Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

How come when people talk of death or dying, they look up? she thinks. Like they’re hoping to find the belly of some traveling hotel? She thinks that perhaps people need to visualize something. It eases them to imagine heaven as a sort of extended holiday. She is beginning to think that people tell themselves fantasies.

But what is the alternative? she wonders. We are born, then we die. Nothing else? Nothing, nothing else?

Sometimes she needed to shudder out loud at night, a quick lunge of air, in recognition of her own mortality.

What do you think happens afterwards? she asks Agnes, who is dyeing her hair back to an orangey-red. The rickety white sink in her room had become permanently dyed with the black and red splotches of an abstract painting. Ruth is sitting on Agnes’ bed, smoking out the window. Smoking was something to do. Every time she struck a match she could imagine that first cell of terror forming until it grew and grew and became her. And still she kept smoking, filling up her chest until it felt tight.

What do you mean afterwards?

You know, when we die.

Oh I don’t know. Agnes has wrapped her hair in a towel and is now plucking her eyebrows.

How could you not think about it? What else is there to think about? Agnes shrugs.

To avoid thinking about anything they watch Stage Door . The boarding house of actresses remind them of their Hell, complete with terrible food, although the girls skirting the halls in their bathrobes are not imbued with the bon mots of Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn, in the roles of warring roommates.

Hepburn: I see that in addition to your other charms you have that insolence generated by an inferior upbringing.

Rogers: Fancy clothes, fancy language, and everything!

Hepburn: Unfortunately, I learned to speak English correctly.

Rogers: That won’t be much use to you here. We all talk Pig Latin.

(Afterwards)

Agnes (yawning): Aren’t you sick of this place? It’s such rubbish. I feel like I’m going to die here.

Ruth (looking about at the green walls closing in): It’s pretty terrible.

Agnes: I can’t believe we have a curfew. Or that we can’t let men into our rooms. It’s like we’re still in Victorian times.

Ruth: I can’t believe we have to turn in our keys when we leave. It’s like we’re living in a hotel.

Agnes: A hotel. A hotel! An institution with towel service! The women’s ward of Bedlam! (throwing herself on the bed with theatrics that would have made Hepburn proud).

So in December, Ruth moved with an insistent Agnes to the East End, into a shivering attic flat on Brick Lane above a curry restaurant. There was one large room in which they both slept, Agnes in the bed and Ruth on a mattress on the floor, a creaky bathroom with the sad absence of both a bathtub and hot water, and then a kitchen off to the side. Out of the kitchen window Ruth could watch men in shawls walk with canes down the cobbled street or stand outside their fruit stands and video stores, conversing with the evening rush. Bengali men stood outside the neon signs to beckon people into their restaurant, bartering over Londoners who had arrived already loud and inebriated in black mini-cabs. Ruth referred to them as the callers. Sometimes as Ruth walked home from work, a caller would keep pace with her, as she repeatedly shook her head no. No, she was not interested in having a lovely dinner tonight. No, she didn’t care if it was half-off. They were worse than the flierers in their persistence.

Many evenings Ruth had the flat to herself. Agnes usually out, somewhere. Sometimes Agnes would not come home until the next morning, when she would then try to interest Ruth in her stories of her snogging and shagging, which Ruth thought should be sounds zoo animals made.

In the evening when she would get home from work she sat on a stool by the windows and watched the goings-on like a film unfolding. Relaxing into the stoic pose of the observer. She would smoke and watch the world go by. She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.

I was never anything to you, was I? Nothing, nothing at all.

On Friday and Saturday nights sometimes fights would break out among the inebriated, and from her privileged distance she would watch the violent pantomime, their silver-haired landlord talking to the bobbies when they eventually arrived. Sometimes people would glance up and see her watching them. She appeared to be quite deep in thought, but actually she wasn’t thinking of much at all.

Sometimes her mind was completely vacant. Sometimes no one was at home. The only thing she could mourn was herself.

40 percent off, 50 percent off, Half Off Half Off.

40 percent, 50 percent, Half Off, Half Off, Half Off for you nice ladies tonight…

Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection. Outgoing was much more preferable.

Usually they met up in central London, near Agnes’ work, teeming with rabble-rousers standing outside pubs beer in hand pouring down cobblestones occupying bored queues at cashpoints. Or they went to dark places in their new neighborhood, a complex web of alleys and streets Ruth had not yet tried to learn. Agnes could never understand why Ruth refused to go back to that pub with the bartender. That was the scene in which to be seen. You are terribly BIZ-arre Ruth, she would whine, but Ruth remained intractable.

Agnes needed to wash away the grind, the coffee grinds and molesting eyes of the masses (she preferred the molesting eyes of the select chosen few). Drinking was the best way to wash away CoffeegirlAgnes, who was different than AgnesAgnes. CoffegirlAgnes wore a different costume, it was a mandated uniform, which is such an insult to Agnes because Agnes is an individual. Ruth was the ear to Agnes’ steady stream of complaints as they pounded down the cobblestones.

It was starting to be cold outside at night. Cold and gray, always gray. Ruth sometimes needed the realization of her embodied air, that blow of frigid smoke, to remember that she was still breathing. Ruth kept one hand in her pocket, since she had lost one glove, gloves that she had bought at Horrids with her discount, nice inky cashmere gloves. It made her upset to even think about that lost glove hiding in some dark alley, cold and alone, without its twin. Agnes wore a vintage orange belted coat that exactly matched her hair, with a shaggy cream fur collar and identical shaggy fur earmuffs, her hands hanging raw and pink. Black chipped nail polish.

They sit and wait. They warm the backs of bar stools. What are they waiting around for? They are waiting around to be discovered. In the meantime they order drinks or have drinks bought for them. They start getting drunk. If she drank too much then Ruth would wake up and the only pain she felt would be the indeterminate pang to her head, comforting in its constancy, evicting all other thoughts that dared to enter except the banal necessities of the present. And when Ruth drinks then Ruth can be brave can escape outside of herself.

They put on a show. The show that green girls know so well. Posing for the invisible eye. They wait for their photos still wet touch don’t touch Ruth is laughing in every frame drunk drunkener than drunk drunk Agnes is serious poised she knows how to pose for her picture she knows her good side.

They are at a karaoke bar. Agnes has dragged a limp Ruth onstage. Agnes wants them to sing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” (Right.) As Agnes writhes about on stage, on her knees, Ruth stands in the back and giggles, swinging back and forth, back and forth, a drunken metronome. Agnes is front and center and Ruth is off in the corner she is just laughing laughing laughing her throat open, head thrown back she is laughing so much she can’t stop she can’t stop stop stop. (But later lying in bed that’s not how it works out. Ruth is the star moaning into the microphone she is the seductive kitten and HE is standing in the back, behind the crowd, watching her. HE only has eyes for her.)