End Zone

13

Myna Corbett and the responsibilities of beauty were to occupy me on and off for the rest of the year. I don't know exactly what it was I felt for her, or thought about her, or expected to give or receive. There are a thousand kinds of love. The simplest thing to say is that she made me feel comfortable. She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement. So this love in a way was ecological; she made me feel at peace with my environment and maybe on my better days I did the same for her. Since my examinations of life sometimes ended in oblique forms of selfmockery, and since my investigative projects often manifested themselves as parodies of hunger or grief or exile, it was refreshing to seek in this woman a perfect circle whose reality overpowered the examiner's talent for reducing in size and meaning whatever variety of experience he was currently engaged in sampling.

Myna owned half a million dollars and membership in a sciencefiction book club. There, by most standards, her attraction ended. She weighed about 165 pounds. Her face had several blotches of varying size and her hair hung in limp tangled clusters. She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up. We had two classes together, Mexican geography and a sort of introduction to exobiology. Myna was the only female in the geography class (traditionally a course for football players) and seemed quite serious about the layout of Mexico. We got along well from the very beginning. I enjoyed listening to her talk and I liked the total liberty of her clothing. There was a sense of cavalcade to the way she dressed. Any number of fashion eras were likely to be represented at a given time. The feeling was warm, colorabundant, distinctly antihistorical.

We had mock picnics behind the Quonset hut- chopped almonds and Gatorade. Myna would usually bring along a sciencefiction novel. She'd eat and read simultaneously, bouncing slightly on the brown grass when she reached a particularly invigorating passage. It was during our third or fourth picnic, on an unseasonably cool day, that we got involved for the first time in the responsibilities of beauty. Myna wore a carved plastic bracelet, meshed gold chains around her neck, and a handembroidered? Victorian shawl over a silk gypsy blouse and floorlength patchwork skirt. Her boots were studded with blue stars."I've just realized what's really curious about you," I said. "Somehow you don't transmit any sense of a personal future."

"I'm a now person, Gary."

"That's good because I'm a then person."

"I know," she said. "That's why I like you. I need some perspective in my life."

"You'll hate me for saying this, Myna, but I think you're one of the prettiest girls I've ever known. Man or boy. Pound for pound."

"People are always telling me that. What a pretty face I have. It's just a thing you say to fat girls. It's supposed to make us guilty so we'll lose weight."

"But it's true," I said.

"I know it's true. All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor. But I like myself the way I am. I don't want to be beautiful or desirable. I don't have the strength for that. There are too many responsibilities. Things to live up to. I feel like I'm consistently myself. So many people have someone else stuck inside them. Like inside that big large body of yours there's a scrawny kid with thick glasses. Inside my father there's a vicious police dog, a fascist killer animal. Almost everybody has something stuck inside them. Inside me there's a sloppy emotional overweight girl. I'm the same, Gary, inside and out. It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?"

"There are standards."

"Whose?"

"I don't know. The Greeks. The Etruscans. You can't escape some things. History forces you to listen and to see."

"You have to balance history with science fiction," she said. "It's the only way to keep sane."

"We'll have another picnic tomorrow "

"Jesus, can we?"

"We can do anything we want, Myna."

"Can we bring something besides chopped almonds? Can we bring vegetable pancakes and maybe brownies?"

"We can bring anything we want as long as it's humble and meatless."

"Can we not bring this blanket? Can we bring a different blanket? I don't like this one. It makes me think of dead baby rabbits."

"It's been in my family for generations."

"The way you say some things. I actually believe you. I think you're serious. Then it hits me that something's not right. Can I bring my book again?"

"Of course."

"Can I wear my orange dress that you like so much?"

"You look like an explosion over the desert. Yes, you can wear it."

"Can I bring my tarot cards with me?"

"Of course you can. Absolutely. It's a picnic."

"Thank you, Gary."