Broken
Two
Wildflowers burst from the grass, from within ankle-deep blades of silver-green, flared yellow petals propped on lanky stalks. A pair of leaves, three. Four at most. Innocent creatures looking for the sun, shivering with frissons induced by the wind. A little higher, darlings, a little more to the east. See that bright circle over there? Yes, there's your precious sun. Drink the rays in and grow, and someday you may be lucky enough to get trampled on by the mayor himself.
Cam yawned and loosened his tie with two fingers: it was never tight to begin with, but as they say, old habits die hard.
The shallow brook reflected her face as she peered in. She was in a chipper mood today, even more so than usual. He only had to crack a half-hearted joke for that chipmunk grin to break out; more often than not a gasping breeze of laughter gushed with it, a single rush of breath: Hah.
It unsettled him, that smile. It was twice as bright as any, so much so that he could only conclude it was fabricated, designed to hide, to shield, wrought by a mechanical hand at some point: a warped veneer fashioned from dreams and nightmares alike, at the fork where the real and the fake went on separate ways. True, at the moment everything he had was guesswork, but only time will tell—let time do its job and the chink in the armor will show, betray a glint, a tell-tale glimmer. She was humming below her breath.
You're not as two-dimensional as you want me to think, honey. You're not that opaque.
"Cam," she said, not taking her eyes off the green-and-brown mallards waddling about. "Are you happy?"
"Not particularly. Not sad, either. Neutral, I suppose."
She laughed her single breath of laughter. "No, I mean with your life. Are you happy with where you are, what you're doing?"
Beyond the hems of his pants two shoes stuck out, buffered by a band of pasty skin each. Jarring: a stretch of deep navy, and then the pastel pale of his ankles. Dark and light colliding, the natural and the manufactured. The pair of pants itself appeared to be tailored for someone else, someone less tall and possessed more meat on his bones. Blue-black tubes of cloth under-stuffed with flesh, laid straight in front of him, with a written instruction that said, These are your legs, these are your feet, deal with it.
"I could do worse," he said.
The look she gave him was somewhat condescending. Pitying, even, should he choose to read in too much. "That's not an answer."
He sighed in exasperation. Why he kept choosing to spend time with her was beyond him; she was especially predisposed to asking the most baffling kinds of questions: Are you satisfied with what life has given you, Cam? Do you think life is unfair, Cam? Don't you ever feel restless, Cam, like a bird without a nest? Cam this, Cam that. What is love? If you're given the chance to live your life again, what will you change? Life, life, life. For all her cheerfulness, her questions sure were depressing. "Yes, I'm happy. Not so much that I want to jump for joy, but happy nonetheless."
He closed his fist and tugged upwards; torn clumps of grass stuck out from between his fingers, roots dangling. Sorry, grass, he thought. Compulsive behavior on my part.
A black ant crept along his arm.
"Don't you want to be that happy? So happy that you can't help but jump for joy."
Cam shrugged. "Not particularly."
"No?"
"It would be nice if I could be that happy," he said, "but I don't actively pursue it. If it comes, it comes."
"Hmm."
Her fingers skimmed the water, slender bird-boned things, tanned above and pale below. When she wasn't talking, you could mistake her for a woman of nobility, someone from the past, from those old pastel portraits of rosy-cheeked ladies with their frocks and bonnets, with their hair combed and gathered at the nape, with their hands fish-belly white and their lips painted crimson. It was in the way she moved: a trace of dignified wave in her hands, a tilt of the head. The impeccable posture. The only exception was whenever she fidgeted.
Sunlight hit the water and bounced, caught on the underside of her palms, on her jaw, on her cheeks. Under her breasts. Shards of dappled light dancing, yellow-and-white flecks of fire trapped in perpetual motion, grated pieces of the sun watered down, made earthly. If he was an artist, he would have painted her. No, not her—the idea of her, of a modern-day milkmaid-slash-noblewoman, a reincarnation of the sun cracked like an egg.
"Don't stare," she said, chiding. "It's rude."
"Don't tell me how to live my life."
Chipmunk. That smile again. Faked, perfected through years of practice, summoned with such ease that she might have begun to believe it herself. She didn't fool him, though. He had little doubt that the smile she wore hid something underneath, some sort of restlessness, a discontentment she chose to vent through her pseudo-philosophical questions. The current below a frozen river, a flash behind drawn curtains. A hint of decay underneath the perfume. Your mask is crumbling, Lillian, and I can see it. After all, even the sun has dark spots.
He brought a fist to his mouth and yawned again, this time almost dislocating his jaw. Almost. He was prone to hyperboles at the worst of times.
"Cam."
"Lillian."
"If people are flowers, what would I be?"
Now that was an interesting question. A nice diversion from her usual life-and-happiness routine. Problem was, he never thought of people as flowers, or vice versa. Creativity he never lacked, but he was short of the imagination to sort through people, to take inventory of their traits, to turn them around in his hands, to categorize them as flowers. You're a lily, you're a petunia. You're a sunflower, because you stink. You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
Imagine: Yes, Howard, stand there at the corner. Laney, in the middle, beside Georgia. No, don't stand too close to Rose; you're supposed to be the accent. Stand straight, Eileen—you're wilting.
Arranging people as if they were flowers. Playing Goddess. You go here, you stand there. Face the wall and think about what you've done. Imagine the power, the authority, the sovereign responsibility: I am the judge, I am the king.
And people thought he was laid-back.
"Cam?"
"I'm thinking." He took his flat cap off and raked his fingers through his hair. "A foxglove."
Her brow furrowed. In curiosity, he hoped. "A foxglove?"
"A foxglove."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Because I say so." Candidly, he picked foxglove because it was the first flower that came to mind. The first word he thought of was carrot, but blurting that out was a threat to his self-preservation. He crossed his legs and uncrossed them. Grass tickled his ankles: Wear longer pants next time, Romeo, they seemed to say. Lucky there weren't ticks around.
"I don't find foxgloves particularly pretty." With a finger on her chin, her eyes downcast, her legs tucked neatly beneath her, she was the perfect image of demureness. Like a porcelain doll without its lipsticked mouth and painted eyes, without whorls of satiny hair curled tight around the ears. Without eyeleted lace trimmings and rustling triple-flounced skirts. Stripped and broken and left to pretend. Hah.
Deceive
Verb
1. (of a person) Cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage.
See also: delude, beguile, mislead
Ah, yes. Let's pretend, shall we?
Here's your ivory comb, baby, and here's your ball gown. Here's your white silk gloves, here's your floppy hat with the pink ribbon you like so much, here's your pearl choker necklace. Your cedar cigar box, your diamond earrings, your embroidered suede boots. Dress yourself up like the prodigal princess you are, you sweet broken doll, you.
Cam knew all this fancy nonsense because of Laney. Little Laney, with her braids piled tight on top of her head like an external brain, forcing little Cam to play house, forcing little Ash to behave while little miss Blondie poured him imaginary tea.
And now it was Lillian's turn.
"What does that say about how I see you?"
Her lips curled to a smile. She took her hand away from her chin and used it to brush a strand of hair from her eyes. Her little porcelain-doll glass eyes. "That I'm toxic?"
He shook his head and smiled. "My turn. What barnyard animal would I be?" Even as he talked, he hoped she'd say cat. Kitten. Feline. Anything that meowed and had whiskers, bent tails and arched backs. Striped fur, spotted fur, bandy legs. As long as it had something to do with cats.
"You're already a barnyard animal," she said. Either she didn't notice his disappointment or she ignored it. "Let's go with crops instead."
"All right. What vegetable would I be?"
Without missing a beat, she said: "A carrot."
Well, would you look at that, thought Cam. Great minds think alike. He refused to comment on her vegetable choice and babbled instead about something unrelated.
"Laney used to have a porcelain doll." Somewhere at the back of his mind, beyond the barbed-wired border of practical intelligence, flicking through the surface of his thoughts, a voice asked him why he was telling her this. Cam ignored the voice; it sounded too much like his own. "She called it Her Majesty Elena the Second."
"Oh? And who was the first?"
"Laney."
She stared at him for more than a few seconds before breaking out into a toothy grin. "Oh," she said, laughing. "Oh. I get it."
Playing with dolls, playing Goddess. Miniaturization at its finest: little Cheryl was best at it. Cam had glimpsed her once manipulating her toy horses, her stuffed sheep, her rubber cats, her barnyard figurines. Lining them up, side by side, like a firing squad. Even animals weren't exempted. You are whoever I want you to be.
And me?
I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum and all that. Nothing like Latin gibberish to make a man feel intelligent.
These thoughts would be his undoing, one of these days.
"You remind me of it," he said.
The laughter stopped. She twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger, the hair that had clung to his shoulder that rainy day more than a month ago. He was never sure of her hair color: brown seemed too plain, auburn too red, chestnut too dark, dirty blond too light. In the end, he went with brown.
"How so?"
He breathed in the scent of grass and spring wildflowers, breathed in the clear sunshine and brook water, breathed in the noise of mallards with their webbed feet paddling beneath the surface. And he said: "It was broken."
Shattered.
Splintered.
Lillian closed her eyes and shook her head. Looked at him and smiled. Not the fake chipmunk grin; this was different. Mouth closed, stretched, eyes reduced to crescents, like tapered rainbows, like inverted mouths beaming, purple irises. A sad, abandoned doll. A bony urchin. A dejected soul appraised and discarded, hidden by the sun, by a cheery smile and manual labor.
All this time, he thought. All this time, you've been hiding behind your animals, behind your five-star crops.
"Cam," she said. Her voice was quiet. "Everyone's a little broken inside. Even you." She sighed. "But you know what?"
"What?"
This time it was the chipmunk grin that showed. "The most broken ones are the hardest to grind."
She was a ball of fire crammed inside a tiny bodice. A king-size mattress shoved into a drawer, buried six feet underground, bursting at the dovetailed seams. A walking time bomb waiting to happen. Steeped with volatile emotions, clogged by a staunch belief in sickening cheerfulness.
"Cam?"
"Lillian."
Sunlight enfolded half of her face, her oily nose glinting, the other half shrouded within speckled leaf-shadows. She leaned forward. "Cam, do you think I'm crazy?"
The shadowed collarbones dipped with every movement of her shoulders. She was a lovely mottled shade: irregularly tanned and pasty, ochre-brown-pink, depending on which swathe of skin showed.
It was his turn to twist his mouth into a jaunty grin, to apply a jocular set to his jaw. "Everyone's a little crazy inside, you know. And," he continued, grazing her cheek with his fingers, "the craziest ones are the hardest to grind."
a/n:
And thus begins the downward spiral.
I finally figured out where I'm taking this, and it's a road to bittersweet endings. Maybe even plain bitter. A word of warning: this is not a happy honeypot of love and marshmallow fluff. See, I've even changed the category to Angst.
Each chapter jumps about a month or so. At least, that's the plan.
Thank you, all of who you reviewed and favorited and followed. All of you who read what I write. I appreciate your support so, so much. I only wish I could express it better.
