“The worst thing is, you never know when somebody’s going to just disappear,” she tells him. Tutti, through inviting the narrator into participating in her choreographed staging of a shooting scene from the film Heat and encouraging him to get to know people while they’re still around, sets the narrator off on a path to close the distance between himself and his loved ones.
The narrator has a number of arm’s-length friendships at school, such as video game-obsessed Doo-Wop and Tutti, nicknamed on account of a ripe-smelling fart, who also comes from a single-parent household and invites the narrator into the tradition she shares with her father of watching films. The young narrator lives with his widowed mother and bed-ridden, dying grandmother, whose pension is exploited by the narrator’s mother against his grandmother’s knowledge, to fund her business as a psychic. Its cast of characters from a largely residential area live disconnected, isolated lives, unified only by the sole market and the school. It follows a boy who buys an egg sandwich every day one summer from the standoffish woman (the object of his boyhood crush) who works at the sandwich counter of the local market, who he nicknames Ms Ice Sandwich on account of her signature blue eyeshadow and deft use of tongs in sliding sandwiches into plastic bags. Ms Ice Sandwich’s aftertaste is honey-sweet, a little sour, and dare I say it? It was even a little salty. I read it in a single sitting that very afternoon.
Its cover was turquoise and practically tessellated with sandwich triangles. After realizing I was putting too much pressure on the clerk to find a book that captured my very particular emotional desires, I pulled the slim novella Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami off the highest shelf. They all seemed to taste of soured, tepid coffee and I was looking for a mango sorbet, something which paints a similar emotional landscape as Eve Babitz rather singularly does. Has it always been this way? At the bookstore that afternoon, nothing seemed to have the colors I was looking for. Colors, once captured, seem to quickly fade away, become trite and tried, sometimes become noxious and sugary as a children’s breakfast cereal. Finding whimsy seems to be like catching a butterfly, swiping a net through the air to trap a dainty, elusive creature.
One late summer morning, I was running my finger along the spines of my bookshelves-past the twisted postmoderns and the bleak and dramatic Russians, through the airy, cerebral words of the French-and I wondered where the colors went? I knew they were out there.
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