ten honest thoughts

1.

The first thing I ever shoplift is lipstick. I do not know how old I am, only that I am old enough to walk to the Rite Aid at the corner unattended, flanked on either side of the wide blacktop shoulder by Alicia and Jeila – fifth grade, I think. Fourth at the earliest. Alicia is tall and athletic and Jeila is red-haired and skinny; both of my hands could completely circle her waist if she let me, and I feel like a small hippopotamus walking between them, two sets of hands on my coat collar like fingers wrapped around the hook of a leash. Alicia likes to steal and Jeila likes to egg her on and I am caught in the middle, torn between wanting to be good and wanting to join in, and Jeila watches the register while Alicia nudges me closer to the rack, looming high up before me like a wall ready to be scaled.

I take the one closest to me: deep red, dark red. Revlon, I think. $9.95 in a gold and black tube.

We go home. We do not get caught, not that day. My mother drives me to my grandmother’s afterward, and I play with the lipstick in the pocket of my coat the whole drive over, sequester myself away in the downstairs bathroom once I’m left alone. I’ve never put on makeup before: it’s been warmed by my pocket and smears across my face like thick, waxy paint, sticks to my teeth like bloody meat. Women in the movies have red lips, perfect hair, they have hearts that turn either black or bleeding depending on the music swell and this is the first moment where I see myself reflected in them: there, in the tiny, wood-paneled bathroom with the oil portrait of my aunt on the wall, I can see myself years ahead in a desert, in a laboratory, in a film noir bar with my hair loose and legs for days, smoky eyes and lips like spades split in half while I tell some gun-toting scoundrel where he could find the diamonds, the kidnapped ambassador’s daughter. I am not a girl, here, but a woman: a woman with weight, a woman with power.

I stare in the mirror for what feels like hours imagining an impossible future, fraught with danger, intrigue, romance. My grandmother finds me there and sighs, her whole body sagging with the weight of unshed disappointment as she breaks the spell the mirror has set over me, sets to cleaning the whole mess off; she swipes dry tissues over my mouth and my face is pink from nose to chin, the nails of her free hand dig into my jaw as she turns my head this way and that, looking for traces she might have missed. My throat is dry. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

“I wanted –” I start, unsure of how to finish, “I wanted to look like –”

My grandmother shakes her head. “Oh, honey, don’t,” she says, “Men don’t want girls who look like this.”

 

2.

Stories were home to me long before my own was. I have been told to look for the feeling of it in people, in places, but books do not brook such disappointment so easily found in earth and flesh; if one ends badly, it can be retold, reshelved, given away. Broken hearts cannot be placated so easily.

3.

My grandmother may love me, but she does not particularly like me: there is too much of my father in me – rust, iron, ink – and not enough of my mother, she of the short hair and doglike devotion, my mother with her curved spine riddled with holes. She takes food from my plate and curses my father’s family and thinks I’d make some nice Jewish doctor a wonderful bride should I ever rid myself of my bitter tongue, my petulant attitude. I have the hair for it, she says, a good voice, decent hips – once I lose the weight, I’d be a real catch. She’d like to see a great-grandchild before she dies, and I’m not getting any younger.

She married my grandfather to get out of her house; an abusive father, a quietly strong mother, a sister and brother with better fortunes than hers. My mother did the same, slightly reversed. Sometimes I think I can see myself in her – the tilt of my nose, the set of my eyes – but when I blink, it is gone.

4.

We were on the dock at the house her family was renting and it was late, the sky already full of stars. Her family was in the living room and we navigated the cold wooden planks with the light from our phones until we could sit comfortably in the black, knee to knee, laughing at our own clumsiness. The lake was wide and dark before us, reflecting the night like a mirror, a parallel world. She did not know the constellations, but I did: Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Libra and Draco and all the other summer configurations, balls of light dead for millennia, strung up over our heads like tealights as I told her all the stories I could remember. Dead men tell no tales, but survivors take up pens, survivors always learn by heart. Water lapped up against the dock as she looped her arm through mine and pulled me back, laid us both flat so that we could stare upwards at the sky and find Hercules, Scorpius, the Pleiades.

One word to describe each other: to her, eccentric. In return, important.

When I think of her, this is what comes first.

5.

The first is small: whispers and comments, being snubbed at lunch. The second is a bit longer: no seats on the bus, no partners for gym, for music, for anything fun. With the third comes the snip of scissors as Graham Hagen slices off the end of a ponytail – the teacher catches him, luckily, before he can do more damage, but dark hair still spills across the plastic table like cut straw and it sticks to your hands when you hold it up later, examining it the way you would an interesting insect, an owl pellet. Your hair hangs at a weird angle in the back for a month.

This is how it starts: soon it will be snowballs and pop cans from car windows, soon it will be stolen private notebooks read to the entire class. Soon it will be theft and rumors and parent-teacher conferences, lunches eaten alone in the library for lack of anywhere else to go. This is where you devour books and memorize poems, this is where you pick up your first pen and draw lyrics and lines over your arms, your feet, try to press so hard that the ink bleeds past the skin. This is where you fake sick on the bad days, curl into yourself in the privacy of home and eat frosting from the can, watch Saturday Night Live reruns with your head buried into the couch pillows and imagine yourself somewhere shiny and new.

This is how you learn: don’t let the hurt show. No tears, no pain. Laugh. Laugh.

6.

The first time I heard Sekou Sundiata it was like my brain caught fire. The first time I read Sandra Cisneros it was like my heart was beating inside someone else’s chest. Fitch left me speechless and Pavlova cracked open my ribcage, Rilke held my lungs in his god-fearing hands and squeezed.

I want more than anything for someone to feel that way about me.

7.

His name was John or Jim or Josh and he had been drinking since he’d gotten off the plane three days earlier, but there was a moment at my cousin’s wedding where I looked at his business partner and thought, in the same breath, you’re an asshole and I want you to touch me.

This was not the first time this particular stroke of inspiration crossed my mind, scrolling shamefully across the bottom of my thoughts like the rolling ticker in a news feed.

It has definitely not been the last.

8.

My grandfather was an artist, an accountant, the only one in his family to have green eyes. He was the only grandfather I had the chance to know. I was not allowed to attend his funeral and now, thirteen years later, I keep thinking of the ways we venerate the dead – eternal flames and iron-gated graveyards, monuments and military bands and weeks of mourning, draped in black – and of how my grandfather passed away in May and by February my grandmother was married again, selling off his paintings and his jackets and giving his watches to my cousins, his ties to my uncles. There was nothing for me but photographs, and even those were meant for others; too precious for my greedy hands, my thirsty, grieving heart.

My grandmother is going through photographs again – none of the cut ones, none with my mother’s first family headless in dinner jackets or long-forgotten cousins with their arms around empty air on park benches – and lays them out across her plain white dining room, piling them up in frames on tables and chairs, leaning them against the wall like carnival prizes: throw a ball, win your history! How strange it is to see my grandfather’s face amongst the lot, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, trapped in creased black-and-white paper behind a crumbling cardstock frame. Nineteen years old and handsome, he was likely the one who set the timer, who squished himself into the view of an unknown rabbi’s office. There are a dozen men posing in this photograph and every single one of them is dead, now.

My grandmother catches me looking and tears that one from my hands – “That’s mine,” she says, “It’s not supposed to be out with the rest,” and she places it carefully in the crook of her arm before sauntering off into the living room. My mother continues sorting through photos and I can only stand there, speechless, thinking of how empty my grandfather’s plot had been when I’d gone to the cemetery last year: unkempt, unvisited, the grass untouched, greener than green in the low grey light.

“Kiddo, he doesn’t care,” my father reminds me later, unpacking groceries and pretending that he can’t see me hiding tears behind my hair. My father wants to be cremated, his ashes shot into space, he has no use for the family politics of graveyards. But still: the moment my grandmother tore the picture from my grip I could feel my grandfather’s hands on my feet, the rumble of his voice in his chest, the forgotten needle in the carpet sticking into my leg. I could feel how cold the ground was as I knelt on all fours, crying and mumbling, scraping away with my fingers at the earth that had grown, muddy and thick, over the headstone.

9.

At one point, everything I knew about sex came from books.

10.

I dreamed of you exactly once:

I met you in a bar in Washington and it was me, but not – taller but still small, slimmer but still soft, the version of myself I would like to see in a movie. You had your hand curled around a whiskey rocks and I wore a green blazer, pinned my hair back. Your collar was neat and pressed.

The low light made your hair seem redder, gave your nose a sharper hook. Your eyes met mine and you waved me over, the bar was loud and the booth small enough that we had to sit closer than what might have been proper just to hear each other. You kept drawing shapes with your fingers in the wet rings left by our glasses – they covered the table by last call, testimonials to a successful reconnection. I did not know where the time went, only that by the end I was bold enough to ask whether you remembered that time you called me “beautiful” and drunk enough to ask you if you meant it. I have been funny and sweet and kind, but not cute, not pretty, certainly never beautiful. My heart did not race as you licked your lips, moved closer. The air was thick between us: stale and sweet, like old liquor spilled somewhere behind the bar, and your hand found my knee under the table as you said, “I did,” your fingers moved in circles as you said, “Still do.”

The turbulence broke the fantasy; thunderbolts striking like a bull’s-eye to the heart, rattling the jet and ripping me back into the world. When I left, we were in your kitchen: my back to the sink, your hands in my hair.