She is small, and the warm stale air sinks beneath the accumulated scented detritus of its occupants.
She wishes she was taller so she could stand above the heavy scented fog.
She breathes the stultifying air.
It smells of souring baby formula and the sweaty undersides of swollen breasts. It smells of Juicyfruit gum and decay. It smells of diapers and frustration and the verge of something ugly. It smells of silences self-imposed and the vomit-tinged pulse of regret against the back of one’s throat. It smells of blood . . . of menstruation and bitten lips and fingerprinted bruises and the pinpricks of almost forgotten dreams against numbed unhopeful skin. It smells of unintentional surrender and choices carved against flesh. It smells of smoke and invisibility and the spoilage of intimate withins.
Looking back from now across the years, she rubs a bit of fragranced memory against her wrist and breathes deeply, willing the individual components to coalesce into the singular olfactory experience she remembers.
The scent of obsequious loathing.
There it is.
She is small and she sits in a curved plastic chair the color of drowning. Her feet swing beneath her, and she admires her brown leather shoes as they appear and then disappear against the background of the scuffed gridded floor. The shoes have shiny rectangular buckles and thin notched straps. The shoes are far too small for her, and the buckles pinch the skin across the top of her feet. She wishes there was room in these shoes for socks.
She shifts her feet within the shoes; now that she has focused on the discomfort, her awareness expands to fill her consciousness. Unable to relieve the pain, she takes a deep breath and points her toes hard against the floor, pulling her feet forward and up against the bite of the buckles. She folds herself in half so that her arms drape to the ground, her long hair concealing her within a tiny reddish-gold room in which she stares at the tops of her feet straining against their sharp restraints. Counting, then . . . a slow heartbeat count of a hundred.
The heavy plastic shuffle of digits on a lighted display counts another slower beat. She glances up to watch the number settle at 78, knowing that their number is 91. Her own internal count is 93 . . . 94 . . . 95.
Her right foot starts to bleed. A small trickle that flows from beneath the buckle down the top of her foot and into the tip of her shoe. She tests with her toes for the warm liquid thickness, feels the blood collecting beneath her toenails where they scrape against the leather skin.
96 . . . 97 . . . 98 . . . 99 . . .
She relaxes her feet; the relief is immediate and exquisite.
Her left foot bleeds now as well, this blood smearing along the top of her left foot as the strap shifts soddenly across her skin.
Still folded in half, still concealed behind cascaded hair, she wipes at the blood and then sucks it from her fingertips. The metallic bloom against her tongue is intoxicating in its familiarity . . . a shimmer of delight races along her spine and collects at the base of her neck. Pain is not pain if she welcomes it; pain is not pain if there is also control.
She bends into the bite of cut flesh once again and breathes more deeply of the room’s scented air . . . seeking and isolating the top-notes of intimate withins.
With a sideways reaching hand, she burrows within the confines of a large black purse, pulling out a single tissue stained with the perfect moue of her mother’s own armored red of control. Carefully, she rips and folds the tissue so as to halve the lip-print as well as the fabric. She then carefully fits these soft bits of ghostwritten comfort beneath the buckles of her shoes. The tissue bunches out along the edges and is stained damp lipstick-red, but the flow of small-wounded exit is quickly staunched.
She sits up and lets her feet hang limply in the air.
There is a large poster with phone numbers one might call in case of misbehavior; she knows no one who would make such a call. There are thick plastic shelves bolted to the wall filled with endless forms and papers and documents that must be correctly and completely filled out before anyone here will do anything that is not refusal. Large windows have been coated with something that prevents the welcome of sunlight and makes everything viewed through its lens appear to have been drained of all vitality. She watches in amazement; surely the world is not always this gray and dull and sluggish? She focuses on a large tree, trying to discern what it is about her vision that has been changed so that the tree looks . . . flat.
How has she lost a dimension?
She pulls her sight back into the fleshy scented room.
The heavy plastic digits shuffle again . . . 86.
Her mother’s long delicate fingers align and realign the papers that rest on her lap. One by one, her mother lifts the pages and scans the words with nervous eyes, looking for problems. Each page is carefully placed at the bottom of the pile so that the next page might be lifted and examined, and in this way the order of the pages is maintained. There is also an envelope that contains official documents brought from home; these too must be fingered and replaced in their correct order.
Her mother turns and brings up the corners of her lipsticked mouth . . . something less than a smile. She smiles back at her mother . . . something less than happiness. Her mother leans over and whispers, “You’re getting to be such a big girl. I remember when you were born.”
The girl is not sure what to say in response, so she says nothing.
Her mother reaches for her hand and smiles again, this time an actual smile, “Your daddy and I were so excited. We wanted you more than anything in this world.”
She smiles at her mother, but her throat hurts.
Plastic numbers flip and summon . . . 89.
All around the room, people sit in rows of perfectly parallel plastic molded chairs, bolted to the ground and yet somehow sinking. People stand and move and take their turns, but it is as though they are forever moving downward . . . as though forward means descent. This is not a place from which people rise.
A small round boy suddenly breaks the thick buzzing silence of the room with a prolonged shriek of betrayal, and that shriek is itself broken by the sudden smack of a hand against his cheek. The sound of the slap startles no one but the boy, and the room returns to quiet, the small boy’s sobs smothered against his mother’s chest as she carries him to the bathroom. There is another faraway shriek and another muffled slap, and the room shifts a bit and studiously averts its attention. After a few minutes, the small boy reappears with a lollipop in his mouth, and the room sighs . . . everything is as it should be. A few older women reach for the boy as he walks around the room, cooing endearments into his ear. Everyone wants to touch him.
The girl knows the intimacies offered after harshness.
She wants a lollipop.
90
Her mother tenses and gathers her papers one final time, leaning to loop her arm through the strap of her purse and checking to be certain that no vital bits of information have fallen and are now hidden beneath the chairs. The girl tucks her feet way high beneath the chair so that they do not impede her mother’s view of the emptiness below. Her mother perches on the edge of the plastic chair, waiting.
91
The girl is small and her face does not clear the counter, and so she tucks herself beneath it, catching bits of conversation as she balances and presses first one foot and then the other down onto the buckles of her shoes. Something within her lights up as the pain fires its way through her system.
The woman behind the counter asks the questions in a bored voice that soon happily reaches for the distraction of condescension, and her mother answers in such carefully submissive tones that the girl wants to reach out and pinch the skin of her mother’s freckled upper arm. There comes a moment when plaintive explanations are apparently required, and as she listens, the girl is not sure she will ever be able to smile at her mother again.
Her father would not speak like this.
But then again, her father is the reason her mother speaks like this.
She wishes their family did not need.
There is shame in begging to have those needs met.
She sees the shame swell in her mother’s eyes as her mother smiles and nods and leans eagerly forward into the judgment. The girl hates what she sees, but she needs what she hates. The girl takes a deep breath of the fragranced air and wilts into her mother’s side; she tries to focus on the pain that is of her own making.
The woman who was the girl looks back across the years and inhales deeply of her memory, waiting for the coalescence.
There it is.
