[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Jo Langdon - Strings

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Jo Langdon worked on her manuscript of short fiction, Temper.

The stories in Temper traverse tertiary and school spaces, academe and precarity, as well as experiences of postpartum care, early parenthood, and familial crisis, and the intensities and complexities of love and female friendship. ‘Strings’ shares an interest with other works of the collection in what exists beneath the surface of seemingly quiet, small or ordinary scenes and events.

 

^{Image by Guillaume Bourdages}

Strings

            In home ec class they make boyfriends, one each out of string in different colours – wool, in fact: bright soft worms from a bowl at the centre of each table. Each length of wool is approximately the span of Ru’s hand, from where the inside of her wrist and palm meet to the tip of her middle finger. There is no option to make a girlfriend, though that she might want to has only occurred to Ru in brief hot shifts of shame for which she chides herself mentally to get a life. (Nobody in school is openly out, and she has neither a mirror nor window in which to see other possible versions of herself.)

            Each colour represents an attribute and some of the girls are making theirs mostly blue, because by the laminated instruction chart, blue stands for physically attractive. It is a clear, vivid blue, obvious as the sky, with a darker blue for strong. There is a gentle, baby blue for kind. Ru weaves slowly, telling herself she is taking care – but also not taking this too seriously as to worry over how blue or not-blue her string man turns out to be, or to worry about any of the other colours and their associations. Her classmates have chosen their strings already, claiming them in piles between their working hands, and Ru realises that, by going string-by-string from the bowl, she’s limited her options: mostly the pieces left are burgundy, which stands for dependability, a trait she’s given little thought or care to before. Paired with mustard – for funny – all that’s left are the colours of hotdog condiments. 

            Beyond this task at hand is a remembered movie scene – one that plays over in her peripheral attention. There are white ducks on a lake’s surface; the symbolic weight of water on all sides, every border liquid: bright, cold and shifting. Two young adults in a rowboat cut through the vista, one of them pushing, pulling the oars, the other reclined. Then the rain – the young woman’s hair turning a darker shade of apricot, the colour deepening to cinnamon as it takes in water and holds it. The scene in Ru’s head progresses mutely, though she knows there is an emotive soundtrack. The couple are drenched and expressive on a jetty next, unleashing their misbeliefs, then the young man lifts the young woman higher under the falling rain and they melt together in a cumbersome kiss. The ducks – or are they swans? – are no longer part of the mise-en-scène. Before the weather set in, Ru thinks, their white figures had seemed as innumerable as the ensuing raindrops.

            In years to come she will remember this scene anew – its memory, and less the scene itself, unwatched in the time since. With it she will think of social media chain-mails asking what advice she’d give her younger self in just three words. Somehow the string men tie this prompt and the film together, and Ru thinks: break up with X, dump him – like the Britney Spears t-shirt, ketchup-bright letters against powder blue – and she will try to whittle these ideas into a trio of words. The love interests themselves barely figure, and the string doll is long cast away – or sometimes figuratively transformed into a paper-doll chain, emblematic and empty. Ru’s awareness circles, trying to discern her own colours like stripes in toothpaste. She’d like them neat and solid, crystallised like the sections of a candy cane, instead of this lathered mess she makes – works up – then sometimes lets go, like spit.