All about Skin (37 page)

What does Lillian wish for, when the pineapple-mango cake is presented to her? For one, she wishes it were not called an upside-down cake; she'd helped her mother make enough cakes to know that there is nothing “upside-down” about this cake or any other: All cakes, Lillian, age six, said to her mother, have to be turned upside down, to get it out of the pan. She also wishes for, well, I can't tell you that, little Lillian has blown out her eleven candles, made two wishes, one for herself and one for her mother, who she knows is somehow connected to her very thoughts, after all, it is her mother who made her pineapple-mango, although Lillian only asked for a pineapple cake, but secretly wished for a pineapple-mango cake, and stared longingly at the ripening mangoes in the market, days before her birthday, and called the pineapple cake a pineapple cake and not a pineapple upside-down cake, and her mother, when she presented the cake this very afternoon, didn't call it a pineapple-mango upside-down cake, but Lillian's pineapple-mango cake for her eleventh birthday. Lillian's first wish, to be clear, is that through her mother, all other mothers, and eventually everyone else, would refrain from incorrectly attributing upside-down-ness to any one kind of cake. So far, then, Lillian's birthday is a smash.

To jumpstart Lillian's imagination, prior to her beginning life as a sixth grade student in middle school, where mediocrity reigns supreme, Lillian's parents take her and twelve other elevenyearolds, Lillian's friends, to the local sculpture park, where there are exactly seventy-five sculptures. By Lillian's calculations, and her parents are sure she will have calculations, that is exactly five sculptures for each of the fifteen visitors to the site (Lillian, her twelve friends, and Lillian's parents) to claim as their own personal favorites. Lillian's parents bring along fifteen “goodie bags.” Inside of each there is one disposable camera, one mechanical pencil, one grid-lined 3.5 x 5.5 inch moleskin notebook (each the dullest cardboard-brown), one set of binoculars, one birding book for the Eastern states, one whistle, one PB&J sandwich, carefully wrapped in wax paper, one baggie of her mother's famous homemade sea-salt and thymesprinkled potato chips, and one canister of water. The sculpture park, situated on eighty-four acres of personal property, includes a few trails with sculptures hidden in unexpected places.

As with every new visitor to the park, Lillian's eyes are immediately drawn to the largest sculpture in the park: the head of a man who wears a very long earring and reminds Lillian of photographs she'd seen of Blackfoot men in
National Geographic
. Goodie bag in hand, she runs to the sculpture, situated at the topmost part of the farm, and thinks: “My favorite!” She walks slowly around the sculpture, slightly disappointed by the large air-vent-type opening in the back of its skull, noting that it is likely needed to keep the plaster sculpture from being blown off in a heavy storm. On the opposite side of the sculpture, the ear facing away from the parking area, Lillian stops short. The man's ear is an open doorway. She peeps inside the head, and sees a staircase. She backs away from the ear and slowly walks around the head again, smartly guessing at the height of the head, thus deciding on the number of stairs, and thus, the number of floors in the head. She's looking for various windows, to decide if the walk up the stairs in the man's head will be worth it, just for a view of, she guesses, the Taconic Parkway. She returns to the open ear and remains standing there, unsure of her next move.

Lillian's second wish. It's here, on the tip of my tongue, but who am I to reveal Lillian's wish to you? Let us, then, redirect our mind. Here's a question to ponder: what will Lillian do? Will she let her curiosity get the best of her? Will she move, against her will, inside the man's head? Will she shrug, as she is wont to do, and decide the sculpture is slightly flawed, hang her shoulders at her uncommonly impulsive decision to claim the statue as hers, without first carefully examining it, weighing it against others in the park, using her sharpened compare-contrast skills so deliberately and systematically taught to her just three years ago? Will she walk away from the sculpture, head held low, knowing that her parents' ever watchful eyes are on her, that one of them, loving her deeply, will say, “Oh, Lillian! I wanted that one!” to bear the brunt of her shame, for being so uncharacteristically impulsive, as they are wont to do?

On one nonparallel plane, Lillian, the child who is rapidly losing her imagination, and increasingly believing in the synthesis of the causeeffect and compare-contrast schools of thought, thus increasingly adopting a model of responsible behavior, simply takes it—the great disappointment of disappointment—and climbs the stairs. The effect of her greed, mixed with a sudden impulsive act, will be a view of the Taconic Parkway that no one else in her party will have access to; had she strolled through the park, contrasting one sculpture with the next, one vantage point with the next, she would not have had to suffer the potential great disappointment of disappointment. (Yes, for a moment, Lillian imagines she might not be disappointed at all, that perhaps there is a, oh, she doesn't know, her mind is having a hard time collapsing and expanding, but oh, something something, a room, a nook, something, perhaps tucked into the cerebral cortex of the man's head, or sitting behind his other ear, maybe a book or pamphlet, or, oh something some
thing
that will make the climb worth it!) Lillian lives, in this parallel plane, in the great unknown, the very site of creativity, of imagination. Lillian will not, for example, shake her head, shrug her shoulders, and tromp off to another sculpture, or find a friend to chat with, or try to identify some trees. No, if Lillian fails to climb the stairs, she will live with this decision the entire day, twisting her hair around around around her fingers, biting her lower lip, chewing the inside of her jaw, digging the point of her shoes into the grass, shifting from one jutted hip to another, tugging at her white shirt, trying very hard, indeed, to not wonder: what would I have seen? And here is where Lillian's imagination, that much-abused, much-neglected organ, will begin to pump life into itself, into Lillian, recover from years of atrophy, and press Lillian into worlds that take shape in her eyes, worlds unlike the one she's currently standing in. Lillian will attempt to fight it, but since she's let her imagination suffer so, it will not splinter into many imaginations, thus leaving room for her to imagine a tug-of-war between herself and her imagination, or a boxing match, an arm wrestling session, none of that. Lillian's imagination will stay whole, and she will have no choice but to admit defeat; no matter how unconsciously it all happens, it happens.

In another nonparallel plane, Lillian has a temper tantrum. Her friends and parents, alarmed at such bad behavior, such outrageous, public fits, run to her aid, and discover that the giant head has utterly utterly presented a false face to Lillian. They each rush to remind her that she actually never said the word “mine!” aloud. Problem solved. Lillian gathers her senses about her, wonders, for just a brief moment, what came over her, what child possessed her, no, that's too imaginative, even for Lillian, whose dulling by the minute. No, Lillian chides herself: Grow up! And all is passed.

In yet another nonparallel plane, Lillian stomps off, away from all the sculptures, bottom lip thrust out, top lip mashed in, arms folded sourly across her chest. Her parents see this, and rush over to fix the problem. Lillian tells them, and one of them says, “But, you never said it's yours! I, personally, want it for myself ! Shall we fight to the death for it?” (Clearly, this is her father.) Lillian looks sternly at him and says, “Don't be ridiculous, Father. We would never, either of us, kill the other!” She half-skips down the hill, triumphant, awesomely unaware of two things: (1) that she imagined the scenario playing out precisely as it had, only minutes before, as she stood at the base of the head, at its neck, trying to figure out the best course of action; and (2) that her mother, the most curious of them all, had already turned her back on her suddenly dramatic child, and wandered into the head. Lillian's parents were born in the eighties, when the country was busy cleaning up messes it had made overseas by fixing the economic system in order to make the country think it was experiencing an economic boom. The eighties were a time of money, pure and simple. There was no staggering president who wanted, more than anything, to reclaim the nonswagger of his youth, thus the nonswagger of his adulthood, who, in attempting to outdo his father, and to, subliminally, castigate his father by subtly blaming him for his poor reasoning skills, said, forget money, I want my childhood back! And the nostalgic moody crab that he was decided childhood was education, and thus instituted that horrible policy of No Child Left Behind, which Lillian and her cohort suffered through, whose imaginations, once free-roaming things that her parents still held on to dearly, were left behind.

And this is where the story gets thick with bird song and great winds ushered in on broad branches of low-hanging trees. Remember Lillian's second wish? Oh how convoluted it was. Lillian both wished to have different parents, ones who lived in the real world, one in which mothers called cakes “cakes,” and she wished, simultaneously, for something different, yes, she wished to be surprised. By what? Life itself ? By her parents? By an act or behavior or thought of her own? It's true, even Lillian was tiring of herself, of her caustic nature. One day, the very day she stared longingly at the mangoes, enraptured by their smell, there she stood in the middle of the aisle, her mind gone, her senses taking over, wavering, there, her body, wavering, in the market, Lillian had an image of herself, age older, half human, half machine, no, one-eighth human, the rest of her machine, analytical, mathematical, scientific; she and all of her friends, who would one day assume their expected positions and run the world would do so with efficiency, stamped: STEM-approved. Lily? Her mother. Lily, honey? Lily was transported back into her brain, she stopped wavering, and a thought a feeling a sense a memory of the future, synthesized and planted itself in her mind, waiting waiting waiting for her to one day retrieve it. And thus she did, on her eleventh birthday.

Here we are on this alternate plane. Lillian's mother has entered the head. Lillian will never see her mother again, but she doesn't know that, yet. Or maybe, if she allows her imagination to fatten up, to gain a pounding heart rhythm, to flex its spirit muscles, to have body, she will see her mother again, because, not out of grief or terror of never seeing her mother again, but out of terrorgriefcuriosity out of a deepening realization that there are many realities, that Mr. Kelvin didn't have all of the answers, out of wanting to see the thing that takes her mother away, Lillian will enter the head, will climb the stairs, will witness what her mother witnessed, will slip into another dimension, that of the imagination of the giant, bodiless head. And it will be so easy for her there, for she will not have to admit that her imagination is now just as alive as that of the giant, bodiless head's imagination; no, she can believe that everything she sees in that head, every floating, disembodied laugh, every pair of bent legs, hopping on invisible trampolines, every miniature guitar-strumming squirrel, every half-eaten sandwich conversing with the closest half-eaten banana, is all the imagination of the giant, bodiless head, and she can scoff at these images, as she surrenders to them, as she had, eventually, surrendered to STEM, forever in search of her mother, whose curiosity outweighed her own, and got them both trapped in this lovely, strange, terrible, beautiful world.

Learkana Chong

T
his is the story of Tamara, daughter of Chea and Neary Rim, and Jude, son of Mary and Saul Barlow, and how they came to know each other only to remain fruitless and divided. And so on the seventh day of the spring semester, on the campus of California State University, Altanero, in the city of Altanero, Tamara tried to quench her thirst at a water fountain outside the science building. Tamara lifted her dark hair from her face, and bent low to drink, but the water did not spew forth. And she pushed the button harder, and still nothing came of it. And someone cleared his throat behind her and she turned around, and it was a comely young man with fair skin and a mop of light brown hair. And he smiled at Tamara, and offered her a drink from his water bottle. He said to her, “Fountain's broken. Want a drink from my bottle?”

And Tamara said to him, “I don't know, that depends. Do you have cooties?” But she smiled in jest, and the young man laughed in return, saying, “No, but you can waterfall it.”

And Tamara said to him, “I suck at waterfalling, so I'll pass. But thanks for offering.”

And the young man said, “I can't let you walk away dehydrated.”

And Tamara said to him, “I'll just go to the library and drink from the fountain there.”

And the young man replied, “Okay, but do you think you can give me your contact info, so I can make sure that your H2O quota has been sufficiently filled?”

And Tamara laughed again and gave him her number, and asked him for his name. And the young man answered Jude, and asked Tamara for her name, which she gave to him. And they parted ways from the fountain, smiling.

Thus Tamara's striking dark hair and striking dark face found favor in the eyes of Jude, and Jude's fair skin and mop of light brown hair found favor in the eyes of Tamara. And Jude coveted the curves of Tamara, and saw her as wilderness, and Tamara coveted the ideal that was Jude, and saw him as sublime. And both thought the other good and kind, as early lovers are wont to do. And for seven days and seven nights they talked to each other by way of mobile device and became acquainted, and were together for those seven days and seven nights, and it was on the seventh night that they came to know each other. They came to know each other in the basement that Jude called his bedroom and in the glow of the television playing over their intertwining bodies, and they were not ashamed. And the parents of Jude were sleeping upstairs, and all was quiet. And Jude said to Tamara, “Is this your first time?” And Tamara said to him, “Yes.” And Jude parted her waters and knew her, and Tamara thought as they laid with each other, no, he is not entering me; I am encasing him.