Thus
a baby was born into a family unable to breathe freely, a self-conscious bunch that drew their bloodyline through generations and was called "Picking Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps." The Father carried this painful history with him like a club and wielded it chaotically behind a grim curtain of isolation. The vivacious mother, an accomplished actress who in her way loved the infant, attempted through the years to impart to her daughter a thorough knowledge of the Stanislavski system of acting. Through these techniques she hoped to teach her daughter, whom she called Tinkerbelle, to inhabit the right mask in any given scene, or situation, and to to create an emotionally expressive and authentic performance. The girl found herself a tattered adolescent character wearing untidy masks and despising most of those her mother had given her.
Bloodthirsty Savages Raging
As a child TInkerbelle was acutely self-conscious when in the presence of other people, and had great suspicion that her family was watching her as she slept. She would never allow herself to sleep in the presence of others, not even a short nap on the couch, in the afternoon. She was also horrified at the mere thought of crying in front of others, and would never let anyone see her in such a pitiable state. In fact, she never cried at all. Ever. Her guard, like hair on the back of a spooked cat, was always up.
Later her inner voices, that corresponded with the masks her mother had given her, fought viciously with one another. Bloodthirsty savages raging inside a silly costume of short skirts and teased hair. Tinkerbelle began to challenge her mother's instructions at every turn, constantly demanding that she reveal to her the meaning of life and explain why she gave birth to her. Her mother, discouraged by her daughter's harsh words and inability to find meaning by simply acting her way happily through life (as she had done), would look into Tinkerbelle's troubled eyes and say:
Just smile! 🌼
"You are so pretty when you smile. Here, have a donut." At age twelve Tinkerbelle demanded to be called Belle, which seemed, in retrospect, to coincide exactly with the day she began to filch alcohol from the depths of her parents lower kitchen cupboard. She would carefully pour burning colors, liquids, sweets and bitters from each tall bottle using both hands, one at the neck and one at the base, into dirty canning jars found among the large rocks in their dirt basement. Later, sitting alone in her smoke-filled bedroom, she would lift the elixir to the window and admire her magic potion. Taking a deep breath she would take a quick gulp of the burning potion, awakening to the kaleidoscopic effect on her senses and the depth of meaning it roused in her psyche. At once it transformed her weighty burden of constant thinking to her greatest joy .
Belle also, at age fourteen, kicked off the habit of skipping high school by climbing out the window of journalism class during third hour. She was often spotted by disapproving classmates, crouching in the woodlot behind the school grounds with young outcasts and older ones, who brought drugs to sell. Oddly, there was one seemingly sentimental and out of character piece that remained steadfast throughout this odyssey. Belle most loved the one person who was most earnestly concerned about what other people might think of her. The one who told her repeatedly to just "be happy!", and "you look so pretty when you smile!" The one who taught her to hold in her stomach, and who was obedient to social norms above all else:
her mother.
So she sighed and prompted her mother one last time, as if she herself were the teacher, and her mother a late-blooming child:
"So what happened to the woman who folded in half? The one who took a ride in a cart with a man? Did she die?" What was her objective? Did she create an emotionally creative and authentic performance?
The mother answered:
"Be comfortable with not knowing."
Belle Looks Back
"In retrospect, I had, at puberty perhaps, already grown weary of thinking about the social conventions to be endured in my future life as an adult. Polite conversation, niceties of decorum, cleanliness of body and mind, pleasing strangers, were meaningless to me. A constant barrage of negative thoughts had been my downfall, and since there was seemingly no cure to be found for it at home (beyond alcohol), I walked resolutely out of the house, heading toward the woodlot beyond the school grounds, where misfits sat on fallen logs leisurely smoking while debating Camus' theory of absurdism. But these conventions had also grown old. I stood up, shook off the dust and started my own merry way, down the steep hill toward The Hall of Mirrors."
Through the Door
Belle headed out on familiar footpaths that led her to a hill where large Italianate houses lined the steep street down toward the massive and ornate county courthouse below. Half way down, approaching the side lawn of The General's house, where large rocks and piles of brush hid her destination from view, she came to the entry into the hall. It was only a short distance from the sidewalk and just a hole in the ground, really, like a woodchuck would make, and in plain sight of anyone walking up the hill. But most people don't notice such things, and most people stopped walking long ago. Glancing quickly around at the empty street, she dropped to her knees. Hiidden by underbrush and posed as if diving into deep water, she shimmied headfirst down through the opening.
On her stomach and burrowing forward with arms and shoulders in the narrow underground passageway, she inhaled deeply sensuous odors. Thick sinuous tree roots reaching, sharp animal scat, buzzings and soft cooings of mycelium, the sultry burrowing of earthworms and a faraway purring of bees. Her hands covered with earth, fingers reached into alien organisms, thick warm liquid pools, oil and humid decay. Down this close subterranean tunnel she inched, toward a dimly glowing halo of light that grew in size, like a fog moving toward her, until she found herself at the opening of a blurry neon-lit room. On hands and knees she squinted into the small familiar space at old Kanouse, doorman of The Hall of Mirrors, leaning over her with a grin. He sat on a small brown metal folding chair, and the neon sign behind him flickered blue letters that read: WE_COME. "Sad, is it?" He had always called her that.
Kanouse reached down, offering his big beefy hand to pull her up. Another sign, a sort of subtitle, she thought, blinked out these words:
IF YOU ENTER HERE YOU CAN'T GO HOME
She adored old Kanouse. How old was he, exactly? It seems she had known him forever, from her days as Tinkerbelle, wandering the labyrinth of neighborhood paths. She loved his bulbous nose, the smell of whiskey on his breath, his soiled and oil-stained blue khaki coveralls, and most of all the familiar way he had with her. He knew her from infancy, certainly, had called her Sad Eyes and then simply Sad. He said he would teach her to be a demon yet. She, still on hands and knees, lifted her hand, took hold of his outstretched one, and let him pull her up to kiss him on the cheek.
He would smile, they would stand facing one another, and then he would make great ceremony of opening the entry door with a low bow and flourish as she slipped off her shoes and walked alone into
the great hall.
The neon-illuminated-dimly-buzzing room felt like the euphoria of low grade electric shock. It was newly sublime each time she stepped into the place. Her eyes weren't yet adjusted and in that fuzzy universe her mind filled in the gaps that foggyblack covered. She saw tall walls covered with portraits of famous people in history portrayed as children who hadn't yet learned to pose properly. Squinting and moving slowly through the semidark gallery she observed a framed oil portrait by Leonardo of Michelangelo as a toddler, quizzically discovering his penis. In the shadows also hung a remarkable gouache of Jesus as a baby sucking on his toe, painted by Caravaggio. The gallery contained many unknown works by the masters. Sadly, and with a feeling of great loss, as if she had learned something new, her eyes grew to meet the dark and those great works faded and disappeared.
What appeared then were endless rows of floor mirrors, like dominos standing on end waiting to collapse, and as she began to slowly weave her way through them, she caught fleeting reflections. Some images were of seemingly partial or unrelated objects, such as a flock of white butterflies flying around a woman's head, or a book opened to a page with a quote like this, highlighted:
Turn the dough a quarter turn
Grasp the side of the dough that's furthest away from you
Fold it in half towards you
Place the heels of both hands on top of the dough
Use your body weight to push the dough into itself
Some of the mirrors were too smudged to make out any reflection on their surface , and some were some so covered with handprints that they looked like thickly stuccoed panels. When she came to one of those she would press her own dirty handprint to the others on the glass. Some of the mirrors had been kitchily written on with lipstick. They said, I love you, beside a lipstick kiss. Or Tiffany is a whore. Some mirrors had been shattered, which also told a story, and some were so tarnished they no longer reflected theirs, and some began a sentimental "Once Upon A Time". Some were philosophical and pondered ideas like
what is time?
Some were her own reflection seductively staring out at her, coyly murmuring the words
you are pretty.
You are smart. You are ugly. You are strong. You are weak. You are fat. You have no ideas of your own. You have no friends. You can do it! You will die. Kill Kanouse. Never enter this place again. You are stupid. Hey baby. You are loved. Coochie mama. You are hated. Mamasita. You are hot. She zigzagged back and forth from one catcall to another for some time. It occurred to her that she had been doing this all her life, negative, positive, all were one. You do not exist. Life is but a dream. You are dead.
The wrinkled face of an old woman, attached to a long elastic neck, sprang out of a mirror toward her, studying her face. Nose to nose they both labored to breathe, and a cloud of the old woman's sour exhalations covered the young girl's face. As the face retracted slowly back into the mirror the cloud cleared and the girl recognized her as the Woman with No Arms from the fair, the one who typed with her toes and stared idly at the onlookers under the tent, who paid a quarter to gape back at her.
Another mirror revealed the life of siamese twins, who went about their daily lives while attached at the torso. They paid no attention to her, but argued about what cereal to have for breakfast, or whether to watch Lassie or The Lone Ranger. She yelled a greeting to them, she had paid the price to stare at them many times, but they were prisoners of the mundane, busy worrying about what their next meal would be (as are most people on earth), and couldn't hear her.
Walking forward down the line of mirrors, she hesitated and observed a large woman crouching on a beach, giving birth to her. In another reflection a giant mouth said the words,
"SCRUTINIZED ANALYZED CATEGORIZED SYSTEMATIZED BENT FOLDED STAPLED MUTILATED"
She tried to arrange herself into a certain cosmic state of mind. Stay loose, she told herself. Treat these abstractions as concrete reality. As she did so, a booming voice from a mirror down the row admonished, "A PURPOSELESS, INDIFFERENT, UNUTTERABLY ALIEN UNIVERSE"
Just then she began to sense, through the vast dimspace an almost imperceptible light twinkling in her peripheral vision. She could only perceive it if she looked away from it. The illusive tiny speck of light seemed to come from a distant mirror in a deep corner of the dark galaxy of The Great Hall. Squeezing her eyes closed and reopening them several times, she made the decision that it was real. It really did exist, like a beacon of sorts. For her. She curiously set out, sidewayslooking at it, like a crab moving awkwardly toward murky depths.
Sidestepping in and out, here there and around, she made her way to the back of the room to the last row of mirrors, right up to what seemed to be a tiny blinking LED light. As she moved toward it, a voice said softly and intimately, "So you want to know about the woman who folded in half." Belle stopped, almost touching the mirror with her nose, but could see nothing but blackness. "The one in the cart with the man," said the soothing but alarmingly dispassionate voice (think Cate Blanchett playing Galadriel beside the divining pool in The Lord of the Rings). Then, startled as if a Broadway floodlight had suddenly flashed on to reveal that the main character had returned unexpectedly, Belle stood frozen
facing the mirror.
There before her on the stage hovered an enormous and ominously up-lit furry head of a woodchuck, which seemed to her both frightening and delightfully comedic. Looking directly into her eyes the woodchuck head said in a dramatic and thoroughly histrionic (or so Belle thought) manner,
"THIS IS THAT STORY"
He then began speaking in a thoroughly matter-of-fact tone. "Your mother wore clown frills around her neck to hide the place where her alligator body connected to her human head. She worked as a circus freak, under the big tent at the local fairs. All mothers do so. She ran away with a carnie. You will also do so one day. It was you. It was you all the time.
So snap out of it.
Stand up straight. Smile. Hold your stomach in, and come here." The woodchuck drew her in with his rank breath, their inhalations and exhalations and the air in the hall mingling as one. Still conscious but forgetting words, she heard the distant drumming of Kanouse's work boots hitting the wooden floor as he ran toward her through the rows upon rows of reflections in the echoing hall. She fell gladly forward into his arms and
the woodchuck watched as Belle slept soundly.
"Ever and always," the fairies said. "Ever and always."
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