Art Begins Beneath the Surface...

by Darya Mattes

       Your thrift shop clothing wasn’t here to distract me this morning, though, and I released the pepper to the four winds and thought of you. How have you been? But I can’t hedge the question, asking “how are you?” “what’s new?”, when I mean to ask “how are things with The Boyfriend?” I wish you had told me, you know. Incidentally, it hurt me to find out from Miranda that you had officially joined the ranks of Those Who Need to See a Gynecologist, Those Who Take Their Pill Religiously Every Morning, Just in Case, Those Who Are Busy Every Friday Night Without Fail. I suppose I can’t have expected to hear it from you. Miranda’s drawn out “you mean you didn’t know?” wasn’t the pleasantest balm, though, after the wrenching shock she had just inflicted. Shouldn’t have been shocking. But it was.

       You have An Apartment now, and so do I. This at least I’ve heard directly from you. You are living with a friend; I don’t know her and her name lacks an associated personage to affix it to my memory, so in my mind you are cohabiting with a sort of nameless shadow, who has long flowy hair and a narrow waist. The two of you eat tofu and steamed broccoli, go to the gym, scrub under the microwave twice a month with lemon-scented cleanser. At night The Boyfriend comes by, you and he disappear into your single bedroom, and Nameless Shadow only catches a glimpse of his hand around your hips as the door swings shut.

       My apartment, as I’ve told you, as you’ve forgotten, is inhabited by myself and three other girls. They are all colorful characters; we have several outsized mittens and a collection of secondhand foreign novels lying on our couch at all times, often accompanied by a clarinette case, a half-eaten bag of guacamole-flavored corn chips, and somebody’s half-finished knitting. A dusty cactus lives on the window ledge and there are postcards of Frida Kahlo paintings on one wall. We aren’t so much messy as disheveled, though. We clean too, though not twice a month under the microwave, smelling like lemon.

You wouldn’t think, now, that I was once giving you cleaning tips but I did, do you remember? We were eight, restless, at my house on a rainy fall afternoon. My dolls, strewn across the floor, had the slightly distasteful air of yesterday’s underwear, and playing with them seemed suddenly out of the question. “Tuesday I heard Patrick say ‘damn’ during kickball,” you reported, casually. “Well did you know,” I shot back, sagely, needing something Big to compete with the d-word you had just tossed at me, “that if you wash your mouth with soap you can’t say that word anymore? Or hell either.” You didn’t believe me, wanted to know if it was the whole mouth, or maybe just the lips or the tongue, and finally I said I’d show you how it worked. Cautiously you licked the bar of Dove in the soapdish and swilled with water afterwards. “Damn,” you said, grinning, and I stuck out my tongue at you and we went downstairs to play Monopoly.

So I sat at our kitchen table this morning, studying the black pepper against the white formica, ruminating for a moment on the way those tiny grains made matching tiny shadows. One of my roommates sauntered in, red Dr. Martin boots tapping the wood floor, mumbled a good morning as she made herself a toasted raisin bagel, and returned to her music theory. Unbidden, the shadowy pepper grounds turned into a slender back, flounces of orange hair rippling silkily down. You turned around in calculus class to pass me a note, and we both grinned, but when your hair had resumed its place on your shoulders I remembered the touch of your fingers as you slipped the note into my hand, and I had the insane urge to run my fingers through the orange tresses in front of me. I blinked and high school math class turned back to spilled condiments; I brushed off the table with the back of my hand and got heavily to my feet.

You were the affectionate one, do you remember? You reached for my hand in horror movies that left us both shivery, delightfully so as we huddled in the theater together and terrified later as we went to sleep in our respective houses, alone, where open closet doors gaped menacingly and an old stuffed monkey on my shelf never curbed his glassy-eyed stare. You kissed my cheek when I complained, close to tears, that I was practically failing physics, and you grabbed me in a hug from behind as you told me you’d gotten into college, your first choice. I let you initiate these things. Hugs seemed awkward to me: I was always wearing a cumbersome backpack, and where did the elbows go? I savored your fingers as they rubbed my back, your pepperminty lips that brushed my cheek.

It’s a funny word: lesbian. It sounds like some nationality, akin to Croatian or Latvian perhaps. “Today’s news: the Lesbian government has sent troops into Uganda.” It is not a nationality; I am being stupid. It is a word applied to someone who loves a Woman, in the event that Someone is a woman herself. Not loves in the backrub-at-a-sleepover sort of way, or in the holding-hands-while-walking-in-the-dark sort of way. Rather, in the way that makes Someone act, finally, when she knows that the orange tresses are slipping out of range of her fingers, to a school several states away. Someone was overcome; she sat on the Woman’s bed, their thighs were touching, the Woman took her hand as they looked at photos and consoled themselves with promises of long emails and phone calls at least once a week. And finally Someone, after years of incidental stolen delights, stole a delight of her own: wrapped an orange lock around her index finger, guided the Dove-clean mouth towards her own, and pilfered a kiss.

I stood in my kitchen this morning and shook my head, trying to empty it of the persistent memories, wondering if they remain equally clear for you. We had a lemonade stand in fourth grade, on the quietest street in the world; I think we made about eighty cents that day, do you remember? In middle school we would lurk in the drugstore for close to an hour, eying the strawberry-scented lip gloss, trying on the mascara, do you remember? Do you remember the letters written from one summer camp to another, filled with initials that meant nothing to anyone except for the two of us, the precious homework hours spent on the phone, discussing handmade earrings and Willa Cather, the Friday-night sleepovers when we watched movies and painted our toenails gold and read Seventeen to laugh at the dating tips?

I shouldn’t even ask if you remember the Other Things: the way your eyes were smiling and crying both when you listened to my sixteen-year-old sorrows, the times when you stroked my arm, lightlylightly, and gave me shivers, those seventh-grade gym classes when I watched your legs in your grey sweatpants, the orange swish of your ponytail, and realized with a sudden start that I wanted something that I could never, ever have. You do not have these Memories; I know they are my exclusive property, and about the others I need to ask, because I’m never sure. It’s unclear to me how much of our pink-slap-bracelet-macaroni-and-cheese-sticker-collection-vintage-crazed-art-inspiring-sleepover history remains scattered in your head, casting proportionate shadows on your consciousness, because I know there is Something Else in the way. Even if The Boyfriend hadn’t come waltzing in, and the Nameless Shadow with her elliptical machines and fat free cream cheese, and the school several states away, there would still be what I did, casting the largest shadow of all, and I know there isn’t even the slightest chance that you will forget.

 

Author’s Bio: Darya Mattes has a folder full of stories on her hard drive, but this is the first one that's been exposed to the world. She graduated last year with a B.A. in anthropology and history from Cornell University, and she currently lives and works in Washington, DC.