Impact 16: of Intinction

"And here, behind you is Gabby!" Claire says finally, and I'm introduced to the woman I'd seen in the bathroom.

"We've been hearing about you, it's so wonderful to put a face to Claire's stories!" Gabby tells me in a lilting British accent as she takes my hand in both of hers, before moving around the end of the table to the empty seat across from mine.

"Seatmates again!" she says as we sit. Something about her smile makes me squirm inside.

"Boats" of sushi and sashimi are ordered for the table, but Claire orders seaweed salads, vegetable tempura, miso glazed eggplant, and something called agedashi dōfu for us.

"Fried tofu," Claire explains to me. "It's good."

"But you've had sushi before?" asks Gabby, seeing how at sea I am with the menu.

"I haven't, really,?" I admit, which takes her by surprise.

"How did you manage that?" she wants to know, her voice is loud and attracts the attention of the larger group.

Everyone is surprised to learn that I've never tried sushi before, which is embarrassing for me, making me blush. I feel exposed, that everyone now knows what I am, an imposter from backwater Buffalo.

"Sarah has been a vegetarian since she was... ten? Eleven?" Claire explains, with real pride in her voice and an encouraging squeeze to my knee.

"Eleven," I agree.

Danny hadn't been interested in it and it had never occurred to me that there might be things I'd like, so I'd always bow out any time friends had invited me.

"Why?" Gabby asked, her expression of frank disbelief is as blunt as her question. I thought of my battles with my mother over food and my weight. She would attack me for being fat and not eating enough.

"Your father says we should stop buying you clothes!" she had threatened. "I have to force you to eat any dinner but you sneak down here to eat in the middle of the night, and look at you!" she'd said in disgust and frustration. "You're gorging on candy and junk food!"

And she was right, but only half right.

After examining my throat and teeth the doctor had told her I was forcing myself to throw up. He had said it in front of me as if I wasn't there. He had said it with contempt, as if he was reporting that I was a shoplifter or I was cheating on my homework. I remember the look of betrayal she had had on her face, as if it was something I had done to her.

"WHY?" my mother had demanded; hysteria rising in her voice. Would she go on a screaming jag there in the office, in front of the doctor? I could remember feeling a claustrophobic panic. My thoughts raced, trying to think of some way to stave off the tirade. A few days before I had overheard some other girls talking about one of their cousins who didn't eat meat. It had seemed such a strange and alien idea.

"I'm a vegetarian!" I blurted.

And it worked, it had stopped my mother cold and the doctor seemed to pivot from judging me to judging her.

It didn't end the battle with my mother, but it ended up being my first real victory. She hadn't believed me, and told me she wasn't going to make me special meals; that I had to cook for myself. She had expected me to fold, to give in and come back to her chastened, but instead I had leapt at the opening. I made meal plans and shopping lists and researched recipes and never once ate meat again.

It was at least partly a coincidence, but that was also when my struggles with my fat middle school body ended. It was the year my height surged. And while Kelly had never gained as much weight as I had, she'd lost her baby fat at twelve, the exact same age as me. But either way I had won. I had renegotiated my relationship to food and my mother - or at least began to. My preoccupation with junk food had shifted in an obsession with cooking. And, far more importantly, for the first time in my life, still under my mother's roof, I'd become my own master.

"You are a willful and hard headed child," she had told me that Christmas as I cooked for the whole family. I'd volunteered to make all the sides, but had stepped in and cooked the ham as well. She had been angry, but there was real admiration in her eyes and the way she said it. I was already a better cook than she was.

"I never liked it?" I tell Gabby.

"Do you eat eggs?" Brent interjects before Gabby has a chance to ask a follow up. I told him I do.

"Definitely get the tamago," he urged, and then ordered "Ikura" with a quail egg on top as a starter for the whole table.

"Ikura is salmon roe," he explained. "So with the quail egg it's like sushi chick-on-chick action." This made us all laugh, and Claire gave my knee another squeeze under the table.

We are each served a bowl of warm miso broth with a single square of tofu, signaling the meal has begun. Gabby talks a lot, but I gather from the way everyone treats her, she's important. She's pretty in her own way, but with large blunt features and a coarse manner, that I'm sure she feels is forthright. I'm not very good at parsing British accents but hers sounds posh. It doesn't matter. I'm enjoying being next to Claire, people watching, and the novel surroundings, so I'm happy to listen to Gabby talk.

The Ikura arrives and it is a little upright roll of dried seaweed around rice topped with bright orange salmon roe and on top of that is the beautiful unbroken globe of yellow quail yolk.

"One bite," Claire tells me, holding up her finger and flashing me an encouraging smile.

"I've never eaten raw egg," I admit to her under my breath, trying not to let the group see my misgivings "or fish eggs..."

"No caviar?" Claire asked in genuine surprise.

"We weren't really that kind of household either?" I explained with a shrug, which makes her laugh.

"But at parties, never?"

"I guess I've been offered, maybe? It just never seemed - I don't know?"

"You'll like it," she tells me. "I promise - although honestly I've never had it with quail egg..."

"It's just the quail yolk," Brent points out. He's been cajoling the whole table. I wasn't the only one looking dubious. "You're going to love it!" he promises.

"It's very pretty," Claire says, popping hers in her mouth, her eyes going wide with excitement and delight, as she chews.

'Don't be a baby,' I tell myself. I'm afraid it's going to be cold and mucusy and taste like fish.

Pushing aside my dread I pop the roll in my mouth. There's a lot going on. Temperature wise, the rice is wonderfully warm. The raw yolk breaks immediately - melts really, as there is no feeling of it breaking - and while it's not as warm as the rice, it's not cold. Moving over my tongue and around my mouth the consistency is surprisingly pleasant - not like mucus at all, it's just a runny yolk, but maybe creamier? And the flavor is rich, buttery and smooth. The seaweed is flaky and pleasantly mild, less papery or salty than I expected, but it's the roe that's the real surprise. Unlike the quail egg, which didn't burst or put up any resistance - just abandoning its shape and oozing over my tongue - the salmon roe resists me, the slippery little pearls are delightfully cool in contrast to the rice and quail yolk and hold their shape stubbornly. They feel like little jelly pearls between my tongue and the roof of my mouth until I bite down and then they burst with little salty snaps.

"She likes it," Claire announces and everyone laughs. I realize I've closed my eyes and am smiling and moaning a little. I open them to see Gabby smiling back in open admiration.

"I can't remember the last time I enjoyed anything that much!" she says, in her crisp British accent.

"Sarah is a true foodie," Claire tells her. "She's an amazing cook - like no one I've ever known."

This makes me blush and I want to protest but the waiter brings the first "boat" which is enormous and piled with beautiful fish. The colors, oranges and bright whites, are more like colors I associate with deserts. My moment of bliss and embarrassment is forgotten in the logistics of distributing all the different pieces to all the different diners. Claire passes on all of them, which earns her a squeeze from me.

Over dinner there's a discussion of the massive artificial waterfalls constructed under the Brooklyn bridge, why it's not lit at night, and why the structure looks so barebones and utilitarian.

"It's the expression of an ethic, not an aesthetic!" Claire argues to others at the table who seem impatient with the artist's choices. "Nothing is hidden, there's no artifice."

"They are artificial waterfalls, it's all artifice!"

"No," she says with a confidence and authority that makes me laugh. "If he had dressed it with fake rocks and lit it like an amusement park attraction it would be fake. But instead it is real water, pumped through pipes, supported by scaffolding and acted on by actual gravity - voila! Nothing more."

"I haven't seen it yet," I admit when asked for my opinion. Claire says we'll take her parents to see it next week.

"It's supposed to be great from the Ikea ferry," Gabby tells us.

"We can take them for lobster rolls and key lime pie," I suggest to Claire.

"But you don't eat lobster."

"But I like eating pie."

The performance is in an art space nearby. The front is a gallery bar. On the walls are large blowups of Polaroids by a photographer Claire doesn't recognize. The images have a soft blurry focus - giving them an impressionistic look.

In half the pictures pale young women, some alone, others in twos and threes are posed

naked, their legs spread obscenely wide, knees bent, exposing themselves. The background of these photos are all in nature, swampy water, muddy forests, rocky beaches. The real focus of the photos are the girls' pale hairless crotches - or at least I think they're hairless. It's hard to tell because of the grainy focus, which saves the images from being grossly pornographic, but somehow so do the poses and backgrounds. If it weren't for the poses the girls would look like corpses, pale bodies abandoned in the woods, but instead they look like alien spiders or deep sea crabs more than sexual objects. I'm reminded of the shiny white flesh of the sushi.

In the other half, a beautiful young woman stands in her underpants, posing with a much older bald man. The man has the physique of a bodybuilder and takes body builder poses. The backgrounds are mundane, but strange. They look like they belong on a beach, but instead they are outside a little cottage or standing in a garden or awkwardly in a living room; all weirdly domestic.

They remind me of Leslie, the man I bought the clothes rack from. I imagine the two of us posing in our underpants with ice cream cones in front of my building. The idea makes me laugh.

"She's very smart."

I turn to see it's Gabby, she's standing beside me looking at a photo of the young woman and the older man.

"I'm sorry?"

"The artist," she says.

"It's a woman?" I ask Gabby, who is watching me and nods. "...now that you say it, it kind of makes sense?"

And it's true, the more I look at the pictures - of girls laying on top of each other, like strange albino crabs, crawling out of the sea, rising from the mud in mossy forests - the less they look like the work of a man.

"That's her," she tells me, pointing at the woman in the picture of the couple in front of the little cottage. "And he's her father."

"Oh!"

There's something shocking about that, transgressive. I'd assumed the two were lovers, or were meant to be in the narrative of the photos. I try to imagine taking a picture like that with my father and shudder.

"Strange I know, Aneta is a really interesting artist," Gabby tells me. She's come over next to me, standing close to examine the photo I am looking at. The picture, two naked girls, both with their legs spread at the camera, are piled like cord wood in a muddy puddle in the middle of a dirt road through a sparse looking forest.

"Aneta?"

"Bartos. That's her too," Gabby tells me, pointing to a picture of two pale women, smeared with mud in a mossy stream. In this particular photo the focus seems to be their asses, which are pushed together, big and fleshy - like strange fruit. These don't look like girls' bodies. These asses are full and womanly. Gabby seems to be indicating which is the photographer, although their faces aren't shown.

"How can you tell?"

"She's very pretty," she tells me with a sly smile, as we move to the next image. This one is of the pale girls. They are in a dark forest and are clearly in a sixty-nine, the girl on top's head between her partner's splayed knees, neck bent to to lick her pussy.

"I love her work," Gabby tells me.

"I like them," I admit, but I'm a little uncomfortable with Gabby and how much she likes them so I add "but she's no Sophie Calle-"

"You're the Boss Bitch girl!"

I must have looked as caught off guard as I felt, because Gabby caught herself, guffaws, and grabbed my shoulder.

"Oh my God, that sounded awful, didn't it?" she laughs, her eyes wide with disbelief at her own gaff. "I'm sorry, it's, I've only just put it together - you're Claire's friend who called Sophie a Boss Bitch!"

"I am-" I admitted, deeply mortified to know that I was the "Boss Bitch girl".

"No, you're blushing, I'm sorry, you mustn't feel bad," Gabby commanded. "Really, everyone loves that story, Sophie and Paula most of all."

"Hey you two," Claire says, interrupting, a tentative smile on her face. Gabby is holding me by both arms, her hands tight around my biceps.

"We're going back for drinks," Claire tells us. "Come on."

Giving Gabby a smile I reach for Claire's hand and let her lead the way.

The performance space is in a large back room. It's a black box performance space with high ceilings but not terribly large, maybe twice as big as Claire's loft. The lights are up and the space is mostly empty, there's a projection screen on the back wall and some old Persian carpets on the floor. Besides some folding chairs against the walls, there's nowhere to sit - no place for an audience.

In the center of the room, on the floor, is a young couple kneeling over a collection of laptops, and other electronic hardware I can't identify. Anodized boxes and coils of heavy gauge aluminum are strewn on the carpet. The arrangement seems haphazard but everything is linked together by a tangle of cables, which are wrapped in colorful stripes of thread - like the way girls sometimes wrap a lock of their hair while on vacation. There's something hippy-ish about the whole affair.

"Is this a happening?" I ask Claire, but this earns me a blank look I've learned means she doesn't understand the reference, so I drop it.

We are milling around the entrance of the space with about two dozen other people, everyone looks as unsure what to do as I feel.

Mark and Brent bring us drinks and the others begin to filter in and group up to chat. I'm glad to feel Claire take my hand. I listen to the others making small talk and watch the young couple busying themselves plugging things and checking their screens. Everything seems makeshift and provisional - all the parts are exposed, the tinkering and preparation for us all to see. I think of the way Claire described the waterfalls and turn to see she is watching everything the young couple is doing with great interest.

"The performance has already begun hasn't it?" I ask her. "It's an ethic!"

She turns to me, her face lighting up with a big smile.

"Yes, exactly!"

The rest of the crowd is like us, giving the performers and their equipment a wide berth, but watching their strange tinkering, not quite forming a ring around them. The couple are about my age, they are painfully thin with the strange haircuts and ill fitting vintage clothes of died-in-the-wool hipsters.

The lights dim a little and the screen lights up and there is a quiet building of an electronic background sound I hadn't noticed, but I think may have been there the whole time.

The performance involves handing out the brightly colored cables to the audience. The hipster girl hands me one, showing me to hold the aluminum coils in my hand, murmuring something about touching. She is also holding a coil trailing a cable in her other hand, and reaches out to touch my shoulder, when she does the music changes, making a rising trill like a theremin. She raises her eyebrows, to see if I understand. I see other audience members holding cables, touching each other, and their contact producing very different sounds. I look and see Claire doesn't have a cable but Gabby does.

"Touch Gabby," I tell Claire, who has been watching and understands. Gabby is holding hands with Molly, who has a coil too, so Claire reaches for Gabby's shoulder. I touch Claire's face and the music makes a loud "Zing!"

It's not that late, but Claire wants to take a cab.

"Thank you," I tell her, once we are situated in the back of the car. We are separated from the driver by a thick screen of plexiglass, my lips close to her ear.

"For what?"

"Sushi. Double Dragons. Everything."

"Lucky Dragons," Claire says, correcting me with a crooked smile. "Did you like them?"

I think of the strange hipster duo and their odd equipment, the loops of soft moans, gamelan, clinking bottles and rain drops... the flashing lights, everyone sitting on the floor touching each other.

"I liked it?" I tell her. "The best part was when we kissed."

"I love you too," she says, smiling. She pauses a beat, her smile warm but shifting minutely, then says, "You were a hit with Gabby."

I blush, remembering how much Gabby had wanted to keep touching me throughout the performance, especially after I had created the stir by kissing Claire, the movement of our tongues making the music loud and frenetic, until we pulled apart laughing.

When Gabby had tried to kiss me I had tried not to be rude, turning my face and presenting my cheek with a smile. I could tell Claire was wary of offending Gabby, but things had gotten a little too awkward after that. Finally Claire had excused us, saying we had an early start.

"Yeah she was kinda all over me."

"You looked like you were enjoying yourself."

I think of Gabby taking my hand and making the music zoom with a low bass hum, leaning over to whisper in my ear, telling me what lovely small hands I have. "So wonderfully narrow and thin," she'd cooed. "Like a girl's."

Her lips had gotten close enough to my ear to make the music treble and skip.

"She's nice..." I say defensively.

"And pretty, and successful and very rich."

"Are you jealous?"

"Of you? I thought you handled yourself really well actually. I've never seen her go after someone like that, but even so, Gabby can be... tricky."

"That's a very diplomatic description," I laugh. "But you didn't answer my question, did Gabby make you jealous?"

"Maybe a little," she smiles. Her expression and tone are self deprecating. My body relaxes, and I realize I had tensed up, that I was braced for a fight, that I've been braced since Claire said we had to go. But Claire isn't angry, she's embarrassed.

"She's not anywhere as pretty as you," I assure her. "And besides, you're successful and you told me you were rich!" I tease, wanting to get away from the subject of Gabby.

"My stepfather is rich."

"Same thing."

"It's not."

"I've been duped?"

This earns me a soft punch on the shoulder.

"I'm not a star fucker or here for the money."

"I know you're not," she smiles, looking out the window at the darkened streets. After a pause, and still looking out the window, she asks, "Why are you here?"

The question is genuine. Claire isn't angry, but she does want to be reassured.

"Because every time I look at you my heart aches like it's going to break," I whisper in her ear, so the driver won't hear, but also just to put my lips near her, for her to feel my words. "Because I never want to stop touching you. Because you're the most beautiful, interesting person I've ever known and you make me laugh. Because you are the woman I have waited my whole life to meet."