Moonwalker, Chap. 5

“Boy am I glad you answered, Minerva. I was just about to send the firemen over to break down the door of your apartment.”

“You could just climb up the fire escape and come in through the window.”

“I know, but I get nervous I’ll find you with your head in the oven like Sylvia Plath. You’ve been in such a bad mood, lately.”

“Wow. That’s either an over-exaggeration or an understatement. I guess I better start practicing mood control."

I just couldn’t get off the sofa. It was the first one I’d actually owned in my life and as I mentioned before, I was forty. I even slept on it because I didn’t have a bed yet, just a blow-up mattress on the floor in the “bedroom,” whose quotation marks reproached me every time I said the word. My life was pathetic, especially to a twenty-two year old who had her whole future before her. I wasn’t sure why Zoe wanted to hang out with me so much, especially since I hadn’t said yes once to one of her invitations. I just thought most art was either bullshit or disheartening and had enough of both in my life. I even told Zoe what I thought, but she was convinced she was going to convert me into a hipster.

“You just need to loosen up and stop taking everything so seriously,” she informed me.

“But that’s what all these so-called artists do!” I protested.

“See, you have more in common than you thought!”

“Minerva,” she declaimed in her most inspirational oratory tone, “Goddess of Wisdom, I summon you to my side tonight to walk through the sacred fire of Delphi where our futures shall be revealed!”

“I think you’re confusing me with the Pythia, Zoe,” I replied. “She’s a snake goddess. I’m the goddess of wisdom, not some crazy oracle. Owls, not snakes. Hoot, hoot.”

“Sssssorry,” she hissed back. “I just work in a coffee shop,” our favorite inside joke. It came in handy whenever a customer tried to cross the line and ask us what we were going to do when we graduated. When Zoe said it, it was still cute because she had just graduated, although her RISD degree in textiles hadn’t exactly attracted job recruiters to her door. Still, she was a pixie and people were willing to excuse her impertinence. I just got bad tips and indignant looks. It was impossible to be cute at forty, although Zoe assured me I was “ageless,” without saying what we both knew, ageless was another way of saying I could look any age at all. I’ll let you be the guess of which end of the spectrum I fall on.Whatever else could be said of me, I did not look ironic. More like tragic. I had black hair and skin that was so pale it didn’t tan, even though I’d spent my whole life so far in the sun without sunscreen. I was so pale people sometimes called me Snow White and hummed Someday My Prince Will Come when I got that glazed look on my face which made me seem like I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. (I wasn’t) Zoe and I were a regular Magic Kingdom because she looked a lot like Minnie Mouse. Of course she was going for the look, which clearly worked for her. Cute got you a lot farther in than life than tragic.

She wore short little skirts, hand-painted with polka dots and cat-eyed glasses, though she drew the line at ears, which were only for special occasions like sushi dinners and karaoke. Zoe was Chinese, but for some reason she wouldn’t explain, was obsessed with Japanese culture. “I keep telling my parents I must have had a past life as a samurai,” she confided in me the first time I met her, “but they insist I’m just trying to rebel. I tell them it’s about time somebody in our family did. They say quiet, you’ll kill your grandmother, but I figure if she survived Chairman Mao, she’ll survive me. Don’t you think so? I mean, she was a part of a real tragedy. What she went through puts Sylvia Plath’s misery to shame. Sylvia should have been embarrassed to kill herself. What’s a little psychological abuse? Nobody tried to actually kill her.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Sorry.”

“I didn’t say that was a bad thing.”

I hadn’t felt tragic all these years, just slightly unglued. It was like gravity didn’t have the same affect on me that it had on the rest of humanity. I told myself I had gypsy blood, which was a great way to seduce guys to go upstairs with me and get it on in garishly lit bathrooms at parties of people I didn’t know. This pretty much guaranteed that nobody I seduced was going to stick around, which was fine with me. I preferred to travel alone, which meant I wasn’t a real gypsy because they never left the tribe and those shaggy ponies that pulled their carts from town to town. In my solitude, I was more like a pilgrim on a quest, although I had no idea what I was looking for because I had no destination.

What was tragic was the gander I got of myself in the polished chrome reflection of the espresso machine as I steamed and foamed milk for the unapologetically exuberant and youthful students who stumbled down Wickenden each morning before heading off to class. My face was no longer thin, it was gaunt, and worse than that, I had wrinkles. You can call them crow’s feet or smile lines, but after awhile it becomes undeniable: I was old. Fortunately Zoe took orders and rang people up most of the time, so our tips were still pretty good. Providence was a cheap city, but it was still hard to make a decent living getting people high on sugar and foam. I should have been a bartender, but that would have meant going out at night, which as I’d begun to mention, was a problem. Plus, I kind of had a “history” with alcohol I was trying to rewrite, so working in a bar didn’t seem like the greatest life plan at the moment.

“Well then—hoot!” Zoe laughed into the phone. “Don’t you at least want to know the future?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, come on!”

“When you get to be my age you’ll understand why it’s best not to know.”

“That’s your excuse for not having any fun!”

“You call milling around while a bunch of horny, sexist guidos check us out fun? I told you. I’m over being objectified by the male gaze. I just don’t want to deal with that shit anymore.”

“Are you sure you didn’t secretly go to college?” I had spent long hours explaining feminist literary theory to her. She found it hard to believe that I actually read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan without being forced to.

“Remember, you went to art school. They’re not supposed to teach you anything useful. That’s what artists are for—to be useless.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it."

"Why’s that again? I can’t seem to remember anything these days. Must be because I don’t use my brain in any useful ways.”

“Yeah, deconstructing everything that comes out of my mouth definitely isn’t useful.”

“Especially since you don’t give a shit about the male gaze. I wish I’d been born a lesbian and never internalized these stupid cultural expectations in the first place. You’re lucky.”

“Shhhh, don’t say that out loud, my parents might hear you.”

“You still haven’t come out to them yet?”

“Nope. They think Cally is my ‘roommate.’”

“You’re going to have to tell them eventually. Do you really want to live with the pressure of them not knowing? What happens when you get married and have those raisinheads you’re always sentimentalizing?”

“Raisinheads?”

“Because they look so shriveled up and wrinkled when they come out.”

“You’re so cynical! Kids are cute!”

“You obviously didn’t baby sit much growing up. Once you change your first 100 diapers you’ll realize they’re nothing but little, squirming tubes of poop and puke. Are you just not going to invite them to the wedding?”

“Well, considering we still live in a barbaric society where gay marriage isn’t legal I don’t have to worry too much, do I?”

“Yeah, but that’s going to change soon.”

“May wonders never cease. Do I detect a note of optimism in your voice? This calls for a celebration. Waterfire here we come!”

Zoe may have joked, but her parents had scrimped and saved for years to send her to the college of her choice and were none too thrilled with her decision to be a textile designer. I knew the pressure to please them had to affect her because she kept giving them hope by telling them she was going to audition soon for Project Runway.

"They love Heidi Klum,” she told me. “She so tall,” my mother say, “So blonde. Why you not marry blonde American, Zongying?” Zongying was her real name, which, in that great American tradition, had been butchered by the Ellis Island of grade school. Zoe made fun of her mom, but Zongying was dutiful, calling three times a week at the assigned time after her mother’s mah jong tournament, before her father’s evening stroll around the block in the suburb of Detroit where they’d finally bought their dream house after years of living in an inner city apartment.

“One of these days I’ll do the right thing and make her proud of me,” I actually heard her say once beneath the sound of steaming milk. “I wonder why they left China in the first place? Life would have been so much easier. My sister never would have heard The White Stripes and shaved her head and bought me that first dildo. Did I ever tell you it was a rabbit? The ears rub on your clit while you fuck yourself with the body.”“Too much information, Zongying.”“Sorry. I forgot you’re still a virgin. If we’d stayed in China my sister and I could have saved our poverty-stricken parents by becoming Wal-Mart factory slaves because we wouldn’t have known any better. They couldn’t be disappointed in us then.”

“What’s your sister up to these days?"

"She’s a junkie in San Francisco.”

“Are you serious?”

“No,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her.“I wonder if they wish we’d never been born?” she continued. I thought of my own parents probably sitting down to eat dinner in front of Charlie Gibson right now. Once I’d left home they’d stopped eating at the table, which I didn’t miss at all the couple of times a year I visited them, except for Christmas, which was an ordeal I approached with the enthusiasm of a soldier being sent to the front lines. Christmas was a minefield where we all lost a limb every year. Sometimes an eye or an ear, too. It was a wonder we were still walking and talking, but maybe that’s how it goes if you just deny your wounds.

“Minnie, come out with me,” she pleaded. “It’s Waterfire tonight. The fires are really bright and sometimes people light sparklers, and there are even fire-eaters and hot guys spinning poi, not that I care cuz I’m a lesbian thank goddess, which is probably why I don’t care about the stupid male gaze you’re always blathering on about.”

“Not always!”

“Well, just sometimes, but you’re always staying in your apartment when you could be out having a good time meeting someone.”

“I don’t want to meet someone.”

“Whatever. Everybody wants to meet someone. I don’t care what you say. I’m making you get out of that apartment tonight. I mean there’s going to be a special demonstration of Moonwalkers in remembrance of Michael Jackson. How could you miss that? Don’t you want to see people walk on the moon?”

Like probably everyone else on the planet, I was aware that Michael Jackson had died a month ago. Even though I didn’t have a TV I still knew an amazing amount about pop culture from working at Chaos, where pop culture was ironic, therefore cool.

“I can’t stand Michael Jackson.”

“Oh, come on,” she pleaded. “How can you hate Michael?”

“You didn’t have to listen to him in the 80s. I mean “Beat It,” and that stupid “Thriller” video that was on MTV all the time. Anybody cool was into Duran Duran back then.”

“Uh—I find that hard to believe, Minerva.”

“Well, ok, anybody cool in my lame town.” Zoe had been lucky because she had an older sister who was a lesbian first and started a punk rock band. She even gave her her first dildo when she turned “sweet” sixteen. She’d been into The White Stripes, an actually cool band, before anyone outside Detroit knew who they were, which, by the way, was another line I’d heard used countless times to convey hipster credibility. You know. “I saw them back when they played so and so dive before they sold out and got famous.”It was always cooler to be into someone before they hit it big. Anyway, the point of this diatribe is to let you know that even though I hadn’t been a Michael Jackson fan in the 1980s, my love for Duran Duran’s “Reflex” and “Rio” was a clear indicator that I wasn’t ever cool.

“Oh, come on. I know you cried when you first heard ‘We Are the World.’ You told me that one time I managed to drag you out and get you drunk.”

“Is that that song where Bob Dylan lowers himself to singing in the same song with Kenny Loggins?”I had told her that. It was the last time I’d been out of the apartment past dark. Bad idea. I’d been so scared I couldn’t resist the shots of Patron the bartender kept pouring, laughing when I howled at the worm right before I swallowed it. Later that night, fucking me up against the mirror behind the bar, he panted in my ear, loca, loca, as my reflection shattered in my fingers.

“We are the World. We Are the Children,” she sang. Loca, Loca. I had to forget or I would be crazy. I had to be crazy to forget. I won’t tell you how the limp worm tasted on my tongue. You either know, or you don’t. Zoe definitely didn’t know. Listen to her, trying to lure me out of the oven, convinced I was as possessed by my demons as Sylvia Plath. If I wasn’t half convinced myself, I’d take it as a compliment.“What’s the next line, Minerva? If you tell me, I’ll let you wear my polka dot skirt.”

“I don’t want to,” I whined.

“Speak up. I no understand English so good.”

“It’s time to make a better world, so let’s start living?” I grumbled. Emphasis on question mark, spoken, not sung. I would have referenced James Bond, but I had a feeling twenty-two year old art school lesbians didn’t know or care squat about martinis or Moonraker.

"Giviiiiinnnng. Not liviiinnnng. One mo time Missy!”

“Can’t you get in trouble with your people for making fun of them like that?”

“What? Speak up! I no understand English so good. We meet on dark side of moon, right?”

That was a definite wrong if I had anything to say about it, which it seemed I didn’t. Zoe sang like a little kid who doesn’t know and couldn’t care less how bad she sounded. “There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives. It’s time to make a better world…”

I couldn’t resist. She was just so damn cute. I opened my mouth and my vocal chords expanded to swallow the rising moon as it came up over the horizon on Narragansett Bay which I couldn’t see from my window—the bay that is—the moon could stalk me anywhere without my knowledge. I expected to die at every moment, which might have been why I let the words pour from my mouth.

"Just you and me!"

Yes, I sang. And I actually felt that exclamation point as it exploded between my lips like the worm I’d said I’d forgotten a month ago.

“Ok, Goddess Minerva. Pick you right up. Wait for me on the street. I can be in Fox Point in ten minutes.”