Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

— Joseph Cornell’s notations for “Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall”

Three in the afternoon. Half the day buried away. Ruth’s days off always oppress her. The realm of choice paralyzes her. To sleep is to choose neither life nor death.

For now, Ruth submits to nothingness. My Sleeping Beauty. She lies in bed still and flat, frozen before an unopened day. Slowly she will thaw. If she moves some spell would be broken. Not a muscle twitches except the delicate fall Rise! fall Rise! of her breath. She has a talent for staying completely immobile for hours, Lot’s wife willing herself into salt. Outside her shell she can make out theslamofdoors theblurofhairdryers thepaddingofstrangefeet.

Housekeeping! Thudthudthudthudthud. Ruth resurrects herself. Can you possibly return in thirty minutes? Please? she cries muffled from underneath the enormity of her buried world, trying to mimic the smoothness of normalcy, the Please? ringing out high and trembling. The terror has seeped into the cracks.

No reply. THEY have left. THEY will return. Some days she doesn’t let THEM in at all but she has no choice today. She has no clean towels left.

Ruth struggles up and out of bed, capsizing her duvet to the floor. Her bed folds out of the closet. As she swings her legs around to get up she bangs into the chair at her schoolgirl desk. She turns the light on, blinking through her blonde hair. She feels dull. Life-hungover.

Her rented room glares at her with its palette of anachronistic greens — chartreusepuke and another shade she cannot place. Pale cucumber, perhaps? Avocado? Some vegetable?

So this is London. This, this is London. A room with four walls. Four smudged walls of moldy green.

The bedsit is housed in an all-female boarding house near Paddington Station. All foreigners and new arrivals. They travel in cliques divided by country, like the Olympics. There are the Spanish girls flipping dark locks zipping up tight designer denim, the French girls sleek like horses swinging expensive purses, the American girls who strut in tight velour sweatpants Greek letters smacking their derrieres. The American girls who will come home from their time abroad with the itchy vaginas of venereal disease and a life-long weakness for fish and chips. At night Ruth listens with growing hatred to their giggles, to the rumbling of manicured feet, cotton in between toes, up and down the hall, their self-delighted promenade.

It is now 3:30. Her headache makes Ruth feel childlike and melancholy.

In the tiny kitchen with tangerine walls, Ruth pours water out of the faucet into the kettle and makes herself a peanut butter sandwich. She forces herself to eat. She feels faint, not of this world. The kettle whistles asthmatically while she chews her sandwich at the little sink, staring into an empty alley through the window. She gulps down a cup of tea. The wet teabag in the sink lies there like a dead mouse.

Her head still throbs. Ruth rifles through her purse buried in her bed for her drugs — packages of aspirin, or whatever they call it over here, that pop out through the tin foil. She finds only the shine of empty gum wrappers.

She checks her voicemail, mechanically. No New Messages, the efficient English phone voice. A female voice. Some days hers is the only voice Ruth hears.

The only one who ever called her was the occasional, impatient Hello Ruth It’s Your Father. I’m Returning Your Call. Or texts from Agnes, the Australian girl who lives down the hall.

She pulls on yesterday’s ensemble pooled on the floor. Hose damp with sweat. She sniffs at her nice black blouse, her only nice black blouse, purchased from the sales rack at Zara. Her nose pricks an overwhelm of worksweet.

Oh to be polished, a seamless image, a film still.

Her mother in her fur coat. Like someone from New England. Regal. Special. Untouchable. Her mother always perfect, an indestructible fortress. Ruth knew all of her outfits, knew their translation. The permanence of her gold jewelry. How cold it was, how heavy, like a lead weight. Her hands so cold. The smell, the taste of her lipstick. She never appeared to sweat. The dust of loose powder. She was allowed to kiss her goodbye, briefly, at the waist, when her mother went out. Never Mommy. She did not want to spoil her hair, sprayed into a helmet, unmovable, the impression she brought into a room. She wished to arrive unsullied. Even when they were in the same room she always appeared like a photograph, a screen of gauze Ruth could not penetrate.

In the aftermath of her mother’s death Ruth felt free, terribly free. Like an umbilicus had been snapped. A weird phrase flits through her head. I am an orphan, not quite. Her loneliness contracts, filling her like a well.

Perhaps without a mother one can no longer be young.

Her head throbbing, Ruth stumbles to the loo, as she had started to call it, preferring the elegant simplicity of it to BATH-room or WASH-room. She brushes her teeth while sitting on the toilet, a trickle of warm against her inner thigh, leaning over to spit out the icy blue froth, holding her hair back in a ponytail, taptapping her brush against the sink. Another knock on the door. Housekeeping. The voice is not English. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Just five more minutes! She must put on her armor. She must put her face on.

She gets out her makeup bag, which she rests against the faucet. Her sole purchase from Liberty, with its vibrant print of pinks and oranges. She paints her face carefully today. She paints her own blank slate. The process soothes her. Gray eyes open wide, pouting into the smeared mirror, she powders her face. Swishswishswish. The pale beige powder spills onto the white porcelain, making muddy water when she turns on the faucet.

She paints her blank canvas of a face. Grinning like a grotesque clown, she dips the same brush into a compact of blush — an angry pink — and smooths it on her cheekbones, rubbing away the two mannequin dots that form, up, up, towards her temples. Opening eyes widewider, she applies mascara. The trick is the mascara. She sculpts her lashes. Up, up, up. Her doll eyes lend her the look of the permanently startled.

The final touch. The lips. With a brush, she dabs on the wad of gooey pink lip gloss, the faintest pink, and dots her lips. She looks at the glass. A girl smacks, smiles back. A polished surface. She is airbrushed to perfection.

She looks happy.

Happy. The word echoes back. Happy. Happy. Happy.

She ties on her Sonia Rykiel striped dark blue trench coat (bought with her discount at Horrids), fits her black beret over limp blonde hair hurrying past her shoulders. Her dark uniform. The trappings and suits of woe. As if to offset her youthful glow. Ruth finishes off the ensemble with her black plastic Jackie O sunglasses to protect herself from the glare, of the sun or otherwise. Her sunglasses slide on her head. We see her in profile.

As she closes her door, she sees Agnes coming out of her room down the hall. A girl like Agnes spends the entire morning putting herself together. Or putting herself back together. Agnes did not wear clothes. She wears a costume. Green girls and their costumes, their trying on of brazen identities. Some green girls very in vogue wear cigarette jeans, but girls like Agnes and Ruth only smoke cigarettes. They are the type of green girls to model themselves on La Nouvelle Vague , they are new and they are vague. They are the type to wear skirts and dresses with stockings, a specific classification. Today Agnes is wearing a tight cherry-red cardigan and a vintage mustard yellow A-line. A darker mustard trench coat. Enormous sunglasses engulfed her face, as if to cultivate an air of mystery.

Out last night? Ruth asks. A feather voice. She hasn’t yet practiced her lines for the outside world. The answer was always yes. She is just trying to make conversation. Balancing her large purse like a piece of luggage (only the necessities!) Agnes rummages around, emitting annoyed noises. Gawd I got so pissed four pints dunno how I got home. Ruth smiles her small way, saying nothing.