Green Beans and Other Impossibilities
A month after Scarlet moved in we were robbed. When I left the house for work that night she was standing at the refrigerator, either trying to cool off or deciding what to eat. She was dressed for her shift at Alabee’s Ladies, her hair teased into a mountain, her skin matted with the glitter gunk she smeared on every night. I said goodbye and she popped her head out, drawling, “See you later, Kid.” She never called me by my real name, only Kid. I’m not sure she even knew it. But that’s fair—I never knew her legal name either. She was Scarlet the Starlet in one of Oklahoma City’s many strip clubs and in the rundown house we both happened to rent.
I returned hours later, worn out and in need of a drink, to an unlocked door and a missing television. I turned on every light in the house, somehow moving through the fear that a man was hiding under my bed, ready to rape me or kill me or both. Once it became clear that I was alone I saw that besides Scarlet’s jewelry box, nothing else was taken. I’m not sure which made me sadder, the fact that they were gone or the fact that those things were all we had that someone else would want to take.
I had a police officer come out to the house. He considered the space where the television used to be and told me we should have kept the house locked.
“We usually do. I don’t know why my housemate didn’t.”
“Well, not too much we can do now. We’ll give you a call if something comes up.” He talked for a while longer about home safety and then how swamped they were at the station. Summer’s heat always causes a rise in the stabbing rates.
“Folks just snap, ya know?” he said, heaving his pants higher around his belly.
“Yeah, I know. Thanks for coming by.”
I stayed up waiting for Scarlet to get back from Alabee’s. The place was too quiet without the television and I was afraid. I managed a cocktail out of vodka and ice and I felt a little braver.
When she walked in at two in the morning I could hardly contain myself. “We were robbed!” I shouted. My voice sounded like a character’s in a sitcom, ridiculous and wavering.
“What?” she asked, cocking her head to the side and tossing her purse on the pleather couch.
“You left the house unlocked and we were robbed! They took my TV!”
“Kiddo, I swear I locked the door. Calm down, please?” She touched the top of my head, dragging her manicure along my scalp. The effect was immediate. I explained the situation in my non-sitcom voice.
“God, I’m sorry, Kid. Back in Georgia I never used to have to lock the doors. Everything was so safe. I’d forget in the city, too, but oddly enough we were never stolen from. I’ll buy you a new TV real soon.”
It was the longest conversation we had had thus far. All I knew about her before then was that she was twenty-six and that her wardrobe consisted of a lot of leopard print.
I had been in bed half an hour, swaddled in the pink sheets my mother had given me as a house-warming gift (endless attempts at getting me to act like a girl), when I heard a knock on my door. A triangle of lamp-light spilled onto the floor, illuminating Scarlet’s halo of red hair.
“I know this is weird, but can I sleep in your bed tonight? I’m absolutely terrified, just a big baby.”
I thought about it a minute. I had never shared a bed in my entire life. I hated sharing a house, to be honest. I liked being alone. I wanted to be a person who needed no people, like those green beans that grow on wet paper towels instead of soil. But she was standing there, biting her lip, so I lifted the blankets for her and she fell asleep without another word.
The next day I left Scarlet sleeping in my bed and went out into the yard with a six-pack of Pacificos. The weather was nice so on my days off I had taken to drinking while nestled in the dry prairie grass our shack stood alone on.
I had been working as a line-cook in a fake Mexican restaurant since I left home. It was a square building next to a dollar store made to look like an old saloon. I was there forty hours a week reconstituting the same five ingredients into enchiladas or burritos with men who spoke no English. But I got to wear my dirty T-shirts and the tiny scars I got on my arms from the hot grease made me feel tough.
Eventually Scarlet wandered out yawning and asked for the time. I told her I didn’t have a watch.
“It’s eleven a.m, Kid. You know?” and she pointed to my beer. I didn’t say anything. “You drink a lot.”
“Not really,” I said and shrugged. I’ve been told this before, but never by a woman who spent her night opening her legs inches from stranger’s faces.
“How old are you anyways? You look twelve.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“Then were do you get your booze?”
“There’s this girl at the liquor store who’s never carded me.”
“A girl, huh? Maybe she likes you. If she lets you buy booze and all. That’d have to be the reason; you got a babyface,” Scarlet said and sat in the grass across from me. I rarely know what to say to people, but this time I really didn’t know. We listened to the cicadas hum for a bit then Scarlet said, “You’re awful quiet, you know?”
“Yeah I know.”
“Are you a lesbian? I mean, I love cock, but I don’t care if you are. My uncle’s gay.”
I laughed and tried to figure out since when a lack of verbal finesse equaled lesbianism. But, really, people can probably look at me and guess. “Um, I don’t know. I’m--” and I waved my hands in the air to explain what I had never given too much thought.
“Oh, okay.”
A few times that week I woke up to find Scarlet in my bed. She would crawl under my covers late at night, when she came home from dancing. She told me she hated sleeping alone, especially in a place where even little shacks get broken into. I told her I didn’t mind. And surprisingly I wasn’t lying—I liked having her there, having something warm to hold. Nothing more than sleeping happened, just my arms around her, even though I was smaller and my arm always went to pins and needles under her neck. She was just the type who needed to be held. She filled the air with her vanilla perfume and my bed with glitter. When the moon hit it just so, the whole thing sparkled like a starry night.
This happened every night. And every morning the sun was bright in my room and never allowed us to sleep past ten. After we had woken up we would stay in bed for hours more, shifting in and out of sleep much like the sunlight through the oak leaves which sprayed patterns on my walls. Scarlet told me stories about working at Alabee’s. There was one bald guy who always requested that the DJ play “Venus in Furs” or any Nine Inch Nails songs so Scarlet could pretend to kick him or choke him while she danced. There was another she called “The White Knight” because he was always trying to save her from her life. He would tell her she was better than this as she gyrated in his lap. Most interesting to me was a man who goes to Scarlet for advice. He wife became paralyzed from the neck down in a car crash and though he loved her he wasn’t sure how much longer he could survive in a sexless marriage.
“What do you tell him to do?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“Well, I tell him the only thing I can think to. I tell him to stay with his wife. To keep coming to Alabee’s, paying me to dance, and to keep jerking off in the bathroom in between songs.”
There were many mornings Scarlet could not get out of bed. The first time she was sick I did not know it was only a rampant case of hypochondria. I figured out her stomach pain was all in her mind because the more I cared for her, the sicker she got. Scarlet was horribly dramatic about it. She believed in her illness the way some people believe in Jesus or the weather reports. Though I knew it was imagined, I would push hair from her clammy forehead and bring her warm ginger ale. I rubbed her back to help her fall asleep and sometimes I would hum to her whatever I had heard on the radio that day. My heart would leap when I would hear her calling me, “Kiiiiid? Kiiiid?” her voice pained and whiney. I would rush to her beside, happy at the thought that she needed me, really needed me. I knew it was all an act; even her needing me was part of it. But oh, how I soaked it up.
“You should go to school and become a nurse. You’re good at it.”
“I’ve thought about that actually.”
“No shit? Well, you should go for it. Otherwise I think you’d be good in porn,” she said. I stopped rubbing her back and laughed, “I’m sorry, what?”
“Yeah, you with your babyface. They use girls who are legal but look like they’re underage. I think it’s for pedophiles who don’t want to break any laws.”
“Eh, I’ll stick to cooking for now.”
“Suit yourself.”
We did not own a lawnmower so the grass got overgrown and came up to my knees after June’s rains. By August waxy weeds and yellow wildflowers poked through the knee-high green grass. Vines started growing up our wooden shack of their own accord and the whole thing looked like a lush jungle house in the middle of Oklahoma’s prairies. The sunlight glittered on the shards of our broken windows and made rainbows of our screen door. It felt magical and it felt like ours, the only reason the two of us existed as ‘the two of us,’ whatever that meant.
Sometimes Scarlet would join me outside and drink some of my beers but mostly she hated drinking during the day. It made her feel sleepy and she preferred to feel alive when the sun was out and her stomach wasn’t hurting. I, however, liked the heavy, drifting nauseous feeling that came with getting too much sun and drinking too many lime-flavored beers. Years ago, when I started drinking, I had not intended to make a habit out of it. In the past I was waiting for something interesting to happen and I had thought that a beer buzz would help that along. All it ever really did was make hours melt away and the television glow more personable.
One morning I stayed in bed with Scarlet very late. She was feeling ill again. “Have you ever kissed a girl?” Scarlet wanted to know. I thought about lying. But I didn’t. I told the truth.
“No.”
“Have you ever kissed a boy?”
“No.”
“I don’t get it. You’re pretty. You look like a boy. Like a beautiful boy.”
I laughed. I said something about being a misanthrope. How could I explain that I was a green bean who needed no soil? She slid her head across the pillow and pushed her mouth against mine. I didn’t even have time to close my eyes.
“I just did that so you could have your first kiss already.”
“I know.”
I had asked her about the photo album she kept in her room. She handled the album gingerly and had a narrative for each picture. There was one of the ocean with a circle of rough grey breaking the water’s surface.
“That’s a whale’s back. We went on a whale watch one summer. Up in Massachusetts.”
I have never seen the ocean. I have never left the state. I have never gotten close enough to a real whale to take its picture.
“Whales sing to each other underwater. I’ve heard recordings. Scuba divers or something must record it. It sounds like crying, but I think it is just them talking or singing to each other. It’s the most beautiful thing. I’d dance to it at the club if I could,” she said laughing. “But mostly they just play ‘My Humps.’”
“Who did you go whale watching with?” I asked. But what I was really asking was ‘who came before me? Who took you out of these state lines, these horrible borders?’
“I was married for a little while. I was so young, about your age, but that’s just what you did in Georgia. He was a really nice, rich guy. Here, this is him. We were going to have a baby and everything, but I can’t. Like, my body can’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Kiddo.” As Scarlet showed me more pictures, her and her ex-husband eating lobster on the same vacation, a few of them in front of their first house, I thought of the incompleteness of all the unions the two of us would have with other people or with each other. We could spend our whole lives with people we loved never leave behind something we had created.
Scarlet was putting on lipstick in the bathroom mirror. I made a funny face and she smiled at my reflection with her berry-red mouth. I remembered it was her night off.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I have a date with an old friend.”
“You do?”
“Yes. To dinner. And I’m late. See you later, Kid.”
Scarlet did not sleep in my bed that night. She slept in her own, alone. She isn’t mine, I told myself. That’s when I knew that I wanted her to be. I put a pillow over my face and shouted Fuckshitasshole! into it. The next night after work she slept alone again. On the third night I did not have work so I took shots of gin, which I rarely do, until I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake up until eleven the next morning. I wandered into the kitchen, my stomach sour with gin and emptiness, my short hair standing on end, and sitting at our folding table was a man. To me he looked like he was around forty. Gaudy gold rings choked his chubby fingers and he wore a wrinkled button-down, but nice slacks. He looked at me and spooned the fruit loops he was eating through his chapped lips.
Since he wasn’t saying anything I said, “Hey. I’m Scarlet’s roommate.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Bill.”
I made my own bowl of fruit loops and sat across from Bill. We both looked into our bowls, watching neon colors bleed into the milk like subdued fireworks. I could hear Scarlet moving from her room to the bathroom, getting ready. I felt like a little kid with a freshly divorced mom who brought her boyfriend home for the first time. I also felt like a boyfriend, jealous and angry. Hey, buddy, she kissed me, I attempted to tell him with squinted eyes. As Bill and I chewed our mushy cereal, I began to understand that I had never been someone who needed no one. I had always been someone who needed one person, specifically, Scarlet.
I put my bowl in the sink and changed into a bathing suit in my room. I put on the giant sunglasses I had found at work and took a bag of cherries from the refrigerator. I went into the front yard and made a nest of the tall grass, spitting cherry pits with exaggerated force. Look at me, I thought, not drinking, eating a full breakfast, and tanning outside like a normal girl. And then I got a terrible urge to be naked. I get these socially unacceptable compulsions sometimes, like the need to vomit in public or to pluck out my eyelashes. They really shatter the image of normalcy I’ve got going on. However, there is no getting around them so I slid my bathing suit off. Where it usually covered, my skin was white and alien, I hardly recognized it. The sun was hot and soon I smelled like burnt almonds. The wind, though, had the sting of autumn.
Scarlet and Bill walked out. He averted his eyes, but Scarlet’s scanned my body. She had never seen me naked before.
“Fall’s coming. I can feel it,” I told her.
“Bullshit,” she said and joined Bill in her Honda. And they drove away.
Scarlet came home the next afternoon and lowered herself onto the couch without saying hello or anything to me. Her face was crumpled in fake pain and she curled her body up like a question mark.
“Kiiiiiid, will you make me Tummy Tamer Iced Tea?”
“No, I will not make you Tummy Tamer Iced Tea,” I said and darted into the bathroom. I turned on the shower and got under the warm spray. I knew she wouldn’t follow me because she had probably had enough of seeing me without clothes on.
I thought of it as I shampooed my hair. I thought of what I wanted to say to Scarlet. I wanted to tell her, “You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts.” It was the truest thing I had ever thought of and I repeated it over and over myself until the water turned cold. “You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts. You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts. You are not sick. You are so alive it hurts.”
I got out of the shower and stood between her and the TV she had bought for me. I had thought to put a towel around me, but I was soaked and I stood there, silently, long enough for a puddle to form around my feet. I tried, but I couldn’t say it. It seemed silly and I thought she wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t even true about her. That’s when I realized I wanted nothing more than for her to say it to me. I wanted to be told what I knew was not exactly, but almost, true about myself. I wanted to cry and be held and need people the way I hoped they needed me. I wanted to stop feeling bigger than my town and bigger than my life and I wanted to feel like a speck in the universe like everyone else does. The impossibility of it all filled the room, thick and suffocating.
“Is something bothering you?” she asked, snapping me back to reality.
“No, not really. I’m, um, I’m just really drunk,” I lied.
“Well, go take a nap. Jesus H., Kid.”
“Yeah. I think I will.”
Scarlet practically moved in with Bill the next day. They had dated after her divorce and she told me that he was the sort you could not see for years and then love all over again. I rarely saw her until she woke me by getting into my bed after a month of me sleeping alone. She curved into me and flung an arm around my stomach. Stubbornly, I continued to feign sleep until I realized that she was shivering. I turned around and looked at her.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sounded like it was about to brake. I flicked on my bedside lamp.
“Holy shit, Scarlet! What—”
“Shhh, I’m okay.” It was clear that she was not. A purple bruise bloomed around her left eye and her lip was split. Blood had pooled in the wound. It looked like a ruby, or a shiny beetle. I reached out and touched it gently with my thumb. She winced.
“Who the fuck did that to you?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. I asked her again.
“Bill,” she said. I sat up and she grasped my arm.
“It was stupid, I’m really okay. I just want to sleep here tonight.” She told me that her another ex-boyfriend, the one who violated his probation, had shown up at Alabee’s and watched her dance. When Bill came to pick her up Scarlet showed him all the money the ex had given her. A lot of money, for a lot of lap dances. Bill figured they must have been fucking so he hit her face, her beautiful face and then dropped her off.
“You don’t deserve that.”
“Kid, calm down.”
“You don’t deserve that.”
“I’m really okay. He’s honestly not like this.”
Maybe her hypochondria was gone, I thought. If a stomachache meant she was dying then I would have thought a split lip would mean her life was ending. But no, to her it just meant that shit happens, and that killed me. I let go of the bed sheets I was clenching and held her. After awhile she stopped shivering and I thought she had fallen asleep. I kissed her head, right above her ear.
Without opening her eyes, she said “You should ask the girl at the liquor store out.” I pictured the liquor-store-girl and I going on a date. Doing things normal people did-- seeing movies, sitting in cafes, holding hands. It didn’t look right. I pictured Scarlet and I doing those things. It looked appealing, but unrealistic still. I pictured me punching Scarlet in the mouth the way Bill had. I couldn’t even imagine it. I kissed Scarlet’s hair again in the same spot. She pretended it was sleep that made her roll closer to the edge of the bed.
“Let’s have a day,” Scarlet said, shaking me awake. I had not seen her for a week, she had been at Bill’s, and it took me more than a few minutes to believe it was really her. We had had two days before. On the first one we went to the matinee and hopped from movie to movie all day. We got to see three movies for the price of one and stuff our faces with salted popcorn. When we finally left the sun nearly blinded us. We were struck by it, as if we expected the whole world to be as dark as our cinema. Our second day was completely unplanned, and it only lasted an hour. Scarlet determined that I was too drunk to drive to work, though I was really fine, so she put me in her car. On the way we passed a small field filled with dying dandelions. We got out of the car and kicked our way through the white fluff, making wishes with each burst and blow.
On what would be our third and final day Scarlet wore a frothy pink dress that seemed light enough to melt into the air. She took me to the city, past the neon Sonic signs and towering cowboy boots advertising Western Wear Co. and right into the heart. We stumbled upon a restaurant call the Spaghetti Emporium. It had a giant Leaning Tower of Pisa coming out of the roof and the host was dressed like a gondola rower. Perhaps, I thought, this is Scarlet showing me the world. “Ciao, bella, we’re in Italy.” We both ordered giant bowls of penne pasta and when Scarlet noticed my hands starting to shake she got me a glass of white wine the size of a baby’s head. We talked about the things we believed as children. I told her that I once thought God looked like King Friday on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Scarlet used to think that pee was all the apple juice you drank.
“Then what was your shit?” I asked.
“Chocolate, of course. I never ate or drank from the toilet or anything, but I just knew I was right.”
Scarlet told me she was moving out through a mouthful of sickly-sweet tiramisu.
“Bill asked me to move in with him. He’s just leasing out here, but he’s from Tulsa and he wants to move back.”
“Can you order me another glass of wine?”
“Oh, you’re just worried because he roughed me up a bit. You’re a sweetie to be concerned. You really are. But you don’t understand the menfolk like I do. If a man is jealous it means he loves you. It means he really needs you and will do anything to not loose you.”
“I can’t help but think someone like Bill, or your ex-husband or the guy who just got out of jail, or whoever the hell else, should never have you in the first place.”
“Kid, no one has me, if you want to know the truth of it. But Bill is good. We’ll get an apartment with a backyard in Tulsa and he has money to look into that thing where they stick more eggs in you. Part of me still wants a baby and like, a dog, or whatever. You know?”
I did know. I asked her if she thought I was the sort you could not see for a while and then fall right back in with, wherever you left off. She said she was certain. Then we talked about the bubbles in Pelligrino, we talked about the famlies we hadn’t seen and we talked about the twin-delima of space travel. We paid our check and we went back to what was once our house.
On the day Scarlet left I took a marker (it was grape-scented) and wrote her name on every part of my body. She was on every finger, she was on each leg and all the inches of my back I could reach. I would have written her name on my organs, my lungs, my liver, my spleen, if I could have. When I finished I looked in the mirror, I did not look any different. This made me laugh. I ran the bath and got in and stayed in until the water turned violet and I came out clean.
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