British artist Tracey Emin is in the news again for her new exhibit, "Those Who Suffer Love." The exhibit shows a more mature side of the 45 year old artist, though there is apparently a "an animated film created from hundreds of Emin's sketches of a masturbating woman" which compares the idea of masturbation to the idea of creating art alone.
More interesting to me is her installation pieces from the 90's. People freaked out about this piece, called "My Bed" because of the used condoms and bloody underwear on the floor.
today
well this morning, more precisely
a man came to my door
and in my sleepiness
I thought if he asked if I was John
when I am clearly not John
unless I went to sleep at night
and woke up in the morning as an entirely
new person in a new body
(isn’t that all those transsexuals want?)
but really he wanted to know if it was John’s house
which it was
I was still me, still a girl.
I was certain the man could see my tits through my sleep shirt
so I folded my arms
what an awful defense
and the man told me that he was from the gas company
and needed to talk to John and not to me
so he left.
later that day I tried to cook an egg
but the stove wouldn’t make fire
it just made a noise like
clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
so my mother hadn’t paid the gas bill
this has happened before and it always means something
its worse when she doesn’t pay the electric bill
we have to throw away everything in the refrigerator
so that we can start all over again
I decided that I was grateful
one: that it is late spring so the sun can warm the house
like it did the indians' wigwams
two: that I wasn’t the type to put her head in the oven
when things go wrong because
I would have been shit out of luck.
I think things are going wrong
because
my mother left two pieces of toast in the toaster
I found them golden and cold
who the fuck forgets their toast
unless they are
well you know
remembering their wine
and every time, she cries and says
at least I’m giving you something to write about, right?
no, mother, you’re not.
this doesn’t even deserve these past 308 words.
It did not matter how blue the sky was or how new-green the leaves on the trees were when Bethany Bremmers’ mother turned around to see her daughter was suddenly not there. The world drained of all color, apart from the most violent, shocking red. Everything was blindingly bright red, as if someone had tossed a pail of paint. The color saturated the world in such as way that there seemed to be no space left for air. Mrs. Bremmers found that, screaming in that supermarket, she could only inhale something as thick as water.
Mrs. Bremmers had gone to the supermarket that spring afternoon only to pick up a few things for her family. It shouldn’t have taken more than an hour. She put baby Richie in the cart’s seat and had Bethany link her chubby fingers through the saudered metal. She started in the bread aisle, selecting the whitest, fluffiest loaf she could. She pulled brilliant colored cans from the stacks with a practiced wrist, and found the freshest milk. She got goose bumps while waiting for her six-year-old to choose a tub of ice cream. She chose an electric-blue kind, with gummi bears petrified in every bite.
The produce section, that glowing square, was always saved for last. Mrs. Bremmers never knew why she did this. She only knew that it felt right to have the fruits and vegetables, sitting on display under streams of mist as fine as an exhale of breath, be the finale of her trip to the supermarket. She rolled a giant watermelon, the first of the year, onto the platform under the cart, and wondered if avocados were too extravagant of a purchase. She squeezed the peaches, testing for give. The bananas were ripe and the blueberries sparkled like neon pebbles. She placed them all in her cart, humming a song she had heard on the staticy car radio. It was somewhere between the zucchinis and the summer squash that she looked down to see only speckled tile floor where her daughter’s tennis shoes should have been.
***
She was just a little girl I had babysat two summers before and on the occasional winter night. That’s all she should have been.
My mother called me as I was sitting with Mark, watching the sun sink. We had just smoked the stickiest bud and I was feeling dreamy and alive, sitting on a hill with our backs against the trunk of an oak. The moss was a little wet, but we needed to sit for a while before walking back to Mark’s car and driving off to see friends. Prom was last week and graduation was looming. I remember feeling slightly stifled in the in-between, feeling like freedom was always just a reach away.
“Kit? Kit? Where are you?” my mother nearly shouted into the phone.
“I’m hanging out with Mark. Why?”
“Come home right now. That girl you used to baby-sit, Shannon’s little girl? She went missing this morning. We’re doing a neighborhood search.”
“Oh, God. Okay, I’ll be right there. You’ll wait for me?”
“Yeah, you have a little time. They were just in the supermarket and she vanished. See you soon,” my mother said hung up.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked.
“A girl I used to watch, Bethany, is missing. We have to go look for her.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s around somewhere. My mom used to loose me all the time when I was little.”
“Yeah. I’m sure she just ran off. We’ll probably be looking around Jackie’s neighborhood. They lived on Christopher Ave.”
Reluctantly, we got up. It has been nine years and still I feel guilty that in the face of a child missing, alone in the world, we took the time to kiss, heave our shelves up, pick the pine needles from our jeans and walk to Mark’s car. It has been nine years and here I sit in my kitchen with my coffee, a baby growing inside of me and a toddler napping in her crib, still thinking of how easily children disappear. How easily that child disappeared.
There is sugar spilled on the counter, into which I made swirls and stars with my pinkie finger. That was hours ago and it is still there, on the counter as if I were proud of my creation. What am I doing with my hours? What do I do with the time I have while Sadie sleeps? The clock on our lemon-yellow walls reads three-fifteen. I will wake Sadie soon. I will touch her sunny red hair (a genetic miracle and proof that Tom was my destiny: we can create ruby-haired, sapphire-eyed babies) and stroke her freckled cheek. I might even have time to take her to the playground before I come home to make herb chicken and quinoa for dinner. Sure, I’ll leave the sugar on the counter. But Tom won’t mind. He’ll laugh; I’m his young, scattered-brained wife who can cook but never cleans. I amuse him. He loves me.
***
In the next week the police questioned everyone at the supermarket: the woman looking for half-priced ham, the bored cashier with gooey eyeshadow, the stock boys and the baker. Everyone in town found their flashlights and trudged through wetlands and flowerbeds, calling her name. The local media came out eventually, reporters with perfumed salon hairstyles stood next to Mrs. Bremmers with her buckteeth and frizzy halo of hair. The interviews all started to look the same, the Bremmers crying, wearing whatever was lying around, looking into the camera asking for the return of Bethany. Of course the police interviewed them as well, placed them under an umbrella of suspicion for a short while. Especially after one channel seven interview where Mrs. Bremmers stood in her front yard, holding Bethany’s Cabbage Patch Kid and wailing “she must be somewhere! Children don’t just disappear! There were no trapdoors in that supermarket! Some one knows.” She looked crazed. The ratings dropped. Beyond the people in the Bremmers' own town, no one seemed to care.
It was partly because Bethany Bremmers was not the blue-eyed, blonde-haired dream child the world fell in love with and wanted to find. She was brown, but in no way exotic. She had muddy brown hair and eyes to match. Her skin tanned in the summer but was nearly translucent at the first sign of a rain cloud.
What’s more, what’s worse, even was her weight. She was fat, plump and pudgy. Because she was six years old there was always the promise that she would outgrow her baby fat. There was the hope for diets and jogs and teenage makeovers at slumber parties. But to disappear at six, to be probably dead at six meant that she was stuck in that skin forever. Even the artists at the photo-aging center gave up on the hope she would one day be thin. They changed a fat six year old into a fat eight year old and recently into a fat fifteen year old.
Mr. and Mrs. Bremmers did their best to keep Bethany alive in the eyes of the public. The police kept looking, but the media did not care. That October, only five moths after her disappearance, a five-year-old beauty queen from across the country, in Nevada, made national headlines when she vanished from her front yard in broad daylight. All that was left was a pink bicycle and a bedroom filled with glittering pageant dresses. Her parents were equally beautiful, with big shiny teeth that gleamed under the cameraman’s lights. The country loved that little girl. Candlelight vigils were held, prayers were whispered and pictures of her were worshiped. Bethany Bremmers, with her chubby, dimpled knees and love of lizards and geckos, was collectively forgotten.
Two years later the body of the miniature beauty queen was found wrapped in trash bags and buried in the soft mud near a stream. It turns out her uncle had scooped her up one afternoon, put her in his car and did Godknowswhat before snapping her tiny neck and placing her in the earth.
***
In spite of everything, my summer that year was a golden one. I was seventeen, soon to be eighteen, I was in love for the first time and I was escaping my small town in a few short months. I was going to leave my mother (my older brother and father already had, awhile ago) and start my real life. I was going to read books, lots of them, on the campus’ lawns with the people I was meant to be friends with. People who burned with the need to do things other than mull around in shopping malls and dingy movie theaters, people who created things and had an easy way about them. People who knew what to do with their hands. I was going to see the world.
But during that summer all of that was just dream (parts of which did come true, later on) and I was still in my mother’s house. When I wasn’t working as a salesgirl at the department store, I was with Mark. His family had a swimming pool that no one ever used so it was always covered with a layer of pollen and dead leaves. By July it had gotten so hot that we didn’t care and just dove in. Breaking the layer of slick, orange leaves was like cutting through the atmosphere and being both under water and in love with him, was like swimming in outer space. We would orbit around the deep end, in that thick silence as long as our lungs would allow, watching the other’s hair shift and float and, with fingertips, crush the tiny bubbles which collected on our skin like stars.
I only saw my mother late at night when she had gotten home from work and was watching television with a glass of white wine brimming with dying ice cubes. She was always watching stories about missing little girls, and more pointedly, legal experts fighting about missing little girls. In early summer, Bethany was on the programs my mother watched religiously. But eventually my mother was always talking about a toddler who was most likely killed by her young mother.
“It’s so sad. So, so sad. That family is such a mess,” she would say and look at me with doe eyes.
“I know. They are. Goodnight, mom.”
Now she calls regularly. She won’t come into the city to see us, too many trains and too much traffic, so we occasionally drive out to see her in the town I grew up in. She plays with Sadie and smokes her menthols on the back porch while I brew iced tea. Tom tries to answer her barrage of questions until my mother’s boyfriend comes over and she beams at us. Love makes her happy and quiet.
These visits are rare, though. We mostly talk on the phone. I laugh to myself. Even when I lived at home, my mother was still not much more than a voice on a phone. I thought it was always because we were too busy to see each other and speak face to face. But maybe, but really, it is because we were too afraid to look into mirrors, too afraid to glimpse into the pasts and futures we saw in each other’s eyes.
***
Not knowing was the worst thing.
Mrs. Bremmers could not sleep during the night, no matter how close Mr. Bremmers held her. She kept the baby monitor on her pillow, listening to Richie’s breathing: the most beautiful sound in the world. After Bethany’s disappearance her hearing became incredibly acute, rather like those mothers who get a surge of super-strength to lift cars off their trapped children (oh how she wishes). Mrs. Bremmers listened through the night into the early morning to all noises and any noises. The ticking radiator and gurgling dishwasher held no clues—that was certain. But the mailbox opening and closing at three a.m, the rustle of garbage in tall tin cans, and even the flicker of streetlights would cause Mrs. Bremmers to untangle herself from her husband’s arms and leap to the window.
She answered every phone call and sometimes cried into the receiver when it was just telemarketers hoping to sell her cable. In the first two years anything could move her to tears: the sight of Richie, posters for missing cats, family photographs, magicians who used trap doors, anything. Mr. Bremmers cried alone in his truck, sometimes he would have to circle the block five times waiting for his face to un-crumple so he could go home to his wife. Eventually they both became blank. There is not a limitless supply of tears, everyone knows this. They smiled for Richie, their little boy who would never remember his sister, and so, (his parents hoped) would never feel the pain of a phantom limb like they did. They lived what was left of their lives and never gave up hope. Hope became a painful, cruel word. The Bremmers hated themselves for it, but if they just knew the truth, no matter what it was, no matter how terrible, they could release the hope that soured their stomachs and kept them up through the night, kept them driving through farm fields and back lots, shouting a name that never answered. Hope hurt.
***
I have perhaps one vivid memories of Bethany. I knew her when she was four years old. That was before her brother was born, before I knew how to drive, before I had ever kissed a boy, before my parents split up. My father would drop me off at the Bremmers’ split-level house whenever they called me up. If he saw Bethany in the yard he would mutter, “Crisco: kid-in-a-can” before patting my knee and speeding off. It took Bethany a while to warm up to you, and even then she was never a chatterbox. She did not like to play with Barbies and make your own necklace kits like I had when I was her age. Bethany liked to be outside in her dirty bib overalls and tied-dyed t-shirt. Together we overturned every rock in her yard looking for “critters” as she called them. One afternoon we had our greatest discover yet: a pale pink salamander. I was nervous to touch it so I let Bethany keep it in her linty pocket until I found a Tupperware container in the kitchen. We filled it with water and rocks and put the salamander in it.
“What do you want to name it, Bethany?” I asked in my singsong voice I instinctively used for children.
“I dunno,” she said. I lifted her to my hip so she could touch her pet. It wriggled from the rock at her touch and dove to the water.
“Oh I think she likes you! What if we name her Sammy? Sammy the Salamander?”
“No. I wanna name him Bartholomew.”
I laughed, “Where did you come up with that? Okay, he’s Bartholomew.”
We played with Bartholomew until her parents got home. When I came over the next day Bethany burst into tears at the sight of me. She couldn’t even form the words to say what was the matter and instead lead me to the backyard where we kept Bartholomew.
“Look!” she wailed. I looked. The salamander was floating in the water. His skin had peeled in layers and looked something like soggy paper. We had a funeral for Bartholomew and we both said a few words.
“Sorry I thought you were a girl at first, Bart. You were a great pet.”
“The best ever, Mewy,” Bethany added. She was no longer crying, but was instead running her sticky fingers through my hair as I held her on my shoulders. We threw dandelions at Bartholomew’s grave and went inside to eat strawberry-frosted Pop-Tarts.
And now she is gone. Now she is probably dead. And we may never have answers.
What would I do if Sadie were to vanish? What would I do if some bad man grabbed her, like so many bad men do? I would ache. I would ache and hurt and cry like I never have before. It would be like loosing my legs. No, worse than like. It would be like loosing my stomach and lungs, something internal, because my daughter is so much apart of me that without her I am not myself.
But after that? Once the doctors give me a metal stomach and cellophane lungs, what would I do? I would stay in cities, riding trains, looking into backs of houses, taking passion where I can, drinking endless martinis and painting my fingernails red. I would disappear from the life I am living now. Oh, I am a bad woman.
To Be Continued. If you've read this much, 1. you are awesome 2. you're eyes may hurt 3. give me your thoughts. you might as well.
2. The Hours by Michael Cunningham my neighbor wants to teach me
how to defend myself against
meteors, floods and hyperspace activity.
maybe he can sense how susceptible I am
to all of these things
and more.
I turn my head
as I walk down our street,
cast in lamp-light and too-few stars,
to tell him I have no money.
how much did you pay to be born?
he calls after me. I couldn’t say.
ZERO
he shouts.
yet look at how much you got for nothing:
eyes, ears, heart, lungs, feet and voice.
you have so much!
so what can you spare?
I find a dollar in my pocket and give it to him.
he bends down and picks up a pebble
off of the sidewalk we are standing on.
he cradles it in his old, old hands
and whispers to it
as if he didn't want to wake it.
he presses the pebble into my palm
and says
NOW, you are safe.
