by Rachel Yoder
Spurred by the harmony within her house, and then by her fear of having it all crumble around her, she wrote another missive to Wanda White this same weekend, for she had not heard back since her first e-mail and wondered if she had the correct address (an academic one at the University of Sacramento), or if White was still alive (she no doubt was in her eighties or nineties, based on the publication date of her book and other odds and ends Nightbitch had been able to piece together), though Nightbitch had not been able to find any obituary for her. She had not, in fact, been able to find much of anything about White on the Internet, which was quite peculiar indeed, for she considered her online searching abilities fairly advanced, given her catholic approach to searching (that is, to search any and all possible words and combinations in the near and not-so-near vicinity to the target subject). She wanted to tell her husband about White, but wasn’t sure how even to begin explaining the woman, the icon, the looming and massive idea that White had become.
I’m obsessed with this book, she began, waving the Field Guide in his direction as he checked the settings on his work laptop at the kitchen table.
Oh, he said, not looking up. Tell me.
It’s this weird field guide to mythical women around the world, but it’s supposed to be true, she continued. This woman who wrote it is an academic. And the really strange thing is, whatever I read in it syncs up with what I’ve been feeling or thinking about, like magic. Or like the ads on your cell phone.
Her husband offered a sideways glance at the book.
Cool, he said. Can I look at it?
She unconsciously clutched the book to her chest, suddenly protective of its wisdom; it did not feel correct to show her husband its pages, which now felt so personal, even holy. Through reading this book, she had been communing with something greater than herself, with White and with the women she invoked in her reportage. Suddenly the book felt too sacred and tender a thing to parade about, especially to her husband, who would most definitely not view it in the right light, the way she had come to relate to it, for that is what she now did: relate. She was in a relationship with the book and with White, and she did not welcome her husband into it.
Sure, she said, still clutching the book to her heart. Once I’m done.
Just a look, he said, now turning to her and holding out his hand. Having sensed that she did not want to show him, he now wanted to look all the more. Come on, he encouraged.
But I need to write something first, she said, walking toward the guest room, where her own laptop was located.
Hey! he hollered as she left.
She sat at her desk and placed the book in her lap. Why had White not replied? she wondered, struck with the fervor of a heartsick teen. And with such yearning right there, in her throat, she began to write.
WW—
Hello again. I have been awaiting your reply to my last message, and since I’ve not yet heard from you, thought I would write again. I hope I’m not a bother. I hope you can see that I have been, one might say, “spiritually compelled” to write. What I mean is that your book and research have spoken deeply to me, and I need to know the person who has written a text so intimately in conversation with my most private thoughts and desires.
I’m wondering if you have, in all your travels, ever found, say, a suburban American housewife or a mother in a small Midwestern town beset with, well, a sort of animalesque quality? Perhaps she was more hairy than usual? Somewhat aggressive? Prone to bouts of howling? Not actually mentally ill, mind you. Just willing to embrace a certain doglike playfulness, a whimsical approach to her motherhood, you could say.
Please, tell me: have you ever met her? And, if so, can you please put me in touch?
Further: might you be in the possession of a blueprint of sorts for how to be a magical woman in a small town in the heart of America? Might you have drafted some sort of instruction manual for how to exist between the world of ration and the world of imagination in a time when politics, public discourse, even the weather have turned ominous?
I have been unable to find any information online about you or your work beyond that of your Field Guide and am curious to know more about what must be your long and storied career and publication history.
I’m babbling. I’ll stop. I wish you well.
MM
* * *
—
AND IT WAS JUST as things really seemed to be starting to come together—just as her son was now going to sleep on his own in the kennel, her sex life was reignited, she was making mommy friends, she was, dare she say it, enjoying mommy life a bit more, with her doggy games, and not worrying about her career, as so many Internet articles and well-meaning folks had suggested—it was just as her motherhood seemed to be coalescing, that she took the liberty of actually going out, of all things, on a weekend night with some old friends from grad school, the kind working mother she’d lunched with and their old pal the videographer.
What a novelty! What a delight! To join other accomplished women for a dinner cooked by someone else and a glass of white wine and stimulating conversation! A chance to share their respective trials and tribulations within a context of mutual respect and admiration!
The working mother who taught at the university started in about her work immediately, explaining even before they ordered that she had been confronting and complicating the notion of appropriation, artistic ownership, and public persona by recontextualizing Instagram posts within works of art. This woman—this working mother / working artist, who had it all without a hitch—simply printed out Instagram posts in large scale, and that was it; that was the art. Oh sure, there were claims of curation and the power of juxtaposition, but when it really came down to it, she had browsed Instagram and found some pics and gotten a large-scale printer and, voilà: art. Nightbitch had read about it on her website and then in the Times, where she saw that a recent piece had sold for half a million dollars.
The other grad-school friend—the videographer—had been experimenting with the interplay between seer and seen and the ways in which we mediate reality, as if that were a new thing, Nightbitch thought. As if there were actually any original thought that had even gone into such a project. This friend had just had a show in the Kelly Biennial featuring two literally unwatchable videos. In one, the video would cut in and out as the power surged and died, which was meant to inspire thought regarding our relationship with information and power/Power, though Nightbitch felt the installation would simply be annoying. It didn’t even really need an installation, just an artist’s statement. The other video, the videographer explained, was a real-time video of twenty-four hours of her day, alongside an actress acting out that very same day in that very same space. Her friend said something about performance: can we truly be ourselves while being watched blah blah blah. Nightbitch nodded and smiled. Sure. Okay.
And what are you working on? they asked her, and she stammered and chuckled, turned red, stared at the wall for a moment before saying something about the wildness of motherhood, the modern mother’s impulse toward violence, the transformative powers of anger. Her friends squinted, then tilted their heads quizzically.
I’m just at the concept phase right now, Nightbitch added. But I think it will ultimately be a performance piece.
Ohhh, the working mother said, and then the videographer added, Your work has always been so dramatic, and though Nightbitch wanted to say, What the fuck do you mean by that? or At least I’m not doing some bullshit social-media project that gives art a bad name, or If you’re going for ultimate snoozefest with your work, then you’re right on time, instead she nodded calmly and didn’t say anything.
It was meant to be a pleasant dinner, a reunion of sorts among grad-school friends, one of whom she hadn’t seen now in, what, eight years? It began nicely enough—how-are-yous and family updates, chats about this old friend or that one—but soo
n enough, Nightbitch saw it, saw exactly what was happening.
You see, the old friends had been doing more work than she—gobs, in fact. They had all been colleagues and friendly competitors, neck and neck years ago, back in school, even back just before her son was born, but since then these friends had indeed moved forward, progressed in a reasonable and some might say even extraordinary fashion, given their talents and skills, whereas she had punched her artist card and checked in to stay-at-home-mommy land. She hadn’t wanted her baby to be with the horrible women with rubber nipples all day. She had been desperate to hold him, to kiss his cheeks and smell his neck. And she hadn’t wanted to cry as he nursed and then continue to cry some more as he fell asleep and she hadn’t gotten to make him giggle and read his favorite books because he was so tired, exhausted, by his day at day care with the horrible women, where he would not—he refused—to sleep. And she simply couldn’t work at the gallery and do her own work and then take care of the baby by herself, with her husband out of town. She couldn’t, and so she had chosen the baby—the baby, the baby, his allure had been dreamlike and intoxicating—and had left the rest behind. And now. Now.
These other women—they were her friends!—had kids, but one had sold a piece of art for half a million dollars and also had a live-in nanny, while the other had the ability not to care about the horrible women and the day care, or at least not show it, not give in to it, and instead had enlisted her child in full-time day care, with before- and after-school programs, even before the child was in school. Nightbitch knew this because the videographer had said as much, in passing, with a laugh. A laugh! The videographer had no regrets—which she actually said after her third glass of wine—No regrets!—with a laugh and a clink of her wineglass against Nightbitch’s—no ambivalence, a strong and clear vision of herself in the studio and her child elsewhere, wherever that may have been. So these other women, these successful women, of course they discussed their many successes, swapping the names of gallery curators and art-world agents with heightening excitement, screeching with joy as one announced a new show, the other a new grant, both of them comparing their residency schedules and teaching gigs for the coming year.
I just have too many opportunities being offered to me, the working mother said. I’m going to have to let go of the ones that bore me, honestly. There’s just not enough time in the day.
Nightbitch nodded, hoping that it appeared as though she completely understood. Not enough time for all those creative pursuits. Totally. Indeed.
Nightbitch had ordered a kale salad topped with a lovely piece of salmon, and the longer she ate, the more kale seemed to appear on her plate. She assiduously shoveled it into her smiling mouth, chewing and chewing and chewing. As the women talked, actually turned their chairs toward each other on the other side of the circular table and talked and talked and talked, Nightbitch chewed.
I am a cow, she meditated. I am a Zen cow in a soothing green field.
This meditation she needed to counteract the cud that rose from down in her guts, for it was there, she discovered with a startling pang of nausea, that she had pushed all the anger and sadness, all the disappointment about how her life had turned out. It was there she had buried the talented and plucky young woman with big ideas and an unusual point of view. That young woman was down in her intestines, biding her time, or perhaps dead, suffocated in all the shit. And up where Nightbitch still lived, up and out in the air and at the table in the lamplit restaurant tucked into a charming bricked strip of buildings in a quaint little college town, there sat a middle-aged mom, out of the art world for a significant amount of time, no longer a newcomer but also not yet emerged, not yet even introduced to the art world, really, save for some very minor regional shows, a few articles here and there, but otherwise decidedly unemergent, with no hopes of surfacing soon. And this was not how Nightbitch had viewed herself, not by a long shot, for she had been keeping this idea alive, that there was infinite time and potential and opportunity, that she wasn’t that old, that her life wasn’t over, but, sitting at that table, she saw quite starkly, through two glasses of white wine and an entire bale of kale, that she was none of these things and instead was, in a word, insignificant. She saw herself as these other women now saw her, a silent, flabby woman sipping wine without so much as a single exciting comment or opinion to offer to the conversation. She was so uninteresting that they didn’t even need to acknowledge her for a good half-hour. It wasn’t mean. It was just that she didn’t figure into the conversation. (Surely it wasn’t mean? She was talented. And she would have been as successful as they were, had she kept working. She assumed they had all understood this, had this as a shared understanding that put them all on an even playing field. Honestly, none of this had even been consciously considered until this very moment, when she was forced to see herself in this pathetic context, in this pathetic way.)
At first she thought she might cry, but then she saw she would do something far worse.
All of the rage and hopelessness of those long months before Nightbitch emerged tidal-waved back into her. Surely her friends had not meant a thing by all this, had meant no insult, had not even really been thinking of her at all, to be honest, but it was this lack of consideration that wounded her the most, that she could no longer even be a part of their conversation, not that she wanted to be part of such self-involved banter, but she would have liked to be invited to join and then reject it—she deserved that, at the very least. She returned to those horrible thoughts of her husband sipping coffee in a quiet shop while leisurely perusing a periodical, to her long days of trains and failed naps and encouraged poops in the potty and train tracks and more trains.
She swelled with self-indulgent anger, for indeed she saw she was on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum much in the same way her son tossed himself to the living-room floor, kicking and clawing, injuring himself in the process, and then crying even harder—and she could not, she would not, stop it. It was either blasting the anger out or turning the anger in, and she wasn’t willing to keep it there any longer. She would not shred herself up inside, would not churn her guts to acid, would not grind her teeth in her sleep or cause her neck to go out, for the sake of being civil and mature and understanding and levelheaded.
And it was just as the videographer was making a joke, saying, Look, I realize I joke about being a narcissist, but I think I actually am a narcissist, that Nightbitch rose all at once from her chair—tipping the table and sending the silverware clattering to the floor, a glass onto its side, and the water therein onto the lap of the working mother, whose eyes widened and mouth formed a silent O—with a great roar, which halted chatter in the restaurant and plunged it into an eerie, stunned silence. There she stood, panting, so winded already was she from her rage.
She growled at the women, then barked and barked and barked, closing her eyes and forcing the animal sounds from herself, her ab muscles contracting violently, her pelvic floor heaving from years of diligent Kegel exercises.
I could crush a walnut with my vagina! she yelled at no one in particular, and it was then that the people around her came into sharp focus: her friends—The Artists—seated across from her at the table, one of them shielding her eyes as if she were looking directly at the sun, the other with a slight smile creeping across her lips. An old man at the booth behind them, mouth agape. A small girl in the next booth cowering into her mother’s ribs, and her mother stroking her hair and shushing her and whispering comforting things as she glared at Nightbitch.
Instantly mortified, Nightbitch began to sweat profusely, descended into an openmouthed pant, and had the fleeting thought that perhaps she was now in the throes of an early menopause. Then, despite her best attempts, she began to cry hot angry tears as she collected her bag and her coat.
The working mother tried to say something in a soothing, low tone. Nightbitch held up a hand.
Don’t, she said,
then monstered out of the restaurant in a lumbering walk, more tornado than human bipedal propulsion. She surged toward the door and disturbed everything in her wake, blowing napkins off tables and overturning cups and tripping and stumbling and snorting. It was her goal to get out of the place before the transformation really took hold, but she could not resist the smell of red meat after what seemed a lifetime spent chewing kale.
She stopped at a two-seater high-top by the door, a young couple, the woman with a sparkling ring on her left hand, bright with love. The young woman leaned back and stifled a scream as Nightbitch grabbed her half-eaten burger from her plate, ripped a bite from it, then dropped the bun, the lettuce and onion and tomato, to the floor as she exited the dining area. She shoved the meat patty into her maw and chewed and salivated as she surged away, down the street. She loped through puddle-strewn alleyways and, once out of downtown, crashed through shrubs, wanting not to be seen, to stay in the shadows, where she could pant and snort and sob.