“Red”

By Carol Guess

I am fifteen and I have no name, but I am learning how to get into a car without showing my underwear to the men surrounding me.

A woman is teaching me.

She has long nails, a short skirt, willowy heels.

"Girls," she says. There are ten of us in beauty school, thirteen to thirty-nine. "Girls, pretend you are surrounded by handsome men. One of them opens the car door for you. How do you enter?"

I begin by imagining the men in great detail. I give them faces and names because one of them might be my husband. When it's my turn, I totter in my spiky heels to the center of the circle. I sit in the passenger seat, my back to the driver, and swing my legs gracefully, torso twisting in sync.

"Now get out," she says.

And later: remember to keep your knees shut tight, like a secret you can't tell. Her nails are red. One of the men I imagine is real. He has a name and a face and a zippy red car. He is ten years older than me, and a bad driver.

After everyone has had her turn in and out of the car, we leave the parking garage and return to the classroom. One by one we strip to our underwear, step on the scale, and sink.

Think about numbers for the first time that week.

When I step on the scale, the women surround me. I feel their stares like heat on my shoulders and thighs. One writes the number in a folder; another tugs on her straps -- powder blue. There is so much lace in the room. It makes me happy. At fifteen I like lace and complicated colors -- mauve, violet, silver. I like frills and words such as "full-face" and "uplift." They assuage my fears that I do not fit in, fears I cannot name because I cannot point to anything different about me. I look like; all the other fifteen-year olds at my high school: thin, diffident, pastel. We are all anorexic and painfully, almost parodically, feminine. We look like drag queens, except for Jessica, a star on the swim team.

She looks like a linebacker.

I avoid her.

My locker is covered with pictures of ballerinas. At fifteen, for reasons I can't explain, I flip through dance magazines, culling pictures of muscular male stars, which I paste carefully over the bodies of Suzanne Farrell, Kyra Nichols, and Heather Watts. When I get to my favorite photo, of Heather Watts twisted into a pretzel, I can't bring myself to cover her with Peter Martins. Instead I leave her, a tiny woman with legs muscled into perfect figure eights, suspended like a question. I also pin up pictures of girls I dance with, their legs twisted into cautious letters. I would like a picture of the man with the red car, but he laughs when I say I want one for my locker.

When he calls, my mother summons me from the bedroom lair where I am sprawled on my bed eating rice cakes and drinking diet soda. She murmurs his name in a studied whisper, but her eyes betray her pleasure. Because I don't have make-up on, I feel self-conscious. I twirl my hair around my finger and shift from foot to foot.

He is a bad driver because I distract him.

At least, this is what he tells me. But when I say sorry, he puts his hand on my thigh and twists the steering wheel in an abrupt, deliberate jerk. He was my brother's babysitter last summer, while my parents were in Europe and I was at dance camp. My brother liked him, his roguishness, the thick shock of pale hair falling over his left eye. They played good games, my brother says -- catch and half-court and Pac Man -- and ate McDonalds six nights out of nine. He was a good babysitter, my parents agree, and when he calls to ask if I want to go for a walk in Larrett Park one Saturday, I imagine we will play good games, too.

Thirty minutes before he arrives at the house, I am lounging in my bedroom, biting my nails and reading teen magazine articles on bulimia. I am thinking about throwing up, how it would feel, what my mouth would taste like after. In one story a girl eats half a cake and two pints of ice cream before she lets the food slide from her gut to her throat to her lips, then rejects it. I love the articles, love the descriptions before the girl vomits -- the decadence of the orgy, the long lists of forbidden foods.

I am daydreaming about ice cream when my mother knocks. She looks startled to find that I am in my nightgown. Her whole face contracts into a clock. "He'll be here in half an hour," she says, folding her hands over and over. They look like water as she waves me into the bathroom, as she sits me on the toilet lid and begins to do my face.

When the man with the red car arrives, I am ready. I am wearing a short black skirt safety-pinned around my thinning middle, a long velour black sweater, and a gargantuan pink bow at the back of my head. My bracelets and earrings make a great deal of noise as we walk around the park. Once I burp. I am mortified. He pretends not to hear and when no one is looking, plucks a rare flower and tucks it behind my ear.

In beauty school I am learning about illusion -- how to create the simulacrum of depth. When I make up my lips I use a pale, creamy base to destroy their actual shape, so that the face in the classroom mirror has no mouth. Then I outline a new set of lips with brick-red pencil and fill in the outline with movie-star red. For the finale, I smudge a dab of light pink in line with my nose, at the center of the bow-shape everyone in class is envious of.

Once I emerge with a spectacular Betty Boop smirk that Tara, our Tri-Delta, singles out with the right index finger of her French manicure. "You look twenty-one," she says, her voice a mixture of envy and something else. I don't like the envy, but I like her gesture, which happens in slow motion. I even remember touch, soft soft at my skin, but perhaps I made that up, or make it up now -- me, Carol, the storyteller.

The day of our walk in the park, our first time alone together, the man with the red car drops me off in time for dinner. I thank him and ask if he'd like to come inside and visit my brother.

He is, after all, the babysitter.

He cocks his head. His right eye is autumn-amber. "I didn't come for your brother," he says. And he reaches for my lips with his whole hand.

After our lessons, after we have created our faces for the week, we put cheesecloth bags over our heads before we tug our smocks off. The bags emerge stained with cheeks, eyes, lips as the pink of our smocks is replaced by cool tans and crisp navys. We learn to fix snags in our hose with nail polish, spreading the sticky stuff over the runs carefully, without concern for the flesh beneath. We learn to fix anything that runs, sags, or bleeds with acrylic and cotton, bobby pins and saccharine.

Every week we weigh ourselves. Although I hate the scale's bold proclamations, hate the tears of the women who have come for this reason, I love the flowers we become when we strip down to our bras and panties. The older women wear sophisticated colors -- greens, greys, violets that shimmer when they brush past me, biting their lips. We leave our jewelry on, but not our heels; they lie jumbled in a pile like obscure weaponry. Once, as I am tugging my skirt back over my hips, Tara leans towards me, still shirtless, and congratulates me on losing another pound. In the grace of her gesture I see only a shadow, the faint darkness of a line where her cream-colored push-up bra cups meet in a satin bow. My difference is there, in that moment; though I write it off as envy, as wanting to be like Tara, some part of my mind knows it is something else.

In the lunchroom at school, Jessica passes my table carrying a tray filled with food. My friends and I tug the foil tops off plain yogurt, exchange carrot sticks, sip diet soda through bendable straws. When Jessica returns for seconds before Nancy has even finished her symmetrical apple slices, Claire nudges me and I take care of it.

"Hungry," I hiss. The other girls pick it up. Hungry, then Greedy, then, although Jessica is muscular, a swimmer, Fatty.

Fatty becomes Lezzie.

And I am safe.

In beauty school I am learning about perspective. One day my teacher, Glory Sue, hands me a bra with breasts already in it. They are flesh-colored, though not the color of my flesh, mottled pink and freckled, nor the color of Jasmine's, dark brown with red undertones, but the fragile jaundice-yellow of a sickly baby, whiny and urine-scented, longing for milk. The cloth around the breasts is red -- red satin -- and Glory Sue winks as she hands it over. When I fold it double, the cups make a hand puppet, red mouth without a voice. Years later, I find it wadded in the back of my dresser and tie it to a doorknob, knowing my cat will show no mercy, knowing that animals use things in useful ways.

He parks the red car where no one will see its color. He wanted hunter or pewter, something masculine, something stark. Instead there is this red, and me, spread open. I watch the stars through the window when I'm on my back. On my belly, there's nothing to see, so I close my eyes. Once, in the middle of a contortion, he bursts out laughing. When I sit up, frightened, he is holding the red bra.

When he drops me off, the house is dark. In the morning I eat breakfast with my brother, who calls me a slut until our mother shushes him.

At Christmas the man with the red car's parents give me a necklace -- a tiny amber bead encased in gold. They hand me the package, then go into the living room and drink cocktails with my parents. When I show my mother the necklace, she holds it in her palm for a long while. There is something else in her eyes; I can't name it. When she gives it back, the amber feels warm.

When the man with the red car comes to our door, my mother checks my make-up and my father hands me money. Every week, excluding holidays, I earn ten dollars because I pocket the cash. It's meant to cover the usual fancies. But the man with the red car pays for everything, so I think of my time with him as free.

He comes. My parents welcome him. Often he sits inside for several minutes, joshing about stock options, baseball, films. He is serious and pseudo-intellectual, which suits his startling eyes and golden hair. He lives with his parents because he is struggling to open his own law business -- at twenty-five, no less! Wunderkind, my parents joke when they think I can't hear them. They both kiss my forehead before I leave the house. They don't wait up, but they show their concern for our safety -- his as well as mine -- in the bend that signals kiss. Then my father opens the door and everyone watches as I leave the house first. Once, when I turn back, the man with the red car is standing between my parents, the longed-for son of their senior years.

He opens the car door for me. I totter in my spiky heels to the car's gaping red mouth. I sit in the passenger seat, my back to the driver, and swing my legs gracefully, torso twisting in sync.

"Now get out," he says later. We are parked in a deserted lot. The railway station shimmers, ghostly; I will remember its faint outlines better than his hands. I will remember the ghostly silhouettes of buildings, benches, tracks, and the whistle of the trains that pass by but don't stop. Years later, when I see steamed-up cars, I will wonder if the girl waited for her date to open her door and help her out, then into the backseat; if the seat belts left bruises; if the radio was on.

Sometimes he says my name.

At first I don't understand that the moment of naming precedes expulsion. I think that my name, shifting between his lips, is a gift, a moment of identification. But the name is a release, a rush of air that parallels the rush his body makes, all strength and density. No part of me admires it; there is nothing beautiful in it, though years later I will fall in love with a man and try to understand what he calls pleasure. But for now there is only the dark triangle his body makes, hovering, and his words, sounds really, letters chosen not for meaning but for motion.

Sometimes he says my name, but that name never reaches the world beyond his car. In school I take a nickname, while he calls me by my birth name. In school the kids call me Kate and the letters do not remind me of him.

I am safe. And thin. In beauty school we fix dinner at the end of every lesson -- vegetables wilting like sylphs dying onstage. We eat carefully, admiring each other's manners, sticking to the assigned topics: movies, weather, domesticated animals, art.

And Him.

"The key to a successful date is to make him feel like a Great Man."

We learn to listen to men, to nod, to agree. We learn yes yes yes and thank you please.

Years later I take a self-defense class. The first thing the instructor asks us to do is scream. Around me women open their mouths and form the nameless syllables that signify fear. I open my mouth, too, widening the lips my grandmother bequeathed me, the bow-shaped lips that are the only thing linking me to her ghost, to the woman I believe would have understood me. I open my mouth and inhale, silent.

The instructor is gentle with me. But I leave the class crying because I cannot scream.

The man with the red car makes small talk with me, shies away from anything serious. Once I mention the word abortion and he frowns, so I know exactly how he feels. I am in tune with him, with his red car; I am empathetic and sympathetic both; I make him feel a Great Man. In turn, he tells me I am beautiful, desirable, a rare flower.

But in the mirror at school, I do not look beautiful. His stubbled cheeks leave scratches, as if someone has struck a match against my skin. I am thin, thinner, thinnest. My friends and I pretend not to notice as each of us picks at her lunch.

One day I am in the bathroom, redoing my lips -- two colors only, I do not have time for my mouth to vanish and return -- when Jessica bustles in. I pretend I'm not watching as she rummages for change.

When her search fails, when her palms come up empty from her pockets, she turns to me and asks for what she needs in a surprisingly soft, low voice.

I am startled. No one -- not one of my friends--still bleeds. No one weighs enough. It is understood that to bleed is to be fat.

I put the cap on my lipstick. She is looking at me and when I turn away from her eyes in the mirror, I look at the floor. It will be years before I understand that the something else she sees in my eyes before I turn away, the gaze that takes in her solid body, her incautious gestures, her gentle muscularity, is desire.

Yes yes yes.

Thank you.

I do.

Sometimes he asks why I'm so quiet. Once, we watch a film in which the heroine whispers sexy things to her husband. After the film is over, he picks at his hamburger.

"Can't you be more like that?"

I try.

I try to speak, to say things that will light the dark hum of the red car. But years later, in college, four boys will surround me on a dark walkway, surround me and begin, inexplicably, to tickle, then kiss me. The kisses will feel sharp, like needle pricks. And I will stand, shouting distance from a clump of passerby, shouting distance from students clustered at the steps of the library, and my throat will dry and my body will harden and I will not be able to make the sounds that might save me.

In school I stop speaking. My teachers appreciate my polite, discreet presence. My teachers are men, and we do not read books by women. The women in the books we do read are quiet -- victims, mothers, maids. My teachers tell me I am a good listener. They suggest I apply to Ivy League schools like other promising students, white, wealthy students, students who have attended private schools like mine, students like me.

Somehow I doubt the existence of others like me.

But I hide my sense of my difference. When my teachers comment admiringly on my poise, my sweetness, my dresses, I smile, knowing perfectly well by now what effect that has. I am a dancer. I know how to work an audience. At night, in the red car, I perform.

My real self, the girl between two names, is somewhere else.

Years later I will find that place useful for hiding, for avoiding the reality of a lover who has changed, her face mirroring the man who has stolen from her what I am also missing. The something else in her eyes will shift and smoke, becoming fear. I will watch her as she hovers over me, a dark triangle, watch my lover become the thing I am most afraid of, simply because she is afraid of me.

I will fantasize about killing him, her father. I will fantasize about it in great detail, until one day in my fantasy his face, the face I know only from photographs, becomes the face of the man with the red car.

At home, in the vestibular space of my bedroom, between my parents' world, the red car, dancing, and school, I write poems. In the poems I am water, and the man with the red car is a duck. I slide down his back in drops.

In my journal I write that I love him, that I want to marry him.

And so I stop eating, because I cannot find a way to reconcile the worlds I inhabit, and because starvation is the only speech I can afford.

Sometimes, like the goose girl in my favorite fairy tale, I speak to a familiar, hoping my familiar will answer. One day I am talking to the man with the red car. He is eating a sundae and I am watching. I ask him one of the questions they've taught us in beauty school: if you were an animal, what would you be?

He does not have to think it over. "A squirrel," he says, and I can tell he's proud. He slurps the last of his sundae through a straw. He does not ask what I would be.

I think to myself, I would be a man.

It is 1986. When I move to New York City for college, I find it smeared in blood. There are bloody handprints everywhere, prints of names, names of politicians. I read the posters as I rush to the studio each morning -- Mayor Koch, Our Blood Is On Your Hands, then a logo I don't understand, a pale pink triangle. Act Up it says, and Silence Equals Death. But death feels far away; silence, necessary.

In college I study English with a Great Man. I love his excitement at a strong line, a keen metaphor. I love his excitement, but when I whisper this to the girl next to me, he slams his hand on the podium angrily.

"I won't have you talking about me," he says, his voice husky with cigarettes. Later, I learn that he is sleeping with her. He praises her body to us on the many days that she is absent.

After class, girls whisper to each other: don't let him shut the door to his office when he asks you in. When the Great Man asks me in, I stand in the crevice the door makes, triangular, afraid of the bright light of his desk lamp and the blue light of his eyes. He hands me a copy of his latest book, then summons me closer so he can sign it. The book is complicated and clever; inside the word lips appears many times.

I take four classes with him so that I can learn to be a writer. We do not read a single woman author. Once someone asks why, waving his arm from the back row like an alarm that has suddenly decided to go off.

The Great Man answers without losing his place in The Waste Land. "There are no British or American women writers worth reading."

"Dickinson?"

"Too domestic."

"Plath?"

"Too angry."

"Woolf?"

"Derivative."

"Stein?"

He laughs. "I think Stein's problem is self-evident."

I am sitting two rows from the front, vibrating with a new understanding of how a poem is composed. The Great Man has given me Stevens; he has given me Pound. He has also taught me the difference between bad and good poetry. When he asks us to write for his class, I know that I must not write about the man with the red car. That would be an angry poem, or maybe a domestic poem, or, worse, an angry domestic poem. That would be, I now know, a bad poem.

Instead I write sonnets about clouds, six each semester. Twenty-four poems about terrible weather. Sometimes, while I am writing, my pen skids to a stop before nimbus, before cumulus. Sometimes I see no point in finishing that week's poem, however fluffy the cloud, however silver its lining, simply because I am a woman, and women, as I now know, write bad poetry.

I get an A.

One of the boys asks me what I did to make the grade.

At night, after class, I ride the subway to my apartment. One of the girls from class rides as far as my stop. Often we sit across from each other, acknowledging each other's presence only by proximity. I know she sees me; I know she knows that I see her.

It takes me a month to realize who she reminds me of.

By then I feel it, the something else I cannot name. There are jokes -- gay people call it gaydar -- about the thrill and terror of recognition, about its power. But there is no proper name for what I feel and, without a name, without witness, Jessica's bond with me vanishes, becomes wholly body, body and then energy, energy and then vibration, motion without signifier, unrecordable.

I do not see her.

The joke goes, "She could've saved you five years."

But I deny her. I turn from Jessica's new incarnation, this woman who sees through me, who inspires in me a charged knowledge that elaborates, magically, on something I do not yet claim. She sits across from me on the subway, dyke Christ to my Judas, vowing to haunt me. And I see Jessica after Jessica, year after year, until I finally give in and open my mouth in an ecstatic communion.

I come to hate studying. Thin, too thin, I have trouble concentrating. Words waver in front of my eyes. When I faint, the stairs to my brownstone redden and dissolve to dark.

For several days I cannot leave my apartment. Every time I begin a task, fears stall me, until unlocking the door is impossible. I pace, taking pieces of myself apart, until I am saved by a crack whore.

Her name is Corinne.

Her name is Corinne, and she lives down the hall. I know she is a whore because her clients ride the elevator with her, and because her pimp stalks her. Once, I step off the elevator to find him pounding on her door, first with a folding chair, then with his thick body.

"Corinne, goddammit, open the fucking door! Prazzie wants to see you, you shitty slut. Corinne!"

I know she's on crack because she buys in the park two blocks away, out in the open the way crack deals happen in my neighborhood, her palm glowing with light, with the tiny glass vials.

The week I cannot leave my apartment, Corinne breaks the spell, pounding on my door one sweaty midnight. Her desperation does something to my nervous obsessiveness and I open the door in a rush of glad freedom. All she wants is rubbing alcohol. In exchange, she lets me visit her apartment to see her murphy bed and seven cats.

I tell the man with the red car that there will be no more visits. His phone calls stalk me, plaintive and poignant, his grief at our break-up similar to the sound of the girls I dance with when they puke in the sink. Eventually the calls stop and the lies begin -- lies to my parents, who still hope for a wedding.

I am distracted for the next several years. The man with the red car has distracted me. But I do not blame him. I look at my lips in the mirror -- bow-shaped, like my grandmother's. She was a singer, but instead of a voice, she bequeathed me her lips.

Her name was Buena Vista -- good view.

Her marriage to my grandfather saved the family farm.

I like my lips. I do not blame him, the man with the red car, for wanting to touch them. I look in the mirror every morning before I make up my face with all that red. Sometimes, thinking of Tara, I touch myself.

The smile I see isn't mine.

It will be years before I bleed again, before the color red means something else. It will be years before I drive myself, long hours on a deserted highway, to see a woman with red hair. It will be years before someone watches me eat, watches my lips with a stare that is neither calculated nor appraising, but wicked. It will be years before wickedness appeals to me, before I stop wearing pink, before a red car means little or nothing, before the face in the mirror opens its plain mouth to speak.

"Do you have anything darker?" my girlfriend asks the skeptical blonde behind the counter. We are shopping for lipstick because I want to kiss her and leave prints.

"I'll go check," the salesgirl says, and heads for the back of the store.

She does not return.

So we steal things -- silver eyeliner, blue nail polish, men's cologne. For a week, on a dare, my lover and I wear blue nail polish until it scabs off and we find ourselves picking at it with our teeth. But for that week, her hands on my flesh look like bruises, as if someone has hit my thighs, arms, belly. Her hands on my flesh look ugly, and I beg her to remove the color, to make her nails clear again.

For our beauty school graduation dinner, we're instructed to bring something fattening -- something sinful, Glory Sue says. I bake a pumpkin pie. When it is cool, I cover it in plastic, tucking in its edges.

Years later, I will enter my lover's kitchen, lured by a sweet, cinnamon scent, buttery and warm. "Pie," she says. "Sweet potato." We stand in the kitchen, sipping coffee, waiting for it to cool. When it is done, she cuts two large slices and motions me to join her. She walks through the kitchen, living room, hallway. I follow her, and I follow the pie. She pushes open the door to our bedroom with her shoulder, flicks the light with her wrist. Then she sets both plates on the bedstand and sits on the quilt.

The slices are wrapped; for a moment I think she wants me to touch and taste through plastic. Instead she smiles, removing the barrier.

The beauty school classroom mirrors are veiled in gauzy streamers; at the center of the room is a table draped in silver cloth. We place our pies, cakes, cookies, and pastries in a seductive chorus line and then stand, soldiers at a peep show.

We wait for the word.

Eat.

We expect to hear it any minute. But we are well-trained; we do not flinch. We watch each other through the streamer-draped mirror and we do not know that we are watching hunger.

Glory Sue hands each of us a rolled-up certificate, stamped with a red seal. Her lips part. Again we expect it: eat. Instead she stands with her back against the table. "Girls," she says, and she does not mean women, "thank you for your participation."

Years later a student enters my office and drops a paper on my desk. Before I glance at it, she rolls up her sleeves. Outside, it is raining; the light in my office is pewter-blue. Through the gloom, I notice that her arms are covered with bracelets. As my vision adjusts, I realize they are scars.

Her name is sweet; her hands are graceful. In the faint light we look at each other and do not say a word. We do not need to; we speak the way women have always spoken to each other. My face tells her I will remember; her body tells me she trusts nobody.

When she leaves, her inked-up paper clutched so tight I know her scars must sting, I bend my head to my book again. I try to bring myself back, back to language, back to the words that will make her tale untrue. I try to read my way out of what I've seen, but the letters won't let me. Late late nights and early mornings I write, trying desperately to communicate without using my body, sick of knowing only that one language, the language of flesh and blood and pain. I want access to the words men use. I want in, into the club, where the light is strong and arms can carry someone. I want to enter. And I realize that I have known this from the beginning.

Glory Sue's lips part again.

"Touch yourselves."

We look down, at our red shoes.

"Touch yourselves." She puts her hands on her waist. "I want you to feel how fat food has made you. This," and she pinches her flesh until her fingers are full, "is cake. This is pie. Feel it. Feel your fatness. Feel how much of yourself you would like to slice off."

At first we're shy. We aren't used to our own skin. Mine feels flaky, dry, crusted. Beside me, Tara gnaws on her thumb. But soon someone puts a hand on her upper arm.

"I hate this," she says. "How it jiggles. I wish I could cut it off."

We begin to move.

Jasmine puts one hand on her hips; someone else cups her breasts in both hands and bends forward. I touch my nose. Tara puts both hands on her legs; I see her in the mirror. I watch as she runs both hands up and down her thighs, over and over. Soon I follow, imitating her, running my hands up and down my thighs, over and over, along with her, dispossessing my flesh. We touch ourselves, cutting our limbs in half, winnowing and winnowing, and it feels, even now, describing it, like bloody handprints marking every inch wretched.

I see Tara in the mirror, undoing herself. She is watching her own hands, her own eyes. But in the midst of our feast, her gaze meets mine. We stare at each other in the glass, we stare, and the cutting, the severing, the slicing and winnowing become something else. I watch her watch me, my hands on my thighs, and I watch her hands reply, parting her lips.

It will be years before I can name the something else in her eyes, before a woman names the something else in mine. It will be years before I can name it, desire; years before a woman bleeds into my hands and I think yes yes this is what blood is for, salt and not cotton, yes yes this and not children, yes yes and please. It will be years before I learn to scream, before my name matches the mirror, before the words I speak spell something besides rape and the foods I eat become poetry; it will be years before I name the difference, name it desire, name it anger, name it after a color women feel but cannot see.