Kath was not like me. She was a tableau of meekness; a whisper in a loud room; the transparency of glass. Her existence was not evident until, all at once, it was. If she was glass, then I was an oily handprint on the window, the thing that unfortunately revealed her as neither external nor internal, but the emissary between the two. When I think about her now, I try to remember the beautiful parts. My peach-pear woman, I cut out the soft spots and bruises from my recollection. I do not mourn her, or miss her, or feel much for her at all save a delicate and untouchable stirring in my chest. It’s something between love and fondness, poignancy and uneasiness, as if she were a particularly captivating character in a play I saw a long time ago.
———
I might not have noticed her at all if I hadn’t been searching so desperately for an escape that night from yet another rich, crusted old man. I was staying in a motel in Miami Beach then, scavenging for jobs and meals through men I met in hotel bars, ones who promised me things they could never truly give me. She was older than me by at least a few years, a barback at one of those grand Art Deco hotels I couldn’t dream of belonging in back then. The men bought me gorgeous dinners of fish I’d never seen before, wines older than me. But I was the meal, that particularly vulnerable age where my legality still seemed to remain a question: young enough to seem like jailbait but old enough to not land them in jail. Like so many young women, I’d left home in search of a better something, although I still remain unsure of what that something truly is. My proclivity for violence led me to men far older than me, the kind who call you precocious, tiptoe around you as you drip with shimmering youth. The ones who give you gold but leave you in a silver world, the ones who cease to tiptoe and begin to stomp far quicker than you’d hoped. I could never—and still can’t—hate them fully, not like Kath did, but I became skilled in the art of coquettish evasion. I’ve always been an expert at staying just out of reach, having learned from an early age that receiving the trophy is the least exciting part of the competition.
That night, I ordered a dirty martini simply for the olives; it’d been a while since my last meal and I went to sleep each night too empty even for the bedbugs to sink into my stinking flesh. The man I was drinking with was loud and rude; if Kath hadn’t intervened I might have stabbed him. She quietly told me that the manager needed to see me, and led me out through the narrow alleyway from the kitchen. Kath, Kath, her slender body and slowly blinking eyes suggested that what she knew best was how to disappear entirely. If she turned sideways, she was already half-gone.
You’ve saved me, I told her, eyebrows raised.
She told me it was no trouble at all, but before she ducked back inside I grabbed her wrist.
What time are you off? Do you want to go somewhere?
In truth, I needed something to shake off my encroaching sobriety; I suggested she nick a bottle of tequila and we could walk, maybe find something to eat. I had a few crumpled bills I’d stolen from the man inside and I suppose, on some level, I wanted someone to celebrate with, someone to wander the streets with to distract me from my bedbug bites and daybreak.
In thirty minutes, she said before sliding back through the door. It was neither a yes nor a no, but I waited anyway. I wasn’t ready to return to the dimly lit squalor of my room, face another reminder of my mothball life. I hadn’t gotten a modeling gig for weeks, nor had I found any expensive coattails to ride through my unemployment. I knew that my real success was to be found not in the modeling industry but in the profession of modeling itself, the state of being a model. I was the perfect toy, I made sure I was. It was my only real way up and eventually out.
I had known this since that day picking grits out of my bleeding knees, punishment for my mother’s boyfriend’s extended stares. I looked carefully in the mirror at my pale, bony body. I stole lipstick from my mother’s bathroom and slicked the brown over my lips, puckering and holding my hair at my crown to examine the sharp cheekbones, the hips hidden underneath sagging white underwear. Okeechobee was no place to be beautiful, I knew, so I left five years later, once I turned nineteen.
I learned about love from the movies, like I told Kath that night when she asked. Miami is a horribly romantic place despite itself, so easy to fall in love at every garbage heap marinating in the humid summer.
It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever been in love, then, Kath told me quietly. It was a statement that sounded more like a question, so I answered it like one:
I fall in love all the time.
A shadow of a smirk played on her face at this, her disbelief in my naiveté both condescending and enchanting. We were both right, as it turns out. I’d never been in love like how she meant it. It was not my fault that I fell so hard and so often in love—in and out, prone to disgust as much as lust, sometimes simultaneously.
We drank tequila cross-legged at the shore and spread our bodies across the sand, hair half-buried. She later told me she knew right then that she’d love me someday, but in the moment, I considered her just another somnambulist. The air was thick that night. We talked about hurricanes.
I’m terrified of drowning, she told me. I took this to mean she couldn’t swim, but she was an excellent swimmer, unlike me.
Why be scared then? I asked her, which she laughed at. She laughed at me quite often, and I hated it. She had a way of taking my lack of fear for immaturity, and I was too young to know whether or not she was right. I wasn’t frightened of the water like she was, I had no concept of being in too deep in anything at all. Sitting on the beach, we peeled our mangoes and ate them. I tried not to notice the juice running down her chin and hands, her skeletal fingers maneuvering the mango skin. She made me feel clumsy. This was her advantage at first, my reluctance to notice her; later, of course, it became mine.
There’s something so beautiful about a new moon, she said to me, sucking the last flesh away from the mango pit. I nodded, nervous.
Should we swim? I asked; it was a particularly hot night and my discomfort burnt my nerves, made me restless.
We stripped and got in the water, where I felt more at ease. The ocean is singularly comforting, the way I imagine space might be: a vastness you know is not empty, an unknown that is still somewhat known. I exhaled completely and floated underwater, like a half-rotten egg. I do not remember what it’s like to be in the womb but I imagine it felt like this. I don’t remember the womb, but I remember swimming in the ocean with Kath.
———
I had never been involved with a woman before, at least that’s what I told myself. The sleepover fumblings of my preteen years were catalogued in my memory as simply experimentation, my introduction into the world of sex and grime. I thought of her often; Joanna was her name. We lay belly-down on her basement floor, elbows crooked to hold up our chins as we flipped through Jo’s father’s dirty magazines. We’d stolen them from their hiding spot beneath the old newspapers in the garage and giggled at the models’ revealing poses and sultry stares. It was late, our reading lit by a halogen bulb in the corner of the damp room. Jo propped herself up to show me a page:
Maybe I’ll look like this when I’m older?
Fat chance! I teased. You’ll never get tits.
Screw you! Will too. I bet I’ll have tits just like… these!
She had flipped to another page where a woman held up her breasts by the nipples, cupid’s bow lips parted in a gasp as if she couldn’t believe she’d been caught on camera. We exploded into giggles and I threw a pillow at her; she threw it back. We began to wrestle lightly; I took the pillow and pinned her down with my knees on her thighs and held the cushion over her head in a mock suffocation. But I couldn’t resist the power, held it down harder over her. Jo started to cry beneath the pillow and I stopped; ashamed of and confused about taking it far too far.
Jo, Jo, I’m sorry. I began to cry too, grabbing her cheeks and kissing them and hugging her tight.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I pushed her snot and tear soaked baby hair off of her face and kissed her again quick.
It’s okay, I’m just being a dumb baby, she sniffled, and put her hands around my neck as well.
I bet we’ll both look like the Penthouse girls by high school, I told her earnestly, and she laughed shakily. Her laugh flooded me with relief from my confused guilt and I smiled. We sniffed back the last of our mucusy tears and I realized, for the first time, that we were very close. We were always touching and wrestling, but in the June heat something electric carried through the night and I truly felt how close to her I was. We looked at one another and in a fit of nervousness I crossed my eyes; the childish action made us both erupt into soft giggles again, heads bowing forward. She pulled us to the ground, as if to start wrestling again, but our tangled arms just twisted us together, her stringy brown hair dusting the tip of my nose and temples. I felt the light sweat on her stomach against mine, and this time we kissed slowly, Jo’s soft thin lips mashing into mine.
Let’s practice with tongue, I said, and she nodded solemnly. I felt something move in me both terrible and great, something blurry in me that held still for Jo, like a hummingbird at rest.
After hours of trembling in the ecstasy of what we had stopped calling practice, we fell asleep curled into one another on the ground, sweaty hair sticking to our necks and lamplight assaulting the stucco walls.
I left wordlessly upon waking. Jo and I never spoke of that night again, and eventually we grew apart. By the time I’d left Okeechobee she was engaged, fully prepared to be ensconced in the homey life I couldn’t resign myself to. But the memory of her and the hunger she awoke in me always lurked somewhere in the shadowed corners of my mind.
———
When I woke before morning with Kath by my side, I crept silently away like I had done with Jo. I realized I had nowhere to go; I could go anywhere. It was about to be light, that predawn period that threatens daytime, but I found I didn’t dread the idea of sunrise. It had rained hours ago, and the wind still carried that memory. Near the beach, muddy footsteps revealed the days and nights of strangers. Women on their way home from the cars of scarred old men held their arms close to them, circumnavigated the crowds of hungry mosquitoes and kept their eyes cast downward when they passed me.
I couldn’t help but feel that I stood in the eye of an invisible storm where, for the moment, I was safe. I walked the length of the beach towards the city, where the sights and sounds of the emerging day assaulted my senses. I turned towards the beach again and saw the horizon opening itself to me with a fiery vulnerability—I was bathed in incandescence from every direction, and I wondered what it was to be unafraid of the light.
Mediocre Issue | October 2019