Her Body and Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

  She makes me nervous, in an excess-salivation kind of way. We’ve had exactly two exchanges since I started working at Glam. The first one went like this:

  “Do you need any help?”

  “No.”

  And, three weeks later:

  “It must be raining,” I said, as the prom dress creature trembled in her hands and the plastic sheeting sent off drops of water.

  “Maybe if it rains enough, we’ll all drown. That’ll be a nice change.”

  She is very cute when she comes out from underneath all of that fabric.

  The first reports started at the height of the recession. The first victims—the first women—had not been seen in public for weeks. Many of the concerned friends and family who broke into their homes and apartments were expecting to find dead bodies.

  I guess what they actually found was worse.

  There was a video that went viral a few years back: amateur footage from a landlord in Cincinnati who brought a video camera with him in order to cover his ass as he evicted a woman who had fallen behind on the rent. He walked from room to room, calling her name, swinging the camera this way and that and making wisecracks. He had lots of things to say about her artwork, her dirty dishes, the vibrator on her nightstand. You could almost miss the punch line to the whole meandering affair if you were not looking closely enough. But then the camera spun around, and there she was, in the most sun-drenched corner of her bedroom, hidden by the light. She was naked, and trying to conceal it. You could see her breasts through her arm, the wall through her torso. She was crying. The sound was so soft that the inane chatter of the landlord had covered it until then. But then you could hear it—miserable, terrified.

  No one knows what causes it. It’s not passed in the air. It’s not sexually transmitted. It’s not a virus or a bacteria, or if it is, it’s nothing scientists have been able to find. At first everyone blamed the fashion industry, then the millennials, and, finally, the water. But the water’s been tested, the millennials aren’t the only ones going incorporeal, and it doesn’t do the fashion industry any good to have women fading away. You can’t put clothes on air. Not that they haven’t tried.

  During our shared fifteen-minute break behind the emergency exit, Chris hands his cigarette to Casey. They pass it back and forth, the smoke curling out of their mouths like goldfish.

  “Hips,” Chris says. “That’s what you want. Hips and enough flesh for you to grab onto, you know? What would you do without something to hold? That’s like—like—”

  “Like trying to drink water without a cup,” Casey finishes.

  I am always surprised at the poetry with which boys can describe boning.

  They offer me the cigarette, like always. Like always, I decline.

  Casey grinds it against the wall and lets the butt drop; the ash clings to the brick like a bad cough.

  “All I’m saying is,” says Chris, “if I want to fuck mist, I’ll just wait for a foggy night and pull my dick out.”

  I pinch the muscle between my shoulder and neck. “Apparently some guys like that.”

  “Who? No one I know,” Chris says. He reaches out and presses his thumb into my collarbone, quickly. “You’re like a stone.”

  “Thanks?” I knock his hand away.

  “I mean, you’re solid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Those other girls—” Chris begins.

  “Man, did I ever tell you about the time I photographed a woman who had started to fade?” Casey says. Sadie’s Photo specializes mostly in children’s portrait photography, handing them props and planting them in these hellish little dioramas—a farmhouse, a tree house, a gazebo by a pond that’s actually a piece of glass surrounded by green felt—but occasionally they get teenagers, even adult couples.

  Chris shakes his head.

  “When I was trying to clean up her portrait on the computer, there were all these weird reflections, like the lens was dirty or busted. Then I realized that I was just seeing what was behind her.”

  “Shit, dude. Did you tell her?”

  “Fuck no. I figured she’d find out soon enough.”

  “Hey, stone girl,” Casey shouts above the rumble of a forklift. “You coming?”

  …

  When I come back in from break, Natalie is glowering, stomping around the interior of Glam like a tiger stalking in its cage. Gizzy rolls her eyes as I sign in.

  “I don’t know why I keep her around,” she says in a dry voice. “Petra will be in later with some new dresses. Don’t let Natalie take off anyone’s head.”

  Natalie unwraps four sticks of gum and folds them into her mouth one at a time, rolling the mass around in there as she chews, slowly and without apparent pleasure. Chris and Casey stop by, but when she glares at them, they take off like she’s spitting acid.

  “Fuckers,” she mutters. “I have a goddamn photography degree, and I can’t even get a job at Sadie’s taking pictures of screaming babies. How the hell do those two assholes get to work there?” She flips the hanger of the first dress she sees. The mountain-blue bustle trembles. I turn it back.

  “Do you ever wonder if the girls who come in here realize they’re gonna grow up exactly as fucked as we are?” she says. I shrug, and she flips another dress. After that, I let her rage through the empty store. I stand near the closest rack, a collection ranging from pale, silky seafoam to dense moss, smoothing the skirts and watching the front door. The dresses look even sadder than normal tonight, even more like stringless marionettes. I hum under my breath as I fix twisted sequins. One of them pops off and flutters through the air. I kneel down and press the tip of my finger to it; then I tug at the hems so that they skim an even inch over the black carpeting. When I look up, I see a pair of combat boots, a bouquet of Technicolor skirts.

  “You getting off soon?” Petra asks me. I stare up at her for a long moment, my crooked index finger bearing a gleaming sequin, and feel the heat of a blush creeping up my neck.

  “I’m, uh, done at nine.”

  “It’s nine now.”

  I stand. Petra lays the dresses gently over the counter. Natalie is back at the register, watching us curiously. “Are you okay to close up?” I ask her. She nods, her left eyebrow so sharply arched, it’s in danger of touching her hairline.

  We sit at a small table in the food court, across from Glam and the ice skating rink. The mall has just closed, so the space is empty except for clerks turning out the lights and rolling down the clattering grates at the storefronts.

  “We could get a coffee or something, or—”

  She touches my arm, and a shock of pleasure bolts from my cunt to my breastbone. She is wearing a necklace I’ve never seen before: a smoky quartz encased in a tangled sprawl of copper vines. Her lips are a little chapped.

  “I hate coffee,” she says.

  “What about—”

  “I hate that, too.”

  Petra’s mother runs a motel off the highway, taken over from her father when he died a few years back. The patrons are mostly truckers, Petra explains as she drives, which is why it’s set so far off the road. Between the entrance and the distant building is a tundra of thick, knobbly ice, over which Petra’s ancient station wagon rocks like a canoe against the lapping tide. Slowly, we move closer and closer to the motel, which looms like a haunted house. A sign on the dilapidated building next to the motel blinks through a set of letters, B-A-R, three times before illuminating in its entirety and going dark. Petra drives with one hand on the wheel, the other rubbing a slow circle on my hand.

  Petra parks the car along a deserted strip of spaces. The numbered doors are shut against the cold, quiet. “I need to get a key,” she says. She gets out and walks around to my side of the car. She opens the door. “Are you coming?”

  Inside the lobby, a large woman in a peach nightgown is using a sewing machine behind the counter. She looks like a melting ice cream cone—loose. Long hair spills off her head and disappears behind her back. The air is warm a
nd soft and filled with a mechanical purring.

  “Hey, Mama,” says Petra. The woman doesn’t respond.

  Petra bangs on the counter with her hand. “Mama!” The woman behind the desk looks up briefly before returning to her work. She smiles but does not say anything. Her fingers flit like honeybees emerging from a hive on a too-warm winter day—dizzy, purposeful, punch-drunk. She moves a piece of heavy cotton through the machine, creating a hem.

  “Who is this?” she asks. Her eyes don’t break from her work.

  “She’s from Gizzy’s store at the mall,” Petra says, rifling through a drawer. She pulls out a white keycard and runs it through a small gray machine, pressing a few buttons. “I’m going to send her back with some of the new dresses.”

  “Sounds good, baby girl.”

  Petra pockets the card.

  “We’re going to take a walk.”

  “Sounds good, baby girl.”

  Petra fucks me in room 246, which is around the back of the building. She turns on the light and fan over the bed, and takes her shirt off by grabbing it behind the collar. I lie down on the bed, and she straddles me.

  “You’re really beautiful,” she says into my skin. She grinds her pelvis hard against mine, and I moan, and at some point the cold charm of her necklace dips into my mouth and knocks against my teeth. I laugh, she laughs. She takes off the necklace and sets it down on the nightstand, the chain slithering like sand. When she sits up again, the ceiling fan frames her head like a glowing halo, like she’s a Madonna in a medieval painting. There is a mirror on the opposite side of the room, and I catch fragments of her reflection. “May I—” she starts, and I nod before she finishes. She puts her hand over my mouth and bites my neck and slips three fingers into me. I laugh-gasp against her palm.

  I come fast and hard, like a bottle breaking against a brick wall. Like I’ve been waiting for permission.

  Afterward, Petra pulls a blanket over me, and we lie there listening to the wind. “How are you doing?” she asks, after a while.

  “Okay,” I say. “I mean, good. I wish every workday ended like that. I’d never miss a shift.”

  “Do you like working there?” she asks.

  I snort, but don’t know how to continue after that.

  “That bad?”

  “I mean, it’s fine, I guess?” I draw my hair up into a bun. “It could be worse. It’s just that I’m broke as hell and it’s not like this is what I wanted to be doing with my life, but a lot of people have it worse.”

  “You’re very kind to the dresses,” she says.

  “I just don’t like it when Natalie fucks with them, even if she’s half-joking. It seems—I don’t know. Undignified.”

  Petra studies me. “I knew it. I knew you could tell.”

  “What?”

  “Come on.” She gets up and slips her shirt on, her underwear, her pants. It takes her a moment to lace her boots up as tightly as they were before. I hunt around for my shirt for a minute before finding it trapped between the mattress and the headboard.

  Petra leads me through the parking lot and into the lobby. Her mother is not there. She steps behind the counter and pushes open the door.

  At first, the room appears strangely lit—studded with patches of iridescent blue, like will-o’-the-wisps misleading us through a swamp. Dress forms stand at attention, an army with no purpose, surrounded by long tables scattered with pincushions and spools of thread, baskets of sequins, beads, and charms, an unspiraling measuring tape that looks like a snail, bolts of fabric. Petra takes my hand and guides me along the wall.

  We are not alone in the room. Petra’s mother is hovering near a dress, a bracelet pincushion wrapped around her wrist. As my eyes adjust to the dark, the lights coalesce into silhouettes, and I realize the room is full of women. Women like the one in the viral video, see-through and glowing faintly, like afterthoughts. They drift and mill and occasionally look down at their bodies. One of them, with a hard and sorrowful face, is standing very close to Petra’s mother. She moves toward the garment slung over the dress form—butter yellow, the skirt gathered in small places like a theater curtain. She presses herself into it, and there is no resistance, only a sense of an ice cube melting in the summer air. The needle—trailed by thread of guileless gold—winks as Petra’s mother plunges it through the girl’s skin. The fabric takes the needle, too.

  The girl does not cry out. Petra’s mother makes tight, neat stitches along the girl’s arm and torso, skin and fabric binding together as tightly as two sides of an incision. I realize that I am digging my fingers into Petra’s arm, and she is letting me.

  “Let me out,” I say, and Petra pulls me through the door. We are standing in the middle of the well-lit vestibule. A sign resting on an easel reads CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST, 6 A.M.–8 A.M.

  “What—” I point to the door. “What is she doing? What are they doing?”

  “We don’t know.” Petra begins to pick at a bowl of fruit. She takes out an orange and rolls it around under her hand. “My mother has always been a seamstress. When Gizzy approached her about making dresses for Glam, she agreed. The women started showing up a few years ago—they would just fold themselves into the needlework, like it was what they wanted.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t she tell them to stop?”

  “She tried, but they kept coming. We don’t even know how they know about this place.” The orange begins to leak, and the air fills with the bite of citrus oil.

  “Did you tell Gizzy?”

  “Of course. But she said that as long as they sought us out, it was all right. And those dresses do so well—they sell more than anything my mother has ever made before. It’s like people want them like that, even if they don’t realize it.”

  I leave the motel on foot. I walk slowly over the ice, falling frequently. Once, I turn and look back and see Petra’s outline in the lobby window. My hands go numb with cold. My cunt throbs, my head aches, and I can still feel her necklace in my mouth. I can taste the metal, and the stone. At the main road, I call a cab.

  …

  I go to Glam early the next morning. My key is missing—I must have left it on the dresser at the motel, I realize, swearing under my breath—so I wait for Natalie to arrive. Inside the store, I leave her to the morning tasks and search through the dresses. They rustle beneath my fingers, groan on their hangers. I press my face into their skirts, shape the bodices beneath my hands to give them room.

  I wander the mall on my lunch break. I wonder about the merchandise I pass. Who’s in there? The wooden picture frame samples arranged in descending v’s down a felt display case look askew, as if they’ve been invaded. The glass-and-steel chess set in the window of the game store—are those the reflections of passersby in the fat curve of the queen and the pawns, or faces peering out? There’s an ancient Pac-Man machine that takes everyone’s quarters, seemingly on purpose. I walk past the heavily scented entrance of a JCPenney cosmetics counter, and imagine customers uncapping tubes of lipstick and twisting the color free, and faded women squeezing up around the makeup, thumbs first.

  In front of the Auntie Anne’s, I stand and watch as the dough is pulled, heavy and wet. I imagine toddlers, faded girls (they were fading younger and younger, weren’t they? That’s what they said on the news) pressed into the dough, and, yes, isn’t that a curled hand? A pouting lip? A little girl standing in front of the counter asks her mother for a pretzel.

  “Susan,” the mother admonishes. “Pretzels are junk food. They will make you fat.” And she drags her away.

  A posse of teenagers squeezes into Glam after I get back. The girls pull dresses off hangers and slip them on carelessly, not even pulling the modesty curtains closed enough to conceal their dressing and undressing. When they come out, I can see the faded women all bound up in them, fingers laced tightly through the grommets. I cannot tell if they are holding on for dear life or if they are trapped.
The rustling and trembling of the fabric could be weeping or laughter. The girls spin and lace and tighten. From the doorway of the store, Chris and Casey are gnawing on Slurpee straws. They hoot and holler but never cross the threshold. Their mouths are stained blue.

  “Fuck you!” I run toward the entrance, a stapler’s comforting weight deep in my palm. My arm is ready to sling it, if I have to. “Get out. Go the fuck away.”

  “Jesus,” Chris says, blinking. He takes a step back. “What’s your problem?”

  “Hey, Lindsay, nice!” Casey yells into the store. A blonde turns and grins, popping her hip to the side like she’s about to balance an infant on it. Deep in the thick folds of the satin, I see lidless eyes.

  In Glam’s black bathroom, I throw up everything.

  “I can’t stay,” I tell Gizzy. “I just can’t.”

  She sighs. “Look,” she says, “I really like you a lot. The economy is shit, and I know you don’t have another job lined up. Can you at least stay on until the end of the season? I can even give you a little raise.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” She hands me a tissue, and I blow my nose.

  “I just can’t.”

  She looks genuinely sad. She digs a piece of paper out of her desk and starts to write on it. “I’m not sure how long Natalie will last without you,” she says. “I like Natalie.”

  I let out a bark of laughter.

  “Come on, Natalie’s great, but she’s the worst.”

  “She’s not the worst.”

  “She called a customer a ‘sanctimonious twat’ today. To her face.”

  Gizzy looks up at me and sighs. “She reminds me of my daughter, all piss and vinegar. Isn’t that stupid? What a stupid reason.” She smiles sadly.