Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

Chicago, Illinois. A man points his fingers at her. He had stopped a few paces away, listened for a moment, with head cocked, then walked back. Ruth nods her head. Very good, she replies politely. He bows, the magician revealing his fluttering white dove, his miraculous girl chopped in half, and walks away.

Ruth feels, for a moment, like Audrey Hepburn selling carnations out of a basket. Was her departed land of nativity so inextricably wrapped up in her identity, coiled to her DNA, that it could not be erased, her roots impossible to escape, even across the world, even when she learned to say things exactly as they told her?

Chicago, Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat. The Carl Sandburg poem she recited in school. All the children giggled at the part where she had to say, “They tell me you are wicked, and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.”

Chicago, where HE was. Where she could never return. Where she could never escape.

I could not leave you. I was trapped. Perhaps I won’t let something go until I’ve murdered it.

The main visitors to Horrids’ illustrious and tacky halls, swinging shopping bags the color of money, riding up and down the Egyptian escalators, were tourists, many of them Americans. The Americans always disappointed to hear a familiar accent. Why, you’re American! They would ring with dismay, as if hearing an American voice come out of this seemingly unperturbed blonde was somehow not getting what they paid for.

She would regard them coolly. I know not what thou sayest. Sometimes American customers would be shocked to discover that she was one of theirs, presuming that her soft careful accent was in fact English. But you don’t sound American, they’d say.

But you’re obviously American, Natalie cried in confusion, when Ruth mentioned this to her. Not all Americans are the same, she insisted, annoyed. Ruth’s accent had morphed and changed until it was not quite American and not quite British. Since she had come to London she was now from nowhere. And when she returned (if she ever returned?) she would be from there, not here. Tourist. She was not a tourist. She was something in-between.

Since fragrance was at the front entrance, Ruth often had to play tour guide. She was always hasty to correct. This is the ground floor here, not the first. It’s Zed, not Zee. A lift, not an elly-vader. These common errors made her twinge with impatience. Sometimes Ruth remained closed-lipped around Americans, when they asked for directions on the street, clutching their foldout map. Then, she would nod and point, preferring to pass, preferring not to invite the inevitable exchange.

Sometimes older Brits would feign interest in her whereabouts. Where are you from, dear? they would ask. From the States, she would say. If they didn’t already know. Oh, that American girl, that American girl. At first they pretended not to understand her and so she was forced to repeat herself, you must speak up, you must annunciate. Which cements your status as child. The perpetual annunciation, my cipher dressed as the Virgin Mary. My stone statue of dove-gray.

She is probed for specifics. Aah, they would say. Chicago. Very cold, is it not? Yes, it is quite cold there, Ruth read from her script. Although most people assumed the United States was one singular group of people. They didn’t understand nuances of city and country and north and south and red state or blue state. They didn’t get that not all Americans are born-again Christians. They didn’t get that America is in the midst of an ideological civil war.

Ruth was on neither side of the war. Yet oh, to be born again. This is what she desires, and every new purchase, every new boy, all of which she imbues with magical properties, a way for her to look at herself anew in the mirror. Like those rebirthing ceremonies in which estranged children, heated pins of violence, are rolled into blankets and the adults sit on the child, simulating a rebirth. That’s how Ruth feels. She feels all this pressure, like she is supposed to be born again into this world, and I’m bearing down on her, and nothing is coming out yet. Not even her violence, which she swallows inside. She senses this world infected with godlessness and emptiness and hollowness. She senses the despair. She would like to run down the street naked and screaming, but she can’t. It would be terribly impolite and improper.

So she swallows it all. She swallows it all deep deep inside.

Filing into lifts to go to the tube, the squealing sound. Cattle being led to slaughter. Ruth’s nervous deer heart beats inside her pale-girl chest. Pushing, Pushing, Pushing. A labor. The lift is a mother-grave spitting out bodies. What if, what if there was a fire or if it got stuck or or…Ruth’s mind imagines all sorts of calamities. But still she remains unlined, frozen. The occasional gasp. They are sardines in a can glaring at each other. At this time Ruth resists the urge to yell Fire! Fire! Fire! The evacuation of the scream stored deep inside. The crowded theater of her mind.

The train roars by, shaking her as she stares at her reflection in the steel rumbling past. Doors opening.

End of an eternal shift: she is laid out in her tiny bathroom her cheek making love to the linoleum floor. Headache again. Body curled like a paralyzed fetus in a porcelain womb.

The green girl likes to watch herself suffer. My icon of ruin.

Dark sets in, dark and blank and cool. Her body a thing. She steels herself from the crash and roar of the train pain shuttling through her brain. Surrendering herself to the sudden suck of nausea, the swims. From the ceiling she watches herself, watches the floor turn.

Don’t move. A whisper. If you move it doesn’t hurt as much. She fights down the words circulating around her skull like a bee. A brain tumor probably a brain tumor she has a brain tumor. Thirty days a month a week twenty-four hours. An aneurysm maybe an aneurysm just like her to get an aneurysm.

Shut it out. She shuts the words out, the unrelenting monologue. A whisper. Play dead and they won’t hurt you. Play dead. She forces her body to go limp, to make herself go blank inside. More words. A line from somewhere. “Pain has an element of blank.”

The words. She is immobile to their force. Around and around in her head. She is dying she will be dead soon. No one will find her for days. The Housekeeping voice the first to break in, dismayed to find a holocaust of dirty towels. They wouldn’t know where she came from she kept to herself mostly she was sometimes with that girl with the red hair, the Australian. She would be buried in an unmarked grave for American tourists.

Or.

She would be sent home a solemn casket a symbol of grief. An open casket, perhaps. So young, so lovely. It’s Best to Die Young and Leave a Beautiful Corpse. Hopefully tasteful hopefully she wouldn’t look too dead or too clownish, like those airbrushed photos at the mall. Whispers at the funeral. So sad So tragic So sudden. And her mother, and her mother, did you hear? Too much loss, she couldn’t take it, died from grief. HE would be there, his eyes swelling with tears, tears she never saw fall on real skin. HE would regret that HE had spurned her, a realization too late, that HE had loved her, that HE had always loved her. Stifling a desire to throw himself in after her, an infatuated suitor once more, to follow her underground, into death.