The Girl Zone: One. Peri & Mimou: Innocence and Violence

A house was not a home. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t sad. Mimou looked out the window, thinking about Peri. And Mrs. R.

Mimou was home sick. The piano was creating music into the room, adding even more thickness into its already thick air, with great ease, the song unraveling pleasurably, little by little. Mimou had just had her hair cut, she felt self-conscious about her bare neck and ears on display, and so wasn’t capable of satisfyingly telling the woman playing how much those notes were touching her. But it was alright, though. She couldn’t talk worth a damn anyway. Mimou wanted nothing more than to dress herself up in the music playing.

Mimou felt she had a very specific place in mind where Peri could shove her various opinions, but, reluctantly yet without any hints, she kept her mouth shut. Peri knew how to sing, Mimou didn’t. There was nothing Mimou was able to do as well as Peri; how could she, being two years her junior, which might as well could have been light years. As late as in her late teens Mimou still considered herself a lousy writer, a lousy thinker, hid her sensitivity and emotional intelligence as the greatest obstacles possible in the way of ever making anything out of herself in the world, thus worth hiding and hiding well. And Peri wasn’t helping. She kept mocking Mimou about all her wussy pussy stuff and never really got Mimou when she tried to discuss something that mattered to her. Peri was worldly where Mimou was country. Still, no one but Peri seemed to find her at all interesting or want to know her at all. But since even Peri never really got her, Mimou considered herself different in such a horrible and disgusting way, she felt she would die if anyone ever found her out. She might as well blow her brains out.

Everyone wants to fit in. Peri liked Mimou well enough, loved, even, but felt necessary to keep reminding her who the queen was. Mimou would call Peri her best friend all her formative years, because they shared an imaginary play world so intense, so all-consuming, that it trumped anything else, anyone else. Years later, when Mimou watched Heavenly Creatures for the first time, she had a moment of identification filled with utter horror and amazement and awe, and felt that, the murderous plotline notwithstanding, it was the most accurate depiction of an enthralling, suffocating and totally exclusive relationship between girlfriends in a tender age she had ever seen. Her friendship to Peri had been all those things. Enthralling. Suffocating. Exclusive. So enticing that even the raisin girls went bye bye when the joint flickers of Peri and Mimou’s imagination burst into a fuming, flaming bonfire.

Perhaps Mimou was sad now, because, looking back, she felt it was as much Peri’s influence as her mother’s that had formed and molded her thinking so much. Peri’s mother had been an artist. Both Mimou’s parents were middle-class, normal parents like everyone else’s, going to their clerical or blue-collar jobs at nine, returning home at six, all very much like everyone else’s parents, except Peri’s.

Peri’s mother had sat with them at dinner and talked to them about art, colors, forms, not really treating them like children at all, or she would joke around with the girls while serving them her weird stew containing enormous pieces of meat, onions cut in half, potatoes, leeks, carrots, all the ingredients roughly cut into two or four pieces and just tossed in the mix to cook on the stove. Mrs. R. would make her coffee in a French press, was indifferent to housework and would do the dishes by just dipping the tableware under the running water so that it made Peri crazy enough to start doing all the family’s dishes herself – which was no mean feat for a teenager. Mrs. R. would talk about artists she admired or thought the girls ought to know about, she would disappear for hours into her study to do some work, order the girls to go to the store with a post-it full of things to buy, with an amount of cash that wasn’t always enough to get everything, so they would have to think what to get and what to leave behind at the grocery store, and in the end return with added funds after Peri had yelled at her mother for a while about how embarrassing it was and it wasn’t like they were totally broke and why couldn’t Mrs. R. be more careful? Mrs. R had always one of her jackets hanging inside out at the balcony, drying out from the machine, and to Mimou the white shoulder pads against the black fabric always seemed like kind, enormous eyes watching her, whenever they were playing there.

Peri’s house was full of art books and large green houseplants and black and white lithographs and massive colorful paintings, mostly oils in deep red and purple and midnight blue and black, mostly Mrs. R.’s, hanging on the walls in every room, the furniture functional and organic and black and white and deep brown and burgundy and leather and wood, and gorgeous, expensive lamps and huge brass plates full of ripe, red tomatoes, and everything everywhere so beautiful, that Mimou felt it was the most beautiful home she had ever seen, and, as an adult, once realized in a moment of painful clarity that she was more or less recreating that house over and over again in her own home. Was it sad for Mimou that Mrs. R. had never known her as a grown-up, never read anything she wrote, never knew she would write about her and the colossal impact her mere being had made on her, how Mrs. R. would never find out about any of it? Yes. It made her sad.

Mimou let the music wash over her, and felt like crying, realizing, not for the first time, how intellect, in the end, had so little to do with anything meaningful. The woman touching the keyboard by her fingertips couldn’t see her, and thus had no idea how intensely she adored this moment, and her presence inside her home, because all this made her feel strangely at peace with herself.

Peri had taught her everything about how to be a girl, what music to listen to and books to read, how to dress fashionably and what to say to boys, before Mimou eventually came into her own and completely re-wrote all she had known by then, and changed everything about herself in order to be her true self, not a copy of the older girl in a friendship that by then had lost most of its original lure and glamour. Even her first kiss had been with Peri, one of the most appalling secrets between best friends, that Mimou later in her life learned was exactly the same kind of appalling secret most girls, who had had an intimate and forceful relationship to another girl in their adolescence, were keeping. Peri would tell Mimou about French kissing and period and intercourse and what being a prostitute meant, when Mimou admitted she had read the word in the paper, not knowing exactly what it was. They would have endless talks, sometimes until dawn, categorizing famous actors by their attractiveness, discuss crushes, confess each other their elaborate fantasies concerning those boys, tell each other’s fortune with playing cards, study their naked developing bodies in the mirror, walk arm in arm through the playground, simulate again and again the action scenes between Ripley and the Alien Queen.

The musician was playing the piano in front of Mimou, she sang about how we carry with us the violations and insults of adolescence like the most precious jewels. Mimou found herself crying to the song once more, for the last time maybe, crying for her own estrangement from the world while clinging on to her distinctive specialness with ferocious self-love. Outside the cool winter days flew by, the blue skies and the snow almost purple against the backdrop of the fog, the skeletal birches and hurrying cloud banks and thick snowstorms, creating a poetic entry-way into her world of words, a few random leaves from the previous season falling by themselves across the air through these endless, lengthening days.

Mimou thought about Peri, who grew up to be a bigoted, unpleasant person, and seeing her unfriendly face suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, so plain, so severe and humorless, so unlike the face of her mother’s, in the crowd, made her wonder how in the world she had once took this person to be her queen, her ruler, her most important person, her first love, whose approval had been the highest praise possible, whose laughter had been the loveliest sound in the entire world. And even when she had sort of begun seeing the first cracks in the surface, the first signs of true meanness, conceived in the residue of good intentions, perhaps because it was possible, because Mimou had offered herself under Peri’s tyranny, even then she had groveled in front of the older girl, made funny faces, come up with crazy stories, jumped hoops, until a smile once more graced her friend’s face and the torture was over for the day.

Tell me, Musician, Mimou thought, whether you have this kind of history, if it is the same with all the girls like us. These songs are the very first ones we learn. Love songs come only after these kinds of songs. Mimou had no choice but forgive Mrs. R., but to witness her turn her back on Mimou on the beach that day, she in her swimming suit, dripping on the hot asphalt, Mrs. R. with her fishing rod on her shoulder, after a year of silence between what used to be best friends, and Mrs. R. suddenly spotting the almost grown Mimou and quickly turning so that she wouldn’t have to awkwardly deal with the dumped best friend of her daughter’s, had been so awful. That gesture had hurt Mimou in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible.

In one way or another, Musician, all my subsequent relationships for years mirrored that first hard friendship and my behavior in it; Peri’s first taciturn, morose glances and malicious mood swings, the first time she faked sleep just to drive me on the verge of tears for not being able to wake her up, all the while the both of us knowing she was awake the whole time, Mimou thought, the freezing out, the not answering the phone, the pretending to be out when I could clearly see her figure behind the gossamer curtain. I clung onto people by default, I didn’t know how else to be, Mimou thought. Then, after having realized what she was doing, began the years of withdrawal, of seclusion and isolation, the Henry David Thoreau years of Mimou.

The pattern of the music fell upon her as gray and purple mesh, as moss stitch, and fisherman’s rib, and the most ethereal lace, and Mimou pictured the pianist in a simple sleeveless dress, like the one on the cover of one of her records, playing her instrument in her signature position, legs akimbo in the widest possible angle. She thought about how much she had wanted to tell her how important a role her playing her piano and her voice had had in her house over the years. She had gone through a whole period of creating imaginary conversations with people she didn’t know, perhaps they were the ashes of the complex tales she had woven with Peri all those years ago.

The last time Mimou’s parents had run into Mrs. R. at a convenience store she had spread her arms as wide as humanly possible and told them to give that many hugs to Mimou. She had looked terribly ill, Mother had told her, but she hadn’t spoken about that at all, only admitted that she had seen better days. Mimou felt tears stinging behind her eyes. She lowered her head between her knees and didn’t bother stifling her sobs.

Apart from the immediate family, the people who make a difference in a young person’s life almost never get any credit for it. Had Mrs. R. known about how with the brightness of the colors in her paintings, her humor and intelligence, her passion for beautiful things and to always learn more, she had been instrumental in passing on the torch of all those things she found precious in life to Mimou? So that for the rest of her life, Mimou would consider those things as substantial and crucial and precious, and if she reflected in any way any of the wisdom and grace and joie de vivre the most astonishing woman, apart from her own mother, she had known growing up, she was not only happy, but grateful that if she herself remembered and acknowledged that, then there was someone to give credit. Her.

Daughter. Girl. Then Woman. Mimou wiped her eyes and looked around her. On the wall above her writing desk there was a blue and green oil painting by Mrs. R., given to Mimou a very long time ago, in the final stages of her and Peri’s doomed friendship. To my friend, the writing on the back said, written by Mrs. R. The hardships of being a girl, a girlfriend, a lover. No longer comic book tattoo for brains, but a grown woman of independence and brilliance, robust and mighty, with brains as hard and courageous as Scarlet’s, and fast and strong as a thousand horses, and nebulous and mysterious as the cloud in the mouth. Still, she contained in all her accumulated gloriousness the remains of the girl who only learned to speak her mind in her late twenties, the girl with the older best friend who was the goddess and governess of all things for a while, when one year seemed like an eternity, let alone ten years of an impenetrable, commanding friendship. The girl who never would have thought it was the mother of that friend she would cry for, years later.

Dedicated to Tori Amos.