Because Lumen is also vagina. It refers to anatomy as well as light. The last time I went to the gynecologist, I saw my name on a map of the alien landscape of a woman’s insides. The poor woman was only a middle—all splayed open and colorful, with words dangling by black lines from all her secret features.
“There’s my name,” I exclaimed to the doctor when he came in to examine me.
“Is it?” he said, as though he were speaking to a child. He is a doctor. He doesn’t listen to the things I say, so focused is he on the language of bodies.
After I saw my name on the woman map, I went home and did my research, as I used to do as a straight-A student, as my father’s good daughter, all those years ago, when encyclopedias were holy magic.
Lumen is just one name for vagina. There are others, many of them crude, which I would not utter but which pulse in my brain and have their own linguistic heartbeats. But Lumen is the best of them all. It makes you think of moons and astronomy and the comforting light of science.
Actually, a lumen is just a tube. It refers to any number of tubes in your body. Your throat is a lumen. And your ears and nose. Your arteries and veins. Your lungs are filled with branching lumens like the roots of a tree growing in your chest. You are made of tubes, and through your body of tubes pass fluids and gases and ephemeral magics that can’t be named or quantified.
Our bodies are factories. Food is put in at one end of a tube, it is processed over time, and it is ejected at the other end of the same tube. When it comes out it is something else. Also, the vaginal lumen. A boy puts himself in you. Your body accepts that offering and performs magic on it. Nine months later, out of the same lumen, a miniature human is disgorged.
My name is a processing function.
No. More to the point, a lumen is not the tube itself but rather the space within the tube. That’s important. Don’t you see how important that is?
That space is the lumen.
So I am Lumen. I am light, and I am space. I am emptiness. I am all the holes of the world. I am hallways and passageways. I am open doors. I am deep, dank wells. Maybe even gaps in time. Maybe I am the empty hiatus between day and night, the held breath of dusk. Or the excruciating nonmoment between an action and its consequence. I am the hiccup on the telephone line when someone delivers tragic news.
I am empty space, and I am the light that illuminates that space.
I am that furious lacuna between prolonged girlhood and the womanhood that refuses to come—when your breasts don’t bud and your limbs stay bony and your blood won’t come.
I sometimes grow tired of myself. I grow hateful.
I have been in love with punishable things.
* * *
I must have slept, but I don’t know for how long. The sun was low on the horizon when I woke. Blackhat Roy sat in the corner. He was looking intently at the cover of the book I brought him, but when he noticed I was awake he tossed it aside.
He said nothing, just watched me while I shifted my clothes back into place. My skin was pinched, my joints aching, my body on humiliating display. All I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could, but when I was about to leave, he came over and stood before me.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
“Just…”
He reached out, and at first I thought he was going to seize me again—but this was something new, something gentle. He moved himself against me, and it was a full moment before I realized he was embracing me.
Feeling bitten, I recoiled and pushed him away.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Lumen, I—” And he moved forward again.
“Don’t you dare,” I said and backed away. “Don’t touch me.”
He looked at me, confused, then down at his own hands as if to discover some unintentional threat there.
I didn’t want to explain. I was revolted by tenderness. I simply didn’t want to be loved by Blackhat Roy. The idea was unacceptable to me.
He came toward me again, and I clenched up.
“No,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Goddamn it, Lumen,” he said, exasperated, “I’m just trying to—is it this?” He gestured all around him, at his broken-down house, his meager life. “I’m just trying—”
He came at me again, more forcefully this time, trying to bind me in his arms. I fought against him, but the more I struggled, the tighter his hold got.
“Stop it,” he said. “Lumen, just stop—I’m not doing anything wrong.”
And when I finally wrenched myself free of him, my body swung backward, spiraling out of control, my face catching the edge of a plywood shelf, and I fell to the ground.
At first I was numb, dizzy, and then my hand went up to the sudden searing pain on my cheek and came back covered in blood.
“Lumen,” Roy said. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just be quiet for a minute.”
I looked at myself in a mirror hanging on his wall, and I was surprised. There was a girl, a long gash on the side of her face, bleeding fluently, something unfocused in her eyes. That was me.
“Goddamn it,” Roy was saying behind me, and when I turned I found he wasn’t speaking to me at all. He was pacing the floor, his fists pressed tight against his eyes. “Goddamn it,” he said again. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how.” He took one of his fists and rapped his knuckles hard against his skull. “She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I hurt her. I broke her.”
And there was nothing pretty about it, nothing dramatic. This had nothing to do with the rituals of our little town, nothing to do with breaching or the cycles of the moon. This was something different, horrible in its plainness. His rage, my bloodied face, his fists, my shame. These were not the primal forces of the earth working through our polluted souls, not the bright clamor of youth in the stark urban fields of the modern age. It was just small and ugly and wrong.
The hospital was closer than my house, so I rode there, my bicycle serpentining across the road in my dizziness. I wasn’t sure if I would make it. By the time I got there, the front of my shirt was soaked and sticky with blood. I told them I fell. They treated me immediately, calling my father, giving me six stitches. A plastic surgeon was called in, since the wound was on my face. Everyone was very concerned.
The hospital was tidy and clean. It reminded me of civilized places. Places I didn’t belong. Places I was too ashamed to go back to.
* * *
After the stitches, I asked the nurse if I could use the bathroom. I felt funny, and in the bathroom I discovered blood on the insides of my thighs. At first I thought that maybe Roy had injured me—but then I realized what it was. I wasn’t amenorrheic anymore.
It hadn’t been a very long time since I had incanted magic words to romance my blood into flowing. But now it seemed like I had traveled a great distance from those fancies. I had grown accustomed to blood of all kinds. This was just a period.
* * *
I have a treasure. Do you want to know what it is? I could draw you a map to it. First you need to find the place where I live now, in a city in the northwestern quarter of our fair country. In the room where I sleep, there is a dark varnished maple dresser whose origins are unknown to me. On top of that dresser, you will find a jewelry box with many small drawers and hinged doors, like a magician’s cabinet. The very bottom drawer pulls out a long way, and you will need to pull it out almost completely in order to discover a packet of white tissue paper tied with a string. Undo the string, unfold the wrapping paper, and there you will find my treasure.
It’s a necklace, if you really want to know. It was given to me by my father. I don’t wear it anymore—because time has made it into a treasure, and you don’t dangle treasures from your neck. Not real ones.
It’s not the locket he gave me for Christmas. This he gave me that June, that same June that everything was happening. It was for me to wear at the prom. Ours was a small school, so everyone, even sopho
mores, went to the prom.
When he gave it to me, it was wrapped in the very same tissue and string (such consistencies are important)—except it was also in a gold foil box with a little bow on top. The box is lost now. You can’t save everything. You can’t save every little thing.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, and it was just before bedtime, so there were very few lights left on downstairs. We sat in a comfortable pool of kitchen light, surrounded by dark doorways, and we felt safe.
“I just thought you should have something nice,” he said. “For the dance.”
He was embarrassed, and he stirred more sugar into his mug of coffee for something to do with his hands.
I unwrapped it and held it up to admire it. It was a simple gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a dragonfly. Its wings had little bitty rubies in them, and the whole thing sparkled. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever been given.
“It’s perfect,” I said, because I wanted him to know he had done a good job of making me happy. He smiled and nodded and sipped his coffee, more pleased than he let on. That was our way, then. He and I, we were timid about the common practices of life now that I’d gotten older. But we helped each other along, and we stumbled through. We knew the quiet codes that stood in place of more overt, gangly expressions of love—and we got by all right.
I remember wondering for a few aching moments if maybe this had been a piece of my mother’s jewelry. I pictured her as a girl who would like dragonflies. A wisp of a creature with a name that pointed to darker things.
But then he rose from the table and rinsed his mug in the sink.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said. “Miss Simons—Margot—she, uh, she helped me pick it out. You might want to thank her, too.”
“Oh,” I said. I forced a smile, but he wasn’t looking at me anyway. “Yes. Yes, I will.”
He came up behind me, leaned down, and kissed me on the top of my head.
“Good night, Lumen,” he said. And then I heard the stairs creak with his footsteps as he went up to bed.
* * *
I didn’t wear the dragonfly to the prom. That was my statement. I wore a party dress that was a few years old but still fit decently, and I wore the Christmas locket my father had given me—the one with pictures of him and my mother in it. My father and I never exchanged words about it. I saw him glance once at my neck, and that was enough. He distracted himself by taking pictures of me in my dress in front of the living room bookshelves.
If Miss Simons noticed I wasn’t wearing the dragonfly, she didn’t let it show even a little bit. In fact she stood with me before the mirror in my bathroom and helped me hide with makeup, as much as possible, the sewn-up part of my face. When she was done, I looked like a different Lumen entirely—some future version of Lumen, maybe, the woman I might become.
We both looked at my reflection in the mirror. I thought she was going to tell me how pretty I looked, but instead what she said was, “You’re tough, Lumen. Tougher than anyone I know. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.”
After all, I realized, she wasn’t a bad woman. I wanted to give her something in return.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean,” I said, “for everything. For the necklace.”
She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at me in the mirror, a true smile, and she knew.
My father didn’t ask if someone was taking me to the dance, because he would not pry so far into my personal life—and the answer would only lead to discomfort whether it was yes or no. Instead he simply asked if I needed a ride to the school, and I told him yes.
When he pulled up in front of the school, I could tell there was something on his mind, so I didn’t get out of the car immediately. I waited, and together we watched people arrive, walking through the double doors of the big building, linked arm in arm in their finery.
“Margot and I are going to a dinner party tonight,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Friends of hers.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be home by midnight. You’ll—you’ll be home by then?”
It occurred me that we were talking about a curfew. We hadn’t had a conversation about a curfew in years—there had been no need for one. Where was I going to go? I had been a good girl, impervious to trouble. But now things were different.
“I mean,” he went on, “there’s no moon tonight.”
I was embarrassed. We both were. I looked down at my hands.
“I’ll be home.”
“You’ll be home,” he said. He did not look at me but nodded to himself, as though confirming a truth that he was ashamed to have questioned in the first place.
“I promise.”
I lingered. Suddenly I didn’t want to be away from him. We waited and watched the others arrive. He shifted in his seat. I could smell his cologne. I can smell it still.
“Did I ever tell you,” he said, a thin smile forming in his beard, “how the coal hole got its name?”
What he referred to was a hollowed space in the wall of our house, under one of the eaves. When the house was originally built, a hidden panel was installed in the wall so that the space could be used for storage. When I was a little girl, I liked hiding myself away in there. I felt safe in that cramped triangle of space, which seemed like it fit me but no other human on earth. When my father saw I liked it, he cleared out the boxes of old photographs he had stored in there and set it up as a hiding place for me, with a light and a tiny bookshelf and an assortment of throw pillows I could arrange however I liked. I would stay in there for hours at a time, and he would bring me crackers and cheese. We called it the coal hole, and it had never occurred to me to wonder why.
“It’s from Silas Marner,” he said.
“I never read it,” I said.
“I know. It’s about a grumpy old man who has to raise a little girl all on his own. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know the first thing about children. He’s all on his own.”
My father paused. He looked away from me and was quiet for a while. I wished I could see his eyes, but I was also afraid of what I’d find in them.
“Anyway,” he went on, taking a deep breath, “when she starts to act out, he doesn’t know what to do. So to punish her, he shuts her in the coal hole of his house all by herself. Except here’s the thing. This girl, she’s not like other children. She’s got a spirit in her—brilliant, mischievous. And it turns out she likes the coal hole. It’s no punishment at all to her. Once she discovers it, she climbs in there all the time.”
“So…” I said, though there was a catch in my throat. “So what does Silas Marner do?”
My father smiled.
“What else is there to do with a girl like that?” he said. “He lets her do what she wants. And he sits back and watches her grow up. And he is amazed.”
I leaned over and embraced him, my head against his chest, and I felt small and safe with him as I have never felt with anyone else in my life. He kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair.
“But sometimes a father worries,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and I did not like to think of what I was doing to him by becoming the person I was.
“I know,” I said again. “I’ll be there when you get home. I promise.”
* * *
I promise.
I don’t like to think about it. I don’t like to write it. Outside, our neighbor’s sprinklers just switched on by automatic timer. It must be nearing dawn. He has told us that early morning is the best time to water your lawn. There is no other sound to be heard. I have been listening to silence for so long.
I promise.
I would erase it if I could. They say you can’t hide from truth. But you can’t hide from lies, either. You can’t hide from anything, really.
So why do we keep trying?
* * *
Helena, my husband’s pretty colleague w
ho jogs around the park, discovers me behind the school, where I watch Jack through his office window.
“Ann? What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” I say and smile too widely in deference to her. “I just came to drop something off with Jack.”
“Ugh. I know,” she says. “Everybody’s been so preoccupied preparing for the parent night tonight. Isn’t this a nice place just to sit and contemplate? I like it, but nobody ever comes out here.”
“It’s very nice.”
“Say, what do you think about that woman, Marcie Klapper-Witt, and her brownshirts cleaning up the neighborhood? I’ll tell you something—I’m not sure I like it. When people get zealous, I keep my distance. That’s my policy. Oh—but you’re not close with her, are you?”
“My son bit her daughter,” I say, shy and proud.
Helena laughs and touches my arm.
“Ann, I’m making a prediction—you and I are going to be best friends. Mark my words.”
I would like to be best friends with Helena, but I’m afraid I don’t know how. I don’t know if I’ve ever been best friends with anyone—especially someone like her, who is so merry about life, whom people enjoying being around. I worry that I don’t possess the spirit required to uphold the friendship of someone so vigorous. What manner of research is required for such a prospect?
That night, while she and my husband are occupied at the parent event at school, I drop my son off with Lola and walk through the neighborhood. It’s empty and quiet, and a dog barks somewhere, and somewhere else a peal of distant laughter escapes from an open window. I am aware of the sound of my own feet shuffling against the sidewalk, so I walk differently—heel, toe—so that I add no noise to the night. When a car comes, I move quickly aside and hide behind a tall bush, compelled by some instinct I shut inside myself a long time ago.
Overhead the night is cloudy, and there are no stars. If it weren’t for the street lamps on every block, you could get lost on these lanes. Everything is a jungle when the light is gone. Something in my chest longs for a blackout. And then my eyes would readjust to the night, and then I could see all the helpless residents wandering, lost, feeling their ways. And I could watch them and be unafraid.
When We Were Animals Page 24