by Natasha Bell
“Are you ready to co-operate now?” he said.
I nodded and saw Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh turn their backs on me.
2002
8/19/02
Al,
I miss you. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not supposed to make you feel guilty or question your choices. Not now. There’s no going back for you, is there? You have a child. You’ve created life. That’s so much more real than anything I’ll ever create, isn’t it? That probably makes you more real than me. But I can’t help grieving for you. Is being a mother really everything the world says it is? Is it really our sole purpose? Don’t you resent Marc just a little bit for being able to hold his child proudly and also go off to work and have it affect nothing for him?
Sorry, I’m being an angry feminist. You must have so many hormones racing around your body still that you barely know what to think. It’s cruel for me to worm my way in when you’re vulnerable. In a way, I feel vulnerable too. I have these bits of work coming together, but the moments in between—I have whole periods of doubt, of not knowing, of feeling invisible or inconsequential. I get this unease in the pit of my stomach. What will people think of me? How will they react to my work? I know I need to be open to criticism, but I’m not sure I can handle rejection.
What if everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is condemned? Will anyone other than you understand? Sometimes I have this suspicion that I’m a bad person. I list all the non-bad things I do: the acts of kindness, the things I volunteer for, the money I give to charity, the stuff I sacrifice. But then I wonder if maybe I only do those things to mask my true self. What if, deep down, I’m just not nice?
Do you have the same fears? Do you worry about being your mother’s child? About your own? Do you think about nature versus nurture?
I’m scared of losing you, Al. I’m scared you’ll give your whole self to your child. I’m scared there’ll be nothing left for me.
Am x
THURSDAY, JULY 4, 2002
The nurse showed me how to wash my hands and arms, then wheeled me over to the frightening plastic box. The label on the side read “Baby Southwood.” Her tiny, shriveled limbs were a deep pink, her slit-like eyes fused closed. A cannula ran across her face into her nostrils. I watched her chest rise and fall with the machine, her delicate hand pierced with tubes.
I reached forward on my chair, feeling the movement in every butchered muscle between my chest and thighs. I slipped my gloved hands through the openings in the side of the box.
“I’ll give you some time,” the nurse said and I heard her slip out of the door.
I’d been in labor for twenty-two hours, four weeks too early. Still only four centimeters dilated, I began to hemorrhage and the midwife said the baby’s heartbeat was rising. A doctor was called. Marc was ushered away to put on scrubs and I was wheeled into surgery.
I’d been begging the nurse since I woke up to let me come. Finally, she’d checked my stitches and said it would be safe to visit the neonatal ward in a wheelchair. “Your husband’s asleep in the lounge,” she said. “Should I wake him?”
I shook my head. Marc was exhausted. He’d been worrying about both of us, dozing mostly in the chair beside my bed, waking as soon as I moved a finger. He needed to sleep.
I looked at my daughter, wired up like an alien, and felt like I’d never felt before. Please, I thought. I promise…What did I promise that evening? I can’t remember my words, but I know it was everything. I promised to devote my life to her. To do anything she needed. To keep her safe and warm. To make her happy and strong. To protect her from and prepare her for everything she might encounter. To love her always.
“I’m sorry,” I said aloud. This was my fault. It had to be. This was my punishment for worrying about what would change, for not enjoying my pregnancy. For drinking coffee and eating unpasteurized cheese. For continuing to work. For feeling stressed. For thinking of myself. For trying to have it all.
Please, I thought, touching my baby through a latex barrier, please just let her live.
May
Ten Weeks Gone
I don’t know how, but eventually Marc found the letters.
Nicola was ringing him every few days to give an update, but there was rarely any news. My phone records had come through, but my last communications were nothing out of the ordinary: a call from my mobile network, a text message to Marc about the girls’ swimming lesson, an unanswered call to Fran, another from a colleague. That was it: no communications after my disappearance. If the phone was stolen along with my wallet, Nicola said, the thief probably inserted a new SIM card.
With the police offering nothing for him to pin his hopes on, he couldn’t help but feel the pressure of everyone’s advice. No one explicitly told him to give up or move on, of course, but it was there in every question about the girls and work and how he was. Gentle reminders that this couldn’t continue forever; life somehow had to go on. Perhaps he was thinking of the girls, realizing he needed to offer them a home rather than a shrine. I imagine he sent them to his parents for a weekend and determined to have the house cleared by the time they returned. He wouldn’t have wanted to, but he had no choice.
He won’t have got rid of anything, but I imagine him packing my things into boxes and hauling them up the little ladder to the attic. Maybe he hesitated, wondering why on earth I’d bought a metallic silver T-shirt and when he last saw me in the peach suspender belt. Maybe he placed my jewelry close to the hatch, unable to consciously contemplate a life without me, but subconsciously already imagining Lizzie wanting to wear my diamond pendant to a school ball, Charlotte claiming my grandmother’s brooch as a memento before going off to uni.
He wondered if he should take our photographs down. Where did one stop? My voice was on the outgoing message. He didn’t want to erase it, but knew how morbid it must sound to anyone who phoned.
The house was full of my things. He couldn’t box them all. But he couldn’t leave my mud-crusted walking boots in the rack beside the front door to morosely greet everyone from the postman to Charlotte’s new best friend. Patrick and he had plans to watch the Grand Prix and Marc had told himself he needed to have worked it out by then.
He heaved the last box up through the hatch and tried not to think about how long my stuff would be up here. He decided that didn’t matter right now. He had to think about today, about this one step, not the many that may or may not need to follow.
He climbed through the hatch and knelt on the chipboard panels to stack the boxes to one side. I wonder if he looked around, trying to remember what was in the other boxes up there, whether we still had the cot and the buggy, what we’d done with Charlotte’s train set and Lizzie’s toy kitchen. Did he sit under the bare bulb thinking about our family? About the years we’d spent in the house below. Changing nappies and sleepwalking through scream-filled nights. Fixing the banister Lizzie kicked out during a tantrum and patching Charlotte up after she toddled into the CD rack. Yelling up and down the stairs. Chasing them through the hallway, around the breakfast bar and out into the garden until they were pinned against the apple tree and had nowhere to hide from our tickles. Plastering grazed knees, cutting chewing gum from hair, wiping tears from cheeks, carrying them to bed and worrying through fevers. Marc looked around the dusty attic, surveying the remnants of what we once were. His eyes scanned the boxes and the junk, landing finally on a black lidded archive box. It was stacked discreetly beneath two boxes of old curtains and with the sleeping bags and the tent piled on top. It looked perfectly normal, not out of place, not something anyone would notice. Except Marc. He knew we’d never bought archive boxes. And he had these same ones on his shelves at work. Everyone did; I guess they must have been cheap for the university to buy in bulk. I must have pinched one from work, he realized, but how had it found its way up here? He moved the sleeping bags and lift
ed the curtain boxes. Perhaps he thought he was going to find more of my essays. Perhaps he was hoping for a box of art books or lecture notes or ancient bits of student work.
He lifted the lid and saw a stack of faded manila folders. The top one bulged, its flap only just closed. From its left corner, in my thick Sharpie lettering, he read MARC. He stared at his name, his heart pounding. He lifted it up and found another beneath it reading CHAR, another beneath that reading LIZZIE. He opened the flap of his own file and a supermarket receipt fell out. He scanned down the list of items, then turned it over to see his own writing. Back late, love you. He flipped it back over. The date on the receipt was 2005. He pulled everything out of the folder and spread it on the floor. I’d kept every note, letter and birthday card he’d ever written to me. I know Marc has a similar collection in a shoe box on his side of the office. I found it years ago, but never mentioned it. Sometimes, if he was out, I’d open the box and just look. He too kept every reminder I tacked to the fridge and every postcard I wrote while I was away but, not trusting the post, carried home in my luggage. He kept every note, every message I pinned to doors or hid in books, every paper airplane I folded and flew to distract him. Daft words and messages I’d barely thought through. A thousand simple I love yous and a hundred Darlings. Neither of us were sentimental hoarders, but how could we throw away such things? I’d look at a tiny torn-out scrap with Marc’s heart crudely scratched in pen and know I couldn’t relegate it to the bin. Such things didn’t belong in refuse sacks to be manhandled by men in work boots at seven on a Tuesday morning, slopped into the back of a lorry and brutally upturned at the tip. I’d imagine them wriggling free from their neighboring newspapers and food scraps, fluttering in the wind and seeking something to devote their sentiment to in a loveless landfill. So I kept them. A whole folder of notes he probably had no recollection of writing. For the briefest of moments, crouched in our attic, realizing we’d shared the same romantic dilemma, Marc would have felt us whole again.
He wiped his cheeks and picked up Charlotte and Lizzie’s files. Drawings and Mother’s Day cards, hospital bands and crumpled crayon messages. Beneath these was a file labeled SCHOOL containing an old art book, notes passed in class with Philippa, a certificate of achievement. My father had a file too: letters he wrote to me, but also printouts of the scans following his chemo. My mother’s file was almost empty: a photograph of a rosy-cheeked young woman with a baby, and the one card she’d sent when I left for university.
At the bottom, he discovered a bulging folder labeled AMELIA. He recognized the name of my Chicago roommate and, curiosity welling, lifted the file from the box. He froze. There on the cardboard at the bottom of the box, lay a passport.
He put the folder down and reached for the passport. He flipped to the photo. I looked out at him, young and serious. Was I twenty-eight, twenty-nine in that photograph? My hair was longer, hanging loose over my shoulders, tucked behind both ears, emphasizing the point of my chin. Not a flattering image, but it still made his stomach flip.
What went through my husband’s mind? What pieces was he starting to put together? Of course, his first question had to be: What on earth is her passport doing in the bottom of a box in the attic? Had it fallen in when I was packing these things up? Had it been accidentally scooped from my messy desk with these folders? When had I packed them away? Why, if these things were so sentimental, had I put them in the attic?
I don’t know how Marc reconciled these mysteries that afternoon, whether he shrugged and said it must have been an accident, one that would have been annoying and costly when I did get round to booking our next holiday and we turned the house upside down before I admitted defeat and had to go to the passport office for reissue. Or whether doubt began to worm its way in even then.
Either way, he placed my passport in his pocket and turned back to Amelia’s folder. Inside were a couple of hundred handwritten letters. The scratchy writing was familiar to him from the envelopes that periodically arrived on the doormat. Marc removed one at random and smoothed its folds on his thighs. It was postmarked May 2003. I’d visited Amelia that summer, taking the still breastfeeding Lizzie on that nightmare seven-hour flight. I arrived back exhausted but gushing with stories about my friend’s success. Marc remembered picking me up from the airport and kissing my tears as I embraced him. “It’s only been a week,” he teased, but he spent the whole evening with both Lizzie and me in his arms, as if he was afraid we might vanish once more.
* * *
I was brought a cup of tea today, sweet with sugar, the bag left in longer than most people prefer, just like my husband knew to make it. He sits with me when I eat now, watches me chew. I sleep for long periods of time, wake with no memory of my dreams. I don’t have the energy to fight his questions any more. Today he asked me to describe our sex life. I wonder what he does with this information. Files it away for his private fantasies, perhaps. What does he achieve by getting me to talk? Isn’t it enough that he is keeping me here? That I am his plaything? It’s like owning me physically is not enough for him; he must get inside my mind, root around and leave me nothing.
He hasn’t touched me since I hit him with the tray, though. The cut on his cheek is almost healed. My bruises too are fading to a pale yellow. Soon they’ll be gone.
I think a lot about where he goes when he’s not with me, who he talks to, how he holds himself. Does he think about me? I like the idea that a part of me slips out of the door behind him, follows him through the locks and into his life. He doesn’t get to do this to me and simply leave me behind when he feels like it. I hope I’m with him always, whatever his life is out there now.
2003
5/4/03
Al,
You’re coming to New York! I can’t wait. I have a show opening, so you can help me set up and spy on all the important fuckers. Your baby will be a great disguise—nobody pays attention to mothers, do they? The idea of domesticity erases any notion of creativity.
How are you doing? I know it’s so hard for you right now, I know you’re still grieving, but I’m pleased you’re coming. I couldn’t do this without you. In his way, I’m sure your dad would have understood that too. I think he would have been proud of us both. The timing of this show is bad, but I couldn’t say no. It’s what we dreamed of back at grad school. It’s the tittyfucking Whitney! I hope they like my stuff. I mean, I guess they must, because they already friggin’ asked me, didn’t they? But I still have to pinch myself and check this is real. It terrifies me that it’s a new piece. If they like it, it should help me get a grant, but if they don’t, my whole career could just fizzle and die. What would happen to me then? I’d probably fizzle and die too. I used to think I didn’t care, that I made things just for me. But now the stakes are higher, turns out I really do.
Will it be weird to leave Marc? Or secretly a relief? It’ll be the longest you’ve looked after Lizzie alone, right? Does it worry you that you’ve got seventeen more years of this? I feel trapped if I work on a performance piece for longer than a month. I could never do a Linda Montano. I mean, it’s not the most difficult thing to wear the same colored clothing every day and live in a one-colored room, but still. It’s the dedication, the kind of meditation on your art: deciding to live it every second of every day, whether or not anybody’s looking. I’m too bad at making decisions and sticking to them. I mean, I’m earning money now and getting commissions, but I still don’t always wake up feeling like an artist. Does that make you laugh? I’m not anything else, am I? Not like you: mother, wife, teacher.
I bet ORLAN wakes up feeling like an artist. All that plastic surgery to give her the Mona Lisa’s brow protrusions, the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, Diana’s eyes—it’s a genius concept, but what does it feel like to be the Frankenstein’s monster of idealized female beauty? Can you imagine transforming your flesh for art? Making that kind of commitment? I suppose you have transformed your f
lesh. Somehow doing it for a child seems more acceptable than what ORLAN does. I love that someone’s out there doing it—I mean, I think we need it to exist for art’s sake—but everyone I know is like, “Yeah, she’s doing cool work, but I’d never go that far.”
Mostly I just like being anonymous. I had a fight with the Whitney’s PR guy because he wanted me to send a picture for the flyer. I like being able to sit with the audience and experience what they’re experiencing. More than that, I want my identity to be an irrelevance. It’s getting increasingly hard to remain private, though. People want to put a face to the work, to draw meaning from who you are, place you in a safe little box and say they understand you. I’m like, what the cock? I feel like my face’s lack of celebrity is as much of an accomplishment as if I was plastered all over billboards. You have to work to be stealthy in this city. What if we don’t all want to be Andy Warhol? I mean, it’s bad enough that your skin color and the way you talk and where you went to school and the parts between your legs influence the interpretation; now it’s all about your online presence and building a brand. Vito Acconci said he stopped doing live performance because he felt like everyone knowing what he looked like put more emphasis on the cult of his celebrity than on his actions.
I’m getting a bit obsessed with this life-as-art-as-celebrity thing. Britney may not have an output beyond cheesy pop and a kiss with Madonna, but she’s a living performance, isn’t she? She’s more committed to the character she’s created than I am to any of my pieces. I leave them in the gallery or on the street and move on. She’s still partying and performing wherever she goes. And we’re all watching, like she’s there for our consumption. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if kids end up studying celebrities alongside Montano’s Seven Years of Living Art?
