Shell

Lena Pressesky

Outside her white walls, there is a violence that Morgan knows nothing of. Outside the fence and the gate there is a molding tide that pulls at people like sand on the beach, moving them in a way so that they’re not quite sure if they’re moving backwards or forwards. But Morgan doesn’t know any of this, inside her room where time doesn’t exist.
*
Morgan, age 6: As a child, she takes magnifying glasses to ant hills. She has a little plastic one that folds into its own case. She holds it over the sandy mounds, watching thin streams of smoke uncurl in the air until the crawling black seeds squirm under the heat, writhing and steaming.
She likes to find snails and turn them upside down, watching their antennae pulse and stretch from their bodies before she salts their vulnerable undersides. When she sees how they wither and pucker, she goes looking for some more. With her mother’s Tupperware full of salt, she explores beneath the plants and foliage of the backyard, taking the creatures from their shady, dewy hiding places and dropping them into her pot.
Her behavior as a six year old immensely disturbs her younger sister, who runs screaming from the incinerated ant domes.
*
Morgan’s boyfriend, Derek, is thirty years old, and works at Francie’s Yoga teaching Vinyassa flow. He is good at his job, correcting crooked downward dogs, gripping hips tightly and pulling perky ass towards his groin. In the shower after class, Derek and Francie soap each other, he relishing the toned and tanned limbs of this forty-five year old yoga empress, she tongue-bathing his pulsing pectorals. While Morgan is coiffing prom queens at Ciao Bella Salon, Derek twists the lithe and flexible Francie into positions that only experienced yogis should attempt. He comes home smelling fresh, his hair still dripping onto his thin white t-shirt.
*
Morgan, age 13: When she is in the seventh grade, Morgan gives her first blow job. At thirteen years old, she is becoming pretty, although her breasts won’t grow in for another two years. Her mother embarrasses her immensely even years later, telling dinner guests how Morgan insists on wearing flimsy cotton training bras, despite the fact that she was “practically concave up top.” So when Christine Herman asked Morgan to come to the Rainbow Party she is throwing, Morgan could hardly refuse. Emboldened by the thumping of her own heart and Kevin Milbrae’s extended cock, she swipes Revlon Cherry Bomb across her lips and adds her own mark beside the other lipstick stripes, her entrance stamp into the world of sex.
*
Ciao Bella’s glass door chimes with the entrance of Morgan’s next client. She is young, early twenties like Morgan, and walks in as sweet as the breeze she brings in with her. Besides the dead ends of her medium brown hair, she is beautiful and fresh, and her friendly, unassuming “Hello” bites at Morgan like last night’s floss against her ravaged gums. Morgan turns tepid water on over the girl’s hair, massaging the scalp, and begins her questions:
“Are you a student?”
“Yes, I’m in my last year,” she replies. “I absolutely love it here, but it’s time for the next big adventure, you know? Grad school at Columbia next—psychology.”
The girl grins, lost in the blinding vividness of her future. She flinches, and Morgan realizes her fingers are raking the girl’s scalp with painful deliberation. She eases the pressure. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did that hurt you?”
“Oh, that’s alright.” The girl laughs.
*
Morgan, age 9: She has felt anger before, but today it is something different. Something is pulling at her mind, worming its fingers into caves and crevices that she doesn’t want to see, pulling apart the soft gray tissue. Locked in her room, she screams and cries and throws her weight onto her bed. But she can’t satisfy her incredible need to break something.
A porcelain mermaid sits on her nightstand. She painted it herself, the pink glazed sea shell bra spilling its color onto the mermaid’s color bone. Morgan takes it from its languid position and hurls it against the mirror. The mermaid shatters, exposing its white chalky insides. In the broken mirror her reflection is lined and disjointed. A perfect glass triangle contains a brown eye and a piece of her high forehead.
*
Derek and Morgan both work downtown. Today he comes in the salon with sandwiches, and they eat them at the tables that line the sidewalk.
“Anything interesting happen to you this morning?” Derek asks her.
Morgan swallows. “Yeah, actually. An old woman died in the chair today. I think I must have been coloring her hair for a good half hour before I noticed.”
Derek laughs and piece of his sandwich falls onto the open paper wrappers. “You’re hilarious.”
When they finish, Morgan crumples the wrappers and heads inside the salon. Derek follows her, hand cupping her ass.
“You still have fifteen minutes,” he says.
They fuck in the supply cabinet between the bottles of peroxide and shampoo. After locking the door, Morgan folds her arms around his neck, kissing his lips and running her hands beneath his t-shirt. Derek flips her around, pulling down her jeans and thrusting inside her. Morgan grips the shelves, feeling the coarse wood against her palms as Derek finishes and pulls on his pants. He kisses her, grabbing her behind the neck and pulling her face towards his. It is moments like these when Morgan knows she will marry him.
*
Morgan, age 11: In school, she sits in the middle of the classroom. She is scribbling methodically beneath the peeled up corner of her binder paper when Mrs. Naughten puts a firm hand on her desk. Morgan has detention after school for drawing on the desks, signatures of disturbing, angry cartoons. Mrs. Naughten sends another kid out to Morgan’s mother to tell her to wait an hour in the parking lot, or come back.
Inside the classroom, Morgan must write lines. While other teachers have moved on to more modern techniques of punishment, Mrs. Naughten chooses lines. Morgan hates the feeling of chalk, the powder irritating her fingertips and getting on her clothes.
Finally she trudges out to her mother’s car. Her mother doesn’t yell at her, only stares through the windshield as though she will crack the glass with her gaze. She turns and asks her daughter why she is always getting into trouble. Morgan doesn’t say anything, only sighs and stares out the window.
*
After lunch, Morgan begins work masking the salt and pepper of a handsome middle aged man. He could be sexy, a silver fox, but he insists on having her dye it, even when she says the cut alone will make him look younger. Sometimes, she sees herself as an artist, creating beauty from the dust that lives and breathes in a new way when she is done with it. Mostly, though, she knows that after the first wash her clients’ locks won’t fall the same way, even with the twice-a-week conditioner she sells them. The hair will grow back, damaged and dull by daily wear, and she will cut it off again, sweeping it from the floor and into the dumpster behind the salon. The gray flecks sprinkled on this man’s shoulders will tumble over the dry brown ends that have already made their home there.
*
When Morgan gets home from work, she thinks she might crack. The milk in the refrigerator has gone bad, and there is only one egg left in the carton. Derek will be home soon, and she wants to make him scrambled eggs. That is the only thing she is really good at making, maybe the only things that keeps her ass-grabbing lover coming back. So she calls in Chinese food from the place at the end of her block.
*
Morgan, age 14: She loses her virginity in Michael Kessel’s attic. This is the special place he takes girls, because even though it is dusty, the dimly lit crawl space inspires them to take their clothes off. The attic is cluttered with things from his childhood. Books, and ragged stuffed animals. Antiques that have no place in the house live up here too. A set of wicker chairs with the bottoms peeling out crowd a corner, and there is even an old lacy dress that his mother wants to turn into scrap pieces for a quilt. Surrounded by things both dated and timeless, Morgan and Michael are removed from the world that passes by the only window, the stripe of four o’clock sunlight their only reminder that this is impermanent. In this world, Morgan is safe, even when Michael removes her shirt. She is safe even when Michael removes her pants. She is safe even when Michael thrusts between her narrow hips, drawing blood from her body that will ruin her underwear. Even when Michael’s interest shifts to Bonnie Summers, a girl whose name and blond pony tail and full high breasts make her everything she is supposed to be, Morgan is safe in places like the attic.
*
It is nine o’clock and Derek is not home. Morgan is worried, and she should be. She is afraid he has been in an accident. Her mind passes quickly over the pretty, older woman who owns the yoga studio, who she met once or twice. Derek is not fucking Francie, and he is not strewn in pieces across dark pavement. Although Morgan knows he is out with friends, she has forgotten he told her this as she crumpled their sandwich wrappers and nodded her head. Morgan, at twenty-four, is losing her memory. She will forget more and more until everything that has happened to her will no longer make her Morgan.
*
Morgan, age 3: Even as a young child, Morgan is smart, her mother’s friends saying she is wise beyond her years, if a three-year-old can be that. She enjoys hiding beneath an overturned laundry basket, peering between the loosely woven fibers at her mother’s clicking loafers. It is not that she is hidden that this appeals to her. It is not that she is swaddled in this synthetic womb.
*
The next day at work, Morgan mixes color in a bowl with a brush. The woman in the chair is Francie, the gray showing at her roots, her tan arms exposed in her tank top.
“You look so fantastic.” Morgan tells her. “Yoga really does wonders for people, doesn’t it?”
Francie laughs. “Oh, thank you. I’m just doing what I can, you know? I’m getting old!”
Morgan eyes the razor sitting on the right side of her counter. She feels vengeful, because even though she doesn’t have any proof, she knows. But the thought is fleeting, because she doesn’t want to leave Derek. Let him do what he wants. She is alone and she is the only one who knows it.
*
Morgan, age 18: She gets a tattoo. It is on the back of her neck, an image of an unfilled circle. When asked why she chose it, she told people, “It’s empty, but nothing can get in it. It has no starting place and no end.” Everybody she tells that to looks at her funny after that.
*
The day after Francie came in to get her roots dyed, Morgan sleeps with another man. It is Derek’s day off, and she relishes the fact that while he sprawls naked on their queen bed, TV remote lolling across his chest hair, she is in the supply cabinet fucking the Silver Fox.
This is how it goes:
The glass door chimes and he walks in, smiling at her like he already knows her. For a moment, she smiles blankly like she always does, ready to warm the tap water. But this face is familiar, and she remembers him, and asks if there is anything wrong with his hair.
“No,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with the cut. I just couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
Morgan smiles. Besides these two, the salon is empty.
He continues: “Would you like to get dinner sometime?”
She says yes, then asks him if he is busy right now. When he says no, she pulls two salon chairs together and brings a bottle of white wine from the back. He looks surprised, and Morgan laughs.
“We serve it to our regulars sometimes. And anyone who gets jittery over haircuts. They pay enough for it, after all.”
In an hour still no one has come in, and the glass bottle is empty. Morgan and Jerry laugh about finishing a bottle of wine before noon. He is a retired doctor, with three kids, two out of college. He is divorced. Morgan tells him about the snails. She is not sure why, maybe it is the topic of children. But she is relieved when he laughs and says, “Yes, there is something very satisfying about the way they shrivel like that!”
The alcohol makes them both very brave. At sixty years old, it has been a long time since Jerry has done anything adventurous. Morgan, too, is awakened by their potential naughtiness. It starts with a kiss, and she only means to pull him in the closet for some making out and “heavy-petting,” as her mother once said. But soon, her shirt is coming up over her head.
Jerry stops them for a moment. He tells Morgan that he likes her. He tells her that he wants to take her out. But Morgan is already undoing his button-fly jeans and working her hands into his boxer-briefs. He hoists her around his waist.
Sex with Jerry in the supply cabinet is very different than with Derek. It is not that he treats her differently. He is not more tender with her. But when he pushes deep inside her, he comes as though it is all he has to live for. Washed in sweat, Morgan is briefly disturbed by this, feeling both important and anonymous. She wants to shrink back within herself, but instead she hears the bell against the front glass door, and composes herself to go answer it.
*
It is three days since Morgan has seen Jerry. He calls Ciao Bella once, but it is Morgan’s day off. In his post-sex haste, Jerry ducked out the glass door, blushing at his practically public coitus and cursing himself for his bad behavior. Like a twenty-year-old! He chides himself. He wants to apologize to her, to do things the right way. But she is only just waking up, the morning sun wriggling through the broken blinds that fall across her bedroom windows. Derek is asleep next to her, dreaming of Francie, his dick hard and his mouth dry.
Morgan gets up now. She frowns at a picture in a frame on her bedside table. It is her, smiling, her arms wrapped around the neck of her little sister. Her sister wears a crooked graduation cap, one hand holding it in place on her head and the other clutching her rolled paper diploma. Morgan tries to remember her sister’s college graduation, but she cannot. She tries to remember the folding chairs, the wind biting at the microphone and obscuring the words of the speaker. But all she has is the picture, a millisecond click, a blink of time printed on shiny photo paper.
Morgan follows her feet to her car.
She pulls out of her driveway in the misty morning and onto the main street where her apartment complex sits. She follows it through the residential areas and onto the winding road that takes her to the freeway. But she doesn’t take her car onto the curving ramp that leads her to freedom. She follows the windy mountain road instead.
The trees on either side of her blur together, moving faster. Fall is setting in, and some of them have lost their leaves, the ground below their branches strewn with bright orange and brown. But the pine trees retain their needles, the green not striking or vibrant but dull. It is easy for Morgan to feel at peace with herself in places like this, but this is only temporary.
She parks her car at the edge of a forest. There are people who live up here, but she drives further beyond their houses to a secluded edge without hiking trails. She sits in her car, key resting in the ignition.
*
Morgan, age 24: She is sitting in her car, parked on a dirt path that leads only to an immovable impasse of trees, staring through the stark branches. In every breath she takes there is a moment of panic, of disjointed confusion where she can’t quite remember the minute before her. She has some idea of why she is here, but her mind swirls within itself so she cannot really see it. Her brain is not blank, not black with deadened nerve endings or deteriorated structures. Rather, every thought is shrouded in white foam, like she is watching her own feet disappear in the pull of the tide. She watches herself get out of the car; she watches herself open the trunk.
*
Even in the half-formed haze of her cognition, Morgan knows she might be crazy. This is a viable option, she tells herself as her gaze falls on the gasoline can in her left hand. Inside her car, she douses her upholstery, and lights the matches. It is easier than she expected to light her car on fire, and as the flames rise before her eyes, the heat presses itself into her skin. She takes off her jacket and tosses it, her wallet in the pocket, through the open window and into the burning metal.
As she walks away she has already forgotten about the snails. She has already forgotten about middle school, and high school, and her first times, and her last times, and the things she broke. She has forgotten about Derek, who is still asleep, and Jerry, who is drinking coffee in the cool early morning.
She forgets that although she can burn the ID in her wallet, there are hairs she left on Derek’s pillow that have escaped her.
She forgets about her sister, grading papers in another time zone, who shares her DNA.
Clothes, dried with her sweat, lie in a pile on the floor and are waiting to be washed.
Snail shells that have long been vacated crowd a shoe box somewhere in her closet.
The flames from the car lap at the dried pine needles on the ground, and make their inevitable ascent to the trees. Someone in a nearby house will smell the fire, and call it in. They will find her car, charred and smoking, though they will not find her body inside.
*
The police cars, with their lights blinking silently, follow Morgan’s footsteps down a winding mountain road. The uniformed men find her walking where the dirt meets the edge of the road, her sneakers dusty and the skin of her arms raised in goosebumps where the cold morning air moves around them.
It is after days of questioning that the police pronounce her mentally incompetent. It is after weeks of questioning and months of family visits that she wakes up to her white walls and isn’t quite sure why she is here. With nothing to tie her to the ground, she will become something that is blown into the wind, that catches in your hair without a trace.