Strange Young Girls
Art and marriage for the obvious muse
Photo by Alice - of friends and me in high school. St. Louis, 2018.
The good in me is thanks to Alice.
(The bad in me is thanks to God.)
I. The Married Girl
The voice was pale and unsure of itself—this was the nerve center of its beauty, the falter before it found its stride. A girl’s voice, one that held no particular emotion, though a few of us looked up from our phones in suspicion, prepared to be accosted in some way. She didn't command much attention from the subway car, didn’t even seek to catch the eye of another passenger. Instead, she kept her gaze low and delivered what seemed to be a brief sermon. The train paused in the station as if to hear her out. She informed us that God would not let anyone die outside His love, invited us to forgo our selfish interests for a while and give some thought to the state of our souls. And that was all. She offered no literature, extolled no guru. When she finished, there was a palpable easing of tension, the thaw of our hardened layers of skepticism.
It was a delicate intervention. Before the girl talked about God, I’d devoted my commute to getting worked up about how the men Hiroyuki calls my “pedophile boyfriends” are better public intellectuals than I am—making me an obvious muse, making me stupid. This was a vain and pointless line of thought, and the girl’s interruption came with the kind of exquisite timing that makes a person give God a second thought. With each stop, the shuffling of passengers in and out left the girl’s audience altered and dispersed, though she never repeated herself for the newcomers, who went about their commutes with no knowledge of the passive evangelizing that preceded this quiet. Those who witnessed the girl’s soft proselytizing had lived different, less coherent lives than those who got on after us. It was late; I was alone and losing the feeling I’d spent all night inventing at the bar, perfect-hypnotic-drunk. I missed my stop, and missed another before the lapse caught up to me. Because I am often getting on and off trains at the wrong places or in the wrong ways, I’ve developed an outsized reaction to the error, a silent hysteria of bad outcomes—first that I am lost, and then that I am the wrong kind of person for the world, incompetent to get where I need to go. Maybe it was because I wasn't dressed for the wet snow coming up (I was wearing tights and miu miu ballet heels I got on eBay in my efforts to become a beautiful idiot) or maybe it was because the girl’s sermon reminded me of her that I rode to Alice’s stop.
The strange young girl—the one walking the strip, hiding her madness, sweet soft and placid in the old song—is an obvious muse. More obvious than the washed-up old novelist writing his obituary on his phone in bed beside her, and more interesting. The obvious muse doesn’t seem to know why she sleeps where she sleeps, or with what people. Assign reason and order to her, but it won’t lay flat. Alice got married two years ago, when we left college. I expressed no opinion, gave no objection; I’m happy for you, I said again and again. Until it didn’t sound so strained; until I meant it.
This is the story of one night with Alice: she opens the door in her I Beat Anorexia t-shirt and doesn’t pretend to be glad to see me.
“God,” she says. “You’re not dressed for the weather.”
“I tried calling.”
“No you didn’t.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Ella, that’s what you always say when you’re drunk.”
Alice has a nice place, nicer than a girl is supposed to have at our age. A two-bedroom whose sterile, renovated insides resist the decay and genuine beauty lining her street. I live with a 65-year-old Japanese DJ who lets me stay in his spare room for a thousand bucks a month. He waits up for me when I’m out, unless it is very cold, because according to Hiroyuki "rapists don't go out in the cold." Sometimes, I like to imagine we've gotten ourselves fixed in a tense, dire romance that neither of us can act upon. Other times I like to imagine he is my surrogate father. We live in that part of Bushwick where the J and M trains clatter overhead. I moved in with Hiroyuki because he was the first person who didn’t run a background check or make me sign a lease. My credit score had just dipped below what any legitimate landlord, however desperate, would stoop to accept. Hiroyuki believes, like I do, that I will marry someone rich, ideally the bad-dad type who imparts financial literacy to his children and little else. Older than me. I like this fate. All my rich friends have cruel fathers, inattentive and withholding of love. They feel guilty for resenting them, because they are the same terrible men who gave them good credit scores and expensive educations. The ultra-rich have a peculiar gift for shame, disowning the family name. I’d like to get them all in a room with their fathers, airing their grievances publicly, pawning the love they were given.
I was lucky: I was loved. I was loved so much, I had to sell my car to nudge my credit score above 600.
I present my theory to Alice. “Don’t have sex with Hiroyuki,” she says.
“Did I tell you he looked at some pictures of me online and said I wasn’t always pretty?”
“You weren’t always pretty,” Alice says. “You used to be smart. Lie down with me. No, go rinse off first. There’s a towel in the spare room.”
“In the spare room,” I mock.
When I’m clean and damp, she gives me a University of Missouri sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants.
“They’ll be big on you.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, really. You’re getting skinny. I don’t know if it’s because you’re poor or anorexic or on drugs or what, but you’re way too skinny. Don’t smile, it’s not a compliment. You look insane.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“Not a compliment.”
“I meant thanks for the clothes.”
“No you didn’t.”
I remember summers in Missouri, tornado sirens on the first of the month, baby oil in the sun on the decks of cul-de-sac swimming pools that the wealthy patrons of our babysitting careers owned but never used. I remember driving to the school tennis courts at night. She was so serious, even then, insisting between cigarettes that we should practice our serves. She might have been unhappy, but she knew what she needed to do to get where she was going. That was the first thing I envied about her.
The first time I saw Alice’s naked body, I decided all girls should have tennis in their past.
I remember sleeping on the golf course at the country club and waking to the sprinklers passing over us before dawn. I remember competing for older guys, remember the lobsterman we both liked that time on vacation, buying us Arbor Mist from the Circle K and ferrying us to the opposite shore, making sharp turns around the harbor at night just to hear us scream for him to stop, taking lashes of seaspray, I remember how fast and important everything was, and how new. I remember stealing birthstone rings from a kiosk at the mall. I remember getting on my knees in a prefab bathroom with the boy she loved. Strange young girls, biting each other’s soft parts with our jealousy.
“Move over,” Alice is saying. “You’re on my hair.”
“Let’s play remember-when.”
“I’m sleeping,” she says.
“Remember,” I ask in the dark, “when we were fifteen and sad we weren’t old enough to vote for Hillary Clinton; remember we like loved Hillary Clinton?”
There is laughter as she recoils from our history. “What about the nights I had to babysit and you came over to copy my math homework,” she says. “I remember spray tans before prom, how bad you were at tennis, mango juul pods.”
I remember. And the dull hum of cicadas, and the stray cat she named пушок, Russian for fluff or pubescence, depending who you ask. I remember driving to college in New England, sleeping in Alice’s car at truck stops.
“Remember,” she continues, neither sleeping nor trying to sleep, “how I drove us to Kansas City so you could see that band manager, wasn’t he like forty—you know you’re still a bit like that, but now the men are older and worse—”
She sits up. Keeps going.
“I’ve been wanting to say, I mean—what are you doing around these post-ironic conservative types, they’re just Nazis with art degrees, and they’re making you stupid. You didn’t used to be stupid. Don’t you think it’s embarrassing?”
I sit up. She keeps going.
“I’m serious. I remember when I liked you, before whatever this is, this residual love. You know what I think your problem is? Your problem is you go after these literary types twice your age or more, and by the time you realize they want to get married, you’ve moved on, and no one is happy, you’re not happy—are you happy? You take too much klonopin and you’re too skinny—don’t smile. Your problem is they have nothing to give you and you have nothing to give them. They won’t ‘help’—”
She puts elaborate air quotes around “help.” I get out of bed; she gets louder—
“—with your ‘career’—”
I’ve walked away, but I can hear the air quotes—
“—they don’t even think you’re talented. Do you think they think you’re talented? And don’t those scene types all have sell-by dates, I mean. I mean you might focus on getting better or smarter, because it’s over for you by 26. Wait, stop, come back, I’m sorry.”
Alice follows me to the kitchen.
“It’s just that people here don’t know about beauty,” she says. “They go to the kinds of art installations where someone is like giving birth in a kiddie pool. Or bars with girls reading bad poetry off their phones. You, reading bad poetry off your phone. And you’re not allowed to talk, you’re not allowed to laugh, you’re not allowed to say anything except how amazing that was. That was amazing. You’re always saying that.”
“Do you have anything to drink?”
“I’m not drinking right now,” says Alice.
“Stop.”
Alice laughs, shakes her head: “It’s not that. Just trying to be healthy.”
“Why is everyone trying to be healthy all of a sudden. You used to puke into Dime Liquor bags over the side of the bed.”
“That was you,” Alice says.
“Maybe I’ll get married,” I threaten. “I’ll wear press-on nails and a dress from Ultimate Bride and let him knock me up on a motel room floor in Nashville—don’t laugh, I really will.”
“Who would marry you? One of your pedophile boyfriends?”
“That’s Hiroyuki’s thing!” I turn, flushed and defensive. “He coined ‘pedophile boyfriend.’”
She sighs. “I really hope you don’t sleep with Hiroyuki.”
II. Pretty Baby
I sleep on the couch her husband brought in off the street six months ago. In the morning we’re over it. I tell her the story of the girl’s sermon on the train. I embellish a bit, adding a stabbing on the subway platform.
“I remember mega churches,” I say. “I remember eating disorder camp. Remember that whole summer we were digging our nails into our mosquito bites. Putting our fingers down each other’s throats in the woods.”
“We were so mean to the bulimic girls,” she smiles.
“Bulimics lack self-control,” I remind her. “We gained like ten pounds between us that summer.”
“Eleven pounds,” Alice says. “I gained five and you gained six.”
“I actually think you’d be a really good mom,” I tell her. There is the impulse, always, to soften things.
“You just want to see me get fat,” she says.
“Probably. Sorry.”
“In seventh grade, you said I reminded you of a praying mantis.”
“I was just jealous you were tall. I wanted to be a model but I was too short.”
“Do you actually think being short was the only reason you couldn’t be a model?”
“We’ll never know,” I say.
“You really are a narcissist, a little bit,” she says.
“I think you have borderline personality disorder,” I say.
“That’s actually super misogynistic,” says Alice. “Johnny hates your new friends too, by the way.”
Alice and I have a joke we do ever since she got married. I say, Are you still with that guy? And she says, Who, my husband?
Then we laugh, in our rehearsed old way.
“Sometimes,” I said to Hiroyuki on a late night we spent very drunk, how we like each other, “I think I shouldn’t have had the abortion—sometimes I think I should have kept it, even just to look down at a baby, you know when they’re little and they curl up on you, they look like cinnamon rolls, I mean they look so cute it just breaks you, I mean you want to literally eat them. Don’t you think? I could have done it alone.”
“No,” Hiroyuki said. “You’re really poor.”
He tells me I’m depressed, as though my desire to die has hardened into something more earnest than everyone else’s. I don’t eat or sleep at the appropriate hours, he alleges; I don’t have friends over; I’m out for entire weekends and in for entire weeks.
“You know what it really was?” I said to him. “I didn’t want to get fat, get older. Who would want me like that, all stretched and scarred and loose, I mean I'd have like heavy tits, a bad waistline. Anyway, I’d be so jealous of the baby, all smug and perfect and clean. Don’t laugh, you know what I’m talking about. It's all lovable and I'm all used up.”
What I meant to say was: Hiroyuki, what if I looked at it, just rinsed of my insides in the hospital sink, feeding and crying at comic intervals — what if I looked and realized I couldn't love it, couldn’t tend to its survival, could only resent it, let it wail itself hoarse. What if I shook it. What if all I could think was: I used to be a babygirl. I used to get paid to be that kind of thing. I didn’t like it but it got me out of some debt. And maybe I did like it, just a little — what if I liked it, and the baby took it from me.
No, I imagine him saying; you’re being stupid. Hiroyuki thinks I look stupid with makeup. He thinks I sound stupid when I talk about men. He thinks I am stupid when I wear short skirts. He thinks I couldn’t place Japan on a map. (Give me a map, I said. I don’t have one, he answered.)
But he does have a map: it’s a map of New York City and it’s pinned to a bulletin board in the kitchen. He makes grand, sweeping gestures when he describes the ethnic makeup of each neighborhood — these are Russians, he points; Jews over here, Dominicans there; where we are it used to be Japanese but now it’s just anything.
A vague look comes over us, though we aren’t looking at each other. He is distraught when he says “just anything.”