With tongue.
She pulls back. Slaps me a hot one. I smile. The lingering taste of salt and apples … at least to me.
“That was entirely inappropriate,” Peppina says, her slap hand on her heaving bosom. Such a harsh voice for a vixen.
“I’m going to speak to your father,” she says as she lurches up and toward the door, “your … problems are worse than even I understood.”
Exit a vixen, stage left. I gotta confess. As she’s walking out my teen door? I watch her ass make its beautiful up and down flex with each step beneath her … what do you even call black pants like that? Vixen slacks? I’m pretty sure I can see wetness in the dark space under her ass and between her legs.
Let’s make that shopping date, sister, I go.
In my head I mean.
The second my dad’s ho is gone? I shove my bed against my bedroom door. I shove my dresser across the room and dump it onto the bed for weight. I unplug my TV and put that on the bed too. Then I dismantle all the floor-to-ceiling two by fours from my homemade studio and jam the two by fours between the bed and the walls. I step back. Vaguely the whole shebang looks like a spaceship. Also I superglue the doorframe in the knob area. I figure I’ve got twenty-four hours tops.
To make this room into something they’ll never forget.
26.
ON THE WALL OF MY BEDROOM, WITH MY PURPLE SHARPIE I write “Aphonia.” I draw a big bald girl head with an open mouth around it. I give her very long luxurious eyelashes.
Aphonia literally means “no voice.” The Sig taught me that.
On the other side of my bedroom door the bamorama has begun. It’s them. The first round of parental pounding on my door. The first round of “Ida? Open this door, please.” The first round of my father the alien and his ho bag red head. “Ida, you’re going to have to open this door. Ida, this is not appropriate.” The next “Ida” I hear? I chuck my digital clock at the door. As it flies in the air I see 9:31 p.m. tumbling in space. The thunk stuns them for a minute. I hear them muttering gibberish in whispers on the other side of the wood. Then someone tries the doorknob. Rattlerattlerattle. SUPER GLUE. Tards.
My ass buzzes. Whoever it is can suck it.
If you google Aphonia and check out the Wikipedia page you’ll see all this crap about how when a person with Aphonia prepares to speak, the vocal folds, which ordinarily come together and vibrate, don’t meet. Yeah vocal cord banging is how talking happens. With Aphonia, there’s not banging. So you are soundless. Aphonia can be caused by injury, but also by fear or trauma or stress. What I’m saying is, you could, you know, go voiceless from just being fucked up. Like me.
I retrieve my Zoom H4n from my Dora purse. I put it near the door and turn it on. It’s definitely sound I want. Their idiotic door poundings. After tonight I’m never going to have to listen to them again.
I rummage around in my Dora purse for my Swiss Army Knife Elite. There’s some crumpled up paper in there. I uncrumple it. Ah. Failed test from school. At school they make us memorize the capitals and main domestic products and political systems of Iceland, of Yugoslavia, of Rwanda. They give us tests with maps that are only the black and white outlines and borders of so-called countries. We’re supposed to fill in the names. Write down the data. In the place where Rwanda is I wrote “Marlene” in red. That’s the only word I wrote. I failed most of my tests. Tests are for pussies.
I lean on the wall I’m writing on. I think about Obsidian incarcerated in some retarded lock-down halfway house for teen fuck-ups. I think about me barricaded in my room. What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl. I draw an outline of a girl on my wall. I give her straight swaths of deep purple hair. And a little necklace with a sharp shard dangling from it. I write “Cuntry.”
Ass buzz. Fuck off.
Boom boom boom and Ida Ida Ida at the door. Ida this and Ida that. I grab my Mac mouse and hurl it as hard as I can at the door. For a second I feel bad for it and think I hear a little yelp. But no, it’s just Peppeleptic making woman noises.
I wonder where voice lives in a body. Is it in the throat, where the flaps pound each other to death, making us think we’ve got important fucking things to say? Or is it in the mind, where thoughts crash crazily into each other pinball-y and dinging, until they slide down the chute and out the hole and into the world? Couldn’t voice come from anywhere?
For a bit there is silence at my door. They must be going for help or some kind of … sledgehammer.
I lay down on my bed to rest from the writing. I finger my Swiss Army Knife Elite. I choose one of those littler blades. Without needing to look, I point it straight at my face. With one hand over my Aphonia mouth I carve a tiny smile on my chin. I smile a wide chimp smile. The little carved chin cut stretches and oozes. My soundless mouth above my tiny bleeding mouth. I touch the tiny carved smile with my thumb and smear the warm wet there and put a bloodprint on my wall. I, was here. Then I suck my thumb.
I roll over and off of my bed and down to one of the last corners of my wall without my life story on it. I write, “Dear Francis Bacon: the best canvas is the body.” I mean, I’m not Francis Bacon. I’m a girl. For sure I can’t paint, so I’ve had to use my body for most everything.
I stare at my girlwalls.
It’s taken exactly seventeen purple Sharpies to write my girlstory on these bedroom walls. In the dim light of my orange and purple lava lamp the words make the walls seem to pulse. All those words. I can almost hear them. Nearly no blank wall space left.
I’ve got until ten p.m. to finish writing and filming this. That’s when my ride arrives.
Ass buzz.
I drop to my knees. I smell my sharpie. I close my eyes. I remember when I was five my mother sat me on her lap while she played fronz shoe burt. I know because she said this is fronz shoe burt. In my head I repeated the words fronz shoe burt. I pictured a guy named burt with beautiful hair and shoes. Long fingers. Even at five I wanted to die sitting in her lap, inside music and the smell of her motherskin and her breasts against my back.
Sitting here huffing my Sharpie on my knees I don’t want to open my eyes. Yeah, I know.
It’s Schubert.
Badaboom. A more potent round of parental authority pounding at the door. Jeez, is that a baseball bat?
Failing.
To.
Penetrate.
I have this weird urge to write Siggy a special note on the wall. Who the hell knows why. It makes my skin itch. Like I owe him a solid one or something. Something like “Don’t shit yourself Sig, no way am I giving your wang movie to the slickters.” Or “Sig, dude, do not surrender to the Vipermedia Asshats! Resist!” Or maybe what I really want to tell him is “Um, brainbuster? Next time you work with a female? Ask her which city her body is. Or ocean. Give her poetry books written by women. Like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and H.D. and Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson. Let her draw or paint or sing a self before. You. Say. A. Word.
But I don’t write any of those things.
I don’t have to. My window is talking. On the other side of my room, tapping on the window that leads to the fire escape, hunched over like a little gargoyle?
Is the Sig.
27.
WITH THE MEMBRANE OF THE WINDOW BETWEEN US, I put my hand on the glass and look down at him. His breath is fogging up his side of the window. “Can you hear me?” he shouts.
I nod.
“I’ve been trying to reach you!” he yells.
I don’t move a muscle. I stare at him.
“Can you please open the window?”
I am a girl statue.
“Ida, for god’s sake, can you let me in?” he yells at the glass.
I fog my side of the window with a few big breaths. With my finger I write backwards: tell me your dreams.
I watch him read it and then begin to curse. The guy truly has a case of Tourette’s. How does he get on in regular life? Talk about bord
erline whack job. I erase my question with my elbow and refog a space. With my finger I write: your desire is for your mother.
He pounds his hand against the glass pretty hard and hurls some obscenities, but really, he’s just an old guy hunched on a fire escape talking to a minor’s window. If a cop drove by? He’d be so busted. I’m no psychologist, but I know crazy when I see it. It almost makes me like him.
Behind me there’s more commotion. It’s possible they will find a way to break in. I cross my arms over my tits. I take a huge breath. I let him in.
At first he’s all flustered from trying to cram his old man balls body in through the fire escape window. But then I get a good look at his face and he looks like utter shit. His eyes are outlined in red and he clearly hasn’t slept in a good bit of time. And he’s a map of facial tics. He’s … well, my diagnosis? He’s coked up to the nines.
“Thank god I found you at home,” he sputters all out of breath, his hair even more cuckoo’s nest than I’m used to. “I know. I know,” he continues, “this is highly unusual, but…”
Um, unusual? Fuck yeah times ten. Once he’s in, he shuts the hell up and stares at my walls.
I stare at him staring at my walls. I follow his head as he moves close to one wall, tilts his noggin to the side, stretches out his hand, touches some words. “My god,” he whispers.
But then his shoulders jump and he sucks in a wad of old man air – it’s the bedroom door banging again.
“What on earth is that?” he squawks.
My choices for communication at this point are rather endless. I’ve got enough technology in this room to run a space station. In the end? I decide on the simplest thing of all. “DAD” I write on the palm of my hand, and point it at him. Then I walk over to my desk and grab my laptop. Something tells me this is a sit down. I sit down on my bed. I put the laptop on the bed. I pat the bed on the other side of the laptop and smile.
Sig coughs.
The door pounds.
I open a Word doc. I type, “S’up, doc?”
“Shall I speak?” He asks. His hands are shaking like vibrators.
I shrug. To me, it no longer matters where the voices are coming from. But I do think it’s interesting he decides to enter the word.doc.
“Ida,” he types.
I immediately snag the laptop back and tap out “I prefer ‘Dora.’”
He stares at it for a second, then types. I can tell he learned to type way back when typewriters existed from how his fingers form into mostly his two forefingers and his hands lift up too high from the keyboard. Almost like a two fingered pianist. Look at him bang away at those keys. Also he looks a little insane. Why do old dudes always look insane? When he finishes, he hands the laptop to me.
“I lied. About your case study name. The truth is, my sister’s nursemaid had to surrender her name when she entered our family. Her name had been ‘Rosa.’ Rosa was my sister’s name. Unless she surrendered her name, she would not have the job. She took the name ‘Dora.’ When I needed a name for someone who could not keep her real name, ‘Dora’ is what came to me. My unconscious motivation, I suppose.”
I pluck out a few words in response. “You are one fucked up little dude,” I type back and hand to him. I grab the laptop back and type, “So the fuck what?”
Then he types “You know what I want. I need the video. I’m being hounded like a thief day and night from the media people. If they get their hands on it … my life is ruined. I must have it.”
“Asshats,” I type.
“I need that video. Or I need it destroyed. In my presence,” he types.
I stare at the Word doc. The curser blinks its vertical little sly eye.
Then his hands lose motor control and he resorts to speaking. His voice sounds like a skipping record. “I don’t … I have to … LISTEN … it’s important . . .”
I mean wow. He’s the epitome of lost his marbles old man at this point. He’d be totally right on a dirty street corner downtown asking for change. His pupils look like they are about to dart out of his eyes. Grownups really could use some advice on drug use.
Then there’s a WHACK at the door that sounds like someone’s skull cracking open. I look at my bedroom door and I’ll be goddamned if whatever they hit it with didn’t make – you guessed it – aVAG crack.
The Sig nearly falls off of the bed, then jumps up and addresses the door, arms akimbo.
“Now see here,” he booms at the door.
“Who the hell is in there?” Pepperoni shrieks back.
“Dr. Freud,” Sig answers with authority, suddenly realizing how weird it is that he’s actually in there with me. He shoots me an uh-oh look. Like I’m supposed to know what to do.
“What are you doing in my daughter’s room?” My father says in a raised octave voice. It’s the voice of a half-father. Weak and distant and heart attacked. I feel a pang of something for him inside my ribcage. Once there was father, wasn’t there?
“Now just ease up a minute,” Freud stammers. “I can assure you, I’m here to help. I’m a medical professional.”
I look at my Sig reasoning with a door. Arms akimbo. Really. You crawled through the bedroom of a minor because you are here to help? Dude. You are so busted! I’m smiling ear to ear, my freshly-cut chin smile no doubt dribbling blood.
The Sig turns to me and hunches his shoulders and leans in. “Listen to me,” he whisper spits. “I don’t have time for this.” He grabs my arm pretty hard. I look down at my arm where he is clutching it. “Sorry,” he goes. “Just, for the love of christ. Give me the video, and I’ll help you get out of here,” he pleads. “What’s wrong with your chin?”
He’ll help me? I stare at him inside the womb of my room, chaos all around us. You know what he looks like? He looks like what Heidi’s grandpa would look like if Heidi’s grandpa was a coked up loony begging for a fix. I type one last thing on the laptop and turn it toward him: “Dude. You are a coked up old man in the bedroom of a she-minor. Wake up.”
All kinds of hell is happening on the other side of my bedroom door. It sounds like the opposite of family. I look at my half-smashed upside-down digital clock on the floor. It’s about a minute to 10:00 p.m. My ride, I suspect, is here.
Sig’s whispering gibberish and chasing me around my room while I pack up. I put my H4n into my Dora purse. Along with my Swiss Army Knife. Vicodin. Speedies. Then I walk over to my closet. I rummage around in the shoes I never wear and all the crap that’s down there – dirty clothes and dust bunnies and dead batteries and cig butts – in a box in the corner under all that is a trusty tin of lighter fluid and matches. Without even looking at Sig I stand up and point the tin of lighter fluid in his general direction.
“Christ!” He shrieks, and jumps back and away.
Tard. I roll my eyes. Holding the tin at hip level I shoot it at my computer. I shoot it all over the floor. I shoot my spray all over the walls, my bed. The smell of camping. Or a family bar-b-que. My eyes water.
The door is banging and lurching.
Sig is backed against the far wall.
“What in the name of Christ are you doing?” he goes.
For a Jew he certainly mouths the word “Christ” a lot. What is up with that?
I light a match. I light the matchbook on fire. I throw the flaming matchbook onto my bed.
Instantly there is a bed fireball. Our faces light up and heat. It’s really quite stunning, in a pyro pretty kind of way. The flames make their way out like fingers tracing the lighter fluid paths I sprayed everywhere.
As the room gets hot as shit I stare at Sig. Right that second? He mirrors me. We have the same look on our faces. The look of “why?” The look you have your whole life, I think. Sometimes words are irrelevant.
But time’s shrinking. Things smell like burned apples and synthetic fibers and circuit boards. Sig yells something incomprehensible and drops and rolls. Smoke stings my eyes and skin. My technology begins to crackle and pop. The purple words all ove
r my walls seethe.
For a tiny moment I consider grabbing his arm and pulling him toward the window … but you know what? Fuck the Sig. I’m so outta there.
Halfway through the fire escape window, with the Jag, Little Teena, and Ave Maria in sight there on the pavement below me, my bedroom door says one last thing that shocks even me. A booming voice, a voice filled with something from before I was born. It’s not my impotent father. It’s not Pepperoni. I turn and look back toward the talking door, Sig’s deranged little body on the floor behind me just over my shoulder.
“Open the goddamn door you piece of shit pervert,” the voice booms, “or I’m gonna blow it to smithereens!”
Sig remains grounded on the carpet in a coughing fit.
As I clamber down the fire escape toward freedom I realize whose voice was at the door. Late, but not never.
My mother’s.
28.
WHEN SHE OPENS HER APARTMENT DOOR, MARLENE wears a black Nike warm-up suit and bright purple Nikes. Bright purple nails. Bright purple eye shadow. She brings a big black Nike sportsbag with everything else we need into the kitchen.
First things first: the wigs. For Little Teena, A.K.A. “the caseworker,” a man’s dago number with mutton chops. And a furry black mustache. For Ave Maria, A.K.A. “the distraught sister,” an Alice in Wonderland complete with baby blue headband. Eerily wholesome. And for me, A.K.A. “teen gone wrong,” no wig. My hair has hit the length of girls who cut their own hair short in little self-destructive hacking motions. I look exactly like a girl who fucked up her own head and life. I don’t need a wig. I’m perfect for me.
We could SO be on an episode of The First 48.
Ave Maria rummages around in the Nike sportsbag looking for extra “disguise” crap. She pulls out an eyepatch. “Can I wear an eyepatch too?” She straps it on. Now she looks like a pirate Alice in Wonderland.