How when a woman I loved told me for the first time, "You are so fucking beautiful," the air in the room immediately cinched like a drawstring before exploding in my chest like a shot of tequila. How later when she said, "I'd love you even if your face burned off in a horrible car accident," I was still so full, there was not enough space for me to take it in. How later still, after so many disappointments and fights, after I stayed again and again, I often wondered whom she was fooling.
A few words from a woman with a keen third eye, the way I immediately recognized the truth, how steady her voice, how clear her eyes, how awake now the unnameable something that had lived inside me since I was a child, shifting with her syllables, turning like a secret wall, her prophecy pulled from my chest like a scarf from a magician’s sleeve, her words flat as a cookie’s fortune to anyone else but to me real as the whiskers on a rabbit: “You will achieve greatness in your life…you will create something extraordinary.” A silver-coined dare, a mirror of a promise, a woman sawed in two.
How the first woman I loved like a fairytale rose above me in the moonlight shining through her dorm window, her silver cross glinting in the space between us, the pillow on her bed damp with my tears. How she gazed into my eyes with an intensity like fire and wolf's teeth, gently wiped my cheek, and said, slowly, each word a covenant, "If I ever meet your father, I will break his kneecaps." How I would have given her anything for that kind of devotion, how from that moment on I didn’t believe she was real.
How the night before the towers fell and the smoke and ash choked New York like an impossible trick, I grabbed up all the magazines around the house, picked up a pair of scissors, and began absentmindedly cutting and pasting images from articles and ads to a piece of paper until every bit of white was gone. How I went to bed and forgot about it until after school the next day when I found it on my desk, how the blood bags and buildings and fire engines and planes rose up to meet my startled eyes, how I could hardly remember the scissors in my hand, how I was never one to make collages, how when I showed it to my mom when she got home from work, explaining that I'd made it the night before, she called me a freak, how as we watched the news that night, the word singed my ears and crashed down through all my stories.
How my father frowned at me in my bathing suit the year I turned fourteen when he took my sister, brother, and me to the Grand Canyon. How he grimaced when he saw the softness around my hips and stomach, how he said, "Looks like you need to lose some baby fat," as if I'd put on weight carelessly, or even deliberately. And how, absurdly, horribly, this was almost worse than before, when he'd look at my legs and lick his lips, worse than his fingers on my skin.
The way my cousin, two years older than my thirteen, the person I admired most in all the world, slipped into our shared bed at the beach house after a long night of flirting with the older guys downstairs, kissed the side of my head and whispered, "I love you, kid." How she had little or no idea what my home life was like because this was her first time coming out to see us rather than the other way around and we were on vacation, how I never told her about my stepfather's heavy hands, how her words, because they were uttered when she thought I was asleep and because she used the word love when neither my stepfather nor my mother ever did, buoyed me up, kept me from sinking for the next year or two until social services came and removed my stepfather from the house.
Sitting in the leather passenger seat as my stepfather drove us along the winding roads to the nearby orchard store for hoagies, the air conditioning cooling my cheeks, the windows down, my hair whipping around my ears, my Neil Diamond cassette tape playing on repeat, our voices filling the cabin. "The boat that I row's big enough for two," we sang, him forcing his voice into falsetto to make me laugh, me driving mine down below Neil's. How I felt oddly contained in those moments, safe with the man I knew could break me like a twig. "Just me and you..." he sang, and I was happy.
The way my sister, after I'd run through the woods to escape another kick to the back from our wild-eyed stepfather and she'd found me huddled in the bushes at the bottom of our hill, asked me if I wanted a hug; how this was exactly what I needed, how this really did make everything better.
I was in third grade when a headhunter spotted me at a fair, and I began going to modeling school. When I told my father over the phone, I could feel him rising on the other end; I could almost see the pink of his tongue against his upper lip. He rarely asked me questions about my life in Florida, but he wanted to know how I looked these days, how I liked the catwalk, if I would have pictures to send him. "I'm not very good at the catwalk," I reported. "The other kids are older, and they keep trying to give me tips, but I just walk funny." He assured me I'd get better with practice and told me to send pictures to him in California when they were ready. "Love you, Carol Baby," he said, smacking his lips before hanging up.
My brother, maybe five years old, and me standing in the corner of the backyard where the side of the house met the fence, standing over the raised beds of dusty dirt filled with remnants of sand dollars we'd broken, me about six and a half, we standing in the California sun, no parents around, me asking in a voice I could barely hide the tremble from, "Do you think I'm weird?" He, really stopping to consider, his soft grayish-black eyebrows squinting, his voice high yet quiet, his lips the color of the roses growing nearby, "What do you mean?" Me: "Weird. Different. Special kinda, but not really...more like strange." The eyebrows. The rose of his mouth opening, his t's and r's playing hide and seek: "I don' think you' wei'd." And this, after all my cruelties, after every penny I'd promised and never given, after every undeserved pinch and unkind word. "You're not weird,” he'd said, and I knew he loved me.
The lumpy purple-gray, glazed clay ostrich I made in art class in the first grade, how my teacher beamed when she saw it, how she said I was special, how she told my mom I was her favorite, how she loved my ostrich so much that I gave it to her, how I loved her and her giant yellow boa constrictor and her huge head of silver curls. When she'd hug me, I'd disappear into her bosom like a quarter behind an ear, like I'd been there all along, and her arms would seem to wrap around me twice to cover all the empty places.
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