Holly Golightly Syndrome

  Chapter 3

  “Oh Shit!” Someone on the lit side screamed, seeing something in the darkness that Bertha could not. Slowly at first, and then more frantically they all began to run out like nervous birds on the shore approached by people.

  The sound of a chair scarping the floor woke her out of her stupor. George looked up, slightly amused, and continued to dust.

  The world outside was very, very blue. The snow on top was so white and pure it became bluish in contrast to the normal, gross city slush snow. Movies make snow in New York some sort of glamorous affair in the winter, but really, it usually ends up pretty disgusting and not terribly fun to walk through.

  Plows spastically reared up and down the streets, making it difficult to concentrate on a mindless piece about saving money that was easy enough for a fourth grader to understand.

  It had been difficult making the transition from college to the real world.

  She had wanted to write about serious things; about the intricacies of human nature and the way different aspects of your background, such as your beliefs, affected your internal disposition and the way you interacted with society. The less religious she became, the more fascinated she became about the effect religion had on other people.

  Unfortunately, there weren’t many places to do that, so she was stuck reverting the language she had learned in college into the way “real people talked.”

  It had been a problem she had experienced ever since high school, with comments like “Put it in your own words” which really means “Put it in what I think should be your own words.”

  In college, people finally gave you some degree of respect, and it felt demeaning to end up with a job that, quite frankly, she could give to her nine year old niece who spoke as if she were texting.

  (Did I really need to pay some 40,000 $ a year to be qualified for this. Really?)

  (But a job is a job is a job)

  In the meantime, she could still potentially write a book under a pen name, and no one would have to know about her involvement with a tweeny magazine, and compare the pieces.

  One time her friend confronted her about the issue.

  “Why would you want to publish anonymously?” She clacked her gum. “What’s the point of that?”

  Bertha was terrified that her identity would take away from her writing.

  First of all, she was young. There was still a group out there in the literary world that would either dismiss her for being young, or would praise her for it.

  Both of them were wrong.

  Second of all, she was white, middle upper class, and lived a pretty easy life.

  It wasn’t as if she could write about a cultural identity either; she was a mosh-pit of European countries and none of them particularly resonated with her.

  She wasn’t particularly one political party or the other but came closest to libertarian, which would be a problem because there’s an ignorant part of the country that seems to be under the impression that all young people are liberal.

  She could write about being crazy, of course, but that was walking a fine line between credibility and genius. To make matters even more difficult she wasn’t quite sure how to define her insanity.

  Basically she had “White girl problems.”

  This would definitely reduce her literary credibility.

  But she didn’t want to write as a white person.

  Or as someone from the upper class.

  Or as a particularly feminine or masculine woman.

  Or as a Libertarian.

  But most of all she didn’t want to write as a relatively attractive person.

  In high school her kind, elderly Spanish teacher told her class a pretty applicable mantra.

  “Pretty girls say pretty things.”

  Unfortunately Bertha didn’t catch on to that lesson right away, and soon found out that if you were a pretty girl who said something mean or even worse, honest, you were automatically a “bitch”. As if a pretty girl cannot, by law, ever be well intentioned with cynicism.

  But after a time she began to learn and catch on. She kept her mouth shut more often, and let steam off writing.

  (Pretty girls say pretty things but they can write whatever they want.)

  She felt mad with power, letting the vanity pulse through her veins and consumer her, baptized by fire.

  (Mwahahaha I can pretend I’m a forty year old British scholar who people take seriously. Come here Kitty, so I can pet you conspicuously like a villain.)

  Her writing could be a scream, a sob, an ache, and an unabashed study of narcissism, but it would not be of outward petty narcissisms, it would be those nasty bulbous narcissisms that anyone is capable of.

  Thunder and pounding rain synchronized to the Finale of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

  Her fingers flew faster and faster and faster and faster and…

  Ten pages finished.

  (When you’re a little kid, you “play” without regards to any rules.)

  (But what happens if you never stop playing?)

  The progress made her grin like Jack Nicholson in “the Shining.”

  Alas! She had been cured!

  The door swung open, and a scream nearly knocked her out of her seat.

  Her brother leaned against the doorframe, catching his breath.

  “Geez, you scared me.” He gave her a strange look. “Do you always do this?”

  “Only during thunderstorms, the lighting is better. Where are…”

  “Hey Berts!” Her dad and mom came in, carrying three or four different plates. “What’cha up to.”

  “Oh just writing.” She hit save quickly and shut the computer.

  “For work?”

  “Yeah.” She lied. “How was the drive up?”

  “Good.” Her mom yawned. “Except your dorky dad almost got us in an accident.”

  “Oh…. Here I can put your coats in the closet.”

  They all looked respectably tired.

  Her dad turned on the game and lay on the couch, while her mom began to heat up some of the dishes they had brought from her grandmother. As usual, there was enough food to cater a party. Aromas of pasta fajoli, and homemade raviolis permeated the living room, making Bertha so hungry she almost felt sick.

  They all sat down with the usual “blessusolordforthesethygifts…..ChristOurLordAmen.”

  It was always awkward because at other people’s houses when they were the holding hands sort, instead of the speed worshippers. Of course her grandparents would also say it more slowly and deliberately too, and look smiting-ly at whoever decided to race through it.

  But at a table where only one out of four people, at most, actually believed in prayer, it felt more like a declaration of being from religious families more than anything else.

  Despite being away from having a family meal for a few months, everyone sat in the same seat as they had normally at home. Bertha’s dad sat at the head of the table with Bertha to his left, and his mother next to her, and his brother on the right, and an empty place where their sister would be sitting.

  One time her dad decided to mix things up and switch seats, but everyone made him move back.

  By the end of dinner they had barely made a dent in all of the leftover pasta.

  Rain continued to slap the windowpanes.

  Bertha’s brother looked particularly morose today. Purple bags underlined his eyes, and his face was looking a bit gaunter than normal.

  It was only in dropping a glass bowl that Bertha realized her hands had been shaking.

  A deep, inset terror clutched at the reaches of her nervous system.

  (No… no.. .nono)

  “I’m just going to sit down for a moment.” Bertha excused herself, and collapsed into the leather chair. Her father’s eyes didn’t move from the unusual sports channel, which was featuring curling at the moment.

  A few things had killed Bertha’s faith, but s
he had still remained agnostic from time to time.

  But now it was gone.

  She had a running bargain with herself.

  Her own depression didn’t necessarily mean there was a god one way or the other.

  But her brother’s depression did.

  It wasn’t fair. The universe may have had a reason to pick on her, but it certainly had no reason to pick on him. He was one of the good ones.

  Despite seriously doubting the effectiveness of prayer, one of her main plea had been that she alone would take any strain of the misery.

  So every night, in spite of not believing in it terribly much, she prayed that no one else in her living family would ever cry themselves to sleep.

  Her parents were both in denial about the thing. There was no going to counselors or taking medication if that could be helped.

  (There’s nothing wrong with you. Just get a grip.)

  Her mother was perhaps the most vehement.

  She had told her frequently how there was nothing wrong with her and not to “Use it as a crutch.”

  As if whatever she had was a crutch… it was more like deadweight than anything else, and not to mention as a repulsive to people as if she were eating a container of questionable looking cold mixed super ethnic food and asking for a kiss afterwards.

  (There is no god. There can’t be.)

  (If we are made in his image, then god cannot be such a lovely thing-god would throw temper tantrums and cry, and fall in love and do all of the silly things that humans do. Then he would not be god.)

  A loud commercial interrupted one of her frequent spirals of existential funk.

  “Are you tired of cooking seafood, and being left with the lingering smell of a dead fish?”

  A woman in 90’s looking clothing emphatically plugged her nose.

  “Now there’s air neutralizer from Captain Freeman’. For the people who love fish, but don’t like the lingering smell!”

  An Asian man in a white lab-coat appeared on screen. “Our exclusive formula is…”

  The brief silence between switching channels.

  “I am the great and powerful…”

  A velvet green curtain opened, revealing a man speaking into a microphone of some sort.

  “Wizard of Oz.”

  Silence again.

  The man behind the curtain had the appearance of a fish as well.

  Back to a game.

  “First down Packers!”

  Bertha got up to put away the remaining dishes.

  “How was Ellen?”

  “Good, good.” Her mother talked loudly over the clatter of plates. Whenever she couldn’t hear very well, she spoke more loudly. “She and Tom were just lounging around when we got there, I swear those two are two of a kind. How have you been?”

  (Crazy.)

  “I’ve been good. There’s this new promotion up at work because Betsy quit.”

  “Oh that’s great. You should try and go out for it.”

  “Yeah.”

  (Also I hate my job, am horrifically enough in love, and have taken to attending strangers’ funerals).

  But she left the rest of that unsaid because it would provoke a comment about her eyebrows or teeth whitener, or something of that sort. And she wasn’t sure how she would respond to the latter comment.

  Eventually the others settled into her room and the spare, leaving her with the couch.

  Every nothing was on TV, so she found herself flipping through pages of hasty notes.

  Her arms almost seem to act of their own accord, like Bruce Wayne’s hand.

  But instead of typing anything coherent, she stared at a spare notebook for fifteen minutes, thought of Eliot, and promptly wrote three very significant words.

  The floorboards creaked overhead.

  Someone else was awake, probably her brother, or her father. Her father had this gait about him that reminded her of someone who had just gotten off of a horse. He said “howdy” too. He seemed to be a bit of an inherent cowboy.

  (There were a lot of cowboy men out there.)

  (During one of their first encounters a blue eyed was tending to a stray cat. He very, very much wanted to be Clint Eastwood from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” but picking up cats didn’t make him Clint Eastwood, especially because he was more of a Paul Varjack from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s who also interacted with cats.)

  (Hollywood, as you can see, has brainwashed me into thinking that cats are particularly significant. All of my subsequent encounters with cats have been extremely anti-climactic.)

  (Well if finding cats without names isn’t going to do me any good, I may as well hang out in the mountains, and maybe I’ll hear the voice of my secret admirer carried on the breeze.)

  (“Oh Jane! Jane Eyre… wait) Mr. Rochester is very confused at my presence “You aren’t Jane Eyre. What the hell are you doing here?)

  The next day everyone was up early.

  In a zombielike state she managed to drag her feet to the coffee maker, and pour herself a cup. “So Berts” Her father had already been awake for four hours. “What do you think about taking a vacation to the Margins?”

  The Margins, as their title implies, were particularly out of the way.

  They were one of the only uncharted places left in a world increasingly over-mapped. Sure, they were labeled on a map, but no one had managed to thoroughly explore them.

  The last few men who had tried had gone missing.

  Campers usually stayed at the better visited outskirts of the margins. Very few bothered to penetrate its interior.

  Originally the land had belonged to Native Americans (as most land mysterious land happens to). But unlike most of the rest of the country, the Native Americans who had lived there weren’t driven out by settlers. Historians still don’t fully understand the reason why the Native Americans had left that area. It was estimated to have an abundance of multiple resources, though no one had dared to collect them.

  Early explorers found remnants of villages reminiscent of the eternally frozen scenes playing out in Pompeii. There was still half eaten food out, and other signs of recent activity. Later, all of the settlers went missing, except one, who was locked in an asylum. Oddly enough, these chilling historic accounts didn’t seem to concern the parks department which created “the margins” camping ground shortly after.

  In short, it seemed haunted and all in all a good time.

  “Yeah I’d love to go.”

  “Good deal.” He began to heat up his coffee in the microwave.

  “Would everyone come?”

  “Well it’d probably be some time in the summer when I can take off, so yeah, but I’ll get back to you on the exact week; but probably sometime in August.”

  This was a valid concern.

  Both of her siblings were likely to bring someone with them, in her sister’s case her husband, and in her brother’s some girlfriend.

  Of course they would spend time with one another, but when night came around, everyone would retreat to their separate tents, and she would be alone with her thoughts, a lone sock.

  It reminded her of being home in college over breaks. Her boyfriend had not been from the area, and no amount of skyping could ever fix that. Of course, to him a month hadn’t seemed that long, so he hadn’t bothered to visit. It resulted in several nights of listening to “Neutral Milk Hotel” at night, burning incense and over-thinking the future as if the future were truly something she could tangibly plan out.

  But in some ways, it was a bit of a relief at least to have her own room and get away from her roommate every once in a while. Her roommate had a tendency to be very quiet, and then move suddenly, causing Bertha to have a near-heart attack and believe the room was haunted. This of course, added to the ghosts that were already there. The ghosts that had an infatuation with turning the sink on and off, was at first, relatively disturbing, but Bertha quickly got over that and mere
ly got annoyed with it for being loud with the running sink and being unaware of the ecological effects of running the sink all the time.

  If something was going to haunt her room, it would be very preferable if it would hover over her silently.

  The more experience you have with ghosts, the more you get used to them.

  When she was little she remembered waking up with an imprint of a second sleeping child next to her in bed.

  It used to bother her, and she’d run to her parents’ room, the house creaking with every step of her tiny, frozen feet poking out of the bottom of Aladdin pajama, pale as rabbits.

  But as she got older, she found herself longing for the ghosts that used to lie so calmly and regularly by her side as a loyal lap dog. She figured that the ghosts were very cold, considering that they had lost their body heat.

  They never seemed horribly malicious to her, they were just redundant cold memories that flocked towards the living and all things warm.

  Back when she believed in superficiality demons seemed to pose the greatest threat. Damien and Emily Rose and all their demons. Not to mention “The Exorcist, which is terrifying even for a skeptic.

  But over time, she became less concerned with demons, the devil, and hell, and became more concerned with the people who had created and believed in them.

  (What malicious person had decided that certain people should eternally roast alive, hanging from various skewers and hooks? What type of person would create a being who gained off of other people’s misery?)

  (What sort of person would wish that upon even their worst enemy?)

  Hell is just a form of passive aggression for the things and people that we don’t understand and for the things we can’t control, like the seven deadly sins…

  The seven signs that you may in fact be human:

  Lust- I want sexual intimacy

  Gluttony- I want food

  Greed- I want money

  Anger- I get upset

  Heresy- I question society

  Violence- I fight back

  Fraud- I play pretend

  Treachery-I have hurt others

  But I want. Gimme.

  (“Lament not Eve but patiently resign not on thou which thou hast justly lost” but by that on that which thou hast justly won in losing….)

  “Bertha!” Her mom asked, more loudly.

  The car was so close she could feel its hot exhaust beast breath.

  She watched her un-affected expression pass by in the passenger’s window.

  Unfortunately they found it easier to pass through Times Square, weaving their way through tourists.

  They seemed to be struck dumb on sight, like curious fish drawn towards a shiny lure, as Bertha had once been initially drawn to New York. Pretty pretty. Pretty empty.