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How I remember
The crate arrives on a Tuesday. It is there when I return from class, my toes still taped up and my left ankle sore and throbbing. It is raining, and I have tracked water shiny like oil slicks up the stairs and into the hallway, where it has already gathered into little pools from my neighbors’ footsteps. The crate is wrapped in brown paper and stamped FRAGILE in black letters with lines that overlap like fence posts. In the dim hallway light, the box looks a little like those objects you occasionally see on the side of the highway, tossed from cars. It looks abandoned, and this makes me stop, head cocked and staring, when I come around the corner of the hall. I am a magnet for lost wallets, dropped keys, and stray animals, but I am not used to getting packages.
I toss my bag over near the table and nudge the box in with my foot. It is heavy and slides hesitantly, taking the doormat with it. The door clicks shut behind me.
I switch on the overhead light and bend down on the kitchen floor, making the shadows shuffle on the brown paper. The room is quiet like a medical operation, a sting investigation, a police interrogation. Things seem to echo without really doing so. I slip my fingers underneath the folded seam and pull the tape away like a long curl of old wallpaper.
It is an orange crate. Indian River, the label says in a banner of blue and gold. World’s Sweetest Oranges. I expect that it is just a shipping container until I tear the paper off the top to see the red plastic netting stapled around the rim. The crate is full of oranges. They stare up at me, eyeless and amber, through the bright synthetic snow-fence of a lid.
I sit back, stretch my legs in front of me, and point my toes. I can hear the bass lines of music swell from some neighbor’s apartment, slipping beneath the crack under my door, the dull throbs of my ankle matching up for a few seconds at a time. I pick up one of the oranges and hold it in the curve of my palm. It is cool and heavy and smells of citrus and burlap. There is no card, no note, and no explanation. I can’t begin to image what would have possessed my mother to send me fruit.
I lean back and unfurl my fingers, letting the orange slip off my palm. It rolls slowly over to my dance bag and comes to a delicate, cushioned stop. This is one of those moments when time seems backwards, rearranged, an anagram of itself. I stay on the floor a little while longer and watch the orange rest there like some accidental still life.
I will try to tell you
I have danced on stage innumerable times, and this is just like that—a performance, a communication. The Morse code of newly visible bones. Except with this you can never really hope for anyone to understand. Your attempt at communication falls short, stops, like the light from softer stars, which will fall a few thousand light years short of reaching Earth or anywhere else. It is as if you have overdone it with the costumes—all tulle and sequins and feathers—and all they can see is the way you look, not why you look that way.
The only explanation I can give is this. It begins and you don’t know it, like a song you’ve never heard, played on a record almost out of earshot. That is how vague it is, this barely audible instruction. It, like music, fills the room, unfolding and unraveling like fog or kite string. You will learn it just as you learned to type; the elegant stretch of the index finger toward the y, the tapping rhythm of letters a polished mantra. It is the graceful curve of an ever-present question mark, a desire to peel the skin away.
You will look at the skeleton as inspiration, as a near-perfect archetype that needs only gentle upholstery—silk, cobwebs, and the like. It is a triumph, a feat, a coup of the body. It has an arrangement, a pattern, a slight hieroglyphic tint. You will order your life to it. The paradox is clear and demonstrated: in this world, the emptiness fills things in.
Liquids
I take the subway to the hospital to see my friend Helen, who is staying on the fifth floor, room fifty-nine. The floor of the entranceway is tiled in checkerboard, and I half-consciously step from white square to white square, playing a game of postponement with myself. There is a receptionist, or possibly a nurse, dressed in green scrubs and sitting at the desk just inside the lobby. She sees me and smiles a little, nods. I am a newly familiar sight in the hospital’s carousel
of people.
Helen has been here for two weeks, and they say she will stay here until there is nothing more they can do for her. She is not moving toward a recovery, but rather a decline, a weakening, a descent. It is something like this: her stomach is slowly disintegrating. The slow surprise of decay, and then the organ’s rejection of time, space, life. She will get worse before she gets better and then get much worse than that. Later, she will return home with ample amounts of morphine and lie upon her own pillows until there is no reason to do even this.
I have been here every other day. I think of it as on-days and off-days, but sometimes she captures my thoughts even on the days I don’t come. I see something that reminds me: the slow growth of moss on the wooden fence behind my apartment, a girl in a jacket like Helen’s on the subway, the bare, angling branches of a maple tree.
Those of us who return over and over to this tiny gray room are a loosely assembled cast of characters, showing up for a roundtable reading of a script we don’t quite understand. There are Helen’s parents, her serious Irish father and tough Jewish mother, who smile in Helen’s room but cry on the way to the bathroom, the cafeteria, and the parking garage. Two grandmothers, used to disappointment and tragedy in the way older women often are, yet unprepared for this latest manifestation. Finally, there is Helen’s quiet brother Noah, who stands in the back of the room stiff-shouldered and wide-eyed. He walks me to my subway stop every day, never veering from his steady vocabulary of twenty or so words.
And there is Helen, dressed in silk long underwear of varying shades, front scooping down to expose a collarbone bare as marble. She stretches out over her top covers, wearing socks, with her feet relaxed in a semi-natural point. There is only a little about this that is performance. She is two weeks into being an old hand at this
tranquil game.
Her whole room looks like mirrors, this little silver box. It unfolds and displays its gleaming surfaces of bed frame and sink and spidery medical equipment as a stark lovely offering. Helen is hooked up to an IV with a silver needle piercing her thin wrist. Everything is a map of veins, flushed with liquid food struggling to replenish her. She grows thinner, thinner even than she was before. Yet there is this difference: this time, no one wonders why.
It is always the same
At the front of the room there is always a mirror. This is true of every place I have danced. For most of us, we have been staring through that silver wall to see ourselves for twelve years, fifteen, even twenty. Like Red Riding Hood and the savage grandmother-wolf, it is the better to see ourselves with, all our slips and tangles and long-limbed mistakes. Sometimes we stand in a line.
Helen and I have danced together since I came to the city on scholarship, with a body far from the healthy Midwest but still holding more flesh than any of the other dancers in my class. Helen became my best friend, my second sister, and my partner in this new education. Together we practiced the quiet art of hunger and never thought twice about it, because, as they had told us, dancing is the embrace of pain. It is the constant argument of soul and body, and so the soul must learn to control and to ignore.
When Helen got sick, I wondered at first if it was all part of it, the whole canon and creed we had accepted so willingly. I don’t think it was. Her disease was simply a hijacking of that body we had worked so hard to control. Still, it continued the task Helen had started, and for a while, that made it all seem, frighteningly, all right.
There is always that mirror, stretching from wall to wall. At some point, the mirror makes the sharp decision for betrayal, and what you will see is not what really exists. At least, that is what I am told.
What you must remember is this: it is possible to learn the yearning for hunger.
And Charley
Charley is the closest thing I have to a boyfriend, but we don’t really talk about it like that. He is a painter, good enough to make a little money off his work, enough to live on. We run things haphazardly, air-kissing the audience at the end of this thrown-together production. We embrace each other as we would any accident. Charley is pleasantly surprised each time I show up, as if my visit is just what he would have wanted had he given it any thought.
There is a canvas leaning against the far wall of his apartment, a new one that makes me think of liquid shadows. I turn to face it and find myself standing toe to toe with my own image, the body of that Jordan twisted and falling backward through layers of black and blue. I have gotten used to squaring off with these almost-Jordans. Lately, Charley has been painting only me.
We don’t discuss this, either. I have not asked him why he has not covered a canvas with anything but my image in the past two months. And no matter how many comments our friends have made about the beauty of the paintings and their resemblance, in my eyes, they all have one thing in common. None of them looks like me.
I tell Charley about the oranges, and this gets him talking about fruit, its duskily feminine characteristics and lush composition. It is here that I fade out a little, back away. There is nothing about fruit that I want to resemble. I have never wanted to be a pear or a mango. I have no use for curves.
As Charley paints, I watch this new Jordan emerge with her laughing mouth and mocking eyes. There is not one thing about her that I recognize.
The proper way to prepare a shoe
My mother calls while I am breaking in a new pair of toe shoes.
What are you doing? she asks as I slam the bathroom door a few times on the sole of the shoe, her voiced raised and exasperated. My mother has seen me break in toe shoes a hundred times, but she has a way of forgetting, a clean style of willed amnesia, that strips her memory of things like that. I figure this was probably the reason she remained married to my father for so long, as the litany of indiscretions and small betrayals lengthened with the years. It may be because of him that she first learned that behavior, as the ache for erasure does strange things to people. Three months ago even that ability failed and she left him to move to Florida with her also-divorced best friend.
When I ask my mother about the oranges, she resumes her breezy, song like way of speaking.
I thought you could use some sugar, she says. We talk a little more, but our conversation is something like scaffolding, like bare bones, a frame with not much in between.
I hang up without telling her that long gone are the times I needed such things. These last weeks and months, I crave emptiness. I hold the cool satin lily of the toe shoe in my hand and continue to work the sole with my fingertips.
Coconuts and violins
I meet my sister Emily for lunch at a café near her apartment, two blocks from the hospital. The first thing she does when she reaches my table is turn away and pull her shirt halfway up her back, revealing two long, curving black marks that run up either side of her back. They are the graceful f holes that belong to guitars, cellos, and violins. She has made herself into a string instrument. Emily is strong and long-boned, with cropped blond hair and calloused fingertips. She plays the guitar and sings in a band called Candle Wish. She is beautiful, but I don’t want to be like her with her graceful cello hips and her curves.
Once settled with sparkling glasses of juice and ice, I tell her about the oranges.
Last week Mom sent me coconuts, Emily says. Which is strange because I thought they grew those in Hawaii, not Florida. Emily twirls her straw around the ice in her glass, and then stops.
Your skin looks like paper, she says.
The deaths of certain stars
Helen says things sometimes. Things that I think of later, while I ride the subway home or fold laundry in piles on my sofa. Last week I brought her a news magazine from the stand down the block because it had a story about exhausted, burnt-out galaxies. I liked the pictures. It was the smoldering hanging-on of the stars that I liked the most, as we sat there and read under the wide eyes of her brother Noah. I held the pages out to Helen and spread open all these secrets of the satellites. She stretched and ran her fingers down the metal frame of the bed.
It’s bad luck to live below them, she said. Sooner or later all satellites come crashing to the ground.
The satellites fall
It is a clear day and the clouds are cartoons, spread out here and here in the blue soup of the sky. Noah walks me to my subway stop and after my train comes and goes I walk with him further, eight blocks, to his apartment building. This happens without us speaking; instead, we look at the sky. We are following a script again, though this has the feeling more of a dress rehearsal, as if I am costumed and made-up and this close to forgetting my role. This has nothing to do with Helen, or Charley, or even Noah. It is a last-ditch attempt at self-destruction when the emptiness is just that (not like before: to be hungry is to be empty, to be empty is to be full). It could be said that we are both lost, if one was looking for an excuse or some evidence of innocence. It could be said that we are struggling to embrace life, uniting in our anguish. All of this could be said. In truth, it is none of this; our coming together does not fill, does not cure, does not lift. In truth, it is just a way to keep from drowning.
Why is it that we are always surprised to find out what we are capable of?
After, he chain-smokes cigarettes, sitting on the window ledge, and we try to make conversation. His vocabulary swells with necessity. It moves beyond Helen and the hospital; in fact, it steps and slides and curves around, avoiding these topics. The window is wide open and big drifts of winter air move into the room, tinged with the smell of burning wood and car exhaust. I think about Charley’s Jordans, each relaxing within a square of dark canvas, masquerading
as me.
The oranges wait
There are three messages on my answering machine. Helen’s mother, telling me that Helen will be coming home tomorrow, and will I come and see her. A student from the ballet class I teach on Wednesday nights, wondering about class times this week. And the last is from Charley, who rarely calls me as he figures I’ll turn up sooner or later. He is wondering where I am.
Last week, I dragged the orange crate under my living room window, far from the radiators and the coldest spot in the apartment. With all the lights off, and only the streetlamps shining through the bare windowpanes, the oranges glow citrus, gingery. Next to the crate is my biggest houseplant, a glossy-leafed peace lily that has not flowered in months. The edges of the leaves are papery and frayed, though new leaves grow hopeful from the center stems. It has begun to turn brown from the outside in.
I come to
You will not realize what you are doing until you look at the bare slope of your hipbones and the ribcage’s slanted, almost horizontal lines, in the mirror or a photo, perhaps, and you feel the warm swell of pride, of accomplishment. This will be mixed also with the sharpness of fear.
The day Helen went into the hospital is the day that I stopped eating anything much more than Gatorade and dry cereal in little plastic bags. It was initiation, passage in to the subsequent level, the next logical step. I could leave behind the entry-level anorexia (say the word; roll it around your tongue like candy or a small pebble).
Sometimes, life plays backwards, shuffling itself in glittering pieces like shards of glass. This particular discovery is not like that. This is like looking at the traffic light at the exact moment it turns from red to green, catching the lamp in your neighbor’s window just as it goes out.
Straight lines and a still life
I pull my toe shoes out of the bag and line the bottom with a hand towel. I pick up the oranges, one in each hand, and make three trips from window to kitchen table. After this, I pause, and toss in a seventh.
When I get to his apartment, Charley is not home. I use my key to unlock the door and, once in, relock it behind me. He has left no lights on, but the huge windows on the east side of the apartment let the light flow in like strands of silk or the tulle of ballet skirts.
I take out six of the oranges and place them on the table. I arrange them in various patterns—a triangle, a circle, a cross. I settle on the five points of a star, with one in the center. This is a constellation only—the mind must draw the lines, and Charley’s may draw different ones. It doesn’t really matter; I could never make out the figure of Cassiopeia tossed upside-down in her throne, though I could find her assigned stars.
There is something vaguely pagan about this offering of fruit, caught here between solstice and equinox. The oranges appear to glow on the table, its surface scratched and covered with drops of paint. They are a peace offering or a suggestion of a still life.
In the little alcove where Charley stores his paintings, the many Jordans stretch and rest and stare, lazy with enamel. I am in a house of mirrors with my true reflection missing; the lines of my body hijacked by Charley’s fervent, obsessive brushstrokes.
I sit down on the floor in the middle of the paintings, a circle of images, of women who just happen to be me. I will tell this story later, to Helen probably, as she might see it something like the way I do, but it will come out in pieces, each sparkling like a separate shard of glass. Everything is lined up as a beautiful excuse, a myriad and multifaceted reality. Life may happen in straight lines but you rarely remember it like that.
I pick up the last orange, the seventh one, and I pierce the skin with my thumbnail. Here, it is so much easier to pull the skin away. It comes in a long, thick curl. I open the fruit and set it on the floor in front of me, in anticipation of eating, the last part of this quiet ceremony. The eight sections of the orange stretch away from one another, lying open like an eight-legged star.
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