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For R.G.
Annabelle is a problem with no solution. She craves what is bad, wrong, unhealthy, and awful. She goes online to chat with others about their unspeakable cravings. She now craves this talk. It’s another bad habit. Problem, no solution. Only in the case of online chat, it is no longer unspeakable. Everyone there is chatting up a storm about what they previously thought was immoral, reprehensible, out of control. Pleasuring themselves. Then facing the stares, reprimands, and holy images of the Cult of Denial. Real or imagined, they find guilt in those stares. Guilt another craving, but one too rich for their blood. Too much guilt and they have to purge. Until the cravings find them again.
In her online community—that is what she calls it—Annabelle finds no limits to her expression. There is always someone to respond, someone to pay attention to whatever she says. She spends hours online, hours when the normal world is asleep, when she used to try to follow normal and wind up with black eyes from punching herself in her sleep to keep from dying. She knows death and its hoary, black wings too well for a young woman. She has to remind herself, “young woman.” Her online chatters sometimes ask for her real name, a photo, something of her personal affects. She forgets what she is until someone asks her for proof.
She loves chat rooms, she loves theory, she loves literature, she loves talk so much that the lack of it scares her to no end. She understands the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” who foundered for lack of talk. That woman’s demands so modest and unassuming compared to those of her chat room. They know the oppressor is silence and they are not about to shut up. They gorge themselves on their own and each other’s words. They revel in saying too much, prod each other for not saying enough. There is always more to say, an infinity of things to say about their obsession with food, with oppression, with a fucked up culture that their online community takes aim at with every keystroke.
Her online name is Grendel. Her rage is monstrous. Her appetite for it is huge, it is ugly, and it cannot be stopped. Rage burns through the chat room on a regular basis like an erotic wind. They have become quite inventive in how to conjure the turn-on of a good rage session. The glory of that pleasure is also what finally ends it. Burned out, ravaged, they each turn away from their monitors and slump into the daylight of their lives, the scent of charred flesh enticing and haunting them even as some, including Annabelle, wave the banner of vegetarianism as a peace offering. Her carnivorous attitudes are, after all, strictly metaphorical. She will not kill even a mosquito. She struggles with eating vegetables after reading about the secret life of plants. When she binges, it is on food so heavily processed and packaged, like the Botoxed and chemically peeled Hollywood royalty, so far removed from the sources of their creation, that even she is momentarily fooled into believing they are the immaculate conceptions of edibles.
Every time she burns out, she thinks that’s the end of it, she has no more to say, and only death awaits her. Her acquaintance with death has led her to a more-than-metaphorical understanding. It is something she fears even as she craves it. A problem with no solution. Food is death. But she can’t live without it. Nor can she live with it. The problem comes when she and those around her run out of energy to both tell and listen to their outrageous lives.
If only her life wasn’t so sad and ordinary. That’s why she buys tabloids with her Twinkies, which, urban legend has it, boast an indefinite life shelf when left undisturbed in their original wrapping. The tabloids shield her Twinkies from scrutiny at the check out. For her, the worse sin is eating a Twinkie, not reading the tabloids. Carrying a Twinkie in broad daylight would be a real challenge. She fantasizes about this even as she dreads the thought: the hostile stares of overweight women furious at her cover girl thinness; the hope in her mother’s eyes that she is eating something that will round her out, puff her up, approaching something “normal.” She is in love with facades. Like talk, she cannot get enough of a Twinkie-fied life. A Hostess cupcake cream-filled existence. Like the boob jobs and liposuctions and air-brushed images of the Hollywood elite, she craves the unreality of it all even as she rages against it. She stopped trying to make sense of this a long time ago. But she will never stop talking about it.
These days, she will talk to anyone who will listen. She talked to her former sophomore English teacher recently after running into her at the mall, later chatting online for days about that weird synchronicity. Of all things, to run into Ms. Gilbert in front of Auntie Anne’s pretzels on a weekday night, and for her to recognize Annabelle and stop and ask her what she was up to lately. She was glad to finally thank Ms. Gilbert for turning her onto Charlotte Perkins Gilman and to tell her how she had sparked her continuing interest in literature and all things literary and was even studying at the local university and had now discovered Theory (which she was fairly certain Ms. Gilbert hadn’t studied and so was careful not to lord over her). They talked so long that at one point Annabelle thought about suggesting coffee at Our Daily Brew, but then Ms. Gilbert frowned and checked her watch. And in that moment, Annabelle’s confidence started to unravel, since she had assumed that Ms. Gilbert had actually cared about her enough to stand in the mall for nearly half an hour while Annabelle caught her up with some of the details of her early life.
Breathless, Annabelle paused, the sweet, doughy perfume from Auntie Anne’s momentarily overcoming her equally intense focus on Ms. Gilbert’s greenish blue eyes that, while staying focused on Annabelle’s, seemed to also spread like a mist or a cloud, softly enveloping yet also diffused. Before Ms. Gilbert could respond, Annabelle, gulping air, rushed to add, “I’m writing a lot now.”
“That’s great,” Ms. Gilbert murmured, the freckles on her fair-skinned face relaxing into tiny brown-red puddles. She sounded genuinely happy but also a touch relieved, Annabelle thought, feeling a twinge at “relieved.” As if Ms. Gilbert had felt some personal responsibility for Annabelle’s “overactive imagination” and was happy that it was being channeled in a constructive way. But when had it not been constructive, at least as far as Ms. Gilbert was concerned?
Maybe Ms. Gilbert thought her class had overstimulated her. The doctor husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” had ordered bed rest and social isolation for his nervous wife. Had Ms. Gilbert worried that Annabelle was similarly “overwrought” by the literary encounters and imaginative liberties of that class?
“Yes, yes it is,” Annabelle replied, hoping that in the repetition of her affirmation that something else would occur to her. Instead, she simply stood there, bony hands dangling awkwardly at her side, thinking how she probably sounded as obsessive as ever.
“Well,” Ms. Gilbert interjected after an endless few seconds of silence. “I’m really glad to have seen you and to know you are still writing and studying literature.” She glanced down at her watch again. “I’d better be going. I told my husband I was going to make this a quick trip.” She paused and scanned Annabelle’s face, then quickly added, “As much as I hate coming to the mall—I almost never come, but I had to pick up some shoes for my mother—I’m glad I got a chance to see you. I’ve wondered how you were doing.”
Annabelle, suddenly cheered by the thought that Ms. Gilbert also hated the mall, overshadowing her guilty obsession with its bright lights, intense food smells, and shiny surfaces, gushed back, “I only come here to take a break from my online chatroom. From one unreality to another.” She laughed, a bit nervously, she thought, as if disclosing her obsessions in this way would spoil Ms. Gilbert’s relief at seeing Annabelle still among the living.
“I know what you mean,” Ms. Gilbert smiled kindly, her overbite pushing against her thin top lip in that rather endearingly shy way that had touched Annabelle before and made her trust Ms.Gilbert as a confidante. “Once you get here, the place just sucks you in.” She sighed, ran long fingers through her dark red hair. “Good to have a real conversation.”
“I’ll let you go,” Annabelle said cheerily. Ms. Gilbert hugged her and strode off towards the huge red letters of L.S. Ayres department store. The hurlyburly sounds of the recorded calliope music drifted up from the Food Court. If she weren’t so conscious of being a grown woman, Annabelle would have taken the Down escalator’s invitation and bought herself a ticket for the Endangered Species merry-go-round and straddled the manatee. Something she could and would never do in real life with those gentle, shy creatures, but that’s why she loved metaphors. She didn’t have to ride a real one to imagine how sweetly lulling it could be.
—
Sometimes, after such encounters, even benign ones like Ms. Gilbert, she thinks she is, indeed, easily overstimulated–by literature, by her online chats, by just about everything that demands her attention. Sometimes she takes to her bed, her inner doctor/husband ordering her away from all her bad habits and obsessions and prescribing plain chicken broth and saltines to settle her nerves and ease the self-induced emptiness in her stomach. As much as the doctor character triggers her fears of captivity, she also tells herself that rest is not necessarily captivity, and rest is something she needs, even though it feels as if her body is imposing it on her, just another form of aggression. She and her body are locked in struggle. Problem, no solution.
Ironically, during episodes of bed rest, those days she misses classes because she literally cannot raise herself out of bed long enough to bathe or dress in street clothes, her imagination fires up more flamboyantly than even the online chats inspire. Her endlessly voracious imagination holds her captive to its cinematic displays. She is the wounded Grendel, biting off the heads of warriors like puny raisins and swallowing them whole, just to prove how powerless are his human opponents, but also in defiance of whatever vague and distant humanness he possesses. He rages at the thought he might be governed by those vile humans, with their miniscule emotions and pathetically ordered lives. He blooms in their blood, ferocious and unpredictable. And it’s his endless appetite for rage that also binds him to his nemesis Beowulf, eroticizes their physical combat, and, even as he steals off to the cliff, cherishes their contact even as he rages at his own weaknesses in being able to physically withstand that epic encounter. Beowulf cannot live without his, Grendel’s, death; his rage is not because Beowulf must kill him, but that he and all the other humans refuse to acknowledge the eternal bond he and Beowulf share—that there are no heroes without monsters.
She cannot be heroic without the monsters that populate her dreams, asleep or awake, it makes no difference. She loves her monsters. That is the problem, and that, too, has no solution.
—
Her chat room friends have encouraged her to write about her life. She has written about her life to them, but several have suggested that she should do it offline first, to give it the proper attention and focus. They praise the therapeutic effects of writing about her struggles. “It will help you remember,” they write. “When you remember, you can let go.”
Let go of what? she wonders. She would rather write about Beowulf, about the Yellow Wallpaper, about any literary work that is so exquisitely scary. She cannot imagine anything she wants to let go of. Not even the memories of the choir boys pinning her against the church basement walls, the thickly painted cinderblocks a pasty white in the glare of fluorescent lights. How they fingered her like a garter snake or a beetle, fingered themselves and made her watch, slapping her if she closed her eyes. And how could writing such memories allow her to “let go” of them when, written down, they only seem to invite readers into a voyeuristic infatuation that even she feels upon writing? At least when she writes them online she knows someone is listening; someone will offer the appropriate reactions of disgust, rage, sympathy, empathy, concern. In writing them online she does not have to face her memories alone. Any creepy lurkers in the chat room who say the wrong thing get quickly shouted down, so to speak, driven offline by a chorus of protective voices.
Even so, there are still lines she draws about what she can or cannot write, afraid of approbation or, worse yet, disbelief. How her sexual fantasies follow scripts they may not want to know about, borderline pornographic yet firmly rooted in fears of being out of control of her body. Where her own stimulation and fulfillment grew to depend upon the manipulations of those boys, who in turn noticed and shamed her to no end about her sluttish, wanton ways. Having forced her to follow them into the tangled forest of their own confused, violent impulses, they promptly abandoned her, leaving her to figure out for herself how to understand her own embarrassing, self-denigrating desires. How could she still have a lover of her own to whom she could tell her deepest desires, figured as they were by those brutish, pathetic boys? Boys she expected would marry “decent” girls, raise children in that same suburb, attend the same church, and lock up their own monsters until they either burst out and devoured them or shriveled up from neglect and with it, any hope of an emotional life.
She is not about to let go of anything she feels or has felt. She is not about to join the ranks of those zombies disguised as teen-aged boys. What else could explain their callous disregard of her except that they had somehow let go of some feeling or another that connected them to their own fears, weaknesses, and lack of control? She wants to write about characters that resist letting go and instead brings their memories forward and into the light. She wants to feel more than she does, not less. Why doesn’t anyone seem to understand that? Instead she is met, both online and in her everyday life, with cautions and whispers about “overdoing” it. Yet it’s true that, like the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she has faced exhaustion bordering on psychosis; her emotions have frothed up and at times threatened to drown her. What she wants to feel and what she feels able to feel are at times at odds.
One night “Grendel” chats online to a long-time friend, “Hogwart,” about this problem.
Grendel: Last thing I want is to land in the hospital again. The more I remember, the less I eat. The more I eat, the less I remember.
Hogwart: That’s why I liked cutting. Made me feel more in control of my body. Hogwart identifies as a gay male with multiple piercings and tattoos. Annabelle
suspects that he has neither piercings or tattoos, too afraid to undergo the needle at someone else’s hand yet still infatuated with the image of such bodily adornment. She started singling him out for chats because of the cutting.
Grendel: Isn’t it weird that the very thing that marks us as out-of-control makes us feel the most control?
Hogwart: Some gays think cutting is femmy. Like, why don’t I just put it out there instead of keeping it all to myself?
Grendel: Yeah, I’d love to see what they’d do if you DID put it out there!
Hogwart: Would you run?
Grendel: Hell, no. You’d be doing me a favor.
Hogwart: Are you eating anything right now?
Grendel: Yeah, I’m smashing a Little Debbie right into my teeth. Makes me have to lick all the cake and cream without biting.
In fact, Annabelle has not eaten all day and has nothing but a half-full cup of cold, black coffee on the table next to her monitor. As she writes, she starts feeling as if she is eating and enjoying what she’s eating. With Hogwart there to listen, the guilt eases. The pleasure of what is “bad” feels good.
Hogwart: What is it about Little Debbies that makes us want to pick up the whip?
Grendel: Don’t get all s&m on me . . .
Annabelle can cite the Little Debbie bible chapter and verse: calorie count, servings per container, first ingredient, last ingredient. She’s researched the multisyllabic chemical enhancements and knows exactly what effects such substances have on lab rats and mice. She knows everything there is to know about how BAD her addictions to junk food are. And with her body already in a weakened state from not eating, and then bingeing and all that entailed. Loving Little Debbie, scarfing Twinkies, gorging on nacho cheese Doritos and two liters of Coke were not the problem. She wished she could truly enjoy them. With each bite came the hope that the next one would be better.
Hogwart: If only you were a man . . .
Grendel: How do you know I’m not?
Not knowing for sure was what kept Annabelle coming back to the chat room. Everyone seemed so aware of the fact that they all could and probably were making up their identities as they came to and left the discussions. Instead of being upset by someone’s change in identity, most of them LOL’d and/or admitted to being swayed by some apparent sincerity on the part of the identified. They were all there to let their imaginations run wild and see what they could get away with. Or not. They came to pride themselves on their collective ability to sniff out a fake a byte away. Talking about addictions was, after all, not for the uninitiated. Theirs was a chat room for truth, and those who masqueraded were quickly exposed, shamed, and typically fled, leaving the rest to their “monsters” without worrying about hassling with those clearly out of the loop.
Sometimes such flirtations did surface, and Annabelle, after a fashion, welcomed them. She enjoyed the strokes, dodges, and subtle evasions in ways that she never did in her everyday life. She might never have the real thing, but she had started to believe that perhaps in some ways the online seductions were better. Like reading good literature was better than actually living what she read. Or at least equally good in its own right.
Hogwart: Send me a photo.
Of course, she and Hogwart have played this out before. Last time she sent a scanned photo from a JCPenney catalogue of a woman in antiseptic white bra and panties, about as unrevealing and asexual as a nun in habit.
Grendel: What do you want to see?
Hogwart: No games. The real you. You should know by now I’m no pyschokiller. No stalker. I really want to see you as you.
Hogwart’s sincerity strikes more fear into Annabelle than anything s/he’s said in these past few months. Hogwart was changing the rules, and Annabelle counted on the rules to keep going. Their identities were endlessly changing and changeable. “Sincerity” meant being sincerely invested in a never-ending string of metaphors to depict oneself. To expect anything other than metaphor, other than an imagined life, was borderline obscene.
It was also confusing. She’d grown so accustomed to online relationships that in the literal world of bodies, talk, and movement, she’d become adept at countering the effect of other’s (unreal) reactions to her. The raised eyebrows over her pallid thinness; the heated (sometimes overheated) stares at her milky skin and well-draped clothes over her fashionably thin torso. She was not what they saw. She was their sleeping monster. She was as ordinary as knives. Their defining looks vaporized in light of her hard-won skill at shifting identities until she herself was giddy with power. Everyday life was now unreal, the imagined lives of her literary universe, including her online world, her only reality.
Grendel: What makes you think I’ll show you?
Hogwart: You can’t survive on metaphors alone.
Grendel: I’d say I’ve had a pretty good run so far.
Hogwart: You can’t run forever.
Annabelle types, Wanna bet? Then she backspaces to delete each character one by one.
The indefinite shelf life of Twinkies was, after all, just another urban myth.
She is self-aware enough to know that she is afraid of being rejected for being so damn ordinary, pathetically so. Her problems with eating, the fallout of sexual abuse, her self-image and all that cultural baggage she so willingly carried in the daylight hours of her life are not what made her stand out; they are what made her so predictably normal. Statistically speaking, her monsters are mainstream, hardly on the fringe. Rare are the ones who have not been forced to deal with the Problem with no Solution, who live the airbrushed lives force fed into the cultural narrative as the Ideal. At least the tabloid goddesses and gods still reveal something of their monsters, remove the airbrushing now and then to glimpse the uniqueness of their unscripted selves. The protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” had not kept to her bed. Her monster lived; it tore down the wallpaper bars to its existence.
Would Hogwart find anything but disappointment in her chiseled face, milky skin, round, curious eyes? Her red hair, much brighter, bushier, and thicker than Ms. Gilbert’s, reaching out like tentacles or flames, in a halo around her head? The eating disorder only enhanced her beauty even as it threatened to curtail it and her life. She looked anything but monstrous. If only.
Nothing can truly represent the selves she claims as hers. At every turn she slams into the limits of any representation. Irony is no remedy for this problem.
Maybe Hogwart is right. Maybe she’s leaned on metaphor too long, if not as a solution, then as a way to avoid the problem that was her.
Hogwart: Are you still there?
Grendel: Right.
Hogwart: Sorry if I scared you.
Grendel: Being scared isn’t a problem. I’m scared all the time. I live with scared.
Hogwart: I’d worry if you weren’t. Scared, that is.
A big sigh escapes Annabelle’s lips. Where could the woman-as-monster live in a Yellow Wallpaper world? In literature as well as life, the Problem with no Solution was locked up, abandoned, abused, and/or murdered. That was the cultural narrative. Another sigh. Relief warms her nerves. She smiles. And types.
Grendel: Funny how unscary it is to notice how scared we live.
That night she slept. She remembered her dreams. She was eating, a green salad full of many, diverse, and exotic greens. The greens spoke to her as she ate. They called her by name, her true name, not the one her parents had given her, not her online names. A name too secret to be spoken, only felt as though through photosynthesis. She loved the sensation of feeling those green plants enter her, bond their chlorophyll with her platelets, swimming in the sea of her corpuscles. She could not imagine not hearing them call her name, so powerful was their presence. If this was love, she was voracious for it. When she got out of bed, she asked her mother if there was salad in the house.
“For breakfast?” Her mother’s quizzical look did not deter her from reaching into the crisper for the deep green of spinach, the noble spears of romaine, the whimsical tendrils of frisee. She wanted them all, she wanted more than was in that lone crisper, but she was still in her Hello Kitty! pjs and not about to wander to the megastore in such a sorry state. She would have to be content with the available offerings, for now.
“Dressing?” Her mother’s voice sounded suddenly hopeful.
In the dream, the greens had eschewed all cover ups. But lemon, they advised, was the perfect foil to bring out their grassy goodness. Fruit, of course, was a huge step in yet another direction. Yet since the greens had summoned it, she felt encouraged.
“Lemon will do.” As she spoke, she sensed the untruth of her words. The greens responded by presenting themselves as Other, as monstrous, looming, weedy things Not Her. The lemon, too, puffed itself into a gigantic yellow poisonfish and threatened to invade her too-fragile immune system. How could she presume such familiarity with beings so clearly distinct and distant from her own devouring humanness?
But the dream. Her eyes welled; how could the dream be so wrong? Once again, she felt the flute-like voices of her verdant intimates echo within her. A lonely tear strayed onto her lips. The monsters suddenly retreated, the metaphor now visible. What bound her to the plant world, their common element. They needed each other, as lovers do.
“And salt. That good sea salt, from the Celtic coast. A good pinch of that.” Her mother smiled slyly, as if she’d been waiting her whole life for her daughter to ask her for just that.