by Emily Temple
I shook away the memory. Serena was no tethered insect, no screaming girl. If anything, she was the boy. Wasn’t she? I waited to see what she would do, how she would turn it back on him, but she just stood there for a moment more, her hands over her heart, before collecting herself, throwing back her shoulders, and marching away.
“Why did you do that?” I said. But this repudiation of Serena had, I admit, thrilled me. I thought he might take me in his arms now, as though we were forbidden lovers left alone for the first time. (Now, of course, I see it for the goad it was, the invitation: Try harder, little girl.)
“Electric fences don’t work unless they’re electric,” he said. He did not move any closer to me.
That night, obsessed as I still was with my image in the mirror, I barged into the bathroom when Jamie was hurriedly changing in there. It was late, and I suppose she’d felt safe enough to eschew the extra safety of the stall. As it was, I walked in and she quickly pulled down her shirt, but not so quickly that I didn’t get a glimpse of a series of regular, raised bubblegum slices, all perfectly parallel, all the same length, stacked in a column to the left of her belly button.
“Please don’t say anything,” she said. I found that in fact I couldn’t. I turned around, my own stomach forgotten, and left her there.
10
At the moment of the truly unbearable, I once heard someone say, you can’t help but change form. In the old stories, there are two kinds of transformation: punishments and escapes. The brutal King Lycaon, who was turned into a wolf (hence: lycanthrope, if you’re keeping score) after serving his own son to Zeus at a feast; Actaeon the peeper, whom Artemis reshaped into a stag, bending his knees backward so his own hounds would rend him limb from limb; Medusa, who was once so beautiful, as the story goes, that Poseidon could do naught but rape her—which he did in Athena’s temple, after which slight the goddess punished the victim with an ugliness so profound that all who looked upon her turned to stone. (This ancient allegory holds.) On the other hand: the virginal Daphne, whom I think I’ve mentioned before, became a tree to escape her suitor; the virginal Pleiades were shaken out into stars to escape theirs; poor Io, “the horned virgin,” whom Zeus turned into a cow so his wife wouldn’t catch them out. (As if Hera, by then, really thought him above bestiality—she knew who she’d married.) You see there’s a pattern here: virgins transforming at the moment they would have been deflowered, or else, if they’re unlucky, at the moment just after. Is this the moment of the truly unbearable? Or is the threat of transformation merely another way to contain us, to keep our legs swaddled closed with fear?
In fact, there’s a third kind of transformation: one that seeks to change not only you but everything. A final, desperate effort to get that deepest desire. The Little Mermaid, Sandra Dee, William the Bloody. All of these threw themselves out for the love of another. For Sandy, it was just a makeover, but the Little Mermaid walked on broken glass to be loved, and ended in dissolution, sea foam smashed against the rocks. (She could have saved herself, if only she had been willing to cut out her foul prince’s heart. But alas.)
After my father moved out, my mother waited. To me it seemed that she had almost no reaction to the end of her marriage. She was friendly with the movers who came to take away his things in a small number of boxes. She tipped them well. I remember she was on the phone more often than usual. Sometimes she played records. Sometimes the house was silent, which was the only fact in all of this that made me think she had been hurt at all.
Two months later, she threw a party. An enormous one, bigger by far than her old Saturday night gatherings. From the stairs, I watched each guest step carefully into the house, not quite sure what awaited them—a tearful wronged woman? A sinner licking her wounds? I suppose they were curious. In any event, they came. She greeted each one warmly, loudly, with a joke, and the fear melted off them—I could almost see it, pooling at the threshold—and they slapped her on the back, and kissed her on the cheek, and told me how grown-up and beautiful I was, the filthy liars, and drank and danced and stayed out in the backyard past four.
One of them had a guitar. He asked me questions about my classes, about what I liked to do on the weekends, about whether I had a boyfriend, and why didn’t I, because clearly, I was a catch. A catch! I offered to bring him a beer, and he told me I was the best, truly the best, and after I brought it to him, he let me sit beside him while he played and played. He was young, a law student. My mother didn’t seem to notice him, or me, until she told me to go to bed. In fairness, I was barely thirteen. When I left, the guitar player squeezed my hand, and his calluses made me blush. I was wrong, before. Luke wasn’t the first man to touch my hands. At least there’s that.
Yes, I remember his calluses, and the fat, underwater sound of his guitar, and also the fat, underwater sound of his breathing, later that night, as my ear was pressed against my mother’s bedroom door.
In the morning, she was sitting by herself at the kitchen table. The guitar player was gone. She looked like an elegant statue that had been forgotten on the beach for many winters, warped by wind and sand, leaving only the vague shape of itself behind.
“Is that why Dad left?” I asked.
“Is what why?”
“I heard you last night,” I said. “With someone.” With him, I could not bring myself to say. (Of course, I can’t even remember his name now.) She got up and poured herself more coffee, added cream, and leaned against the sink.
“I have never been unfaithful to your father,” my mother said. She drummed her nails against the counter once, and then took her coffee upstairs, to drink in bed. I didn’t realize until much later that she hadn’t exactly answered my question.
She didn’t get out of bed for three days.
When she finally emerged from her room, she had changed. She was diminished no longer—in fact, the combination of the party and the days in bed seemed to have made her even taller, if such a thing were possible. She no longer looked as though it was possible for her to cry. She no longer looked as though it was possible for her to be hurt, or to be sad, or to be silent. She marched out of her room and went straight to the garage.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, she became utterly obsessed with the Fatties. She had always worked on them in her spare time, but now she spent hours with them, hidden away, the radio she kept in the garage turned to full blast. She would come home from the advertising firm, where she did nothing, she once said, but staple things together, tear things apart, and change the size of words, and then go straight to the Fatties without even entering the house. She stopped making dinner; I lived on pasta and toast. I think she stopped eating, but even this did not diminish her. She would get up early in the morning to be with the Fatties before work, and she would stay with them long into the night, even as the air became edged with cold. The Fatties doubled in number and then grew into a horde, crowding the garage. When I looked inside, I saw heavy clay body parts on every surface, a fat face at every window. Eventually, the finished Fatties began to spill out into our backyard, first congregating around the garage doors and then spreading out over the grass, a Middle American Medusa’s garden. Even then she couldn’t stop. She kept building. She kept smoothing back the clay skin, forming the clay hands to fit her own, looking deeply into the hollow, carved eyes.
What was she looking for? What form would satisfy her? Or was it just that she was trying to fill the space my father had left with creature after creature who might finally accept her love?
Maybe the latter, because the only hours she spent away from the Fatties were spent with men. I almost never saw them, the men who stopped in the kitchen for a drink before following her upstairs, the men who dropped her off in the middle of the night, the men who called, or who didn’t call. All different men, all with the same face.
I was paranoid about them. I thought they stole things, small things we’d never notice, or maybe left things: wadded-up bits of newspaper in the drawers,
business cards in the books, belly lint under the rug. Sometimes I would search the house after one of them had gone, turn over all the pillows, peek into the cabinets. I never found anything amiss, but even still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed.
If it had just been the men, that would have been all right. I could have learned to live with the tiny inaccuracies. If it had just been the men and also the Fatties, that would have been all right too. But if my mother had been hibernating somewhere inside of herself for those two months, for those three days—well, then she’d woken up angry.
Here: her hair was everywhere. She squatted in the living room and thrust an imaginary knife up between her frogged legs. “You’re doing this,” she said, thrusting. “This this this.” Thrusting, thrusting, stabbing herself to death from below, both hands clutched around the phantom blade. I can’t remember now what I had done or said to inspire this; I know it had involved a boy. Maybe one of the men who all looked the same, but maybe not. “This is you,” she said, thrusting. Her wrists and ankles were coated with clay. She pointed to a chair with her invisible knife and told me to sit. And I said no, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid that if I sat, she would hit me. “I won’t hit you,” she said, softening her voice. “I promise.” And so I sat.
Then she hit me in the face, so hard the room went dark.
“See?” she said. “You see what happens?”
I know others have had it worse. I know it’s a little thing, finally, to be hit in the face by your mother. She didn’t beat me, not really. Not in any of the ways I know children can be beaten. She didn’t starve me. She didn’t pimp me out to her friends and creditors. But I was indignant, like all lucky girls. Not long afterward, she dug her fingernails into my arm so hard it bled, and I stood in the stairwell and screamed until one of the neighbors called the cops. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Saturday. When the two uniformed men rang the doorbell, I was elated. I ran to explain, to show off the slim lunar wounds on my arm. My mother, exasperated, her robe opening, followed me to the door.
“If I’d talked back to my mother, I would have gotten the belt,” one of them said.
“My father used to hit me across the face with his shoe,” said the other.
“Don’t be a brat,” said the first.
“Your mother’s a delight,” said the second.
I gaped at them, my arm still lifted in evidence. My mother shut the door. I was alone with her again.
Anyway, this is not a sob story. These are only the facts. After my father left, my mother began to hit me, and after a while, my pleas to live with him first ignored and then impossible, I did something so that she wouldn’t hit me anymore.
“Sometimes,” Serena said once, her toes digging into the warm grass, “I think just rage would be enough.”
We kept meeting at the rock palm. We drank our nettle tea. We focused on our empty stomachs. We fainted dead away. Serena did not want to talk about what had happened with the fence. It didn’t matter. During that time, I felt that the space between lifting our bodies and not lifting them was so infinitesimally small, a sliver really, one that could be transcended at any moment. It was the same feeling you might get when faced with a deeply desired object that is only barely out of reach. Pony backpack, etc. The difference between having and not-having is so thin you imagine you’ll break through it at any moment, like a film of soap. If I can stretch this far, why not stretch a little farther?
One night, Serena stood at the edge of the rock palm, looking out into the darkness. Daring herself, I thought. She got close, closer than I had ever been, shuffling her sandals against the rock. She lifted one leg, and then another, shifting her weight experimentally.
“Careful,” said Laurel.
“Maybe I’ll float,” said Serena. She spread her arms. She was facing away from us, and her voice sounded much farther away than her body.
“Maybe you’ll fall,” said Janet. She stood and went over to the edge to retrieve Serena, but when she reached her side, it was as though she had stepped into a sphere of hypnotic influence. Her shoulders dropped. She pressed her hip against Serena’s. They stared out into the darkness together, their arms entwined. I felt the urge to join them, and I must have moved to do so, because Laurel grabbed my wrist. Her eyes were wide. She’d been drinking again. I could smell it on her. I could always smell it on her, now. I thought I should say something, but I didn’t know what to say. I stayed where I was, and eventually both Serena and Janet returned to us.
“We’re close,” Serena said. “We’re so close.”
Much later, I would think about this moment, and whether I should have known to take it for the sign it was, whether I should have read the portent in their toes edging toward the ledge, in the panicked look on Laurel’s face, in the unforgiving black of rock and air. But how can you blame me? Back then, I feared nothing. I didn’t even believe it was possible for girls like us to die, cliff ’s edge or no. Death was for goldfish and grandmothers, disappearance was for fathers and fortunes. Girls like us would only go on forever.
The first time we all bled together, we pretended we were wolves. It was the hottest part of the summer; the midpoint was past. We were restless, reckless. Our bellies were already sore, but this was a new soreness, and a new lightness, too. We ached—wombs, hearts, backs, thighs, bitten fingernails, our bodies unsolvable proofs wanting impossible things—and so we spent one night on the rock palm not trying to levitate at all, but lying on our backs, hands on our empty stomachs, howling at the moon. We’d heard the wolves singing on the mountain all summer, their voices faroff and hollow, like men lost at sea. So we sang too, to show the wolf-men that all hope was not lost: we could be a port, a sleeve, a mirror. What could our bodies do? They could do anything. We felt only moments away from truly sprouting claws and fur, our fangs growing to enormous proportions. What big eyes you have, etc. Why not? We were above the things that other girls did for fun. Did they even have fun, or plans, or teeth like ours?
At the end of that night, Serena presented us all with thin glass vials, the kind that might have come with a kiddie chemistry set. The most powerful kind of magic, she told us, was blood magic. The most powerful kind of blood was menstrual blood.
“Well, sure,” Janet said, but she examined her vial with interest.
“Collect some of your own,” Serena instructed us. “Keep it somewhere safe.”
“Are we goths now,” Laurel said, but she took her vial too.
The moon was impossibly bright that night. It looked enormous, closer to the earth than I had ever seen it, and for the first time in my life I had the impression of it as a real celestial body, a curved gargantuan rock shackled to us by an invisible tether.
Serena did not look at the moon. She was inspecting her own legs, drawing her hem up and down like a curtain. “Apparently I’m not being alluring enough,” she said. If she’d been another girl, I would have expected a whine, an edge of self-pity. But Serena sounded almost clinical, as if noting which element in a complex recipe or mathematical equation had gone wrong. My stomach turned with guilt, and also a deep pleasure.
“You are,” Laurel said. “You’re being so alluring that he doesn’t trust himself. That’s why he turned on the fence.”
Janet lay on her back, folding her arms into a pillow.
“Besides,” Laurel went on. “You witnessed his most profound spiritual moment. Men are deeply affected by that kind of thing.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” Janet said, without raising her head. “She was eleven.” In her black clothes, so close to the ground, she was nearly invisible.
“I’m not the one who’s being disgusting in this scenario,” Laurel said. “And that’s not what I meant.”
“What do you think, Olivia?” Serena asked. “Has he said anything?”
I swallowed. Eye. Leaf. Fireplace. I shook my head. “Something is definitely holding him back,” I said.
Serena reached into the po
cket of her dress and pulled out her own vial. I could see that it was already half full of a dark red liquid. “I know,” she said.
She had a new plan, she explained. One that would finally make Luke tell her everything. We would sneak some of her blood into Luke’s food. Laurel worked in the kitchen; I worked in the garden. It shouldn’t be too difficult. If Luke had redoubled his defenses, she said, we had to respond in kind.
Even I had heard of this old magic: if a man eats your blood, he’s yours. If he’s yours, why wouldn’t he tell you all his secrets, teach you to fly? If he’s yours, why would he ever even look at another girl, no matter how close to him she stood?
“This seems a little extreme,” I said.
“Not to mention unsanitary,” said Janet.
“It’s unnecessary,” said Laurel. “He’s already in love with you. You just have to take the next step.”
Serena stroked Laurel’s head fondly. “This is the next step,” she said. Then she tucked the vial into my bra. She took both of my hands and kissed my cheek, hard. “I know I can count on you,” she said.
As I walked back to the dormitory, the vial rubbed and squeaked against my breast. Now I wonder: Had she heard me after all, there in the garden? Or did she simply guess that I dreamed about Luke every night? Did she realize that as hard as I tried to scrub myself of desire, to realize the truth of emptiness, to gear my body and mind toward levitation, I still wanted him, as badly as I had ever wanted anything? If she did, her response was brilliant and cruel: to make him love her with magic and therefore unimpeachably, and even worse, to make me cast the spell.