“Are you all right?” The tattooist touched her arm with his fingers. She moved her arm away from him. “Sorry,” he said. “You only want to be touched if it hurts.”
She looked at the little girl on her arm. Her lips were pursed, forever trying to blow out the candles.
“Can you teach me how to do this?” she asked.
“Transform yourself? Or tattoo?”
“Draw with a needle.”
“Do you have any money?”
“Forty dollars and two memories,” she said. “I could stay here. Clean up. Do anything else you want.”
“Don’t scratch your tattoo,” he said. He started to hand her the card with care instructions written on it. She stared at him.
“All right,” he said. He nodded as if he had known it all along.
“I want another,” she said. “The other arm. A snake.”
He got up and went to the door and locked it. He pulled the shade down. Then he took a stencil from his flash and returned to her. “Turn around,” he said, “so I can work on your other side.” He pressed the drawing onto her arm. When he pulled it away, Rose could see the outline of a snake. She stared at the bandage on her other arm and imagined the girl beneath it while the tattooist drew the snake.
When he was finished, he dropped his instruments. “I can’t do any more,” he said and walked up the steps that led to his loft. She listened to his heavy breathing for several minutes before she got up. She threw out the needle and put away the inks. Then she went into a small office in the back and curled up on a battered couch.
When she awakened, it was still dark. She felt hurried, as if something had to be finished soon. Something she had started and somehow had messed up. She turned on a light over the desk and looked at her arms. Where the glass had pierced her skin were now black lines, jagged shapes tattooed into her arms.
She remembered standing in the motel room, wondering why she was there. Her mother was dead. Too many sleeping pills. Her father was dead. Too many cigarettes. And she was alive. Her body ached. Her body that wasn’t hers. The tattoo itched. It had not brought her back from the edge. Something had pricked her, just as her father had feared: men, boys, life. She hurt, as if slivers of glass were tickling her insides. She had raised her fists in anger, wanting to pound the windows that looked out onto the parking lot, when suddenly she knew how to have peace.
She ended up in the hospital eating shit and getting sponge baths from Nurse White.
She turned her arms around and pulled off the bandage over the little girl and her birthday cake. The scab came off with the bandage. The girl had tears in her eyes. She had heard the conversation, had known her life had changed.
Rose peeled off the other bandage. The snake shed his scab, and Rose was in the backyard of her home, eight years old, bent over a translucent snake skin, wondering where the snake had gone. What an easy life. If you don’t like it, just shed it and begin anew. She reached out a finger and touched the skin tentatively. Dry.
“If it’s from a poisonous snake you could die.” She looked up. Uncle Bobbie. He smiled. All his smiles looked monstrous. She wasn’t sure why. He snatched up the snake skin and began running. She went after him, into the woods where the oaks and maples were shedding their leaves. Suddenly his footsteps stopped and she was alone in the woods. Then Bobbie jumped from behind a tree and threw her to the ground, laughing all the time, tossing the skin into the air, out of her reach. He pulled off her pants and then his. When it was over, he promised to get her a pony if she didn’t tell anyone.
Rose turned off the light. Now she had four memories.
She watched the man prick pictures into other people’s skins all day. She took care of his inks and needles and cleaned the floors. At night, she counted his money and gave it to him. He needled her when everyone was gone. A drop of blood tattooed on her right forearm brought Bobbie back to her, brought his smile as he zipped up his pants and she put her hands between her legs. She cried and he told her to shut up. Her parents were afraid to leave her with anyone else except family. Afraid of the outside world. Uncle Bobbie had been right, they would tell each other, there were millions of guys out there just waiting to hurt their child.
A willow tree brought her father back. She leaned her head against his knee. He stroked her hair while he read his newspaper. Her mother knelt in her garden and whispered to the flowers.
“I’ve never seen anyone heal as quickly as you do,” the tattooist told her. He seemed tired, as if he felt it all, too.
She nodded and took the needle from him. “May I try?”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” he said.
“Isn’t that what this is all about?” she asked, holding the needle like a writer holds a pen, poised to express herself.
“No,” he said. And he went up his steps. She waited until she heard his heavy breathing and then she began drawing.
She tried a flower but it turned into a warped sun, bringing back a summer when she was four and Bobbie was pushing his fingers between her legs while he held onto something between his legs. Rose laughed at his face, funny Bobbie, until he hurt her and she started to cry and wondered where her mother was. The sun was too hot and the flowers were dying.
“Momma,” she whispered.
She tried tattooing flowers again, this time on her thighs. First violets, then roses, gardenias, rhodies; a garden bloomed on her skin and she was next to her mother in the dirt. Her mother was crying, the tears making paths through the dust on her face. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Rose asked. She was ten and her throat hurt from trying not to cry. Bobbie lurked in the bushes somewhere, always waiting, and Momma cried.
The tattooist came down the stairs when it was morning. He looked at her thighs.
“You’re an artist,” he said.
“The agony and the ecstasy?” she said. “I’m my own Sistine Chapel.” She held up the needle. “Will you do my back?”
“Why?”
“I have to remember,” she said.
“But wasn’t it nice before?” he said. “When you knew nothing?”
She shook her head. “I knew nothing when I was two years old and look what happened.”
“You hardly scab,” he said.
“I go straight to scarring,” she said.
She took off her shirt and camisole. She didn’t care if he saw her. He made holes in her back and let the ink soak in, making the memories permanent. They could be wiped from her brain but not from her skin.
“What have you drawn?” she asked when he paused.
“Can’t you tell?” he said. “Don’t you remember being a kid in the bathtub with your brother or sister? You’d wipe the other guy’s back and then put soap on it and draw, usually words, and the other person would have to guess.”
“I didn’t have any brothers and sisters,” she said. “But I do remember a cousin, Mary, and we played together. Sometimes we took baths together, when we were real little and we’d do that. Yes, I remember now.” It had been nice to touch her and to be touched by her. They were each the other’s drawing boards. They got water and soap everywhere. “We floated little plastic ships in the water and pretended we were seeing the world.”
“That’s what I put on your back,” he said.
She got up and went into the bathroom where there was a full-length mirror and looked at herself. Two girls stood on a sailing ship. They held hands and waved to the mermaids in the water. The ship bobbed in the waves. A flag with a rose on it flapped in the breeze.
Rose smiled. Some of the memories were good.
She went back into the room where the tattooist sat.