Joy For Beginners (19 page)

“Yeah. Do you know where it is?”

“No, I was hoping you might.”

“My friend would know. He’s here, but I can’t get him to answer his cell. It gets pretty loud in there.”

They stood, looking about them.

“I’m going to guess over there,” Marion said, pointing across the swath of green grass to a collection of low buildings between the more imposing structures of the opera hall and the sports arena.

The young man nodded and fell into step next to her.

“Are you getting inked today?” he asked.

“Just research. For an article.”

“You’re a writer?”

“Journalist.”

“Words, then.” His stride was long and easy as they crossed the grass through crowds of summer tourists wearing shorts and baseball caps, children playing in the fountain. “So I suppose you want to know why I do it?”

They were nearing the convention; Marion could hear the music pounding its way out of the walls of the building.

“Yes.”

“Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.”

He gave her a quick salute and melted into the crowd in front of them, the ink on his skin as good as camouflage.

 

MARION’S FASCINATION with tattoos had always come from the stories that were held within the ink—the ones that were obvious, slamming into your vision with the force of a well-aimed fist, and the secret messages that hid, slipping out only for the moment it took for a shirtsleeve to move, a skirt to flutter. There were the invitations—a vine of leaves, symbols in a language she didn’t know, meandering down the lower backs of the women in her yoga class, disappearing under a smooth line of spandex; the warnings—the devils and screaming skulls, their intent as clear as the hair rising on a dog’s back; the travelogues and merit badges and memorials; the products still on the shelf long past their expiration date.

It was the last—the tattooed names and images now regretted, rendered by time simply into symbols of one’s own mutability—that had caused her to continue moving forward in her life without committing any part of it to ink. Those tattoos always reminded her of sophomore year in college, when she came across a short story she had written the year before. The mere act of seeing the typeface on the title page had brought back the excitement she had felt as the words first poured onto the page and the characters opened their souls in front of her. She turned to the first words of the story and started reading—only to be shocked by what she suddenly perceived as the immaturity of the thoughts on the page. Could she possibly have ever been so young? She tore up the story, relieved that no one other than her professor and a friend or two had seen it. For a year after that she had written nothing, paralyzed by the prospect of her future self, the thought that people would read her stories and see her as someone she had ceased to be, her writing something that she had grown beyond even as the ink sank into the page.

Journalism had helped break the block and had been her creative outlet and source of income for more than thirty years since. For some reason, people saw articles as facts caught in their own time, profiles as verbal photographs allowed to yellow with age. It had never bothered her that what she wrote as a journalist was dispensable; she was satisfied being a thought in someone’s day if it left room for her to grow into the next one. She was a chronicler of life as it was lived in that moment.

Marion checked her purse for her pen and notebook and stepped forward into the crowd entering the tattoo convention.

 

TWENTY FEET AWAY, the world had been tourists in shorts holding the sweaty hands of their cranky children. But as Marion stepped into the murky light of the building, reality lurched into fantasy, a cave filled with surreal creatures, the air humid with the heat of bodies, reverberating with a bass beat, the scream of tattoo guns. A spider’s red-and-black abdomen ballooned into view, its grasping, needle-sharp legs crawling across a shaded web of a forearm. A shower of stars fell across a shoulder; a bat, wings flung wide, flapped across a pale white back. Images swarmed over a man’s naked torso and legs and arms, shrieking to a stop at hands, feet, face, which remained untouched, demure. Out of the corner of her eye, Marion saw another man, muscle and bone coming through his skin, so true to life she had to draw closer to check what she knew was not real. The man saw her fascination and smiled like a cat.

“Ready to feel some pain?” a skinny young man asked his friend as they walked by.

“It’s been way too long,” his friend replied.

Marion wandered between the rows of booths, feeling the music pulse against her skin, hearing the dentist-drill screech of the tattoo guns coming from all sides. A woman lay on her side on a padded table, her shirt drawn up and her pants unzipped and partially lowered to reveal the pale white of her stomach, the rise of her hip. Her arms stretched lazily above her head; her expression remained blank as the tattoo machine worked its way along the koi fish design that had been transferred to her skin. In the next booth an emaciated man grimaced each time the needles made contact, clenching his fist. Three teenagers watched him, nudging one another and pointing.

At the end of the aisle, in a corner booth, Marion caught sight of the back of a young woman, standing by one of the tables. The young woman removed her shirt and stood arguing with the heavily tattooed man holding a tattoo gun and someone who looked more official. The official handed her a surgical cover and she raised it to her chest and lay down on the table, exposing her right side. Marion could see the mound of a lush left breast underneath the cover. Where the right breast had been was simply a flat expanse, mowed across by a ragged, purple scar.

The woman looked up and caught Marion’s eyes. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, Marion thought.

“Assholes,” the young woman said. “Told me I couldn’t expose my breasts in public. ‘Indecent exposure.’ Can’t put it out there if you don’t have it, I told them.”

Her eyes blazed in her thin face; her hair was short, spiked. She pointed to the two sides of her chest, one after another.

“Guess which one
they
think is indecent.”

Marion’s eyes filled. She had a sudden image of Kate after her surgery, her chest flat under the covers, her eyes huge and broken.

“You look like my mom,” the woman on the tattoo table said to Marion. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“Well, you can tell them all that I am getting a fucking victory tattoo. In public.” She closed her eyes and put in her earphones, cranking the volume dial.

MARION MOVED ACROSS the last of the rooms of booths, walking through a field of conversations.

“That’s the thing,” an older man was saying insistently, “in the end, every piece we do gets buried or burned.”

Two teenage girls lounged against a pillar.

“I’m going to get one the minute I turn eighteen,” said one.

“Yeah. My mom says I can, but I’ve got to be able to cover it. Like, what’s the point in that?”

As she walked outside the building she passed a man standing by the exit, a swirling seascape of waves flowing over his bare shoulders and down his back.

 

YEARS AGO, when Marion’s children were young, she took them to her mother’s house in Iowa for a visit. Her children had been rambunctious, their bodies disrupted by the time change, their minds disjointed by the sudden shift in house rules, chasing one another about the house, flailing a long foam bat they had found in the hall closet. Marion walked into the living room, ready to tell them to take the bat outside, when the tip of the bat caught the edge of one of the family photographs on the wall and sent it flying. It landed on the couch, the children standing around it, openmouthed in shock.

Marion quickly picked up the picture, her fingers searching along the back for the wire. But she didn’t feel the usual paper backing, the surface both too thick and too rough. She turned the frame over and saw an oil painting attached to the back, a seascape she recognized from years before when she used to watch her mother in her studio.

Hearing her mother coming, Marion swiftly hung the photograph back on the wall. But later at night, when her mother was in bed and Marion had finally convinced her children that they wouldn’t fall out of the beds that were so foreign to them, she went back into the living room and worked her way around the space. Three, six, eight. Every photograph had a reverse side, a painting facing the wall.

 

“WANT TO GO with me to the tattoo shop?” Marion sat in Daria’s kitchen a week after the tattoo convention.

“Are you going to get inked, or are you going to watch?”

“I’m still working on the article,” Marion said.

Daria buttered a piece of warm bread and handed it to Marion. “Don’t you ever think it’s funny?”

“What?”

“You got married, had kids, but a tattoo is too big of a commitment?”

“I’m going to do it; I promised Kate.”

Daria looked at her sister, her face serious. “Hey, rule number one—never get a tattoo because someone else tells you to.”

“Or because someone tells you not to?”

Daria started to reach toward the bait, but then sat back, thinking. Marion watched her, surprised; the Daria she knew always jumped into the argument, and Marion had been regretting her words even as they left her mouth. She would never have said them, she knew, if Daria’s comment hadn’t been so close to the truth.

“You know,” Daria said, “when I got those first tattoos, Mom always said I did it because she’d told me I couldn’t. But when I actually saw the designs on my skin, that wasn’t what I was thinking about at all.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That they were mine. And that they were beautiful.”

Daria glanced down at the tattoos on her arm, an expression of almost maternal affection on her face. She looked up.

“You know, there is one thing you have to get used to, though.”

Daria got up and went over to the catchall drawer of her kitchen. Marion always joked you could find anything in Daria’s kitchen—playing cards, screwdrivers, old television remotes and unpaid car insurance bills.

Daria pulled out a bottle of bright purple nail polish. “Now, give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Sweetheart, if you can’t handle this, you’ll never make it with a tattoo.”

 

MARION WATCHED the thick purple polish slide across her short, cropped fingernails. It had been twenty-five years since she and her daughter played spa in the backyard, Jeanne’s small face intent as she painted water across her mother’s nails. Jeanne had always insisted on real polish for her own nails, preferring greens and blues, sometimes orange, her fingers so small it took the merest touch of the brush to cover the surface. Jeanne would run around the house for hours after, her hands aloft in the air, making the colors swoop and weave like butterflies.

The house had always been full of sound and motion back in those days, the children’s lives bouncing about the spaces like oversized beach balls. But Marion had loved the noise and activity, the way it pushed at the edges of her life, making it larger. She had loved the rampant chaos of toddler birthday parties, and even, although she rarely said so, the hormone-laden angst of her children’s adolescent years, the way their bodies and emotions grew ahead of them, as if creating space for the adults they would become.

But then, as quickly as a simple breath in and out, the children had grown and gone, all the noises departing with them.

The day after she and Terry had taken their last child to college, Marion sat on the living room couch alone and listened to the house around her. It had been too many years to count since she had been in the house alone, without the knowledge that a child would be arriving soon. Sitting there on the couch, she thought with a small smile of all the sounds that would fill the house when they did return but at that moment, there was only the murmur of the refrigerator, the clunk of a neighbor’s car door outside. Marion listened to the empty space around her. She could almost hear it moving, stretching out into the bedrooms, expanding into the area behind the couch where she used to hide the Christmas packages. It was the empty space that made her pay attention to the little clicks of the baseboard heater, the steady in and out of her own breath. Framed by stillness, the small sounds became art, worthy of contemplation once again.

 

“THERE,” Said Daria, sitting back and looking at her work. Marion’s fingernails lay before them, ten small moments of gaudiness. “That should do it.”

“
Now
will you come to the tattoo shop with me?”

“No.” Daria grinned.

 

ON THE WAY HOME, Marion went to the grocery store, the ten moments of gaudiness taking Terry’s favorite oatmeal from the shelf, sorting through packages of meat for the one with the longest expiration date, picking up a cantaloupe, a tomato, the purple bright against the red, pulling her mind away from the grocery store into images of color and shape, a memory of Jesse’s triumphant three-year-old face above a handful of deep purple irises he had pulled out of the garden, the lilac fabric of a hot-air balloon they had taken once, on a whim, the children clinging to the basket, their hair aloft in the wind.