Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

Her stomach cramps and rebels. Nausea. Ruth hurries to the toilet and surrenders to a quick sick. Groan. Knives. It is that time. Again. The red mixes in with the brown, a filthy paint.

The toilet will not flush. She pushes on the silver lever, up and down, up and down, a performance of futility. She sees her pale reflection in the silver, hovering, hovering over herself.

On her day off she decides to get her nails done. The Horrids holiday party was coming up, and the temporaries were invited. This is now occupying her thoughts. She wanders into a place in Covent Garden past the billboard for The Lion King , the musical, past the cobblestoned street of cobblers kebobs fishandchip shops, near mannequins posed and doubled over in the windows of Zara’s and Marks and Spencer’s.

Pick a color. A casual order. Her choices are a garish pageant of metallic purples or reds, then a parade of Easter pastels. She thinks about asking for “Tiger Red” because she just saw The Women , but only Agnes would understand that joke. She can’t decide in time so settles on an innocuous enough clear varnish.

I’ll just take this.

The girl looks at her puzzled. A gold chain dangles in between her deeply tanned breasts. She is already cotton swabbing cold on each of Ruth’s fingers. Ruth’s nose pricks with nostril-flaring chemicals.

Ruth remembers accompanying her mother to the salon as a little girl, a warm place where she could run around slipping on wet curls blanketing the floor, her mother waving under a hot-air helmet. The feel of her gold wedding ring, a comforting heaviness, when she held Ruth’s hand, careful not to smudge her nails freshly painted coral, which Ruth would stare at transfixed. Sometimes the manicurists painted Ruth’s and her sister’s little nails, hard squares of chewing gum. Ruth always wanted the shiniest. Hot pink covered in rainbow glitter.

No color? The girl looks curiously at Ruth.

No. Just clear.

The girl shrugs.

There were certain ritualized movements Ruth was expected to perform when accepting a manicure that she did not know, or always forgot, planting her hand in a clear bowl of lukewarm soapy liquid post-file, tickling the stones at the bottom, holding out her hand for the obligatory up-to-the-elbow massage with a cheap peach-scented lotion, her arm instead flopping like a fish back down to the dishtowel-covered table. Her hand arches a scared cat’s back as opposed to calmed flat, a willing accomplice. Relax, the girl scowls. She kneads Ruth’s arm angrily, pulling at her knuckles with a smack.

They both keep eyes glued to the monitor overhead blaring music videos. An anonymous boy band, grunting and posturing. Followed by an anonymous girl band, grunting and posturing. Then the libidinal cooing of the singer whose perfume Ruth pushes onto the masses.

Ruth wonders what it would be like to be a manicurist. She thinks about it and can only conjure up Deneuve in Repulsion . Or the girl in that Godard film who is doing the nails of Juliette who is a prostitute, and turns out to be one as well. Then that scene in which the two of them walk around naked with Pan-Am bags on their heads.

All right — expert shake and twist of one last bottle, brushing on the final coat of wet. Fifteen minutes to dry. The girl gets up and leaves, snapping her gum one final time.

Ruth sits alone at the table, fingers fanned out, staring at her hands.

Afterwards she wanders around the high streets to look at dresses. A desperate, heated search. But what she is searching for is something elusive. Changing room of Topshop. Cowboy boots fitted over tight jeans walk past. She hears the meaningful clink of bangles. The swish of skirts worn by girls dressed as gypsies. Ruth stands in the changing room, in her bra and cotton underwear from Marks and Spencer. She surveys herself. She turns to the side and studies herself in profile.

Oh, how much it takes to groom oneself for a party she thinks. There are the nails, and then perhaps she should get waxed, her upper lip feels furry, it yearns for that brightening strip of pain. And then she would like to get stockings, gold, silky stockings they sell at Horrids. She didn’t know why she was worried about it. It was a week away. But she would almost rather not go. It was too much effort. To look passable. To look pretty enough. To make sure all the seams lined up and everything matched and she looked as much the her in her mind’s eye as she possibly could. She did not know even who she was dressing up for. So much effort to go through to smile smugly at her mirror reflection. Saying, yes, this is you on your best day.

She puts her clothes back on, and leaves, depositing her dresses in the arms of the attendant.

Outside, a cold slap of freeze. She hears her preacher in the distance, bellowing into his bullhorn:

A life devoted to things is a dead life, a stump.

The eternity of the tube. Pushing down steps thick with bodies, a cattle cavalcade. On the train home: businessmen, emitting beer from their mouths, stench from their armpits, reaching in, holding onto the bars, pressing up against her.

Is this a wind-up? she overhears.

Are you winding me up?

Ruth imagines her fellow passengers crushing tightly wrapped young bodies with that drunken force. Come on baby, just a little more, come on baby, dearie, love.

The camera skirts around the fragrance department, like the device Hitchcock used in Rope . Colored perfume bottles on mirrored trays like little glass houses. Mirrors everywhere. A maze of thickly made-up faces. Mannequins behind glass. Full pouts. Distant expressions. They seem more alive than the people inside. A woman applies lipstick while crouched behind the counter. Another hunches below the till to eat. Another sends a text furtively hands tucked inside her apron.

A roomful of robotic smiles, parroted pleasure. A roomful of automated transfers. There is a glitch in the machinery. One shopgirl asks the customer twice if she wants her receipt in the bag. She has been standing on her feet all day. She is exhausted. The customer, politely, says yes both times. Sometimes there is an attempt at contact. The false compliment on either side of the counter. Nice necklace. Nice eyeshadow. Nice cage you got there. The bubbles of niceness float up, but they are not real feelings. Perhaps people go to a department store to cool the ache of loneliness lingering in their belly. To release the hysteria bubbling up in one’s throat. So lonely, so longing for any interaction.

A close-up on Ruth, my Hitchcock blonde. Who is the girl behind the counter? I wish to know her. She escapes outside of her body and lets it do all the work. She is an automaton. I want to say to her: It must be terrible to be stuck here. I want to look deep into her eyes and say: I see you. You are not invisible to me. I see you. But the girl will smile blankly. Would you like me to pop your receipt in the bag? As if someone had pulled her string. I am just a moment in her day. I am a blip on her screen. Next please next please until it was over and her shift was done and she could die and be reborn. She only exists from the waist up. She is my girl miraculously sawed in half. This was the only world she knew that day. The world behind the counter.