Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

I can’t help it. It makes me laugh. All those spoons with their heads bowed like dutiful fucked up silver nuns. I reach down into my kneesock and pull out the spoon I nearly always have with me. Against my skin. I hold it up between us. On the convex side is my elongated spooky looking head. On the concave side is hers. We both smile. Alike almost. Only my smile has paper where teeth should be, like when you put an orange peel there. I bend the head of the spoon over and hand it to her.

“I’ll treasure it,” she says, maybe kidding.

I turn back to the mirror. I spit the crumpled up $1.7 mil out of my mouth into the bathroom sink. I uncrumple it. I stare at it in the sink. It’s damp, but salvageable. I don’t mean the check just. I mean my life.

“Happy birthday, Dora,” my mother says, as she almost seems to move toward me kinda like we might embrace.

HOSPITALS. FUCK’EM. I’VE HAD MY FILL, I CAN TELL YOU.

Same creepy fluorescent lighting, same odd assortment of losers waiting in earth-toned little hell rooms, same bizzaro industrial floor cleaner smell mixed with sweat and blood. Flocks of fucky doctors and nurses milling about. Ave Maria is sitting across from me in a — you guessed it, Naugahyde chair — swinging her legs up and down. Little Teena is thumbing through an issue of American Sailing . I’m making my signature fingernail patterns in a Styrofoam coffee cup.

We’re waiting for Marlene to come out of surgery. They won’t let us anywhere closer because we’re not family.

There’s a lot I could tell you about that word family.

A month after the Holiday Inn episode me, Ave Maria, and Little Teena ate lunch in the restaurant on top of the Space Needle. Courtesy of Ave Maria’s mom. All three of us high as kites, higher even than the Space Needle. Ave Maria pitched bites of food with a fork over her tipsy mother’s head, Little Teena wore a fez, Obsidian ordered some dessert on fire and for the first time I noticed that the view up there? It’s kind of awesome. If you walk around the thing in a circle, and you can avoid the freaky vertigo because of the slightly-slanted walkway and the ever-so-slowly-spinning disk, it’s downright gorgeous. The sound. The mountains. The city. All the neighborhoods and sigh and bulge of life.

I ordered lamb for lunch. I’ve never eaten lamb. I feel bad for eating baby sheep but FUCK it’s good. Like melt-in-your-mouth good. And after two martinis, who gives a shit about PETA? It was kind of a going away party. Ave Maria is going to Yale. You heard me. What? I told you they were rich. I do wish I could plant a nanny cam in her room just to see how the snooty snoots react to her. Little Teena got a paid gig down in San Francisco to tickle the ivories at a gay jazz club. I know! Life is good.

About our … teen drama, well, I already told you: wigs, work. No one ever had any idea who we were. Or are. There is not surveillance camera footage. No evidence we were ever there. Except some cockamamie story the three men who were arrested told.

The three stooges, A.K.A. the publicity agent and his goons, were arrested for attempted kidnapping. Turns out Marlene was in the trunk of their car. When they ran out that night to chase us and discovered the Obsidian-slashed tires, Smiley called the cops from inside the halfway house and enunciated perfectly into the phone that three perpetrators who had killed the intake guy at the halfway house also had some big black tranny in the trunk of their car and they were trying to escape. “Murderous perverts,” Ted kept saying into the phone. “Preying on helpless trapped children!” But when the cops arrived, Smiley just went back to his tard shtick.

There was no record of Obsidian ever having existed.

Someone in the hospital waiting room farts. I look at Little Teena. He nods his head up and down in the universal yup,’twas I gesture, then says, “Why does everything about sailing sound like gay sex?” He looks up from his magazine. “Check it: able bodied seaman. Aft bow spring line. Anchor ball. Anchor chocks. Barrelman. Back and fill. Bimini top. I mean Christ, it sounds like some kind of SM play party.”

Ave Maria laughs like a shy little girl and covers her face. Then she goes, “Whoa,” solemnly. She holds her arms out in front of her. Her wrists have brown and yellow and blue bruises on them. Faint, but there. From me. “Aren’t those the coolest bracelets in ever?”

I love her I love her I love her.

I look down at my dirt water coffee cup. In spite of myself, I’ve carved a fingernail heart.

Obsidian and me, we’re having an A-frame built in the woods near a crazy lesbo aunt she has who got booted off the reservation for constantly beating all the men at poker and making her own peyote-laced hooch. I don’t mind telling you, that hooch is tasty. And whirly. We might expand that into a business.

I’d tell you where exactly but frankly I don’t want to talk to people much for a while. It’s near the Nisqually wildlife refuge though. Bats, rabbits, beavers, bears, foxes, coyotes, salmon, harbor seals, and all manner of birds … I had no idea how cool animals were until I met them. The wingnut lesbo aunt, who isn’t wingnut at all but we help her keep the story up — she gave me a present. It’s a sealskin hat. It kind of looks like a union soldier hat only you know, seal skin-y. She says the seal is my animal totem.

Animal totem, huh? I knew a guy once who told me all about totems … what’s your feeling about rats? Crazy lesbo aunt said they were sacred but gross. I said, well is there some kind of ritual or prayer thing I should do? Can I switch being from whitey space city and become part of your tribe? She looked at me like I was a tard. “This isn’t fucking Dances with Wolves , kimosabe, but it’s a good hat in the rain,” and she laughed, and I laughed, and Obsidian laughed, and we drank whirly wine and can I just say, laughing is cool.

As for my girl wall story, well, I remixed it and turned it into a bitchin’ little art installation called: “Dora: A Headcase.” You have to enter a Dora room lined with pink plastic and vag fur and Vaseline in order to experience it. When you get inside, the walls are words. There are stories about everything that’s happened to me in my dumb little life. There are lines from sex books and lines from bands and lines I collected in bathroom stalls all over the city. And letters to Francis Bacon and even advice here and there to Sig, like “Sig, you gotta decrease your douchehood next time you get a girl client.” On the ceiling of the girl room is a film with the most bitchin’ soundscape you will ever hear in your life playing in a loop. The sounds of boots on pavement and wind and rain banging the cord of a flagpole. The sound of dog breath and Lexus engines and bum pee and violin concertos all mixed together. Ave Maria’s high notes and things waitresses at Shari’s yelled at us and falling glass. The sound of water. Of a metal bar rolling on the concrete of a parking garage. Birds and electricity hum. Sound is everywhere besides in your voice.

I won a buncha arty awards for it. Very cool.

The hospital waiting room smells like air freshener and hand sanitizer and plastic valves mixed with Little Teena’s fart. Ave Maria stands up and says, “I’m going to sing a hospital sex change song!”

Some old bag walks by right when she says that and makes a raisin-faced grimace at us.

“Bite me,” I say. The old bag shuffles away like someone bit her ass.

“Good christ,” Little Teena says, and goes back to his magazine.

Ave Maria paces in tiny circles with her eyes closed, humming to herself.

I reach inside my Dora purse and turn on my H4n. Little Teena rattles off sailing terms.