The Animators(32)

I’m getting angry. I turn away.

Finally, she sighs. “Goddammit. Fine. You pretty girls, your vanity is unbearable, you know that? Hold on. I’ll fetch you your motherfucking mirror.”

She disappears into the bathroom, emerges with a small compact. Hesitates for a moment before putting it into my outstretched hand. I linger, too, before training it on myself.

It’s even worse than I expected. It’s the me-but-not-me, the palsied, bizarro world me. My pupils are dilated, giving me a goggling, slightly deranged look. There are purple patches below my eyes, like I’ve been clocked hard from both sides. My head has been shaved, leaving the whole bald, small, misshapen. The entire left side of my face slopes down—my eye, my lips spilling to the side, badly cracked. My cheek hangs loose, like someone’s let the air out. I reach up, touch my jaw. I can barely feel it.

“They had to shave,” Mel says. “They thought they were going to have to operate at first. But it’s already growing back. See? Look at you, blondie.”

When I start to cry, only the right side of my face moves.

“Hey,” Mel says. She reaches out and takes my head in her hands. “You’re getting better every day. I know you can’t see it, but I do. Don’t do this, Sharon.”

I’ve never been a knockout, but God knows, I was glad for what I had. I have been someone who has made her living from sketching the exterior, as well as the interior, of things. I have made a livelihood from the appeal of the visual. It’s hard to ignore the shallow scream in my head: I am totally unfuckable. I was already a failure with men, before this. This is the point from which I will never bounce back.

Before she leaves for the night, Mel leans over the bed and gives me an awkward, one-armed hug. “You’re beautiful, shitbritches,” she says. “Don’t cry.”

I sniff her shoulder. Camel Lights, something mealy and warm. Fabric softener. But no booze.

—

I’m having trouble recalling words. Broom-Hilda encourages me to get back to work so I can rebuild my synapses. “The connecting fibers of your brain,” she says. “Think of them as interstates. They help you get from one thought to another. We’re repaving them.”

Someone brings me a sketchpad, a pack of colored pencils. I spend an entire morning staring at a blank page. Gripping a pencil with my fist like a kindergartner, I manage to draw one dark, square apple.

—

“Hollingsworth people called,” Mel tells me on her next visit.

“Uh huh?”

“I said you were getting back on your feet. Same thing I tell Donnie when she threatens to fly out.”

I wriggle my nose, adjust the nasal clamp. I’m still hooked up to oxygen. My hands are getting stronger, more flexible. I can finger things well enough now to pick my nose and ears. Sometimes I find myself doing so involuntarily in front of Mel, who thinks it’s hilarious, yells, “Pick a winner, dollface.”

When I first woke up, Mel asked me if I wanted to call anyone. Another reason my gratefulness trumps any residual anger I might feel toward her: Anyone else would have called my family on their own initiative, but Mel knew better. How can I stay mad at her when she so totally and completely gets it?

She asks again. “You sure you don’t want me to call your mom or something? Well, I guess you’ll be able to do it yourself pretty soon. Doc says you’re an overachiever at the rehab stuff.”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

She shifts in her seat and sighs. “Sharon, I feel a little weird not calling. I mean, I understand, obviously. But you had a stroke, dude. Don’t you think they’ll want to know?”

I shrug.

She kicks one leg up to hook around her knee, braids her hands together above her head, and sighs. She looks good. Laundered and showered. She visited a salon and had her hair rebleached. “Well, all right, boss. If that’s the way you want it, then by God, that’s the way you gots it.”

I reach out to the control panel to shift my bed up. My legs twinge as the mattress elevates. I cry out. “What’s wrong,” Mel says.

I gesture. She jogs out of the room, returns with a nurse holding a clipboard, who leans in to adjust the morphine.

I have been in the hospital for five weeks. Our first Hollingsworth pay installment is months away; all our savings are going to pay the rent on our empty studio in New York. Here, my room has a window view onto the parking lot and, beyond that, the green: lots of sharp, low shrubbery, patches of soil that peter out into sand at the margins. When the window is open the smell is rich, bacony; I pantomime the question to Mel, making a frying pan motion only she would understand. “Salt,” she says. “Ocean’s not far.”

I close my eyes. When I open them, there’s a new, rosy glow to the room’s edges. The morphine is taking over. I feel myself sliding toward sleep, relieved that Mel is here. I want to keep her in the room with me for as long as I can.

“Lite-Brite,” I say.

She chuckles to herself. Removes a small nail clipper from her jacket pocket, worries it over her thumb. “She wants to hear the Lite-Brite story,” she mutters.

The Lite-Brite story is the part of Nashville Combat that really gets to people. It was posted on YouTube to promote the movie; it’s the scene people send to their friends, and when it’s shown in theaters, the crowd erupts. Mel had her way with the scene, reverting to the twitching, trip-wire expressions of the opening credits. And the tones: bombastic, intense. The fruit of the hours Mel spent nerding out over her color key game, a massive shade chart occupying the screen of her desktop Mac, aiming for that grainy, ghostly seventies neon, the look of K-tel record sleeves and ColecoVision graphics. After all, isn’t that the future we envision for ourselves: all brighter colors and dramatic graphics, everything at its ultimate zenith?