The trashcan is filled with tea bags. Overflowing. The ones on top are still wet. Saturated and dark. They stick to the few scraps of other things that have been thrown away. A paper towel. An empty, plastic honey-bear.
There are a bunch of girls in the room, all sitting in a circle. A wicker chair, a wooden stool, an old, green sofa, a rocking chair with its white paint chipping, a cushioned piano bench. The girl on the stool holds a green, glass pipe. She puts marijuana in the bowl, pushing it down lightly, gently, with her little finger. She holds it and takes a long hit. She plugs the little hole in the side with her finger and turns her other hand upside down to put the little flame from the lighter in the bowl. The flame rises, blue and yellow, feeding on the air and the mossy plant.
The girls smile at each other. She passes the pipe.
There is a record playing. A record on a record-player. The girl manning the records, sitting in the wicker chair, is named Mary. She sits cross-legged in the chair. She’s wearing cut-off jean shorts and black sneakers and a tank top with a red heart painted in the center. She doesn’t wear a bra.
The pipe is passed around the circle. The record plays. Drums and flutes and a female voice yelling indistinguishable words. The large, round, wooden coffee table is covered with ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and mugs half-filled with tea. There is heavy smoke in the room now. Weed and cigarettes and records and tea bags. And the warm light from the fake Tiffany lamps in every corner, on every side-table. And the windows, against the black, black night, like mirrors, reflect the ghosts of the girls.
It is September, 2007. And they are playing records. And they are smoking weed. And they are sitting in a circle.
The girl in the rocking chair talks about her day. She painted in the morning, but then she had to go to work and make sandwiches. When she works, she has to wear a uniform. “It’s like terrible,” she says. But now she sits in the rocking chair, also cross-legged, picking at her nails, wearing a short, plaid dress. Everyone can see her pink underwear. She seems to know this and enjoy knowing. Her name is Tina. Where the other girls have applied dark, thick eye-liner, Tina wears none. The other girls have hair that’s all chopped-up or shaved in places. Dyed at the ends or with blond roots coming in against dark brown or blue. But Tina has dirty-looking hair. Long and light brown. Her legs are furry, unshaven.
“Do you like the new album?” Stephanie, the girl on the piano bench, asks Tina as she points to the record player.
“Yeah. I mean, I’ll always love the first one, you know? I played that thing to death. But this is good too. I like it.”
“You don’t like this?” Mary says, getting up from the wicker chair. “I’ll change it if you don’t like it. I haven’t really listened to it yet so I thought I’d put it on.”
“No, I like it. I just loved that first one, you know?”
Mary changes the record.
The two girls on the couch stand up. They ask if anyone wants anything and explain that they’re going to go get something to eat. Stephanie says that there is some food here. Some peanut butter—but oh, she remembers, actually maybe there isn’t any bread. There are bananas, though. They could put peanut butter on the bananas. But the girls who had been sitting on the couch say they want to go out and get something. As they walk out the front door, Mary shrugs, rolls her eyes, and takes another hit from the pipe. The screen door slams. Stephanie shakes her head and laughs.
It is a big room. And a big house, really. A beautiful house. Old, dark wood. The girls have hung beads, and cats and skulls and stars made of paper-mâché, from the ceiling. There are paintings on the walls. Some are abstract. All colors and eyes. And others are full of detail. Faces, with creases in the eyelids and lips. Some are done on canvas, others on tinfoil. It is getting warmer in the living room and sleepy with smoke and music.
“Oh do you want to watch that film I told you about? About the art thing?” asks the girl on the stool. She’s looking at Stephanie.
Stephanie says she would and that she had forgotten all about it. She, Mary, Tina and the girl on the stool get up and walk through the kitchen. The kitchen counters are also covered in half-filled mugs with cold, soggy tea bags in the bottoms. There is a white cat on the counter by the sink. The sink is filled with dishes. There is a note taped to the refrigerator: Please don’t put tea bags in the sink!!! Stephanie grabs the white cat as she walks by and carries her into a small room, where she sits with the other girls on a futon, which is already folded out into a bed. There is a framed painting on the wall above the bed. It is a print of a snow-covered field. All the girls are smiling.
“Um, someone has to put it in.”
This makes them all laugh.
“Shit. I’ll do it. Is this it?”
“Yeah.”
The movie is short. It is about art and how people define art. It mostly consists of flashing images of doves and fires and brick walls. There is a narrator. The girls nod, agreeing with him. The narrator talks about the curves on dinosaurs’ backs and whether they can be considered art. He asks about what isn’t considered art. He does not answer a question when he asks it. Stephanie’s mouth is open a little and her brow is furrowed. Thinking. As the television flashes through different scenes, the girls’ faces light up with different colors. Blue, red, gray, blue, orange, lighter orange, blue. Once, Mary blinks exactly as the image changes and her face changes color.
The faucet in the kitchen is dripping.
Fifteen minutes later, the movie ends.
“So’d you like it?”
“Yeah. Fuck, dude. It was really good. Who made that?”
Some man who had been a guest lecturer had made it and given copies to everyone in the class. He had been very smart. Very cool. He had told them to watch out for something of his that was going to be shown in some festival.
“What festival?”
“I don’t remember.”
The girls all walk back into the living room and sit down. A few minutes later, the two girls who had left to get food walk back in the front door. One is holding a brown bag, while the other one is biting into an apple. A moment later, a new girl walks in the door with a bike. She has very short hair and a scarf wrapped around her neck. She says hi to everyone. She seems surprised to see so many people in the room. She rests her bike against the wall and goes to the kitchen. She comes back with a beer.
“I have to go to work, I guess,” says Mary, lighting a cigarette. I ask if I can walk with her back downtown and she says of course I can.
We wave goodbye to the other girls and leave the house. The screen door bangs shut behind us.
Mary works at a few different jobs, but hates this one the most. She thinks she is going to quit soon. She just wants to do her sculptures and she doesn’t want to worry about going to this job, especially so late at night. She wishes she could just be sculpting. Her boss hates her anyway, she says, because she always drops things and talks too long to the customers. One time, she tells me, she got high at work and her boss found out. But for some reason, he didn’t fire her. Mary wishes he would have. She’s afraid to quit, she laughs. She’s less afraid to be fired.
There is a casualty in her voice that I envy. I am unable to talk so freely, to make small-talk and mean it, to be so unconcerned with seeming smart, interesting. Is her confidence a result of her dyed hair and seven visible piercings? Do they convey her true self or conceal it? How long do you have to fake it before you become it? Is she trapped in her freedom of expression? Is she trapped? Is she trapped? I wonder.
She says goodbye to me downtown, at about the spot where I had met her that afternoon. She had been smoking a cigarette and holding a large book on art history when we started talking and she invited me to come hang around and smoke or something, if I felt like it. I had had no reason to say no.
Now, as the wind whips her hair up, she says that she hopes I had a good time, but doesn’t wait for me to say whether I did or not. She waves goodbye and the tattoo on her wrist becomes visible. It is dark outside, but it just looks to me like a solid, black rectangle. She turns the corner and walks away. A perfect little living thing, I think. A twinkling light of an airplane moving across the sky, putting in ear buds as she goes.
It is only about 10:30 and still very warm out. On the way to my bus stop, I see two girls on vintage-looking bicycles. Maybe Schwinns? I imagine they’re going to the house where the other girls are. I imagine that everyone lives there but me. That everyone will sit around and play records and watch short, experimental films and admire each other’s paintings and smile at each other forever.
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