“Of course, dear,” Gumption drawled. “By the way, did your daughter not just stroll out of your house with that young man in the dark clothing?”
Mrs. Baker looked taken aback.
“It was the first time he was a guest in our home, but you can bet he won’t be welcomed again.”
“Yes, I think that’s a good idea. And if I see any drug deals happening on your side of the street, I’ll try to be understanding.”
Mrs. Baker’s face flushed red. “This is not a joke,” she said through her teeth and pointed a finger at Candace. “This woman who you adopted off the street needs help. She needs professional attention.”
“Quite right,” Gumption said. “Hardly a joking matter, which is why I was glad to lend a helping hand. As far as professional attention, well, I think that’s up to Candace. Right, dear?” She addressed Candace.
Candace looked mutely from one woman to the other, then threw back her head and laughed a chilling high-pitched laugh. Mrs. Baker’s face grew slack. She turned on her heel to cross back to her side of the street, looking once over her shoulder. Candace had stopped laughing. She stared at Louise. Her dark, unbrushed hair hung loose and feral around her white, bony face. Mrs. Baker jumped as if someone had pushed her, picked up her gait, and went back into her house. Gumption could still see her through the window seconds later before Mrs. Baker snapped the curtains shut.
Chapter 13
“People have called you a female Andy Warhol. What do you make of that?”
A thirty-something-year-old Gumption Road picked up her cigarette from the ashtray on the little end table between the couch she sat on and the leather lounge chair where her BBC host reclined. She took a long drag, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“I think people don’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to women and the arts.”
“Do you not see parallels in your work to Mr. Warhol’s?” The host smiled smugly and crossed his legs. He wore a suit and tie, and his brown hair was fashionably long, the ends brushing against his collar.
Gumption tilted her head and took another drag from her cigarette before placing it back on the ashtray.
“Are we here to talk about Andy Warhol?”
He lost his smile. “Of course, people also describe your paintings as shocking and exploitative of women.”
“I think society is due for a good shock. We women are not the gentle, addled creatures you men like to make us out to be, and I think it scares you. Much of what I try to capture in my work is female strength.”
“How do the graphic sexual images you paint of women demonstrate female strength?”
“My dear, our strength lies in our sexuality. It is wild, raw, and ravenous, and from it springs the very essence of life.”
The host cleared his throat and recrossed his legs, the movement ushering a tiny smile from Gumption, who watched him with a steady stare. She wore a knee-length knit dress and large silver hoop earrings, a center part in her long, straight brown hair.
“You’ve certainly caused a stir with your Lolita series,” the host said.
“That is just my point, Barry,” Gumption drawled. “My latest collection has nothing to do with Lolita.”
“Doesn’t it? Your subjects are twelve—thirteen? Pre-pubescent girls in very provocative, er, bordering on what some critics have called inappropriate poses.”
Gumption’s smile grew wider. “Art critics and the public are alarmed because they are paintings of young women blossoming into their sexuality and womanhood, produced by a woman.”
“Is that fair, though, Ms. Road? For example, I ask you about one of your more well-known works, Girl Before a Mirror. It is of a, um, very young woman examining her most intimate parts before a mirror. That painting has drawn much ire from men, women, mothers, fathers, and even young girls themselves. I wonder if you feel sometimes that you go too far?”
Gumption laughed and picked up her cigarette, taking another puff. “I thought it quite mild. You don’t see her intimate parts. What the painting reflects is a young woman getting to know herself, examining her changing body from girl to woman. I think more girls ought to take the time to get to know themselves better.”
The host smiled thinly. “You are not suggesting on television that girls give themselves exams before their mirrors?”
“Are you not comfortable with the topic, Barry?”
Barry Dudley looked uncomfortable.
“You did bring up the painting, after all,” Gumption said. “I will say this. Women are sexualized their whole lives. Everyone gets to enjoy a woman’s sexuality—everyone but the woman. So many women are blocked, ashamed, and ignorant of who or what they are. Women are badgered, harassed, raped, exploited, put on a pedestal, and before a woman comes to grips with any of it, she is suddenly invisible. By the time a woman reaches middle age, society has taken what it wants, and she looks about her, dazed, wondering what happened. How dare I, a woman, capture any of this madness? If I were a man, society would be singing my praises. I’d be the darling of the art world with my little,” she made quotes with her fingers, “‘Lolita series.’ Lolita...” She gave a mirthless laugh. “The fact that the series has come to be named so goes to show how men have always seen women: for their own pleasure and enjoyment. I did not paint the girls for men. They are not Lolitas for the sordid pleasure of the bourgeois elite, like Gabriel Matzneff, who glorifies in his writings his debauchery of young girls and male children and is applauded for it. And people call that fine literature. Or Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl and fled as a fugitive to France. He is still making award-winning films. The world is full of predatory men held in high regard and beloved by the public. But women are coming into their own and one day the hunted will become the hunter.”
Barry Dudley adjusted the knot of his tie. “That is a rather extreme outlook, Ms. Road.”
“Sexism, machismo and womanizing are extreme, Mr. Dudley. My view is that women will have to get extreme to combat the extremism that has been the acceptable norm for centuries.”
“And what is it you are trying to convey with your latest heartbreaking series of young girls committing suicide?”
Gumption looked thoughtful. “The first painting sprang from a brief article I read in the London Tribune, a lonely little commentary about a Yorkshire child named Lucy Sallow, who, at the age of ten, hung herself in the attic of her home. There wasn’t much said of Lucy, her life a blip. Of little consequence. And I thought, how terribly tragic. I ruminated and brooded over her for days, and wondered what could compel a child of ten to kill herself in such a dramatic way? And that’s when I started the work, as a sort of homage, I suppose, but also, I think I was trying to work out the why of her suffering. After the first work was completed, it started me on the journey of girl suicides, capturing the pain and loss. I suppose I’m still trying to work out what it means. Why are little girls committing suicide?”
“You are no stranger to tragedy and violence,” the host said, moving on. “In fact, you are, as most people know, American born, from Louisiana. And of mixed ethnicity. Your father, a ‘light-skinned mulatto,’ as you’ve referred to him in the past, was murdered by a group of white men who were part of a terrorist group called the Ku Klux Klan.”
Gumption nodded. “He was taken violently from our home late in the night, his crime a supposed rape of a white woman. A part of him was returned to us in the early morning hours. His head. Lobbed onto our front porch, like so much unwanted rubbish.”
“A grisly scene for a young girl to witness, however you admit to violent revenge on the men.”
Gumption stared at the host with eyes turned hard and shiny as newly minted copper pennies.
“In my household, we had guns, understand,” Gumption said, her voice controlled and steady. “My daddy taught me to shoot, and I was quite good. Fancied myself a cowgirl at times.” She smiled, but it traveled nowhere near those hard, flat eyes. “I knew who each one of
the murderers was. They wore their hooded sheets, but everyone knew who they were just the same. A year before they murdered my daddy, I discovered where they liked to gather in secret to go over their exploits. It was in a little glade. I’d gone exploring and climbed a willow, messing about, playing as children do, when the men showed up to talk over their escapades: men they’d hung and drowned. Men who had disappeared and met a violent end by their hands. They bragged of the women they had their way with.”
Barry Dudley looked riveted as he listened to Gumption.
“So after they did what they did to my daddy, I kept going back. Hiding. Waiting. Until three days after his murder, they showed up and started all their huffing and puffing with each other. The men were hashing out a new plan to abduct a young man, Benoit Vivant. Only fourteen. Smart as a whip, but didn’t know his head from his ass when it came to the country. He was spending his first summer with his grandmother Antoinette, and he was her pride and joy. By the end of the week, if they’d had their way, that promising young man would have been swinging from a tree.
“I hid in some bushes, waiting for the right moment.” Gumption paused and lit a new cigarette, letting the suspense hang in the room. She drew in another lungful of smoke, one eye squinting from the vapors pouring out of her nostrils. A pleased smile swept across her face.
“When I came out with Daddy’s Smith & Wesson, I took out the sheriff first. When the others rushed me, I took down two more while the fourth reached for his pistol. I’d been practicing my aim and speed for a year and a half. I finished them off in one round.”
“Good heavens,” Barry Dudley said. “And you were only eleven years old at the time?”
“Yes.”
“How dreadfully gruesome.”
Emma tapped the screen of her phone, pausing the video. The comments had been dismantled. Gumption’s face was frozen in a sly smile, her eyes looking off to the side.
Emma thought about how it wasn’t long ago that African American people had very few rights, and that if she’d lived in that time, she’d have had just as few. She thought about the sorts of things Nisha had experienced in Lincoln Heights, shrugging off acts of horror as everyday run-of-the-mill incidents.
The memory of the rough sketch of Wren Mahoney in Gumption’s living room sent a cold shiver running down Emma’s back. She Googled: gumption road, suicide series. The images were disturbing. The first one to come up must have been her initial painting in the series, the one of Lucy Sallow.
In an attic with wood beams intersecting an A-framed room were boxes stacked against the walls, sheet-draped furniture and old children’s toys forgotten in a corner heap. Grainy light streamed through a small square window, creating a hazy effect. A girl’s body swung from the rafter beam. Gumption had only painted Lucy from the chest down, her long hair falling past her shoulders. The girl wore blue jeans and a white blouse with ribbed elastic through the center, her dangling feet clad in wedge shoes. Emma chewed her lip, studying the painting, then, feeling disgusted and creeped out, she closed the page, locking her phone.
Her stomach growled and she placed a hand on her belly.
It was 9 PM and Emma was starving, but Jill had locked up the food. The refrigerator and food cabinets were now locked for the night. By 8:30 PM, everything was off limits. A week ago, Emma had a physical and the doctor told her mother that she was twenty pounds overweight for her size and frame. If she continued to gain weight, she would be obese in a few years and at risk for developing chronic health conditions.
Emma had watched in alarm as her mother ordered timed locks for everything that day.
“You’re fat shaming!” She’d exclaimed when the locks arrived and Jill Dawson had a handyman install them.
“That is a misguided comment, Emma,” Jill had said, iPad in hand, displaying a new spreadsheet for checking every food item and its quantity at the end of the night, forty minutes before final lockdown. “This is for your own good. I did notice that you have a weight problem, but I’ve been so busy with the twins, I didn’t realize how distracted I’ve allowed myself to become.”
“I don’t have a problem!” Emma had screamed, hyperventilating.
When her mother got it in her head to do something, she was thorough and could be iron-willed about accomplishing goals.
“Some girls are just naturally bigger,” Emma argued, jogging after Jill as she went through her room. “What are you doing?”
“I’m planning for contingencies,” Jill had said, unmoved. “The first weeks or months might be the hardest. The obvious conclusion is that you will hide food.”
“Mom, seriously!” Emma had screamed, grabbing Jill’s arm. “This is not okay. I can’t help that I’m fat, and you need to accept me for who I am.”
“Nonsense,” Jill had snapped. “This is simply a mathematical problem of taking in more energy-dense food than your body can reasonably process. Your liver can only store so much glucose before your body starts stashing it away into fat cells.”
“Will you listen to yourself?”
“Listen to myself?” Jill had looked nonplussed, taking Emma’s words literally.
“Mom. If you would just take your blinders off, you’d see that everywhere, bigger women and girls are being celebrated instead of starved and made to feel bad about their bodies.”
Jill had given Emma a long, hard look over the rims of her glasses. “What is it that people are celebrating about women and girls being fat?”
The sad thing, Emma remembered thinking, was that her mother’s question had been asked in earnest. Emma could see the wheels churning in her mother’s brain, trying to imagine a party, possibly with balloons and presents.
“People are celebrating and accepting that big is beautiful, too.”
Jill had sighed and looked genuinely perplexed. For someone who was the founder and creator of a popular dating app, she still found much of human behavior hard to understand. Some of the more recent social and cultural shifts appeared beyond her scope of comprehension.
“I don’t know why anyone would want to celebrate having an increased risk for diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, myriad joint problems, and a higher propensity toward various psychological morbidities. I’m sorry, Emma. I know that there are fads that sweep through the teenage demographic, but growing fat and celebrating your weight gain is not something that, as your mother and a scientist, I can in good conscience let you do to yourself. Being twenty pounds overweight at thirteen is harmful to your health, and it is my job to help you get back to a healthy weight.”
Emma had almost continued arguing and then had shut her mouth. Maybe it would be a good thing. The side effect, after all, was weight loss.
As much as she tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter that she was fat, really, if she were honest, it did.
The last few nights had been somewhat okay as she grew accustomed to not snacking late. But tonight, the hunger pangs had started early and she felt they wouldn’t be going away soon. Emma picked her phone back up to open her new favorite girl on girl videos through Candy Porn, but the image of Lucy Sallow hanging from her attic rafter flashed through Emma’s mental imagery, killing her libido.
Her phone lit up and she read the message from Cat.
Omg hv u seen the vid making the rounds on wren?
Cat had shared a link.
Emma clicked it on. Someone had recorded Wren screaming at her younger sister, a slew of cuss words flying out of her mouth like they were going out of style. Her sister was only five, and she looked truly terrified. Emma’s hand rose to her mouth, hovering there.
“Oh my god,” she whispered. Then typed:
Who posted this???
Don’t know!
Christ on a stick
She looks like she’s going to kill her
She looks like she’s on something
I guess she did have a dark side
Jeesh
Emma yawned.
GN. Need to try a
nd sleep. Take my mind off my stomach. Thx for the horror vid.
Your mom still locking everything up?
U know it.
Poor em.
I’ll have the last laugh.
Night
G’night.
Emma clicked off her phone and turned off her lamp.
She stared up at her ceiling, her stomach gurgling. The thought of a grilled cheese sandwich made her mouth water. She punched down her pillow and turned on her side, Blue Mars’ face coming into focus, her moist, parted lips, her large breasts, her… The sex fantasy was subverted by the thought of grilling onions and placing them between toasted, buttery slices of sourdough bread with melted Swiss cheese. Avocado would be good, too. Did they have anymore avocados?
Emma shifted to her back again, her stomach cramping, her mouth filling with saliva. She swallowed, trying to force the hunger away by slipping a hand down her underwear, stroking lightly, Blue Mars’ face back in focus.
When’s the last time I had Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? She asked herself. It used to be her favorite candy. She liked it cold, with a can of cola.
A full five minutes passed before Emma realized she’d been lying there with her hand down her underwear and fantasizing about food. Frustrated, she turned back to her side, then sat up and swilled down half the water in her water bottle, just to have something to fill her stomach. Her last thought before she drifted off to sleep was, I really hate my mom sometimes.
Chapter 14
“Emma, it’s 6:55 AM. I’ll be feeding the twins in five minutes,” Jill said. She stood in the archway between the dining room and kitchen, frowning down at her phone. The twins were in a playpen. A sheet was spread out on the dining room floor, a variety of courses placed in small dishes for them to choose from. Her mother never fed, offered, or coaxed them to eat one particular food item or another from the little dishes. Jill silently took notes while the twins ate. Apparently, Emma had been fed the same way, although she had no memory of the experience. Now, she studied her mom curiously.
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