Susan Steinberg - Spectacle - Stories

When the plane crashed, I was all messed up.

For years, I was all messed up.

I could see the scene inside the plane.

I could see the scene outside.

And I had thoughts of flying.

Then thoughts of falling.

Then thoughts of crashing to the ground.

There was a time I thought of other things.

I could become so gripped by things.

Like for a time I thought of underwater.

I mean I was gripped by thoughts of being underwater.

Because my father once said, when I shouldn’t have been listening, What if all the earth’s water were drained.

Because my father once said, when I was too young to deal with it, It would be wild.

He said there’d be ships and planes and cars and bodies.

It made me afraid for years.

I was afraid to drive across bridges.

I was afraid the bridges would collapse.

Then the car would sink.

The car would slowly fill with water.

And my body would fill until it burst.

For years I would replay this scene.

Until there was another scene.

And then it was this other scene.

And the words they used to describe it.

And the girl I knew who was in it.

She was coming back from study abroad.

I was not allowed to study abroad.

This is not the time to talk about this.

This is not the time to talk about me.

But my father was to blame for this.

My father preferred I went nowhere.

And I went nowhere for many years.

At some point I got over it.

Because at some point I had no choice.

Because one gets older and one has places one needs to be.

So I bought a ticket to be somewhere.

It doesn’t matter where I was going.

What matters is I was on a plane.

I was in the air.

The flight attendant was at my row.

Her skirt made a sound like paper.

She said, Are you all right.

I knew I didn’t seem all right.

And I knew it was wrong not to seem all right.

Because my father was often not all right.

And I took after him in many ways.

No one wanted to see the ways in which I did.

So I pressed my face to the window.

I could see our shadow on the backs of clouds.

It was perfectly plane shaped, our shadow.

And as we went higher,

And when our shadow was smallest,

And when there was no shape, but just a point,

And when there was no point,

The flight attendant said, Are you all right.

She was wearing too much makeup.

It was orange and stopped where the face stopped being a face.

There was a time I wore too much makeup.

It was sophomore year I wore too much.

It was part of my performance then.

I was not a nice girl.

I was a very nice girl.

I was not very nice.

There was a way I was.

There was what I wore.

And I danced wildly for the guys I liked.

I danced obscenely one could say.

I was just a bit obscene back then.

By which I mean my needs were just a bit obscene.

It was something one didn’t fully get over.

It was something that came from being a girl.

So there was no point in her asking, Are you all right.

The right thing to ask was, How can I help you.

The right thing to ask was, What can I get you.

The right thing to ask was, What exactly do you need.

It was hard to know exactly what I needed.

There were too many things going on.

There was my body inside a plane.

There was my mind inside my body.

And the mess of that.

Listen.

Sophomore year was years before.

I hung out with the girl back then.

She had two blond streaks.

Her initials were G.O.D.

I thought at first she would be too cool.

But she was not, as it turned out, too cool.

She was cool, but it turned out I was too.

Because I knew how to be from watching girls.

And I knew, as well, from watching guys.

There was a way they stood there.

And the girls just stood there.

And what they wore.

We knew what to wear.

We wore schoolgirl skirts from the Goodwill.

We wore guy’s sweaters and black tights.

The Goodwill was on the corner of North and Harford, and no one wanted to be there.

People went there because they were either poor or cool.

The poor people bought serious clothing.

We watched a woman buy a wedding dress there.

We weren’t laughing as she held the dress up to herself.

We weren’t laughing that she was by herself and holding up this tattered, yellowed dress.

We were poor too, but we were not the kind of poor that counted as poor.

We were the other kind, the student kind.

We were the kind that bought shit fast, then ran up North.

North was dangerous for girls like us.

There were no trees.

There was endless brick.

There was broken glass.

There were car alarms.

There were guys who wanted to fuck you up.

They wanted to get you hooked on things.

We were already hooked on things.

We weren’t hooked, but we were something like it.

The guys said, Sister.

They said, Let’s see that smile.

They said, Let’s see that ass.

They said, You make me hard.

We said, Fuck you.

We had other guys.

We had guys we liked.

They were students like us.

They lived in small apartments like us.

They took useless classes like us.

We took philosophy because they took it too.

Though we didn’t understand philosophy.

We passed notes in class on how bored we were.

And how hungry we were.

How over it we always were.

Nights, we all went to the bar.

We got fucked up and stood around.

There was a guy at the bar we didn’t like.

He called himself the mystic.

He wore a hat made of old socks sewn together.

He was an asshole, this guy, and only he called himself the mystic.

We called the guy the misfit.

He would put himself into a trance.

We called the trance the so-called trance.

We tried to ignore him when he rolled his eyes back into his head.

We said, So what, when he predicted things that didn’t matter.

Like what song would come on.

Or who would walk through the door.

And the misfit would say some shit to us.

Like fuck you or something.

And the girl and I would laugh.

But this was years before and who cares about this asshole.

Let me get back to the subject.

Let me get the subject back.

The flight attendant.

I have lost her orange face.

I have lost the papery sound of her skirt.

And the look she gave.

She needed me to seem all right.

And I wanted to seem all right.

But I was thinking the scene I often thought.

And thinking the words they used.

They described it as a fireball.

They described it as a spectacle.

I didn’t know how to deal with it then.

I tried to deal with it then.

I tried to deal with it by going nowhere.

That was my father’s joke.

I would stop by on my way to class.

I would bring him things to eat.

I would watch him lying on the couch.

I would stand there waiting for something.

I was always waiting for something.

And my father would say, Get over it.

You need to get over it, he would say.

You need to get over her, he would say.

Then, Where are you going, he would say, as I turned to leave.

Nowhere fast, he would say, as I opened the door.

He would laugh his ass off from the couch.

He loved his joke.

But the real joke was I would return to him.

And I would return again.

I would return again.

Until there was nothing to return to.