Second Annual Wild Violet Writing Contest Winners (2004)
Fiction
— Third Place
What
it Might Mean
By Sara Beth Jonassen
(continued)
Outside the diner, my big sister and I stick cigarettes between our lips;
watch the street fair progressing down Second Avenue while, inside, Dad
pays the bill.
“You gotta light?” she asks. I hand my lighter to Joanna. She grasps it roughly, bombs up, shoves it back in my direction. Each little action of hers an expression of hostility. Made so routine, I doubt she’d notice it at all. It’s funny, I think, the way Joanna never seems to have fire for her smoke, even though she’s been a smoker far longer, even though she’s the big sister with the heavy purse over her shoulder, full of all manner of things, surprising things.
At her best Joanna is fanciful, a collector of whimsical little objects that make you go Ah! There were lots of surprises in her pocketbook while she was a friend to him. One time she pulled out a box of hard candy that tasted like violet flowers. Another time, a sweet-tasting lip gloss full of glitter. A rubber ball with a tiny horse suspended inside, trotting amidst sparkles. A minuscule bottle of bubbles with a tiny plastic wand that could be hung around your neck by a long plastic filament.
“I didn’t invite extended family to the show because I’m such a small part,” Joanna says through a mouthful of smoke.
And I tell her, “Yes, but your presence is felt throughout the entire play. Everybody responded when you were on the stage. Didn’t you hear their laughter and applause?”Joanna looks right at me now, a rare blue-blue moment. Her mouth looks like she’s tasted something unbearably sour. “Yeah,” she says, “but is that because of my acting or my fat body?” She chuckles deep in her husky throat, but it doesn’t sound light and happy; it sounds like the crackled moan of an impending blaze, the sound you hear while the smoke precedes the lick of flame. Joanna doesn’t really want to hear my answer, I can tell, because she turns her eyes away, towards the street fair, where dark-skinned Latinos browse booths selling T-shirts, animal-balloon hats, turkey legs.
"Well, your body is part of it," I tell her anyway. "An extension of your power," I say. They sound weak and impotent — the way the skinny fairies looked on the stage, flitting around like generic moths — my words.
Joanna nods her head and looks at me with all that smoldering hostility crackling in her blue eyes, like she’s looking right through me, like she’s about to spontaneously combust. “Let’s go look at the hair clips,” she suggests then, lumbering towards the booths, her head and shoulders dropped, her round body no longer like a sun at all.
And then it occurs to me that I will never know Joanna, my big sister, and her immense vulnerability. How it feels for her to stand upon that stage, large and barefoot, bedecked with bunches of grapes and leaves, sparkling, arms raised and legs spread, like a dense sun. Smiling grandly, face filled with light and paradise. What that’s like, trying to concoct beauty, magic. Having only a voice, a body, at her disposal. Taking so much risk to fulfill an illusion. Putting everything up there on the stage — her trueness, her light, her power, and her magnificent, large body. What that awareness felt like. That she might be celebrated. Or humiliated. And how terrifying, that gamble.
How it sounded to her, the laughter emanating from the darkened audience.
And what it might mean.
