Giselle, the Dancer
Clarice swore she had never seen the wall open up like that before. She stood right in front of it when it slid apart, the lights of gallery hall illuminating the white sheetrock like it was one of the portraits. Except it wasn’t—it didn’t even have a nameplate. If it hadn’t been for the grinding noise Clarice might have thought she imagined it, the plaster peeling back and sliding away, leaving little flakes of white paint in sweet little sugar clumps on the sides of the newly opened panels. Clarice swore she had never seen the wall open up like that, but it happened so smoothly and so cleanly, and she hadn’t even flinched, so maybe she had and just forgotten.
Clarice wasn’t surprised by this forgetting—forgetting of the brain but not the body. She had forgotten a lot of things lately. Since Giselle moved out a few months ago, Clarice’s memory seemed like a dream, the kind of dream that when she woke, she thought she could remember most of it, but the more she tried to stretch her fingers back into the Jell-O bowl of remembering, the more the details squirmed out through the spaces between her fingers. Moments later, despite all the fishing, she was unable to remember why her fingers were all stained red and smelled of strawberry, and what she was even doing there in the first place.
The smell of peeling plaster stung Clarice’s nose as it lingered toward her. She looked down at her fingers to see if they were stained, or sticky with gummy gelatin, but they looked mostly normal, grayish and dry. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked, but no strawberry wormed over her tongue; she tasted only the bite of salty flesh.
Clarice had been to this gallery at least a hundred and thirty-three times since she moved to this city three years ago. She came to the museum often, mostly to stand in the big open room and feel timeless. That’s what she liked most about big, white rooms, the ones that had lots of gleaming painted walls, like they were still wet from paint. She liked this gallery best, because it had spatterings of art, folding tables cluttered the middle and it was unclear what they were for except to demand a bit of reverie. It had the clean type of mess, the only mess Clarice could tolerate. Sometimes the gallery felt like exposure therapy, sometimes it felt like home.
Clarice approached the wall, the brownish-red opening looked like a gaping mouth, a maw. Up close, the hole wasn’t exactly a hole, it was more of a cavern hiding a room of colors, pastels draping down from a dark, barely visible ceiling. Bunches of mint greens, peachy pinks, lavender blues, like someone threw colored chalks into the hall during and they suspended themselves, stuck between falling and landing. Leaning her head into the room, Clarice could almost taste the dusty pigments, dusty but florally, like dried flowers or fruit.
Clarice touched the edges of the wall lightly, the plaster biting at her fingers. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone else had noticed the break. The only other people in the gallery leaned close together, staring at the opposite wall, speaking in a low tone she couldn’t understand. A bit of her twinged at the sight of their two heads barely touching, bits of straightened hair twining together. She turned back toward the room, and stepping over the low wall, she left them and the gallery behind.
Inside, Clarice found layers of colors, a hall of mirrors kind of layering, purples upon greens upon blues, colors she knew had names but hadn’t bothered to learn despite what Giselle might have tried to teach her. An awkward set of lights framed the room, getting darker the further back it went. Clarice reached her hand out, grabbing at a curtain of peach to steady herself, but it flinched from her grasp. They looked thin, nearly see-through, like a sheet of watercolor suspended before her. The closer her fingers got to a wisp, the more it drifted away.
Clarice continued, hands outstretched, lazily trying to catch the colors. She felt unreachable the further she moved through the hall and looked back after a few moments to catch a glimpse at the gallery of white, and emptiness, and predictability, but all she could see now was the sheets she had already passed through. It reminded her of Giselle.
Giselle had distrusted Clarice’s love of plainness and careful order, it was the first and final rift between them. Giselle said it first at a picnic on the bank of The Isis river one late spring as the flowers came into bloom. “I don’t understand,” she said, stretching out her long legs so her knees popped, loud crackles against the soft bubbling conversation of the other picnickers. “I don’t understand how you could want to be so bland.”
Giselle didn’t seem to understand that blandness and cleanliness were not the same thing, but Clarice didn’t correct her. Instead, she pretended not to be hurt, brushing a stumbling ant off the crumpled blanket, spreading out the edge so it would lie flat.
Giselle was all full of color, and mess, and spontaneity. Her clothes never matched, her blush unblended, her books dogeared, unfinished and chewed. Clarice didn’t mind though, she liked Giselle because she gave Clarice a feeling of adventure without actually having to live all careless. She was like a painting to look at, to admire the risks the owner had taken without having to take any risks herself.
Giselle was a dancer, the modern kind that danced with long silk ribbons, leaping up effortlessly followed by a rolling silk like she would become a bird and escape the realm of gravity. But she never got weightless, she always came landing back down against the hardwood of the studio with a clunky painful thud.
Clarice let the memory slide through her body, wiggling down her organs and out through her toes. She shook her foot to release it from her body, to leave it there in that messy gallery where it belonged. Giselle would have liked this bit, this part of the museum, where there was no one to tell her off for grasping at the curtains of purples to try to taste them.
A bright light shone through towards the end of the room, brightening the curtains and illuminating them like a kaleidoscope. Clarice pushed forward, glad to see an end to the hall, leaning around the edges of baby blues and soft reds, careful not to touch them so they wouldn’t flinch away from her. Creeping around a final cast of brown, she found that it wasn’t a gift shop at the end of the new exhibition, or a familiar looking cafeteria, but a wall, the color of egg shells, stippled and tiny crosses visible on it, like tartan.
A memory spilled over the Jell-O bowl of Clarice’s mind, pushing up into her consciousness. Giselle had worn a tartan scarf all the time—when they first met, she’d worn it, tied tightly around her dark brown hair, pushing away frizzy curls. It was thin, checkered, rough like the beard of Clarice’s grandfather against her face. Clarice reached toward her cheek, to hold the rough pattern again. But instead of a soft, crisp wrinkle of warm fabric, she held only her own tight skin unusually cold against her fingers.
After soaking in the hall of colors, the whiteness of the wall glowered like the hazy sky in the summer months. It broke through and stung her eyes, too bright to be comforting. Unlike the gallery, the whiteness here didn’t feel calming or orderly. It felt unnatural, like it needed to be covered up, concealed, fixed. Fear slithered down her back, a strange nervousness biting at her ankles—here, the whiteness frightened her. Unnatural and terrifying, it didn’t quite fit.
Clarice looked around for security but didn’t see any. There was no visible plaque either that said she couldn’t touch. She stepped up and pressed her careful fingers against the wall. She felt that it wasn’t painted concrete like the rest of the rooms in the gallery, but it was rough, actual tartan and it had a slight give like a taut trampoline in an early winter morning. Clarice pressed, once, twice, then stepped back, looked around for other attendees. But there was only her and the colors, left to admire or fear each other.
Giselle wouldn’t have liked this either, she never liked something as blank and clean as a wall. In the apartment they shared, she would tease Clarice for her ritualistic cleaning, the kind that sent her into a fugue state every Sunday. Clarice woke up early to slap on the yellow gloves and open a new pack of sponges, and she contented the nervousness dancing inside her with scrubbing the walls and the floors, the appliances, the counters until they shiny. When she was done, Clarice surveyed her living room, shivering comfortably at what she had accomplished.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Clarice said when Giselle teased her.
“Mess has personality,” Giselle said, pushing a sweaty strand of hair away from eyes. “I want this place to look lived in.” She dropped her gym bag so that it left a dark rubber skid against the skirt of the wall.
Clarice had wondered if Giselle was dirty on purpose, like she wanted to convert Clarice to the pain of ugliness. Over time, after dance, Giselle stopped washing her hands and left chalk marks on the handrails and on the creme cotton couch. Once, when their friends visited, she flicked frozen yogurt off her spoon over her shoulder, leaving a dark purple streak sliding down the wall behind her. The four of them giggled like teenagers when Clarice came into the room, refusing to tell her the joke.
When she saw the purple drip, Clarice smiled deeply, pulling up the edges of her thin lips so her teeth shone. She excused herself to the bathroom, compensating for the mess by scrubbing at her hands with a steel wool pad until they bled hot red sticky blood all down the drain.
Giselle seemed to think the only way to make a mark in the world, or in someone, was to dig her fingers in, make scratches in the wood, leave rings on the table, kick a hole in the baseboard of their bedroom wall, punch a bruise. Clarice would rather keep everything exactly as it was so nobody ever had to know she’d been there even after she was gone.
Clarice turned around in the room, circling to see if there was anywhere else to go, if a blinking red EXIT sign would suddenly appear, show her out to the little gift shop of overpriced pencils, mugs, and unrelated duplicates of Van Gogh or Monet or Kahlo. Despite the twirling, she saw no indication of an exit, and she turned back where she had entered, frustration at the poor design driving her forward.
She faced the heavy reds and tried parting them to find the way she’d come. Seeing all the colors lined up and mixed, they didn’t seem to invite her in as they had before. Despite all the dust already on her shoes, her new dress, her hair, her face, she still didn’t feel as if she belonged. Like if she did get in between the curtains it would spit her out or swallow her whole, like she wasn’t worthy.
Clarice ignored the fear crawling up her sleeve and stepped further into the colors, squishing herself in to fit. The curtains didn’t flinch away this time, they curled around her like angry fingers, unwanted arms. Her stomach jolted and the room pressed in to collapse on her. She realized she had to crawl out before she got trapped under layers of rot, and mold, and moss, and was forgotten, never found again.
She struggled out of the curtains, tripping out and back to the eggshell wall, glowing still underneath the lights. She rested her manicured pink fingernails against the wall. Clarice faltered just slightly, but as all the dust and chalk and mess pressed against her back like an unknown predator, she pressed her nails deep into the tartan. Her nails punctured a small hole into the wall and she pressed harder, ripping more, pain searing up into her fingers and tingling her nail beds.
More of the tartan ripped, the hole widening, caving a little. She concentrated only on her fingers, the grating sound plugging her ears as she ripped, red speckles popping up, her acrylic nails snapping. The more she clawed, the more she felt like she was digging her own grave, her heart slamming into her ribcage like an animal trapped, struggling to get free.
A shriek broke out from behind Clarice, both scaring and freeing her from the panic.
“Stop,” a frantic, strained voice said.
Clarice’s fingers twitched, a sense of displacement seeping over her, a brief feeling of teleportation sloshing her stomach. She looked up, opened her eyes and saw she stood in front of a portrait—what was left of one. Her fingers were deep into the canvas, tearing into the soft, blue flesh of Giselle, the Dancer. Flecks of acrylic dusted down her bare arms. Clarice’s arm hair stood up, holding the dust afloat and she flinched.
Before she could react, arms wrapped tight around her waist and wretched, pulling her body and clawed fingers out of the painting, bits of color popping off and clinging to her nails. Clarice yelped, her head thumping once against the floor of the gallery, a woman in clattering guard uniform pinning her arms straight out, pressing hard against her wrists. Clarice struggled, once, twice, and then relaxed her spine into the floor.
When they were together, Clarice had never wanted Giselle to come here, to ruin the sanctity of her one place of escape. But even now, Giselle had taken over the last place Clarice owned, placing herself to permanently exist in the one place Clarice hadn’t wanted her to.
The guard yelled urgently into her face, specs of spit flying. Clarice twitched and turned her face to see her fingers gnarled like witches hands. Little bits of blood, or maybe it was paint, cracked from her torn nails, sliding, dribbling gently down her cold fingers, stinging. Her left hand twinkled with dust and blood and feeling.
The security woman sat back releasing her hands, the heavy clomp of feet approaching rattled in her ear pressed against the floor. Clarice quickly stuck her fingers into her mouth, savoring the flavor, sucking at the taste of strawberry, of memory, of eagerness. But it tasted like chemicals, like broken promises, like violence, and her tongue bent away from it. Clarice spit her fingers out, grimacing. She must have lost her taste for Jell-O.