by Mona Awad
“Victoria. You seem in quite good spirits,” Ursula observes.
“Oh, I am. Such good spirits.”
She’s looking at me now. They all are. Still smiling. Ignoring each other. Sitting exactly one chair apart. Three white boxes in their laps ticking like bombs.
Ursula looks around the room like this is all to be expected in the final semester, at this time in the Process. Speaking of which, maybe we should get started since—
Then the sound I have been fearing most. The step of a boot of softest suede. Expensively wrinkled like the skin of a Shar-Pei. The white moon of her face coming out of the dark. Looking . . .
. . . flustered, apologetic. And frail. Pale, very pale. Is it her skin or the fact that she’s wearing black? A long caftan that goes up to her neck like a nun’s habit. Her hair is pulled back severely like someone is trying to hang her by it.
“Eleanor, you’re late.”
I watch her features become warped by confusion, panic. Both firsts. A sick joy spreads through me as she apologizes (another first), then quietly protests: “But . . . you sent out an email saying you weren’t starting until 5:11.”
“My email said 5:00. Why would anyone request a meeting at 5:11?”
Eleanor cowers a little, looks even more confused by this.
I imagine his human fingers clacking on laptop keys as he composed first in my pleading voice to Fosco, then in the voice of Fosco to Eleanor, all the while humming to himself.
“But—”
“We can discuss this more after class, Eleanor. For now, why don’t you take a seat and let’s get going, shall we?”
She opens her mouth, then looks at me and closes it. Better not to piss off KareKare, who is really the only one on the faculty who has anything kind to say about her diamond proems. I watch her sit down slowly. In the highly uncharacteristic corner seat. Poking out of her black purse, I see the corner of a small white box. Seeing me looking at it, she tucks the bag under her chair.
“Now, I understand you all have work to share with me today. Except Samantha, of course.” I don’t bother correcting her.
“Of course,” they say, almost in unison. Still not looking at one another. Still smiling to themselves. Dreamily. Smugly. Or, in Eleanor’s case, tensely. As though they’re each cradling a secret, both wondrous and dangerous. I feel fear. Shimmering fear.
“Well. Who’d like to start?”
“I will.” From all of them at the same time. Fosco looks pleased. So eager!
“All right, well, why don’t we make this easy and just go in the order in which you arrived. Caroline, let’s start with you.”
Caroline stands up. Jagged scars gleaming in the spotlight shining down on her.
“This is called ‘Peeled,’” she says quietly. “Honestly, I don’t quite know what it is yet. Sort of a poem, I guess. . . . I don’t normally write poems, but.” She bites on her lavender grin. “I was inspired.” Her hands are shaking a little as she grips the page.
“Anyway, I really think this could be the beginning of something.”
An audible snort from Victoria. I can feel Kira side-eyeing me but I keep my gaze fixed on Caroline, who looks down at her trembling page lovingly as though it is his face. She begins to read as if under a spell.
* * *
—
A man is standing in her living room holding a razor.
Did he break in or did she let him in? So muses the unnamed heroine of “Peeled,” who is very obviously Caroline. Thus begins her psychosexual obsession with/possession by a demonic rake named Byron. Tea is stirred suggestively. The clink clink of a spoon in its cup has a trance-inducing effect.
And then.
And then I recall Caroline’s face when she shaved that cinnamon stick at Smut Salon. Her head tilted back in a restrained performance of ecstasy. Eyelids fluttering open and closed like she was possessed. Did he carve those words into her peaches-and-cream flesh or did she, while he merely leaned back on her couch and observed, encouraged, supervised with eyes like smoking tar, asking softly what good is it to be left with no trace, to be wounded without the pleasure of a scar?
* * *
—
Silence when she lowers the page. No one claps. No one says, So good, Bunny. No one hugs her. There’s a pointed cough from Fosco. I hear the word slut leave what I am certain is Eleanor’s closed lips.
Caroline sits down looking pleased and purged. She opens her white box. Inside is a monstrous cupcake with purple icing the same shade as her hair. I see his face when he offered it to her, the gallant gentleman knowing just the thoughtful confection. She begins to eat the cupcake as if she’s starving. Shoveling big chunks in her mouth with her cut-up hands.
“Does anyone have feedback for Caroline?”
Silence save the choked-back laughter of Victoria. The squeak of Kira’s pen as it makes the note: Bitch. Eleanor is staring murderously at the floor.
“Interesting,” Ursula murmurs, surveying the room, then observes how sometimes the silence itself speaks.
“Yes,” Caroline says. Her voice still among the smiling clouds. Whatever. This is precisely the reaction she expected. We can all go fuck ourselves. She shovels more cupcake into her mouth. Purple icing on either corner of her rose lips. Her scars sweating beneath the lights.
Meanwhile, Fosco offers some feedback platitudes. A departure. Pregnant pause. Quite a departure for you, Caroline. This dark . . . romance that you’ve given us. Second pregnant pause. Condescending smile.
Normally Fosco adores Caroline’s pieces, fragmented narratives involving anxious young women who clearly have never had jobs, who instead brood through afternoonish times of day, think quirky thoughts, bake, and are wistful.
“But of course, it’s fine to depart, Caroline. To get lost now and again.”
“Lost? But—”
“Because this is why we’re here, isn’t it? The Process can be tricky, elusive.”
Suddenly, Caroline’s eyes shine with tears. “I think it’s the beginning of something,” she whispers. Her face turns pitifully to Ursula, but Ursula has already turned away.
“Who’s next?”
No one raises a hand. I gaze deeply down at my desk, at the grains in the wood, trying to hide what I tell myself is strictly my own horror, trying to hide the ticlike smile that I seem to be smiling in spite of myself, that surely must be hysterical. The three white boxes continue to gleam dreadfully in my eye corners no matter where I look. A dread that won’t stop winking at me. Nudging. Psst. Not at all curious, Samantha? I hear Max’s voice saying in my head. Not even a little curious to know what’s inside?
“I’ll go,” says Kira, who is holding her bundle of pages like it is an executioner’s list. She can’t wait to read the names.
“Kira, wonderful.”
I watch as she opens her white box. A doll. Wearing a velvet dress. Glassy tiger eyes that stare at me. Cherry mouth smiling. Enjoying yourself so far, Samantha?
“This is called ‘Wolf Meets Girl,’” Kira says. “It’s sort of a fairy tale but totally reenvisioned. I think it’s the beginning of something.” An audible sniff from Caroline. Victoria makes a fart sound with her mouth. Eleanor now has her eyes closed tight as fists.
“Slut!” Cupcake hisses before Kira’s even done, her tale of a lovely redheaded mute whose delicate spirit has been too-long smothered by wicked sisters, and has now been released from her silent prison by a wolfish stranger with the gift of tongues. He is just beginning to speak in a low voice of her fierce depths, to count the many ways she is magic while she counts the many colors of his eyes. Agate. Jade. Periwinkle. Puce. But Caroline has run crying out of the room. Silence. No one moves. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry or to scream. Instead I stare at the doll who is still staring at me. Smiling inscrutably. Kira opens her mouth to continue but Fosc
o expertly cuts her off, an absolute first. “Thank you, Kira. I believe we have the gist.”
A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again. “You’ve given us more than enough to discuss, I think.” She looks at us all in her probing, intensely gynecological way. Well?
“I hated it.” This from Caroline, now emerging out of the dark. Her mouth still covered in the icing that so exactly matches her hair. “It’s so derivative.”
“Derivative, Caroline? That’s quite a—”
“Stealing! From the fairy-tale canon. Which is so wrong and so typical of her.”
“It’s called literary appropriation, hello?” Kira says, stroking her doll’s blood-colored hair.
Caroline snorts. “It’s theft. Narrative theft.”
“Say more about that,” Fosco urges.
Caroline shakes her head. “I can’t.” Tears in her eyes. She eats more of the cupcake.
“Anyone else? Victoria, yes, let’s hear from you.”
“I didn’t hate it,” Victoria says, arms casually crossed. “I just thought it was lame, stupid, and utterly uninteresting.”
Fosco frowns. Looks troubled. There’ll be no cruelty in the Womb that doesn’t come from herself, from Mother. “Can you be more specific?”
“No,” she spits, looking Kira up and down. “It’s a general impression.”
“Samantha? Eleanor?”
I stare at the glassy eyes of the doll that accuse me. Accuse me or acknowledge me?
I look away. “I’m still processing.”
“I must say, Samantha, once more I’m right where you are today. I’m processing too.” She puts her hands together as though she’s praying for us.
“Well, who would—”
“I will,” Victoria interjects. She stands and empties her white box onto her desk.
Words tumble out and scatter onto the desk and the floor. A. The. This. Because.
Megalomaniacal. Penis. Dove.
Magnetic poetry. I close my eyes. See him handing over the little bag of words with total seriousness.
Victoria holds up a single wrinkled page. “So this is a vignette.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Kira whispers to me.
“Excuse me?” Victoria says. “What did you fucking say? What did you whisper-whisper over there like a little bitch?”
“I didn’t say anything at all, did I, Samantha?”
Kira turns to me for backup, doing her look of innocent surprise.
* * *
—
An experimental pornographer/garbageman named Hud. An existential ballerina. What happens between them in the dumpster is an obliteration of the flesh conveyed in a sound poetry of grunts. Punctuated by the odd magnetic word. Thigh. Ooze. Genesis.
After she’s finished, Victoria drops back into her seat like a marionette suddenly abandoned by its puppeteer. She looks like she puked up soup all over us and she is daring us to like it or hate it. She couldn’t care less. She begins to arrange the words with her fingers oh so tenderly. The laugh-scream-cry that has been rising in my throat at last threatens to erupt, and I’m forced to hide my face behind my hands.
“Thoughts, anyone?”
“Liar,” Caroline growls. “You’re a liar. And you’re a terrible fucking writer. Blood clock? Mind moon? I’m sorry but what does that even mean?”
“Caroline!” Fosco chides.
“It’s not my fault if you don’t get it, Caroline.”
“Yes, it is!”
“May I say something?” Kira actually raises her hand.
“Of course.”
“Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. Even though there’s always been this small voice inside of me that says, Um, what the fuck is this, please? This makes no sense. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that? To work all night with a Victoria Decoder? Who would even care to? And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.”
A silence so profound it’s noise. White noise. Beneath which I hear laughter. His laughter. Behind a human fist whose fingernails he’s painted all the colors of the rainbow.
“I guess what I’m saying,” Kira continues, more quietly, “is that I understand now. I should have trusted myself as a reader. My instincts as a reader are so, so valuable. And I’m grateful to Victoria for illuminating that for me. For teaching me about who I am as a reader. Thank you so much for that, Victoria.”
Victoria gives her a wide smile. And under the table she spreads her legs, revealing bruises all the way up her thighs.
“You’re so, so welcome, Kira.”
Beside me, Kira swallows a gasp.
“I hate you,” Caroline whispers. Closing her eyes as though she has a headache. It’s unclear who she’s saying it to.
“I agree,” Kira whispers, her gaze still on the thigh bruises like someone struck.
“What is your take on all this, Samantha?”
Now they’re all looking at me, sort of pleadingly. I think of Max. Casting his huge shadow over each of them in turn. Playing the sadist, the sly god, the garbageman. Sitting in their living rooms, in their bedrooms, smiling at each of them like he’s The Bachelor. Holding a red rose between his pointed fingernails. Holding their hands. Handing them each a small white box. This is you. And then I feel like I’ve fingered their various underwear, am deeply, unbearably familiar with the colors and cuts, the hand-feel, that I know all the songs on their Spotify sex playlists. That I held the razor blade over Caroline’s peach-fuzzed skin, mine are the teeth sinking into Victoria’s thigh flesh. I kicked their stuffed ponies off their sleigh beds, caused their nightstand novels to topple over, their bottles of melatonin and Valium to spill to the floor, their jelly-bean-colored vibrators to roll around in the little drawer, beginning to collect dust at last. And after, mine was the hand that turned out the unicorn-shaped light. The breeze coming from their open bedroom windows cooling my skin as I replayed their various humiliations, a triumphant smile on my untorn lip.
I feel sick. Hideously sick.
“Well, this is so wonderful,” Fosco says, taking up my silence like a fallen torch. “These sorts of difficult conversations. So illuminating, so valuable. How they open us up. The Wound is tapped and it bleeds. I must say, though, I’m a little concerned by the androcentric leanings in today’s pieces so far. Did you notice that, Samantha?”
“Yes.”
“As female storytellers, writing at this level, at this institution, we must be mindful of this. Do we really want to enforce the narrative that we’re ‘saved’ by a boy? Illuminated by a boy? Ravished by a boy? The same boy, it seems? Who says the same things to save and ravish and illuminate us? Do we really want that to be the Work? The fruit to come out of our time here at Warren? One would hope the Work wouldn’t just be the stuff of slumber parties. Samantha, wouldn’t you agree?”
They stare at me. Kira stroking her doll, Caroline among the now frowning clouds, Victoria still smirking and trying for bored but clearly pissed. Well, Samantha?
I look over at Eleanor, who has been silent all this time, holding the still-closed box in her hands, watching me over it, a caveman enemy over a flame. The diamond-etched proem sits in her black lap containing god knows what.
“I think I need to hear from everyone,” I hear myself say.
Eleanor looks at me and I feel her soul hiss.
“Now E
leanor, I hope you’re not writing about a boy too,” Fosco says.
Eleanor suddenly smiles. “Of course not, Ursula. I’d never be that stupid. But as it turns out I brought the wrong story,” she says looking at me. “My mistake.”
“Eleanor, that’s highly unlike you.”
“I know it is. I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again.”
34.
When I get home, I find him in the backyard leaning against the fence, smoking, wearing Kira’s cat ears. He’s staring at the patchy corner of lawn where he has talked of planting something. God knows what. He smiles when he sees me, raises his whisky glass. Oh so casual. Maintaining his cool-man slouch. I think of the way my black metal drummer boyfriend would saunter over to me after his gigs, his fake-blood-splattered lab coat heavy with sweat, his corpse paint running down his eyes. Dying to know. Too cool to ask.
“So. How was Workshop, Samantha?”
I stare at his mouth that has spoken so many lies. Hands that might have touched god knows what parts of their pink-and-white bodies.
“Illuminating,” I say.
“Illuminating,” he murmurs, taking a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. Huh. Not the adjective he was hoping for exactly but—
“What did you do to them?” I blurt out.
He looks at me. Confused. Disappointed. Frankly, a little irritated.
The smoke slowly escapes his mouth. Blows right into my face.
“You have to tell me.”
He stares at me, at my attempt to look authoritative, the desperate pleading it conceals, then snorts and looks away. Shakes his head. Takes another drag. Defiant this time.
“I can’t just give it away like that, Samantha. I wanted to leave it open. To interpretation.”
He smiles slightly at the word interpretation, recalling perhaps key moments in his own genius.
“You need to tell me what you did. You need to tell me exactly.”
“Do I?”
He’s pissed now. And not a little hurt, Samantha. I am his audience of one, do I not realize that? The work he put into this thing, the planning. He was expecting, frankly, for me to be blown away. Instead, here I am asking for little annoying details and worse: explanations.