Sari Wilson

Stories

Patriotic Dead (cont'd)

He is looking for his clothes. In pulling on his shirt, he knocks over one of her lamps. The lampshade hits the floor with a tingly clatter.

"I'm sorry," he says. He bends down to give her a dry kiss.

As he opens the door to the hallway, she screams, "Go fuck yourself."

"Prefer truth to everything," the grey-haired man yells from the bottom landing.

She gets up to shut the door and realizes that she is still naked. When Cara, at the age of 18, moves to New York City, her entire childhood takes on the aura of a condensed dream. (Corroded metal playground equipment; sweet hay smell of her school's corridors; suspicious stares greeting her and her mother as they stand on the church steps.)

Her mother did not object to her going to New York. Not after that night. Cara and her mother had been sitting on the porch when the rocks came hurling through the screen and landed on the floor. A car peeled rubber; and the laughter, she can still remember, sounded so close that it seemed to come from inside her own head. "Slut." "Whore." These were the words tossed out into the humid night. The rocks gave off a rank odor. It turned out that they had been smeared with shit.

Her mother began to weep. It ended as it always did: Her mother moaning about her unlived life—if she had not gone to that concert in Des Moines; if she had not met that man from Peru (Cara's father); if Cara had not been born. The string of calamities that came to a stop with Cara.

So Cara had left. It turned out that leaving was not the hard part. Many people left. (Even her mother had worked in Milwaukee for several years in her early twenties.) No, leaving is not the hard part. It is staying. To make a life here. Cara had. She lived in a darling apartment in the East Village, neighborhood of her initial triumphs. She had a granite countertop. She got her hair cut at Bumble and Bumble. Dolce and Gabanna boots—the pointiest! This list goes on. These are the things of her survival, of her success.

New York City has given her the freedom from the pressing sense of scarcity she has grown up with. Here there is so much—and it arises as if from nowhere. These delicate piles of champagne grapes, these glittering strappy shoes that can't be worn for more than an hour, the Brazilian dark chocolate, the Tunisian figs. It all appeases some central anxiety in her. Her same features—half-Peruvian, half-Scandinavian—that caused physical taunts, snickers, cold stares and, finally, those rocks on their porch, now win her admiring, inquisitive glances and that esteemed question: Where are you from?

She begins modeling for extra cash. Inside vast, crumbling buildings, in overheated rooms loud with clanking radiators, she takes off her clothes. She tells her mother that she is waitressing. "Oh Cora" (for that was the name she was born with), her mother says. Her mother always refused to waitress. Instead, she works in a box factory.

Cara is tall and fleshy, but firm. She can hold the poses for as long as they need. When she sits, her mind grows dull, like a lizard soaking in the sun. Her body comes alive. At twelve, she began stripping for the boys behind the park bathroom. The boys' eyes widened, jaws went slack, fingers twitched. A deep calm came over her mind, even as her body drank in its power. It is like that, something like that.

She is asked to sit for smaller groups of artists—independent groups. At lofts, in squats, once in the back of a plant store, in a room as warm as a terrarium.

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© 2009 Sari Wilson