I wrote some time ago about my short story "Wendy and the Lost Girls," appearing in the anthology Nothing But Red. Recent events in the news compel me to produce it in its entirety here.


WENDY AND THE LOST GIRLS
By Elizabeth Bales Frank

Our number one dream is the one we call “The Milk Carton.” Maya dreamt it first and told us about it the next day in the cafeteria. That night, we all had it. You’re at the quick-store buying milk. Wendy’s photo is on the milk carton -- the famous photo, the one you by now know better than your own face, the one on the flyers you’ve been handing out every weekend. So many weekends now that you can’t remember what you did with your time before finding Wendy was your purpose. The carton provides the numbers on Wendy, what we used to call the “vital stats” and then, as the hope of vitality faded, the cold facts. Five feet, 98 pounds, hair sandy blonde, eyes -- with their cute downward-slanting corners and their amber flecks and their ability to refract prancing shifts of light -- “brown.”

After we had dreamed the dream enough times, we started to have variations: Susannah sees herself on the carton. Kimmy sees Wendy buying the milk, not in the grainy surveillance camera footage, but live, as though she’s hovering somewhere in the store, although even being there doesn’t focus the picture any – Wendy is still dulled and blurry. Tricia sees herself buying the milk, dropping the carton. It explodes, spewing blood.

The dream of the milk carton is the first united dream, silent, like an ancient movie. In it we hear nothing but our heartbeats, nothing but our breathing. Except when Kimmy dreams it. Then we hear a voice calling through a wave of crackle. Through white noise. Through the sound between stations.

Maya was the first, too, to dream “Wendy, Indifferent.”

In that one, you find Wendy, safe and whole. At the sight of her, your back arches like a cat stretching out of a nap. Your relief is electric. It hums like a string on an electric guitar and the reverb burns up your spine and sends hot spidery shivers across your scalp. All those sensations happen at once, as scary as a first kiss. Not the real first kiss, the clumsy pressing, but the one you wait for, the one that will awaken you. The one that will explain to you all the fuss about kisses, that will penetrate your shyness and spiral deep inside you where you never thought a kiss could reach. We’ve heard all about those kisses and in our dreams we feel that sensation, seeing Wendy, safe. In the early dreaming of the dreams, we fell out of bed with the excitement of her sighting, but by now we’ve learned to control the salty currents of relief. Our ability to control the impulse to give way too soon, we think, is what brings us the dreams in the first place. After all, everyone wants to see Wendy. But we’re the ones who do.

We learn to relax. We stay in the dream. There she is. Wendy. In the flesh. And we love her. We love Wendy. Maybe we didn’t before, but we do now. Before the disappearance, she was on the social fringe. New in school, shy, joining us late. Uncertain, with those pity-me eyes and her smile that tried too hard. Her nervous courtesy pricked us, reminded us that our mantle of cool wasn’t there as recently as yesterday and could vanish again as soon as tomorrow. Her bright redundant greetings oh hey hi what’s up good morning Maya Susannah Kimmy, how are you Trish you look great your hair oh my God those earrings are great, only pointed out that our current ease was temporary, something that, at any moment, could be taken away.

But whatever we thought of her before, Wendy is all that anyone thinks of now. We all love Wendy now. We love her because she was so loyal so fast to our stupid rules and traditions. We love her because she admired things about us that everyone else had stopped noticing. We love her because she was such a hungry audience for our puny talents. We love her because she isn’t here.

And we treasure her as you treasure anything you’ve lost. A kitten. A charm bracelet. A grandfather. A dad. Our daydreams about her once she’s gone dress her up so much that if she came back no one would recognize her. Wendy is ideal. Because she isn’t here to prove you wrong, Wendy is everything we need her to be.

So we find Wendy, safe and whole. And we’re ecstatic with relief – now we’ll get attention, too! We’ll be heroes, ‘cause we found her! It’s Wendy’s indifference after we dance around her, after we cover her with hugs – it’s then that we realize we’re in a dream. She doesn’t care that she’s been found. She doesn’t want to come home. She won’t even write a note to her mother (and in the dream, of course, we never have a pen.) In the dream, she’s gone over to some other side, a place where she’s free of our concern. She can barely tolerate the time it takes us to understand that she just doesn’t care.

Her indifference is regal. Wendy is a princess of the land in between the stations.

The sequel to “Wendy, Indifferent” is “Wendy, Rescued” although the rescue is still in progress when the alarm buzzes us awake. If , in a rare but exciting version of “Wendy, Rescued,” we get to drag her along with us, heading for home, hellbent for breakfast, something always prevents us from getting Wendy to her mother. And that’s what we used to want to see. We used to want it so much that it was the first dream that left our bed and nagged at us in waking time – we wanted to see Wendy back with her mother, the kneeling, the hug, the tears.

We’ve shared other dreams: Kimmy’s dreary documentary “Looking for Wendy,” Tricia’s thriller “Looking for Wendy While Being Stalked by Someone Unseen,” Susannah’s existential “Wendy, in a Parallel Universe, Thinks We’re Missing.”

It was Maya who suggested that we unite our dreams deliberately. We keep the visions to ourselves. We call each other at night and agree on the dream that will take us, together, to Wendy. We don’t tell the shrinks they send to the school to help us “deal with it.” We say nothing to our mothers. Comfort would only weaken us. It only takes one mother’s touch, one light on in the hall, one Let’s talk about it, honey to initiate the wave of static that loops around and feeds on itself until the transmission is broken and we’ve all lost Wendy for the rest of the night. And we can’t lose Wendy. She has things to tell us that no one else will admit.

The moment she wins us is the point in “Wendy, Indifferent” when she gives us that weary, grown-up smile, tired of our tirades about searching and worry and curfews. She won’t come back. She can’t. She is beyond our pleading and our dread. It is when realize that that we know that we want to be there, too.

Kimmy went first. She left a note that read: “Dear everyone, I had to go, I couldn’t resist it anymore.” After that, they rounded us up and grilled us for hours, which only proved her power. Who would have listened to us before? Just say “Wendy” now and see what happens. See how just saying her name invokes trembling and action, respect, legislation. No one ever hinted that a girl could have such stature. Nothing we can do can equal that. That’s something we learned together in the white noise.

Maya, steamed that she was not the first to go and exhausted from the official questioning, ordered “Kimmy” for that night’s viewing. It was a risky choice, since we hadn’t yet created “Kimmy” and all we wound up getting was a fog and the sound of two girls laughing. Tricia was found in the park later that night, barefoot in her nightgown, bruised and mute. They took her to the emergency room, then to the psych ward. We weren’t allowed to see her. We knew they gave her drugs because we couldn’t raise her on our frequency. Her voice grew fainter and fainter and eventually disappeared.

Susannah went next and went far, having learned from Tricia’s lesson. She went without a trace, no strand of hair, no fallen button, no idle witness to tell a story of an unmarked van. Susannah dove head first into the white noise. When we found her in the dreams, through the static, she said only, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” forgetting, we realized, Maya’s instructions that the next to go had to give detailed directions. It seems that our rules don’t apply out there.

We’re locked in at night now, kept home from school, questioned like suspects. It’s worse, we imagine, than anything that was done to Wendy before her martyrdom. Why question us so hard? You wouldn’t understand our answers. Even if we confided about our network, you wouldn’t believe us. You never do. Girls, Wendy told us, are prey: skittish, glossy, small. Our strength lies in camouflage or short bursts of speed, our ability to dodge. Our bodies, our lives, are soft, dispensable.


We disappear in your distraction – a glance away, we’re gone. You let it happen all the time. Listen to us? Wendy, lost in silence, is the only one you’ve ever heard.

Labels: Nothing But Red, Wendy and the Lost Girls

posted by Elizabeth at 11:52 AM