Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

Abar, her father would have said, where there is no shame in ordering a scotch. Where a person could smoke a cigarette unmolested. But there were none, and Mina instead wandered into the old Paramount studio store, where in a montage of lightning edits — color, hand, pocket, money, color, exit — she quickly bought an armful of expensive cosmetics. A teal eye powder. A tiny brush to apply it. A waxy-smelling lipstick in a blue red (Caput Mortuum) made for black-and-white photography. Translucent face powder, loose, of course, and the fluffy real-horsehair brush to apply it. A bottle of Red nail polish. A concealer stick, in Bisque #9, Medium Fair. She left quickly, buzzing with the secrets of the universe in her paper bag, followed by, within seconds, dire regret. She opened the bag, there on the sidewalk, out in the sunlight, and stared at the Red nail polish, all wrong, really, the polish — actually a Midwestern near-red, sort of weathered-barn colored — not what she wanted at all. She stood there, dismayed by her failure to even address the shelf of red nail polishes — the Original Real Red polish, so close to Raven Red and Scarlet Red but darker, oddly, than Carmine Crimson Red — how she avoided the issue altogether, just grabbing Red, not even Simple Red, and of course the polish would never be exchanged, but tossed in a drawer with thirty other nearly perfect unused colors, until it became old and its chemical components started to separate, all the colors finally turning into an umber-orangey rusty red topped with a pool of murky colorless oil. She would just have to wait until she could devote the time, until she felt up to determining which, finally, would be Rita Hayworth Red. She barely resisted the urge to toss the whole bag of cosmetic purchases and go back in, to do it right, microexamine the red polishes, head back in there and trial-and-error the whole row.Spend hours on it. But instead she ambled in a zigzag on the pavement, staggering vaguely away from the place, her head looking back while her body went forward, nearly stumbling into a young woman approaching her, unexpected and unnoticed, seemingly curb-sprung, touching her arm (touching her!) on the sidewalk.

“Excuse me, ma’am, may I have a second of your time?”

Mina felt the inexplicable but undeniable horror of an unseen stranger putting a hand on her bare skin, her forearm. She jerked her hand body-ward. At a sideways street-wary glance the woman seemed a beige sort of person, not brunette but simply brown haired, her whole body exuding a monochromatic nylon Nude- or Flesh-colored drugstore stocking shade (bagging and bunching at the bone-apparent knees and ankles). Her imprecise, maybe-young body was all forward leaning, both slender and awkward at once. The girl nevertheless held herself with a rigid, remarkable poise that must have required exuberant discipline. Her brownesque look was clean and groomed — it wasn’t fashionable, but it at least required effort to produce, at least conveyed some self-attention. Mina continued walking — she didn’t like being called ma’am. She didn’t like looking at this girl, either.

“Please, ma’am, just one second,” she said, and Mina again felt the girl’s hand touch her arm. It made her jump, this aggressive yet barely there cool hand touch. Mina’s body already transformed by adrenaline, she turned hard on the girl, fit to bark or even yell. It came that easily — her urban-accessed rage, huge reservoirs of hostility at the ready, induced by a touch or a wrongly chosen noun.

“What?” Mina said, and the sound of her own voice animated her. She felt the word shape itself in her mouth, the wayher body almost shook on the stop of the t. She knew she would repeat the word, that she would enjoy hurling it at the girl, the huff of breath moving the w over the h. Only in a certain volume and intensity could you hear and feel the near hiss of the middle h. “What?” she said again, and the girl did not recoil or back off, but instead met her look and returned it.

“You feel anger. You feel fear. You jump when you are touched.” The girl’s eye contact did not waver. Mina made an audible inhale, looked away, and an audible exhale. These days, on the unwalked streets of this place, mere attention and description, mere articulated detail of attention passed for brilliant perception and near extrasensory abilities. People so unused to being addressed by strangers that simple exposition was wisdom. She sighed her boredom, shook her head, but exaggerated it.

“You have heard of St. John Solutions?” the girl asked, pamphlet-proffering, now losing the eye contact. The glinting, glossy pamphlets — vitamins, holistic therapies, meditation, massage therapy, aromatherapy, past-life therapy, empowerment workshops, colonic irrigation, self-actualization, life counseling. At St. John Spirit Gyms. Mina had of course seen them everywhere. Little sandblasted glass-fronted places, in plastic-colored blue and that franchise drywall white. Even Lorene now went to St. John Ataractic Asepsis Therapy twice a week. At her hairstylist’s suggestion. Her hair and skin texture apparently indicated pathologies. Deep cosmetic pathologies which, evidently, were never merely cosmetic, but cosmological, in fact. Mina shook her head and started to walk away. The girl continued speaking.

“What you most want to run from is where you should go. Ask yourself the following questions: Do you feel anxiety aboutthe decisions you have made in your life? Do you have difficulty sleeping? Do you have occasional vulvic itching? Do you feel fatigued? Has your skin lost its resiliency? Do you suffer from inability to concentrate? Do you crave sugar? Do you sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it any longer?”

Mina, for the first time in ages, wished for a car, a rolling up of windows, a radio to blast.

“Do you feel a longing for home? Do you suffer from yeast overgrowth, chlamydia, urinary tract infections? Do you feel you’re entitled to more? Do any of the following describe you—”

She walked quickly and heard the girl’s voice gradually fade.

“—lonely. Full of rage. Hypervigilant. Bipolar. Bruise easily. Sensitive to household products. Addicted to television. . alcohol. . the Internet. . prescription drugs. . junk food. . illicit drugs. . shopping. . OTC drugs. . sex. . plastic surgery. . herbal dietary aids. . psychotherapy. . sleep. . cigarettes. . working out. . caffeine. . Visine. . foods containing MSG. . self-improvement therapies. . foods containing aspartame. . twelve-step programs. . foods containing Olestra. . thrill-seeking of any kind?”

Of course, the car radio was where this St. John guy lived (or flourished, an opportunistic fungus or virus sprouting great flora of new growth, the oxygen-deprived, exhaust-basted brain cells of all those traffic-ensnared captives waiting to be contaminated). But — Mina had to consider — maybe they had something. Maybe she had something. Candidiasis. Opportunistic microorganisms.Undistinguished vaginitis. Couldn’t her illnesses at least be distinguished? She felt a longing for cures. It was part of the siege of local optimism. A belief that nothingis irrevocable, nothing couldn’t be solved, answered, and quickly, too. It was the schizophrenics, or schizoforensics, of this utopia/dystopia place — things deeply, pathologically wrong, but instantly and infinitely remediable. She enjoyed this kind of self-obsessed hysteria as much as the next gal, but the aesthetics of it, the strip-mall franchises, the slogans, the girl’s panty hose — how could Lorene, Lorene, even consider? Then there was the unfortunate thing about confidence men who truly believed what they said. The unbearable sadness of it not being true.

Mina was behind now, she would barely have time to get ready for work, she’d have to call Lorene from home and tell her she’d be late, again. She hurried along the long stretch past Hollywood Memorial Cemetery. Ask, go ahead (no one did)— Cecil B. De Mille and Jayne Mansfield were buried there, sure, but everybody knew that. But she knew Tyrone Power, Norma Talmadge, and Marion Davies. Clifton Webb (she used to know them all), Dabney Day, and Virginia Rappe. Famous dead people and people famous for being dead. It had amused and pleased Jack that she remembered these names. The more obscure, the more her father laughed. She knew, eventually, them all: Westwood Memorial (Marilyn, sure, but also Donna Reed, Natalie Wood, and Dorothy Stratten), Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills (Stan Laurel, Ernie Kovacs, George Raft, and Freddie Prinze), and Forest Lawn Glendale (Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, Alan Ladd, and Tom Mix). Mina still could recall all of the names, though none of that mattered now.

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