gold-digger-seductress. The static image. The idea of femininity, of beautiful woman. The creation of solid, static, image-centric identity—the “actors” produced by Hollywood who get “typed.” All of this is her “poesis”; and my Marilyn is poethical.

As a woman who played a dumb-blonde-bombshell-gold-digger-seductress but also showed us a confused, sad, sometimes unbearably sweet, sometimes unlikeable and cruel, insecure, terrified, immodest, vain, (etc) real human being, “warts and all.” As a woman who walked at the border of the beautiful and the grotesque. As a woman who refused easier, often offered versions of success because she wanted to really act. I take this as the poethics, the breaking out of what is easy, what is successful and acceptable. How she humanized a stereotype. How she worked with the reality of the living within the image.

Hollywood is (obviously) the deliverer of “shiny freeze-frames,” of images intended to convince its viewers of a specific world, and as an attempt to control the conversation (or keep there from being a conversation). I see Marilyn as making an attempt, a brave attempt within the conditions of her life (no matter how it may (or may not) have failed), to engage honestly with her life. I see her as staking everything on this attempt—she risked, again and again, the career, which she had worked so hard for (and risked everything for in its time). She said: “I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I’m an actress.” (McCann, p. 85)

Marilyn said, “I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.”

In discussing the biographers' conclusions that Marilyn wasn't really beautiful, Churchwell notices the emphasis on what she terms a nearly Nietzschean will to beauty (Churchwell, p. 186). I find it interesting because, to me, her beauty seems both magical and provisional. Most pretty girls spark in me a reaction of jealousy/ loathing/despair. I’m thinking again of Retallack's statement: “Difficult texts, those that are difficult because of the proportions of what the writer is attempting to take on, have this quality of appealing vulnerability. Rather than pushing the reader away, they suggest collaboration” (Retallack, p. 49-50). I’m thinking of how Marilyn's body itself makes her seem vulnerable. While most physical beauty seems to be used as a shield or a weapon, Marilyn's almost seems to do the opposite. I wonder if her beauty itself is made in collaboration with her audience.

In some ways I feel as if it's cheating. Retallack is talking about writing as a form of life, and here I am, talking about a person's life as writing-that-is-a-form-of-life. Of course Marilyn's life acts as a life. It is one. It can't really avoid it.

I think that what is striking about Marilyn Monroe, and her life, in particular, is the degree of things. We all engage with the problems of image (both desiring to make it complete and impenetrable, and desiring to be free of it). We all experience the problem of memory and its confusions. Of the difficulties of negotiating the chaos without giving way. Of being happy in the midst of our sadness. Of the feminine and (or versus) the masculine. Of identity/lack thereof. Of mortality. Of being alone. Of how to live. The conditions of Marilyn's struggles went to the extremes of our designated opposites. And she was very famous.

And Marilyn is problematic in terms of my theory, too. There are all sorts of things I’m leaving out. Her internal inconsistencies, such that she loved animals and hated violence, yet wore fur and ate meat. Her rigid defense of whatever ideology she believed in at the moment—her tendency to seek ideology. And sometimes she says things that make me flinch, such as when she says that “the star system” is the same as the slave system. Which I feel shows an absolute lack of perspective. Though, it's so hard to say; the quote could be incomplete.

semester3annotation4

ANNO 4:

THE PALE KING

BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

*This annotation is a bit of a disaster because I’m so overwhelmed trying to write it. Because the subject is so intense and complex.

I usually think that the separation of form and content is so artificial that it's a stupid conversation. Until it comes to David Foster Wallace.

I always, passionately, completely love his content. In The Pale King more so than ever. This sort of inherent pain at/inherent problem with being alive. That we want to be constantly engaged with things, have all the cracks in our collective fantasy (of security, competence, narrative) filled in, so that we don't have to face ourselves. Being aware that we are alive, being unaware that we are alive (for example, Obetrolling, ch 22). Humility. Engagement. Wanting to be completely self-possessed (ie self-aware, self-sufficient. Not so needy and interconnected. Rather separate from, and above, and in some way in charge of. And yet the impossibility of this. Being so scared of being alive and not knowing what that means and so creating narratives, cultural and personal, that fill in or disregard or distract us from these questions (ie advertizing. p.145). How weird, surreal things get when reality and narrative diverge too far. One of my favorite parts of the book is the conversation in ch. 19 in which they discuss the future, and advertising, and basically how the perceived/agreed upon meaning of everything will have diverged so far from the actual meaning, that people will be so wrapped up in their fantasy reality which has this really complex relationship to actual reality, not exactly opposite but not lined up with it either. It's like the part in Infinite Jest where Hal et al are watching the younger kids play Eschaton, and there becomes the split between what's happening on the “map” versus what the kids are actually doing. It like split my brain open. It makes me want to laugh and scream. (Hysterically, both).

But his form often makes me nauseous. Like there's all these extra words. Like he's structuring his sentences just to give me a pounding headache. Like he won't stop making the same goddamn point over and over and over with only the slightest variation. Like there's all this excessive, irrelevant information crowding in, cluttering my head. Like his sentences are too long and full and make me sea-sick. Like he writes all this shit that seems like it should be funny but just feels sad.

I (of course) like his lack of cohesive narrative. The way all these instances sort of draw together into a certain question/set of questions/feeling of questions, draw me deeper into the questions but not really to a conclusion. I’ve always felt that a lot of his writing is based on ideas he has about the world, about what writing should do. Like that we impose plot (order, coherence) on the world for our own sakes, as a means of trying to understand; and that writing should engage readers, should help break open the narrative and the coherence, bring us into the questions, and into our lives. My theory is that that's why he likes to end things mid sentence. Or start leading us into plots only to drop them, unconcluded. As if to show us our desire for that to be the point, but disallow that from being the point. And all the while he has his real narrative which has nothing to do, really, with specific individuals and events, but with ideas, questions, fundamental problems of being alive and aware that you're alive.

I like how he can find epic dilemmas mirrored (or, rather, as fractals) in things like chiropracty, and a day at the IRS (which I think is kind of the point of the book).

I have somewhat of a problem with his writing (his fiction) because it feels overly thought out. As if he sees these things, has these ideas, sketches out a way to show them, and then fills it in with specific details, fills it in with his totally brilliant intellectual understanding of writing. But rarely do I feel he believes it. His characters and stories usually seem more like examples of something than like actual living, breathing, unpredictable organic structures. (Though they have all the qualities of organic structures, since he knows that they ought to.) They sort of feel like somebody's really advanced robot that they've plugged their entire brain into, that emulates human thought patterns and emotions in every possible way, but doesn't have the spark of consciousness. Reading him, I long for his surrender. Like he's so, so smart, but he could really find something if he'd let go of needing to understand it all.

The Pale King is fascinating because in it I’m pretty sure he realizes all this. Realizes that his complete understanding of everything doesn't get him in. All my notes up until close to the end were things like: he doesn't seem to be able to trust that we readers can/will understand what he's saying, and so he over-explains; and: his nervous need to be totally self-aware sort of kills. But I think this need is also important because it's true—a real feeling of need—for him and for a lot of us. But with this too I feel like he keeps himself at a distance, is too self-aware of the need to be self-aware, if that makes any sense. And conversely I think it keeps him from being able to move outside of it, see outside of it. If that makes any sense. These are all just feelings I’m working with, trying to figure, can't quite. That to actually write the need for control/understanding, he has to let go of that need to some degree) were in fact the experience he was trying to convey.

And then all the dialogue at the end of the book basically shows that he's been doing this on purpose. I mean, it talks about all of this as the issues/difficulties of living. (So I assume that it was on purpose throughout the book.) I’m putting examples at the end so that you don't have to read them if you don't want, because I know this paper is way too long.*

The really fascinating, crazy making thing about this book is: he seems to be talking about dissociation, intellectualization, and trying to show it via dissociation and intellectualization. Which is trippy, but I don't know how effective. Because though it's telling me all about this experience of being unable to get inside of an experience, it doesn't actually embody that for me, doesn't take me inside. (Though I go back and forth. Because he does give me the same feeling that my own brain gives me when it starts to do this, when it gets locked out of life—this sort of spinning, nearly suicidal nausea. Does that make it embodiment? And why do I think this is always fiction's job, to embody? And do I just dislike the writing because it makes me feel sick rather than sustained? Is it necessary for writing to make the reader feel good? Usually I’m nervous about writing/anything that makes me feel good, nervous that it's seducing me and tricking me.)

The other thing that fascinates me about this book is that where it resounds for me is in the shift that comes, nearly at the end, when it becomes apparent that the point of the book is all the running around, talking about and around, comprehension and theorizing and being unable to enter.** In a way I feel as though most of the book was in the service of—as set up to—to get the reader primed as it were, for this shift. Like he gets me all spun and tense and dissociated and nauseous and unable to exist in my body, my life, just so I can really feel the quiet of stepping in. And not only that, I feel like the proportions of the balance matter. That there has to be this great thick mass of stuff at the beginning relative to the clarity and precision of the end. This struck me when I read Good Old Neon, as well—that while I pretty much hated most of it, it might be needed, as contrast, or in interaction with, the end. [“This is the sort of shit we waste our lives thinking about.” ← is where it switches in that story.]

I think I like his non-fiction better (essays, but also the parts of this book where he speaks directly, as himself) because he can't help but be embedded. Because he does seem to believe. What I like about all of his work, what I end up reading his fiction, obsessively, for, is as a means of access to him. Because he makes me feel less alone—the things he talked about, the way he approached them, even the conclusions he seemed to come to, make perfect sense to my soul. It makes me feel almost peaceful, and definitely comforted. He is the story I am trying to read, not the stories that he wrote.

The thing that always breaks my heart about his writing is that it feels like he's trying with every bit of him. I feel like he means what he's doing, and saying, and is true in his efforts. With others who seem to be unable to let go of being in charge of/keep saying they're aware of everything I feel like it's petty insecurity (Tao Lin), but with Wallace I feel like its serious, deep, horrifying insecurity. That this is something he's really struggling with. That he's both using his brains against the reader (I mean, playing God, designing and plotting out rather than exploring and conversing) but simultaneously trying to break through that. I have the most total respect for him.***

Reading this book, I kept thinking of that Mary Oliver poem that everyone posts everywhere. Wild Geese. The lines: you do not have to be good./ you do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ you only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves. Like, this is what his writing, or he, needed. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

***I 'm not sure that anything I’m saying here has any merit at all. I’m painfully aware of how fucking smart he was, so much smarter than I can even comprehend. I have considerable doubts that I’m not just missing the point entirely.

**[Because theoretically at this point he does enter. The writing suddenly becomes tighter, is more-embodied-less-described, etc. The really strange part for me is that even while this shift is evident, it feels so perfectly planned that I still don't quite believe it. It still feels like part of an elaborate story-problem.]

*Examples include:

“...believed in the interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as totality—in the universe as an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at it's highest point, an organism which could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe's way of being aware of and thus 'accessible [to]' itself.” (403-4)

“'They thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit.' Meredith Rand says. 'You only stop if you stop.'” (486)

“'Certain parts you tend to repeat , or say over and over again only in a slightly different way. These parts add no new information, so these parts require more work to pay attention to...in those parts where you do repeat the same essential point or information in a slightly different way, the underlying motive, which I get the feeling is concern that what you're imparting might be unclear or uninteresting and must be recast and resaid in many different ways to assure yourself that your listener really understands you—this is interesting, and somewhat emotional, and it coheres in an interesting way with the surface subject of what Ed, in the story you're telling, is teaching you, and so in that respect even the repetitive or redundant elements compel interest and require little conscious effort to pay attention to, at least so far as I’m concerned.'” (501/2)

love

i should be doing homework.  i might be doing whatever i can to avoid dealing with myself.  i can't stop cleaning/organizing.  i even painted my nails, and i NEVER paint my nails.

but also trying to face myself.  sit with all the uncomfortable feelings.  i've been hating myself so much lately, and , as usual, been so worried about what people think of me.  i hate that i'm so bitterly jealous of other people--anyone who's prettier, anyone who people like more.  but i'm also trying to find a way to understand that all that jealousy comes of feeling that i lack those things, i'm trying to have empathy for myself instead of hating/yelling at myself for being bitter and jealous.  i'm trying not to do things to reassure myself that people like me/care about me, but try to find a way to like and care about myself.  it's really hard.  right now it involves a lot of tea and letting myself cry.  trying to find some sort of sturdy center, of what really matters, what i'm doing in this world. 

i think what really matters is compassion, and the work of compassion. 

also, my relationship is just breaking my heart.  so sad, my whole body hurts. 

before i start my homework this morning:

i got jspahr's new book in the mail this morning.  god i adore her.  i wish i could tell her how awesome i think she is, without seeming like a creeper.  *sigh.*

i'm at b&b.  which i kind of loathe, but is the best place to study.

i'm reading The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world, which i think should be required reading for every single person ever born.  it is fantastic.  i want to talk about it in detail, but there's too much and i'm too inarticulate this morning (/always) and i wouldn't do it any justice.  but it completely shifts my most basic understanding, of everything.  which is painful.  but also awesome.  when i finish my annotation, i'll post it here--unless it's just awful.

the part i'm reading right now is all about the old testament, which of course i find fascinating.

good morning orphansparrow!  good morning I AM!

i love that we all write blogs and read each others blogs, it makes me so happy.  it's kind of like letters.  i love you guys!

added to my list of authors:  anne carson, julie carr (did i say her, before?), bhanu kapil.  and i absolutely cannot get jenny boully out of my head, i don't know why.  i'm totally in love.  one of the blurbs i read about her was something like, "it's so nice to read someone who believes so fully in love"  [i'm paraphrasing terribly, but that's the general idea]  and there is something about her that seems to, if not believe in love, at least let herself fall in love, and fall in love with falling in love.  i love it because she doesn't seem to have all the bitter edges of holding back out of fear, out of expecting to be broken hearted, and she seems to be fully in the broken heartedness when it comes, but still not bitter, and still somehow in love.  it seems so unabashed.  and like, she's not trying to be smarter than the experience.  [sorry, this is how inarticulate i am!]

okay, i'm going to go read now.

love!  =^^=

writers i am in love with [a very partial list]

jenny boully
selah saterstrom
maggie nelson
juliana spahr
danielle dutton

i'm fucking tired.

i'm fucking tired.

"stories"

1

Her favorite part is in JJ's car at three in the morning on the freeway headed North. They’ve got the bass so loud her hands have gone numb. God knows what they've taken and they're going too fast. JJ says: If you puke in my car I’ll kill you. She's plastered to the seat, watching the needle pass 90. thinks: We could totally die. They're speeding on the overpass—the lights of the city blurring—trucks honking—bass throbbing through her body and: God, we might really fucking die.

The stars look like lemons. The buildings are invisible. She's waiting for the sirens. She's waiting for the impact, then the air. So she can think: Oh, well.

2

It would be better if I was thirty pounds thinner and had cheekbones like Justine. The girl is climbing all over the room. It's here somewhere, she says. She keeps coughing. Kye's eyes look black, jaw tense. His hands move like wings. Do you remember, he says to her. I glance away.

I go upstairs. I try to keep level with the top stair which means I get shorter and shorter. Finally I am crouched but my head is taller than the step. I should squish it. When people go by I close my eyes so they can't see me. To get to the next flight I have to lay on my stomach and slide. Realize I'm dying, but don't mind. I get to the blue couch.

I lay with my legs hanging over the end of the blue couch and stare at the ceiling. The light flickers. I kick my feet on the edge of the blue couch in rhythm with the flickering, on the off -beat, trying to guess when it will do its hop-skip, its fancy step. I'm always just behind.

3

Candy asks if I want to go to Church with her and I say Sure, because I'm bored, and also to piss off my mom. She's Wiccan. She waters her plants with menstrual blood and says that Christianity is oppressive. So I say OK to Candy, go to Church. We sit in back so they won't notice when we fall asleep, but I don't fall asleep. I sit on that bench and listen. Then I decide to convert.

Candy's preacher is fine about it and gives me a white Bible with gold letters and asks me Do I take Jesus in my heart? And I say Yessir. I don't mean it, but who cares. I know Candy doesn't have Jesus in her heart. She tells me she doesn't even think she has a heart cuz she never feels bad about anything. I tell her Me Neither, but it's a lie. I feel bad about everything.

I go every Sunday now. There are so many people in that Church that they have two TVs playing a video of the preacher while he's preaching, and Candy says it also plays on channel 8 so people who can't get to Church won't go to Hell. She says her Dad takes the portable TV to the bathroom and watches while he takes a dump and shaves. I like the TVs. They're pretty funny.

After Church me and Candy smoke roaches and listen to Blondie. She tells I'm pretty but too fat to be a star.

4

I'd swim at my grandma's house. On the island. I hated it. The sea smelled like death and swimming made me angry. I'd do laps to the buoy and back. Rickie'd sit on the beach and throw rocks whenever I was within range.

In Girl Scouts they warned us that salt water could kill if you swallowed. I'd lift my head in time with my strokes, limbs beating the surface, gulping. Jaws grinding sand.

They'd say I had gills, that I belonged to the sea. Skin raw, chest tight, jaw sore. Seaweed in my fingers I’d kick to get away.

Belonged to the sea. Gramma spit and said I was an idiot child, daring it.

The water was warm and the sun shone. Rickie ate tuna salad on the sand. He poked sticks in the tide pools. Whenever I came near he stood up and threw rocks. I came right up to shore before I turned back out.

I wrapped both arms around the buoy's red stripe, rested my chin. He stood up and waved, the blue in his shirt the same blue as the sky. I let myself slip so the water was around my chin, and then a little further. I stuck my tongue out to taste the salt. I opened my mouth and let a little in.

5

It was a good time to be alive. Everything smelled like blood and sun and dirt, and when I opened my eyes the sky was blue. There was rubber hitting my face and knees in my back and elbows in my stomach as I gave my body up. Gerald Vladnier stumbling back too fast and Corrie Elise spinning around and then somehow flying, and there was yelling, and impact, and limbs. Alyssa Jenkins could be seen in the background, one hip cocked sideways, pretty hair tossing in the wind. The outfield rushing in.

A stunning curve. Flesh against flesh. Bone behind it.

Gerald spun the ball on his finger and winked. He said something in a low voice, smiling.

Wha'd you say, Gerald Vladnier?

Corrie Elise, aka Barbie, pushed up her sleeves and swayed to center field.

I was thinking how muscle feels when it's working. About the whistles from boys who whistle at girls like Alyssa. About the satisfaction of a body stretched, beaten, sliding into home breathless, satisfied, the pure pleasure of skinned knees.

Hey, Barbie.

Gerald spun the ball in his hands and scowled.

I was waiting for the ball, the impact on the inside curve of my shoe. The moment everything comes together before it flies apart. Knowing how the ball is flying as I'm flying, hitting the pavement, lifting off, rounding the bases, the closest thing to free.

I stepped up to the plate.

Corrie Elise Meyers, nicknamed Barbie for her angel face and giant tits, who'd bat her eyes then punch you in the stomach, had kicked the ball. She was at first when he went down, rounded second as they called foul, never stopped.

Not my fault the idiot didn't move.

At the bars the girls did tricks, ponytails whipping. I was faster than their laughter, faster than their ponytails, faster than the smile Alyssa Jenkins flashed at Aaron Coover that left him staring stupidly as the ball came flying at his face.

They called me Kickball Queen. I could kick a ball clear across the playground to the bars, and round the bases faster than Pandy Fackler could give it up. If there was pro kickball, they'd have scouted me. I was always picked first.

6

He brushed my hair back and called me Baby, and my knees went out from under me, and that was the end. I have a weakness for men with swords, who say from the start that they're going to break my heart, so stay away.

He brushed my hair back and said: Baby, we leave tomorrow; the ocean is a cruel mistress; I'm not the settling kind.

Another, I said to the bartender, fluttering my eyes. I had taken, lately, to drinking whiskey and wearing knee high boots, hoping to turn myself into the kind of woman who doesn't flinch. That's not a problem, I murmured, as he leaned in.

I have a weakness for wide-shouldered men who can lift me with one arm. Six shots later I was upside down and holding his hat, watching the sidewalk lurch by.

Geirmund flapped behind us: He'sgotawhore! He'sgotawhore! He squawked.

Gerroutta here, damn thing. He waved an arm behind him and I tilted madly at the ground.

He had to set me down for three different brawls. I smoked cigarettes and played with my curls. Killthebastard! Geirmund flapped happily. Gottalight? I fed the bird a rum ball and he hopped up on my shoulder. Whosanicegirl. He nipped my ear.

I have a weakness for men twice my size who could kill me with one hand.

Back in his quarters he took off his belt. You want me to choke you? He asked. Call me a wench, I whispered. His skin tasted like salt.

Never fall for a sailor or a soldier, Gramma Silva always said. A pirate is the only way to go.

7

The house has white walls, and if colors can echo they echo white, flat white. I've got the headache again.

We watch action movies in the day, drink as people explode. Chain smoke. My body feels hot and bloated and I'd like to take it off. I look at him. He looks old.

I have this dream. I'm really old, like a hundred years old, and have spun white hair and wise eyes. Or I'm sixteen and the car is flipping over the median. The point is that it's the moment I'm going to die and suddenly I'm so sorry because it's over and I've missed it. I feel like I should apologize. Those nights I wake Bennet up kissing him and hold on. Babe, he says, and pats my back, still mostly sleeping.

Bennet pounds the ball and it bounces hard past me and I dive but miss and go down. The impact is all on my hip. I scream without meaning to then roll towards the ball. The scream isn't a normal scream and it doesn't really come from me. I get the ball and am back in, cherry bomb John and move up a square. John's forehead creases. It's forty degrees out and the leaves are turning. The ball is flying at me but straight at me this time. I swing at it using my arms as a club and slam it hard into Bennet's shoulder. Fuck, he says. He twists sideways, face white. What the fuck. The ball bounces into street. We all stand breathing hard and watching.

What the fuck is up with you.

The court is resonant, a flat sound that keeps going. What the fuck is up with you. My hands prematurely arthritic. In summer the ground absorbs the shock, in winter throws it back. Hey, John says. He says it half soft and half commanding. It fades away but stays, too. Babe, Bennet says. What the fuck is your problem.

The Zombie Apocalypse

He's waiting for the Zombie Apocalypse, he tells her. He can't wait for the Zombie Apocalypse.

I'm gonna get those mothers, take them out.

He shows her his machete, the two headed axe, the silver-bladed sword he keeps on the wall.

Used to be easy. Used to be you could just chop ‘em, whack, whack. Now they run and climb. Some of ‘em can almost think. These days it takes skill.

Baby, he says. And Oh, Lord she starts melting. Can I take you out sometime; buy you a Slurpie, throw bread at the birds.

When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, this place will be like Detroit, without Welfare. Zombies won't be the only problem. People will eat people. You'll have to learn to shoot.

He shows her his gun, thick and mean.

Wow, she thinks: This is better than I thought. She bounces it in her palm. Rubs the metal with her thumb.

Or we can go live in Alaska. We'd be safest in Alaska. But we'd have to go now, get acquainted, before word of the Zombie Apocalypse gets 'round.

She spins the gun on her finger. Ain't they got Vampires in Alaska, she asks.

He eyes her. Who told you that, he asks, looking hard.

Nobody told me. I saw in the theaters. Vampires, they move fast.

9

Both bottles are on the table, and her chin too. She doesn't look good. “Justine.”

I pick one up and shake it. Rattles. Do you have juice? She squints. I go to the fridge and look in.

There's lemon meringue pie and chocolate milk. I bring both to the table. Pick a bottle up and shake it.

“Oh, that kind.”

“Looks like.” We have some more.

Sometimes Lucy's here. “Lucy, go to your room,” I tell her. Her mother is obviously in no condition. “Get off it” she says back, taking a smoke.

Sometimes my legs are gone. I'm at the grocery and I can't remember what I need. Justine, she says, pulling my sleeve, Where's our legs? Our chins dissolve laughing.

Sometimes the door's too small and Lucy grew up too fast. Kate doesn't look so good now. “Slut,” she calls the girl. “Hussy.” Her mouth twists up when she looks at her.

“Used up crack whore,” the daughter says. I throw pie: “Learn some respect.” Kate laughs. Throws pie too.

It gets later, dark, sticky. She picks up a bottle and rattles it. Justine. Where are our fucking legs. I laugh but when I look up she's not laughing. “These aren't real tears.”

9

I think I'd be happier if I was a paper doll. An outline of something, she says.

She leans closer to the mirror to put on lipstick. Her shadow translucent beside her on the floor.

Yeah, I say.

It looks broken, bending onto the dresser at the neck.

How do I look?

Gorgeous. You always look gorgeous.

Good.

I light a cigarette and look away as she pulls off her shirt. She sits on the floor painting her toenails Harlot Red. Her breasts push against her bra as she leans forward.

Or maybe just a story, she says. If I could be a story.

Her shadow is short and close to her, head bent forward. In it her head touches her knee; in life there's distance between them. I shift, look around for mine. The light's getting thinner, fast.

She looks up and smiles.

The way the light hits, she looks about thirty. Then she turns her head and she's sixteen.

My cigarette's gone. I light another.

It gets shorter, comes closer.

I don't know what's happened to the time.

10

Clementine, he called me. He taught me how to handle a gun, how to shoot.

It's damn hard to hit a moving target. If you've ever got to run away, don't run straight.

Be unpredictable.

He spread the map flat and pointed. That's where the winters got cold enough to crack your teeth. That's where they have roaches the size of lemons, where a foot-long centipede once crawled across his wall. There's where they have the Northern Lights, and I only ever seen one thing prettier. When you're older, I'll take you.

He told me about Bear Island, where him and Sean and Shane and Mark went every year in August, got liquored and shot guns in the air. There's no bears on Bear Island, and it ain't an island either. Sometimes in the night I'd wake screaming and he'd come lay with me. He smelled like tobacco and Dial soap.

He kissed my cheek. His face was rough. I touched his closed eyes.

He kept his promises, and when I was older, he did take me. It was all different then, though; mixed up.

I was a wild thing, barely speaking, running hard in the fields. They couldn't keep up. They'd fall off some twenty yards back, hands on knees, breathing. I'd throw myself belly down in the tall grass. Clementine! I'd dig my nails into the dirt, lay my face against it, tasting him.

11

The game was to hold it all day. You couldn't answer the teacher's questions, not even when they asked why you wouldn't speak. Unless you found a way, with your mouth full of water.

We had ballet together, too, and eventually it extended into that.

You were aloud to get fresh water as long as there was no pause between mouthfuls. Sometimes I cheated and just didn't talk. Ballet was hard with your mouth full of water. Sometimes I swallowed it on accident in arabesque.

It really pissed the teachers off, but the thing was to do it anyway. I felt guilty when I cheated, but also proud of my guile.

I wanted to swallow. The desire ballooned the more I thought about it. I got so full of wanting to swallow. The minutes got slower and slower and the water got smaller and thick like spit, and warm. Whenever I gave in, book held up to cover my face, I was flooded with relief and sorrow.

The thing was to do it no matter what, no matter if the teachers got pissed or the kids rolled their eyes and called you stupid. Because it was about withstanding. We were making ourselves strong.

I practiced the balance beam and she did the climbing ropes. Then we switched. Miss Milton approved us to come in at lunch. We did unicycles, tennis. She was the unsurpassed dodgeball champion, a snake, quick and ruthless. Say what you will, I knew her better than anyone. It was all of her right there on that court. She took them out without smiling. She took me out first, left a bruise the size of an orange on my thigh. You can't let me do that, Suzy Q.

It started off blue then turned purple. It spread. Eventually it was a sick mottled brown, reddish brown, burnt sienna, wider than my palm. It stretched, ochre, rust, cerise. Violet at the center. Spots of white like in sausage. Tender for weeks, except tender is the wrong word, it sounds slight and this thing was not slight, when I poked at it I caught my breath, teared. When I dug my fist in deeper everything came clear and sharp and sweet.

Miss Milton dribbled the ball. It echoed. It was an asphalt room and everything echoed. We called it the cage: three cement walls and the fourth chain link, so the only light came through crisscrossed. Everything echoed and echoed and echoed again. She bounced the ball and called our names to assign us to one side or the other. I was always the first one out because I was the one she went for. I liked the cool air, thin light, the shouts and the sound of the ball smacking flesh, concrete, howls of victory, loss. I stand center court, absorbed. When you hit the ground here nothing will soften the blow.

I've read too many stories about sisters in tough circumstances and I'm sick of them; I want us to have been different, but we weren't. There is always the one hurt worse and it's never the one you first think. There's always the one that fights and the one that disappears and whichever one you think is which, you're wrong. One parent is mean and the other distant, or they're both mean and both distant, it's are hard to tell. There is the horror of the house, mentioned. A setting sun. Air, hard and clear. Nights of secrets. They smell of pine and buttercup and grass and you will never love anything as you love this now. I a lust for scrapes and bruises, she for guns.

12

It started in the kitchen. Next to the stove, but not the stove. It moved the wrong direction, along the counter, towards the window. For the first time she understood words like licked and leapt. She let her hands get too close. From outside, when she got there, it was stunning. It was winter, and the cold that crystallizes time, feeling. The fire was a living thing, mythic beast, burning inversion of that world.

The sirens were part of the frozen world. They came from far away, too late. Men in heavy boots ran through the snow toward the creature, its tongues. Their motions were blurred and slowed. They dragged their hoses behind, raised them and let fly. Neighbors poured from their own houses to see. Some carried tea in sturdy thermoses, others cigarettes. An old man sipped from a glass of brandy, squinting. He told the story of another fire, a far off place. A few of the boys hung off to the side with a joint, sweet smoke mixing with the rest. She breathed in.

This was a new world.

She stood, looking at what was left.

13

Everything smells green, then closer to the sea it gets salty. The ground is warm even at night. Year round people sleep in tents on the beach, eat sardines from the can, grow out their hair. Child, they say. It's a new world. You're free.

I can't walk barefoot like the rest, rocks cutting one way and bones the other. The kid shows me a shortcut I can never remember. It doesn't much matter.

Summer smells like lilacs.

The house is set off the road, up a gravel drive, purple with moon. The kid's on the front porch watching his cigarette glow.

Frogs sing and floors creak. At the top of the stairs there's a bathroom. It's next to the woman's room, so I am quiet. I hear when she turns over, says soft things to the husband. Night comes in where the windows won't close.

The kid doesn't sleep either. Our faces are twin vampires at breakfast. I steal his cigarettes, he takes my favorite eyeliner. You look like death I hiss over pancakes.

Sarah knocks one day and asks do I remember her. Her hair soft brown. The way she tucks it from her face makes me want to cry. She wears bangle earrings, no shoes. I try to smile. Disappointed, she goes away.

The bathroom doesn't lock. Sometimes the window frames the moon and I look for his face. Summer lingers, windows kept open, doors unlocked. Lilac. Twenty minutes down the driveway, down the hill to town.

Town is one pizza parlor, one ice cream shop, many bars. The men call me Sister and whistle through broken teeth. Their eyes frighten me but their hands are all the same. I remember this place but I was different.

On my knees in the bathroom. The towels soft. Everyone sleeping, I hear them breath. So dark that dark is a presence. The moon framed by the window and I look for the man in it. Warm air on my skin I close my eyes. The kid smokes, watches the glowing tip trace towards and away.

14

After, we walk, her slower than me. We walk to the corner and she stops and says Which way, and I say Left. She takes a drink and passes it to me and we walk down the block and when we get to the end I say, Which way. She says Down. We notice things—cherry blossom trees, a house with a too-big door. Everything gets worse every minute, especially the sun. We walk down the hill a ways and then stop and sit on somebody's step and pass it back and forth. Shit, she says. Fucking shit.

When we're done she plants it neck down in the grass and lights a cigarette. I take a couple hits. They come by and yell and we give them the finger and Ella says Suck mine.

We walk through houses that are too big and too close and weird trees and people who look wrong. Everything's inside out, I tell her.

She says Yeah. It is.

When I was a kid the monkey trees were surreal and now having been a kid seems surreal. I saw them on the way to the swimming pool, hot days. I'd stop and reach up while the class kept walking. I'd grab a monkey-tail and say, See, you're standing on a side-walk in the summer with a branch in your hand that should in a jungle, feel how it prickles and presses, feel what kind of air there is today.

15

The boy down the street thinks he can walk out his window and walk on air. I like his eyes. Don't look down, he says, but I can't help it. His window looks into the street. My street. Hey! I throw rocks up at him in the night, he serenades me with his stereo. We have a secret together. We lay together in his magic-box room. I am one of the boys, one of the girls. Look, he says. Look how gold the sky.

Maryanne and me go to the water, watch the birds. Feathers slick with oil, sewage, who knows. It breaks her heart. Look, look at us. Pixie Stix, Diet Lipton's. We stop at Roger's Corner Market to see what's going on. Nothing, says Ronnie. He's missing two teeth and puts his cigarette in the gap. You want somethin' to happen? But Ronnie's got nothing and everyone knows it. We keep going.

There's nothing to do between three and nine PM except this: Pixie Stix and Diet Lipton's and seeing what's going on. Sometimes it's Pop Rocks and Diet Coke or Nerds and 7-Up. Sometimes we go and get our makeup done at the Mall. We tell the girls we want to look like Donna Reed. They don't know who that is. Some days they paint us like Lucy Honeychurch, some days Marla Singer. Then we smoke cigarettes at McKee's and the boys tell us we look goofy. But they like it. We get them to take us to the theater and buy Diet sodas and Zots. Maryanne's prettier, so she only gives handjobs.

The movies are my life. The plush dark of the theater and flickering lights and the way it's like diving under, plunging. I go down for so long that when I get back up top it's strange.

All I can see is the side of my nose when I close one eye. The tip of my tongue when I stick it out. The round part of my cheeks when I smile. A peripheral fan of lashes.

My lashes are butterflies, are felt.