Snap, p.7
Snap, page 7
“I have just the thing for you,” Nina assures her, digging around in her frayed net shoulder bag. She pulls out a hairbrush, a paintbrush, a driver’s license, and a green peanut M&M with hairs stuck to it. She offers the peanut to Ida. Ida, who missed breakfast, realizes again how hungry she is. She wants one of those twenty-four-hour breakfast places, the hash browns heaped on a lattice of sizzling bacon. Silver-dollar pancakes on the side. Orange juice, too, and a paper placemat with a map. On the map, one of those arrows pointing to a picture of the restaurant with the words YOU ARE HERE arching above it.
Ida declines the hairy M&M, which Nina tosses out the open door of the truck. They’re parked on their own tent site, in a KOA with sand lots on one end, trailer hookups on the other. The trailers get grass, the tents, sand. Picnic tables all around, and near the office are shower stalls, a game room and a swimming pool with a slide crammed with hopping children. Some of the trailer people have carted their TVs outside and sit under miniature awnings to watch baseball games, forgetting about the ocean, just a half mile away.
At last, Nina shakes the bag exasperatedly and pulls out a disgusting object resembling a hunk of petrified Swiss cheese with a kinky tail. Nina lifts it by the tail, the way you’d handle a dead rat.
“You need to soak it in a little water first,” she tells Ida. “Wow. It’s getting pretty old, I guess. Funky, too.”
“What is it?”
“A sponge. A menstrual sponge. It doesn’t pollute. You just have to rinse it out in between.”
“Well…”
Nina scowls, picking some little balls of fuzz out of the holes in the sponge. Then she blows on the sponge as if extinguishing a flame and tugs experimentally on its tail. “It’s a lot better than those raunchy old rags they have to use in backwards parts of the world. In Canada, for example.” She stares at Ida question-ingly. “You’re from Canada, aren’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, maybe not Canada, then. I don’t know. Parts of Ireland. I read somewhere that in some of those countries you’re not allowed to touch the ground when you’re bleeding. You have to sit in a cage and they bring you your food on a tray. Thank God we re civilized.”
The remainder of the day is lazy, pleasant and uneventful. Because Ida slept through the trip, it is her responsibility to set up the tent. Big Stan, lying flat on his back on a picnic table splattered with bird droppings, reads her the instructions, bellowing commands faster than Ida can think.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “The corner stakes go in first? How? Which ones are the corner stakes? Where are the corners? I can’t find them.”
“It’s upside-down,” Nina yells from the truck, where she is playing with her hair again, clipping the damaged ends with a nail scissor. She’s got her feet on the dashboard, so now and then she clips a toenail, too. “You have to flip it over so the zipper’s on top. No. Like that. No. Yeah. Like that! Yeah! You got it, baby.”
“Insert point A into point B,” Big Stan reads. “Insert point C into notch A while point D is placed into ground.”
Ida shoves the fourth corner stake into the packed sand, giving it all of her ninety-six pounds. When the fourth stake is in place at last, the first stake pops out of the ground like a cork off a champagne bottle. She circles the canvas, pushes the stake back in and counts to ten. On eleven, the third stake pops out.
“Adjust center pole,” says Big Stan. “Attach fly hook A into point C and fly hook B into point D.”
Ida regards the maze of poles, the masses of tangled rope and nylon cord. If she crept off now, she supposes, neither Big Stan nor Nina would notice. They are both self-absorbed as children. Nina, immersed in her grooming, studies each strand of hair before closing the scissor around it. And Big Stan has fallen asleep, suddenly, his mouth open, the instructions sheet fluttering against his chest. A breeze makes its salty way from the ocean and carries the paper away toward the neighboring campsite, where a family spreads their supper on a red-checked cloth on a picnic table. The children drink soda out of tall, chilled bottles. The adults pour their beer into heavy glass mugs. They look peaceful, happy, well fed, civilized. What are they doing here?
Ida thinks of baking and imagines herself making a wedding cake. First she prepares the sponge cake, sprinkling each warm round with a spoonful of orange liqueur, spreading the moistened cakes with buttercream, licking her fingers, licking the spatula, rinsing it under the steaming tap. Her kitchen is cool, remote, a sanctuary. Lined up along the counter is an array of measuring cups of graduated size, their smooth insides dusted with flour, cocoa and confectioner’s sugar. Nearby, the six measuring spoons lie nested in their stack like a child’s toy, simple and pleasing. Soon the oven timer, slipping into its final second, rings, and the pastry layers are done. She removes them from the oven, allows them to cool, then slides them gently onto each iced sponge cake, spreading them, in turn, with chocolate ganache.
Chocolate ganache. Ida has always liked the sound of that, a sort of magic incantation. All it is is a bunch of semisweet chocolate shavings melted in a pot of heavy cream. So deceitfully easy to do. Too, she likes the names they give to different kinds of chocolate. Bitter. Bittersweet. Semisweet. Sweet.
The tent is up; it stinks of mildew. But the zipper works. Ida rolls back the two flaps of canvas, securing them with Velcro strips. There’s a screen, and inside, two more flaps and two more screened openings. It’s larger than she’d have guessed. From the outside it looked like a toy, too small, too cramped for comfort.
Under the floor, the sand makes a cushion, a bed. Ida smooths it with the callused soles of her feet, raises both arms, touches the ceiling, then breathes, breathes, breathes. Twenty sharp, twenty deep, and then the deepest breath, held until her knees start shaking and her arms grow weak. At last her knees buckle and her body simply drops, kerplop. How sweet, she thinks sincerely as she hits the tent’s floor, the three of us in this thing together.
6
June
Dear Audrey,
I wonder if you’ve seen this ad I’ve seen, in the newspaper, about the grand opening of a shopping mall, one of those “events,” with Victor the Wrestling Bear attending, and NO FREE HOT DOGS. Probably not in Canada, actually. There’s a No Free Hot Dog symbol, a hot dog inside of a bright red circle, slashed on the diagonal like a No Smoking sign. Imagine. I knew you’d like it. I would have clipped it and sent it on but had no change and didn’t buy the paper, just read it at the newsstand, aloud, to Big Stan and Nina, who don’t like to read for themselves. The ad made them hungry, so now we’re hanging out at one of those seaside chili dog stands with the roll-up screens and striped awnings, in a gravel lot surrounded by narrow highways clogged with Winnebagos. Homes on wheels, in case you don’t have Winnebagos in Canada. Do you? I don’t remember. I cannot imagine feeling for one of those things the way I’d feel about a home, if I felt that way about my home, which I don’t, anyway.
I’ve always envied those monks, the ones that don’t sleep or talk, and in particular the ones that don’t eat, so I’ve decided to fast, or in any case not to argue with Big Stan and Nina, who say there aren’t enough hot dogs to go around. I’m on a liquid diet: V-8 juice in those little cans, and milkshakes and Cup-a-Soup made with water heated over someone else’s campfire. I do feel a little weird. Probably Nina’s spiking my shakes. She’s got a real assortment of stuff, all legal, collected over a decade, I think. She keeps them in a bubble jar along with the super wand, reserves for her poison ring, I think. You know, those rings with elaborate hinged domes that pop open. Saline, calcium and saccharin tablets, diet pills, antacid, Motrin, aspirin, Sominex and those chlorine pills for purifying stream water. Also gelatin capsules stuffed with cayenne pepper, and those magic capsules that sprout miniature Disneylands when you drop them into a fish bowl. I hope 1 don’t get one of those.
How are the cows? Still screwing? 1 don’t miss it, frankly. I think my body’s changed. I think it simply would not accommodate, any longer, any member of the opposite sex. No pun intended. I mean the act no longer seems possible because, well, I am not precisely a woman anymore, because nothing that I feel is in particular womanly. It’s a state 1 believe I have wanted to achieve for some time.
Here we are on the Outer Banks … blah, blah, blah. Big Stan keeps a map in his pocket but 1 can make out only a corner of robin’s egg blue. However the water isn’t blue, but silver. Nor is the sky blue but white as a light bulb.
Do you remember when meditation was popular, years ago, and we were too embarrassed to do it because we thought it was a put-on, like lévitation, like those boys we knew who wore all white including turbans so they wouldn’t look like tennis players? As I recall they wanted to radiate rather than absorb, the way the moon does, which is 1 understand now a rather admirable way to want to be: stolid, reflective, imperturbable and out of reach.
Which is how I want to practice to be. Step one is Not Caring. For instance, although I haven’t actually been kidnapped, I haven’t tried to get away, either. I’ve simply let myself go, the way parachutists arrange, should they lose their nerve, to be pushed from the plane. In the interval between the jump and the opening of the chute, I ve heard, an eternity passes. Or, more accurately, an absence of time. If you free fall again and again, then you simply don’t get old, you don’t change. Underneath you, the earth keeps spinning, the minutes pass, but you are simply not part of time. You’re free.
If you’ve had your picture taken lately, you’ll know what I mean. Have you? The shutter snaps, and imperceptibly your life stops and starts again, so you’ve been freed of that moment and of what it had in store. You’re like a bloodhound following a scent, coming to a river, paddling across, not knowing whether, at the other side of the water, the scent will reappear.
Have you ever heard that for every cigarette you smoke, your life is shortened by five minutes? Well, for every photograph, you free fall for that fraction of a second, so time is broken into parts, like a triptych: a scene, and then a slice taken out, and then the scene continues, and then another slice, and life goes on. It’s really quite extraordinarily liberating.
What I’m getting at is this: Why not free fall forever? Just go a bit higher, breathe deeply and jump?
Nina has an 8 by 5 camera, and it and the tripod and the lenses are stashed in the back of the truck with all her other junk, and Big Stan’s camera is under the seat in its leather case inside a combat bag of sturdy green canvas containing also the flash in its own case, several boxes of film and an envelope of lens paper. Also a paintbrush and several Q-Tips he uses to clean the viewer, and some batteries and a visor.
Big Stan and I are perfecting a routine: he distracts the salesgirl, flirts over a tube of Crest, tells her how white her teeth are, while I keep interrupting, bugging her, asking advice: what ASA, how many exposures, any extra shots, what kind of deal they have, any mailers, etc., all the while slipping film canisters into Nina’s giant bag. Then Big Stan buys the toothpaste, and I buy one roll of film, make a big to-do about it, thanking her and looking scatterbrained, my specialty, so if they catch us I’ll tell them I don’t know what happened, the film must have toppled into the bag, whole leaning towers of film, no wonder the bag became so heavy. He uses it up in a day and blames his bad luck on Nina — she stood in his light, she tampered with the roll, she sneezed and scared the picture off as if it were a fish. Ever since I started modeling for them, Nina has taken a picture a week, maybe. It’s like she’s reading a palm, trying to psych out the image. She dresses you up, arranges you and then waits for the light to get right, and then waits for the song to end on the radio, and then waits for the next song to start, and waves the birds away, if you’re outside, or beckons them close with crusts of bread, if she wants them near, not necessarily in the picture, just close by, and then waits for her coffee to perk, and drinks it, and fools with the tripod, and focuses and refocuses, and pours herself another cup of coffee but doesn’t offer you any because you’re not supposed to move, she’s got you just right, just exactly right, every hair on your head, and then tells you you’re too self-conscious, you have to relax, but don’t move, just relax, and keep your eye on her little finger, or on the spot where her little finger was when she told you to keep your eye on it, and don’t pay her any attention whatsoever because she wants you to look solitary.
Nina’s truly sweet when she’s taking your picture because she’s lost in technicalities, like a child in a forest, not scared, just excited, running to and fro, so busy dropping crumbs she can’t follow the trail. Either she forgets to load the film, or overexposes, or knocks the tripod with her foot, or confuses bottles in the darkroom. But none of this seems ever to faze her, even after all that preparation. Nina treats whatever happens as if it’s what she had in mind, and carries the botched contact print around for hours, and studies it, and shows it off, and talks and talks about it, and makes you hold it up so she can back away from it, and asks advice on where to crop it, and then never crops it at all, or crops it in the wrong place, or crops it in the right place but throws out the print and saves the scrap, and begins a new series, the Unidentifiable Flying Object series, or the Unladylike series, or the Unbrushed Hair series, my favorite. She goes for the blur, the out of focus, and if it’s all right to begin with she bleaches or paints, and overbleaches and over-paints. Most of the stuff we have in the truck is hers, boxes and boxes of stains and ancient unlabeled chemicals, and fragments of mirror, and whole bolts of dusty, moth-eaten backdrops: white velvet, and gold-stitched paisley, and a strawberry picnic cloth and all her other tintype props, hats, mostly, and lace collars. Which angers Big Stan because there’s no place left for a darkroom. He can’t develop a thing, he has to wait. The photographer Weegee made a darkroom in the trunk of his Chevy, and that’s what Big Stan wants, a Chevy, to begin with, and a darkroom in the trunk. Also a shortwave radio that he can sleep with the way Weegee did, and another in the car so he can drive around the city beating the cops to the crime scenes. Also, New York, because there aren’t enough victims down south. Which is where I come in. So far today I’ve drowned twenty-eight times, half in the ocean, half in the sound. What we’re on is a giant sand dune, the ocean on one side, the sound on the other, a road dead center flanked by condos. The sound is too shallow for drowning unless you get on your knees and swallow it, but the ocean is easy, you just lie down.
Weegee never threw out a picture. Weegee’s girlfriend was Wilma Wilcox, so when Big Stan wants us to know he’s in a Weegee phase he shouts out Wilma, Wilma, in his feigned sleep, while smoking a feigned cigar. I think this is supposed to make me feel sorry for him. And Audrey, it really does.
We’ve been a long time in this parking lot at the chili dog stand, out of sight of the ocean. I’m lying sideways on the hood against the windshield, wipers digging into my elbow, and I’ve just now finished my shake, purple residue included. It tasted faintly of sulfur so I think I know what it was, one of those egg-dying pills for Easter. Big Stan and Nina are in the truck, lazing in the shade I cast, eyes shut, their fingers playing in the space between Big Stan’s knees, the fingers lacing and unlacing. With her fingernails, Nina dents the ligaments in Big Stan’s wrist, Big Stan makes a bracelet of his thumb and mid-die finger, tries Nina’s forearm on for size, up to the elbow, squeezes with all of his might until Nina screams and turns and bites his nose, and this is the passion they inflict on each other while I watch them through the windshield. Of course they know that I’m watching, and I know that they know, too. However, they are not easily intimidated once they begin to injure each other. It’s a battle of the earlobes, now, morsel by morsel.
I have to tell you something, Audrey. Some game animals are lazily browsing on a desert near a water hole. One zebra wanders away from the herd, not purposefully and not by accident but incidentally, because a fly disturbed her so she glanced up from her grazing and walked off delicately with a very slight flexing of her ankles, as if for each step there occurs a momentary lapse of gravity. Out of the shade, away from the herd and their drinking, out of a pocket of cooler air into strong sunlight and further on into a spot where heat revolves like a dog chasing its tail, and there the zebra inclines her eye toward some seedy grass tops, extends her big head and begins to munch. The parched grass is warm in her throat. A flock of egrets rises in the distance and wheels and comes down farther off where she can no longer see them. There’s a scent in the air, a new one, hyenas, familiar yet not terribly alarming simply because she is not the type to be alarmed.
So she eats and eats, not wondering what will happen. As night falls she can hear the hyenas’ laughter shrink in a circle around her. The laughter is high and insane, not unlike Nina’s when she gets excited, and in the interval between each shriek is a lengthy silence with a presence not unlike Big Stan’s when he is contemplative. The hyenas for the moment are not terribly hungry, having recently eaten, yet still they are aware of the possibility of hunger and of the suddenness with which hunger descends, and the zebra likewise is aware of this and of her body; the way her own tough hide holds her insides in place, and she hears her own blood moving round and round with an uplifting sensation as if she had been pumped full of rivers of helium.
Ida signs this crazy letter Love, Ida with three X’s, the way she signs all of her letters to Audrey. Then she slides from the hood of the truck, rolls the letter up like a telescope and secures it with a desiccated rubber band she finds at her feet in the parking lot. From a trash can she pulls a sticky, gritty soft drink bottle, rinses it in the sink in the ladies’ room, blows it dry under the hand dryer, slips the letter inside and with a chunk of firebrick hammers a bottle top onto the mouth of the bottle. In the parking lot she peers once more into the truck but regrets having done so. Big Stan and Nina are still making out, now supine on the seat, so that Big Stan’s giant knees and elbows are thrust here and there into the dashboard and even the ceiling with a pressure so apparent it seems that the truck might blow apart at any moment. His fly is open and Nina’s hand has vanished between its teeth.
