Work Text:
Barbara meets a woman with short black hair at the bus stop. Barbara is going to a special store full of running shoes, because she thinks she might enjoy running for the sake of it. In the morning, the air is peachily polluted and striped with sunshine, and she would like to gulp it down in great big swallows as she runs and runs and runs along the beach. The beach with real water, which you can get inside of. Barbara is still a little scared of it.
Barbara looks at the woman for six long minutes, as they wait for the bus. She has learned not to stare, so she sips at her with tiny little glances. Barbara loves the dark hair smoking her legs, the dimple in her cheek, and her phone case, which bears a funny picture of a cat. There are paint splotches on her denim cut-offs. She smells like sweat and sawdust. She is so beautiful Barbara follows her onto the wrong bus and doesn’t even care.
Barbara meets a girl who lives nearby. She is so beautiful. She likes sidewalk chalk. She is also very sick and often in the hospital. She likes her mother’s Stephen King novels, but begs Barbara not to tell anyone about that, because she’s not supposed to read them. Barbara goes to the library and reads Misery. She loves Annie Wilkes’ loathsomeness. Then she learns there’s a movie, and Barbara loves movies, so she buys it immediately even though she doesn’t know if she likes it yet. Kathy Bates is sublime. Sasha taught her that word. Barbara loves Kathy Bates so much she watches every single one of her movies in a week and cries when she learns there aren’t anymore. But she gets the girl who lives nearby to watch Fried Green Tomatoes, which helps.
Barbara doesn’t love her period. She goes pop-eyed when Gloria tells her it happens every month. “Every month? ” Barbara asks. “What do you do? How do you go to school? How do you work? ” But also. She loves her period a little bit. Only a little. But still.
Barbara hears a boy on the train say the word “upskirt.” She looks it up on the laptop she knows how to use now. Barbara spends a month in online places she’s pretty sure she shouldn’t tell Gloria about. She learns about terrible things there, some of which are useful. She smashes many websites to pieces with her wonderful new knowledge, and signs up many terrible men for thousands of magazines per month, and records their names and addresses down in a special notebook. Just in case. And she finds one girl who maybe hopefully doesn’t even know about the pictures that were taken of her by terrible men, and Barbara sends her flowers with no name attached.
Barbara meets a beautiful librarian with liver spots the color of coffee and a T-shirt that says COCOA BEACH. There are so many beaches she’s never even heard of. The librarian loves her too. The librarian helps her find books about Pepi Litman, who was so beautiful and funny and dashing, and Anacaona, who was so beautiful and brave and brilliant, and Solitude, who was so beautiful and heroic and dauntless. And she learns about the librarian, who lets her stay after closing because Barbara keeps staring at her in that way she’s really not supposed to do anymore, and the librarian is so smart and dogged and wise. She doesn’t have breasts anymore, because she got sick, but then she got better. She climbs mountains now. She has a grown-up daughter and a wee little baby granddaughter and no husband anymore, and a lot of pet snakes. Barbara gets to the feed one of the snakes a pearly little mouse one afternoon, because the librarian thinks she’s “a doll.”
Barbara has to lie down for an hour after learning about dark matter.
Barbara meets a beautiful woman wearing a lovely old shirtdress and big black work boots at a party full of so many beautiful women she has to keep herself from jumping up and down. The woman kisses her at midnight and it is so wonderful Barbara cries. The woman is worried, because she is so wonderful, which makes Barbara laugh. “I’m just happy,” Barbara whisper-shouts in the woman’s ear, before she kisses her back.
Barbara meets a girl who tells her she’s secretly a werewolf. Barbara is pretty sure she’s right. She’s so good at howling.
The librarian introduces Barbara to volunteering, which is wonderful. She does it at the women’s shelter. Barbara feels like screaming a little bit all the time she’s there. She feels a very beautiful anger coursing through her, which she loves, but it’s a different kind of love. It’s hungry, and so sad it makes it hard to breathe.
Sometimes, after a shift, she looks at her ceiling and misses Barbieland so brutally it feels like how the librarian described chemo. It doesn’t stop, is what gets Barbara. There is not one single solitary corner of the real world that ever takes a breath from hating her. There are so few gaps. There is a way of hating women for every single type of person to enjoy. There is never a bad day to do it, there is no home it does not live within, there is no romance without its beveled edge.
Gloria says it is wonderful that Barbara loves Audre Lorde, but maybe that it isn’t a great idea to ask people if they would like to borrow her copy of Uses of the Erotic at the bus stop.
Barbara meets a woman at the beach who teaches her how to swim. She has beautiful tawny skin dusted with dark hair and she parts the water with her strong arms like it can’t kill her whenever it wants. She laughs a little, not unkindly, when Barbara tells her how frightened she’s become of the water since learning about riptides.
“Didn’t grow up near a beach, huh? The woman smiles. Barbara smiles too, not saying anything. “It’s a lot! And like … don’t watch Jaws anytime soon. But anyone can swim in the ocean. Really.”
The woman holds Barbara’s hand as she learns to keep herself from breathing in the salty water. Then she holds her up as she learns to float, her hands touching and untouching her back so lightly. And when Barbara learns to swim, she cheers so loud, and they get pizza after.
Barbara reads the Bible. It’s pretty funny, even though Gloria says it’s not supposed to be.
Barbara loves food. Barbara can’t believe how much she loves food. Everything tastes so good, even when it tastes bad. It makes her a bit of a different shape, necessitating some new clothes. Gloria takes her to the mall. Barbara has an awful moment in a dressing room because there is cellulite. It is so frightening that she cries a little. But then she remembers the woman in the shirtdress and how her body had cellulite too, and more besides, and how she was shaped like an arrested avalanche, all the lovely soft rippling of her, and Barbara remembers how she loved it so much it made her sing on the long walk home. And when Barbara comes out of the dressing room crying, Gloria hugs her and says she knows, she knows, but she is still so beautiful. And Barbara tells her she knows that too.
Barbara sees the beautiful woman with short black hair and paint-splattered shorts at the beach. She’s wearing her new running shoes, which aren’t actually so new anymore, because it turns out she really loves running. She gets sand in all their fancy nooks and crannies as she jogs across the beach to the woman, who is drawing the people around them in a sooty little sketchbook.
“Hi!” Barbara says. “That looks amazing.”
“Thanks.” The woman looks up, her eyes shielded by dark glasses. “Are you an artist?”
“I’m not sure yet. Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Go ahead.”
The woman goes on drawing, but keeps glancing up at Barbara, then smiling, then looking back at her sketchbook. Barbara watches her hands make their little genius movements.
“You see them,” Barbara says, as the woman draws a little girl eating sand. “You really see them.”
The woman grins. “That’s the nicest thing you could have possibly said to me. Are you sure you’re not an artist? Or like–” The woman pauses. “Not to be weird, but you’re really gorgeous. Have you ever been an artist’s model? Which is, uh, my totally smooth way of asking if I can draw you?”
“Yes!” Barbara laughs. “Yes.”
The woman draws her very quickly. “It’s just a sketch,” she says, “but if you have time, I’m also a painter, and I’m always looking for studio models.”
“I have time.”
Her eyes are very dark and serious, but the face around them is alive with joy. It reminds Barbara of girls’ night, and of the party full of beautiful women, and of the little werewolf girl.
“Has anyone ever told you you look like a Barbie doll?” the woman asks.
And Barbara smiles.
