1. Upside Down

Upside Down

Nicole

“ W hat the hell are you doing home?” Tima asks, a milk carton halfway to her lips in front of the open fridge. She looks out our small kitchen window that’s littered with half-dead herbs from my last attempt at apartment gardening, furrows her brow, and looks left to right. “It’s not snowing. Did school get canceled?”

I drop my keys on the counter and sink into a nearby kitchen chair. The orange vinyl squeaks as I lean back. As soon as a tear trickles down my cheek, Tima’s circling our Formica kitchen island and rubbing my back while I sniffle and rub my nose on the back of my sleeve. Polyester isn’t absorbent for snot, and I look around for a tissue, only finding paper towels that are like sandpaper on my face. They’ll have to do. Tima and I don’t think about buying tissue for the apartment. That seems ridiculous now since we’re two single roommates who have had our fair share of heartbreak, but we’re twenty-three and in our first apartment. We’re lucky we have dish soap and food.

“F-fired,” I stammer, shaking my head like I’m trying to wake up from a bad dream.

Tima pulls back like I slapped her. “Fired? How did you get fired?” She smiles and wipes a tear off my chin. “Did you fuck the janitor in the storage closet?”

I can’t help but sputter a laugh. It feels good to feel something except for failure and fear. Failure that I couldn’t keep my teaching job at a religious school for more than a few months. Fear that I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

Teaching jobs are hard to come by in Chicago this year. It’s like every single woman with a degree in something came out of college in the last ten years and immediately decided to get a teaching job. The position at the small school associated with a large church was all I could get. It wasn’t much in pay, but it paid my half of the rent on the apartment I share with Tima, paid for my city bus pass, and my half of utilities.

“I’m not having sex with Mick,” I snort, thinking about the elderly custodian. “They said I wasn’t going to church enough.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a religious school. They said the teachers have to attend church every week.”

“You go to church,” Tima says.

I lift my head. “They’re also picky about where. They don’t care that I go to the Baptist church a block down every couple of weeks. They said parents want to see me in their pews with my hands raised every week. So not only do I have to go to church on their timetable, but I have to go to theirs.”

“That’s the most ridiculous and authoritarian thing I’ve heard of. Did you fight it?”

I sigh and straighten my shoulders. “No,” I practically whisper. “I just…don’t have any fight left in me.”

Tima tilts her head. “What do you mean you didn’t fight? You just accepted it and shrugged?”

I sniff again. “What was I going to do? There were already parents complaining about other things. I’m too lenient. I’m too strict. I give too much homework. I don’t give enough homework. I had parents calling me because I gave their kid the D they earned, and their poor darling couldn’t play basketball until they brought the grade up. Calling me at home, Tima. Being a teacher is like being Joan of Arc on a salary of eight thousand dollars a year.”

I reach for a nearby glass and eye the jar of sun tea Tima makes on the window ledge every day, regardless of season. I pour the glass three-quarters full and think about adding a splash of rum and honey like Tima prefers.

I’m not usually a drinker, choosing to only have a sip or two of wine if I’m out at dinner, but I want something to take the edge off. I yearn for something to make me think about anything besides looking for another job. I also don’t want to wrap my brain around seeing people and having to explain to them why I got fired .

The phone rings, a shrill sound cutting through the silence in the kitchen, and I startle. Tima walks to the phone, greets whoever called, and twirls the cord around her finger as she slips into the next room.

It must be nice to have friends.

I wouldn’t know. Not only am I jobless, but I’m friendless. I’m new in town and don’t know a soul except for Tima and the friends of hers that I’ve met as they traipse through the house on Saturday nights, drinking cheap bottles of wine before going out on the town. I left my friends back home when I moved three hundred miles away, and long-distance phone calls are expensive. Chicago isn’t an easy city for a mouse like me to make friends in, and I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall oven glass. Fingering my hair, I study my tear-stained face and squint.

Long, brown hair, stick-straight from the iron. Pale cheeks that stay that way in the summer no matter how much baby oil I slather on my skin. Winter air certainly doesn’t help except to give them a smidge of pink that only lasts for two minutes when I come inside. Mousy clothes.

I study my boring brown bell-bottom pants, my pink peasant top, and the green and brown plaid coat I’m still wearing, belted at the waist, and I immediately compare the simple outfit to Tima’s wardrobe of miniskirts, boots that go up to her knees, and plenty of necklaces and bracelets. She even wears miniskirts in the winter, choosing to shiver as she waits in lines for club entry with her friends .

I finger my bare earlobes. Mom wouldn’t allow me to pierce my ears or wear loud jewelry. She said it would show wealth, making me prone to mugging, or signal to a prospective husband that I’m greedy.

I need a change. Desperately.

Tima walks back into the kitchen, hangs up the phone, and smiles at me. “You’re coming out with us tonight.”

I stiffen. Tima’s a great roommate, and we’ve become close in the last eight months since I moved to Chicago, but we’ve never gone out except to get a quick dinner. Tima has her friends. I have my embroidered pillows. We’re not exactly bookends.

But to be invited to hang out with Tima and her friends…

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I say, drawing the words out.

Tima puts a hand on her hip and leans against the wall. Without speaking, she opens the kitchen drawer she uses for junk and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I watch as she lights a cigarette, takes a long draw off it, and blows the smoke out of her lungs into the kitchen air. I wave the smoke away, and she smirks. “Nicole, you have to get out of the house.”

“I just want to feel sad for a bit.”

That’s not entirely true. I want to break free. I itch to do something different. Anything. Something dangerous. I eye Tima’s cigarettes and wonder if I should take up the habit. I just don’t know how to be someone other than who I’ve always been. I don’t even know how to articulate my desires to the world around me. It’s not in my genetic makeup. I’ve been told the world was one way, and I needed to adapt to it.

“Do you want to keep doing what you’re doing? Being who everyone else wants you to be?” Tima asks.

No, I most certainly do not. My tongue won’t work to say that, though. I’ve been conditioned my entire life to be who everyone else wants me to be. I feel like a snake that’s desperately trying to shed its skin but can’t. I often wake up from nightmares where I’m being suffocated or strangled. My entire body is telling me it wants out of…something. I have no idea what I need, but it’s not whatever my life currently is.

Tima bends down like she does when her new designer jeans are too tight and she needs them to give a little. “You’re coming out with us. You’re borrowing an outfit from me, and you’re going to get the stick out of your ass before it sets down roots and becomes a tree. You’re twenty-three, but you act like you’re seventy. You’re coming to the club with Miriam and me tonight. No questions.” She strokes a strand of hair out of my face. “You’re going to dance. You’re going to talk to a man.” I open my mouth to protest, and she puts her index finger over my lip, startling me. “You’re going to try a cigarette. I’m going to buy you a beer – maybe even some vodka shots. Have you had a white Russian?”

I raise my head and squint. “You want me to date a communist? ”

Tima sputters the smoke she just inhaled and pounds on her chest with her closed fist. “No, sweetheart, a white Russian is a drink. It’s not a man from the Soviet Union.”

She tucks her cigarette to the side of her mouth and pulls me up with both hands. “We’re going to get you dressed,” she says. “Then, we’ll roll and feather your hair. There’s a Farrah under there somewhere.” She stops and looks at me again like she’s seeing me for the first time. “I mean, you have brown hair, but total Farrah.”

I look down at my clothes. “I can’t go like this?”

She raises an eyebrow and looks me up and down the way the girls did in the junior high bathroom. “Not if you want to actually be let into the club.”

I let her take my hand and follow her to the bathroom. She pops a piece of gum into her mouth to get rid of the cigarette breath with one hand and turns on the bathtub with her other hand. “In you go. I’m going to find you something from my closet. Wash the hair. Shave the legs.”

“It’s not my normal hair-washing day,” I protest. “I’ll have to re-iron it.”

Tima pinches her nose, shakes her head, and mumbles “Jesus fucking Christ” as she marches out of the bathroom to her room, ostensibly to find something for me to wear.

I dip my toe into the filling tub and let myself sink into the warmth. Reluctantly, I wet my hair and flip open the lid on the Agree bottle. Lathering my hair, I push away thoughts of my job. Maybe this is the right thing to do. I can’t stay a quiet choir girl for the rest of my life. Tima is right. She’s young and fun, manages to hold a job as a secretary, and gets a lot of male attention. I’m obviously doing something wrong.

I’ve never had male attention. I’ve kissed a few boys during some forbidden bottle-spinning games in high school, but I was always pushed away from boys who weren’t husband material, even if I was fifteen. If they weren’t an eventual husband as soon as I left high school, I wasn’t allowed to date them. I even went to prom with my cousin because he didn’t have a date. You can imagine the incest jokes.

Some things need to change. Desperately. Maybe getting fired was the kick in the ass I needed.

I rinse the shampoo from my hair, drain the tub, and put in leave-in conditioner, letting it set as I use my electric razor on my pits and legs. I glance at my bush in the mirror, wondering if I should shave it like Tima does, but she’s an anomaly. Everyone I see in locker rooms and at public pools has a full bush, just trimmed at the sides so it doesn’t hang out a swimming suit. It’s winter. I’m fine like I am, and I can’t imagine the razor burn.

When I’m combing out my hair with my towel wrapped around me, Tima knocks on the bathroom doorframe and walks in with dental floss.

At least, that’s what it looks like.

“What is that?” I ask, eyeing what passes for fabric in her hands.

“It’s your halter top tonight. ”

“Like hell.” I eye the offered top and look down at my medium-sized breasts. “I don’t think I’ll fit one of them in that.”

She shrugs and chomps. Her hair is already beautifully feathered, and I can smell the Breck hairspray in her hair. She obviously used her hot rollers while I was in the bathtub. She holds out my pants for the evening in another hand, and I momentarily forget about the top.

The pants, if they can be considered that, are dark purple and have a hint of glitter to them. I’m sure they look fantastic in the light of the club, but I don’t even have underwear that’ll fit me while I wear them. All I have is underwear my grandmother bought me at Sears, and I was raised to never have panty lines. A slip isn’t an option here, and I search my mind to think about where I put the girdle my mother bought me before I moved to Chicago.

Should I wear a girdle? It seems like something a nice girl would do, and it keeps everything in ship shape. But I’ve never seen another girdle in our apartment. Tima must not wear them.

My roommate understands the dilemma, and she huffs so hard that her bangs blow out of her face. “You don’t wear panties with them, Nicole.”

“You want me to leave the house without panties?” I ask, my mouth hanging open after the words roll off my tongue.

“I have so much to teach you. Turn around,” she says, roughly turning me by the shoulders until I’m facing the mirror .

Tima’s red hair is so different from my wet locks, and her made-up face stands in stark contrast to mine which barely gets Bonnie Bell lip gloss.

Without warning, she rips the towel away from my body, and I shriek, covering myself by placing a hand over my bush and an arm across my breasts. “What is wrong with you?”

“I’m getting you ready. You need desperate help.” Tima glares at me from the mirror. “You do want help, don’t you?”

My naked shoulders slouch, and my eyes droop to the small makeup bag on the counter. It’s all I have for cosmetics, and it only contains some simple gloss, two jars of nail polish, and a light pink blush I can’t be sure even matches my skin tone.

“Yes, I want help.”

A chill runs through my body in the cold bathroom air, and I’m not going to get relief from the top that Tima shoves down my raised arms, if it can even be called a top. I close my eyes, not wanting to see my own breasts or even Tima’s face when she sees my breasts. I can’t stand the judgment, and I can’t remember the last time someone other than my doctor saw my body.

Wait. Only my doctor has seen my body.

Tima knocks on my shoulder, and I open one eye, dreading how I look. My eyes focus on the reflection in the mirror as Tima moves down my legs, taps my left calf, and helps me into the purple pants as I lift my feet.

The top is a white halter, but the sequins look pinkish in the light. I can imagine what the bar lights will do to it .

But my boobs don’t look half bad. In fact, they look pretty great. I haven’t yet started to sag, and the halter stops about halfway down my breasts, making a nice natural cleavage. When my pants are on, Tima taps my hands and wakes me from my thoughts so I can button and zip my own pants.

I may not be able to eat anything or sit down all night, but I don’t look half bad.

Tima smirks as she watches me turn in the mirror. “Yes, you’re passable. But we need to do something about your hair and makeup.”

I gesture to my sad makeup stash. “Can you work with that?”

She clucks. “No. I’ll be back. Dry your hair while I’m gone. Brush it. Naturally. I’ll get my rollers while I’m getting the makeup.”

Thirty minutes later, I’m in rollers, the metal hooks burning my earlobes, and Tima blots my red lipstick and then smoothes on shiny gloss. When she steps out of the way, I blink, not recognizing myself with the bright blue eyeshadow on my lids and thick mascara on my lashes. Bright blush draws drastic lines up my cheeks. It’s probably not as dark as many wear, but it looks out of place on me. New.

“A masterpiece,” Tima says, stepping back and unrolling the first few rollers as I stare open-mouthed at my reflection.

She uncoils all the rest of the rollers on my head, and my hair bounces around me in beautiful waves. Even my hair is in on the fun because I swear it shines like it hasn’t in my entire life. It’s like my hair woke up and said, “New year, new me.” It feathers perfectly when Tima runs a brush through it. Even my damn hair behaves like it’s scared I’ll never fix it again if it sags or looks dull.

I look like Tima and the friends she hangs out with. Not a soul from my school job would recognize me, and I smile at the fact that I don’t care what they think now. I can go to any bar I please. I signed a character contract when I was hired that kept me out of bars and pool halls. It kept me from drinking, cigarettes, and men while not married.

But I am under no contract tonight.