I was wearing yellow nail polish the day my sister turned into a bird. I wasn’t surprised – and I wasn’t horny either, which was strange, because it was the summer I left Saint Dolores’ School for Indolent Prodigy Femmes, where I had lain most nights in the long white dormitory with my Hanami-fresh nipples pressed against the blithely muscular back of Dylan Cosway, also a girl, but called Dylan, so you know (as I knew, the moment I met her at the bus stop, a hockey stick in one delicate hand and a dog-eared copy of Mrs. Dalloway in the other) that she was cool.
But she belonged, and I didn’t.
I didn’t belong because we were poor – not poor in the sense where your first boyfriend at university makes fun of you, because when you take him to meet your dad he sees you don’t have a dishwasher and all your family members are all still chain-smoking and you don’t know what Le Creuset means and you feel a profound shame and sense of impostordom that you retain until your late twenties when you realise that first boyfriend was actually an utter dick – but poor, like, as an aesthetic conceit, which falls away as soon as climactic life experience demands you have a cinematographic outfit. Poor as in a single tin of sardines on a scuffed mahogany credenza beside a mason jar of wilting, white peonies.
So in the single bedroom I shared with my sister, in our seafoam-coloured bungalow in the suburbs of, let’s say, Prague (its walls plastered with posters of anachronistic yet modish pop icons including Roy Orbison and Lux Interior, Peter Murphy from Bauhaus – that kind of guy – smeared with the elusory buds of her rose-scented Glossier Balm Dotcom) is when the transformation began.
Wolf Blass’ parents were out of town at a big psychiatry conference, where Ben Lerner’s parents also were, so he was having a party (Wolf Blass, not Ben Lerner). She, my sister, was going, because she was a metaphor for oppressive femininity, and I, essentially a cipher whose physical attributes will remain carefully undisclosed, was not.
I perched on the side of the bed, my hands primly folded in my lap, watching her dress up. My faded Bratz doll comforter reminded me of the girlhood we had shared, skimming stones on a river we for some reason go to all the time, where they said the dead body of a heavily tattooed man had washed up once, all bloated and pale (he was never identified, but helpfully contributed to the sense of ambient dread that infused my adolescent years in Prague).
There, in our bedroom, she carefully teased at her lashes with the mascara wand. She touched the centre of her bow lips with a tiny jot of crimson. Her eyes met mine in the broken mirror that denotes both our poverty and the abjection of the Jezebel, and then she smiled. And then she coughed. She coughed white feathers.
I remember how those white feathers gleamed in the soft and perpetual efflorescence of this short story, where no one ever says ‘Hey, it’s getting pretty dark in here, can you turn on the lamp please, no, not that one, the one on the table,’ to a person leaving the room to go to the bathroom.
