2001-11-14 || 2:38 p.m.

|| em. this is what happens when the server is down at work and i have lots and lots of time to cut and paste, cut and paste. ||

so. i am writing a novel. and i am biting my lip and i am just about to post a part of it. are you ready? i am ready, but i am hiding behind the disclaimer that we are operating on quantity, not quality here, and i have not gone back to change anything. and it's just that i still feel like i have been writing loads of shite in sweet diaryland lately. i just can't find the good words. so i will fill the empty spaces (kicking that silly mel entry back to the archive page) with this. kay. thank you. you look really hott today, you do. xoxo

There is a photo of my mother and father on their first date. Emmy took a picture of them on a lark on the steps of the house in the orange groves. They are standing at a far enough distance for it to be awkward. She is 23 and he is 24 and at this point they just want to make it through dinner. Mary has long hair and is wearing a dress with a pointy collar. There are molecules waiting patiently inside of her to spring into action. They sense answers and destiny just outside the darkness, and they are buzzing in anticipation. She mistakes it for nausea. Gilbert is clean-shaven and there are necklaces around his neck. He is standing barefoot on the front steps, his shoes still in the van he has been living in for three weeks by the beach. He had Mary meet him at Emmy's so that he could take a proper shower, with soap and shampoo and a clean dry towel, with shaving cream and his father's lucky razor and a mirror to look at fourteen times before descending the stairs. Dinner will go swimmingly. They will smile at the waitress and leave their broccoli florets untouched. They will finish off a bottle of wine and lean in with flushed faces under the guise of needing to catch the words of the other over the din of nighttime candlelit conversations. They will leave the restaurant to walk up and down paved hills, Santa Ana winds leaving their hair disheveled and full of static, and when she goes to kiss him under orange streetlights she will swear there was a spark of electricity.

I am lying on my bed and the lights are off. A record has ended and I am listening to the needle winding around an endless track, never gaining speed, never slowing down, patient in its efforts to find the grooves that create music. It sounds like space and sidewalk. Or the inside of a room when it thinks no one is listening. I can hear my mom's car turn off in the driveway. I can draw with my finger the path she makes up to me: Front door to the living room where Dad is. Dad is reading a hardcover book with the television still on, reading glasses making shiny indentations on the sides of the bridge of his nose. She sits on the arm of his chair and he tells her in low voices what I have done. They are laughing half-heartedly and suddenly feeling utterly exhausted. She leans in to kiss him on the cheek, kiss him on the lips, kiss him on the top of his head. She tells him that she has finished twenty-two report cards, asks what he had for dinner, reminds him to feed the cats. Living room to kitchen. She picks at food kept in Tupperware, pulls out a bowl of soup encased in plastic wrap and puts it in the microwave. While it is heating she hums the song she sang in the car on the ride home and pours herself a glass of wine. Kitchen to bedroom. She runs up the stairs believing she can take off her work clothes in time to hear the microwave ring. She pulls off her pantyhose in a distracted way and lets her skirt fall to the floor in the middle of the room. She finds Dad's jogging pants in a pile of laundry and pulls them on. She looks in the mirror while taking off her earrings. She inspects the lines around her mouth and wonders if the cream she bought at the supermarket is working. There are words that come to mind: "diminishing" and "alpha hydroxy." "Age-defying." She sticks her tongue out at her reflection and turns the light off before she can catch herself doing it. Bedroom to my room. She has forgotten about the soup in the microwave. She is padding along the hallway and is wondering why my lights are off. She opens the door the way she does when she thinks I am sleeping.

"Paigey?" A rectangle of light with a Mom-shaped shadow is cast on my bed. I turn over to face her, my head mashed into the pillow so that she cannot make out the shape of my hair.

She doesn't turn on the light. She leaves the door open and sits on the edge of my bed. I smell my mother: night face cream and Dad's dirty laundry and the hot sweet smell of her evening ritual glass of wine.

"Dad says something happened to your head."

"Something happened to my head." I am surprised by how calm she is. She ruffles my hair in the dark and then stops.

"Oh, Paige. What did you do?" She reaches over me to turn on the light on the nightstand and I sit up. Her hand comes off my head and goes to her mouth. "Oh Paige."

I can't see her mouth but I can tell she is wanting to laugh. I am relieved and hurt and hold my head with both hands.

"Is it bad?"

"No. It's not. Bad. I can't believe you did that. Did you do it all yourself?" She grips my chin like I am five years old and pushes my face away to see the back. "Oh. That's a short spot."

She is frowning at my head. She lets go of my chin and gets up to turn on the ceiling light. She stands at the doorway and I am sitting on my bed and her expression changes.

"It'll grow out." She stands there for a minute and I watch her looking at a ghost. I am sure she is seeing her sitting on the bed with me. I want her to sit down and admit it: Brigid is here. I want to explain that I don't want it to grow out because then I will be Paige again and Brigid will get lost.

Her back touches the wall. "I have soup downstairs."

I sit in the walk-in closet that connects Brigid's room to mine. It is filled with boxes and breakable things wrapped in paper and I am thinking of the summer before Brigid left for college. There were boxes then as well, labeled with her name and their contents: blankets. Books. Winter clothes. College things. Alive things. The closet was transformed into her sewing room and if it wasn't too hot she stayed up sewing. She moved the record player as close to the closet as it could get without getting unplugged and we sang along to Dad's old Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin and Cat Stevens records: sewing music. After the single McCall's pattern had been thoroughly exhausted, having spawned five dresses with varying material and pocket sizes, she started making her own patterns. She made plans for dresses and skirts out of newspaper and if it was really late at night she scrapped the newspaper and pinned long pieces of material together haphazardly. Sometimes I stood in the middle of the closet, the pull chain of the light grazing the top of my head, and sang the parts to "Aqua Lung" she couldn't sing because of all the pins held between her lips as she fitted me for A-line dresses and pencil skirts. The adjustments to fit her own body came later, at the sew-together rip-apart sew-together stage after the record had stopped and Dad had come in at least twice to tell us to go to bed, as she stood in her underwear frantically trying to get things to lay right. Late at night she told me secrets. There had been a couple times when she never came home. Once she stayed up all night sitting on our roof with Patrick Sotheby, just feet from my open window. She found pot in one of Dad's record sleeves and tried smoking it in the laundry room with her best friend Marlo when they were fifteen. She lost her virginity in Andrew Parr's backyard on the Fourth of July. She was still afraid of the dark, even though she had stopped coming into my room to sleep with me when she was thirteen. She was afraid to leave home. She loved me very much and was so glad we were sisters.

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