deathlings.com: Bodily Decoration for the New You

Bodily Decoration for the New You
by Consatnce Gelvin

She congratulated herself on how she'd gotten her delivery down pat. The hesitation, the slight stammer nuanced her words so naturally.

Andrew caressed a thickened caterpillar of puckered skin, his touch cotton ball gentle. Dawn jerked away, just slightly, as if stung.

Dawn heaved herself up the steep sidewalk in front of Sandy's Taffy in the Penny Arcade. She craved the tart sour-apple taffy nobody else she knew liked. Sandy herself said she only sold the stuff to tourists and Dawn--"You be my only sour-apple repeat customer, darlin'."

"Look at you! So high you touch the sky!" a father crowed to a designer overall'ed kid who straddled the paint-peeling Dumbo ride. The child clung to its ears instead of the harness and looked scared to death. God, I hate this town, Dawn thought to herself. Every fucking tacky place in this hellhole can burn to the ground.

She thought of her friend Alanie--who called herself "A-lah-nie" though her Dad pronounced her name: "A-lay-nee." Dawn's Mother always called Alanie and her caretaker slash yard "boy" father: "the help." Dawn would cringe inside when her Mother said lah di dah things like, "I'll have my boy bring over some of our extra firewood." It didn't seem to faze Alanie or her father though. Alanie would babble on about how glad she was they'd moved to Squanee, about how she loved it, like it was some kind of Disneyland or something. "My Dad took my picture with the Chief Walking Quiet statue--"

Dawn looked up sharply at the word "Dad," but Alanie's smile let her relax. "Big whoop. Don't you know the whole Chief Walking Quiet legend was made up by the first Squanee Tourist Board?" Dawn relished raining on Alanie's parade.

But Dawn herself had been enchanted by Squanee Springs, her father's hometown, right after they'd moved from Atlanta. She'd loved the "Madame Tara Fortune Teller--Only One Cent" booth and the gaudy pinball machines clustered in "The Oldest Penny Arcade West of the Rockies." She'd filled her empty plastic milk jug with the naturally carbonated, sulfury-smelling water that bubbled from the round brick buildings atop wells. She'd delighted in the old-fashioned brick shops built right next to the sidewalk, and the Gold Rush Victorian houses that crawled up the base of Mt. Squanee. A delight that had slowly curdled into a generic dislike of the unremitting tourist-ness of the town from its cheesy knickknacks: "Squanee Springs' Love-a-meter. See if you're Red Hot tonight!" to its air of forced fun, to its television-tainted prettying up of Western history.

She turned onto the cobblestone sidewalk, which led past the McAllister building that had been sliced into small storefronts. She saw the shoe repair shop where she'd never seen any customers; "Mushroom Monday's", a t-shirt screenprinting business; and last, a store that had been empty as long as she'd lived in Squanee. She peered, as she always did, inside. Like all empty spaces it looked smaller--instead of larger--without furniture crowding into it. For years a torn, yellowing Squanee Sentinel with the partial headline, "Squanee Girl Reported...," a plastic cup whose faded-out letters read "Betty's Café: The Biggest, Not the Best, Burgers", and a dead plant stuck in a crinkly foil-wrapped pot had littered a wooden board on the radiator.

Dawn felt that sad still life pretty much summed up Squanee. But tonight she stopped, dumbstruck. The discarded items had vanished. In their place was a propped poster with gaily-colored scrawls proclaiming, "Magick Tattoo. Bodily Decoration for the New You. Opening Soon."

She had no idea how long she'd stood there, but quaked with fear when she noticed it had grown dark. Mother would be angry. She hurried up Ruxton Avenue, the street that dead-ended at the Heart-of-the-Springs Chateau and Old-time Melodrama. She could see clearly into people's houses, what she liked best about walking at night. Making a right turn onto Sparkling Water Street, she trudged toward the unwelcoming light streaming from every window of the building she called home. Surely not another party? On a weeknight? Dawn touched the tiles of the bird bath for good luck. "They're one-of-kind designed and fired by Artemus Van Briggle himself," her Mother would tell guests in her fakey tour guide voice.

It never helped. The door exploded open, like her mother had sensed Dawn creeping through the pine be-decked lawn. "Where have you been? It's almost six. Go up the back way and wash your face. It's so greasy it looks like you rubbed Crisco all over it. Put on that peach-colored sundress I--"

Her mother held up her wineglass and peered at Dawn through it, just one of the gestures that had confused Dawn since childhood. She narrowed her gold-flecked eyes at Dawn. "In-cred-ible. Fucking incredible. Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you doing this to me? You'd had to have piled on twenty pounds for it not to fit." Her mother's words spat and sizzled--like water in a frying pan--in Dawn's face. Her father stepped out onto the porch. "What are you two doing out here? How's my favorite girl?"

"Been stuffing herself with candy from that cheap--" "No, I haven't! I've only eaten the apple and cottage cheese in my lunch. I--"

Dawn's father lifted a strand of her hair, tucked it behind an ear, then pulled his gaze back to his wife. "Now, Mallie, she's a growing girl."

"I knew you'd take her side. She's growing out of everything I buy her within months. She pigs out on--" Dawn stood mute while their words tumbled over her. A figure, darkened from the contrast of the living room's blinding lights, floated in front of the open door. "Brad! Just having a little family confab out here. Have you met my daughter Dawn? Bet you didn't think I was old enough to have a sexy, teenage daughter."

They laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. Dawn slipped her mother an appraising glance at the "sexy" part, then flounced around back and into her room. She didn't come down for dinner and ending up eating her hidden stash of Oreos, fish crackers and aerosol spray cheese stuff she licked off her fingers.

The next morning her mother said she didn't know what had gotten into Dawn lately she was so hateful, and she had absolutely no intention of taking Dawn to Santa Fe with her. Dawn cried, mad at herself for acting like a baby, said "You promised!" and said she didn't want to stay at home alone.

Her mother's lips tightened into a slash across her face. "Don't be silly. Your father will be here. And Alanie and her father." Then she smiled calmly, tried to juggle the silverware which promptly clattered down on the table's buffed oak. She shrugged, picked up Dawn's half eaten bowl of cereal and poured it down the disposal. Her mother said she was learning how to set boundaries. She said that Dawn needed to suffer the consequences of her actions. That she'd learned all this from the Support Group she'd just joined.

Dawn had craved the reprieve of Santa Fe. She stumbled through the motions of getting ready for school, her insides dead, cold, like a stubbed-out cigarette. Later, she walked to Squanee Springs High School with Alanie who said, "Thanks for letting me spend the night on Tuesday. Everything you have is so perfect, your stuff, your doll collection; you've even got a stereo and a canopy bed. God, It must be nice to be you." Dawn didn't reply and Alanie didn't seem to notice.

And later: Dawn walked into the cafeteria and panicked because she didn't see anyone she knew to sit with. Casey, her lank hair parted down the middle and her eyes raccoon-ringed, chanted with her other hood friends, "Rich bitch, rich bitch" as Dawn walked by.

And later: Steve Silletti made a cupping motion toward her breasts and J.R. and O'Black laughed and Silletti whispered, "More than a handful's too much."

And later: Dawn wasn't comforted that the mother she hated wouldn't be at home when she got back from school.

"Dawn? Is that you, honey?" Her father, shirtless and clutching a Coors, entered from the parlor. Her gaze skittered away from the whorls of hair on his chest, even on the tops of his shoulders. "I told Fred to take the afternoon off. With pay, of course. He was absolutely delighted. Said he was going to take Alanie up the Cog Railway. So I guess you could say we've been left to our own devices, huh, kiddo?"

Dawn felt tears rush to her eyes, the top of her nose stung like it would when she'd jump into their pool without pinching her nose closed first. God, she thought for the thousandth time, I hate Squanee.

Dawn's mother thanked God herself for her Support Group. Without it she wouldn't have realized that Dawn was just acting out, was testing her authority. Dawn's mother sometimes wondered what she'd have done without her friends who seemed to understand her daughter's mystifying behavior, then explained it to her.

I'll have to remember not to ask yes/no questions, her Mother thought. Dawn's father noticed her silence with a mixture of concern and relief.

Dawn thought nothing; the exquisite blankness of her mind sometimes soothed, but more often tortured her. She envied book characters' rich interior lives. She was able to float away from herself only when she drank, emptying bottles from her parents' wine cellar.

Then she discovered something besides the alcohol that calmed her. For reasons she couldn't fathom she'd taken to staring in at the "Magick Tattoo. Bodily Decoration for the New You" shop, the only place in town that had any resonance for her.

Dawn loved the easy familiarity of the young couple that owned the tiny shop. Their bodies were similarly built: angular, broad shouldered; each had a short, spiky haircut. She loved their clothes that looked New Yorky to her: baggy pants, tight t-shirts that exposed their peekaboo, pierced belly buttons, chunky, square-heeled shoes. They both sported matching tendrilled, tattoo'ed vines that encircled their necks. Dawn shivered when she imagined needles piercing the tender flesh of their Adam's apples.

She was amazed at how clearly she could see from her vantage point in the foyer of the Mountain View Apartments across the street. She liked the pictures of tattoos that lined the walls--the garish kind, the kind you visualized when you thought the word "tattoo." The kind that brought to mind coarse men's hairy arms that boasted kneeling, naked women with breasts thrust out and "Maria" or "Sue" lettered in blue underneath. But she liked it best when the owners brought out thick books like photo albums and the customers thumbed through the plastic-gloved sheets, pointing at, and ooh-ing and ah-ing over, the designs inside. She loved it when a customer, flushed with pain survived and secret knowledge of intimate decoration, had called out, "'Bye, Florian. I'll let you know how Jerry likes it."

Florian. She was sure that's what the woman had said. What an odd name: Florian. But she loved the musical lilt to it--floor-ee-un. She'd say it slowly, savoring it, till it melted, like sour-apple taffy on her tongue. The man's name was Prince. Dawn later discovered that was his last name; it was lettered on a small piece of paper and taped under their mail slot with the words "Magick Tattoo" above it. Prince. That's all Florian ever called him.

What surprised Dawn were the people she saw coming out of the shop. Men, women she'd seen for years at her family "soirees", heard about, read about in the "Squanee Society Snippets" section of the Sentinel. One glareful, summer-hot afternoon she watched Florian at an easel Prince had set up in the corner. As she readied her paints and brushes, he'd brought her a wicker tray with a basket of apples, rosy-shaded pears, lush purple grapes tumbling out of it. The gesture had filled Dawn with a sadness and longing, for what, exactly, she couldn't pinpoint. Florian had painted each fruit carefully, before tearing off the sheet with the outline of a pear's rounded curves.

Dawn had gasped in shock when she'd seen her former Health & Hygiene teacher hesitate, then make a fierce trajectory into the shop. Florian showed the sketch to Miss Netterson with a "tah dah" gesture. Miss Netterson of the droning voice and of the "Let me be the judge of that," and of a pinched, hungry expression emerged with a shy, secret smile on her narrow lips and a burstingly fecund rosy pear tattooed on the inside of her left wrist.

Later, Dawn almost didn't recognize Miss Netterson's photo under the headline, "Local Teacher Announces Engagement to Denver Principal."

Dawn couldn't see what Sandra Smith, legs spread in stirrups like in a doctor's office, had tattooed on her inner thigh. Prince left before Sandra arrived, and Florian had taken Sandra's hand, helped her lie on the elevated examination table, draped a billowy, extra-bright white sheet over her.

Months passed. One afternoon Dawn watched as Sandra struggled up the buckled sidewalk in front of "Magick Tattoo." She had that ungainly waddle of all pregnant women, and her leotard stretched over a belly button as thick as a pumpkin stem. She brought Florian a basket swathed in shiny wrapping paper.

Dawn watched them all enter--the pale youth minister from Squanee Springs Living Gospel Church, the stuttering janitor B-B-Bob as the bullies at Squanee High called him, the pock-mocked owner of Ted's Tubz Laundromat--and eagerly she'd devour the news of the unexpected transformations their lives had taken. Innovative speech therapies with almost instantaneous results, a lottery win, a senior minister job assignment.

Florian looked up. From a distance Dawn hadn't noticed how each tiny hair of her beautifully arched eyebrows was brushed almost straight up, giving her eyes a perpetually startled expression. "Ah, the woman who watches. Welcome. We were hoping you'd come by some day."

Dawn's heartbeat quickened and she felt her face flush because someone besides her father had called her a woman instead of a girl, and because Florian had obviously seen her skulking about, gawking at them.

"Daughter of the Squanee-founding, Gold Rush big bucks Jamisons? Surely you're used to everyone in town knowing who you are?"

"And envying you your house with its veranda bigger than their cottages, the ski trips to Aspen, the..."

Florian didn't finish her sentence, just looked at Dawn, smiled, glanced back at Prince. "Tea, cookies, that leftover coffee cake from Squanee Sweets?"

"You couldn't? Ah, but you could. Join us, please. We've so looked forward to meeting you."

And that afternoon and into the early evening Dawn told of her life, spoke of things she'd never dared speak of, of things she'd barely allowed herself to think about. And throughout, Florian and Prince nodded and poured tea and plied her with treats and laughed at her words, but only the funny ones, and listened to her and touched her hand and asked her questions when they didn't understand.

And only, as iris-hued streaks painted the sky above the mountains, and crumbs and grounds sprinkled the cups and plates, did Dawn realize she'd never been really listened to before. All her life people had responded to her with conditioned, formal reserve and when they'd talked of themselves, they'd denigrated the simpleness of their lives. She'd never inspired a moment of sincere curiosity about herself in her entire life.

The problem was everyone in this envious town thought they knew all about her. Had her all figured out.

As Dawn was reluctantly drawing herself away from the magical afternoon at "Magick Tattoo," Florian looked up at her and asked, "Are you brave enough for the tattoo I have in mind for you? " Dawn was confused, frightened, excited by Florian's description of her perfect "bodily decoration." "Just think about it."

And so Dawn had. She'd stare, transfixed, in the mirror, imagining herself decorated with Florian's handiwork. She'd imagine the reactions of her family, friends. But she held back, surely such a drastic step wasn't necessary. Surely there was a more--what was the word her Mother used?--"organic" means to the same end.

She traced the thin, blue-veined skin of her wrist, but fear shuddered through her. She felt a coward.

She started fires that fizzled. The last one she was heralded for putting out. A sham hero, she told herself.

She stuffed agate paperweights, and delicate silver jewelry that shivered in her hands, and imported cooking gadgets, and other expensive trinkets into her pockets and purse. She was never caught. When she gave the items away with a careless grace she was effusively thanked, her taste praised. She plagiarized reports and won writing contests and science fairs. For her efforts she was described as the "Squanee Golden Girl" in the "Society Snippets." But the Golden Girl wanted to be tarnished.

Florian held Dawn's gaze then enveloped her in an embrace, "You're making the right decision." Then she spoke a simple sentence that Dawn would repeat to herself in the months that followed.

It took some time for her parents to notice. Her father had turned on the light, something he normally never did, looked taken aback at one of the pale, worm-like tattoos that crawled up her arm.

Dawn had been in her room when her mother burst in. Her mother's lips had writhed, almost lewdly, like she was chewing on something especially distasteful. She grabbed the arm with a fresh-looking, puckered red slash across the wrist. "What's this? When did you hurt yourself?" She forced Dawn's sleeves up, inspected the arms Dawn laid out before her, an offering. Her mother examined the tattoos closely, almost with relish. "Did you damage yourself to get attention? How in the world--did you burn yourself, did--" Her mother's eyes narrowed, "I'll bet you tell people I did this to you, don't you? It won't work. I'm calling a plastic sur--"

O'Black had goaded Andrew, told him Dawn Jamison was way above the likes of him. Spoke of her family, her house. Dawn heard about the conversation, watched Andrew start to recede from her. But sometimes she'd look up, find him watching her, afraid to approach her.

"Nobody in Squanee knows about the fire. It happened when we were still in Atlanta. God, it was so awful--"

Consatnce Gelvin has placed in several writing contests including: Arizona Authors League Short Story Contest, Writers West, MileHiCon 30, Garden State Horror Writers, and the 1998 and 1999 Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition. Her play: "Mental Health and Other Myths" was produced by Love Creek Productions in New York City the end of October. Her first novel No Reason to Lie will be published by Hard Shell Word Factory in 2001.