Dress You Up
I didn’t get to see her properly for nearly a week after that. We both silently agreed to keep our heads down and get on with whatever made my mother happy. I could see it pained Katya and her rebellious nature, but she did it for my sake, and I appreciated that. She fiddled about in the garden and by some miracle managed to get the roses to bloom. I stayed inside and did the endless ‘ladylike’ tasks provided to me – sewing scatter cushions, darning clothes, arranging flowers, taking my brother and sister for walks, going to church. Our eyes met when passing in the hall or when I’d collect flowers from the greenhouse, and she’d always slip me a cheeky smile. Every fibre of my being screamed out to reciprocate, grin back and crack endless jokes, but my mother’s fury had shaken me to my core.
“I’m sorry!” I felt like crying every time she smiled at me and I lowered my eyes to the floor and didn’t smile back. “Don’t think I hate you! I can’t risk you leaving me!”
Every evening I listened to ‘Rumours’ on a loop for hours, shivering at Stevie Nicks’ haunting vocals and remembering how Katya had wordlessly held me. I always developed a lump in my throat whenever ‘You Make Loving Fun’ came on. Because, she did. She made loving FUN! Being alive wasn’t a chore when I was around Katya, it wasn’t a task to complete to make someone else happy. It was joyful and cheerful and… fun!
I also thumbed my way through her copy of ‘Dorian Gray’. I’d never been a huge reader but I found myself captivated in the story, in Wilde’s ability to write a sentence that just made me scream “YES! That’s it! You’ve captured the essence of being human into a sentence!”
Katya had written in the margins of the book, tiny notes that made me giggle when I was reading alone, in my room at three in the morning with her patchouli candle flickering next to me. When Dorian first sees his portrait and flings himself onto a divan, crying about his impending ugliness, she’d scribbled ‘what a drama queen!’ with a doodle of a tiny crown. When Lord Henry tells Dorian he’ll one day age out of his good looks she’d written ‘delete it, old!”, which made me cackle for hours.
I finished the book on Thursday night, nearly two weeks after first meeting Katya. It seemed so bewildering to me that the whole bedrock of my life had changed in the course of ten days. I was physically more confined than ever, but mentally I had taken flight. I now knew in my bones that I was going to transcend this town, one day. I told myself every day, like a child reciting their times tables. I was getting out of here.
When I finished the book, the bittersweet melancholy ending, I closed it and looked at the picture of Oscar Wilde on the back – and burst into tears. I loved this crazy man, a man born in the wrong time but doing his best with it. A man who’d invented a whole new goddamn artistic movement that was all destroyed by something so inconsequential as who he loved. I identified so much with feeling trapped, a bird in a cage beating their wings desperately to break free but only hurting themselves in the process. The only difference between us was – I had a way out.
A sudden burst of reckless courage gripped me. I grabbed a pen and my notepad, scribbled out a note without stopping to check if it was legible, and tore downstairs as quietly as I could. I guessed it was about midnight, and skulked through the house like a thief. When I reached Katya’s room, I slid the piece of paper underneath, leaned my head against the door for a yearning, fleeting second of desperation, then became self-conscious again and tiptoed back up to my room.
The note said “Honey, Oscar Wilde, honey? Honey, I’d like to get Oscar WILD with you! xxx, Trixie”