Suicide Blonde (Canons)

by Darcey Steinke

(I’ll never forget my first time reading Jesus Saves: I felt sick about the ending, I wanted to undo what the novel had done; maybe I even felt betrayed.

Near the plant was a cedar wall panel with a Japanese scene. Bell’s boa hung on a hook beside his film stills; blurry body gestures from a super-8 film Bell made years ago. There were lots of little things: the blue glass lamp, the leopard with eyes that glowed, empty wine bottles, brass goblets, postcards of Europe from former lovers, candles and incense on a special table with a linen cloth, along with Bell’s crucifixes, saints, Hindu gods, a GI Joe doll, obsidian voodoo beads, a dog’s skull and an African mask of an antelope.

What did it mean that I wasn’t the kind of girl who could wait, dispassionately passing time drinking wine or reading a novel? My instincts told me to leave him, it’s what I always did when I sensed the first soft spot of discontent. I was the kind of girl who left men. It wasn’t like me to look for Bell.

I thought of crazy things: I would walk up to him and tell him my mother died, I would say an old boyfriend called, tell him a magazine wanted my photographs or maybe

Bell wanted a disciple, someone who agreed that he was a new person, defining modern ways of living that had nothing to do with conventional commitment, someone capable of emotional toughness and moral vacuity.

Sometimes I think I’m more interested in Bell’s old lovers than I am in Bell.

That’s what my mother did to try and keep my father. She looked pleasing, acted pleasing, made the house pleasing, all in an effort to mollify the uncertainties and unpleasantries of the unknown.

There’s a telepathy between us sometimes so laserlike it frightens me.

My mother sees me as a part of her body, something that still belongs inside, a heart or a liver that she wants back.

No matter how vulnerable people are, how fragile the delusional structure of their lives, they go on living.

People die from liver failure, heart attacks and gunshots but not from loneliness, vanity or confusion—

I knew how a memory could spiral off like loose yarn.

A dream of cockroaches crawling into my mouth haunted me and I was worried the stranger would be suddenly beside me, his thick cock nudging my ass.

I was aware of being clichéd, sentimental and wanted to show her I could be as tough and raw as herself.

I am the worst kind of person, attractive, overeducated, raised with middle-class delusions of grandeur. But it’s not just me; family life in America sucks, because if you’re even a bit smart, the pressure from your family to jump classes is excruciating. There’s this insane idea that materialism creates status.

to devastate yourself is somehow life-affirming.

I’d taken my parents too literally, because it was clear now I wasn’t a princess.

“Meaningful relationships flutter between two things, convention and sentimentality.”

“Relationships are like wallpaper patterns, you think you’re moving forward but you’re always caught in your own obsessions.”

“is that horror is everywhere, it’s the rule, not the exception. Life is a disease.”

The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.