1986 #4
When I passed that billboard, I thought of Bertie’s biography, The Juggernaut.
It describes Bertie’s marketing genius, her ability to spin tragedy into company growth.
She revived Earthshine Soap years after that fire.
She put up that placard to honor the Earthshine workers, even though they’d been accused of burning the factory down.
The company finally took responsibility for the strike, and this admission earned them public trust. They wanted to rewrite history.
The Soap for Women. The first commercial aired during Stars and Shadows, perhaps Bertie’s boldest marketing tool.
On the billboard next to Celeste stood Vincent in a tux.
Behind them, in black-and-white, was a still shot of me, taken from the original funeral scene, my eyes shut, my hands folded, my dagger necklace an unused weapon.
Soon, Celeste would call for my cremation and, together with Vincent, on the eve of their wedding, would visit the incinerator and watch my body burn.
Do you know what rage feels like to me? Like hunger no diet pill can stave off.
Like hunger that’s been building for years, a muted pain suddenly recognizable.
You want to devour everything in sight. At home, I pulled my framed diploma from the conservatory off the wall and tossed it.
I dumped the boxes of Earthshine memorabilia on my living room floor and trampled old VHS cassettes with my feet.
I located all my old headshots and shredded them, one by one, until they were paper confetti.
The last glossy photo to meet the shredder was taken when I was pregnant that first time—and my expression was softly victorious.
When anyone learned I was pregnant, they’d say your hair is amazing!
My hair had been amazing. It was lush and thick. I conditioned it weekly with margarine and egg whites. I used only silk pillowcases. Now it was ruined, overpermed and damaged from chemicals.
I found Wyatt’s grooming kit beneath the bathroom sink. I lifted those heavy shears from the case. I held tendrils of my hair and snipped, one at a time, and the strands spilled onto the floor.
Cutting my hair seemed to release something in me. I felt a lifting, a lightening, a coolness. I felt how Stella must have felt as she broke through to the surface of the earth, how she could finally breathe. Snip, an S for Stella on the floor.
I set down the scissors.
I ran my hand through my roughly chopped hair—uneven, asymmetrical, like Cyndi Lauper’s, only worse. What would Wyatt think? Then I hated myself for even having that thought, because I shouldn’t care what he thinks. But I did. I did still care.
For our honeymoon, Wyatt had suggested Miami because he wanted to take a tour of the Everglades.
I didn’t mind. When he was off doing this, I pinned my hair up as I floated on a raft in the pool, smelling of coconut oil and chlorine.
Beads of water pilled on my skin like little balls of mercury.
In 1973, when we got married, crisping yourself like a Cornish hen was very on trend.
As a Midwesterner, I measured the success of a vacation by the depth of my tan.
That evening, Wyatt arrived back at our room with two daiquiris from the downstairs bar. Hibiscus blossoms floated atop the glasses. Wyatt set them next to the bed where I lay, reading through a script my agent had sent me.
He didn’t wear a beard back then, and he had a small dimple on his chin, and I touched the divot because it was mine to touch.
Wyatt pulled up the back of my shirt and kissed me along the burn lines where the edge of my bathing suit touched my skin.
His lips only made the sunburn feel warmer, I wanted to tell him, but I also didn’t want him to stop.
I didn’t know how to speak my desires back then.
I was still young, still learning about my body.
The internet as we know it didn’t exist yet; I couldn’t just look things up.
Back then we learned by doing, and you know, I think it’s better that way.
I reached for my daiquiri on the hotel nightstand and took a sip. The alcohol warmed my body even more. My sunburn felt more burny. “Did you find the fountain of youth?” I asked.
“That’s in St. Augustine.”
“Same state,” I said.
“Other side.”
Back then there was such a thing as flirtation, a purposeful withholding. It created tension, the good kind, the anticipation of pleasure.
I peeled off his shirt and noticed a scratch on his side where he’d been jabbed by some palmetto branches.
I kissed it. He was still wearing his jeans, and he crawled beneath the sheets with me.
You’re looking for something sexy here, but you won’t get it.
That’s the thing with flirtation—it’s its own kind of pleasure.
We fell asleep. We woke up. By morning, Wyatt was covered in poison ivy.
I caught it, too, from the oils left on his clothes.
For the rest of our honeymoon, we were rendered helpless.
It hurt to move. We didn’t mind—we had the rest of our lives, didn’t we?
The future spooled out before us. Hope is a kind of love or a willful naivety.
Either way, we believed the best parts of our lives were yet to come.
We took turns going to the bar downstairs and ordering daiquiris and food to bring back to the room.
I’d rub calamine lotion on his rash, and he’d rub it on mine.
I desired Wyatt, yes, but I cared for Wyatt.
I helped him button his shirt because his fingers were too swollen.
When we married, I was young, and I still foolishly believed I was like George in It’s a Wonderful Life. I could lasso the moon, if I wanted.
But George never did lasso the moon, did he? He buys a fixer-upper, finds himself with too many kids, and nearly loses his family business to shoddy bookkeeping by a drunken uncle. He wanted to see the world, but he never did. His most heroic act is giving up his dreams.
When did it all go wrong?
If they make the movie of my life, what scene would they highlight? What’s the inciting incident? The rising tension? The dramatic moment that represents the whole of things? That’s what kills me: I’d once been so optimistic, and so very, very wrong.
I thought of our first kiss, the same night he came to see me play Audrey in As You Like It. It was my first lead role at the conservatory, my first time stepping onstage as someone other than the Earthshine Girl.
Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me poetical?
That’s Audrey’s best line. The audience cackled when I delivered it because she’s euphemizing her lust. She’s a hedonist, ruled by desire.
Onstage, I wore a dress with a corset that amplified my cleavage, and I held a leash attached to a goat we’d rented from a petting zoo.
After the show, we’d gone back to Halley’s place.
We sat on her purple couch. “‘Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me poetical?’” I said to Wyatt.
Even then I was playing a part, borrowing lines.
We locked eyes and leaned in slowly, so very slowly, like we were measuring the distance between us in molecules, marking each one because we knew once our lips met, our lives would never be the same.
A movie moment.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” WYATT SAID THE next day when I opened the door with that ridiculous haircut.
He’d come over to pick up some things: his mail, his racquetball goggles, some snow boots I’d never seen him wear.
He rang the doorbell instead of using the key.
“Your hair is … uh…” His face drooped with concern.
“They wrote me off,” I said. “Stella—she died for good.” I must have looked feral with my mess of hair, my eyes wild. I was wearing his jeans, and they sat low on my waist.
“She always comes back,” he said.
“Not this time.” He reached for my hair and ran his fingers through it, studying it like a problem to be solved. “It’s awful, I know.”
Wyatt led me to the bathroom and put a towel over my shoulders.
He had me sit on the edge of the tub. From his grooming kit he withdrew the razor, and he swapped out the attachment and clicked a piece of plastic into place.
He turned it on. I felt the buzzing in my head and down through my arms to my chest. All that buzzing reminded me of those 1950s fat-jiggling machines, the ones that promised weight loss without the work.
I watched my hair fall to the ground in clumps.
“Fresh start,” Wyatt said.
I ran my hand over my head—so soft. Softer than Prell shampoo could ever make it. Not coarse from hairspray or gels or chemical perms. More like the pelt of an animal.
In the mirror, I was surprised at the image of myself: my neck, which looked sleeker than ever before, the boxy angle of my jawline, the contours of my face, which appeared so different without the counterpoint of hair.
My face looked brighter, despite the signs of age that had settled into my skin: the quotation marks at the sides of my eyes, the parentheses around my mouth, as though everything I said was an aside.
“Fresh start,” I said.
He removed the towel from my shoulders and brushed the hair from my neck. He’d thought to plug the tub so the drain wouldn’t clog, and I loved this part of him, his foresight, his practicality. He found an old bread bag and began collecting my hair in it.
“How are your plants?” I asked. The room blurred from my tears. I didn’t want to cry. Wyatt put his arm around me, then pulled me into him, and let me cry there, in the hollow of his chest, a place that felt warm and dark and familiar.
I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, not for the affair he didn’t even know about—not yet—but for all of it, for our lives not leading where we thought they would take us.
For not being me in real life. For being a cliché.
Melodramatic. Made for TV. I’d saved the authentic parts of myself for the camera.
My real life is where I’d done the performing.
Nobody ever tells you that at some point in a marriage, you may start to loathe the person you’ve become.
Nobody ever tells you that you imagine car wrecks and downed planes and sunken ships with your spouse on board, and what shocks you isn’t these fantasies but your reaction to them. You aren’t always sad.
But sometimes you are.
Wyatt kissed the top of my head, and I felt the distance in that kiss.
He used to like to tell the story of how we met: late summer, my classmate’s Labor Day cookout.
We all jumped into the pool with our clothes on after a few too many gin and tonics.
I don’t know what had happened to us. Falling in love is like jumping into that pool; it’s exhilarating.
Intoxicating. You feel so alive. But then you have to climb back to the real world, and the air is cold, and your clothes are heavy with water, and there’s a lot more effort to that, to the climbing out.
“Good thing you have a symmetrical head,” Wyatt said.
They killed off Stella, but Stella, she always came back. She fashioned weapons out of jewelry. She filled her belly with earthworms. She sucked moisture from roots. She could hoist herself up through rock and mud. Like Opal Doucet, she could dig herself out of any grave.