Idle Town

By Qingyang Xing - Shenzhen, China

The afternoons were the worst.

The air in Idle Town stood still, swamp-like, suffocating. Birds screeched and bellowed against the relentless summer day. Even in Mr. Mothcap’s sundry shop, heat waves climbed up and over the tired windows, seeping into my sanity. The tawdry mustard curtains melted into the floor.

From my perch at Mothcap’s I saw Kayla, the girl who left Idle town for college only to return with shocking red hair, get kicked out of her house.

“No politics!”

I caught a glimpse of her father’s livid mouth behind the kitchen door. Kayla had covered that door with paintings of her youth – wan faces with kaleidoscopic, inscrutable eyes. Amid slammed doors and shattered glass, she screamed in protest, waving her arms frantically at the doorstep. The devastated door made a huge crack under her vigorous kicks. A fiery red bandeau top complemented her famous hair, paired with blue flares on which she sewed felt stickers shouting, ROCK N ROLL. The felt colors must have faded, because I remember seeing Kayla around Mothcap’s as a little girl, wishing I could wear all those strident shades of purple and green without a tinge of doubt.

Kayla bent down and sifted the broken window shards. With her hands wrapped together, she came down the doorsteps, blood trickling between her fingers. She turned and gazed at me from across the street.

I recoiled, stripped naked in the act of looking.

The next day, Kayla wore the same blue flares, with a new felt sticker proclaiming, YES POLITICS. She left town again. From the shop, I watched her march away with a suitcase.

“Where is she going?”

“To the city, where her girlfriend lives. Kids these days…” Mothcap stopped dusting, and rested his elbows on the counter.

“Did you say girlfriend?”

“Yep.” Mothcap answered, his lips smacking, making the “p” extra plosive.

“Is that why–"

“Yep. I’d kick her out too if I was her dad. Up to no good. Heard she was involved with protesting in the streets. Shame. She was a decent kid.” Mothcap turned and went back to dusting.

“Protesting” was one of the many abstract concepts I could not comprehend. I’ve never seen protests in Idle Town. Perhaps people here didn’t feel the need to protest anything. I never understood how people fought so fiercely for things they couldn’t see or touch. “Politics” sounded like such a big word, intangible too. But Kayla fought for it. She was like a bird with beating wings, killing herself to escape into a wider sky. Kayla was a bird with red feathers.

For two stifling months I sat at the front of Mothcap’s and read. Occasionally I would look up and wonder where Kayla and her girlfriend were. I wondered what it was like where people accepted them.

I took a grape popsicle from the freezer. The mauve ice twinkled in the sun. I tongued the cool cubes of the broken sorbet, savoring the sour juices, which left a ring of burgundy around my lips. I opened my book. It was about a disinterested killer. Just when I reached a stopping place, the page flipped under a sudden breeze.

“You’re reading Borges?”

I looked up. A girl about my age stood before me. Her skin glistened in the sunlight. Her punch-pink, sweetly pouting lips slightly parted. Platinum blonde hair tumbled down her shoulders, resting in coils against her slender figure. Her eyes were the color of pine, enchanting pools that drowned me in an instant.

“Yes. I just finished Monk Eastman.” I shook off my shock.

She gently took the empty seat beside me. Her eyes glimmered.

“That ending’s one of the best I’ve ever read.”

I nodded. “On the 25th of December, 1920, his body was found on one of New York's downtown streets. A common alley cat, blissfully ignorant of death—”

“– was pacing, a bit perplexedly, about the body.”

She finished the sentence with such ease it seemed like her own life story.

“A mysterious, logical end.” I murmured.

She extended her hand.

“My name’s Tazia.” she said.

“Gia.” I took her hand, my fingertips still sticky with grape juice. I blushed, thinking she might have noticed.

“Why don’t you come to my place? It’s my old house. I grew up there. I’m visiting from the city.”

“Sure.” I stood up.

We talked on our way to her house. I learned that Tazia took a modelling job in the city when she was twelve, the first time she had left Idle Town. She lived with her mother who owned an apartment in the city. She liked the pictures taken, especially those that captured her look of deep concentration. One of them made it to the front page of a city newspaper. Within a week, men lined up in front of her mother’s apartment, blocking her exit. Some asked for a picture, some complemented her blonde hair, and others asked for tokens, such as a piece of her clothing. More than a few wanted marriage. They sent extravagant bouquets, milk chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, and bathing suits, the ruffled kind, with cherries printed on top.

During the frenzy, which lasted for three months, Tazia received letters. Despite her mother’s efforts to hide them, she caught glimpses of the sentences on the wrinkled paper: explicit descriptions of her body, nauseating offers.

“Why are they writing if they’ve never met me?” she asked her mother.

“They love you. Just see it like that.”

“But how could it be love if they’ve only seen pictures?”

Tazia’s mother had no answer.

After the whirlwind of fame, Tazia never booked anything major. At times, it felt as though the whole episode had never happened. More often, she felt like she had been discarded.

We arrived at a small, gray house, with the front windows taped shut. Without natural light, the furniture remained veiled. Dimmed hues of blue and green poured over every inch of the interior. Then we entered Tazia’s little room. On every wall hung bolts of warm-toned fabric, overlapping and softening the perimeter. Her bed was unmade, acanthus-print sheets and turquoise fleece blankets strewn haphazardly. There was a wooden table by the wall on which books were stacked to the edge of the window. Golden remnants of the sun filtered into the dark room, painting the books’ spines with a flash of nature’s glaze.

“Let me show you something,” Tazia said.

She stripped the bed linens and revealed a mattress of books. Before I could express my surprise, she tore a curtain from one of the walls, and uncovered even more books. Books were stacked from top to toe, made into walls, enclosing the entire space. I spun around, taking in the sight of her grand library.

“It’s comforting, you know? I actually wrote of a few books here. They are like my past self, stored in this house, safe and sound.”

“You write?” Every revelation of Tazia lured me in.

“I do.”

I picked up an olive green-covered book and read out the title. “Paper Doll. What’s this one about?”

Tazia hesitated.

“A child’s toy sits in the window of a shop in Lower Manhattan, until an Italian longshoreman arrives, and buys her for himself. He takes her to his tenement, and leaves for work. His friends handle her, dance with her, and toss her, too high sometimes. They toss her so high that one day, they toss her away.”

We sat in the bathroom in front of a wide mirror. I opened two bottles of hair dye that Tazia had fished out from her mint-colored bag. She positioned herself on the edge of the bathtub, calves tensed to keep balance. I sectioned her hair into strands, my hands testing its silky texture. Her follicles were sensitive, like mine – she shivered when my fingers brushed on her scalp. A cheap smell of gasoline diffused into the air. We exchanged frowns in the mirror. I picked up a strand and squeezed the bottle. The coal black color seemed alien to her glaring blonde hair, almost a contamination.

“Black? Tazia, are you sure?” I paused, realizing I had never asked what color she wanted.

“I think so.”

“But why?”

“I want to do what my mother couldn’t do. I want to take back control.” Her eyes glinted with determination.

“If you ever return to modelling, will you have to bleach it again?”

She looked down at the viridian tiles of the bathroom floor. I blamed myself for asking.

“I don’t know. But for now, this is what I want.”

So I rubbed in the dye.

“You’re good at this,” she remarked.

“I tried to dye my hair red once,” I said, embarrassed to explain further. We nervously laughed in unison.

That summer Tazia invited me into her world. We collapsed on her bed of books, sampling selections, luxuriating in each other’s muted comfort. Suddenly, one of us would burst into laughter and read out a whimsical line, and the other would reciprocate. On unbearably hot days, Tazia read me sonnets, and I subjected her to my poor imitations of Lady Macbeth. We had heated debates over Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas. We read Borges with our heads touching, elbows set against the bed frame. When we tired of every activity in Tazia’s library, we ran to Mothcap’s, ate a stomach-bruising amount of grape popsicles, and watched Idle Town’s events unfold in the blistering summer day. We yelled at oblivious passersby our little chants: “Grape popsicles! Best and only in town!” and giggled when the targets avoided our direction. Sometimes we succumbed to the heat and fell to the ground, our bare backs touching the cool floor, our limbs splayed, like starfish.

“What is this place to you?” I asked once.

“What?” Tazia turned her shoulder to face me.

“Idle Town. Is this some sort of holiday escape?” The moment I heard those words I regretted how sour they sounded. Tazia fell silent for a while, possibly hurt, lost in her thoughts.

“It’s home.” She answered.

I didn’t know what I wanted to hear, really.

“What is Idle Town to you then?” Tazia studied my eyes.

“It’s everything I’ve ever known. I don’t know if I’ll go anywhere else.”

Tazia wasn’t home that day. I bolted across the street, my ankles brushing spiky bushes. She wasn’t in Mothcap’s, either. I collapsed onto the counter, arms folded, trying to think. It had been a week since our last regular meeting. Where could she have gone? Why would she leave without telling me? As if on cue, Mr. Mothcap handed me an envelope with beige insignia.

“She left this for you.”

I took it over. A strange, gripping force prevented me from opening the envelope. I rubbed the pattern of the insignia until the temperature of my fingertips rose. I turned to Mr. Mothcap.

“Where did she go?”

“Didn’t say a word. Another girlfriend, probably. Good riddance anyway.” Mothcap shrugged. “You get all rowdy around her.”

There was a long pause. I squirmed in my seat.

“Don’t say that,” I blurted out. “Don’t call her good riddance.”

Mothcap looked baffled by my rebellion, and so was I.

“You never knew her.”

I grabbed the envelope and fled the shop. I found a cold pavement shadowed by a tree, far away enough. I stared at the thin envelope in my hands, holding it to the sun to let the light shine through. The uncertainty of the contents unsettled me. I ripped open the envelope. On a scrap of paper was a drawing of a small cat. It sat with its head held high and its claws extended. Its eyes were verdant green. On the other side there was a line: “A common alley cat, blissfully ignorant of death, was pacing, a bit perplexedly, about the body.” Beneath the line there was an address in the city. No letter, just a piece of paper. Tazia had left.

A leaf fell from the tree, landing at my foot, an intruder. Wrath started to build up inside my body. I defended her. She called this place home. The cat looked cruel now, with a tint of dismissal washed upon its features. The emptiness of the envelope riled me. The heat was invading my space now, entrapping me. I looked up: the infinite languor of the town was paved before my eyes.

I gasped when I saw the photograph.

It was many years later, yet Idle Town’s heat remained intolerable.

That scorching afternoon I heard a knock on my door. I turned away from the window and stood up. It was the newspaper man. I took the paper and sat down, my usual afternoon itinerary that replaced Mothcap’s grape popsicles and reading on the ground. Occupying half of the front page was a photograph of Tazia.

Her hair was still coal black, embracing her shoulders. I thought she’d bleach it blonde. Her telling lips were painted carmine red, as were her fingernails, completing the bracing palette. She wore an incongruously mature white suit. I couldn’t believe how much she had changed. Yet her pine-green eyes seemed as clairvoyant, as passionate, as the afternoon we met. There was something new to Tazia’s embellished look, though, something fateful. Her eyes pierced straight through the paper and the dust-laden air, through the draining heat that blurred my vision. A weight on my heart was removed.

I sprang up and went to my bookshelf. From the Borges book I removed the slip of paper I had banished long ago. I turned it over to read out the address.

Maybe it was time.