Convergence
Olivia Meehan
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She drives a little too fast over the torn up roads of Joshua Tree. Past metal fences and muted houses that hang low. The blur is cut with flashes of electric green: grass that gurgles sweet water, and laps up fertilizer like a drunk dog. A yard sale appears and Eliza pulls over. Two older ladies with bright eyes and baggy skin survey her as she joins the other customers, fingering racks of beaded blue and rusty red leather. Her hands fall upon golden locks and she pauses for a moment.
Back on the road the breeze blows a different way through her hair. She likes how the ringlets jump up and down as she throws the car over a speed bump. Pulling into the gas station, she leans on the hood of the car as the gasoline churns into the tank. She likes how the world is bare and flat and how the dust shifts along and how she feels like she is someone else. Because no one out here knows her. A deep warmth starts in her belly and expands to her chest. *** Sitting alone in her room she bites her nails because she is thinking but her mind is blank. The walls are too thin and the noise itches her skin. She tucks a strip of straight sandy hair behind her ear, listening to the basketball hit the tarmac outside. Listening to the neighbor’s dog whose bark slices the sky, to Cyrus, the turtledove that sits on the power lines above her window and bobs his tail up and down, sometimes shitting, sometimes crooning, listening to the animated banter of her roommate, the entertainer, who hosts too many nights a week. She takes an edible so her mind can lay still and she opens the book for her English class whose cover is pleasing but whose sentences are too long, too full of too many words that don’t sink in right. *** It’s dark and people are going places. She puts her white pants on. The white pants with a carpenter loop on the side. It’s so much simpler now that pants with a loop on the side are appealing. When you go into one of those thrift shops where music is crackling and the ads are clear and the fluorescent lighting is just low enough to make you believe you have been in there for twenty minutes when it has been an hour… Just run your eyes across the slabs of denim scanning only for a loop and you can save time looking. But why save time when you were trying to get away from it all in the first place... She puts her top on, and then her socks. She does her makeup, and slides golden curls over sandy hair. “Too much?” she asks, turning to her roommate. “No, its fire” the entertainer responds. She still seeks confirmation from those whose sensibility she curiously admirers. The entertainer almost always runs warm. Eliza looks in the mirror. She looks hot. But this is bold. Bolder than usual. It’s off brand. But it feels good. And when she walks into the room where all the people ended up; all of them with their own preparations, their own way of making and remaking, she is someone else. *** She likes to pretend. But she’s not really pretending, she is embodying; pushing out different sides of herself. It gets her high. The way that you get high when you walk around the streets of a foreign country by yourself and you feel like you are a king and a peasant at the same time; you see it all and yet no one sees you. Sometimes, when she is alone, she puts her wig on and slides into that new pair of wooden heels she thrifted. She likes to vacuum the house like this, “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette playing in the background. And when the lighting is right and the sun hits the floral sofa and the California breeze blows the staleness of the air away… *** Her grandma on her mom's side was a stewardess. She was very beautiful. Eliza has a black and white photograph of her from when she was in her twenties taped above her bed. It has a thick mustache drawn onto it in ballpoint pen. Lines purposefully appointed by this beautiful woman whose hands shook, her mind clarified by too much cocaine. “Why did you have to ruin your face like that,” her husband had said as they reminisced over old photographs. So now it sits above Eliza's bed, carefully mounted by shiny gold tack pins. *** Eliza likes the way her curls fall over her eyes when she bends down and dips up to the music. She likes the way they encourage her to look around a little less, smudging off certain sections of vision. Or maybe because the hair looks right on her. It looks real. The statement becomes her whole body, filling her with a warm high, and suddenly nothing is overdone. She can corrupt the whole room with her dancing; a feeling of intoxication that splashes the faces of the circle that is expanding around her. These curls blind people, making them look away, leaving a dark spot seared into their retinas. Everything she wants to do is right. *** Sitting on the swinging bench in the front of the house, she sucks a slice of Meyer lemon and lets the sting of citrus shrivel her cheeks into a kind of smile. As her wet brown hair drips water down her spine, she wonders when the large dead palm leaf will fall off the tree and if it will hit someone. She wonders if the little boy on the tricycle will ever make it over the speed bump. She wonders why there is a cane leaning against the side of the house and who needed to lean on it in order to walk. She picks it up and crumples her body onto it, pretending she has no strength. She hobbles down the road noticing how all the lawns in this suburban cul-de-sac are fluorescent green and how hers is a muted yellow. She thinks about the cost of water and the ugliness of gravel. She reaches the end of the cul-de-sac and turns around, leaving the cane on the side of the road. |