The lunatics: the ribbons

After the scar healed I left the boat and I took a job in a restaurant. Alaska in the winter and I chose to work in a restaurant. Although that's a funny way to put it- chose. I didn't have much of  a choice, you're either on the boats, or you're a woman or a you're a tired man or you're a disgraced fisherman and you work in a restaurant. I hated it at first. I wanted to put my fist through a window.

A man used to come in named Michael. He wasn't a lunatic but he wasn't a hero. He would come at the end of the night and he'd sit at the bar and slowly drink from his one drink and he'd try and talk to me.

Michael was just like everybody else in that place, a lump on a bar stool,  but there was one thing that made him different, and that was the hours he kept. We closed every night at 11pm and he'd come in every night at ten thirty five.  That's ten minutes before last call. He'd sit at the bar stool and he'd order a drink and nurse it as we closed the place down, stacking the chairs and counting the cash and mopping the floors, each one of us more desperate than the rest to be done, to go home, to leave behind the sour smell of liquor and lumps and hard surface sanitizing solution and steam. He'd sit there and sip at his liquor, holding it up to the light every three minutes and studying it, pretending to be pensive, pretending we were watching him, mysterious lump.

We were not encouraged, by the owner, to show patrons the door. He knew this and he stayed and it drove us mad. It was his one small power, his little sissy sips, his crossing and uncrossing his legs, the way he tried to make me stay and talk to him when he knew I had to be in the back washing up. But we were not encouraged to ask him to leave, not encouraged to put his head through the window where it belonged, and so I put my fist through the window instead.

It was the night he told me that the scar on my face, which was round like a crater, made me beautiful. He told me not to worry. Maybe not everyone recognized a true beauty, but he did.

He told me this as if I wanted to hear this, as if I needed to hear this, as if I'd been waiting my whole splinter-filled life for him to come plonk onto a bar stool and reassure me that I was not hideous. Little crater girl, little pock-cheeked thing, you're so pretty to me.

Oh Michael, Oh Mike-can-I-call-you-Mike, that was a misstep.

I've always been like this, placid as a fish in a bowl until I am no longer a fish in the bowl. My mother fed me medicines for years, carted me along to the hospital every other Tuesday or so, had me poked and examined, draped in lead blankets and needle-pricked. I was sick, she'd say, and I needed to be fixed before it was too late. To her credit, I always did have a stomach ache. Not to her credit, how do you say that, it was because she would feed me milkshakes of pepto-bismal and tumblers full of cough syrup. The one day when I was seven I got tired of the doctors with their insulting questions and their little mouths pursed.

They'd given me a little plastic cup and asked for a sample and I went into the bathroom alone. At first this had been a struggle, they'd decided my mother had better come with me but I insisted I could brave it alone. I screamed, my mother winced, the doctor shrugged. I went into the bathroom and waited a few minutes before I could go, I could feel their mounting impatience on the other side of the door. And then I filled up their cup and  I washed my hands. It was one of those kiddy bathrooms where everything is miniature. As I was reaching for the soap I ended up touching the mirror instead, the cold smooth glass, and then I decided to hit it hard with my forehead. Silver glass splintered across the sink and the floor and my whole world turned red as the blood pooled down into my eyes.

The doctor ran in yelling for someone and then that someone appeared and swooped me up, running me down the hall as my mother jogged behind them, white as a sail, so horrified, so dignified, the beleaguered mother of such a sick, twisty little thing.

Fifty three stitches and all nearly above the hairline. Five numbing shots below the skin and a raspberry lollipop at the end.

And so that night when Michael was holding up his glass and making a big deal about telling me how pretty my dented face was, I got tired of it, like my mother and her glasses of thick syrups, and I turned around and put my fist through the window.

This may not have been the biggest mistake, putting it through the glass. I think the biggest mistake was retracting it, pulling it out again, against all those shards and spikes I'd made, making ribbons out of my wrist. You'd think I'd been trying to kill myself, but I wasn't. I just wanted Michael to pay his tab and leave.