Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [56]
—Are you going out to dinner? she asks.
—Too much conversation. Maybe the movies.
—The photographers might use their infrared cameras to track you. Remember Mabel Wong, Glaucous’s wife?
—I’m not sure.
—Glaucous wears blue chain mail. Anyway, the media planted a tiny camera in his wife’s popcorn when she went to the movies with a questionable male friend. They got a whole stream of intimate moments on film. But what they didn’t count on was her swallowing the camera. They had her on film down to her alimentary canal.
—You’re making that up.
—Well . . .
—You’re so bad.
At least manic brings out her sense of humor.
—You know he’s fighting a match in a couple of days.
—Uber? I thought his next match wasn’t until September.
—It’s a benefit for Children’s Hospital. I think you should go. You can raise some money for a good cause and it would give the media just enough, without giving them anything at all. Afterward, you could go out for a bite to eat with him.
Allison suggests I would make the more striking and photo-heavy statement if I arrived at the benefit match in simple black. So I let her tug me along, feeling like something fixed to the rear bumper of a car. Inside the shop, she goes to work.
—It should convey the right message, she says.
The message being that a woman can express grieving in good label stock.
I keep telling her I don’t care what I wear but she goes out of her mind about this stuff. I think she’s always found a way to contain the things she can’t talk about by fastening zippers, collars, cuffs, hooks and eyes, and belts.
I have to tell her several times that she doesn’t need to sit inside the dressing room with me to remove the dresses from the hangers. But she wants to be there, like I’m picking out my wedding dress or something. I’m going the limit to restrain myself and ride the mood.
In the eighth store, I lose it. The space is so small we knock knees when I pull my T-shirt over my head. Before she hands me the same dress I’m sure I’ve tried on in three different stores already—just like one she wore when she was twenty and turned heads—she checks the price tag. Allison makes a small but perceptible click with her tongue, which is, I know, her way of expressing weariness over the cost of a well-made outfit. And with this cost, the cost of everything else, because that’s the way it is with Allison. Things build exponentially and drop quickly. And though I understand, I understand, I understand, I can’t understand another minute.
—You have to stop! I yell. —You just have to stop! I don’t need your help. With anything!
As I try to take the dress off in that wedged space, all we can hear is the camera that’s mounted on the ceiling, moving back and forth, watching me undress. And when I finally get it over my head, I see that Allison looks as if she’s losing oxygen. She makes that face, like women in the other dressing rooms must be whispering about her. She stops removing dresses from hangers. She just lets the black fabric sit in her lap like a pet she doesn’t know what to do with.
Then she gets up and excuses herself, waiting outside the door until I finish dressing. Her mood shifts entirely. Like a funeral procession, we go back to the store where we had placed something on hold. When I think we finally have things sorted out, a dress bag in hand, she suggests we browse the makeup selection before heading back to the club—which is her way of normalizing, I guess.
—You really shouldn’t go alone, she says. —To Uber’s match.
I can hear it in her voice. A new panic has set in about my personal safety. We hit on this one frequently. I rim my eyes in sample eyeliner, tilting the counter mirror. She begins to work that theme about things being a whole lot different than they were when she was my age—how we can’t just go about freely anymore. Maybe she wants me to take her on my date with Uber? I don’t ask.
The lines around my eyes thicken.
—I’ll