yellow

The box of shoes rests in my living room. They are, after all, just shoes. Lacey, tall, dark, loud, and beautiful bought them and then needed to get rid of them. I took them as another measure of her generosity. Now they’re an assurance that she had it all planned out. So they reside here by the front door, jumbled in a cardboard box soiled with the invisible residue of loss.
“Lorrie,” my mother calls. “Lorrie, I bought the eggs.”
I tear my eyes from the box, and I meet her in the kitchen. I take some plastic grocery bags from her hands, and we both land our heavy loads on the counter. She massages her wrists and checks her watch before pushing her deep red curls out of her face. Her green eyes are still red from tears on the way home from the store.
In South Carolina, the dogwood trees blossom in the spring and her eyes constantly look just the way they are now. In April, she could get away with blaming her tears on the trees. The November chill outside the kitchen window, however, won’t let her get away with anything.
“You tell Lacey that she is welcome here anytime,” she started telling me in third grade. Even until high school, she made sure Lacey made regular visits to my house. Then in college, we planned to go to school together. I got into a university; she didn’t. She stayed behind to help out her single dad with a job as a waitress.
“I’m saving up,” she promised me with a wave of her hand and a nonchalant flick of dark hair over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you there.”
She won't meet me again.
“You have three hours, honey. Then you need to get ready for the funeral,” Mom says. I nod and pull my brown, thick hair into a frizzy ponytail down my back. She leaves the kitchen carrying the yellow carnations I knew Lacey would love.
This kitchen is at one foreign and familiar. It does not feel like the same one in which Lacey and I made cream cheese cookies on a midnight trip to my kitchen. Then, the dark room flickered with a soft yellow in the candlelight. We shared dozens of the golden treats, laughing and crying over our lives.
Now, the walls are an ugly tan. How is this the same room? Where are the bowls? Which drawer has the spoons? I let instinct tell me what I can’t immediately remember as I gather the items I need.
The recipe isn’t difficult. I know it without looking at the sheet Lacey wrote for me after our first sleepover in fourth grade. I set the oven to 375 degrees. My fingertips twitch as I pull the cream cheese and the butter from the refrigerator.
The cream cheese lands with a soft but solid thud in the plastic bowl. I take spoonfuls of butter fling them into the bowl. It clumps on top of the cream cheese in a greasy half-moon.
Is this why, I wonder, as I cream the two ingredients together with pressured strokes of my spoon. Is it because she felt mashed between life’s bowl and spoon? But, there is no answer to this question, just as there are no answers to any of the other millions of questions I never asked.
I pour vanilla extract into a teaspoon, and my hands tremble, spilling it onto the counter. Only a drop actually makes it near the bowl. It slides in a brown trail down the outside of the container.
Damnit. Why can’t I do this? Lacey did this. Lacey made these cookies any time I needed to be cheered up. I was the recipient of many a Tupperware container full of these golden treats, made with chocolate sprinkles when I argued with my mom, red sprinkles when I was single on Valentine’s Day.
Why, then, didn’t she make these cookies for herself? Green sprinkles for the thousands in debt she incurred over the past few years. We could have laughed about it, maybe even used copper-colored sprinkles to match the pennies we had to our names.
Or, why didn’t she let me make them for her? She only had to ask… or shouldn’t I have known? But, I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. She knew we had different debts. Mine was books, tuition, and boarding. Hers was clothes, jewelry, and… shoes.
I catch the salty droplets sliding from my eyes with a kitchen towel before they can fall into my bowl.
“Sweetheart.” My mom is behind me. “You don’t have to do this so soon.” Her aged hands are sources of soft strength on my shoulders. I shake both her hands away. I am even surprised at my reaction to her, but I know I have to continue.
She shrinks from the kitchen. I take a deep breath, knowing I shouldn’t have pushed her away. I wish I could wipe up our pain just as easily as I wipe up the vanilla on the counter. I can’t though. So, I will do what I can.
I pick up my teaspoon and the vanilla extract. I steadily measure out what I need, then tip it into the bowl. I pick up the white, foam carton containing the eggs. I pick out an egg and crack its shell. As I separate the yolk, I try to push away aching thoughts... thoughts of how the flow of the egg whites between my fingers resembles the red flow from the gunshot she put through her head. Pouring in the yellow cake mix, I push away thoughts of the crumbles she thought her life had become. But, watching the cookies rise in the oven, I did remember her low, genuine laugh, how people around her watched as she passed, and how, once, she met me in a coffee shop to consol me after another heartbreaking boyfriend. She spent her last ten dollars on Mocha Lattes for the two of us, and put the change in the tip jar.


The smell of the cookies floats faintly through the house, from the oven through the living room and into my bedroom. I know the cookies are almost finished. I walk past a mirror reflecting the black dress I’ve changed into for the funeral. I try to keep going, past the box and toward my cookies, toward my first steps of acceptance, but I stop. A pair of pale yellow pumps rests atop the others.
I sit down beside the box, and my hand impulsively reaches for one of the shoes. These were her addiction. She could never resist a pair of yellow heels. I want to pull it into my chest, to pull her more near, but I know these were a cause of her pain. I throw it as hard into the opposite living room wall as I can, and my mom is beside me once again. Finally, I release myself into her arms, and I let myself cry into her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my ear.
“Me too,” I tell her. She pulls away to look into my face. My first words since I’d heard the news. She wipes my eyes with her soft fingertips.
“Lacey loved you,” she says. “She just didn’t love herself.” My mom stands and helps me to my feet. I rise, knowing I will miss Lacey every day for the rest of my life.
The vanilla aroma is now rich and warm, drawing our noses toward the source. We travel together into the kitchen. She takes a mitt from the drawer and pulls out the cookies. They are a perfect golden yellow.


For Tara, who wanted a golden dog and taught me to make golden cookies... and most of all, had a golden heart.

.stuck.

It's a month and ten days later.
Tara is gone. You still see Rich outside of Wal-Mart. He sits, just hiding his face behind a person, a tree, a shopping cart... anything. Closer, it is not him.
"You won't be seeing him for a while," says Josh. "Actually... ever."

You entertain yourself with magazines, with plans, with trips... but you avoid those things, those people, that might actually move you forward. You shop, you read, you write painful fiction to put it out on paper. So desperate are you that you change what you wrote into what you will write.

Stuck.

This is what you will do

This is what you do.
You make a new plan. The plan won't involve either of the following: your heart-broken fragility or him.
You realize that you are better off. You realize that he wasn't good at being there when you cried. You realize that he was good at making you laugh. Laughing makes you feel better. How is it better not to laugh?
You pray for a phone call, an acknowledgment. You get nothing.
You write him letters you want to take back and forget.
You think of conversations you want to have with him, things where you are strong and assertive and you make him see that this is all him. It's his fault he dumped you.
And then a day passes. And you wake up feeling better, then worse. Then you realize that today, you will make a plan. Today, you will be happily singularly free. Today you will go to Trigonometry class and history class. Today you will visit your boss and put in your two weeks notice, although now you go to your job to stay busy, and even though you dislike the charming smell of popcorn on your skin and in your clothes, you're afraid for that period in which you struggle to have something to do, somewhere to go.
But life always works out in the end, you remember. Never before have you been stuck out in the streets. Never before have you not felt God's blessings of health and family and understanding on a daily basis... Never before have you been heart-broken.
Never before has he blatantly not cared... but then you remember that he has not cared. When he did the same thing to his last girlfriend, you know he didn't care. So you resolve not to care.
You resolve not to be heart-broken. You resolve that tomorrow is a different day. Tomorrow is a different chance you have to change.
Tomorrow, you will follow your instincts and you will do what is right for you. You will quit, and you will start. Quitting is the first step in starting.
This is what you will do.

I decided to decide.

Life (n): that unexplainable, incorrigible mass of weightless opportunitistic possibility; that lovingly hateful existence of happiness and sadness, each day ending in a good result or a bad result, both of which withhold negative connotations: the bad days are, well, bad and the good days have to end; that short chance every person gets to live, to try living, even in the hurt and the happiness.
Life is short. What do I want to do with it? I decided to decide.

I want to take for granted that my work get published on a continual basis and pretend not to appreciate it when someone talks to me about something I’ve written.
I want to fall asleep and wake up with a person I know will always not only love me, but always be in love with me.
I want to see my play on a stage, any stage.
I want to be a good sister.
I want to learn about a different country in its native language.
I want wear beautiful clothes to beautiful theatres.
I want to spend most of my wedding reception dancing with my best friend, then live with him, want him, fight with him, love him, for the rest of my life.

I want to be in tune with what my body needs, but not over- or under-indulge.

I want to name my daughter Liv.

generally, everyone else is generalizing

I'm thoroughly fed up with discriminatory comments about the promiscuity of women and girls. And just as a side note, let's think: when's the last time anybody gave fuck about male promiscuity. Never.


That's not the point I'm trying to make, though. What I am trying to say is that it's exhausting being so frustrated by generalized comments like:

Implicit in this argument [about whether girls should get the HPV vaccine] is the assumption that good girls don't get cervical cancer; only "loose" ones do—and they may get what they deserve. [Slate]

And therefore only the girls who, oh I don't know, want to save their cervixes from cancer, would ever want to get the HPV vaccine, and of course that means that all girls selfish enough to want their cervixes are automatically sluts.

It doesn't matter that "the CDC reports that at least 50 percent of Americans are infected with HPV over the course of their lives, and a whopping 80 percent of American women are infected by age 50." It's also not important to note that "approximately 13 percent of American women ... are or will be a victim of rape over the course of their lives."


I mean, if you're raped, then you "deserve" to have cervical cancer. Yeah.


I think I understand why feminists are generalized as being constantly pissed off. They are. People keep on with their stupid comments, and feminists are the only ones commenting (and yeah, mocking, a little) back.

aNorEXING the unhealthy-skinny

Yesterday, a photo of this woman appeared in Italian magazines and on billboards sparking debate.

From this photo, she looks like she needs some sleep and a few hamburgers, but otherwise, she looks okay. That's only because from that angle, you can't see the breasts she doesn't have, because breasts are made up of fat, or the ribs protruding from her body, as if she has slipped from the Holocaust directly into today. That's what Italians woke up to in their morning papers on September 26.

This was a diliberate message about the dangers of anorexia by famous, and equally infamous, photographer Oliviero Toscani. Toscani is known for his outrageous photographs, so he is obviously well picked for the job by Nolita, whose message to fashion-lovers everywhere is that anorexia is not the pretty ideal of completely effortless "skinny" that most girls want to be.

"I've been looking into the problem of anorexia for years. Who's responsible? Communication in general? Television? Fashion?" said Toscani. "So it's very interesting that in the end a fashion company has understood the importance of the problem, and with full awareness has found the courage to take the risk that this campaign involves."

This comes from a guy who fights HIV through bare bottoms. But it also comes from a man whose aim is "to use that naked body to show everyone the reality of this illness, caused in most cases by the stereotypes imposed by the world of fashion." Reuters

Good job fashion industry, well, Nolita in particular, who went forward with the idea with the total support of Livia Turco, the Italian Minister of Health. She says that this can "open a communications channel" for youngsters hoping to make it into the fashion industry to "promote responsibility towards the problem of anorexia."

Well, maybe they're doing some good. Others, like the guy in charge of the Association for the Study of Anorexia, thinks that girls may use this as a competition for "extreme thinness."

Why would girls find this attractive? They shouldn't! Fashion week in Milan banned all those unhealthy-skinny chicks from the runway, just like Madrid. A BMI under 18 isn't just unhealthy, it keeps you from walking the runway.

Get pretty and get no respect

"You're a pretty girl," is what I was told by a man with a physical disability in a wheelchair. I thought this comment was sweet, reminding me of the kiss on the hand and the promise that I was pretty by another young man a few years ago before a concert I was to perform in. That was sweet. The man in the wheelchair, however, went on to say, "No, you're a pretty woman, because that's what you are now," almost as if he had been an observer of my growth process since I got my first period in the summer after fifth grade. It was at this point that I smiled politely and promised myself he meant it in the best way.

Let me here state that I wasn't offended by his comments; it just made me think about what it meant to be a woman, if that's what I am, against what it meant, or means, to be a girl.

Maybe Ms. Spears was a good role model (for once) in sharing her confusion of those in-between years of mixed girl- and woman-hood. She let the world know that even though she had the body of a woman, she had the feelings of a girl. This is a communal feeling among girls-becoming-women everywhere. And it's okay.

It's funny, though, what society expects of women and girls. Even yesterday, a man commented to me, "You women are all the same, all of you." I smiled politely, hoping my real opinion wouldn't show through in hopes of supreme Regal customer service, but he continued on. "You expect the men to carry it all for you." It's so hard not to be offended, not only because he honestly believes that all women are the same, but also because he believes he carries everything.

Think about it. Women, quite literally, carry everything. They carry a full separate human being inside of them for almost a year. Why? To carry on the line of that man's family.

Women also carry the stresses of today's highly judgemental social group without ever showing it. The current style for women is careless grace. Models depict sexiness by making it all seem easy. If you saw the real stresses that the model is facing, the strives she endures for her lean body, the family see never sees because of her busy lifestyle, the agent who wants her to weigh 110 pounds, even though she's 5'11", you'd never think she was beautiful. A man, though, who carries and shows his stresses can be sexy. Remember Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca? Remember the handsome, yet saddened look he carries as he awaits Ingrid Bergman's return to his cafe? Even in 1942, men could be sexy while stressed. Keifer Sutherland depicts this today in every episode of 24.

The spectrum between guys and girls seems to grow ever wider. Recently, my boyfriend enlightened me as to a custom among guys, one involving what seems to be dominance code. It's subtle, yet present. It's a nod. If a guy is checking out your girl, depending on how he responds to you, he gets a nod or a dirty look. If his nod says something along the line of "Good job," he gets the nod back. Anything else, the dirty look comes on full force.

Umm, what?

It's essentially condoning, even reinforcing, the attitude of women and girls as equal to something nearing an impressive breed of dog. The bitch (literally) who won the Eukanuba Tournament of Champions probably gets more respect.

I'll admit it; I like taking time to dress myself, straighten my hair, paint my nails, and, just for the record, I will not stop shaving my legs or under my arms (Note to the feminists: It's not just for the social standard; those tiny hairs are irriating!). It's true too that I like the attention and the compliments I get. It's not true, though, that I do it because:

"This current generation of young women... believe they will find any sort of satisfaction, emotional or sexual, through allowing themselves to become the sex objects of young men's fantasies..." thus "fueling a sorry state of affairs." Daily Mail

It's not true I like how, right under our noses, our very own guys are, perhaps unintentionally, carrying on a form of oppression through our own attractiveness. And it's right out liar-liar-pants-on-fire that the girls are to blame for this.

"They want to be taken seriously, but, by behaving like this, no one can blame the young men who treat them like sex objects and little else. "

Can't win.