Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

She feels an immense violence stirring inside of her. She looks and looks in the mirror. She cannot find herself. She feels somewhere deep within a desire to cut through that glass, that image of herself. To explode outside of her small space. To destroy it somehow. To purge herself, cleanse herself, this creation, this product of others’ eyes. To be wiped clean.

That itch, that desire to cut off one’s hair, one’s prize of ribbons, one’s fire escape of femininity.

The green girl needs to externalize her own suffering. This is how she will wear her grief.

Or maybe she is just bored.

Or perhaps I am operating the strings. Perhaps I am directing this scene. Ruth is my silent film star, always silent on the outside even when she is screaming within. She is my Falconetti playing Joan of Arc.

I make my green girl kneel. I am the harsh director. She begs and pleads: Please don’t make me do it but there is a clause in her contract. I am reminded of the Barbie dolls that I played with as a young girl. I would perform the cruelest acts on my lovelies. I would behead them. I would cut off their hair to make them look like Ken. I would sentence their bodies to various torture machines. Perhaps writing for me is an extension of playing with those dolls. Ruth is my doll. I crave to give birth to her and to commit unspeakable acts of violence against her. I feel twinges of joy at her suffering.

She looks at herself in the mirror. She looks at herself. She cannot break through. She stares at the haircutting shears resting at the sink, which Agnes uses to cut her fringe as well as her trim (brown as a mouse). She stares at the scissors and wills herself to pick them up.

Suddenly she picks up the scissors from the sink, grabbing a chunk of her hair. It does not cut as easily as she imagined.

She picks up the scissors and carves away at the girl with the blonde hair in the mirror.

She tears into her hair. She cuts and cuts and cuts. Clumps of blonde feathers come out in the sink. Her gorgeous virgin hair.

Is it masochistic? An act of self-flagellation. There is a finality to it. To cut off one’s breasts in one mean gesture. To surrender oneself to vague and distant eyes. To say. This is the new me. I have been born clean. See my face. I wipe the paint from the mouth of the pretty girl. Wipe the paint from your mouth. This is me. I have no shield of feathers to hide behind. I am ugly and true. I have cut off my lovely, my darling. Cut it off. Cut, cut, it off. I stand a monument to pain. I stand naked to this world.

When Mia Farrow cut her hair off, Salvador Dali called it “mythical suicide.” What happens to a woman when the eyes are no longer on her? Is that in a way a tiny death? Or a sort of freedom? The locks shorn off. Is one unlocked? The rape of her locks.

Now, a close-up on her face. Her face haunting, haunted. The tears begin to tumble out a torrential rain.

Although she is sobbing still she attacks her hair. More. More. After a few minutes of frenzied ecstatic cutting she examines herself. Hanging onto the porcelain sink stained like dried blood with Agnes’ hair dye, which tilts as she leans.

First the dread sets in. She begins to grieve her hair with genuine sorrow.

She lays herself down on her sea of clothes, her own chalk outline. She spreads her arms wide, a banal crucifixion. Oh, she is ugly. She is ugly, ugly, ugly.

O the horror the horror. And nothing to be done.

Then she curiously feels calm. And numb. And her head proud and cold, like a Greek statue. Like she is wiped clean.

Finally Ruth manages to rouse herself. She showers and dresses in an armory of black wilted fabric. She cleans and powders her face and surveys the damage. She combs what was left of her hair carefully. She painstakingly applies her makeup, taking no pleasure, no love, in painting her face. It is her mask to shield her from the day, the world. Two dots of pink blush on each cheek, a stroke of black mascara, a protective coat of pink lip gloss.

Finally she picks up her phone. Almost coolly, calmly. The mask back on. She schedules an appointment with a salon down the road.

She stumbles out a fetus into the cold air, her beret covering her science experiment. The salon is off a side street on Brick Lane. She opens the glass door. Bored swiveled eyes, returning disappointed.

Hi, I’m Ruth. I’ve a 2 p.m.

A gangly boy stands up from his previous place lying down on the sofa covered with customers’ coats. He wears black sweatbands on each wrist. She follows him downstairs to a room of lonely disembodied sinks. She lays her head back onto the hard curve, her legs sticking out. The hose rushing out too hot, too cold, just right. The water swishes in her ear. When he touches her hair, tears come to Ruth’s eyes. It feels like so long since she had last been touched with purpose.

Big plans for tonight?

No, no. Just staying in. Soft, breathy. She couldn’t remember how to talk, how to socialize outside of her head.

Cool, cool. She struggles up. He dabs at her with a cheap white towel, which he arranges around her neck. Like a boxer between rounds. She follows him, fragile and exposed, up the winding stairs, nervously nodding to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

She follows the boy to a chair. There is no mirror. He fits her around the neck with the uniform black shroud. He nods at the stylist, a bored-looking Scottish woman, and returns to his post, body down on the sofa.

Tried to cut your own hair, hmmm? She lights a cigarette, running her hands through the damage, lifting up a black cowboy boot to pump her up higher in the air.

Yes. She has turned to stone. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

It looks terrible, doesn’t it? Ruth then gulps. She can’t see herself. How does she know that she exists if she can’t see herself?

The woman shrugs. What were you trying to do? She is wearing tight black jeans, from which a pouch of white flesh spills out.

Have you seen Breathless ?

Nope.

Jean Seberg?

Suck, exhale, blank expression. She places her cigarette in the filled ashtray. It simmers along with others extinguished and estranged.

I thought it would be freeing. (I wanted to be clean. Wiped clean.)

Eyebrow cocked. More flipping through hair, looking to see how it falls. She was a woman of few words.

Just don’t make me completely bald.

The woman snorts. You did a pretty good job of that yourself. She lights another cigarette.

You want me to take it all off? Like short short?

Yes. Yes. Take it off. Take it all off.

She shrugs again.

Ruth busies herself with a magazine on her lap. Flip flip flip. Beautifulwomenbeautifulclothes. Everyone in the magazine has long hair. Long, long, lovely hair. She feels fragmented. She forgets who she is. She forgets who she was. Filled again with that destructive sense of want. Of want and can’t have. A damp blonde rain falls onto flaxen-haired maidens in party dresses. They are all lying in a bed of hay, as if they had accidentally fallen there. Ticklish, Ruth’s hair sticks, to her face, her lips, her lap, the girls’ pouty faces.

The whiz of a razor being applied to Ruth’s neck, to the sides of her head. She looked at the woman next to her. An older woman with silver foil in dark wettened hair. She overhears her talking to her stylist, a boy with a rat’s tail down his neck and tight jeans. Ruth can make out snippets. I suspect. I suppose. Oh dear.

The whir of hairdryers.

Ruth relaxes into blankness. She turns into a stone statue.

Whaddya think? Hand mirror handed over.

A more glamorous alien blinked back at her. Her eyes were planets.

Big beautiful glassy eyes offset by a startle of lashes.