Dinner characters:
                   my Father, the Model, my boyfriend, myself

She makes us watch her late night show on public access. It's obvious that she draped a nylon stocking over the lens. Her face blurs and glows. When she crosses and uncrosses her legs, their nylon sparkles. My father watches and wraps his left arm around the Model's waist.
My boyfriend glances at my father.

(At 21, you realize that the world isn't made of molecules, but of stereotypes. And you learn whom to hate.)

After dinner, we return to my mother's. In my bedroom, I put on my flannel pajamas, but he pulls them off. "Let me see your legs."

On the plane, I tell him, "I'm sad, because nothing surprises me anymore."
He looks at me,"I can't help you."

We land and his friend's father is waiting for us. My boyfriend's feet rotate outward.

In the morning, I sit at the edge of the bed my boyfriend still thinks is for sleeping and I watch snow melt off the neighbor's roof. Drops fall like silver nickels; I can almost hear the clinking. It seems appropriate that, at a ski resort, snow would melt into money.

At 6 a.m., the hallway is dark.
6 a.m. is when the horror of other people's houses fades. The family is frozen behind bedroom doors, and the house (or ski lodge) demands a companion. As its objects—lamps, cabinets, sofas—one by one turn visible again, they need to be acknowledged and loved by someone. Awake and lonely, I am a perfect someone.

The kitchen light is on.
My boyfriend's friend has flattened out yesterday's newspaper on the kitchen table. He looks up at me, and I can see: he must have been born at this time of day. Before the light was strong enough to reveal color. Across from him is an identical, white-haired boy. The twin looks up at me.

"Good morning."

At dinner, it becomes clear that the twins hate each other. One makes a comment, the other lifts his white eyebrows and rolls up his yellow eyes. "Dad, please tell him he's wrong."
The dad pushes back his sleeves, showing blonde arm hair, and starts a joke. The twins end the joke with identical laughs: (rewrites)
First, a hiss.
Then—their torsos lean forward & their heads bend down.
Finally, they shake.
How do they survive the sight of each other laughing? (The limits of self, stamped out in the inevitable hiss and shake?) I'm not sure they can.

As a guest, my boyfriend shines dull with politeness. The paisley couch: "What a nice sofa." Plates of spaghetti, steamed cauliflower, and bread: "What a lovely meal." The ceramic monkey: "I'll tell you why I enjoy this, Mr.—."

My boyfriend doesn't ski, so I keep him company at the lodge. But at night, he wants to go out.

The tubs, neon blue hexagons, float against the black of the pavement. I keep on my coat until I'm at the hot tub's edge, where I neatly fold it and push it back.

I think about frozen chicken breasts: thawing in burning water, the skin turning into satin while the center is stiff ice. The sensation of the hot tub is the sensation of thawing. Of turning into something edible—steamed, salted by chlorine—and not meant to think, move, talk.

The adults give in. They want to be edible. The woman in the red bikini across from me: her freckled, loose breasts must start to feel like they're for someone else. She closes her eyes.

We're deep in the pot. The steam is so thick we cast shadows on it.

The young teenagers mistake the danger for sexuality. A group of 14-year-old girls look at the twins and whisper. Then, one by one, in the 3-feet deep water, they stroll by. Their chests jutted out. Breast-nubs erect. Docking next to us, are shrill with success.

Any impulse towards movement has evaporated. The steam frizzes my hair. The neon water laps, hot and hot, against my breasts. But then, I forgot that boiling forces out germs: I feel clear snot tapping against my upper lip. Its trail from nose to lip vibrates with heat. I take a wet, shriveled hand out from the water and rub it away. But the water from my hand tightens my face, dries it out, and more snot slips out, as if it fancies itself moisturizer.

The blonde family doesn't own any kleenex. I spin out a foot of toilet paper, and keep it with me under the covers.

My hair, curled from the hot tub, stays curled with sickness.
When my boyfriend climbs into bed, he kisses the back of my head. "A childhood friend of mine had hair just like this."

The twins take my boyfriend on his first ski lesson, and I stay in bed with the shades drawn. At 4 p.m., I need to replace the toilet paper I've dampened and shredded. I open the bedroom door.
The lodge is sighing. Drawing attention to its exhale, the emptying of lungs. The quiet confusion after noon—when routines, needs, are self-evident. Now: shadows that buzz with the graininess of video footage and a stillness that sounds like static. (I'm at the end of the hallway.) (A sigh is both the nostalgia for order, the necessity of the inhale, and the melodrama of despair, an emptiness of meaning.)

On my way back from the bathroom, I notice that the door to the master bedroom is open enough for me to enter without touching either the door or its frame. The bedroom is carpeted in grey and smells like other people: the scents people use to smell like other people: laundry detergent and deodorant. Sitting on the dresser's counter are two framed photos. In one, a twin is securing a soccer ball in the hard curve of his left arm, and smiling with a missing tooth. In the other, a twin is holding a baseball bat, squinting into the camera with all the menace of a blond team captain.

I will one day set up photos of my own children. They'll be swinging through a jungle of purple vines. Their skin will shine white and their hair will be long, black and hopefully knotted. Maybe they'll be smiling for the photos. They'll have fangs.

BARING FEET (offender: the twins, this morning in the kitchen)

act: showing uncut toe nails and hardened
toe skin, turned white

significance: to live without consideration
of others, without expectation of judgment, without the sense that the only stable self is in others' perceptions of you

act: hiding feet in socks or socks and shoes (but not hiding feet without socks in shoes, which represents the freedom of baring feet at any moment)

significance: to live as a host of signifiers, to live as presentation, inflicting upon others your self, treating the self as a commodity

(But then, baring feet has become a signifier. People who bare their feet are proclaiming a belief in the "natural life," so baring feet is now a sign, and, as a sign—hypocrisy.)

At 6 a.m.—after the boys are asleep—I take my curly hair, my remaining toilet paper, and my heavy, sick bones to the cold morning kitchen.
I have the fridge open, infecting its food and letting the cold make me sicker, when a tall, wrinkled woman opens the kitchen door and drops her purse on the counter-top.
"Why, hello," she says. She doesn't sound happy. She has black bags under her eyes and black roots in her blonde hair.
She makes quick eye contact with me and then looks at the fridge. "You must be the sick girl. Don't worry, I'm here, okay? You're not surrounded by boys anymore." And then she smiles.

The blonde girl is an ex-girlfriend to both the twins. I understand her appeal.
She's a girl who hides her charms so that all men feel compelled to exaggerate them.
She shows up wearing glasses, no makeup, and a GAP vest that streamlines her chest.
"You must be the girlfriend. Still sick? Poor thing. Boys, are you taking care of her?"
I feel ashamed of the lipstick I put on.

over dinner,
she claps (as bimbo) she nods (as woman) she squeezes the mother's hand (as someday-mother) she laughs (as college student) she has no arm hair (as blonde) she probably has no under arm hair either (as blonde) she touches my boyfriend's hand twice (as blonde) and nods laughs (as blonde) suggests we all go skiing tomorrow (as blonde).

My boyfriend looks at the ceiling as I fall asleep. "Wasn't she sweet?"

At 4 a.m., my brain and stomach switch places, and I'm nauseous with words. I run to the bathroom, lock the door behind me, and bring up full sentences.