Scintillate: “Judy and the Dream of Horses”

I hung up the phone. Or rather I slammed it down on the small table, the one that wobbled in the kitchen. We had tried to even out the wobble too many times with napkins, paper towels, and once, an empty tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste was my idea. It was the night Julie and I had too much to drink. I had slipped on the puddle of the Blackberry Ridge flavored Boones, and down I went. I banged my head on the chair first, and ended up directly under the kitchen table; staring up at the Sharpie scrawls of bad poetry I had composed the last time I found myself under the that table. Julie had struggled to get me up off the floor when she heard my roommate, Bess, unlock the front door, but it was no use. I had the toothpaste tube in my hand, toothpaste on my face, in my hair and Julie stood over me to deal with what we called the Bess Situation.

Bess had been in Boston to see the Magnetic Fields; and Julie and I, not having scored tickets, had stayed behind with pizza, Boones and Stephen Merritt on the stereo instead. We were content; then I slipped.

“What is she doing on the floor?” asked Bess. She was dressed from head to toe in red, her signature color, and her wingtip Mary Jane heels were also a deep shade of crimson. She could have passed for the devil.

“She’s playing a fun game,” responded Julie. It was true, I was playing a fun game; and it was called being drunk under the table on a Friday night.

“When will you two grow up?” asked Bess. We were 22-years old.

“I’ll pick her up… I’ll pick…” Julie couldn’t finish her words before the vomit made its way into her throat, and seeped through the cracks between her closed hand with which she had covered her mouth. She ran to the bathroom, and made some guttural noise that was not of this world.

Bess sighed. She ducked her head under the kitchen table. “Happy, Chatel?” she asked.

“Very much so, Dunlevy.”

“I see you have some toothpaste there… you brushing your hair with it?”

“I squeezed it all out so I could fix the wobbly table,” I explained. In my head, both drunk and sober, the tube seemed like the best fit. The material of it was similar to clay but it wouldn’t harden and dry into dust, and it wouldn’t stick to the floor, my hands, or the table leg. Indeed, the empty tube lasted longer than any folded up paper towel, it was malleable and could wrap its plastic sides around the foot of the table better. It stayed there until the next time I was on the floor and grabbed it to throw it at Brian.

When I slammed the phone, it had been weeks since the removal of the empty tube of Colgate, and again the table wobbled. It had also been weeks since the break-up. James had called to set up a time to retrieve a record; that would not be happening. I had given him the limited edition EP, and would not be parting with it. I had declared it already lost to him, and my consolation prize for the last six months. It had been the fourth time he had called about the record, and the fourth time I had dramatically slammed the phone to make a point. It was before cell phones were commonplace, and the slamming of a landline phone still made an impact.

I stood in the doorway and stared at the dull walls of our living room. Halfway up, there was wood paneling that was painted an ugly shade of nude, as if old-lady pantyhose had been the inspiration. The upper half was covered in floral wallpaper that we had desperately tried to cover with band posters. There was a definite line of who had contributed what to the wall: the Miles Davis and Coltrane posters were from Bess; and mine were constantly on rotation of whomever I was listening to at the moment; and to prove their fleetingness in my life, I always hung them haphazardly at an angle, dangling by one tack.

I hated that wallpaper. It was burgundy with tiny blue flowers, and looked more as though it belonged as the pattern on a Mormon woman’s dress, and not on the wall of our Newmarket apartment. I had, on several occasions, slipped my finger underneath the seam that ran behind the couch and tried to lift it off, but Bess always stopped me. She didn’t want to do anything that would risk jeopardizing the return of the deposit. I only half understood.

It was Saturday. We were out of beer. I slipped on my Chucks and scuffed my way around the corner to the convenience store.

“We’re out of Newcastle,” said the register guy when I walked through the door.

“Really?” I asked, “how is that possible?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got this pint size girl who comes in here and buys it all up so other customers have to go without.”

“Are you suggesting I have a problem?” I asked.

“No,” he explained, “I’m suggesting you try another beer.” Newcastle had been the ex’s favorite; and I only drank it as some romantic notion of drowning and rinsing myself all at once. Vodka had stopped burning, even on open cuts. Gin had lost its sentimental meaning; and whiskey was less poetic than Hemingway had ever written. So I went for the Newcastle, and I was quite certain I could feel it pushing James out through my veins with each sip.

“We have Heineken,” he suggested.

“I don’t drink beer in green bottles,” I said. The selection in the fridge was small, and most of the bottled-beers were stacked on the shelves behind me, warm and needing a few hours to chill.

“What about Magic Hat?” he asked.

“Nah, it gives me a headache.” I squatted down to see what was hiding on the bottom shelf and saw a roll of aluminum foil. We had been without it for a while and had taken to covering leftovers with makeshift plastic bag concoctions. I grabbed the foil, a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, and headed home.

Bess had a record player. I put on the record James had been demanding for weeks, opened a beer and unrolled the aluminum foil on the floor. I loved the shimmer of it against the dull lighting from the ceiling chandelier, and the way it refused to stay wrinkle-free against my touch. It couldn’t help but be affected by even the smallest movement against it; it was completely at the whim at an outside source. Malleable. I got up and walked along the center of the foil, and stood there looking down at the contrast between my bare feet and the silver that ran crinkly underneath them. I looked up at the floral wallpaper and cringed; then I back down again. It was clear. There was no other place in the apartment that the foil belonged so perfectly. Wrapping up leftovers was a waste, as they hid in fridge away from view; the wall, on the other hand, was something one couldn’t avoid – it was necessary to the existence of the room, the apartment and the house that sat too close to the street. It was the only building on the block that was placed partially on the sidewalk, as if the original builders had no depth perception.

Strip by strip I started to hang the foil from where the wall met the ceiling and down to where the nude-colored wood started. Then cut, tape in place, and back up again. When one wall was done, I stood back and admired it. Its shininess reflected not only the muted lighting of the room, but the sun that streamed slightly between the curtains, and the candle that sat on the coffee table. It reminded me of one of those heart-shaped crystals that people hung from their rearview mirror that, although provided some sort of satisfaction for the owner, was just utter annoyance for everyone else the way it bounced rainbows of light in all directions. My new wall didn’t quite bounce rainbows of light, but I knew it would serve a purpose to annoy.

I opened another bottle, turned up the music, and continued. I was out of beer and aluminum foil at the same time and went around the corner for round two. Again the register guy joked about the Newcastle, again I reminded him I didn’t drink beer in green bottles and when I pushed two boxes of aluminum foil across the counter, he looked at me puzzled.

“Trying to prevent the aliens from reading your thoughts?” he asked. Although it had been decades before, people were still discussing the Betty and Barney Hill abduction by aliens because they were from the neighboring town of Portsmouth, and Betty, like me, had been a University of New Hampshire student back in the day. “You know, Betty Hill’s nephew lives near here,” he continued.

“I know,” I said, “he used to fuck around with my freshman year roommate… but mostly because she was hoping to be abducted, too, her second semester because she was failing.”

“Really?” the register guy asked, “and was she?”

“Was she what?” I asked impatiently, as I did have a project to get back to in my apartment.

“Abducted.”

“Not to my knowledge, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she claimed it years down the road… drugs do that,” I explained.

He bagged up my items and tossed in a grape Blow Pop for free because he knew they were my favorite and I scuffed my way back up the street.

By the time Bess came home, I was eight beers deep and had covered two and half walls in aluminum foil.

“Jesus, Chatel,” she said. “What the hell is wrong with you?” She had her hands on her hips surveying the room.

“I hated the wallpaper,” I said as I balanced myself on the arm of the couch.

“I really hope you didn’t use glue, because that’s going to make a mess and we’ll never get our deposit back…”

“Yes, Dunlevy, I’m aware. I used tape on the foil so it’s pretty much just attached to itself except for the corners of the room where I used tacks.”

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“No.”

“Yes, you are,” she accused.

“Maybe a bit,” I said.

“Did you go to campus at all today?”

“I went to the radio station this morning to borrow albums… so, yes.”

“Okay, let me be more specific – did you go to your Saturday anthro study group?"

“It’s already safe to assume I’ll be failing it because I haven’t gone once, so… no.” Actually, I had gone once, but left ten minutes in to it.

“You can’t lock yourself in here forever listening to your depressing music and willing James back into your life,” she said as she handed me another piece of foil.

“I’m not willing anything. And if you were paying attention, you would hear the sweet lulls of Belle and Sebastian engrossing this room.”

“What time do you plan to be done with this insanity?” she asked. “Because you do realize we’re having people over later.”

“Oh are we?” I glared at her over my black-rimmed glasses. Bess always seemed to forget that it was actually I who was having people over, because by midnight she’d be telling us to be quiet so she could sleep. It was always at that point in the evening that the party moved into my bedroom and ended in some bizarre activities to break all the sexual tension in the room; behavior that would have Bess squirming in her seat the next morning over coffee with both disgust and mild jealousy.

It took four rolls total of aluminum foil to cover that living room. I replaced the posters when I was done, and like Andy Warhol before me, sat back to admire my own private Silver Factory. I rolled a joint, put my feet up on the coffee table that had been covered in profanity and sketches of genitals during the last party, and inhaled deeply. I had always loved silver. My prom dress was silver; my first car was silver, and the bra I had on at that moment was also silver to match my old school silver Saucony sneakers.

By nine people started showing up. Bess, as usual, had been in charge of the snacks; and since I had it down to a science, I made tray after tray of Jell-O shots – a college standard back in those days. And we danced, because that’s what we did then; and we were too loud, because we were good at it. And like clockwork, Bess would tell us to “settle down” at midnight.

In the haze of it all, we didn’t know that one of us would be dead within two years, that one of us would be sentenced to jail for 10 years on drug charges, that three of us would come out of the closet, that one of us would be raped, that two of us would survive suicide attempts, that between all of us, there’d be a half dozen abortions, there’d be two finders of God, a future writer for CNN’s AC360, a Harvard professor, and that despite our incestuous group, only two of us would end up together. As we danced in the darkness of the aluminum foiled living room, with just the candle to keep us from falling over our feet and the feet that moved around us on the dark blue rug in the center of the nude-colored wooden floor, we didn’t know what was to come.

Julie pulled the Sharpie from my back pocket, the one I always had on me so I could adorn whatever was around me with words, both original and stolen, and she began to write on the aluminum foil walls. We covered them that night, between the group of us. With markers, pens, pastels and even lipstick, we inundated that silver empty space with lyrics and poorly drawn sketches of ourselves, the shape of Jack’s Adam’s apple, Aaron’s beard, and my profile that I hated so much.

When we woke the following afternoon, the space above the couch read: “Judy and the dream of horses.” And the same line repeated itself all over the walls, every inch that could fit it, that’s what it said.

Julie rolled over in her sleeping bag and looked at the wall, too. “Hmm… and all night I thought I was writing the entire song. I guess I couldn’t remember the rest of the lyrics,” she said. She pulled the pillow over her head to block the sunlight. I ran my fingers through my hair and took my place on the couch, in the room I had covered in aluminum foil one Saturday afternoon; the same foil I refused to take down when it was time to move out of the apartment. It was the thought of it all being squished into crinkly spheres that kept me from it; malleable, sliver balls that were completely at the whim of outside forces, with a possibility of ending up in a landfill somewhere, with an open-ended storyline and reeking of nothing but uncertainty.