The Life Fatale (con't.)

At Western State College, you can major in disciplines like snowboarding kinesiology and mountain rescue. I had a mandatory, senior-level English class on Bob Dylan and an internship writing for the ESPN Winter X-games. Dude. Check my CV. Girls with pit hair? Check. Dogs with dreads? Check. If it was dumping snow on the mountain, no one went to class. Instead they hitched rides (sometimes with professors) and threw their boards and skis in the backs of old trucks and vans and Volvos for a half-hour climb up Highway 135 for a powder day.

There’s a big “W” carved on the side of the hill when you first drive into town, and before the homecoming game in Gunnison, the students set the big “W” on fire by way of hiking up the mountain with torches and chants like Native Americans. And as soon as the sun sets, the big “W” lights up the whole valley and a crowd of flashlights dance around a bonfire where bare-chested boys in face paint and more whoop it up.  As a visiting student from the University of Alabama who is true to all things Crimson Tide, I found this display of school spirit both awesome and appropriate and a reminder of home. Undergrad in a ski town ain’t bad. But the rest of my life? It’s just too easy to live in La La Land...

My pals—none yet thirty—climb far and fast up the coconut trees of life; their calloused feet and hands are made for scrambling. They have houses to keep, husbands to raise and offspring. Out of our circle everyone has a baby or two except me and except Allison, who is a poet. Allison also returned to below the Mason-Dixon after our ski bum tour, which makes us the kindred spirits out of the bunch with the no babies thing and the southern thing and the word thing. But no one messes with Allison about this shit. Go, figure again. You don’t mess with dykes from Kentucky.

The odds are stacked in Gamble’s favor. Prim’s daddy complex makes for a long night of things the old man hasn’t done in awhile—along with a few things he had never done before in his life. Not even in Tijuana. She makes him feel like he is half his age. After it is all said and done, the two of them smoke cigarettes and talk in bed. Prim lies on top of the sheets, exposed. She flicks ashes onto an ashtray, but some get caught in the breeze from the ceiling fan and fall onto her naked body. Gamble entertains Prim with a conversational generation gap, which makes her giggle, which widens the gap even more.

“You never told me you were a ballet dancer.”

“You never asked.”

“When I was in high school we did this dance called the mashed potato. That’s the only dance I know.”

“Oh, really?”  Prim asks. “Can you mash potato? Can you do the twist? Jesus, Gamble. My nana taught me to jitterbug when I was twelve. When I was twelve, you were forty-one.”

Film noir historians believe there are three types of women. Two are inconsequential—The Good Girl and The Marrying Type. One is not. The Femme Fatale deals the most direct blow to the idea of family, wifedom and motherhood. I am the Femme Fatale of my collegiate clique, and ‘Bama never even it saw it coming.

Bottom line: My peers are mothers, good girls, and the marrying type.

I tend to query letters, editors, and sleepless nights with a blank page. I share a bed with the nicest man I’ve ever seen. I work at the mall. All this time, I thought we were running even-Steven—my friends filling their little red wagons with conventionalism (albeit of the Gen-X hippie nature) and me with, well—filling my wagon with lots of things. And then sometimes I dump out those things and start again. Other times I set the whole goddamn wagon on fire and kick it off the edge of a deep ravine, the flaming things tumbling out on the way down, down, down and starting subsequent fires of their own. It’s them with their nuclear families and me with, well, this.

There’s this flick called I Wake Up Screaming. A 1941 thriller. Three men try to seduce the same woman and are pissed that she doesn’t give in to any of them.

One man says, “Women are all alike.”

And to this another replies,” Well, you’ve got to have them around—they’re standard equipment.”

These days, standard equipment e-mails. Often and regularly. First the niceties: Hello, how are you? Are you still drinking like a fish? And then on with the show: The forwards. The maternal verve cleans out the coop (of whomever) and keeps it all together for the sake of posterity. As a result, the esprit de mommy has been extended to me. Well, and Kokopelli666 gets the same forwards I do. She must be barren, puckish too. They cram my inbox: bits about breast feeding, how to get knocked up (prayer, lift your legs while the semen’s still in you...), the fucking environment, cancer, unstable mental states. Apparently, all of the above can be cured by one or a combination of the following: yoga, triathlons, tai chi, chai tea and most importantly (big smile, tilt of head) a positive attitude. At this very moment Scotchguard is seeping through my pores, and I’m going to not only get cancer, but I’m going to get the type of cancer that will turn me into something akin to a Cyclops chicken full of warped hormones and steroids, like the ones they serve at KFC. Oh, and have a nice day. The second act is all about baby, which is a one-sided conversation since I don’t have any. I have a sloppy house and pulp fiction. Sub-standard equipment for the 21st century. What am I thinking?

I am thinking femme fatales don’t turn out to be good mothers. We turn out to be the “No wire coat hangers!” mothers and the margarita-with-salt mothers. So ha-ha, ain’t it a funny sumbitch that ‘Bama ended up without the full-range family and the SUV and the soccer practices? I guess the same way it’s funny that my husband isn’t really my cousin and yes, I’ve slept with a black man.

In Out of the Past, another fine mess of categorical bullshit film noir, from 1947, femme fatale Kathie Moffet tells Jeff Bailey the truth: Womanhood is a duplicitous métier:

"I never told you I was anything but what I am—you just wanted to imagine I was."

Prim walks out of the bathroom fresh from a fuck and a shower to find Gamble hunched over in the chair by the window. He always hunches, she thinks. She also thinks: I will hunch if I live to be old, too. His eyes are closed. Prim wraps a towel around her wet body, and checks his pulse. He isn’t breathing. She makes the bed and packs her things and before she leaves, she orders room service: the midnight breakfast with bacon, eggs, grits and toast with jelly. One pot of coffee with cream and orange juice. Fresh fruit if they have it. She chuckles when she thinks about Gamble saying to her, “small-time crook.” As soon as she hangs up the phone, Prim grabs her backpack and walks out the door. She calls Gamble’s wife from her cell, which is the stupid mistake that costs them both their lives.

We are deep, designing creatures with vulpine capacities. My ability to produce a replica of this nature both astounds and terrifies me at the same time. And the deal? I won’t knock getting knocked up until I try it. But come on. Just saying, “femme fatale” sounds cool. Doesn’t it?

Jennifer Henley Daniel was raised as a Southern belle before she became a writer.
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