“Marcie! Hey
it’s good to see you!”
“Hi, Julie.”
Julie looked
her up and down. Up and down, then smiled brightly, her eyes glistening like
wet caramels. Then came the single syllable.
“Wow.”
It wasn’t a
“wow” like “wow, is that your new car?”. It was a “wow” like, “What happened to
your new car?” It had a tiny backlilt, an inflection that was just a little bit
“off”.
Marcie knew it
wasn’t a good “wow”. It was almost a disappointed “wow”, but strained through a
sort of Facebook screen so she could never be pinned down or held responsible.
“Wow
yourself.”
“Yeah.!” The
“yeah” started off as a high squeal, then sailed down to a whisper.
Julie looked
away for just a second with a sort of reflexive hair-flip, like something you’d
do in junior high. Marcie half-expected her to start chewing on the end of her
braid. Then she brighted herself again.
“So what are
you, y’knowwww – “
“Oh, same old
thing.”
“Did you ever
get – “
“No.”
“So are you
self-publishing now? Whatever happened to that novel? You know, the one about
the cruise ship and the - ”
“That was
quite a while ago.”
“I can see
that.” (See what? “That”.)
She hair-flipped again. “So what do
you do now exactly, you know? I mean.”
“The same
thing you do, Julie.”
“Oh, of
course!” She kept looking Marcie up and down, her eyes flipping from head to
mid-thigh, though pretending she wasn’t doing it.
“You know,
it’s been an awfully long time since we’ve seen each other, Julie.”
“Tell me about
it!”, with a well-practiced “oh, yeah!” eye-roll.
It was then
that she noticed something funny about Julie. Or at least, she thought it was
funny. She had a sort of glaze over her, like something you’d pour over
cinnamon buns, or maybe a shell of amber. Glossy. Her smile was glossy too.
Had she
done something to herself?
Marcie
believed that, as you aged, your face decided to go one way or the other. It
either went Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy looked
almost the same in the ‘60s, well, at least both of them had normal faces, and
now Shatner was round as a pumpkin and Nimoy looked like a burnt-out old
matchstick.
Skinny faces got fat, fat faces got skinny. Gaunt-looking people rounded out and softened, as if their inner selves were working their way out. The healthy-looking ones housing gaunt souls ultimately lost the battle of looking like someone else.
But there was
a third possibility, and that was to stop. Stop time, stop the clock
ticking. Marcie always thought there was another word for that: “death”, but apparently
not, because everywhere she looked these days, she saw people who had decided
to stop the clock
Except that
there was a cost.
As Julie
pretended not to look at Marcie’s burgeoning weight, the little dewlappy thing
that hung below her rounded chin, the lizard skin on her arms, Marcie pretended
not to look at Julie’s House of Wax immobility, the shellacked quality which
was now considered highly desirable, even as she heard the creepy murmur of
Vincent Price in the background.
Some even
turned the clock back. Ageing backwards, which was really some trick. If
they kept on going, they’d be fetal in a few years, or disappearing altogether,
their molecules just coming apart: poof!
“So, I guess
you have a pretty big one coming up pretty soon.”
“A pretty big
one?” For some insane reason Marcie thought “bowel movement”.
“Birthday!”
She almost sang it, lilting high on the first syllable.
“Oh, Julie,
how did you ever remember that?”
“I did your
horoscope, silly, don’t you remember? Look at that.” She plucked a hair off the
shoulder of Marcie’s blouse and looked at it.
“It’s a hair.”
“Yes, I know,
but it’s - “
“Didn’t your
hair used to be - wait, now what color was
it, I mean before?”
“Before what?”
Julie was starting to sound defensive. She could dish it out, but she definitely
couldn’t take it.
“Before the
Jurassic Period,” Marcie wanted to say, but she didn’t. All the nasty things she
left unsaid were going to kill her, one of these days, like a great landslide
falling down on her.
“You’re still slim,”
she said instead. “How do you do it?”
“Oh! I cleanse.
Every month. High colonics, they’re awesome! You just purge away all that gunk
in your system. All those toxins.”
“I thought you
were vegan.”
“Oh, but
vegetables have chemicals on them no matter what, because of the water supply.”
“I still eat
cows.” She was becoming extremely depressed. How to get rid of her?
“You’re going
to kill yourself, Marcie,” Julie murmured, pulling out and using the
appropriate facial expression before tucking it away again.
(“Yes, if this
conversation goes on any longer.” Another rock in the landslide.)
“My
grandmother ate cows.”
“But they were
different cows.”
Marcie burst
out laughing. She couldn’t keep the
laugh to herself.
“I should say
they were.”
“No, you don’t
understand, they weren’t GMO cows.” Marcie thought this was something about
General Motors or something. Her lack of interest finally must have registered
on Julie.
“Listen,
sweetie, I have to go now, but I want to give you something" (rummaging in
her voluminous shoulder-bag) “- or actually, a few things, they’re freebies
from the gym, you know? And the salon and stuff. Take them.” She thrust a wad
of things in Marcie’s hands with a tight smile, turned around abruptly and gave
a little Liza Minnelli backwards wave over her shoulder before flouncing away.
Marcie stood
in the street shuffling through her treasures. A coupon for Turbo-Charge Fat
Blaster Weight Loss Supplement, $2.00 off the first 60 capsules. An ad for a 60-ounce
mega-capacity twenty-speed macerating Power-Juicer, 90-day trial free of
charge! “Look 20 years younger in 20 minutes with Botuline, available NOW from
your dentist!” A little packet of shampoo from a trendy salon, something called
Blow your Head Off!, to mask “the grey” (grey sounding as ominous as
some creepy space alien, and as undesirable). An ad for dental veneers with a
woman smiling like a piano, showing every blinding-white tooth in her head.
God, she
must think I’m a disgusting mess.
Just plaster
things on the outside, and run-run-run. It’ll catch up with you one day. Sooner
or later all your molecules will come apart, never to be replaced. When your
molecules do come apart, there will literally be nothing left. Is that
why you draw back so hard, by trying to minus-out the years you’ve slogged on
this earth? Keep hitting the reset button. But what about your mind? Can you
erase that too? I suppose you can. It’s done in a slightly different way.
They were
friends then, quite good friends, had many excited conversations about this and
that, though they often had a barbed quality to them, a
putting-down-with-eyeroll. It was necessarily for them to have a mutual enemy
or threat in order to really get along. Julie seemed like a super-coper, always
on top of every situation, so Marcie was stunned when she suddenly, floridly
fell apart. She had always been a little frantic, but this was something else, as if the tiny dancing
ballerina on top of the music box had gradually accelerated until it was spinning a million miles
an hour. This wasn’t any penny-ante
breakdown, it was wholesale craziness, hallucinations, delusions, the works.
That sounds
awful, Marcie thought, just heartless! It was pain and suffering, for sure, but
it was funny how everyone around Julie seemed to suffer more than she did. And
it was her family who decided she needed “shock”, something her sardonic old great-uncle called “Edison’s medicine”.
The shock
re-set her for sure, but things weren’t the same after that. It was as if some
mute but powerful presence deep in her psyche said: not this way; THAT way, and
gave her a huge shove in the direction of artificiality. This was the
way to make it. This was survival, solace, and something she could be really
good at. As the years passed, her new strategy dovetailed beautifully with what
the culture expected of her: the new Julie was popular at last, and because of
that, Marcie just faded into the background. Not that Marcie went backwards:
Julie just turned and walked away.
Now, it was:
Wow. Look at you. All right. I’ve made decisions, more compromises than I
ever thought I would have to. I am no prize. For this reason, I have one less
friend in the world, though I suspect I lost her a long time ago. Life is inherently
lonely, isn’t it? Aren’t the sweet fleeting times the very worst, because of
how they always go away?
And why
is it that when things are good, I mean, really good – as sweet as they can
possibly be - we are always the last ones to know? Better not to recognize such beauty, even in ourselves, lest we cry out to a heedless universe in last-ditch desperation
and despair: "Freeze!"
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