THE FILMMAKER. This is his painting. She kept it. Wouldn’t let me burn it. I hear these things are going for over ten grand these days. (To the playwright.) You take it to New York. You sell it. You use the money. You do it. You get this thing out of my house.
The playwright looks up from his laptop, closes the lid. He drums with his fingers. He is seated on a blue velvet chair in an auditorium. Men and women raise little Ping-Pong paddles in the air. The auctioneer has been mouthing bids—for how long? months? years?—but the playwright has been working away silently all the while. He is interested in only one lot, only one artwork, the one he came there to sell.
Then the voice of the auctioneer arrests his attention. With his little flip of silver hair, he announces the lot: “Facetious. We open at ten thousand dollars. The opening bid is ten thousand dollars.” The playwright snaps his head up and bites the inside of his cheek three times so he can lift his numbered little paddle. “Excellent. I have fourteen thousand dollars. The bid stands at fourteen thousand from the gentleman from New York. Do I have a—fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars. I have fourteen thousand eight hundred. Do I have a best? Fourteen thousand eight hundred on the floor. Do we have movement? Excellent. Fifteen thousand. I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are standing at fifteen thousand from the gentleman from Lyon. Fifteen thousand, I have fifteen thousand dollars. We are at fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand once. Fifteen thousand twice. All right, then, for the third and final time, fifteen thousand.
“And it is SOLD to the good gentleman from Lyon at fifteen thousand dollars. Very well.”
The playwright looks down at the play in his laptop, and then up at the sold painting, the one he came there to sell, the one the filmmaker made him bring: a giant abstract cum-stained bloodstained face.
The Art of Identity
The performance artist’s ears go full-blown tinnitus because it’s the poet going Just calm down and then the playwright going Use your imagination and the filmmaker going Just wait Just wait It’s not as bad as it sounds so she amplifies her voice and launches it at them. “It’s not as bad as it sounds? You want me to fake being hollow headed all the way to Europe and it’s not as bad as it sounds?” She can’t believe it, can’t believe what they are saying. This is the plan? She stares at them all like they want to eat her, saying, “You want me to do fucking what?”
And then it’s the playwright going Look do you want me to say it all again and everyone getting impatient with her like she’s a child, look at all their smug fuck faces with their we’re all a decade older than you paternalism and her going, “Um, actually, yeah, I fucking want you to say it again because this sounds, you know, insane.”
She crack-twists another tiny bottle of vodka open, pours it into her plastic airplane cup, slams it, then returns the empty miniature to the poet’s tray table. Well, she’s got to hand it to them, they fucking got her on this goddamn plane with the Nazi poet, didn’t they, and they used the oldest trick in the book, the trick of Catholics and Jews. Mega-guilt. Pure and simple. When she had resisted, the poet had walked up to her and like gotten all up in her face, going Look this is the least you can do you’re screwing him and we all know it you have been for years, you owe her this, she went, like there’s some kind of woman sexual history rule book. Some kind of woman sexual sin plus-and-minus column. Like they’re all holier than her. She reaches up and hits the flight-attendant-get-the-hell-over-here-I-need-a-drink button, then looks briefly at the poet, at the side of her face, and yes, she has to admit it, she’s a little afraid of her.
She rubs the letter she’s carrying pinned by her bra against her skin underneath her clothes. A letter from the painter. Well, you make your bed, you lie in it, that’s what her mother used to say, so here she is on a plane to Eastern Europe drinking midget vodkas with a lesbian dominatrix. When the flight attendant arrives, she leans over in the flight-attendant way and says to the poet in pity hush tones, “What does she need?” Because when you’re wearing a special helmet acting like you haven’t enough brains to buckle a seat belt you can’t be seen drinking vodka like a normal adult woman. She has a cuss-fest inside her head. The poet stamps down on her toe underneath the tray tables. She tries to make her face go slack. The poet asks the flight attendant for a pillow for her, and more vodka for herself. When the flight attendant leaves, the poet elbows the performance artist so sharply she cries out.
“What? I was just adding a little Tourette’s to the scene.”
When more vodka comes, the performance artist turns her head to the airplane window as far as she can. How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past—she takes a long drink—what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative—some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? She rubs the letter underneath her shirt, she thinks she sees the reflection of herself in the airplane window, like a black twin, and she’s falling back to memory, she prays to the god of Diamanda Galás.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Well, let’s have it then.
When she was seven years old, a mediastinal cystic parathyroid grew in her head. The tumor, the medical professionals told her so-called parents (one a famous architect, the other a famous concert pianist, both mega-narcissists), was “inoperable.” And there was this: the tumor was pushing on the beautiful gray folds of her brain in just the right way as to make her behavior look, well, there’s no other way to say this . . . retarded. Like in immediate need of a helmet.
The effect this had on her mother was momentarily devastating. But that isn’t the story. What her mother did with her devastation was to jettison it, and jettison it the way intellectual mega-famous narcissistic people do, until it was so buried in the layers of her psyche and her body and her motherhood that it rested at the base of her spinal cord near her fucking tailbone. She didn’t shit right for years.
And what her mother—her famous concert pianist mother—did next was . . . well, a performance worthy of an ovation. Brava.
Her mother used the notoriety and fame she had garnered as a pianist to be something even bigger, better: She became a triple-A martyr, a mother of tragedy and pain, and—most important—a spokesperson. She headed every lost cause, she was awarded community prizes, was featured on Good Morning America. No mother in the country could outperform her, at least when it came to volunteering for lost causes, illnesses, and deformities. Cancer, AIDS, MS, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, lupus, leprosy (yes, there is still leprosy), and all this WAY before she went third world. You get the picture.
Total abandonment of her daughter to the hired caregivers and medical staff and physical, speech, emotional, and spiritual counselors in favor of the martyr limelight.
What her father did with his devastation was a great bit more concrete; perhaps the simplest things we think about gender are utterly true.
It was his role to take the impaired daughter on excursions, so that her seemingly retarded little life didn’t suck outrageously, but only mildly.
So he took her all kinds of places, even though it made his heart have a hole in it.
He took her to the movies.
He took her to McDonald’s.
He took her to libraries.
He took her to the big red bull’s-eye of Target.
He took her to Shari’s.
He took her to water parks.
He took her to boatyards.
He took her to the beach.
He took her to bookstores.
He took her hiking in the forest.
He took her to museums.
He took her on the light rail system.
Again.
Again.
He took her horseback riding.
&nbs
p; He took her go-cart racing.
He took her on Ferris wheels.
He took her to record stores.
He took her to music concerts.
He took her to buildings he’d designed, walking her through light and shadow and form.
He.
He.
He was more tired than any man alive, since she expressed her outrageously embarrassing glee at every one of these places he took her, all of it while wearing a helmet, and everyone always stared and said things under their breath, I mean everyone, I mean always, and at some point, no matter where they were or how it was playing out, she’d get to some frenetic moment where she was in danger of injuring herself or others, a tiny amount of drool sliding from her mouth, pee darkening the front of her crotch, the look of . . . Well, I think you can picture her grimace-smiley too-white face, right?
And so it was that one day, inside his role, this particular thing happened. She was in one of those inflatable worlds that appear at county fairs . . . the kind of inflatable hut kids can crawl inside and jump up and down. You know what I mean.
She entered.
He left.
No, really.
He left.
He left his daughter, he left his wife, his family, his life, radically and without hesitation.
Not that much later—four years, to be precise—her mother was giving a lecture on the child-tragedy circuit. Afterward, a neurosurgeon came up to her and said he knew a doctor in Europe who specialized in the type of operation they’d been told was impossible, and so nearly by accident she got her daughter a different medical team and a world-famous surgeon in Europe, and guess what?
They operated successfully and her so-called retardation disappeared and she bloomed into a completely normal, beautiful, American teen.
Completely normal, except for the pearly skull scar and the emotional scars for fucking life.
And that’s how she comes to be sitting in an airplane with the poet pretending to be her past. Because she’s a stand-in. She’s a retarded girl again, being taken to Europe for experimental treatment again, a story from her real past invading her present. Because without makeup and face jewelry and vintage clothes and hair products, without anything on her head besides that disgusting helmet, she looks much younger than she is. Just past puberty. Which means they can swap her. Which means they can use her special retard-girl identity papers to enter the country with her, but leave the country with a different girl. Later, someone will come back and get her and take her back home.
It’s the least she can do.
And besides, the poet had said, this is the most radical performance art she’ll ever do in her life.
Emotional cripple. Adult need machine. Fuck addict. American artist. She rubs the scar on her head. She rubs the letter against her flesh. The last thought she thinks before she drops into a twenty-something-year-old vodka sleep is: I hate women.
The House of Art
For more than a year, the girl and the widow live together in the widow’s house while her childhood shifts. When the girl arrives she is eleven. When the girl leaves she is nearly thirteen.
Inside, the widow starts to teach the girl everything she knows about art. The history of photography, painting, music, literature. “Look at this poem. How it travels down the page in lines, not sentences. How its beauty is vertical, like a body.” The girl puts her fingers on the page, against the words, tracing their meanings, touching them and touching them. Silently mouthing.
The widow shows her poetry and science, philosophy and myths from all over the world. She teaches her how religion and science each rely on a violent faith between creation and destruction. She shows her how the history of art carries with it the same duality. She shows her the body—Christ’s body endlessly crucified, bodies in war and sacrifice, the never-ending bodies of women, bodies in pleasure or pain or sleep or death, bodies in rapture, tortured bodies, bodies in prayer, bodies in the static pose of a portrait. The widow tells the girl, “Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body—the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman’s body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn’t lie.”
The widow weaves the importance of expression and representation into the smallest details of an ordinary life. She milks the goat and steals the chickens’ eggs while telling stories of archetypal animals. She lights the fire and cleans the dishes while reciting poetry of love or war. She walks miles to the nearest village and brings back underground writings and photos, the same as milk and bread and sugar and coffee and ink and paper, making sure to detail the seriousness of these suppressed objects. She is careful to explain to the girl how it is that human expression is the highest value in life, but so too is death, in this place and time they find themselves inhabiting. The girl takes in everything, rarely speaking, her listening and watching a kind of devouring.
One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.”
The girl’s mind floats.
This is not her first bleeding.
Her first bleeding came at age seven, after her fourth rape, four years before her family exploded before her eyes. She had been buying paper. Her mother was across the street at the post. She could still see her mother even as her own body was yanked by a soldier and dragged behind a wall. Her mother searched and searched, nearly losing her mind, until a soldier marched her mother out of town at gunpoint. Having been left for dead in an alley, she lay there for an entire day, into dusk’s falling, thinking, Death is a gift sometimes. Almost sacred. Like a door to something beautiful and profound.
But she did not die. And so it was that on that day, shivering in the alley, her hand moved instinctively to her rose of being and there was blood. Of course there was blood; but this blood was not the blood of soldiers’ forced entrances, dried and day old and smelling of what goes wrong in men. Triggered early, this blood moved through her like a warm river. New and wet and dark and smelling lightly of metal. Reminding her of steel traps. Of animals. In this way, when what she probably needed was warmth, food, water, and more than anything else in the world, the tenderness of a woman, the quiet hush and caress of her mother, she reached down and found only her own small being, red and hot. She brought her hand up to look at it. She tasted it. Salt and copper. Slippery like oil between her fingers.
Her first thought: I want to paint.
So she dragged her body back to the barn next to her own house even as she could barely walk or stand or bear the weight of anything and she found a wooden plank and she took what was left of her strength and painted with her own menstrual blood. That is how her parents and brother found her. Almost like a wild animal.
As she looks at the red water around her now in the bath, the girl thinks, That is the blood that has returned to me now. The blood I have waited for. And she thinks of the wolf’s paw, the severing she witnessed one night when she first came to this house.
The widow shows the girl how to use a pad to carry the blood close to her body, and in the months to come the girl’s and the
widow’s monthly bleedings synchronize. From that day forward, the widow accelerates her teachings. She teaches the girl how to be present in her skin, how to leave it; how to kill animals to eat them and to use their skins and fur; how to extract medicine from drying and grinding their internal organs; how to chop wood; dig your way to food or shelter; how to shoot to hunt, how to shoot to kill a man; how to use your hands to make things. How to hold charcoal to draw, how to make oil paints, what a sable brush is; how to take a pinhole photo using a box and the sun; how to hold a violin and draw a bow against its thin, unimaginable strings; how to make language go strange and vertical to make a poem. How to trust the moon.
Sometimes, when the widow is retrieving more wood for the fire, or when she is gathering materials to close a hole in the wall or roof, or when she is milking the goat or digging up frozen potatoes or shooting fowl or retrieving a rabbit from a trap, the woman catches a glimpse of the girl in the act of painting. Out in the barn. On scraps of wood. With colors she has invented from berries and roots and olive oil and mud. She paints with her bare hands. And sometimes, the widow sees her paint with her own blood, her hand dipping down to the well of her body. When she watches the girl paint with blood, it takes her breath straight out of her, lifting it up to a place she has not admitted to for years. Frenzied and animal the girl’s hands are. Wild, her blond tangles of hair. Her body thrusting forward and retreating with an unbashful sexuality. Without anyone’s permission or knowledge. Sometimes the girl is laughing. Sometimes she shouts, “Ne!”
What she paints: a face. And the face is either screaming or laughing, at what it is impossible to tell.
The Small Backs of Children Page 8
