Wake, Siren

by Nina MacLaughlin

  “You can just say breasts, you know.”

  “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  “Why would that make me uncomfortable?”

  “Please, you don’t have to get tense.”

  “At the age where I started to grow boobs, yeah, that sucked. That was awful. Taping myself up every day so tight I couldn’t take a full breath.”

  “You couldn’t breathe?”

  “Obviously I could breathe, I just couldn’t take a full huge deep breath.”

  “Sometimes I feel like that with my jog bra on.”

  “That’s not how it feels.”

  “You just said it was so tight you couldn’t take a full breath. I feel that way when I wear my jog bra. I do know.”

  “Your jog bra? That navy blue thing that’s lost most of its elastic? Are you joking?”

  “It’s tight.”

  “Okay. Imagine it tighter. Imagine if your boobs had sprained their ankles and needed to be immobilized. Imagine wrapping yourself up so tight your ribs can’t fill with air. That is not the way your fucking jog bra feels.”

  “Common ground. I’m just trying to find some common ground here.”

  “You haven’t found it yet.”

  “Why don’t you tell me more about what it was like.”

  “When I was thirteen? That hell? Sure. Imagine you’re a human kid—”

  “I was.”

  “—and you have two legs and two arms and skin and hair on your head—”

  “I had all these things.”

  “—and a brain and heart and guts and a mouth and a tongue.”

  “Got it.”

  “Like you’re just a human like the rest of us and some days are fun and some days are boring and sometimes you have to go to the dentist and they give you a giant balloon and some days you get to play soccer and some days you get yelled at for getting paint on the rug and some days you eat Popsicles.”

  “That sounds like a really nice childhood.”

  “And then right around thirteen, your skin starts getting strange.”

  “Pimples.”

  “Not pimples. It hardens, like a thin shell, like it would crunch if you stepped on it. On your arms, your legs, your belly. Like an insect. Like a giant bug. And you’re brushing your hair one morning and there’s these two antennae. There’s these two antennae growing out of your head like wires.”

  “What kind of bug?”

  “It absolutely does not matter. And all at once you have no idea what you are. Like everything that was normal life that you took for granted is turned upside down. You see yourself in the mirror and you understand yourself as the human kid you’ve been, but now all of a sudden you have no idea if that’s true. Am I a kid or am I a bug? The way you’ve understood yourself, and the way everyone has understood you, has maybe been wrong all along, and that all the things you thought you knew about yourself, your most fundamental self, is shattered, like when that glass fell off the shelf after the earthquake that time. Like you stand in front of the mirror and you ask yourself, Oh my god, what am I? And as you walk down the sidewalk you can see that everyone is staring at you and everyone is wondering the same thing: What is that?”

  “But that’s in your imagination.”

  “That people are staring?”

  “People always think other people notice way more than they do.”

  “You are a child, and you are turning into a bug. You don’t think people notice? You don’t think people are like, hang on, what the fuck?”

  “You’re describing puberty.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Everyone has that moment, sweetie. It’s called growing up.”

  “You do not listen.”

  “Everyone has that moment, when the hormones kick in and bodies get oily and hairs grow, when they feel like a stranger in themselves.”

  “Growing pubic hair and getting zits is not the same as going from a human to a bug. It is not the same as going from having shoulder blades to having wings.”

  “Everyone feels like they’re turning into a bug at some point.”

  “Fuck it.”

  “No, go on, sweetie. All right, I’m a bug.”

  “No, listen. So I start growing tits and it feels disgusting. It feels like my body does not belong to me and I have no idea what I am and that a punishment is taking place. I have literally no idea what’s happening or who I am and it is a frightening place to be. Like, I’m telling you: it was fucking scary. All the time. I need you to understand that. And there was no one I could talk to about it because no one could understand.”

  “You could’ve talked to me.”

  “It was confusing and shameful and everything about the way I understood myself came into question. Like, hang on, didn’t we tell you, you’re not a boy, you’re a girl! Like, what the fuck?”

  “I said you could’ve talked to me.”

  “That’s not how it felt.”

  “I remember the day you got your period.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone cry as hard.”

  “Well, it was scary and I hated it and I hated that my body was doing that because in my brain I was something else and I didn’t want to be what I was.”

  “Maybe it’s like when I look in the mirror I get shocked when I see how old I am because in my mind I’m much younger.”

  “Maybe it’s like that. I don’t know.”

  “It was hard seeing you so upset.”

  “It was hard being so upset.”

  “Did I make you feel better? Did I do an okay job at making you feel better?”

  “I feel like this is becoming more about me trying to make you feel okay about something. This is becoming more about reassuring you.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing. I’m here to listen.”

  “I don’t want to talk about getting my period.”

  “That’s fine. I’m just telling you it was really hard seeing you so upset. You seemed so sad and so scared. I remember I wanted to cry but I wouldn’t let myself cry in front of you. And it wasn’t so much sadness I felt, but angry.”

  “What the fuck were you angry about? What did you have to feel angry about?”

  “Sweetie. I was angry at your dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “But also sad. When you got your period and I was doing laundry and washing the jeans you were wearing and I saw the stain—”

  “Did you not hear what I just said?”

  “It wasn’t just a little bit. There was so much blood, sweetie. Do you remember? When I first got my period, it was just a tiny bit on my underpants.”

  “Fucking ridiculous.”

  “No, no, wait, where are you going? Okay, please. Sit back down. We don’t have to talk about your period. Help me understand.”

  “You’re making this really hard.”

  “Just go on, please.”

  “Try this. You’re in a bathroom. A public bathroom. There are other women in the bathroom. Three other women. All of you are washing your hands at the sinks. You look up into the mirror that’s spread across above the sinks and you have no idea which reflection belongs to you. You have no idea which is you.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “That’s because it’s terrifying. And it was even more confusing when I started having feelings for Ianthe. We were in all the same classes and she had those huge green eyes. And she’d wear these shirts that fell off her shoulder and she wore a bra before most of the other girls and I’d see her bra strap on her shoulder and it was like I had a circus in my stomach. I’d see her come around the corner in the hall at school and my stomach would fall into my hips, just like drop right down, and my whole torso would get warm. I just remember feeling extra alive near her, like this elevated energy anytime we were together. A crackle. And when we weren’t together all I would think about was the next time I’d see her.”

  “I felt that with your father at the sta
rt.”

  “Except that it felt awful. I was a girl. I knew I was a girl. You knew I was a girl. There was this huge sug—secret that I felt like I was being buried under. Like this heap of something on top of me every day, crushing me. Burying me alive. Ianthe thought I was a boy. She liked me because she thought I was a boy. But I wasn’t, and I wanted to be more than friends with her. I wanted to see what she looked like without her shirt. I wanted to slow dance with her. I wanted to touch her skin.”

  “You don’t need to tell me this.”

  “I wanted to kiss her.”

  “Sweetie.”

  “I didn’t want to want to kiss her. It was horrible feeling that way. I thought I was crazy. I thought there was something so so so so so wrong with me. Like mares don’t have crushes on mares and sows don’t have crushes on sows. Sheep want rams. Does want stags. Hens—”

  “I get it.”

  “You don’t. Because you have no idea what it is to feel like you’re going against nature. That you are diseased. Disordered. All wrong. I wanted to lie in bed and listen to songs with her. I wanted to jump off the dock with her at night. I wanted to put my hands up her shirt and it made me feel like I shouldn’t be on the earth. I thought I was a monster. Plus I had no idea whether the feelings I had for her were real or whether they had to do with the fact that I was living this secret. Like, did I really like her? Did I really want to jump off the dock with her at night? Did I really want to put my hands up her shirt? Or was it because those were the things a boy was supposed to want?”

  “It’s not a disorder.”

  “Oh my god. It felt like one. I felt like I was disordered. Like, there was something deeply wrong with me. I felt insane. Okay?”

  “Please don’t yell.”

  “And I knew she liked me, too. But she liked me as a boy and that’s not what I was and it was this horrible secret from everyone.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t tell your dad.”

  “I thought about killing myself.”

  “Sweetie. No.”

  “I couldn’t stop my feelings for Ianthe. And you guys arranged the marriage. And I was going to be found out, and then what? Ianthe wouldn’t want to be with me. Maybe Dad would kill me.”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d never met him.”

  “I would lie in bed and just be like, you’re a girl, you’re a girl, you’re a girl. Stop feeling this way. Stop thinking about her. I’ve thought so much about it since then, and the thing with love, I think the main thing with love, the thing that makes it live, is hope. Like hope that you’ll get even closer than you are, hope that you’ll understand and be understood better all the time, hope that you’ll come out of whatever shitty patch you’re going through, hope that there’s so much more always to explore together. And when there’s no hope, that’s the death of love.”

  “Anger, too.”

  “Anger what?”

  “Can kill love.”

  “Well, I wasn’t angry at Ianthe. But I knew there wasn’t any hope. I was a girl. She was a girl. Everyone was glad she and I were together—Dad, you, her, her parents. To everyone it made sense. But I knew it couldn’t ever happen. And that if it did, my life would be over.”

  “I wasn’t necessarily glad you were together. It scared me, too.”

  “That I was going to get found out?”

  “That it meant the end.”

  “Of my life?”

  “Possibly. But I was happy that you were happy. I could see you loved her.”

  “I wasn’t happy.”

  “But you loved her.”

  “I was a monster.”

  “I wanted to murder him. Sometimes I really did want to. Sometimes I still do want to. I prayed for you. I prayed to Isis. I prayed to her that you would know what to do. That the sugar would just go away. I saw that it was burying you. But you were never a monster. I prayed and prayed. Isis, I begged, help us.”

  “It worked. There was hope. There were options.”

  “You changed.”

  “I changed.”

  “I remember turning around and seeing you walking, after the change. Your stride was different. It’s funny how certain people’s walks are so familiar. And all of a sudden your stride was altered. It was so subtle. You never had a swishy girlish walk, not hips like a bell—”

  “That’s how you walk.”

  “I have hips, that’s why. But then there was something, flatter, more rigid in the movement. Still graceful, still elegant, but heavier of step somehow.”

  “I held my shoulders differently.”

  “And your face. Your eyebrows got darker. Even the shape of your jaw changed.”

  “You can notice that?”

  “Oh, definitely!”

  “I thought maybe it wasn’t noticeable.”

  “Oh, I love seeing you smile like that. You became what you always were.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Things worked out.”

  “Things worked out.”

  “You’re happy with Ianthe.”

  “I’m so happy.”

  “I hate your dad.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve wanted to kill him.”

  “That’s hard to hear.”

  “It makes me feel like a monster.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through this.”

  “Me, too.”

  “It was hard for both of us.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m really happy you’re happy.”

  “Me, too.”

  “My beautiful son.”

  HECUBA

  Good evening. I’d like to welcome you all to the third installment of our speaker series, “Transnational Trauma: Displacement, Migration, and Exile in the Contemporary World.” Tonight we’re so lucky to have with us the mother of Hector, Paris, Troilus, Polydorus, and Polyxena, among others. Hecuba has witnessed and endured the unimaginable, and I’ll let her put those to you in her words. I’ll be serving as interpreter for tonight’s talk, and, as always, will do my best to create a bridge between her language and ours. Welcome, Hecuba. Thanks for being with us tonight. Let’s begin.

  “My name is Hecuba,” she says. “I am not from here.

  “This you know already. You can tell by the color of my skin, and the shape of my eyes, and the launch no the rise of the bones in my cheek, and you can tell by the scarves I windmill or spin sorry wrap, the scarves I wrap around me. You can hear it in the way my mouth shapes the words I speak, in the spread of the vowels, the—the slipperiness of certain consonants. You have an idea of where I belong. The way you—the way you—look at me, you see only a representation of a place, a kind, a certain breed that you aren’t sure you want here. I am ‘one of them.’ If only I could make you know what it is to be rubbed out or no erased by people’s eyes.

  “What do you see when you look at me? Do you see a dog? Is a dog what you see? Some scabby chewed-up mongrel? I see the way you look at me.

  “You who belong here, you who were born on this land, you cannot know comprehend this experience of—this experience of exile. Or or exile or—this is me speaking as interpreter now, the more literal translation is is is dislocation. The actual words she used are ‘the experience of being pulled out of the socket of your life.’ She says, ‘This is a state of existing beyond borders.’

  “I am not from here and my homeland as I knew it no longer gives up to me offers an embrace. But this is not just a matter of geography, this goes far beyond notions of geography, of the simple act of crossing invisible borderlines that separate here from there. Those boundaries are an irrelevance to me at this time now. The only borders that matter to me are those to be found at the edges of fear and the edges of dreams, the lines to be found at the limits of hate and of love.

  “The War took everything. It took my husband. It took my sons. It took my daughter who was torn from my arms and her throat slit in front of me. Do you want me t
o to to describe the sound her body made when it landed on the floor? Or the sound in her throat as she gulped no swallowed sorry choked choked on her own blood? Or how the light from the window hit the blood on the floor and turned one band of it white like milk? Do you want me to tell you the look of the sight orb no eye of the man machine sorry soldier who did it? The deadness in his eyes? The nothing in his eyes? Do you want to hear how loud I screamed? I did not know I had so much voice inside me. I put my body on top of her body. My hands, my face, jacketed sorry coated no covered covered in her blood.

  “And while I wept, a sick sort of relief came over me—there can be no suffering deeper than this. There is a vault or rather basement sorry the literal words soul basement sorry bottom. There is a bottom and I have found my way to it.

  “But, you see, I had not. There was lower still. There is a place past grief I hope none of you have to see in the complete span of your hours.

  “I went down to the shore to collect ocean water in an urn to cleanse the wounds of my dead daughter. If there is a boundary between here and gone, this is when I crossed it. There on the sand, a body. A gray swollen body being rolled by the push and pull of the waves. Limp gray swollen, with wounds that yawned no gaped around the chest and ribs. I did not want to look closer, but something drew me. I was pulled by a physical maternal force that is a mystery. This is where I crossed over. The face. The face. My son. My final child. He was the one who was supposed to be safe.

  “I looked up at the sky. In that moment, I was gone. I myself became absence. I had no bones, no brain, no blood. I was lesser than a kite. In that moment, I was the sky. I was spread without end.

  “There are no boundaries to an absence.

  “Here you see the very interpreter himself has rain of the—cries. He cries. You, you who belong here, you hear this story and some of you cry, too.

  “My whole life, my whole self feels like a foreign country I’ve arrived in. In this place, the streets are made of phantoms no or ghosts. Gray shifts of movement, fogs in human shapes. I move through them as a ghost myself. Moments of memory, familiarity, of some sense of recognition, they happen and dissolve sooner than I know what it is that’s appeared. A glimpse of a fruit tree in the yard of my childhood, the smell of char on beef, a shape of a face, my sister? my friend? my husband? my child? These apparitions of what was, there and gone too soon for me to feel anything but their their their inexistence.