Whisper

             She stands on the edge of the station platform, icy wind tugging violently at her hair, whipping it around as the day’s cold gray chill soaks into her carefully moisturized skin. Her vision blurs. She decides that the wind has made her eyes water and gazes defiantly through her tears, waiting for them to fade. Vaguely remembering old forgotten films, she compares herself to a dramatic, starry-eyed heroine. She should bat her long eyelashes tragically, face downcast. A slight tremble of the lower lip. Perhaps a black-netted veil to go with her molded hat and stylish, form-fitting dress. Light hair pinned up in curls, with a few perfect tendrils drifting tantalizingly around a pale, powdered face. Clouds tumble across the sky, leaving her with the feeling that she, too, should be hurrying in some direction. Towards something. But what is there, anymore? Nothing to hurry to. Nothing, the wind howls frostily. Nothing.
             The world rushes around her, around the platform. It is the last platform left, the last place to go. It stands still with her, waiting. Always waiting. She’s been like this so long she doesn’t know anything else. It can’t be the end yet. Another illogical thought. In movies it never ends like this. Something always happens. Someone comes. A final kiss followed by the bright, cheerful production company logo before credits fade in and out. The wind stops. She steps off the platform.

I.
            Late March in Virginia. A painted memory, not gray like the movies she remembers. Lots of colors and emotion, very little meaning. Perhaps a Monet, then. What was she doing? She can’t remember now. There were trees, houses. A little girl and her father. Don’t step on the cracks. The girl skips along, lacy purple skirts fluttering behind her as each sneakered foot carefully avoids treacherous gaps in the sidewalk. Flashes of red. The sneakers are the light-up kind, popular at the time, though not the most practical type of footwear. But that hardly matters to a four-year-old. More green and white? That’s the magnolia tree. Pick me a flower. I can’t reach. The father whisks the child up so she can stretch out an arm—the one with a fresh scab on the elbow—and pluck a flower from the nearest branch. The little girl grins and brushes away white-gold curls, carefully tucking the flower behind her father’s ear. As she leans back to admire the effect, he tickles her and she squirms, giggling, out of his grip. Running a safe distance away, she laughs triumphantly and sticks out her tongue. A challenge.
             The girl fades like an old photograph, blurring at the edges. The golden hair and violet dress lose intensity until all that’s left are the big blue eyes. She notices their expression, catches a questioning look. What happened? And they’re gone. She scolds herself. Projecting again. Memories can’t change. Well, not the actual events anyway. Interpretations change, attitudes change. People change. But the past remains static. Already written and published. No more room for revision.

II.
             Fade in. Just like one of the films she directed during her final years of high school. Fade in, fade out. Pan, backwards tracking shot. You can’t do these things at the time of course, but one advantage of memory is the ability to focus on individual details. Things that may have been imperceptible at the time. Zoom in. Pause.

III.
            Several little girls on a swing set. There she is, with her golden halo of hair, about to go down a red plastic slide. Don’t do it. Stay at the top where it’s safe. The voice of experience? Or avoidance? She lands badly, hurting a knee. Tears well up. The girl looks around. The other children are all nearby. She stands, suppressing her tears. Brushes herself off. Ignores the pain. Tears are weakness, aren’t they? She can’t let them see her cry. They can’t see her cry. She mustn’t cry. She won’t cry. She can’t cry.

IV.
            The same girl, obviously. You can tell from the disheveled hair. Still covered with numerous scrapes and bruises. Still grinning carelessly. What is she holding? A net. Ah, frog-catching. She remembers that. And a small straw basket of blackberries lying on the ground, forgotten. The girl creeps along the pond’s edge, peering at murky banks in pursuit of unsuspecting amphibians. Pausing, she examines her purple-tinged fingertips, evidence of her earlier berry-related activities. Abruptly, she turns and strides back to sit in a small plastic chair. She’ll sit there motionless for minutes, perhaps an hour, waiting for the frogs to come back out. They become bolder once they think she’s gone. She knows this. So even though she’s impatient by nature, she waits.
             The chair next to hers is empty. Occupied in past years by a neighborhood playmate, it now stands forlornly on its own, a miniature landing pad for falling leaves. They used to catch frogs together. Climb trees. Make lopsided, banana-mouthed snowmen. She didn’t understand what changed. Couldn’t see how, at an age when showing off and talking back to adults were suddenly the cool things to do, his friends became more important than a messy-haired, tomboyish girl. He made fun of her in school, friends egging him on. She was too wild, too strange, too bookish. She sniffs disdainfully. He will not be forgiven. And he wasn’t.

V.
            A classroom this time. There she is again, sitting quietly at her desk, novel concealed discreetly beneath. Whispers around her, but not the comforting rustle of a breeze or the chatter of a nearby yellow-painted bird, the kinds of noises she hears when she’s up in her tree. No, not like that. Girls’ voices. Light, carefree, malicious. Devious. They point at her and smile secret, superior smiles. Do they know she can see? Maybe they don’t care. Light glints painfully off of their lacquered, glossy nails. She glances at her own fingers. Dirt under the nails and patches of neon green nail polish that she hasn’t finished scratching off. They toss perfect hair absentmindedly and whip out matching pocket-sized mirrors, admiring themselves with haughty delight. Tiny adults. Eleven-year-old girls trying to be women. Strutting, preening, idolizing, reflecting. They crowd around the latest copy of a fashion magazine, vying for turns to take quizzes that will tell them everything they don’t need to know about life. The girl goes back to the book, carefully tucking a tangled lock of gold-brown hair behind her ear. She adjusts her glasses and turns the page.

VI.
            New scene. Setting? A high school hallway. The actress looks new, too. But looks are deceptive; it’s still the old one. Can we replace ourselves? The girl’s piercing blue eyes have faded over time and now she looks through contact lenses with faraway emerald ones. She brushes back highlighted, straightened hair. No more unruly curls to contend with. Other shapes move around her. The image sharpens. They’re friends, perhaps. Or admirers. Several teenage boys compete for her attention, brightening when she focuses her green, mascara-rimmed eyes on them, listening thoughtfully. Medusa, she thinks, then. Does her gaze also cause disaster? Does she have that kind of power? Like so many things in life, she finds the answer to this and then realizes that she didn’t really want to know after all.
             The girl looks thrilled at the attention, but she’ll soon grow bored. Some of these boys will capture her affection temporarily in the following months and years, but none will hold it. She’s smoothed herself over, put on the act everyone wants. But she’s still wild, really. She hasn’t learned to share herself with others, not when it means trading trees for cages. Domestication isn’t her thing. Neither, for that matter, is decisiveness. She flits between friends, between boyfriends, between emotions. Her parents worry about her grades, though they have changed since elementary school. Relationships cease because she avoids them. She flirts shamelessly until she realizes the correlation, then that stops, too.
             Her grades improve over time, and her parents are thrilled. Though she tries to be careful, she still hurts those infatuated with her. Guilt is a frequent emotion. She doesn’t particularly trust herself, and her friends even less. She works hard until graduation. The cap is too big for her head, while the gown is annoyingly purple. She’s reasonably happy.

VII.
            What kind of transition would you use for the transformation from child to adult? A quick wipe? Or a slow cross-dissolve? Surely not a simple cut. Maybe some people—inspirational coming-of-age novel writers, mostly—can pinpoint an exact moment, but she can’t. These things are gradual. When did she grow up? Correction: Did she grow up? She’s not sure. Maybe just a cut then, if she isn’t certain it happened.

VIII.
            The girl is in a tree again. Magnolia, but it’s too late in the season for flowers. Only half a year has passed, but she’s happier than she can ever remember being. She wonders if she sometimes confuses ‘happy’ with ‘naïve’. She scrapes her elbow and knuckles as she climbs down and jumps the remaining few feet, landing with a dull, rustling thud on the mulch-covered ground. Brushing shreds of bark out of her curly, dark blonde hair, she carefully licks the tiny dots of blood off her hand. She smiles to herself in what she thinks must be a darkly evil—yet surprisingly endearing—way. She can’t help grinning at the thought. She’s learned to laugh at herself.
             Later, she sits on a red brick wall, watching students pass by. An ant struggles laboriously along the top of the wall, pausing occasionally to run in tiny circles before continuing along its original path. She thinks this is very illogical. People do that, she realizes. She’s done it. She’s doing it. But she doesn’t know that part yet. She used to laugh at Lewis and Clark. Well, Clark was all right, but Lewis was the really funny one. She would point at the map of their trail in the textbook, right at the part when the two explorers split up temporarily. Following the dotted line that marked Lewis’ trail, she’d explain, amused: “And that’s where he went crazy.” Finger on the dotted loop in the center of Montana. Lewis really did lose his mind, but not until several years after the expedition, or so the historians claimed. Great expression. Lots of bumper sticker jokes in that one. Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most. But would you? Would you really miss it? How would you know it was gone in the first place?
She shakes her head, clearing it. Hops down and walks away from her wall perch. The ant continues in concentric circles.

IX.
            There’s a boy with her now. Or is he a man? She can never tell, not with these college-age males. Maturity is subjective and occasionally prone to daily variation. Especially in men. Boys. Both. The girl walks next to him in the dark, crisp night, matching her short steps with his longer strides. Lampposts wink at her through black tree branch silhouettes. She hopes her face is in shadow. Her emotions are too exposed around him. Is that bad? She equates vulnerability with pain. Pausing to look up at his face, she is somehow reassured. A feeling she’ll never trust.
             She stays in his room that night. He stands by a desk—or is it a door? Everything has the sepia-toned photograph edges again. The soft light touches the curve of his back, his spine a long dark shadow. Wavy black hair falls down around his face. She can’t see any expression. Perhaps he has no face. She reaches out to him, brushes his arm with her fingertips. He sinks down beside her immediately, enveloping her in his arms. She almost cries.

X.
            She’s in a house. Her house. Everything around her is colorful, vibrant, positive. A business suit-clad woman now, she feels empty, gray. Forgotten. She wonders if she’s just misplaced herself in the back of her invariably messy closet. But she’s done well. Her career is flourishing, and she still has plenty of time to read books, see friends, and watch movies. But not her old favorites. The 1950’s optimism of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” grates on her nerves. She can tolerate “West Side Story”, but the garish colors sometimes give her a headache. She prefers Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman. Peter Lorre.
             A ginger cat brushes against her leg and looks up pleadingly. Demanding food. Is there always an exchange? Food for love. Happiness for safety. Love for peace of mind. The cat’s green eyes match hers. He meows insistently, then nudges her knee with his head. Yes. She played with baseball cards and iridescent glass marbles when she was a little girl. What was it they always said? No trade-backs. No trade-backs. The painting, the memory, is blurring. Like dreams she used to have. Her eyes wouldn’t open all the way, or maybe she’d see everything out of focus. The woman in her empty house, the furniture, the walls are all amorphous splashes of color. A patch of orange where the cat sits. Orange and green.

             She lands on the rails, twisting her ankle. No pain. The train approaches. She doesn’t see it yet, but she knows it’s coming. She’s always known. Forever, the wind whispers in her ear. Forever. She lies across the tracks, carefully smoothing her skirt and brushing golden, wind-tossed strands of hair out of her face. The air is still. She hears a bird chirp. A flash of yellow. The train whistle. See, she thinks, it even whistles like in the movies. It’s coming fast. A hurtling blur of gray and brown. The metal frame shines in the sun. She remembers pennies in fountains. Sun sparkling through rain. Snowflakes on the palm of her hand.
             Suddenly she doesn’t want to be there, in front of the rushing train. Sitting up, she scrambles to her feet. The train is nearly there. The whistle sounds again, and is deafening. She takes a few steps away from the center of the track. Stumbles and falls. She looks up at the dark blur looming over her. Hears the whirring of machinery. A tear escapes, rolling down her cheek. One last whistle. The train rumbles through the station. A metal sign rattles in farewell. The wind replies. Never.

            She was always indecisive.