When Life Turned Purple (11 page)

“I believe in Him,” Lia said. “But I’ve been kind of angry at Him. Like feeling rejected by Him.”

Russ nodded.

“It’s like a co-dependent relationship. He pulls me close, but also pushes me away. I feel like I should just get out of the relationship, but I can’t. I feel like I need Him too much to leave.”

“Doesn’t sound very healthy to me,” said Russ.

“It isn’t when it’s between people,” said Lia leaning forward to rub a blade of grass between her fingers. “But God is different.” She paused. “I’ve been talking to Him and that’s where I got the idea to resist any hanky-panky before marriage—”

“And that worked out pretty damn well,” said Russ with a grin.

Lia blushed, but continued, “And to wear better clothes. Like long skirts and sleeves, and not too tight. And I feel like I do get taken more seriously.”

Russ repressed a grin as he folded his arms over his chest. He liked the idea that he had Lia all to himself.

“Like, all the other girls in the department are wearing thick glasses and tight, low-cut shirts as if to say, ‘Yeah, I’m a left-brained geek, but I’m still one hot babe!’ ”

Russ laughed.

“That’s the ‘in’ thing now,” said Lia. “You see it everywhere—the Hot Christian, the Hot Geek Girl, the Hot Housewife, the Hot Pregnant Chick, the Hot Nanny, and so on.” She paused. “I’m sick of it. I just want to be me.”

Russ nodded, but he couldn’t really relate. He liked all the cleavage and bare shoulders popping out everywhere. Sure, it was a challenge not to let them catch you peeking, but he’d always enjoyed a challenge—especially such a gratifying challenge. At least Lia wasn’t popping out of anything—well, not when anyone else was around, anyway.

A pale violet patch of sky glinted through all the gray. Russ strained his eyes to peer at it, then realized that it was tinged by one of the sparkly purple bubbles.

Emma. Emma used to walked around dressed in the latest chic. Russ liked how other guys looked at her and then looked at him. But he also wanted to punch them in the face and usually returned their looks of envious admiration with a steely glare.

Russ rattled his head as if to shake away the thoughts.

“What’s wrong?” said Lia.

“Nothing,” he said.

She glanced up to where he’d been looking, then she looked at him and gave him a gentle smile. “Emma?” she said.

Russ hit his palm against his thigh to get rid of imaginary dirt and shrugged.

“Do you miss her?”

Russ’s head shot up to meet Lia’s gaze.

Her eyes shined with warmth.

“No,” he said. “Not at all.” He squatted down next to her. “I just love you, baby, and I only want you.”

“So then what?” Lia asked, her voice still soft and warm, like heated silk sheets you could just slide into and wrap around you for protection against the stresses of life.

“I guess….” he began, then stopped. What did he feel? Mostly, he felt like he just wanted to forget about Emma and everything that had happened. He tried again. “Um…well, I guess I feel kind of responsible. But I don’t know what else I could have done.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t marry her. I guess I felt I loved her sometimes, but not in the way I’ve felt for you.”

“Do you—do you think that if you’d stayed with her, she’d be alive right now? Is that what you mean, Russ?”

Russ nodded, saying, “Yeah, I do. But I just couldn’t—” Then he stopped and looked up at the pale patch of sky with its vacillating sparkles, like the winking diamonds on the waves of the ocean. “Yeah, that might have helped. Or it just might have postponed things for a while. I think if she’d not had the abortion, she might still be alive.”

He tried to think of what life would have been like had they kept the baby. He probably would have stayed with Emma then, maybe even married her eventually. But would she have wanted to keep the baby? Yeah. From the way she’d talked to Russ, she wouldn’t have wanted to put it up for adoption. Russ wouldn’t have wanted that, either. He knew people did it and he knew it could work out well, but the thought of having a child somewhere out there in the world while he just went on with his life seemed like a form of cold eccentricity, like plucking out your own eye during a bout of infection and tossing it into the sea to relieve your discomfort and then going about your life with a glass eye to cover it up and pretend you still see the same as you did before.

“We thought it was just a blob of tissue,” Russ said, staring down at the ground.

Lia nodded. “Everyone thinks that. It’s what we’re told.”

Russ took a deep breath, then said, “If we’d stayed together with a kid, you and I would’ve never happened.”

Lia brushed the wind-blown hair out of her face. “But so what? You wouldn’t have missed me because you never would have known. You’d have made your life with Emma and a child—and probably one or two more as time went by—and lived that way. And you’d have been more or less happy.”

Russ shook his head. “I can’t get my mind around that,” he said.

“Because your life took a completely different turn, yeah?” said Lia.

He looked at her. “So you don’t believe in fate? Or being destined for each other?”

Lia rested her chin on her fists as she pondered what to answer. Finally, she said, “I do believe that we are supposed to go through certain events and to interact with certain people in certain ways,” she said. “It could be that Emma would have miscarried. Or maybe you guys would have separated, but kept joint custody of the child. Or it could be that you guys would have stayed together, and you and I would never meet in this lifetime. It seems that we have the freedom to make our own choices, but that God is guiding us and our choices all the time.”

“That doesn’t make sense. It has to be one or the other.”

Lia smiled again. “Paradox exists. Hardly anyone likes to acknowledge it, but I, for one, can’t deny it.” Lia hugged herself. “Delving into astrophysics and stuff has taught me how limiting a three-dimensional world is, how incredibly narrow our three-dimensional minds are. Certain meditations seem to take people out of their three-dimensional mind, but in general, we’re stuck in three very narrow dimensions.”

Russ frowned.

“Look,” said Lia, holding up a leaf between her thumb and first finger so Russ could see it horizontally. It looked like a thin line. “Can you imagine two dimensions—just length and width, no height?”

Russ stared at the leaf. It was just a leaf. What did his beautiful geek want from him?

“This is as close as we can get to imagining no height. But a leaf does have height, even if it’s a barely discernible height.”

Russ nodded. He knew that from his own shop work with welding and wood. “Like a sheet of paper,” he said.

“Right,” said Lia. “But we can’t actually visualize two dimensions, just like we can’t even visual four dimensions. Or five. But there could also be a lot more. Yet we can’t even imagine a world that is one dimension less or one dimension more. So what we perceive as paradox may not be a paradox at all if we could expand ourselves to include more dimensions. But instead, we are locked into this tiny box of three. No more and no less.” She raised her hand to catch the breeze and spread her fingertips, which set the leaf cart-wheeling away.

Lia pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs, resting her chin on her knees and stared off into the distance. “Somewhere, there is a place with no paradox. But we’re not there. At least, not yet.”

Russ straightened up. “What do you mean? You think we can actually access that dimension?”

Lia rolled her lips together in thought, then said, “Maybe in meditation—like really high-level meditation. Or maybe that’s what the Afterlife is. Like it’s another dimension where you can see everything with total clarity. And maybe we’ll see that that there was no paradox all along, but just a continuum of lessons and tests.” She turned her face to look at him, her cheek resting on her knees.

Russ stared at her a moment, the dimming light reflected in her eyes, which looked like the violet patch of sky, only much darker and richer.

“You are one seriously wacky babe,” he finally said.

To his surprise, Lia smiled. “I know. You’re not the first to say it.”

He moved closer to her. “But I love you,” he said. “Maybe even because.”

Lia’s smile deepened. “Yes, and I also know that.” Her smile softened, and her eyes grew even darker and richer. “And I love you, too.”

Lia and Russ found themselves at Evan’s condo for dinner the next week with Edison. It was futuristic and sterile, with pale gray walls that featured large framed digital art of colored abstract patterns that folded in on themselves in a continuous flow of self-reinvention. Or at least, that’s how Edison said she saw them. But Evan described them simply as “A Harry Potter Portrait Meets a Tesseract.”

They ate at Evan’s glass table, which always irked Russ. “Why do I need to see my knees while I’m eating?” he always asked.

But that just inspired Evan to blather about the need for more transparency in life and how sometimes the only way to have it was through your furniture.

Evan finished first and leaned back with his arm around Edison.

Lia held up a fork with some tofu still stuck on it. “Listen, you guys. I’ve got a really personal question to ask you, but you don’t have to answer.”

Edison and Evan looked at her expectantly.

“Like, do these space anomalies make you think of things?”

“Like what?” said Evan, but Edison was already nodding slowly. Evan looked at her.

“Yes,” said Edison. “Like things you need to resolve.”

“What?!” said Evan. “You didn’t tell me that!”

Edison kept nodding, her round body swaying gently with the nodding. “I thought maybe you already realized.”

“But I don’t feel like—”

“Oh, yes you do,” said Edison. “When we were leaning on the windowsill staring up at it one time, you started to talk about—”

“Whoa, stop,” said Evan, making a time-out sign with his hands while still resting one elbow on the back of Edison’s chair. “I gotcha, but let’s not go there right now.”

Russ arched an eyebrow as he looked at Evan and said, “I didn’t know you hid secrets from me.”

“I don’t,” Evan said. “But how I really
feel
about certain stuff, well, even I didn’t know. Until like when she said….”

Russ glanced at Lia. “But that’s not what you said,” he reminded her. “You think of—” He paused, not sure if he should continue in front of Edison and Evan. You never knew what was too personal for each person. But Lia gave him an encouraging nod, so he continued. “You said that you think of God. And you believe in God, so that’s not an issue you need to resolve.”

Lia nodded again and said, “But I’m angry at God. Sometimes. And yet other times, I just want to give Him a big hug.” She cocked her head to one side, her thick black waves of hair brushing the table edge. “I feel conflicted. It’s like Edison said—I have unresolved issues and feelings about God.”

Evan gave a grave nod of his head. “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s like that time when I lost my dragon steed and came across a young gremlin-troll mutant that wanted to disembowel me. Should I kill it or not? After all, despite its gargantuan size, it was still just a toddler. I tried to escape it, but there was no way. It was either kill—or be disemboweled and devoured.” Evan slapped a hand over his face and made sniffling sounds while Edison bit back a smile and rolled her eyes. “So I—so I held up my super-size
kusarigama
and I—and I—”

Edison groaned, and Russ said to Lia, “Are you fluent in geekspeak?”

Lia had been chuckling silently throughout Evan’s melodrama, but she answered, “Nope, I’m not a gamer. Or a Japanese martial weapons fangirl.”

“
Kusarigama
is an ancient weapon—a chain sickle,” said Edison.

“Oh, that clears things up,” said Russ into his beer.

Edison smiled. “It’s two sticks with curved blades on one end of each and connected by a longish narrow chain. Think
nunchaku
with teeth. Like, saber-toothed tiger teeth.”

“Can’t we just go four-wheeling over tree stumps when the tide is out?” said Russ. “And forget all this virtual garbage?”

“Do we need to bring helmets?” said Edison.

“Nah,” said Evan. “You just tighten your seatbelt and emit a plethora of delighted shrieks if you’re a girl and chesty bellows if you’re a guy.”

“It sounds cool,” said Edison. Then she turned to Lia. “But you were saying?”

“I already forgot,” said Lia.

“It’s okay,” said Edison. “You were distracted by two pillars of mutating testosterone.”

“Is that what you really think of me?” said Evan.

“It happens all the time when touchy-feely subjects come up,” Edison continued. “So, Lia. You were saying you had unresolved issues with God.”

“Oh, right,” said Lia. “Well, it’s like I’m so grateful to Him and I see how He saved me from myself in a lot of situations throughout my life, and also how things could have been a lot worse. But I’m still upset about never having been loved by
anybody
—except Russ.”

Russ felt a blush coming on and tried to hide it by taking a huge swig of beer.

“It’s like I had all this meaningless depersonalization. Like things were forbidden to me for no reason and they weren’t even major things. It’s like why couldn’t I just have this simple thing?”

“Like what?” said Edison.

“Like my skin problems.”

Russ’s eyes widened and he stared at Lia. He noticed Evan and Edison looking at her in the same way he was.

“Uhhh,” said Edison. “What skin problems?”

“I had really bad acne, starting around twelve. And see how pale my skin is?”

“English rose,” Edison said, resting her chin on her hand.

“Yeah, well, the acne really showed. So I asked my mom what I should do, and she was just like, ‘Oh, you’ll grow out of it. I had acne and by the time I was twenty, it was gone.’ But when you’re twelve, twenty sounds like forty. I saw ads for acne treatments, but my mom just said, ‘Oh, those never work.’ I begged for make-up, and the answer was, “No, that’ll just make it worse.’ I wanted to go to tanning booths, but she said that would just make me look weird and anyway, they weren’t healthy. I wanted those self-tanning creams, but she said they make you look orange and anyway, tan skin would look weird on me.”

“When your mom was a girl,” said Edison, “I think the self-tanning lotions really did leave smudges and were kind of orange. But it’s weird how she got stuck in that time warp and kept blocking you.”

“Yeah,” Lia said. “So I just went around feeling ugly and self-conscious.”

Russ did a double-take at hearing Lia felt ugly.

“Ugly?” said Evan, his eyebrows arching up to his hairline.

“Yeah. Chalk-white skin, weird-colored eyes, witch-black hair, and an acne-splattered face.”

They all just stared at her.

Finally, Edison said, “It’s so tragic how girls don’t see themselves as beautiful as they really are. Your description of yourself is so twisted.”

“I don’t see myself that way now,” said Lia. “But that girl is still here inside of me.”

Frowning, Russ just kept staring at Lia. He knew girls got delusional about being fat when they weren’t, but this was seriously weird. “Baby,” he said, “your skin is like an ivory rose.”

“Hey,” said Evan turning to Russ. “I didn’t know you were so poetic.”

Edison gave Russ a small smile.

“Shut up,” said Russ. Then turning back to Lia, he said, “Seriously, baby. Look in the mirror.”

Lia shook her head as she continued. “My present dermatic state, let’s call it, took a lot of investment. Finally, my mom gave me money to buy drugstore foundation, and I bought the lightest shade, but it wasn’t light enough for me. Then I begged her to order the right shade from the Internet—there are cosmetic lines that offer especially fair shades—but she had reasons for not doing that, too. I rarely pushed her for anything, but I was so desperate and unhappy, I couldn’t stop this time. Then she finally took me to a dermatologist, and he gave me tons of stuff. Pills, and three different creams to put on every morning and night, plus a special moisturizer—because the creams dry out your skin and turn it into a big flakey mess—and also sunscreen because they made my skin even more prone to burning than before.”

“Did they work?” said Edison.

“No,” said Lia plaintively.

“What?” said Evan and Russ.

“Nothing worked!” Lia said, her shoulders sagging. “And I blamed myself because most of the time, I couldn’t put four layers of stuff on my face in the morning because I was embarrassed to go to school like that…you know shiny with creams and no foundation….”

“You know, sometimes, I really hate doctors,” said Edison. “Your doctor foisted an impossible regimen onto you. Also, it doesn’t sound like he really knew what he was doing. I mean, why else did he need to give you so much junk? It’s like he just threw the kitchen sink at you in the hopes that something would stick.”

“Why didn’t you switch doctors?” asked Russ.

“My mom said that it wouldn’t help. Anyway, he was part of their circle, and my mom had a thing about patronizing only people who were part of dad’s country club.” Lia’s mouth drooped, then she took a deep breath and continued, “Finally, I found out about a place that sold extra-fair foundations, so I’d take a half-hour bus ride to there. And then I really couldn’t put the creams on in the morning because they would mess up my foundation.”

“Did wearing make-up on the acne make it worse?” asked Edison.

Lia cocked her head to one side and frowned. “No,” she said. “That’s the weird thing. The treatment didn’t make it better and the make-up didn’t make it worse.”

“Maybe they canceled each other out?” suggested Evan.

“No,” said Lia. “Sometimes on vacation breaks, I went several days with no make-up and the full cream application regimen. But it never changed.”

“There’s that super acne drug,” said Edison.

“Yeah. Eventually, I saved up and tried it.”

“So that’s what happened?” said Russ.

“No,” said Lia, shaking her head. “It cleared a lot of it up, but not everything. And it also made me kind of red.”

“Hmm,” said Evan. “The mystery deepens.”

“Anyway, I started doing my own research. I stopped eating gluten and sugar and I started taking high-quality probiotics. I started drinking hot water with lots of lemon juice first thing in the morning. And I developed my own night regimen for skin. I mix geranium and lavender oil with extra-virgin organic coconut oil and apply that. Or else I apply borage seed oil with high concentrations of GLA.”

“I never noticed you did all that,” said Russ.

Despite being immersed in memories of her former teenage misery, Lia managed to flash him a grin. “Because I haven’t put all that stuff on since we’ve been married. You’ve never seen me in all my oily aromatic glory.”

“I can’t wait,” said Russ.

“I also take borage seed oil internally,” Lia said. Then turning to Edison, she continued, “And you know what? It does amazing things for that time of the month.”

Russ’s mouth twisted and Evan looked like he’d swallowed a snail. Russ hated it when girls did things like this. Didn’t they know how weird and uncomfortable it was?

“What does it do?” asked Edison.

Russ pursed his lips and Evan grimaced.

“Well,” said Lia, “it eliminates
all
PMS. Literally. No pain, no bloating, no depression, no irritability, no nothing.”

“Wow,” said Edison. “That’s amazing.”

Lia turned to Russ, who was still twisting his lips together and trying to think how he could change the subject without seeming insensitive. “I mean, haven’t you noticed that I’m always the same? That I’m never grouchy and hormonal when I’m having my period?”

“Well,” Russ said. “To be honest, baby, I never noticed that you were—uh—”

“Yet another advantage to the premarital hanky-panky moratorium she had going with you,” said Evan to Russ.

Lia grinned again. “Yeah, that and I don’t get it so often.”

“Gosh, I should really give borage seed oil a try,” said Edison.

“Me, too,” said Evan.

“You know, Lia,” said Edison. “I can really relate to your beauty trauma. Like with me, I hated my eyes because they weren’t like Caucasian eyelids.”

“Caucasian eyelids?” said Russ. The conversation was getting stranger by the minute. It had gone way beyond the bizarreness of skinny girls who thought they were fat.

“Yes,” said Edison. “I have the usual Asian epicanthic fold at a time when bigger, rounder eyes are considered beautiful. Lots of Asian girls have surgery for it, and at one point, I also really wanted that. But gradually, I realized that there is nothing wrong with my eyes; they just aren’t the ‘in’ eye-style. And my mom reminded me that whatever I surgically changed would anyway be passed on to my children. So I would have to deal with it eventually…if not in myself, then with my kids.”

Russ raised his beer to Edison. “Now that’s more like it.”

“Also,” Edison continued, “some people actually prefer Asian eyes. In general, some people think Asians are more attractive than other races or ethnic groups.”

Russ glanced at Evan, who pretended to blush and put his fingertips to his lips and said, “Aw, shucks.”