this short story is dedicated to the summer i spent as a security guard at a major art museum
xoxo
I was looking in the mirror when Ana posted the story online. The employee bathroom was dimly lit with old fluorescents, a small, two-stalled room tucked behind the gift shop. The girl in the mirror wore a blue button-down shirt and the clip-on tie they gave all the gallery attendants after Rachel showed up to the press preview wearing a necklace made from real human teeth. I made the girl in the mirror smile, turning the corners of my mouth up. I made her frown.
I glanced at my phone where it rested by the sink, drops of water dewy on the lit-up screen. I heard some of the visitors outside, trying to find an exhibition guide. A baby wailed. My phone buzzed.
The notification was from Ana. I still got alerts whenever she did something online, even though we didn’t talk anymore. The post detailed her story’s publication in a magazine known for its offbeat, realist fiction, along with a short note thanking her editor for all his hard work on the project. I realized I had no idea where in the world she was: New York, Miami, La Paz, Biarritz, Macao. I left the bathroom, smoothing out the tie, my phone slick against my palm.
I was stationed on the left side of the central gallery, one equipped with an installation by an aging sculptor from Buenos Aires. The installation was a major piece in the artist’s retrospective exhibition, which filled most of the warehouse space, minus a few rooms that housed the permanent collection. Long rows of tall white cinderblocks stood up vertically, evenly spaced in a large rectangle across the floor. Around the perimeter of the rectangle, sheets of copper lay flat, reflecting brown and green depending on the time of day.
I flagged down Lori to ask her if I could take lunch early. I wanted to read Ana’s story. Our lunches went in shifts—early, middle, late. The earliest shift was the least populated, and therefore my favorite, with the bonus of it having the best conditions for reading the story. Just you and the Lake Erie cormorants, their bodies yawing.
Lori walked up to me with a stack of paper in her hands. It was a sheath of pamphlets.
Take one, she said. Then you can go on break.
The pamphlet had a pale woman’s face on the cover, followed by the words the stakes, and then, in smaller font, the questions.
You know, she said, widening her eyes.
She gestured at the installation in front of us.
Of course, I said. Thanks.
I opened the first page of the pamphlet. There was a small graphic with a man and a woman in a bedroom. The woman shed large cartoon tears. On the opposite page, a man in a suit raised his eyebrows inquisitively.
The museum was always trying to find new ways to address the controversy surrounding the artist on exhibition, the sculptor, and the events surrounding his ex-girlfriend, a photographer who’d attained a cultish popularity among certain South American feminist groups. When anyone at the museum referred to either member of the couple, they just said Philip or Ysabel, like we were on an actual first-name basis with them. We weren’t. Philip never even came to his own exhibition. Ysabel was his ex because she was dead and maybe Philip killed her, or at least that’s what the activists claimed, the ones who showed up to the opening with large signs and haircuts. Philip had been accused of pushing her out a window in their Lower East Side apartment. There were pictures—bad, grainy—of Ysabel splayed out on the sidewalk. They were eerie because Ysabel’s art addressed the abjection of female bodies, often featuring images of herself, naked, pressed against large pieces of glass.
She hit the sidewalk face-down and died on impact. But when Philip was put on trial, he was let off. There wasn’t enough evidence to indicate whether Ysabel had been pushed or had jumped. During the trial it came out that she’d been depressed for a long time, especially following Philip’s affair with a younger woman in their circle. She hurt herself sometimes, lost her job at a restaurant, overslept. The judge dismissed the case. I closed the pamphlet.
Wake up, a man said from behind my right shoulder. It’s freedom time.
I looked around. Keenan had come to take my spot for lunch.
Thanks, I said.
He held up his pamphlet. They gave you one, too.
Did you see this? I asked. I opened the pamphlet to a page with a screaming, mustachioed artist, his limbs tied to two opposing horse-drawn carriages. On one carriage were the words the art; on the other, the artist. The graphics in the pamphlet were excessively detailed, done by one of the curators who, we knew, moonlighted as a moderately successful illustrator of children’s books.
Help me, I’m a minimalist, Keenan said in a French accent, twisting an imaginary mustache in his fingers.
It was a joke among the attendants: the institution’s justifications for its own show. There were press releases and conferences, photo opportunities with the mayor and a few moderate assemblywomen. An activist group showed up periodically to the exhibition, even after the opening, protesting Philip’s popularity and the stance of the exhibition itself, which didn’t acknowledge Ysabel or Ysabel’s depression or the alleged murder. But their commitment waned over time. Proposed legislation presented a new, more pressing problem in relation to how women got hurt in their own homes, and there were only so many activists to go around. Still, after the successful unionization of the war memorial attendants next door, the managers had taken a new interest in our wellbeing. They brought in stale donuts and let us off early on Fridays.
I hear if you look at these blocks long enough you turn into one, Keenan said.
Seems like it, I said.
Keenan laughed, waving me away.
I turned off my walkie-talkie—we used it to discuss potentially destructive patrons, usually children—and walked up to the table on the roof, the one where every gallery attendant sat for thirty minutes each day. Two other girls were already up there, Sarah and Rachel, eating and talking together on a bench. Rachel’s hair matched the greenish color of the lake behind her, disappearing into the murky water. When it got cold we still had to go there for lunch, since the breakroom in the museum’s basement got converted to a lesser curator’s office.
They tried to make the roof nice. There were a few potted plants along the wall, a beach umbrella. In the table’s center was a small, red aluminum box with a slot in its top: employee suggestions, it read, in bold, sans-serif font. Some castaway art objects filled the small courtyard, too. There was a metal obelisk with cloth wrapped around it, like a shawl, in the far corner, fitted with a bronze plaque that identified the name and birthplace of a dead female artist. There were three discarded soup cans, carefully nailed into the low brick wall that lined the roof. It was supposed to be a work perk, being surrounded by art, though most of the art was pretty bad and got put up there out of sight for a reason. The museum specialized in contemporary art: every day its galleries grew obsolete. When new works were acquired, curators donated the old ones to modern galleries downtown, or laid them out on the roof if no-one else would take them.
I pulled out my phone and opened the story, flicking at the screen. Ana wrote in short, brief sentences, bits of dialogue I imagined easily, almost as though her story was a movie. I knew she’d wanted to write, and did, but the last time I’d heard about her writing was in high school, at John Muir in Tremont, before her parents moved the family to Brooklyn with her dad’s law firm. Back then she wanted to write a screenplay that featured the two of us as twin leads. The movie would be about a pair of teenage girls who took a road trip to Florida to kill a young adult author because being a teenager wasn’t anything like what the author said it was in her books. Ana hadn’t come up with an ending: whether they got away with it or not, whether they actually committed the murder at all. I thought it was a good idea even though I hadn’t done the things that were in her books and Ana had. My life didn’t even have a curfew, let alone a being-on-top or a reverse-anything. I trusted Ana that it probably was not at all like the young adult author described. When she told me about the screenplay, I’d been flattered, even grateful: it confirmed my integral role in her life.
I’d thought about writing something myself, maybe even something about Ana, about us being friends, even sometimes more-than-friends, but I could never figure out how to do it. I didn’t think I could characterize her without offending her, leaving out some crucial detail, some fragment of her essence. The way she did her eyeliner—dark, and just around the corners—or the way she wore her boots, half-laced-up with the tongue flipped down. It didn’t feel like my place to decide which parts of Ana to include in a story and which to leave out. I wondered if I could write about the times she’d called me, crying, and I’d told her to watch a TV show about men who hurt themselves in funny, spectacular ways. I wanted to make her forget about whatever she was crying about, but it never worked. She cried harder: she identified too strongly with the men. Writing about our friendship felt like a betrayal of her, since she was the one who was the writer, and also the more interesting person.
The new story was about a time, two years earlier, that I remembered well. The world it depicted was not, in fact, imaginary, but deeply familiar. I’d thought, looking at Ana’s post in the gallery, that the presence of an editor implied the creation of a fictional land, or at least a fictional set of people, but I realized quickly that I was dead wrong. In reality, Ana had put various figures from her life into situations they had actually experienced and then given each person a slightly different name. Samantha was Sam, and Oliver became a girl, Olive.
I’d visited Ana in New York, where she’d been staying with her parents before she started a study abroad program in Beirut, one that ended early when things went wrong for her mentally. The story mostly described the period that followed: Ana dated a person that I thought was bad news. Everything in the story had occurred, though this version was Ana’s version, and I had my own. But I wasn’t in the story at all: it was like the world was composed of only Ana, Ana world, with a few supporting actors, a few friends, most of whom seemed to reflect different attributes of Ana’s personality. I scanned the story looking for something close to my name, but I didn’t find it.
The last time I’d seen Ana was on my visit to New York, the one before the timeline of the story. I could never figure out what went wrong, not really, except that after that our paths didn’t cross much: I moved back in with my mom in Cleveland after college; she hated Cleveland and wouldn’t visit.
I regretted reading the story. I wished I’d done what I liked to do most on my lunch breaks and walk across the street past the Mickey Mart to the only living mall in Cleveland. Ana and I used to do it during lunch and free periods before she moved, playing the Mall Game, which wasn’t so much a game as it was just going to the mall, but insincerely. It was like travelling through time: the stores there didn’t exist anywhere else, not even in internet form, and remained open only by some ghoulish, mall-specific feat. We would go in and breathe the food court smell and try on bras and underwear until it was time to go back to school. The underwear store was bright and tacky, the walls covered with posters of skinny, tan women posing in lingerie. Advertising was different now: on my phone I saw photos of real or close-to-real women wearing neutrally colored seamless briefs. I preferred the mall store. It felt more honest about what was expected of me. There was only a limited set of choices: thong, balconette, boy short, longline. Size medium, size large, size extra-extra small.
In the dressing rooms Ana and I shared, I would look at myself until I didn’t feel like whoever I was anymore. Often I wasn’t just one girl, but many, lined up in quick, rotating succession. This girl was a girl in a thong. She was a girl in high-cut silk lace. She was a girl with a garter, a bodysuit. She was loyal and bookish and generous or intelligent and surprising and cruel. Mostly she looked like Ana, even after Ana moved away. We had the same narrow hips, the same freckles at the tops of our shoulders.
There was one moment that contained all the secret possibilities: all the different girls that I was, bundled up in the mirror, thong and boy short and size small-slash-medium-slash-large. Then I would buy stuff, usually whatever was cheapest or fit best, if I was splurging, and I would rush the women behind the counter, gogogo, break is almost over. It lingered even after leaving the store: the feeling of being the girls in the dressing room. Walking back with the new things in my hands, how perfect they were, how they fit me, I thought of the image of my selves in the mirror, the way the fluorescents spread out across my body. The shadows around my stomach lit up like pockets of dirt on a moon. Reading Ana’s story felt like whatever was the opposite. Like looking in the mirror and not seeing anything at all.
Are you going back? Rachel called from across the roof.
Oh, I said. I forgot.
You forgot! I love that. That’s so funny.
I had a reputation for being funny, but I wasn’t sure why. I never really tried to be.
Um, I said. Sorry.
Below Rachel’s collar I could still make out the teeth necklace, poking into her neck-skin. I watched her go down the stairs in front of me. My legs felt unsteady. I grabbed onto the wall for support, my shoulder rubbing against a poorly framed midcentury print. I corrected its alignment, tried to rub the smudge away on my fingers with spit.
How was lunch? Keenan asked when I got back to my post.
Short, I said.
He laughed. I him hurry to his spot, his skinny back small against the white alcove of the next room. We called his post Solitary Confinement. The cramped, windowless gallery had all the boring stuff: letters from Philip to various curators and black-and-white photographs of him as a child. Philip seemed kind, at least based on his correspondences, his child-eyes large and dark. I looked back at the cinderblocks. Same as before: big, white stones that looked like gravestones if you squinted. I heard Keenan’s radio click on from the other room, beeping against the silence.
Two young women came in, talking about something I couldn’t make out. I saw that they wore masks with faces printed on them: identical white female faces plastered with permanent smiles. Their teeth were bright, almost silver, and perfectly aligned, printed on fabric like the kind surgeons wear, maybe a little longer, so that the women showed only their eyes, their hair. The blonde wore tight jeans, the brunette a long blue dress. Both wore the same identical, cheap-looking stilettos. I heard them coming before I saw them: clack, click-clack, clack. They echoed.
The stilettos were a problem. One feature of the exhibition was a series of rules regarding the copper floor panels, the ones lining the space around the cement blocks. They were huge—you couldn’t enter the room without stepping all over them. The panels could be walked on barefoot, but not in sneakers, and not in heels, and especially not in stilettos. Stilettos could cause serious damage, their thin points scraping against the metal. I pulled my walkie-talkie out of my belt and held down the talk button.
There’s a problem in Gallery 3, I said into the device.
No answer. I tried to click the button again before I noticed that the top of the walkie-talkie was set to off. My fingers fumbled at the knob before a light blinked on. I heard the blonde’s stiletto dig deeper into the metal, then the brunette’s, the heels emitting high-pitched screeches.
The two women glared at me, nearing the installation. I felt myself start to approach. They glanced around, looked back at me, then looked away. Then they walked right across the panels, grinding down their heels. Little flakes of copper were loosed into the air.
Wait, I said.
They looked at me and dug in their heels.
That’s not allowed, I said.
I heard my voice like it was the voice of another person entirely, a pitchy thing that hovered in my throat.
That’s not allowed, the brunette imitated.
Her mask-face smiled, but her eyes were serious.
Don’t you know? the blonde said.
Don’t you know? the brunette repeated, louder.
I’m sorry, I heard my voice say to the two women.
They looked at me, still smiling.
The voice said, I’m just trying to do my job.
It seemed like the right thing to say, in my head, but when I heard it I knew it was wrong. The women looked at me with disdain. I thought about lying to them, saying that I was quitting next week, but what would that do? The exhibition would stay up anyway. Finally the suited security guard at the other end of the gallery came up to them and said they would have to leave the museum and don’t you know not to do this to the artwork, to destroy it. They didn’t respond, still staring at me, not even looking at the guard. Eventually they left. The big doors at the front of the building opened and shut, their bodies vanishing behind the fogged glass.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I flattened my shirt against my stomach, my thumb chafing against the wrinkles in the cotton. Political disruptions had become relatively unusual since the activist group departed, but other incidents—accidents, one-offs—were frequent. It was the main tenet of my job to stop them from happening. During mandatory training, the communications co-ordinators had shown us a series of videos: security footage of young children knocking over large steel sculptures made of combined car parts, a particularly vivid clip of a young man pissing on an abstract painting. His pants shoved down his thighs, like a kid stands at a urinal.
I held my thumb to the walkie-talkie button.
Incident in Gallery 3, I said.
I heard my voice echo around the museum from the radios of the other attendants. Incident incident incident. Gallery gallery gallery.
I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to stand on the issue of the activists: whether I should look the other way or wear some type of pin, one with a progressive, supportive slogan, the kind that would signal my solidarity. But even though I was, in theory, in solidarity with the activists, I wasn’t sure if the art had anything to do with what was bad about the artist in question. The cinderblocks themselves felt almost comically silent on the issue at hand. Maybe that was the problem: if the cinderblocks were more honest about their disregard for mental health, or more transparent about their flirtation with other women, then the exhibition would have been fine. Or maybe it was the fact of the exhibition itself, that just having it in public seemed to say something positive about the man who was negligent, in the worst-case scenario the man who had murdered, or maybe just the man who cheated and lied. I wasn’t sure how it said something positive, though. The exhibition’s title was just the word sculpture, and Philip’s name, followed by the dates of the show.
I heard Lori’s flats clicking against the floor before I saw her. She clutched a clipboard to her chest, her brow clenched. She talked to the guard in the far corner, and when she turned back to me, she looked angrier. Lori approached, bending her mouth to my ear even though we were the same height.
You’ll need to be more vigilant in the future, she said. They never should have gotten as far as they did.
I—I said.
We’ve been over this, she said. About the activists. These incidents should be reported immediately.
I understand, I said, feeling the place where the clip-on tie dug into my neck. My walkie-talkie—
We have to present a united front, she said. You’re the face of the museum.
I understand, I said again.
I filled out the report with the pen attached to the clipboard, a plastic one with the museum’s name printed on it lengthwise. Lori walked away, the pen dangling behind her like the tail of a rat.
I went back to my post and hoped the activists wouldn’t return, digging out the pamphlet to read it again. I halfway expected some part of it to be different, adapting to the events of the day, the new surge of local activism. But it wasn’t: the mustachioed man stared at me from his perch, the two chariots paused forever, right in the middle of pulling his body apart.
I held up the pamphlet and dug out my phone. I thought about calling Ana. I wondered what I would say, if I would ask about the story, if I would get her voicemail. Maybe the Ana-character would answer, asking what my name was. I opened the photo application, watching the images unspool like embroidered squares laid across a small quilt. I scrolled back three years. It was amazing how fast you could scroll. Back that far it was mostly pictures of Ana, pictures she sent me, pictures we’d taken together. I pulled up one of them.
My walkie-talkie crackled softly by my waist. I turned it off.
On my phone was a picture of two girls. It was a picture of myself, but a little younger, and Ana. I was wearing a blue button-down. My face looked almost the same, minus the thin lines on my forehead.
In the picture, the me-girl was turned toward Ana, mouth open, while Ana stared straight into the lens. We were both wearing all these necklaces. The necklaces had tangled together tightly, twisted around on each other, their metal rusting, flaking off on our necks green and dirty. The girl that was me looked at Ana with adoration. Ana’s hair was dyed pink at the ends.
I looked closer at my phone. There was a softness to Ana’s eyes that I hadn’t noticed before, and a cut above her lip. Sometimes I didn’t understand Ana at all, or at least not like she understood me.
In my senior year of high school—Ana’s freshman year of college—we went to Lake Erie around Christmas. She stayed in my mom’s guest room, the one off the kitchen. It was freezing at the shore. I looked over at Ana and saw she was crying. When I asked her why, she said the big lake was so beautiful it was scary. You couldn’t see the end, and that was terrifying, and that was also part of its beauty. I wished I could cry too: I wished I could understand all the ways the water was beautiful and scary at the same time. I thought maybe when I went to college I would understand. I never understood. I liked going to the beach. It wasn’t that scary.
Staring at the gallery, I thought that was the greatest misunderstanding between me and Ana. The scariness and beauty of the water. Or maybe it was that Ana was a vegetarian, or that my parents got divorced, or that Ana had her first kiss at age six with the boy who sat next to her at Montessori. Or that she was the writer and I wasn’t. She took the picture and I didn’t. She looked at the lens, and I looked at her.
I put my phone away.
Rachel came from the next gallery over to take my place for my afternoon break. She held her phone up, motioning to the screen.
I’m going, I said.
No, she said. Look.
There was a news story about the exhibition and the controversy in the paper, and a photo of the women from before in their smiling masks. They’d talked to the press before showing up, part of a larger action directed at sexist or negligently sexist institutions. The gallery attendants always shared the news articles with each other, especially when the controversy made it to papers outside of Ohio. It made us feel important, even though mostly no-one cared or read the articles anyway.
You know what that means, Rachel said, raising her pierced eyebrow. They’re back.
What happened to the legislation?
It passed, Rachel said. Horrible.
Horrible, I agreed.
I handed her phone back to her. I thought that if the activists came again, maybe I would just let it happen, pretend I wasn’t watching. Not my job, I would say to Lori, except that it very literally was. Not in my job description, I could say. That wasn’t good either.
I left Rachel, heading to my usual table on the roof. The red box was there: employee suggestions. I wondered if I could say something, write a note about the controversy and the weird position all the employees were in as the bad person’s art attendants. Maybe it would actually do something if the voice came from the inside, instead of just from the activists.
I took a scrap of paper from the wrapper my sandwich was in. But when I looked over at the top of the box, I realized the slot was closed off. There was a red metal block placed just below it. The slot was fake, like when they stitched pockets on leggings to make them look like jeans. I picked up the box, thinking maybe there was another way to submit suggestions, and saw an artist’s signature on the bottom of it. There was the mark of an edition: one out of twenty. It wasn’t real. It was just art. I put the paper wrapper in my pocket, and went back to my post.
At the end of the day I walked out the front doors, down the street to the mall. The lights at the underwear store seemed even brighter than normal. I took off my tie. I blinked in the fluorescents, breathing in the food smell, the pretzels and orange chicken and salad bowls. Then I got to deciding what underwear and bras to try on. I picked out everything, almost every size, every style, every color. I made my way to the little rooms at the back of the store. They had thick metal handles, the kind that feel expensive but aren’t. I looked at my reflection.
The girl faced herself in the mirror, seeing her sloped, small shoulders, her long wrists. The dark mole on the side of her hip. None of the underwear fit very well. She put her hand flat against the mirror, so that it reflected and made a mark, an outline. She breathed on the glass until it fogged up and then she wrote my name in the steam. She wondered which was more real: the mirror-person or the thing I was.