The
sucrose to water content in wine grapes is measured in brix. I step on scales
to see how many pounds I’ve lost. When my friend Nance peers down at bacteria,
she adjusts her instrument’s resolution in micrometres. When I bake cakes, I
cut butter into tablespoons. When I erect sculptures, I hold my tongue out
between my lips, and I hope for something that will please Nance, whose eyes
are keen.
Too many things measured, you lose your knack for poetic
living. I like to throw darts with my eyes closed, but I don’t like to put
music on shuffle; there is a pattern, if you listen long enough. And even the
dart thing—I still have to know there’s a dartboard not just in the vicinity
but in front of me. Risk, after all, doesn’t have to mean danger.
I know a lot of smart people, as in people who’ve been
told all their lives they stand out of a crowd because of the connections their
brains make. Nance is a chemist who works for a large pharmaceutical company.
Her brain connections got her challenging work and great money. Also, her
husband is a good-looking, stay-at-home dad.
Their little girl’s name is Ruby; she’s reading earlier than the rest of
her class.
Nance and I used to eat psychedelic mushrooms together
and do art projects. We made finger paintings and sculptures out of things in
the junk drawer and the jewelry box. She choked on her udon noodles last night
when I showed her I’d saved these creations. They’ve been in my closet, in a
box, behind all the bridesmaid dresses and costume dresses I’ll never wear
unless somebody finally asks me to The Ball. Or—for that I’d buy a new dress.
These days the inspiration has been insects. I’ve been
working with plaster and knitting needles on the largest scale I’ve ever tried.
Like thirty needles strung on end make a mosquito leg. Nance is worried about
how I’ll do the eyes. They’re the most important part, she said. I told her I
knew that and that I was still brainstorming. Some days I feel such pressure to
make the eyes spectacular that I end up wondering if there should be eyes at
all. That’s one artistic avenue: omission. But then what would it mean, a blind
mosquito? An already weak creature made weaker, like a child in a third world
country, they might say. This is what we do to those children, I could say. I
could explain, People misinterpret the children’s need for aid as blood thirst,
a mosquito with no direction, only the desire to go on… But that’s not at all
what inspired the project. The project came out of a humid summer of welt-like
bites and low, low productivity. I crafted one thing last summer, and it was a
birthday cake for Ruby.
The cake wasn’t not
a work of art. It had three layers and a mini-swing set on top with two
little girls sitting on the swings. Ruby still has the swing set and the girls
(which are made of non-perishables) sitting on her dresser. I am ashamed to
admit I’ve checked.
Lately I’ve been taking online intelligence tests. Here’s
what they’ve shown me: My verbal skills are decent; my mathematical skills are
low; my classification skills are strong. These results make me yawn. Before I
started taking the tests, I’d gotten it in my head that I had a hidden talent
in some subject I’d never been allowed to shine in. Not so. I can quantify and
qualify and measure, but I can never write a novel or get a stable job as an
accountant. I am as average as they come—and a little closer to “low” than I am
to “genius.” (Low is to genius as poor
is to plastic surgeon.) I’ve learned that my IQ is higher when I take the Joplin test and lower
when I take the Stewart test. (I blame some of my “weaknesses” on the
distraction of comparing one test to another while trying to focus on a
question.)
I don’t do any drugs now. Nance flipped out in the coffee
shop, just before she discovered she was pregnant, talking about how the drugs
had tarnished her memory, especially when she needed to remember what she’d
said about people other than herself. I tested her then by saying that one
time, over Yerba mate, she’d told me her husband had a knack for scaring
children when he was trying to make them giggle, and that Nance worried he
wasn’t intuitive father material. Nance couldn’t remember saying it, and I
didn’t tell her this, but it got me concerned about the drugs, too. That same
week I remember telling Nance I’d told our friend Nikolai to stop bringing
drugs around because they weren’t doing it for me any more, and Nance had been
so pleased. I remember her face. She didn’t want to be the grown-up all by
herself just because she wanted a kid.
My decision did remove a little risk, a little poetry,
from my life. Because I know spontaneity and risk are quintessential to the
artist’s life, I went through a period of bringing men home from bars. I wasn’t
safe all the time. (I’m sure there is some statistic that concludes people with
low IQs don’t use protection.) I got lucky, and I do mean that in both ways. I
stayed clean, didn’t get knocked up, and I had lots of sex. I kept a tally in
my bedside drawer but then burned it as a poetic gesture. But I still remember:
eleven.
What about butterflies, Ruby asked me when I told her
about Nance and her concern about the bugs. I don’t think I’ve got it in me, I
told her. I was thinking that butterflies had been done to death and then that
bugs were probably just as bad and maybe it was time to go back to butterflies. Then the eyes wouldn’t be such a big deal—all
their other parts so compelling, so expected. Moths could have worked, too, but then I don’t think the knitting
needles would be able to play such a huge part; they are my favorite part. I
told Ruby that she should try doing butterflies. Why not? She used toilet paper
rolls and crayons, glue and seashells, and she took our breath away.
Last night, after udon noodles and thick red wine, I
dumped boxes of pictures and art projects out on my bed for Nance and me to
look through. I held up a mobile I’d made out of Nance’s test tubes and
pipettes and cork stoppers. She laughed and blushed but called it inspired. I
told her that when I showed it to her years ago, she’d called it a “cross
disciplinary masterpiece,” and Nance laughed harder, blushing dark as her wine
lips.
She
couldn’t remember stopping and taking that picture in front of the gas station
in Boring, Oregon, on our road trip to California. She could
remember that, while we were on that trip, she decided to go back for her PhD.
She couldn’t remember what it was about that dinky bar on Roy Street that drew us back so often
that we had five pictures of ourselves there. I reminded her it was a
combination—the margaritas and the tall bartender with the Michael Jackson
tattoo. Ohhh, she said. Things came back to her, but nothing needed to come
back to me; I didn’t need pictures. Ask me what we did during the ’99 riots:
fried falafel at our secret island campsite. Ask me what Nance wore to the
roller rink last year: brown cowl neck sweater and dark blue jeans, with
turquoise earrings she had to put in her pocket when we got rolling too fast.
Ask me the name of Nance’s high school boyfriend’s mother: Eleanor. My memory
either impresses or frightens Nance, and her bad memory makes me wonder if I’d
fare fine going back to the drugs. It’s possible they’d provide me with a bug
eye solution.
I’d been saving a concern for Nance, and last night I
spilled it. I’m worried about my hands. When I was a little girl, I did some
serious comparing—my hands to my mother’s—I’d told Nance this before. Now, it
appears my hands are turning into my mother’s hands faster than they were
supposed to. My strength isn’t math, but I triple checked my equations on this
one, and they all came out telling me it’s too early; I’m aging young.
Nance got a call from Ruby who said she was in the midst
of an existential crisis and longed for her maternal companion. Nance left, so
I sat on the bed with those pictures, trying to find images of my hands and
then comparing them to what I had before me in my lap—hands with wrinkles, hot
pink from trial and error.