In the twilight the stars on the ceiling looked as they once had. They glittered, they shone. Or did they? No matter how diligently Krista forced herself, she could not see them with the child’s eye she once had. Even the twilight did not help the illusion; it did not make her father’s artistry shine the way it once had. The magic was gone. Or was it the hope?
Krista could not will herself to sleep. She stared dry-eyed at the ceiling. Why hadn’t her mother had it repainted? Why had it remained like this for all these years, a constant reminder? Krista held her sides. Anger welled in her.
“So whose fault is it? Whose fault?” she cried out.
She sat up, looked around the room. Photographs of her father lined the walls. On the dresser there was one picture of Helen and a portrait of Ilsa and Daddy Bourne. By the door was the watercolor of Isadora Duncan that Ilsa had given Krista many years before when she had first studied dance. She walked over to the painting of the dancer.
“Freedom?” she said aloud, almost laughing. She tore the painting from its hook, and threw it across the room, against the wall. Rubbish. The glass popped out from the frame, cracking down the center. Krista knocked all the photographs from the dresser, then the wall, every image of her father. She managed to heave and drag the dresser to the center of the room.
In the hall closet, Krista rummaged through boxes, coats and stray shoes to find what she was looking for: the large grey toolbox. Opening the lid, she searched like a madwoman but couldn’t find them. In the kitchen, under the sink, she finally found what she was looking for: two cans of black spray-paint.
In her own room, she mounted the dresser and shook one of the cans. She focused on where to begin. Then, without hesitation, sprayed a wide dark arc, extending her arm its full length from the socket, swinging it back and forth as far as she could reach. She divided the makeshift sky and let the black paint bleed. She painted long, looping spirals. Then she braided a long thread back through the spiral, and traced a black circle around the perimeter of the room. Jumping from the dresser to the bed, to the chair, and back again, she laughed aloud. She had almost forgotten about the pain. From the top of the bookshelves, she began spraying concentric circles, one inside the next, until she reached the center, the zenith of her father’s ceiling. That spot she sprayed into a solid, dark mass.
At random, she dashed the sky with triangles, pyramids, squares. Finally, she sprayed a thickly delineated diamond. With the ceiling almost totally filled, she began sketching eyes on the space that was left, then on the walls around her. She gave them long lashes, deep lids and wide pupils. She laughed again, falling onto the bed, looking up at the place where once there had been sky. It hung dark and dense above her head, decorated with eyes like the fanning tail of a peacock. She lay there watching the memory of the sky spiral away, caught up in madness after destroying the heaven she had left on her bedroom ceiling for so long.
She grabbed the other can. Armed now with both of them, she further attacked the walls. Black lines obliterated family portraits. From the center of the bed, she brought her arms forward with the cans trailing their jet-black exhaust. She focused her attention on the mirror, on the strange face she saw there. Is that me? Again, she drew concentric circles, beginning with the dark wood frame, and moving further and further inward. As she reached the center, Krista could not stop, even as the paint pooled and ran down the glass. Her face was completely gone. The cans were empty. She threw one then the next at the mirror, shattering it. As she surveyed the wreckage, she saw the words again, freed from the page, floating before her:
… all in all, painless… painless… six minutes.
She began a mad hunt. Where have I read these words? The lie. Her intuition told her that they were very near. In this apartment, I know those words are in this apartment. Somewhere.
The lie, she asked herself, where is the lie?
She stood at the window for a few minutes. An elderly woman from across the street stared back. They made eye contact. Two young men in black leather stood, legs crossed, talking with one another, their fists closed around the black spikes of the fence as if impaled there. One kept a terrier on a lead at his heels. What do they know?
In Helen’s study Krista sat very still. The small clock on the mantle ticked loudly and she waited. The lie. Where was it? She made a pledge to herself, to find those words if it took all night, all the next day, all next week, forever. They were in this study. That much she was certain of. She played with a cigarette, switched a plastic lighter on and off. The words, where are they? She finally lit the cigarette and allowed her eyes to slowly and carefully brush the spines of the neatly ordered shelves.
My mother’s library. Those words are here. Krista felt confident of it. She would find what she was looking for. As she read the titles on the many books, she wondered if one might intuit the story of another’s life by the books they read. She ran her eyes over the bookshelves, recognizing the leather-bound spines of her father’s classics, their titles blocked in gold. Two books had shifted slightly, leaning to the right: Stories from Hans Christian Andersen and Salome. They in turn leaned against Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Edgar A. Poe. The Outsider rested heavily against Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest, Rip Van Winkle, Don Juan, Candide, and Sinbad the Sailor.
Krista read the titles faster. The words, the lie. They are here somewhere. Titles jumped off the shelves: Moscow, Propaganda Man, The Future of Belief, The Decline of the Wasp, The Limits of Earth, The Passions of the Mind, Science and the Modern World, The Creative Process.
The nausea returned. Words seemed to spin before her. The shelves appeared to be about to fall in on her. She saw the ceiling, the black scarring. She felt defeated and rested her head on the desk as she watched a cigarette in the ashtray burn slowly down to its filter. Suddenly, she got up, put out the cigarette, walked over to the wall of books. A dark leather-bound volume from the corner of the room where the shelves seemed less disturbed caught her attention.
“East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” Krista read aloud, as if acknowledging an old friend from long ago and far away. She drew her fingers, then her palm, over the front cover of the book, then opened it. There, penned in dark midnight blue, was Ilsa Bourne’s graceful handwriting:
To my son, my little one, Charles:
You, my Little Prince, will go to places of which I have only dreamt, just as your children will go places of which you will only dream.
Go with my blessings, and always remember to send them with yours.
Love,
Mother
Christmas 1930
Krista repeated the words to herself: “Love, Mother.”
Love Mother. If only she could.
She leafed through the book of fairy tales with its fair-haired princes and princesses. Krista almost buckled under the overwhelming desire she felt then. She wanted to be back with Grandmother Bourne, with Ilsa. She needed her. She thought of the old whaling captain’s house on the Vineyard, her grandmother’s home. Krista suddenly needed her summer retreat more than she had ever needed anything before. As she sat in Helen’s high-backed chair she reflected on her grandmother’s paintings. The colors were luminescent, reminding her of daybreak on the Island, light spilling across the harbor as the first ferry pulled into port and the gulls squawked.
Krista recalled one painting in particular. It was a favorite of hers, though she had not considered it since Ilsa’s death. She wondered if it were still hanging over the mantle in the summer house’s parlor. It was one of the few landscapes her grandmother had painted. In it the season was not clearly indicated. Krista had often asked her grandmother if it was summer turning into fall or winter turning into spring.
Ilsa always said, “You must look for yourself. You must tell me.”
Krista wanted the holiday magic Grandmother Bourne created. There was not a home like Il
sa’s when the season called for food, gifts or sleeping under heavy blankets scented with last summer’s wild roses. Krista could still remember her first Island Christmas. Clearly she recalled the fir tree placed in the corner of the parlor, touching the ceiling. A cascade of revolving silver and blue baubles graced one branch after the next, and Krista particularly enjoyed their handmade treasure trove of seashells each dancing on a dangling golden thread. She and Ilsa had made them all.
She loved the nativity scene. Her grandmother told her stories about reindeers and Jesus. Stories she made up on the spot. Stories that would never be repeated. Krista listened diligently. The aroma of breads, pies and roasting turkey filled the house and spilled out through the slightly cracked windows to the garden below.
“Love, Mother,” Krista read aloud.
She thumbed through the book, stroking the delicate drawings. It seemed only yesterday she first laid eyes on them. She pulled her hair behind her ears, lifted her eyes from the pastel plate of a long-haired, blond princess, riding on the back of a white bear, who was really a prince. As she looked up, recalling Ilsa’s voice telling the tale to her in soft gliding tones, she suddenly spotted it.
… may feel a stitch, a slight cramp, nothing different than a bit of premenstrual discomfort. Perhaps some spotting… But all in all, painless.
There was the book, nestled between Helen’s diary and her first attempt at a screenplay. Right beside the glass ashtray where Krista had stubbed out the cigarette was the book: My Body My Body in bold black letters on the jacket. A subtitle spelled out: My Understanding. Those sharp letters were exact and angular. On the jacket was a photograph. A bouquet of diverse women held hands and smiled for the camera. It appeared to be a great big party. Krista let her tears fall on the book. The image lost focus. She might have been the blond one in the corner.
This was it: the source of the lie. Krista detested the faces of the women on the book’s cover. She focused all her anger and pain on those women. A party?
Krista flipped through the pages, remembering. It had been seven years ago. She had been fifteen. Cosmos had arrived in February, a snow-white kitten for her birthday from Daddy Bourne and Ilsa. Helen arrived too late from class to celebrate. She had come home with an armload of books, saying to Krista, “This one, here, catch it,” as she almost dropped it. “I wish I had the chance to read a book like this when I was your age. You know, you have all the advantages. I am serious, Krista. I want you to read this. For your birthday.”
It was not the present Krista had asked for. She had wanted new pointe shoes, white ones. Why, she asked herself, do I need a book like this? Useless.
“It’s time you started thinking about your life. Dance is only sinking you further into the female stereotype,” Helen added, tapping the cover of the book for emphasis.
“Stereotype?” Krista asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Thin. Beautiful,” her mother answered dismissively. “Setting yourself impossible standards.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Honest information. Real information. What you need, and what you are not going to find anywhere else. The truth about abortion, rape, incest. Read it.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You should be.”
“Why?”
“Krista, you are impossible!”
She grudgingly took the book, swore she would never read it and did not until an overnight guest found it on a shelf in the library. Together the two girls read extracts aloud to each other.
As she sat there, recognizing the book, Krista felt afraid to pick it up. Her feelings remained unchanged. She still found the women in the pictures incomprehensible, without physical grace or seemingly much concern for their appearance. She sensed the recent changes in her own body. In just a month of being pregnant and not dancing she’d suffered loss of muscle tone, but more than that she felt as if the core had been gouged from her. Where did they write about that?
She stopped turning the pages, recalling the months after her fifteenth birthday. She had worn a white leotard that summer. Her shoes were white and her body was tan. Her hair whipped the air as she turned with ever-greater precision. She liked to think she could stop on a dime or dance on the head of a pin. Her teacher had told her how much the audience loved her, how she thrilled them. That she had a real future as a dancer. “They come for blood,” her teacher had said, “and you give them that.” It was the one and only time a teacher had ever given her such heartfelt praise.
Krista recalled afterwards trying to share the precious moment with her mother. Helen’s response had been predictably negative. What was the use of beauty, that spiraling feeling of weightlessness and light, when a woman’s foot was bound, mutilated by white satin shoes concealing a block of wood in their toes? Helen raged on about how Ilsa Bourne would rue the day she ever convinced her granddaughter to dance. Until Ilsa’s death, it was forever a bone of contention between them, a deep-seated grudge that had left both women nursing hurt feelings and things unsaid. Krista sat in her mother’s chair, in her mother’s study, thinking about that accolade from her old teacher, holding on to the beauty of it, and for a few minutes lost contact with the pain she had been carrying all afternoon.
“Maybe that is the use of beauty,” she said aloud, “it makes us forget the bad stuff in life.”
Beauty and forgetting. Why didn’t someone write about that?
Krista read the text in front of her. She had the same questions now as she had had when she first read the book. Why, if these women wanted to do something, didn’t they just do it? Krista did not understand then, and did not understand now, how this book could be so significant for her mother. Had these women only just discovered they had vaginas? What was the point?
She slowly turned the pages. There it was, the chapter: A Termination. She read slowly through the types, the various international methods, including the United States. She passed over all the safety information and the debates from the medical community and various religious communities. She stopped at Reasons Why.
There, reading further, Krista found the lie. She ran her fingers under the titles: After Intercourse without Protection—Three Days to 12 Weeks; Vacuum Suction:
… like a Hoover… same idea… vacuums the walls of the uterus… drawing it up, through and out the tube. Start to finish? Six minutes. May feel a stitch, a slight cramp, nothing different than a bit of premenstrual discomfort. Perhaps some spotting… But all in all, painless.
Painless. Krista reread the word in disbelief.
“Painless?” she said out loud. “If it is painless then what is this that I am feeling?”
She read further:
… seventy-two-hour convalescence… some bleeding may occur. Some patients require no recovery period.
Krista looked down at her blue jeans, soaked through with blood. Some bleeding? Recovery? Why did they lie? Why didn’t they tell the truth? The would-be mother dies. Simple. Short. Sweet. Abortion is death.
Krista picked up her mother’s lighter. She flicked it on, then off. She looked at the desk, the shelves, the night outside, and wondered what she might do now that she had found the lie. Who could she punish? Who would pay for their part in spreading a falsehood? Or was she just different from the majority? Did so many other women feel nothing that the authors of the book felt they could safely say that an abortion was painless? Why didn’t Dr. Blackwell or the nurses warn her of all the possible after-effects? What could she do about this?
Nothing.
“Nothing,” she said aloud to no one.
Her answer silently danced around the room, circling her, seeming to taunt her. Krista felt like a child lied to for her own good. She felt tricked. She felt horribly deceived. As she lifted the right-hand corner of the page with the intention of ripping it from the book, she stopped. She had a better idea. Sh
e set the page on fire, holding her mother’s lighter to the thin paper.
The right-hand corner illustration, where a precisely drawn instrument penetrated a free-floating vagina, held open with forceps, and sucked from the uterus an amniotic sac, went up in flame. She watched fire spread instantly as if devouring autumn leaves. The flames spread from one page to the next while Krista leaned back in her mother’s chair with a vague sense of satisfaction until she realized the desk was beginning to burn. She jumped up then, holding the book with just the tips of her fingers upon the boards and ran into the bathroom. There she tossed it into the bathtub and watched as the entire volume went up in smoke. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she waited until the book’s entire spine collapsed, leaving a thick trail of ash on the scorched enamel.
Krista went back to the library. She tossed every book her mother had insisted she read into the tub. Wildly, she pulled others from the shelves: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Fear of Flying, Life in the Iron Mills, The Feminine Mystique, The Women’s Room. She watched them all go up in smoke. As she opened the window, she realized she was crying. The neighbors, she thought, what would they think? She did not want anyone to call the police or the fire department. Quickly, she turned on both faucets in the tub and doused the flames.
When they had died Krista noted the silence. It seemed immense. Another abdominal cramp left her doubled over. No one left, she thought, no one left to hurt. Using the wall for support, she felt her way to her room. The black ceiling, she asked herself, did I do that? From the street she heard a shrill whistle. It was Michael’s. Had he packed?
Michael.
“Taxi!” he shouted.
“Wait,” Krista whispered. “Wait… please wait for me.”
She started for the door, saw the stain on her trousers, the soot on his shirt, and stopped. “Wait, wait, wait,” she repeated to herself like a mantra. In the hall closet, she reached for a coat, anything to throw over herself so she could run into the street, stop him and tell him she had lied: she still loved him. But an immediate pang of pain was so excruciating that it took her breath away. A different pain this time. She took her stinging hand out of the closet and stared at it in disbelief. She had sliced it open on the old splintered frame of a painting.
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