Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

Such a haunting, vacant quality.

Repent! Repent! drones the street lunatic into his bullhorn at Oxford Circus. He is at his usual perch at the top of the stairs descending to the tube, signaled by the red, white, and blue circular target. As she walks by him she averts her eyes so as not to be trapped within his prophecies. For the wisdom of paltry things, he is saying. Ruth turns on the cobblestones towards Liberty.

Her eyes linger on the roses outside the doorway, lovely lavenders, perfect whites, almost a velvet cream, heartbreaking reds, as red as Chanel’s lipstick. Drenched in this lavishness, Ruth feels almost intoxicated with Technicolor, like Dorothy in the poppy field. She sees herself as a beautiful girl smelling the beautiful flowers. She savors in this image. The girl in front of the perfect roses dotted with raindrops. Shiny eyes. Shiny lips. A perfected surface. A cosmetics ad.

Ruth shakes herself out of her reverie and makes a right into the scarves department. Like a museum flooded with light where you can touch and wear anything inside. She finds refuge in these sacred spaces. The rows and rows of perfection, an experience approaching transcendence. Her temple of intoxication. Immersed in the glow of thingness. Everything so beautiful, a beauty so acute it brings tears to her eyes. A little girl in a candy shop (no calories!). She loves the geometry of the rows of wallets in leather goods, separated by every color of the rainbow. The purses lined up like surrealist houses.

She fingers the silk scarves, ethereal butterflies, and picks up a pink felt scarf whimsically looping it around her neck. Pink so pink it isn’t pink almost purple. Ruth loved color so much she rarely wore any. Except on her face.

A saleswoman swoops down on her. Very nice, very pretty, she croons. She has a foreign accent. Perhaps from Eastern Europe. She wears a blue silk scarf knotted around her neck like a cowboy. Ruth admires the woman admiring her in the mirror. She is overjoyed that she is kind to her, so overjoyed she is tempted to buy anything she asks of her, just so she continues to talk to her. The saleswoman shows Ruth how to tie it correctly around her neck. Perfect for you, because you’re so young, she says. Ruth smiles, savoring the compliment, and gingerly removes the scarf.

How much?

50 pounds. The saleswoman senses, smells Ruth’s hesitancy.

Oh, you should buy it. She says encouragingly. She plays maternal.

Ruth folds it regretfully back on the table, her hand still petting it like a cat. I love this store, she blurts out to the salewoman.

The woman smiles, tightlipped. She is not as nice anymore. Americans usually do, she replies.

Ruth teeters hesitantly up to women’s fashion. Shoppers clomp down the other direction on the wooden stairs, clutching their purple bags. She is aware of the watchful eyes of the pretty clerks, all outfitted in various black frocks and standing in languid poses. They are beautiful racehorses. It is a race they are clearly winning. Despite this evident superiority, they are not cruel to her. They smile. They see her. She smiles back, grateful.

These assaults of casual perfection in the form of the shopgirl. The leggy peroxide blonde with a soft doe face. Everything she wears is perfect — it makes Ruth itch. The blonde seems to have fashioned herself entirely out of a film from the French New Wave. How studied is it? How many hours does she take preparing herself for the outside world? Today she wears a black cape, out of which peek lovely wrists. She could be a model. (What is a model a model of?)

Ruth strolls around the racks, reaching out here and there to finger a pleat or stroke a soft cashmere. She lovingly touches these garments she cannot possibly afford, separated by color like a fresh box of crayons. A shiver of delight with each touch.

The leggy blonde is conversing with an Anna Karina type, hair long and shiny like a shampoo ad. The two shopgirls squeal and look admiringly at each other. They are each other’s mirrors. They trade in compliments about each other’s daily costume, the false currency for the green girl. I love that. One of them says. That is just darling on you the other says.

They are conversing about a film based on a novel one of them had seen. I don’t like to read books. They’re too depressing one of them says. I know what you mean the other one says.

They are waiting for a woman to come out of the changing room. She is modeling a blouse for them. Not a blouse but a jumper. It is bright blue. The two salesgirls gather around. Arms crossed as if studying a painting at a museum. There is strength in numbers. I love the color on you. One of them pipes up. It is so you. The other in melody.

Ruth’s eyes lock onto a dress, hanging up on the rack almost insouciantly, so aware it must have been of its hold over her. A little black dress. Everyone needs a little black dress. In every closet there must be that little black dress (do you have your LBD?). It’s on everyone’s must-have list.

The dress speaks to her. IT says: Those who wear me live another kind of life.

Is that me? (Who am I?)

Is that me? (Who do I want to become?)

The dress is giving Ruth an identity crisis.

She approaches one of the salesgirls, clutching IT. IT sways in response, chuckling maliciously. May I? she asks timidly. Voice soft as a breath. She is nodded into a changing room. Soon comes a swift knock. Come out let us see. Ruth opens the door hesitantly. She is naked and exposed. She allows the eyes of the shopgirls to feast on her. She offers herself up to the world.

The two clerks swarm around. Oh, you look like a little Parisian girl! they purr. Ruth beams, swimming in the attention. It’s…. One of them pronounces the designer’s name knowingly like a secret password. It tells a beautiful story the blonde says knowingly. Ruth lovingly cradles the dress in her hand. For a dress like this she is willing to offer up anything. First-born. Soul. Self.

Although it costs two months of her earnings, she puts the dress on hold, vowing to herself to return to at least visit it again although she knows and they know and she knows they know that she cannot afford it. She hardly has enough money to eat. But who needs to eat when you can wear a dress like that? Ruth thinks. Anyway, food gets digested, food goes away. Useless practice. But a dress like that will be forever. A sort of spiritual nourishment, just as fundamental as eat and roof and breathe.

Her perpetual list of wants and can’t-haves. To want. To lack. To have a hole.

She is enflamed with Desire. Oh, the pain of true love. She deceives herself that this is what she needs to be complete.

She hears a voice from deep within. The arsenal of voices telling her to buy the dress. Buy it don’t think. Buy it. Buy it. It is so you. It enhances your personality. It makes you more you than you were before.

But it is an impossibility. Oh she aches she aches her soul aches. She walks out feeling like a shadow of self, shabby, ugly. Oh, the hunger, the hunger. My hunger artist. Always starving herself.

My hunger artist her art is herself she is fast fasting away she would like to disappear.

Why shouldn’t the flâneur be stoned?

— Gail Scott, My Paris

Stumbling outside, Ruth is hit with the cold and the swirl of the crowds. She hears the preacher again.

For the witchery of paltry things obscures what is right, and the whirl of desire transforms the innocent mind.