Creature
The first moment I ever saw Gabrielle, I thought she was a boy. I opened the door of my friend Violet’s house (we were having a party) and this little person ducked by me in the midst of a small crowd, wearing a baseball hat and a huge green polo shirt and these big skater jeans. There were dark shiny curls hanging out of the back of the baseball hat and a good smell like soap and the sea and trees, as she ducked past me into the dark hallway. Of course I didn’t know she was she until the tall boy with the dark, shiny hair who followed her in and shook my hand, introduced himself (“Raphael… Pleasure to meet you”) put his arm around her shoulders, forcing her to look up so I could see her face and said, “and this is my grumpy twin sister, Gabrielle.”
She corrected him quick in her gravelly grumble: “Gabe,” smiling wide open into my eyes before the wave of people behind her and her brother carried her off into the depths of the den, where there were girls dancing on the end tables to music that sounded like the circus. I wandered into the kitchen, where there were some crunchy looking girls in patchwork and gauze eating oatmeal raisin cookies and smoking pot out of a sparkly periwinkle pipe.
Later, I saw this new creature again in the den, showing off a new tattoo to some flirty girls. She’d pulled off the big green polo shirt to let them see the Japanese kanji on her shoulder and underneath she was wearing this little green tank top with one of the fish from that Dr. Seuss book One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish on the front- a little red fish sitting in a teacup. And she had the prettiest body. She was beautiful pink-toned smooth paleness and Spanish hips and strong wiry arms and yeah, yeah, cute tattoos and all that shit but what got me I think was the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine, male and female. She did tough real well but she was so delicate. That’s what always got me about her. She saw me looking and winked.
The party had thinned out by the time I found myself on the back porch with this girl, smoking a cigarette and listening to Fiona Apple wail out the windows:
And I will pretend that I don’t know of your sins
until you are ready to confess but all the time
oh, all the time, I’ll know. I’ll know.
And we talked about our favorite books and high school traumas and the Catholic Church and our Mothers and singing in public and our worst Exes and what we wanted to be when we grew up. And she told me about how she had done heroin for a long time and then she had gone to rehab and she had gotten clean and now her life was so much better and I mean, I didn’t know it at the time but while she was telling me all this, she was high. On heroin, which she and consequently I called dope. At the time, I just thought she had cool yellowish eyes. Pretty and feline, I thought. It wasn’t until months later that I realized her eyes are only yellow when she’s high. Her real eyes are dark brown like mine. But when she does dope her eyes go yellow and her pupils go tiny- pinpoints- but I mean I didn’t know the difference. Not yet, anyway. We met at the end of May. By the time I went back to school at the end of the summer, I was starting to suspect.
It wasn’t til her first visit that I found her stash. But I couldn’t say anything. I think that was the most fucked up part. That I knew for a really long time and I didn’t say anything. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
That night I didn’t know anything. That night was crystalline, twinkling with sweetness and discovery. That night she was perfect, gentle and well-read, soft-spoken and funny. A sexy little tomboy-girl with kisses in her eyes and, that night, one sweet kiss on her lips for me, a good bye kiss of magnitude proportions; gently, quickly, quietly, I was hooked.
........................................................................................................................................................... BerriesInside I am twittering like a bird. This is new, this whole thing. Not the feeling but the realization of it. She is my most amazing creature. Gabrielle, Gabrielle, my Spanish pixie twist of a girl. It is summer and I am hers, she is holding my hand and she is teaching me her New York. She says it’s fucking pathetic that I’ve lived here my whole life and don’t know how to go anywhere on the trains by myself (overprotective parents), so she’s teaching me. For the first few months, she would pick me up at Penn Station, waiting just outside the gate for me by the magazine stand. But now it is August, and I have been learning, and today she said I could take the ACE downtown alone and meet her at the basketball courts at West 4th Street. When I get there, she is already waiting, hands in pockets, eyes following the game. Her grin is like rubies to me, like new pennies or chocolate icing. I admire this girl-boy creature, the baggy pants and big blue polo shirt camouflaging pert perfect breasts and that waist-hip slope she says is Spanish, from her mother. Her long, curly dark hair is twisted into a perfect bun at the nape of her neck where she can hide it under the brim of her backwards baseball cap. She has the most perfectly shaped eyebrows I have ever seen. “You’re early,” I say, smiling.
She reaches out, gentle, smoothing back my ponytail and taking my arm. “I like those pants,” she tells me, smiling approvingly at my new jeans. “Where’d you get them?” I begin to tell her how Violet and I went shopping after work yesterday and all I am thinking is this is it. This is the most slinkster-beautiful person ever and I do not even know how to explain why but it’s there, somewhere in the tension between that perfect girl-body and the boy-clothes that hide it from every one but me, the waist-length hair that only I am allowed to see, to touch. The boy-face, the girl-pussy. She is like an alien, like a goddess, or a mythical creature too beautiful for this place, this now.
In the sunlight so bright we squint like kittens, she holds my hand and we do our rounds of the neighborhood. Across Sixth Avenue, to Juice & Joe’s for smoothies. We pick up one for Wolf: banana-wheat germ-tofu- and alfalfa sprouts. I get strawberry-mango-kiwi-papaya-raspberry-yogurt. We bring our smoothies to the tattoo shop, where Wolf gave me my first tattoo last Sunday. It was a present from Gabrielle, who wears her sleeves like armor- the lotus flower on her elbow, the raging fire, the swarming, waving water, Kwanyin, the strong and lovely goddess in the blue gown. Around my Gabrielle’s wrist, a new bracelet of Japanese Kanji symbols meaning: faithful, destiny, pride, angel. Her birthday was last week and these were her gifts: the bracelet Wolf tattooed on her right wrist, the wings he put on my back. She says she loves that I am pierced, willing to be painted. I pull off my beater and Wolf checks the wings on my back. This is what she has been calling me, my new nickname: Angel. She says I am an angel from above and I fill the hole where she used to put the dope, back when she was a junkie. And that is our song- “Angel”, by Sarah McLachlan, and that is what she calls me. I am her angel, her fairy, her good-luck charm, her wish-come-true-girl. Wolf rubs vitamin E from my shoulders to my hips and then slaps the sore skin heartily. “Now, don’t pick at this. I don’t want you fucking up my work with those fidgety fingers. Gabrielle, don’t let her touch it, I want to shoot it for my portfolio.” Gabe aims the fan at my back so it will dry and I can put my shirt back on.
Next Gabrielle and I go next door to buy mangoes and bread and cheese from Hercules, the four-foot-tall deli-owner who loves us and wants me to marry his rich brother who is waiting in the old country. We bring our food and our books and our big blue tapestry to Washington Square Park and stretch it out on grass dappled by sunlight and the shadows of big, strong oaks. Intoxicated by the summer and each other, we sprawl under our favorite tree and feed each other bits of fruit, pulpy juice running down our chins. She licks the stickiness of my fingers, she nibbles the tips and I shiver.
I lay with my head on her belly, listening to her stomach’s quiet odd sounds, sketching the way the light falls through the leaves on the trees. Gabrielle has fallen asleep, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lays open over her face, her hand resting open and useless on top of the book.
I sit up and look around, keeping my palm to her belly in the warm place where my head had been.
A family like dark red apples in a blue and white bowl. A family like jasmine growing in a kitchen window, stained glass and surfboards on the porch. Tan, blonde children, scampering, skipping with hair made into haloes by the dying sun. I cannot tell if they are girls or boys in their bright striped pants but I want to take their picture. The moms on their blue blanket look alike with sandy hair and long strong legs; they could have been sisters except that I watch them awhile and I see the hand on thigh, the gentle eyes, the feeding of a slice of strawberry as they watch their children dance. I have heard the children calling the watch-me calls of children everywhere: Mama! Mummy! One mom is nursing; the fat blonde baby pats the breast seriously as she sucks and watches the world with wise eyes; the other mom is tall and her long braid swings down her back as she stands, opening a picnic basket, calling the children to come and eat sliced melon, blocks of cheese, wheat crackers from long cardboard boxes.
Gabrielle stirs, reaches for me, her hand opening and closing, fingers feeling the empty air. I touch her hand, take the book off her face and kiss her pink pouty lips. "Look," I say. She leans up on her elbow and looks and the children are on the blanket now, lolling against their moms and one another, eating bites of cheese and tossing berries into one another's mouths. Her eyes widen and she slips her arms around my waist and we sit, watching like TV and feeling each other close and solid and real and she looks at me and she says "Marry me."
