It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [5]
I sighed. All right, fine, I agreed, nodding to the universe. I’m in a shirt I can’t get out of, or one I’ll never get out of alive, anyway. Someday they’ll find me in here, the jaw of my skeleton hanging open, my bra exposed and dripping off my rib cage, the sleeves of the shirt floating ethereally around my humerus bones now that there was no permafat to keep them in place like handcuffs.
I need a nap. I’m so tired. Done fighting. I give in. Shirt wins.
“You win, shirt,” I whispered, just to make it official. “You win.”
And as I looked in the mirror at myself—a half-naked woman, completely defeated—I understood now. The “friction point” was evidently the event horizon after all, and once I passed that mark there was just no going back. In a second, I’d be redshifted, stuck here forever, looking a little too much like the captain in WALL-E for my liking. But then I noticed something in the mirror under the gracious lighting, and for a moment, I saw Laurie Circa 1994 looking great in the shirt, her little Uma Thurman arms so nice in the loose sleeves, the placket buttoned without any bulging gaps from top to bottom.
She smiled her Julia Roberts smile at me, I smiled back, and softly she gave me a look of sympathy. But then the smile quickly vanished and she stared me straight in the eye.
“Get out of that goddamned shirt right now,” she fired quickly. “You look like an asshole just sitting there. You got it on; you get it off. Don’t you dare give up! You rip that shirt off if you have to!”
And she was right, or maybe I was just rested, I don’t know, but my sweat mustache had finally dried up and I thought that maybe, yes, I could give it another shot. I stood up, and without any hesitation I went back in and pulled and fought and yanked, and suddenly the sleeves both popped free and the shirt slid down to my wrists.
I got that thing off me as fast as I could and put it back on the hanger on the wall before it could reattach itself to my body. It was so wrinkled it looked like a dishrag, and no wonder with all of the tugging and pulling that had been going on. Then I saw a speck of something on the hem of the shirt, perhaps some lint or a thread, but it did not move when I brushed it off. I immediately saw another, next to a button, and another on the bodice, and yet another on the inside of the shirt. All were red, and none were coming off. And the more I looked, the more I found, all over the shirt: inside, out, up and down, some dots, some smudges, and then a streak across the front hem. How had I not noticed this when I pulled it off the sales rack? It was very obvious that there was something all over this shirt, even if you weren’t looking at it carefully.
I pulled it closer to my eyes to see if I could figure out what it was, and it was then that I made a match. The red streaks and smudges all over this shirt matched the middle finger on my left hand, which—despite the fact that the circulation to my arms had been severed for the last twenty minutes—was bleeding like a Halloween prop from the hangnail I had picked at. I don’t know if I have arteries behind my nails or if I had moved around so much that I actually raised my heart rate to a healthy pace, but I had decimated this poor shirt so badly it looked like a Manson family member had worn it. A lot. To both houses. My struggle with the piece of clothing was now documented forever, my epic battle smeared all over the once-adorable shirt. No wonder I got all dizzy when I bent over, I realized. I lost a pint of blood in that fight! There was still no way I could present a bloody shirt to Amelie and then hand over my credit card with a smile and not have her push a panic button under the counter to alert authorities. So I got myself together, put my shirt that I could actually close back on, and walked out of the dressing room.
“How did you do?” Amelie asked, still sporting a pleasant