Diamond Girl

Chapter 17



Back at Brown, one of the few classes I ever managed to attend was an anthropology class. The professor was one of those young, cool types who wanted to bond with the students. Those guys never really get it. They feel as young as the students they are teaching because the ink is barely dry on their own dissertations, but what they don’t realize is that they are already almost thirty and that, while they were buried in the stacks, all these years passed. So when, finally, after a billion years of studying, they get their doctorates or their law degrees or whatever, they aren’t still the kid they were when they started out. Because they weren’t out in the 'real world', whatever that is, building up real world experiences and the stories that go along with them, they seem awkward and weirdly young to people their own age, but to people who are the age they see themselves as, they seem like weird adults trying too hard to be kids, so they can’t really fit in anywhere.

I know a little bit about that myself. For example, people might have watched me these last few years and wondered just what is a grown woman, one with a daughter of her own even, doing dancing on tables at clubs? Well, maybe that woman didn’t realize, while she was in her version of the stacks (which in my case was one long party that accidentally lasted twelve years), all that time had passed. She might, for example, look in the mirror one day and see places on her skin that Botox had missed and realize, oh my God, last night lasted a decade. Maybe a smarter woman would then sit down and figure out how to move forward into a grown up life, but no one has ever accused me of being smart.

It’s too bad because I don’t know if I’m a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not quite as stupid as people think. I have thoughts all the time, not just now and here where all I can do is think. I’ve always had them. I spent years trying to find someone, anyone, to connect with and talk to but, of course and to be fair, look where I tried to find those connections. So, no, I’m not mentally enfeebled or anything, I’ve just been scared - now, then, pretty much always. And it was fear that drove me right back into those clubs and stupid waste-of-space parties.

That fear makes me pretty normal, actually, because there are millions of people who hate where they are and are taken aback by the face in the mirror, but they don’t change what they are doing. Unhappy or not, they stick with their routines like gerbils on a treadmill. Those little guys keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping they’ll end up somewhere different, like by magic.

What’s the definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome.

I don’t think that’s true, it’s a blanket statement, it’s a f*cking treatment-shrink statement. Gerbils aren’t insane, they’re just hopeful, like I was, like everybody is.

I was trying to remember Anthro, and my thoughts slid off the tracks, but maybe it’s all a part of it; what we think we are, what people will think we are. In the study of anthropology, people learn about long-gone cultures, and individuals too, by what they leave behind. We know that the Romans had a senate and even water pipes by what’s left to look at. If an anthropologist was going to study what I left behind, I think he or she would get really confused.

The professor, whose name escapes me, was doing his usual incredibly boring, guaranteed to put an auditorium of students to sleep, discussion about the various ways we could understand the civilization and building of the Niantic Indians of Rhode Island through the tools they developed over time.

Suddenly he stopped and looked out at us. He laughed, reached into his desk and pulled out a pair of Gargoyle sunglasses, an IPOD Nano and his cell phone, and put them on his desk. Speaking earnestly, and really trying to break through our fog of clock-watching lack of interest, he recited his cell number and asked every one of us, more than two hundred students, to text him a message right then on their cells.

It woke us up, I’ll give him that. People like novelty in class, so there was a lot of talk and laughter, and we all tried to be creative or smart-assy - which is the same thing when you’re a kid - in sending our messages. I think mine was some lame bullshit like, 'Ms. Kelleher, your Jimmy Choo’s have arrived', something that was both juvenile and show-offy.

After we were done texting, he scrolled through the messages, either nodding or shaking his head, he even read a few of the funnier ones out loud, thankfully, not mine.

When he had our complete attention, he laid down his cell alongside his glasses and the iPod, and looked out at us.

“If an earthquake or a nuclear strike came right now and wiped out our civilization as we know it, eventually other humans, or at least something resembling humans, would reappear and re-colonize. When that happened, they would dig through the rubble and maybe one of them would find and study this little pile.” He gestured at his desk. “After a while, even if the world became like Planet of the Apes …” he paused, waiting for our laugher to die down, his face glowing with the appreciation of an entertainer who knows he has his audience, “… after a while, even they would figure out how to wear the sunglasses and play the music and, who knows, maybe they would develop a taste for Alanis Morrisette too …” another pause for laughter, then he continued, his voice gaining in confidence, “… one of them would discover what this strange little object was and would read the text messages on it to better understand the weird creatures who had once been here.” He picked up his cell and absently scrolled down the texts. We were all quiet by then. “The creature might, for example, wonder, who was Jimmy Choo, or what 'whass up suckah' meant, and from this they would base their judgments and understandings of those who came before. And that ladies and gentleman is anthropology. Have a good weekend.”

I won’t say it was like that moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan breaks through to Helen Keller’s silent world with water, but it was kind of like that.

I know I got it. It’s something I’ve thought of off and on for years, because a lot of times I have looked around me, wherever I was, and wondered if a bomb dropped on the building, what in the hell would people think when they sorted through the rubble later? He was a good teacher. I wish I’d told him that.

Anyway, so I’m obviously going to die and people who never knew me, which pretty much covers everyone, people are going to come in to this weird little guest house and worse, the bigger house where most of my stuff is, and oh my God, what will they make of it?

The graffiti I sprayed on the living room walls. Will anyone see past the obvious property destruction to the S.O.S. I was sending to whoever might bother to read it? Will they look at the garbage and the dirt and think, 'What a filthy girl', or will they think, 'Poor thing, she didn’t have clue one how to take care of anything'. Will they see the mounds and mounds of beautiful clothes in all those different sizes, most of them all dirty and rat-chewed by now, and think, 'Was this girl crazy?', or will some sensitive woman, who knows what it’s like to starve and purge to be thin, look at my clothes and see the weight vagaries I fought so hard against in order to be perfect?

And the shoes, oh my God, the shoes: hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes, all size five, all high heeled, some with broken heels from nights spent running away from various horrors. Will they look at all the shoes and think, 'Wow was she greedy, or what?', or will they see that the shoes, like the story of the princesses that danced their shoes down to the soles every night, tell a story of a magical lost princess who wore them because they made her feel tall and pretty and because each night, when she got ready to go out and put on a beautiful pair of dancing shoes, she thought this night might be the night that changes everything. Will they understand the shoes represented both another night on my own particular gerbil wheel and also meant hope to me?

I doubt it. I think the shoes are going to be one of those embarrassing epitaph deals. “She sure had a lot of shoes.”

They would be correct, I have always had a lot of shoes, but if anyone takes the time to sort through them like a good anthropologist should, they will see that some of the shoes look like they have only been worn once and, if they are smart, they will know that isn’t just because I liked to buy shoes, which is also true, but some of those shoes hold magic in them.

It won’t take anyone looking very deep to figure out what one tiny white shoe means, the one they will find clutched in my cold dead hand, like Clint Eastwood would say. But there are other stories in the shoes too.

If the right woman student of history were to pick up and really look at the pair of Valentino black lace sculpture pumps that I have always kept in a special place, she would know right away the reason those so beautiful shoes had only been worn once. She would know just by looking at them that I was wearing them the night I met my first true love.