Ermeline

The receptionist was a vapid, pretty girl mother had hired because she felt sorry for her. It had been the winter, and she had said the girl had looked so awfully cold—standing there in a skirt-suit with frosted pink lapels. Now the girl sat, forever bored, doodling a chasm of hearts—one stacked within another, forever and ever imploding. There was no use for her—the salon saw so few customers—but they all felt it would be ungraceful to fire her now, after all she had been through.
In the slow part of the afternoon, the receptionist looked up. “Ermeline,” she shouted, her voice spangled with grit. “Your little friend.”
Ermeline sat hidden from the street by the celery-colored machine that dried out ladies’ hair.
She sprang up silently, dog-eared her book and laid it on the countertop among the combs of dead hair. In the breakroom, the three stylists—her mother and Aunt Elsie and the new girl—were lollygagging on the pink, coffee-splotched countertops, and hadn’t seen Ermeline at the door. Her mother—in black stretch pants and a black tee—was lithe as a spider. The new girl was smoking a cigarette out the small sliver of a window.
“And it turned out she had been some former beauty queen, was what she was going on and on about,” Aunt Elsie said. “And now look at the poor dear.”
“Wasn’t much you could do with that pin-sized head of hers,” said the new girl. “To hide that whale of a body.”
“Oh, I’ve got no pity for you,” said Ermeline’s mother. Her mother’s red hair stormed around the eye of her face, tufting outwards like the wind-bent ripples of a pinwheel. “I’d rather have a customer like her—someone I could do something with—than Ms. Hells Bells. She’s telling me she wants this and that, this and that. And the whole thing is a hopeless case.”
“I wish,” Aunt Elsie said, pausing dramatically to take a long sip of coffee, “That we could cut something out of one and give it to the other. Give some of Beauty Queen’s ass to that ol’ dryed-out sourpuss.”
“Stan and I went to a movie last weekend where they cut the face off one man, gave it to the other,” said the new girl. “One of ‘em was Nicholas Cage and the other was—“
“If you could take Nicholas Cage’s face and put it on Stan’s, then you’d be in the ballgame!” said Aunt Elsie.
“Take Ermeline,” said the new girl.
“Now, be careful,” said Ermeline’s mother. Just then she looked around the room. The door was slightly open and behind it stood her daughter—a round, flabby girl in a mush-colored coat.
“Ermeline!” she said, setting down her cup. “What is it, sweetie?” The other stylists were suddenly rigid. The new girl stubbed out her cigarette in the wet of the sink.
“Joey’s outside. I’m going.”
“Don’t come home late. You haven’t nearly started packing.”
“Ugh.” She said.
“Don’t ugh me.”
“What do I even need?”
“Well, even if you were going to a nunnery, you’d have to bring something to wear.”
“Fine.”
The girl shut the door.
“I love you too, honey,” her mother said toward the closed door. Then she turned and laughed toward the other women sitting against the walls of the small, pink room.
“Where is she going?” asked the new girl.
“New York City,” said Aunt Elsie. “Though she probably won’t even leave the library.”

They went over to Joey’s house to watch TV, like they always did.
Joey was standing outside, wearing a tank top and a scarf tied around his thin neck. He had on mittens. She asked why on earth he was coat-less in the middle of winter. “The less logical you are in your fashion sense, the more fashionable you are,” he said. “You want your clothes to say: I’m in a different world, a better world than you.”
“So no coat says, ‘I can afford heat?’"
“Rich women wear the fall collections in the summer, summer collections in the Spring.”
“Rich women are idiots,” she said; She knew enough from the salon.
There was nothing on TV but Clean House. A crew would go into a messy house, full of terrible things, sell all the knick-knacks, clean and repaint it. She identified with the hosts, who hated every small town they were brought into. “This ain’t no thang!” said one, picking up a slender statuette of a shepherdess, leaning over a shivering goat. There were rooms in her own life she wanted to gut, sell every scrap of, paint yellow and forget. “Lemon yellow,” said the host. “Just the simple color of a lemon. Don’t be so afraid of color!”
Next there was an episode of Seinfeld. Elaine would let out long, loose wheezy sighs. Everyone in New York was witty and quick; They fidgeted over their coffees, stirring in the sugar endlessly. Her mother hated when she fidgeted.
At the break she got up to stare into the empty light of Joey’s single father’s bachelor-pad refrigerator. A head of broccoli, a stump of cheese, a shelf full of condiments. Half-and-half. Tofu. Who buys tofu? She took it out and smelled it. “Don’t you eat any food?” she asked. Silence on the other end of the line. “We’ll go out.”
“Your treat?” Joey asked.
She only had a couple of bucks so she suggested the McDonald’s. Joey rolled his eyes. “This doesn’t accord with your views.”
“What views?”
“On labor. On mediocrity. On individuality. On capitalist systems.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Being a hypocrite is what being an intellectual is. I don’t have hard, fast views like some tofu-loving bigot. I…I…don’t care about the language of surface.”
“So what do you care about then?”
“The life of the mind.”
She ordered chicken nuggets. They came with a syrupy-dipping sauce. The art of it was in getting as much possible sauce on every inch of corrugated chicken.
Joey wasn’t hungry; He got a coca-cola and got up three times to refill it as a gesture against what he called “the man.”
“It costs them fifty cents each time I do this,” he said.
“It costs you fifty cents in labor to pee it all out.”
It was almost dark when they left. Back at Joey’s house, his father was home. On the dining-room table he had left four boxy black cases. They were like coffins for cats.
“What are these?” Joey yelled to his father, who was changing out of his workshirt in the bedroom.
“Open them!” his father yelled back.
Inside were four telescopes, uncomfortable in their black velvet as boxed necklaces intended for the pale necks of women—almost fidgety, itching to get out. “They’re broken,” he said, coming out in a tie-dye shirt of some dead band or other. “I intend to fix them, but I doubt I’m capable. If I fail I can mail them off to a factory somewhere, I think,” he said, taking a beer out of the fridge. “But that costs about a million dollars. Each. So I thought I could outsource them.”
They all sat at the table under the hanging lamp and together they fussed with the microscopes for a couple of hours. With one of them, Joey’s father found that the thing was simply disjointed—a screwdriver set it straight, and you could peer directly through the aligned lenses. Ermeline toyed with hers forever. With hers, when you looked through it, you didn’t see things more clearly, you saw nothing. It was like there was a black part somewhere blocking her eye. But even having taken the whole system apart and put it back together again, she could find nothing.

At home, none of the lights were on except for the bluish pulse of the computer screen. Her mother peered into it as if there were something past the screen that she was looking through it for. Her hair was up in a towel which she had tied into a knot. No one could replicate those knots. For years, Ermeline tried—but it must have been something about the shape of Ermeline’s mother’s head, about the way her hands could see around the back of things.
“Mildred says to bring fancy dress,” her mother said, reading off the screen.
“But I don’t have any fancy dress.”

Her mother’s closet was a place she never went. There were French doors and behind them sequined dresses, glimmering downward like hung squid. Seeing them all there embarrassed her—as though she were seeing her mother’s attempts at being someone else, strung up for her to see.
She held a slick of eggy yellow sequins against her daughter. “This is the dress!”
“What about this one,” Ermeline said, pointing toward a shift of burgundy corduroy.
“That one’s fine, too. But this one is much more…illuminating.”
“Illuminating like a red light?”
“You want to be a pretty girl in the big city, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Well, you should try this one and this one and maybe—“ she said, pulling out something blue. “Well, you could try this one.”
She went toward the bathroom she shared with her mother to change.
“You can’t change in front of me anymore?” her mother said, her hands on her hips.
Ermeline said nothing and began to strip, looking ahead toward her mother as she did it. The blue one was too small for her—she could feel that right away and dropped it to the white carpet, where it lay like a victim. “It was too small.”
“Nonsense,” said her mother. “Oh well, try the yellow.”
The yellow fit fine—it was almost too large. There was a stand-up mirror in the corner of the room, which her mother turned toward her.
“I look like a—”
Ermeline didn’t like to think of what she looked like. The breasts of the dress had their own little pockets which were too large for her chicken-cutlet sized breasts. The sleeves were puffed—which said enough. She was fifteen, unpretty, a pouchy face framed above a maelstrom of yellow shimmerings. She looked like a girl drawing attention to her worst qualities.
She had guessed, vaguely, that someday some man would love her. In bed, she could feel his weight pressing on top of her; It was only the burdensome quilts. They would meet in some dark, wood-walled classroom. They would be arguing over some philosophical concept and in the heat of it he would kiss her, though they disagreed. “Oh, always for you,” he would say. Or something equally open and limitless.
No one would love her for a dress—what an insult, to be loved for a dress. You’d hear it in the movies. “When I saw you, standing there, in that blue dress…”
Or that Pink dress.
Or that Purple dress.
Or that burlap sack…
Everything in a dress just aged and fell apart; Your mind stayed forever, crouched inside in some unseeable place where no one knew.
“It’s a bit too much,” her mother said, of the yellow dress. Ermeline tried on the third—the burgundy shift—and it was fine: a reddish-black sack that hid the flesh of her.
Puddled up in the suitcase, the dress looked like a rag used to staunch a wound. Beside it, along with the nine pairs of underwear and the pajamas and jeans and two shirts, she put a book that Joey had given to her that she had already read. But she brought it for the inscription. If the plane crashed and the police picked through her things, or if her Aunt Mildred in New York snooped through her cases, they would think the same thing: Here was a girl whose life had romance, who was loved—not some sad sack who wore burgundy dresses.
The inscription read: “To Ermeline, who is loved.”
There would always be Joey. Though Joey was Joey.

One stewardess stood on either side of the aisle, winking toward every passenger. All of the passengers looked miserable. Padlocked in their trenchcoats, they made gruff acknowledgments, smiled, and shoved past. “Good morning, little lady,” one said to her, revealing half-moons of purple and blue eyeshadow that seemed almost avant-garde in their outrageousness.
In her seat at the aisle, Ermeline could watch the stewardesses bumping the awkward food cart down the length of the plane, leaning their slim figures over the rows of passengers, asking questions with chalky faces screwed into poses of concern. You could fit a quarter in their opened eye-sockets.
“Chicken or beef,” the stewardess asked the man beside Ermeline. His pouchy, pink skin had been poured into the seat and buttoned up into a tweed suitjacket; His hair was a white slab, mounted above his head. “Chicken or--?” he startled, as though suddenly waking from a stupor. Seeing the stewardess there, pale and sun-like over him, he calmed. “Whatever you think is best, beautiful.”
The stewardess blushed lightly. “I’d say the chicken is the cat’s pajamas.” And she handed him the platter.
“And you, miss?”
“Beef,” said Ermeline.

In the big, chilly airport a man held a sign with her name on it. The penmanship was childish, her name mispelled. She had the social graces not to make a fuss of it, but let him take her bags—one of which she had to wait a half-hour for.
In the car, he spoke into a kit radio like some kind of cop. At the ends of the long avenues, she could see a sliver of air where there was presumably a river, somewhere. NY DESC: the people.
The car turned down a quieter street of stone-fronted housed with curved faces and stopped. “We’re here, we’re there!” he said, jokey, turning around to smile through the rectangular opening between the front and the backseat, which framed his face like a television set.
The house was a dark, old townhouse with a glowering face. It was lit from within, but only very softly and the upper floors were completely dark. The front door—a monstrous, wooden thing—revealed a small man who clambered down the steps, softly handing the driver a wad of money he had kept within his fist.
Everything he wore seemed made of nature. A wooly, tweed suit sported leather buttons; the leather had been worked, and folded. His shirt beneath was a light, breathable cotton and the shoes on his feet had been hewn from the skin of an animal.
He shook her hand and reached for her cases—matching pastel-blue plastic things, loaned by her mother who had last used the set on her Honeymoon, and had cried at the sight of them. In his grip, they suddenly seemed light and cheap, as though he were meant only to carry things of heavy, dull importance.

There was soft green carpet in the hallway and walls of dark wood. The fat purplish curtains looked heavy as cough-syrup in the back of the throat. “I’m Paul,” the man said, as he walked her up a curling stairwell. “The lady of the house is sleeping, I fear.” They emerged on the second story—another long hallway, along which there were five doors—two on one side and three on the other. One of the doors was open and there was light coming from within, making a trapezoid of yellow on the carpet that was shadowed in the dark of the late afternoon.
A voice from inside the room stopped him from walking straight past.
“Pauuul,” it said, in a heavy drone. “Paulie.”
On the bed sat a girl wearing a nightie, though it was four in the afternoon, and on the bosom of it three or four enormous, glittering brooches had been pinned. Her pale face was framed in a thick, severe bowlcut that looked like an actual glossy yellow bowl upturned on her head.
“Is this the new girl?”
“Your cousin. Ask her where she’s from.”
“You’re from Idaho,” Annabelle said. “My mother’s family came from Idaho. From the fields.”
“But you don’t know where in Idaho,” Paul said.
“There is no where in Idaho. It’s all the same.”
“That’s a very narrow-minded position,” said Paul.
No one said anything for a second as Annabelle looked Ermeline up and down. Inside the girl’s room there was a small white desk that sat before a mirror, which was covered with a number of glistening bottles of urine-colored perfume. There was a throw-rug of pink shag and a faded white trunk, whose open lid revealed a number of dolls with empty porcelain faces and dark, turnip-shaped lips. The closet doors were large and closed. On the quilted coverlet before her lay a fashion magazine, sleepily tossed.
“No, she’s basically right,” said Ermeline. “Everywhere’s the same. It’s just one giant place compared to here.”
“See?” said Annabelle.
Paul said nothing. “Your mother’s having a nap, I presume.”
“I tried,” Annabelle said. “But I can never sleep.”

In the room Ermeline was to stay in there hung a painting that was just a plain, simple square. In the center was a giant black blotch: Modern art. She didn’t know where she stood on this issue. On one hand, she didn’t like it—it wasn’t beautiful. On the other, most smart people did. But if she just liked what smart people liked, she’d just be a sheep. It was best to be smart and to like what no one else liked.
After Paul left the room, which was smaller than her bedroom at home but which much nicer, sturdier furniture and less clutter, a woman with a small, sharp backside, entered and smiled and began going through Ermeline’s suitcase—folding everything and sliding it into drawers. “Should I send this to the cleaners, miss?” she said, picking up the rouge shift, and turning around.
“That’s all right,” Ermeline said. And, misunderstanding her, the woman took the dress away.

The only time Ermeline would see her aunt was at dinnertime. The woman took her meals very late in the evening—around nine o’clock—and the rest of them waited. Annabelle would be sitting in the kitchen, reading over one of her fashion magazines and tick-tocking her legs against the countertop. She was very particular about her eating habits.
“Is it tofu tonight?” she would ask the cook—the sharp-backed woman—and the woman would nod and grimace. Annabelle would reach into the refrigerator and pull out a plate of fried chicken and pick lightly over the bones, gnawing ever so gently into the drumsticks before putting them back again.
“My mother says I eat like a poor person,” Annabelle said, when she saw Ermeline staring. “But sometimes I’m just absolutely starving and I have to have fried chicken. I don’t know, I’ve always loved it. You know?”
“Sure,” Ermeline said, not really knowing what she was sure of.
“She can eat anything she wants,” said the cook, turning around.
“Want a leg? I couldn’t possibly finish it.”
“Sure,” said Ermeline. But as she bit into it—the globby bits of fat washing over her lips, she felt suddenly ashamed. Annabelle watched her for a second and then, quickly, looked back down to her magazine, where a young film actress with a gorgeous figure was romping through a park, careless.


The first thing the aunt absolutely had to have at dinner was her water glass.
“My water glass!” she said, and the cook heard her through the partition and brought to the head of the table a tumbler of water with a slice of lemon. The aunt would bring it out and bite it and put it back again—though what she put back was only a rind. The aunt had thick, dark eyes that sat back in deep pits. She was old and thin—but not frail; You could see the muscles on her in her arms, and her chest was broad and strong. As a young girl she had suffered from leukemia and the family had done everything to cure her; She had done everything she could to become the strong one.
The aunt would ask after Ermeline’s mother every evening. “And I remember my sister Sheryl always telling me to wear this and that, this and that,” the aunt said, speaking equally to Annabelle and to Ermeline. “Is she still like that?” Her smile brightened. “Oh, you don’t need to tell me. I am sure she remains unchanged.”
Ermeline picked at the dark, glistening vegetables in pools of colored sauces. There was an oval portrait hanging in the living-room. It depicted a middle-aged man in a suit with very sharp lapels and thick black glasses. This was her uncle, Henry; the one with all of the money that had bought the house and Annabelle’s dolls and the modern painting of the blotch.
“So you must have done one single interesting thing in school today,” the aunt asked Annabelle one night. “One single thing.”
“It’s winter break,” said Annabelle.
“Oh, silly me,” the aunt said. “We really must see the Winter Exhibitions sometime.”

On Friday morning the aunt went into the mountains to take her health cure. “Nothing could possibly go wrong,” the aunt said to the two of them, who were sitting at breakfast. “But in case they do, don’t tell your mother I left you all alone in the house with the help.”
“I won’t,” Ermeline said.
“There’s enough food in the fridge to last a weekend for a large Christian family,” said the aunt.
Annabelle looked over at Ermeline with hard, angry eyes.



On Thursdays at 2.00, after lunch hour, Aunt Mildred sucked on a wedge of lemon and then rode the subway two stops uptown to get a massage. She walked back down. “When all the bones are in place, I’ll suffer.”
It was Thursday at lunch hour and Aunt Mildred was putting down her slice of lemon. “I think I’m going to ask you to come with me today,” she said.
The subway was full of people looking at eachother, then looking away. Aunt Mildred rode in the first car and when the doors opened they were right at a flight of stairs.
The masseuse was in a concrete building whose walls were painted in high-gloss blue-gray paint, giving the place a medical look. The waiting room held a pot of bamboo and all the magazines were new, unthumbed.
spa – all of the ladies told her she was a very pretty girl

auction
“Going around at the auction carrying things she had felt pretty—people looked at her as though she were something they wanted, though they were really looking at what she held: a blue urn, a parrot’s cage.”




mildred is makiko
(rest of plotting is in the notebook: she meets a smart boy who chooses a pretty and smart girl over her--the language of surface matters!)


boys on the street yell at her: “Hey there, pretty.” Etc. and she gets in. She feels she can control them. They take advantage of her…