Alma Mater, Kind Mother

by Molly Bridgeforth

Featured art: “Passageways” by Drea Vail

For Halloween, which was a Thursday, Liza and Mary dressed as dead sisters. It was Mary’s idea; she had bought the kind of white cotton night gowns that come in a 2-pack on a whim at Wal-Mart during one of her increasingly frequent trips home. Once removed from their plastic packaging, the girls could see that the gowns were practically sheer. High-collared and ankle-length, a bit too large, but they would do. They looked like something Liza’s grandmother would own. 

Mary began unpacking the props she’d collected for the occasion. She placed two containers of baby powder and a handful of ketchup packets from the dining hall on the corner of Liza’s desk. The room was situated so that if Liza and Mary were both at their desks, they were sitting side by side and Liza hated it. She was commiserating over her latest essay and close to giving up for the night. The thin black cursor blinking against an empty white document on her laptop could reduce Liza to tears. It had become a habit, almost, to have a good cry before writing a paper. Liza had the beginning of a poem stuck in her head which she typed—you do not have to be good—and then deleted; then she typed it again, before slowly deleting it for good, letter by letter. She could tell that Mary was about to pitch a fit over her aggressive tapping on the backspace bar and abandoned her paper. 

Leaning back in her stiff, wooden desk chair, Liza put her hands behind her head and examined the contents of her desk. She picked up the baby powder.

“What’s this for?” she asked. 

“Our hair,” said Mary, “to make us look ghostly.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asked Liza on a whim.

Mary seemed to consider the question seriously. “Well, I don’t know,” she said finally. 

Liza nodded in agreement; there were so many things she didn’t know about real life yet. The topic of the afterlife had somehow felt safe to her.    

“And what about you?” asked Mary. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Oh, definitely,” said Liza.

“That settles it then,” said Mary, grinning. “My roommate is a sci-fi freak.” She seemed to revel in this new information. They had only known each other for close to two months, but she wasn’t wrong. As a child, Liza had inadvertently watched a special on day-time TV, which she turned over and over in her head for weeks afterwards. The balding host—always shrouded in blue light—had attributed ghost sightings to a weak spot in the fabric of the time-space continuum. Liza pictured the universe as a moth-eaten sweater, or her mother’s faded jeans. She only had to wait a few more washes to witness history.

Mary closed their door; Laura—the exhibitionist from the triple down the hall—was famous for bursting in unannounced. “Let’s get ready,” she said.

Liza understood, more than anything else this semester, that getting ready accounted for as much of the evening as going out did. She and Mary had curated playlist on Limewire for the occasion, though they hardly ever went any further than down the hall. Liza had chosen songs mostly by The Postal Service, whose hyper-electronic beats reminded her of that feeling she got when she drank champagne too quickly. 

A full-length mirror propped against their only sliver of spare wall was smudged with fingerprints and oily splatters of body spray with a saccharine scent. Mary sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it to apply her eye liner with a small pencil.

“I cannot put anything that pointy so close to my eyeball,” said Liza as Mary lined the inside of her lower lid.

“Let me do it,” said Mary. She patted an empty oval of fuzzy pink rug next to her. 

“Do your worst,” said Liza. She sat down and closed her eyes. Mary’s face was so close that Liza could smell Mary’s hot breath, close as cat’s breath was her mother’s phrase for it. As a child, Liza’s mother had dressed her like a clown three Halloweens in a row. Seated at the kitchen table, she’d painted Liza’s face with a sticky foam wedge according to a template in a laminated book with a plastic-ring spine. Her mother would comment on a new freckle each year; the large one under her left eye looked like Julia Roberts’; the small ones that popped up around her lips looked like graham cracker crumbs she forgot to wipe away. Liza’s mother was one of the kindest mirrors to look in as a child. Of course, every year in the Tidewater heat, Liza would sweat through the pasty clown make-up before she even left her house to trick or treat. In old photos, her face always resembled a Jackson Pollack painting. 

Her most recent Halloween—her last in highschool—had been spent on the couch watching lifetime movies without so much as a candy bar, while her peers drank warm beer at field parties. She may never have known what a field party was if it weren’t for the girl, dressed like a little red devil, who fell into the bonfire at one. The story had spread in the halls. The gnarled skin that crept up the girl’s hands and wrists was impossible to ignore.

“Okay, you can open your eyes,” said Mary.

“Very spooky,” said Liza, squinting at the dark rings around her eyes in the mirror.   

“I think we’re ready for the gowns now,” said Mary. 

Liza slipped her nightgown on over her clothes; she was always freezing here. But Mary, no stranger to the New England fall, wore nothing under hers—not even underwear. The girls emptied an entire canister of baby powder into each other’s hair, which they had pinned up in nearly identical messy buns. The white powder rose and then settled around them as if the room were breathing. The aroma was over-powering. Liza traced a crescent in the powder that blanketed the floor with the tip of her big toe. 

“Look,” said Mary, “It’s perfect.” She grabbed Liza by the shoulders and spun her around to face the mirror. They were a pair of pale apparitions to behold. Ketchup bled into their scalloped collars. Liza looked like she’d been dead for days but smelled fresh as a baby.  

“Yeah,” said Liza, “we’ve definitely got a Virgin Suicides vibe.”

Down the hall, Laura and Rennie were quietly having people over. Their room was dark and subdued. A single strand of orange lights hung in the bay windows. One of the windows was propped open with a brick that Rennie had loosed from sidewalk and carried across campus in her backpack for several weeks as exercise. Several freshmen from the hall were crammed onto a bare mattress on the bottom bunk.

“You look sad,” said their hostess, Laura, approaching Liza at the door. Laura wore a pillowcase she had painted to look like a jar of Nutella. She held a bowl of candy corn in one hand and red cup in the other. She offered both to Liza as if they held some sort of medicinal quality for her sadness.

“I’m in character,” said Liza. She took the red cup from Laura and sampled it. 

“Who are you supposed to be?” asked Laura. 

“A dead girl, see?” Liza stuck her tongue out like roadkill. 

“We’re twinning,” said Mary and threaded her arm Liza’s waist. 

Mary had invited her boyfriend, who was dressed as a Rastafarian. He was holding a drink in each hand already. He raised his cups to everyone who passed and said “yo!” Red cups and bodies littered every surface. Liza quickly drained the cup Laura had passed her and discarded it with the other empties. She wended through students strung shoulder to shoulder. Someone in a red cardigan and slacks stood on chair near the center of the throng and yelled, “I’m Mr. Rogers, goddammit!” 

The room swelled beyond capacity and Liza migrated towards the open window. She could barely make out the waning yellow moon through the hazy cloud cover. She slipped her shoes off and pressed her warm cheek against the windowpane. She could do without the clothes underneath her nightgown after all. With the anonymity of a loner in a packed room, Liza slipped her arms out of the sleeves of her gown. Inside its gauzy tent she unbuttoned her jeans and slipped them off. She shimmied out of her bra too. She kicked the sweaty, crumpled pile at her feet aside; she’d come back for them later. Liza was returning her arms to her sleeves when someone behind her lassoed her waist with their long arms; a hand wandered under her gown, up her ribcage and cupped her left breast. Before she could react, the person behind her leaned in. Lips grazed her earlobe. A synthetic dreadlock swung into her peripheral and she understood that it was Mary’s boyfriend, the Rastafarian, before he even spoke. Later Liza would wonder why she didn’t stop him there; why she let him go on. 

“Mar, let’s ditch this party and go somewhere,” he whispered. His breath was unbearably hot and loud in Liza’s ear. A fiery blue heat rose to Liza’s cheeks. She willed herself to turn around. Without looking, she grabbed the Rastafarian’s boyish chin and kissed him. His lips tasted like Twizzlers. She was expecting something more pungent. As she pulled away, she let her front teeth trail across the inside of his bottom lip. When Liza opened her eyes, he immediately loosened his hold on her and raised his hands in a mea culpa. As he receded into the crowd, which engulfed him like water, he glanced over his shoulder at Liza and pressed his pointer finger to his lips, which looked like they were blowing out a candle. 

“Yo, Mar! Let’s go,” he held up his fist and yelled into the mass of bodies over the fierce yodeling of The Cranberries. Something about the song title “Zombie” had screamed Halloween to Laura and Rennie when they selected it for the playlist. Liza swallowed the urge to run and dropped to her knees to gather her jeans. From here, the room looked dingy and twice as congested, the audacity of each body crowding the room with two legs. She’d like to have been a ghost while she waited for a path to reveal itself in the silt of Laura’s dorm room. She crawled on all fours until she reached the door remembering more of the poem, you do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles.  

Once outside, Liza felt the overwhelming urge to put her feet in the grass. The cool night air felt like needles everywhere. Before long she was running barefoot across the quad towards the only light she could see. The library was the most impressive building on campus. From the outside, it looked like a castle. A single floodlight illuminated its bell tower. Liza guessed that the building was exactly what female ambition looked like to a man: something luxurious and grand, beautiful but cloistered. Its dark brick tower was a formidable beacon for the entire campus and the surrounding white-clapboard village, which slept under night’s navy veil. To Liza, the most appealing thing about the library was the thick blanket of ivy encroaching on the intricate lancet windows. The way the ivy’s wild tendrils scaled a hundred-year-old wall, making it new again, was the closest thing to female ambition Liza could imagine. 

The interior of the library, with its rich red carpet and ornate wooden beams, was grander than any of the sanctuaries of Liza’s childhood both real and imagined. On the loneliest nights of her recent history, Liza imagined sleeping in the stacks. She knew exactly where she was going. There were plenty of stories to keep her company and maybe even a few ghosts. She pulled a small black and white tome with yellow pages from the shelf. 

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

-Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Molly Bridgeforth  lives and writes in the Shenandoah Valley. She graduated from the College of William and Mary. Her stories have appeared in Nashville Review and Black Heart Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @mfadropout.

Drea Vail is a disabled artist who uses design to create without the boundaries she experience in her reality. You can find her work at dregroovy.design and on Instagram at @dregrooovy.