Day of Characters

 By Emma Kushnirsky

“Day of Characters” is a short story about the first step of what other people considered this woman’s breakdown.

Mom, somehow I doubt you’ve ever felt this way. Bear with me. There was a day recently that was a day of characters, specifically. There wasn’t another way to put it. The individual behaviors of these characters sent me spinning out through the open air with nothing to bump into. My fingers wanted to reach out to them. 

Chaos, the first of my characters, called out to me and shouted, in a voice that came from his throat, “I wanna have a fuckin’ normal conversation with you!” His sentence was addressed towards me. He wasn’t crazy, my brain told me, I felt what he was saying. 

My ankle tendons pulled me back in his direction so the part of my legs that was meant to move me nearly stumbled. There was the proof it was a day: my ankle tendons wanted to perform for my legs, my hips. My intuition was telling my brain to quit saving my life. I didn’t stumble. My ankles managed their new duty with surprising grace. I whirled. 

Chaos had a broad nose, his suddenly still mouth looked apologetic. Six-story red brick apartment buildings rose up on one side. I didn’t usually notice the varied colors of the bricks. Today I saw that a few were almost black, others the color of a red desert. On our other side there was a park. 

The path that led in from the street descended sharply to a provincial scene of parents striding along behind strollers, dogs pulling lanky teenagers past the Hudson, speakers blasting music that dissipated into the wide park air. An elderly man with the rigid spine of an army general was speed walking along the footpath, a cigar clenched between his teeth. He reminded me of you.

Holding eye contact with Chaos, I plopped down onto the bench behind his upright figure. He sat beside me. Even though I didn’t know what to say, it only took me a second to decide. This was on him, after all; he’d initiated the contact. “What do you mean? What do you wanna talk about?” 

He shrugged and the strap of his baggy tank top slid down off his shoulder. He didn’t pick it back up. “It’s an alternative cat call. I wanted to let you know that you look like someone who could … conversate … well.” 

I nodded with feigned seriousness, then laughed. “That’s weird.” 

He looked offended, and then he laughed, too. At the same time, a cloud slid away and the day brightened around us. We both looked up. “What do you think of catcalling?” he asked. 

“Fuckin’ awful.” 

“Me too.” 

I tilted my head. “But you know … you could be doing the same thing, even if it’s not as bad, objectively. Making women feel unsafe.” 

His eyebrows shot up. “Hell. Why didn’t I think of that?” 

I rolled my eyes. “Men.” 

“Yeah, men.” He nodded emphatically. “Would you … want to have sex with me?” There was hope in the question. As he said it he looked down at his twiddling thumbs. His fingers resembled sausages. 

The pauses in his sentences immediately served to make him a more endearing character. They made me pause before I answered “No.” My sense of self-preservation was not yet entirely deactivated. If it had been, I would’ve. I liked his looks. I felt no fear. I felt in myself either a new intuition, maybe I could read a person, or a new stupidity. Don’t worry, mom, I had to go anyway, my phone was ringing. I couldn’t be tangled up with a person just then. “Gotta go.” He frowned. I sprang up. 

The phone was ringing because I was late to meet my friend. We were going together to Saturday dance class.

You know, mom, that my friend would call over and over until I picked up. It was her habit. She had nothing to do with the events of this particular day; she was an everyday feature in my life. The first thing I saw when I approached her on the platform were her sharp eyebrows, darkened with great gusto. There was a green plastic bangle on each of her wrists. She was dressed for dance class and had put on the poise of a dancer as well. 

Normally, she would slouch. Our conversation was inane and I hardly remember it. I’m not here to write about her. On the platform we talked. On the train we were silent. I was enamored of the speed of the shaking, rectangular snake. The snake spit us out so we could bound up the steps into the light of single-family townhouses and Whole Foods stores.

It was sick that they could stitch my skin back together before my satisfaction was returned to it.

Dance studios are a world of their own. The door and three flights of stairs, all painted gray, looked dingy. When I had emerged into the wood-paneled, high-ceilinged foyer for the first time I wanted to be the people I could see through open doors with their legs stretched against their heads. 

The studio was lived in, but never dingy. Whenever I enter a studio, a backstage area, or anything of that sort, I am overwhelmed by the jealousy of what could have been. Everyone seems to say, “You can come to sample, but you will never be a native.” 

Dancers scattered across the floor stretched luxuriously whilst my friend and I waited for class to begin. In the studio, the doorways were the characters. I came in from the stairwell that the street had led to; there was the beautiful foyer. I came into an individual studio; the teacher presided over the character of the room, dictated by whether it was too stuffy, if the wood on the floors was dark or light. 

It may all seem trivial, but passing through a doorway never felt quite the same as when I was there. The instant it took slid through my brain, a page was turned, it was a tiny portal. Only once did I go to the bathroom there.

In that back area which didn’t even look like a bathroom, there was the biggest disconnect from the world I would soon reenter. It reminded me of a Scandinavian sweat lodge. My memory of that part is cloudy. There was a man peeing in full view. 

It seems likely that the reason for the sweat lodge is after all that I had been taken somewhere else and then rejected, thrown back into my first world. I liked going there like I liked going to the zoo. There was a wrongness about it. I liked leaving, also. The sheen of well-earned sweat spelled P-O-S-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y. If you try really hard, like you, mom, you can speak without an accent at an advanced age. Was it worth your time?

I left the dance studio while my friend was in the bathroom.

Later the uptown A train was a character, too, as a setting can be a character in some books. It was a character in the screeching stop it came to and in the way it rattled along the tracks. Every sound it made was icy clear. The clarity was shocking. I imagined that something had come in the night to bring its vacuum-like lips to my ears and remove any debris. The something in my mind blossomed into a bread loaf-sized creature with arms and legs rounded where hands and feet usually were. The creature was made of sand, with sparkling black eyes. It was adorable. It didn’t scare me at all. The train was only a character when I was alone with it, or once I had parted ways from anyone familiar to me.

Still, the people are the most important characters.

I’d forgotten that it was still light out when I went above ground, step by step, my field of vision shifting as my feet pulled me to the surface. The patch of gray sky glowed dizzyingly so that if ever God was a source of light, it was behind those clouds. My walk wasn’t long. You know. You’ve lived there.

The George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal is like an airport. 

The ticket is not like a boarding pass. It looked more like an accordion by the time I got through the door. My hands have never known how to stay still. The entire inside of those buses looks like the carpeting at a bowling alley. I like the walk from the bus because I don’t mind the suburbs when I’m going somewhere. They’re terrible for wandering.

Thank you for paying for my bus ticket. I spent the money on dance classes. I have my priorities straight.

At 1 PM I made it to the suburbs (Welcome to New Jersey), where you live. I visited with you briefly. 

On the day of reversals, the strangers are the ones that matter, you know. People are tainted by the knowing of them. When I walked alone in the suburbs, the monotony lulled me. It amplified my already dulled caution. There was a rabbit on someone’s lawn that wasn’t cautious either. It didn’t run when I came close. I managed to take that as proof that I was doing the right thing in embracing the world without regard for my life. The rabbit was alive, after all. 

I heard from a distance someone calling a dog. A sound instantly recognizable, though we don’t often think about that. LoLA… LOla… LOLA! I could hear the fluctuating tones of the woman’s voice. It came closer and was upon me soon enough, the noise, along with the pitter patter of her feet behind me. I turned around, she had stopped, panting. 

She was a teenage girl in sweatpants, stringy blonde highlights streaking through dark hair. I was unreactive for a moment, dazed by the suburbs themselves, by the sounds of her feet and mine only a moment before, now standing silent and ready and waiting on the pavement. Her eyes were watery blue. She spoke first and I was surprised by the high pitch of her voice. From afar, her voice was lower, more resonant. “Have you seen a dog?” she asked, her words all blurring together. 

I took a moment to answer, looking up instead at the vast expanse of the sky, tilting my head far enough back that I couldn’t see houses or trees. “No. Sorry.” 

“Ok, ok. Can you call me if you see a dog?” I nodded halfheartedly. She smiled in the manner of a politician. But her voice was still panicked. “Alright, I’m going to give you my number. I don’t have a piece of paper. Can I write it on your hand?” 

I didn’t have time to register this as a strange request. “Yeah …” She pulled a black Pilot G2 Gel Ink pen out of her pocket. “The Pilot G2 Gel Ink pen is my favorite.” With those words, I did feel panic. People with favorite pens are not my favorite. Still I held out my hand for her, face down. “No, face up.” she told me, flipping it for me. 

She grasped it to steady it and then pulled back her arm (what was she doing?), used her thumb to send the metal nib out, and with great force plunged the pen into my palm. Once it had penetrated my skin she dragged it through my flesh along what a palm reader had once called my life line. Now calmly she said, “That’s for Mike.” 

Then she pulled the pen out. In the miniscule amount of time before I felt any pain, I saw her chest still, her breathing was steady and natural now, she smiled radiantly and genuinely. I fell back onto the grass by the curb when the pain hit me. It was searing, blinding. The blood came quickly after that. The thoughts Mike who? and Hospital flashed by me at the same time. From someone’s front porch, Charo’s “Cuchi cuchi” was playing. 

When the pain had dulled, when I was sitting tall on a stiff, vinyl chair, what I wanted most was the same satisfaction the girl had gotten from stabbing me. She had stolen it. It was sick that they could stitch my skin back together before my satisfaction was returned to it.

That day was when I went “crazy”, mom, but I’d never felt more myself because I didn’t want to distinguish anymore between people who would harm, people who were too strange for me to associate with, and people who would help. I’m not crazy. I attracted those people to me with the rage I didn’t realize was pounding inside my head the whole time. More than the rage I had felt quieter, more overwhelming exhaustion at the constant filtering of people. You painted that exhaustion onto every square inch of my skull. 

Coat by coat, I was a wall to you. 

Process

This story was inspired by the question “What if women stopped watching out for ourselves, as we usually have to do constantly?”