Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

I opened my door quickly, checked under each bed and behind the shower curtain. The linoleum in the bathroom was rolling up in the corners and the tub had a greasy film. The carpet in the main room was bright red and riddled with a constellation of cigarette burns. There was no window in the back, just an old air conditioner jutting from the paneled walls. There were paintings over the beds of ghost ships, and near the TV was a pressed-wood table and a dresser that matched. The sound was off on the TV. The place reminded me of a porno movie with the red bed and creepy light. The anxious face of the TV announcer spoke emphatically, then the picture switched to footage of a mother helping her children put on gas masks. I flung myself down on the bed, and with my fingertips rubbed at the tense muscles in my neck. The woman on TV sealed the door shut with electrical tape and put a plastic cover over her baby's crib. The announcer spoke silently and then they showed the enemy capital, bombs bursting over its domes and onion-shaped towers. I made myself imagine the people there who were dying, the way their bodies would be twisted, the sounds in the streets. The horror. The TV flashed black planes and white missiles and grainy footage of a bomb hitting its target like a video game. A cat outside started to cry. I closed my eyes, but all I could see were the headlights from my rearview mirror. I pulled the bedspread back, pulled off my shirt, unlatched my bra, but left my pants on, and pulled the covers over me. I kissed my pillow and pulled it into my chest like a lover.

I couldn't sleep and ended up thinking back on all my men. I hadn't been a nice girl, but it didn't have anything to do with sex, more to do with lying. With each man I acted identically, like a ritual. I started by alluding to our life a few years ahead, then ten, then twenty. I'd joke about our children's names, tell him what a feisty old guy he'd be at eighty. It would escalate, we'd speak of buying houses together, joining bank accounts. When I got pregnant once, I'd kept it secret, then aborted. Sometimes someone new would lead me to break it off so quickly and absolutely the guy would be dazed, even shocked, as if I were insane. One man broke into my apartment and read my journals, ripped the crotch out of all my panties. Another followed me across the country, appeared with flowers and a new car begging me to run away. But I had already started up with someone new, was telling him my sad childhood stories. Saying, We wouldn't raise our baby that way. For me a relationship has never been possible unless it was going to end in marriage and children and forever. My heart beat furiously, I cupped my tit, pressed my fingers against my breastbone so I could feel my heart heaving up into my palm. The woman in the next room was talking and I imagined myself snuggled between the lovers in that spot between his warm belly and her smooth back, the lattice of her spine. It was so comfortable there that I soon fell asleep.

A car engine woke me in the deepest part of the night. I went to the window, saw the back lights of the van, the lovers curving down the bluff toward the highway. The TV had changed to bright vertical stripes. I saw my body in its light, my skin was looser than I remembered. It seemed incredible I'd been a baby, that my body could have a child, that someday I'd be old and that someday I'd be dead. I turned off the TV, remembering the sensation of being between the lovers, realized how precious two bodies were when warm and settled side by side.

IN THE MORNING IT SEEMED CRAZY I WAS ON THIS PILGRIMAGE and at around ten when I saw the lovers’ VW van parked on the grassy shoulder I decided to stop, parked my car, sat inside for a moment. Mounds of moss-green water moved endlessly toward the shore. When the waves rose up and thinned I could see black seaweed inside them like my glass paperweight with the rose encased inside. I walked out through the long grass, down the rocky incline to the water.

I knelt by a tidal pool. Starfish clung to the bottom, radiant in shades of purple and fuchsia. I picked one off a rock and was surprised at its fleshiness. There were sea urchins, too, and a luminescent seaweed. As I reached down to touch those slippery strains, I saw the lovers clung together. Surprised into stillness, averting my eyes, I was like a deer that hopes incomprehension and inaction will render it invisible. One time I was with a boy on a river bank when car lights flashed across the water and illuminated my body. It was a familiar female equation, abandon changed quickly to shame.

My foot slid forward several steps on the slimy rocks. She was on top with both hands on the ground, so all I saw were the man's quivering legs and her humping ass. Their intensity made me conscious of the blood moving through me and the geometry of my bones. The waves seemed far away like the ocean heard in a hand-held shell. It was creepy the way I had tracked them.

The women turned her head and saw me. Her eyes were obsidian and lips bluish and pellucid like a shell. She turned back to her lover, sunk into his chest and gave him a long openmouthed kiss. The lovers seemed a natural part of the scene. It showed me how freakish I'd become. The sensation terrified me and I ran back to the car, revved the engine, skidded onto the highway and drove toward L.A.

ON THE EDGE OF L.A. I STOPPED AT A GAS STATION, BOUGHT A map and asked the mechanic if he would show me how to get to the church. He drew a twisty blue snake that curved as I did now through the canyons. To either side stood single-story homes with lots of glass, additions like robotic arms jutting from the back. The yards were neatly overgrown, voluptuous with palmettos and bougainvillea. The church stood on a cul-de-sac overlooking a highway. It was a sprawling single-story complex that contained a bowling alley and a health club. On the wall nearest me was a mosaic: L.A. Jesus, hair blown back, lips parted. The highway below hummed, and though the sky was blue, the light was dusty and brownish yellow, making the church look barren and radioactive.

I hadn't slept much last night, and the wedding was still several hours away, so I bunched up my coat and lay over the front seat. At first I thought of the lovers. Death, actual or metaphorical, was the logical conclusion to most love affairs. The only other alternative was some sort of permanent unity, that's why I had to speak with Kevin. I thought of this L.A. suburbia. . shot in the arm with Hollywood's cash and confidence. . the highway lulled me, sounded like water, like rain. I remembered when I was a kid, the deep hole in my backyard. There was water at the bottom and I would squat on the lip, listening to the sloshing echoes, watching the light on the water like a black mirror. I heard a car engine start down the block. My mind drifted up, floated like a piece of paper to a hill where I used to sled. I was wearing a green prom dress, one I knew from a picture of my mother with a boy named John from West Point. My mother wished she had married that boy. My grandmother told me that when he heard she was serious with someone else he came down from school and they sat on the back porch. John told her it didn't matter if they raised the kids Catholic, the kids could be Protestant, but they should get married. “It's been settled,” my mother said. “I'm going to be a minister's wife.” The taffeta chafed under my arm and I was in Dolores Park on the hill above the tennis courts. At the bottom I could see my house in Virginia, my mother in the front window, all dark except the TV's blue light showing the outline of her slip and her beefy legs folded under. I started to run, hoping the wind would pick me up. This seemed perfectly possible. The smell of grass was everywhere and wood smoke too, and the world was a ragged strip of green to either side. My feet were just lifting when I saw a pale-haired minister in a black suit and clerical collar. Instead of a Bible he was holding a Playboy magazine. I rose up again, heard the cars on the highway, moved my shoulder which was getting stiff. The minister spoke: “Love is a rare possession, almost inane and unnatural these days. It is associated with pleasure, but it is no stranger to pain.” His whole face caved in and I took his hand and was surprised that my own wasn't an adult hand but the babyish one of a five-year-old. He told me jealousy was really the dark twin of duty, that he was so jealous, he looked through the dirty laundry, checking his wife's underwear for sperm stains. We walked into a pine forest, the rust-colored needles snapping under our feet and the evergreens swaying like hay fields. “And forgive those who have trespassed, those who have lusted, those who have lied,” the minister said and he looked at me then. His eye sockets were empty; I could see straight through his head to the green trees. I loved the man because I knew he held a little chapel in his heart and then suddenly I was inside. The air was humid and beyond the stained glass I could see blood moving in patterns like water. At the altar was a bride and groom. Even from behind they looked familiar, it was my parents, flushed, stupidly happy. A convoy of trucks down on the highway rocked my car and I woke. There was organ music and when I lifted my head I saw the sun setting, and that I was surrounded with cars, that the bride was standing with her father just outside the open doors. She was lovely in her creamy satin gown, light glinting the beadwork on her train. Her father, a thin terse man who reminded me of a general, took her arm under his. The music rose louder and they stepped into the church. I thought of my mother's voice saying I was attracted to the same kind of bums as my father, “You'll be dumped at forty-five too.” I watched the last bit of white lace slither inside and someone's hands reach out and pull both doors shut.