Opaline — Michelle Latiolais

Opaline, the sky, a color as though milk tinged with tomato, or with blood, and it was over, the day, over. She walked from the building where her office was, left it behind, talked the day off her as she went, the sky so beautiful, her favorite part of the day, the sky’s muted palette, colors she couldn’t exactly name, such glimmerings. Could she walk into the opaline, a woman enfolded into the pink milky sky, leave all the assholes behind?  

She thought of Medea, at play’s end, the mayhem done, over with, talked endlessly about, Medea taken up by some God’s chariot, she forgets which God, now, but a God, and so Medea’s deeds not necessarily exalted, not forgiven, but not necessarily held in contempt, either. She had never killed her children, as Medea had, but she had never had any children, had never wanted them, had always felt the world had enough children, so many, many uncared for, harmed. Any thoughtful appraisal of how we’d fared with children over millenia didn’t exactly turn up nurture.

But sure, that was something else that rendered her suspect, cronish, that easy relegation, the woman who kept her body all to herself, all mine, mine, mine, the witch cackle behind. If you didn’t birth babies, then you necessarily preyed on them. But she had done neither, though she’d hurt students’ feelings at times. She could tell you all about that, enumerate the instances, the tears, the long office hours to set things back on course, surprised always she was by how mild her words had been, her critique, how very gentle, really, and yet taken so to heart, taken as wounding. She might as well be Medea slaying the young.

Now, crossing the paving stones of the quads, the courtyards, she supposes some would think that she, a woman walking out from a long day’s work, her shoulder case weighing her down, that she had in fact killed children, her abortions, so long ago, but if that were the coin of the realm, possibility, then every menses she’d ever had had killed children, that profligacy of the female body, so many Fallopian trips, a profligacy of eggs surpassed only by the male body’s profligacy of sperm, possibility, squander, but now the sky’s milky reception, this color of nurture, and she left the department chairs, the deans, the Development honchos behind, walked across the Arts Bridge, the theatre now looming against the pink tinged white sky. She walked toward the Maya Lin courtyard, the low shivering water table, and then around it, the installation now ruined by artificial grass or Astroturf that covered what had been the gentle flux of gravel, of dirt. Whose decision, this desecration, and did Maya Lin know? Had Lin agreed to suppress the work’s elemental quiet, to give it the grubby crunch of plastic grass? Doubtful, she thought, doubtful that Maya Lin knew.

She walked out from her day, past Lin’s low murmuring water table, no dirt anywhere now, no gravel, no nude ground upon which shoe soles landed, connected to earth, to planet. She walked out between buildings, walked out beneath this milky solitude of sky, past the Arts Café, her heels beneath her sounding insistent, as though she bolted, but she wasn’t particularly bolting, just her usual quick walk, leaving all that had stayed her attention for hours, writing and books, writers, people longing to be writers, to know that as something that they will be, can be, are. She didn’t know, and yet she believed in them far more than she’d ever believed in herself as a writer, saw them as much more naturally accomplished, brighter, certainly brighter, always brighter. What had Oakley Hall said to her all those many years ago, “there are six organized writers in the world, and you’re one of them and so you just have to do it for the rest of us.” She had, she supposed, done that, kept a program organized, quietly intact, quietly supportive, quietly a cloister, this place where writing is made. The administration wanted big names and bright lights, wanted to turn the Program’s many notable authors into capital, figureheads for fundraising—they would do what they would do.

And they increasingly did things behind her back, did not ask, did not consult “the Director,” nor was she ever introduced officially as “the Director,” and so she rarely called herself the Director, rarely claimed this title, nor any part of the hierarchy they held in such high regard. Let them have their role playing.

Maya Lin’s most famous work in her head, in her mind’s eye, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the slow walk down the black wall of the dead, thousands and thousands of names inscribed in the granite, a country’s ledger, and the outrage, the fury, this Yale undergraduate, this Chinese-American girl whose design called upon a country, her country, to take account, to understand the cost of war, the cost stripped of rhetoric, language, cant. The detractors, they might as well have called her gook, oh, well, they did that, too. How dare this twenty-one year old architecture student not pay homage to courage, bravery, honor, the lexical bunting of a nation’s hubris.

And now, within a university, “they’d” covered Lin’s work in plastic grass, cut it around the black granite benches, the water table, fitted Lin’s elemental installation with a product made from industrial chemicals.  

How many funerals had she been to now, a large square of Astroturf thrown over the mound of dirt beside the grave. Let us look at the dirt, she always wanted to say, let us see this fertile eternity.

She, the woman walking out beneath the opaline sky, she knew she was to walk away, to retire, fold into obscurity, disappear quietly, willingly into her erasure, accept it as milk accepts vanilla, she understood they insisted on that. She wasn’t to fight, and there would be no chariot, or the solace of fame no matter its detractors, and then she was amusing herself, walking gingerly on the cobbled courtyard of the Beall Center for Art + Technology, remembering trying to drink a glass of champagne sitting within a horse-drawn carriage in Nantucket, its wooden wheels jiggling over cobblestones. She was five minutes married, listening to her husband converse with the carriage driver about Sir Walter Scott. The driver in her black bowler hat had been reading, the reins across her lap, waiting for them beneath the old trees, Waverley, or maybe Ivanhoe, maybe The Bride of Lammermoor. She could still see the Penguin paperback butterflied down across the tufted leather seat of the carriage, and she’d wait for a stretch of level roadway to sip from her champagne, not sure, not sure ever of much of anything at all, but quiet, too, in that moment, not embattled, the good French champagne in her throat.

 Today they’d all been laughing in workshop. She’d asked, “Well, just how big is a cat’s penis?” because she’d been working with them on figurative language, its demanding precision. The simile had been in the office of describing a skin tag, but quickly the table dissolved into the animal kingdom and its various penis sizes, and laughter, and the vital aeration of all of them thinking about what she called the mental theatre of the writing, the visuals provoked, precision, even a precision of scale.

Now, she started up another bridge, one that swerved alongside the Dance Studio, and that led into the Mesa Parking structure. She looked up again into the gorgeous opaline sky, this last vision before the tenebrous garage. Years ago, walking out into the evening to find her car she could listen as she walked to the booming rhythms of taiko drumming practice on the garage’s top level, the concrete structure startlingly vibrant, but she hadn’t heard that for years now, no doubt some policy barring students from practice amid the cars, though it had been the garage’s great moment, these huge drums, the intensity of the drummers, their heads wrapped round with woven bands and their arms flailing down from their wide stances. So mesmerizing, their calls, the beat of the drums, the dead concrete suddenly, immensely alive, resoundingly alive—hadn’t heard that for years now.

She walked this second bridge’s gentle decline onto Level 3 of the garage, but she had parked on Level 1, and so she moved between the coke machine and the chiming elevator doors, and started down the stairs. Some imbalance, her book bag, her purse, and she like knucklebones tossed out across a floor tumbled down the short flight of metal and concrete stairs. Her right hand shot out to grasp the railing, and missing, somehow shot back, hitting her own hard cheek, and her knees cracked down, one knee on one stair, the other knee hitting even harder against a lower stair, and then the momentum of her heavy head drilling her chin down until she was entirely stopped, sprawled across the landing’s gritty X of caution tape.  

She wasn’t to emerge from her hand-painted porcelains, her fine flowered sheets, her shoes with their bows and buckles to fight them, these Titans of academia, these chairs and deans and their unassailable policies. She was to go quietly, head hung low, her failure all about her like bad skin, shingles, the small picture in the pharmacy of an older female shoulder covered in livid sores. She was to shrink beneath this pain, become a caution, what happens when you’re not quiet, docile, meek.

Blood pooled beneath her head. She lifted her face, cupping her bloody chin, trying to contain it, the blood runneling down her neck, her throat, seeping past her fingers and down her shirt. No one was about, and she wanted desperately the sanctuary of her car. She gathered the books spilled from her shoulder case, and the contents of her purse, eyeglass cases and lipsticks, tissues, car keys. Blood now on everything, blessed as Vivian had reminded her recently, this significant etymology, the use of blood in consecration or sacrifice. She rose and stepped carefully down the next sets of stairs, clutching the handrail, her shirt soddened and her knees now reddened and stripped of stocking, beginning to turn black.

She settled her books, their leather bag, her large purse, in the well of the passenger seat, and then drew the tissues from her purse and started to wipe everything down, the tubes of lipstick, her keys. She held one tissue pressed against her chin, trying to stop the bleeding but she knew there were more corpuscles in the face than anywhere else in the body, that facial bleeds were hard to stop. She walked around the rear of the car and got into the driver’s seat and lowered the mirror. She looked like a crime scene. She was fine. Just a mess, Fate’s hand reaching out and slapping her upside the head, you dare feel sorry for yourself, you thought maybe it would be a chariot, a God, but she had dared, dared to try to think well of herself. 

She heard in her head, a voice down at the end of the workshop table, “I once saw a raccoon’s penis—did you know they have bones,” and she’d said, “okay, okay, you’re all hilarious, but could we return to my point. I’d like to make sure you remember where this started, my point about exactness,” and Charlie said, “oh, we’ll remember this, I assure you.”

 Her shoe had caught on a rivet, and then the weight of the books, her balance not what it used to be, off balance on the descent, and none of this fall had anything to do with who she was, nor with the animosity she drew to herself. It didn’t mean that some white Abrahamic God reached out and pushed her down the stairs. But even the journalists now said “find the story,” which seemed to her like an invitation to create mythology, a kind of magically imposed cause and effect. Not all fact patterns fell into narrative, told a story. Falling down a set of concrete stairs, bloodying her face and knees—this didn’t have anything to do with calling the deans assholes. Or perhaps the Gods punished you for the truth?

***

Michelle Latiolais is the author of the novel Even Now which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel A Proper Knowledge was published by Bellevue Literary Press, as was Widow, a collection of stories, involutions and essays. Her novel She was released in 2016 by W.W. Norton & Company. Recent work is forthcoming in Mississippi Review in 2025.