the cure effect

by Mollia Jensen

IN THE SPRING OF 1986, my junior year of high school, a poster of Robert Smith—lead singer of The Cure—was the last thing I saw while escaping my burning house.

Thirty-seven years later, for my fifty-fourth birthday, my husband, Greg, gave me tickets to see The Cure in concert. I immediately asked him to be my date. Our kids were in college and we were in the process of slowly remembering ourselves as a couple. He must have known what The Cure meant to me, even though I didn’t talk too much about it over the years. Once I had the tickets printed out in my hands, I remembered how badly I wanted to go, even though I’d glazed over my desire and went about my days, weeks, and months, until it was too late and the show was sold out. My love for their music, their way of being in the world, and the joy of anticipating seeing them live for the first time bloomed in me. I sensed an opportunity to realign with the young woman who connected with their albums and lounged in their luminosity. Their songs tended to make a part of me pause, allowing my spirit to lean toward their musical essence.

I deliberated over my outfit as the special day approached. I knew I wanted to wear jeans and sneakers for comfort, but I also wanted to show up for the part of me that loved the transporting new wave literary songs with lyrics like “Come closer and see / see into the trees / find the girl / while you can.” I imagined a bright colorful puffed-sleeve blouse or a white fairy-tale shirt. There would be plenty of black clothing in the crowd and The Cure has a radiant side to them which I wanted to echo. Their songs can be haunting but also playful. The week before the show, I went shopping at the Goodwill outlet in Seattle. My dream blouse, however, was not on the racks that day. I browsed with the intention of dressing for the music, for the inner teen in me that entered a newly discovered swirly portal when she played their cassettes driving around in 1980s suburban sunshine. There was a batwing olive green t-shirt that felt like a cool-girl-in-the-forest, and a ruffled linen top that brought to mind Laura Ashley textiles in neon. Trying on clothes before purchasing is the sensible thing to do, but it can also ruin the rest of the day due to the lighting, stuffy air, and a full-length mirror in a small enclosed space. So I didn’t try them on—and later I paid the price when the stinky too-tight shirts did not fit. My special occasion outfit needed a back-up plan.

The day of the concert, I still hadn't finalized my outfit. I finished my work day and decided to stop by the fancy outdoor mall that I associated with wealthy women who wore blond blowouts and drove sizeable black SUVs. Usually, I avoided this palace of corporate offerings like Restoration Hardware and Lululemon, but it included an Anthropologie, which sold bohemian flair, and I was buying. I had only been there once, years before, and I’d recently discovered they offered plus sizes, which I enjoyed perusing online. I had just enough time to go by Anthropologie on my way home. Then I would walk the dog, get ready for the show, and be off to a night on the town with my husband. He might know a couple of the hits, but whichever songs they chose to play from the older albums of the early to mid 1980s and the dreamy double album were going to be taken in by me.

I walked into Anthropologie and felt the promise of the expressive blouse I imagined. I saw gorgeous yellow and creamy gauze on racks and relaxed into looking at the variation of cut, length, and pattern. But I must have been in the wrong section because all I saw was small, medium, and large, so I went toward the back of the store with the sale items and looked for my size.

Other women in the store were also what we call, here in the United States of America, “plus size.” They were shopping so I must have been getting warm to finding the spot where a whimsical orange and pink blouse in an XXL might be—but similar to a puzzle in a frustrating dream, the size ceiling stopped at large. After a few more stubborn minutes of searching, I went for help. The sales person was a young woman, maybe college age, busily putting dresses on hangers with a pile of clothes over one arm. She too was “plus size.” 

“Excuse me,” I said. “Is there not a plus-size section in the store?”

“No, I’m sorry, only online.”

Fifty-four years of shame roared inside me like a Class V River.

Then I said the kind of thing I would never have said before I entered my fifties.

“Wow. AM I NOT A PERSON?”

Her eyes darted to mine for a brief, clipped moment then fell back to their work gaze.

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

I completed the verbal transaction with a vowel stretch while taking a moment to feel my charged annoyance.

“Wowwww.”

Walking out of the store was a practice in finding my way back to the state of socially acceptable behavior while feeling rejected, flooded with emotion, and pretending things were okay. I passed other women in their shopping dazes, surrounded by fat aromatic candles and hippy-adjacent earrings. I had dared to dream that fashion had evolved to recognize that the average size of a woman, a sixteen, is an “XL.”

I wanted to look pretty for the concert, for the younger me that had survived something terrifying, and for them, the artists who exuded grace, depth, and the tenets of good musical storytelling.

The Cure was more than music. For me, The Cure encapsulates the feeling of being witnessed. Robert Smith, the lead singer, had been a personal guardian angel of sorts, a long time before, on a day when death hovered like smoke.

Outside the arena, Greg and I waited in line with other middle-aged people who looked cool as fuck and like they had done interesting things with their lives, and it showed through the wrinkles on their aged faces, the tattoos on their arms and—with some of the women—the ruby or garnet lips. I took in details like how some women let their chic wavy bobs go grey and others wore vintage dresses. I recognized DJs from the local indie music station. Which albums were their favorites? Which was mine? Was anyone as excited as I have always been about the song inspired by the Charles Baudelaire poem? I did not have the ceremonial outfit I'd hoped for to reflect my love for the band. I'd worked from my closet and wore the closest thing I could find, which was a white cotton blouse from The Gap with rounded eyelet sleeves, jeans, and for comfort, sneakers. I didn’t feel as dramatic as I wanted—but once the lights went dark to reveal the beauty of the show, I was one with all the outfits in the arena.

When Robert Smith slowly entered the stage satisfying the arena’s anticipation, a memory that has long inhabited my body bubbled up. In my high school bedroom, the poster of Robert Smith hung on the wall, across from the wooden bunk beds my dad built for my little sister and me. Inspired by the film Pretty in Pink—and since we listened to the soundtrack daily—we asked for them to be painted pink and he obliged, choosing a Pepto-Bismol color match.

Our mom lived across town and my sister and I lived with our dad. The weekend of the fire, our dad was on a fishing trip in the Keys. It was the first time we were left alone, even though I was a fresh seventeen and my sister was fourteen. We started in good fun with friends who brought over a bottle of champagne. We played records in the sunken living room and ran around the gated suburban community with its waxy leaf plants and little driveways. The boys got the most drunk, but my sister and I were undoubtedly also a bit tipsy.

After our friends went home and we fell asleep, the weekend took a dark turn. In the early morning hour, my sister and I woke to a claustrophobic heat. In a croaky voice she asked if I was hot and if the heat was on. This was a strange question to ask in Miami. She climbed down the ladder and I stepped off the bottom bunk, and we opened the bedroom door to a thick heat and smoke, along with some kind of wall of terror or black hole. We shut the door with animal instinct. Something told me to go to the closet and breathe in the fabric of hanging shirts where I found oxygen in a long sleeve and motioned for my sister to do the same. The room was getting smoky fast.

We had to get out. Everything in me knew we had limited or no time left before we passed out. I was the older sister, and it was my job to save us. The poster of Robert Smith was taped to the wall, just left of the window that we tried, unsuccessfully, to open. Were there curls of smokey matter drifting across his face?

I could see the screen through the glass. We maneuvered the handles to open the metal-framed windows. It didn’t work at first. Like many South Florida homes, the house had air conditioning and the windows had possibly never been opened. It was a one-story townhome, so we had that in our favor. There was a hedge we would need to tumble into, over, or through. My experience of time was different. It was still and contained the quality of an eternal nanosecond. I didn’t have the privilege of thinking what to do; I just did, we just did. In our bedroom on that early morning, I had a sense that my sister was always right next to me, but I couldn’t see her. We had been through so much together: divorce, our mother’s house being repeatedly robbed, drunk people, predators, summer camp in the mountains, pets, holidays, beaches, boats, swimming pools, seeing Annie the Musical in Miami Beach. How strange it would be to die together—but thoughts like that were ephemeral. I still don’t remember us getting out.

What I do remember, from glancing at it often before falling asleep in the pink bottom bunk, is Robert Smith on the poster, a headshot from his mid-80s prime. He looked mischievous with black hair tousled outward. His eyes, lined with thick black makeup, held a slight smile. In the smoke, his lips were the last thing I noticed: a fire-engine-red mouth, the lip paint trailing off and down from one corner—not in a scary way but to remind us to stay weird and true, qualities I could excel at if I let myself. But with addicted, undiagnosed parents, these traits did not feel safe to relax into. In years to come I would slowly and incrementally allow my weirdness to be revealed until someone else pointed it out mockingly, and then I would retreat, hard and fast, like absorbing a bullet of shame. Staying true was easier. Other than the few stupid mistakes I made as a young woman when I ignored my true self, staying true was, and continues to be, second nature. Getting the window open in a burning house in the smoky room with my sister meant digging down to the truest essence, one that reinforces a will to live, to survive.

The Cure are in their sixties now and their Shows of a Lost World tour received great acclaim. Some called it the concert of the year. Photos circulated of Robert Smith standing on the stage, his frizzy and gray hair sprayed up and out, his belly round under a graphic tee with a long-sleeved unbuttoned shirt over it. His smile received the thousands of people in the stadium. Journalists called the people fans, but Robert looked out at spirits in human form as only he can.

At the beginning of the show, he walked downstage, and then to each corner, offering himself carefully to everyone. He both stood and floated, quietly, non-verbally, with only the sound of cheering and the bells of his sublime heart.

His voice sounded better than ever, clearer than through the years on cassette tapes, CDs, or phone speakers. The entire show washed over me like phosphorescent waves. Greg sat to my left. On my right was a young person who looked like a character from the HBO series Los Espookys, with black hair jutting out in straight edges eight inches from their crown, and one side shaved. I guessed this Cure enthusiast to be twenty-five years younger than me. They held a cracked-screen phone in their hands and exuded an inner quake. When they recognized a song from its intro, they jutted upward, energetically touching all the space around them. I wondered if they knew that I also passionately loved The Cure and would let myself be as physically eager as they were, jumping for joy in my seat if society hadn’t drilled into me that middle-aged women need to behave and strive for normalcy.

In between pop songs the band played long instrumentals that had me (and I suspect others) astral projecting around the arena and levitating on our backs, like stage divers caught by the unseen.

I know that if I ever met Robert, I would tell him his face is the last thing I saw when I broke out of a burning house. I would thank him for the music and for his model of authenticity and self-respect. I would want to sit with him and gaze into his darkly-lined eyes, just for a moment, until we turned our attention to something larger and grand, like castles.

People in the front row gave him bouquets of red roses. He placed the flowers carefully on the platform where the drum set towered, leaving them on the stage to become part of the whole.

The Cure ended their US tour in Miami, eleven miles from our house that burned. If I had been in the front at that last North American tour show, I would have foraged Orthosiphon aristatus, a south Florida wildflower called Cat’s Whiskers, so I could offer them to him. Orthosiphon aristatus are a tall blossom that resembles a lupine but with a circle of cat whisker-like petals at the bottom which reach out and up. They come in lavender or white and look like they belong in a wild forest. I would have handed him white Cat’s Whiskers and felt for a moment as if I were the star of a Cure video, standing on a cliff, overlooking water crashing on rocks, wearing a long flowy night robe, noticing the edge and the unpredictability of wind. A window would be glowing in a stone house behind me. It would call me to move backwards, trust-falling into the night. Robert might giggle if he were the one watching from the house. He’s a giggler. He always looks so characteristically like himself, but my intuitive guess is he would not notice my XXL clothes, or hair, or co-op natural make-up, which would have most likely worn off, as it does. He would instead, with nothing but kindness, say hello to my soul until the zig zag moonlit water would draw our attention to where the art is.

About the author:

Mollia Jensen consistently daydreams about where she can find the next dance floor. She writes about music, dance, and the body. Mollia is working on a coming-of-age memoir set in Miami in the 1980s and is pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction with Pacific University. She's an enthusiastic mom of artistic people, is married to a poet, and receives good medicine from her dogs.