You are sixteen years old today. Today you are sixteen years old. Your dress is older than you are. It belonged to your aunt. She brought it over yesterday. Yesterday was Monday. Monday is the day your aunt has off from work. She likes it. She likes having Monday off because Monday is the day when everyone else has to go to work. She doesn’t want to and she doesn’t have to. Monday is her day off from work.
She brought over the dress in a plastic bag with some other stuff in it. You didn’t like the other stuff. It was ugly: a few pairs of shorts and a blouse with pastel stripes. But you liked the dress. The dress is cream-colored with black stars and a red collar. The dress is made of cotton. It is a simple dress. It is a marvelous dress. And it no longer fits your Aunt. But it fits you. You held it close to you on Monday, and you put it on, and it felt good and so today you are wearing it. And today is your birthday and today most things feel good. It is because of the dress.
Your face feels good and your breasts and your feet and your head. The dress is like a frame. It contains your body and your thoughts and your birthday. It contains all of your birthday. It is the dress for your birthday. And who is going to come over today? Who will come over today, on Tuesday, to see you in your dress at sixteen? You will wait.
You will wait for someone to come over. You could wait all day in that dress and talk to anybody in that dress. It is summer and you are sixteen and you are wearing only the dress, and there are stars on it and there are stars inside you too. You can feel them. They are floating and sparkling and gleaming inside you.
And your lips feel dry, so you put on Chapstick and then over the Chapstick you put on lipstick. It is the expensive lipstick with the gold band, like a bracelet painted around the case. The lipstick is almost brand new, and it smells like sweet coffee and flowers. It feels so good to put it on. You want to keep wiping it over your lips, layer after layer after layer. You just want to just use up the entire stick.
You are sixteen and you have only that dress on. It is summer and you have on lipstick that colors your lips, that makes your lips into a valentine. And the sun is out, and the sun gushes in on the surfaces of the world and even reflects off of your lips. And your lips are shiny and marvelous. And you want to go outside and sit on the front bottom step. You just want to go out there and sit without any shoes on. You want to just go out there and rub the bottoms of your feet into the jam-packed green grass. And so you do.
You are out there now. You are out there in the day. You are out there and you look way up at the trees and you laugh because they are such show-offs. Those trees are just so bold. Each of them have a hundred arms with a hundred fingers and they just let the sky pour right down on top of them. They just let the sky rush into all their open places. The sky colors in and fills in all their openings like lipstick.
And the design of the day on your birthday is three dimensional and complicated and clear and you fit into it. It is because of the dress. It is because of the dress your mother’s sister brought over on Monday. Who would have known that she would do something like that? She hadn’t even called beforehand. She just stopped by and she was so casual about it. She just handed over the thin, plastic bag with handles and said, “I was going through my closet. Do you want any of these old things?” It was so simple; like a birthday, like being sixteen, like summer, like trees and sky and grass and skin and thighs and breath, and lipstick, and a dress; a cream-colored dress with black stars and a red collar.
And so, you rub your feet into the bright, jam-packed green grass and your birthday whispers itself all through you like a song with a lilt in it, a song with a tiny secret in it too. What secret? Who knows? You don’t know either but you wait, you wait. You just stay there and wait for somebody to come. You want someone to come and see you like this and the truth is, you don’t know why. Do you have to know why? Why would you? You just want someone to see you like this. You just want someone to see you.
You pull the top of the dress away from yourself at the neck and look down at all your skin. You pull your head down into the dress. You are a turtle going in. And then, you are turtle coming out. And when you come out, you see the day again. See, there is the day and then there is your body and then there is your birthday. It is August and you are waiting.
And then you think maybe you will just take the dress off. Maybe you will just take it off and spread it out on the ground like a tablecloth for a picnic. You would like to have a picnic on that dress. You would like to eat a cake on it for your birthday. Maybe you could do this in front of everyone. Maybe somebody would come then. Maybe someone would see you.
You’d be there with no clothes on, sitting there in the front yard upon your dress eating cake and someone would see you from far away. And when he saw you, he would take a glass and fill it up with ice and water and then he would walk over and he would stand before you and he would say, “Happy birthday. Are you thirsty?” And you would say, “Yes,” a sharp, clear, matter of fact, yes. And then, he would hand you the glass of water, and you would drink it down, and you would (of course) leave a lipstick mark on the glass. That would be so wonderful, you think. That would be just so, so, wonderful…
And then you hear a noise! It sounds like a motor. It sounds like it’s just whirling toward you. It sounds like it’s coming to get you, to take you, to propel you up somewhere, someplace you want to go to. The motor sounds fast, but soft. It sounds like it’s a motor made from feathers and air or a motor like your heart, which is inside your dress, inside your body, where there are also soft oval eggs with real blood in them, eggs that burst like milk pods inside of you. The blood is red, red like the red collar of your cream-colored dress with black stars on it; red like lipstick, red like tree blood.
The sound is a motor! It is the motor of a car and you run to meet it. You are laughing and breathing and smiling and you run. You run like a puppy, a pony, a puppy, a pony: both. You run out to the road on this hot birthday in your cream-colored dress with black stars and a red collar. You are a running dress. And finally, you see what it is. It’s a car! And it’s your mother. She’s the one driving the motor. Your mother: the one who had you, your mother. It’s only your mother. It’s your only mother. But then, the motor stops and you stop too. And then the car door opens like a mouth delivering your mother, and she steps out into the light. She sweats. And you think, Oh my god, she is beautiful. You think she is the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen. And then she stops and looks at you. You smile at her. You are sun-drunk today, a sun-drunk new girl. She frowns. She says, “What are you wearing?” She looks confused. There are so many designs on her face. You are always such weird maps to each other. That’s the terrible truth.
“Where did you get that silly dress?” she asks.
And to this you answer, “Aunt Jane.” But it surprises you that the words “Aunt” and “Jane” actually emerge from your mouth so easily because you had forgotten you could talk. You had forgotten about words, language, what it means to be able to say things, to speak. You had forgotten.
And then your mother says, “Well come and help me get these groceries inside the house. I’m exhausted.” That’s what she says. That’s what your mother says, your mother; that one who came in on the motor, the thing called a car.
And she hands you two bags and you take one in each arm. There are colors exploding out of the bags. You are holding up all the colors. And you go inside the house. You follow right behind your mother, back into the house, and you put down the exploding colors onto the counter which has no color at all.
Your mother washes her hands in the sink. The soap she uses smells like green trees. And then your mother shakes the water from her hands. Your mother’s hands turn into a sky and the sky is raining from her hands. You stare at her. She’s something like a meadow, your mother.
“What?” she asks, even though you hadn’t said anything. And then again, her face rearranges itself like a shirt being folded in a new way. Then she says, “Oh honey, oh honey, oh honey. I’m sorry. I forgot to tell you happy birthday. “Happy birthday,” she says.
“Thanks,” you say. “Thanks.”
Then she says, “You look different. What is it?”
And for a second, you are so happy because you think that maybe your mother is seeing you, really seeing you, really knowing you in a way you didn’t know until today that you wanted to be known in; a way of being seen and known that would matter only if your mother were the one to see you, to know you in this precise and important way.
But then, she says, “Oh, I know, it’s that lipstick. Why are you wearing so much lipstick? You’d better go wipe it off.”
And it is still your birthday as you walk into the bathroom. And it is still your birthday when you wipe off the lipstick. It is still your birthday when the night empties the bowl of itself out onto the world. It is still your birthday when you take off the cream-colored dress with black stars and a red collar. It is still your birthday when you climb into your bed. It is still your birthday. The trees are still. You are sixteen years old. This is what it feels like.