work in progress

She gets her thoughts on love from the worn appendix in the back of her chemistry book and her wisdom from a raw throated, frizzy haired woman banging away at minor seventh chords on a dusty piano. In the mornings and regardless of the weather, she wears her mother’s tattered navy moccasins (which are a size too big). They have old red and turquoise beads hanging from them that don’t go with anything in her closet. And each night, she dreams of sweet smelling plantations, shiny ringlets of honey colored hair, and finding her true love in the science fiction section of the local library. The girl should not be trusted.

She never feels quite at home in her house. Her mother likes to use expressions like “Well idn’t that the pits” when she sees something sad on the local evening news, like on Tuesday, when a man choked on an acrylic fingernail in his burger basket, and on Wednesday, when there was a five car pileup on the highway. The girl never knows what the “pit” is, or for that matter, how there could be more than one. Her father, well, he likes to sit in his pea green recliner and read his newspaper and he likes to drink gin and tonics while doing so. He is almost always reading the newspaper. For a while she wondered if he even had a face anymore, for it is always hidden by newsprint and the occasional colored advertisement about discount pantsuits or clearance lampshades. Her brother, Neil, has a girlfriend and wears school jackets with letters on them and smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Velva. Neil is never around. Her dad calls Neil a “cut up” and when he comes home late with red eyes and a dizzy stride, her mom shakes her head disapprovingly and says, “Now, you don’t see that from a galloping horse.” The girl never understood what a horse, let alone a galloping one, had to do with her brother getting home past curfew.

So, the girl spends most of her time in her room. Her room is covered in hand drawn posters of weird, scientific things, like the Krebs cycle, the Periodic Table, the Loch Ness Monster, and then, staring down to her bed, there is a poster of Clark Gable from “Gone With the Wind.” She loves his moustache and the tip of his nose because it reminds her of a happy little mushroom her class studied once in Biology. Her mom always jokes to her friends about the fact that her sixteen-year-old daughter has a poster of Clark Gable hanging above her bed. She says that she doesn’t know why, but he makes her daughter “as happy as a pig in slop.” Her mother prefers Jimmy Smits. The girl doesn’t like being called a pig, and she thinks that Clark is much too classy to ever be referred to as “slop.” She sighs whenever her mother does this. At least she looks at a man who will look at back at her, the girl thinks. That’s more than her mother can say.

In addition to the posters, her room is a veritable jungle of plastic plants that occasionally gather dust if she does not care for them. But they do not die, even if they happen to grow a thick grayish film around every leaf. To the girl, this is excellent news. When she was little she had a traumatic experience with her rose garden: one day, for no apparent reason, they just wilted and shriveled and fell pathetically to the ground. The petals reminded her of dehydrated cat tongues. Since then, all plants have been plastic, and whenever Alvy, her cat, meows, she has to look away.

Each night, while her parents eat dinner on their TV trays, watching the local news and talking about The Pits and The Stocks, the girl takes her plate upstairs to her room and studies chemistry. Textbooks cover her bed, and eventually her hand begins to cramp because she’s been balancing equations for almost an hour. And then she smells her food and is disgusted by the hardened gravy on her mashed potatoes. They look like hardened plaster and are the color of her lab gloves after an experiment involving iodine. Alvy starts licking at the plate with his tongue and she gets upset and throws the plate to the floor, getting gravy gunk on her equations. And then she gets frustrated, because now her homework will smell like her lousy dinner and she can’t stop thinking about her dead rose garden. But then she looks up to Clark, smiling as handsome as can be, and decides to continue adding protons to her potassium atom.

The truth is that she understands most everything about science and mathematics. She can do logarithmic functions, and she can determine the velocity of X given its time T, and she can balance equations, and she can identify every part of the human heart. But, after sixteen years of daily study, she just doesn’t understand the force that attracts her mother and father together, and how covalent bonds can exist among humans, and she doesn’t know what acted as a catalyst to make Neil turn his potential feelings for a girl into kinetic ones, and she doesn’t understand how neither of these things have set times T and set velocities X. That is what she wants to know most. And that, the girl has decided, is the next problem she is going to solve.

In the meantime, she has finished balancing her final equation. She takes the now dull pencil from her thin fingers, sharpens it, and gingerly, purposefully, scribes her name at the top of the page in cursive: Grace.




The next morning as Grace rode the bus to school, she thought more about love, and why she had never experienced it. She started by thinking about Scarlett O’Hara, and how even though she could have had it with Rhett, she was hopelessly stuck on Ashley. Grace never understood that. She could only surmise that Scarlett only ever wanted what she couldn’t have. That didn’t help Grace, because she wanted no one, and no one wanted her. Then she thought about her brother, and his girlfriend, Rachel. Rachel was very pretty and thin, and had strawberry blonde hair that smelled like pineapple. When Rachel twirled her hair, she liked to bite her lip and giggle into her hand, and Grace found that very sexy. So did Neil. Sometimes Grace would try to emulate it in the mirror, but she would always end up licking her hair on accident and coughing.

And then she would look into the mirror and feel like a failure. It wasn’t that Grace was ugly, she had shiny medium brown hair that fell to her waist, and pale skin with bright green eyes, but she just felt plain. All the time. Grace never wore makeup; she tried to use an eyelash curler of her mother’s once but pressed so hard that for a week her eyelashes looked like crispy uppercase L’s.

Sometimes, when she got out of the shower, she would stare at her body in the mirror. She saw scrawny little legs that, even when her ankles were together, a quarter could fit easily between her thighs. And she saw ribs that looked like the gills of a fish, and on top of that, two small breasts that reminded her of the Hostess Snowballs that her mother liked to eat in secret. She didn’t see anything special, and she didn’t know why men bothered to buy magazines to see something so plain. Grace would think about the popular girls at school, with their grapefruit chests and rounded butts and how they would wear tight clothes that looked like they were spray-painted on, and how their glittery belt buckles would say “baby” or “angel.” Grace thought it was silly for them to have a belt anyway, as if that light stretch denim would ever fall short of their hip bones.


And then she hit her head on the dirty vinyl seat back in front of her. The bus came to a screeching halt as an old black Oldsmobile skidded past them on the right. From her seat, Grace could see the plate “GLMRUS” fade into the distance. It was only 7:47 and she already had a headache.