FLOATING BODIES

I've already bought and given away Anne Sexton's Transformations at least once, possibly twice, before I purchase it again and finally begin to read. On the one hand, some of my women students have been reading her and I want to meet them where they've ended up. On the other, this is a book I've been avoiding for years because I know what lies down that path. Sexton's "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)" in particular is a source of fear—of terror, even. I wonder if I am capable of reading not just the criticism on the poem but the poem itself. Finally I do. The poem's 161 lines are as bleak, as appropriate as I expect. In my mother's case it was the brother, not her house-builder father. Like Briar Rose she suffers from insomnia before she realizes fully the reasons why she has been so miserable for so long.

The retelling that best helps to explain the immediate source of my mother's flashbacks is "The Maiden Without Hands." This is one that Disney, understandably, didn't choose for adaptation. Lady, bring me your wooden leg / so I may stand on my own / two pink pig feet. / If someone burns out your eye / I will take your socket / and use it for an ashtray. / If they have cut out your uterus / I will give you a laurel wreath / to put in its place. The third-to-last line contains the critical detail; my mother's uterus is the thing they cut from her body. Her periods had been too violent, too crimson, too voluminous. Who determines what voluminous means? Hysterectomy as a treatment option for heavy menstrual bleeding is an invasive procedure which has to be reserved for women for whom other treatment options have failed or are contra-indicated. Then other treatment options were not pursued; then clinical guidance was read as suggestion. My mother applied hormonal creams in the constrained space of the upstairs bathroom. The seeming tile was a single sheet of linoleum. She opened and shut the hall closet door. From me she mostly hid her distress.

Other fairy tales from other sources better capture how our life moves on. As a teen I love my mother with daughterly conviction; I leave out nothing I should say in telling her of myself. In time I am able to borrow the car, and I drive myself to coffee shops and farmhouses in the woods. On the shared route to many of these places, there is an estate that looks as abandoned as it is sprawling. The two or three stories—it is hard to tell from the outside—rise ominous through the bare trees and over an antiqued concrete wall. The abandoned estate makes a perfect analogue for the setting of La Belle et la Bête as Cocteau dreamed it. A bedroom is taken over by vegetation. Heading home after dark I am sure that I will be killed, perhaps by a stranger crouching on the upholstered backseat. The stranger I fear is always a boy or a man; his age matters less. I think I would rescue my mother from anywhere.

Sometimes, if we've argued, my mother goes long periods without speaking to me although I remain a child under her roof. Then it is as if she's really lost her tongue. Is there more than one fairy tale in which this happens to a girl or woman? Certainly it is a problem in the original "Den lille Havfrue," where the mermaid bargains away for good her ability to speak. The reasons for my arguments with my mother don't matter, but I will say that sometimes they relate to my style of anger at what is. I am being bullied or sexually harassed at school; my mother wants to intervene and I won't let her, or she's meddled without my permission and I am filled with rage. Unlike Sexton, who I learn inflicted the same forms of trauma on her daughter that were visited on her, my mother is determined to shield me. Only after the job is done does my mother go quiet; the bargains she makes are contradictory. I watch my mother's frame glide vertical through the series of carpeted rooms above the cement basement.

"Die vier kunstreichen Brüder" is a text that Sexton skips but I do not. Its four brothers were out for land, the land that should have gone to a kidnapped girl. The king rewards them equally, the thief and astronomer and all the rest, but the rest doesn't include the daughter. In my house the mother was the astronomer; her telescope found hovering bodies in the sky. On the deck at night I was bored and tired and cold. Because reading about Sexton's suicide hurts too much, I consider these other legacies instead. My mother locating Andromeda before Cetus—and then, in spring, the hand of Virgo the Maiden. In pain and flight these bodies floated: floated above the felt universe.

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ALREADY SEEN

1) HYSTERA

After they cut her open from inside, she begins to remember in fits and starts. Strange shapes crowd in on her in sleep, sad children counting their translucent fingers. 

Nothing helps: not the teas languishing in the cabinet, not the showy hothouse blossoms by the stairs. No one fills the bottle with boiling water or places it tenderly between layers of flannel at the foot of the bed. She crops her hair dangerously close to her scalp.

My mother already had a child, the nurses would admonish. My mother already has a child, but the child's girl-body has become a fearsome thing. Why don't they remove the patient's tongue as well? 

In bed wearing all my clothes, I slurp pale broth from a spoon. She contemplates telling me nothing—whether in the final calculus a mouth can redress a mountain of hurts.

2) FILM FESTIVAL

Growing up just enough means college, means falling in love with an alcoholic. When he gets drunk he slurs his words, makes cruel remarks. The streetscape tilts; the city lights skip like a record.

Crouched in the lobby of a high-rise in a French seaside city, he thought for certain fireworks were bombs.

         Eventually, he will leave
                   you for the seventh time;
                            these arguments you have
                   are not his fault.

In the morning you wake—sometimes alone, sometimes together. Do you remember what you said last night? A mouse-tail rustles through the kitchen.

Spoiler alert: he never does recall. When you write in the second person, you're really writing about yourself.

3) MAMÀ/MAMAN/MAMMA

The collection of framed photographs. The blue / layers of mountain and shadow. The conviction that / the photos, collectively, will replace a parent to a child. // The white handful of poison. The matte feel of it rolled / between thumb and fingers. The waking up; the slow / consideration of options. The trying and trying again. // The house's crumbled interior walls. The coming to / rest of the objects within it. The terrible violence of /a plan or plot. The third husband, the final husband, who knows and // does nothing. The sound of the mid-night telephone: / its low and resonant buzz. The way plots flow briskly / toward death. Something they both realized long // before White Noise, long before 1985.

4) WE LEAVE THE COUNTRY

because it is blood-drunk. Because children crouch under their desks not as a spontaneous exercise in imagination or in preparation for an earthquake—though in California they do that, too—but to practice evading the armed figures of men. Many favor long guns, like AR-15s and AK-47s. The children wear collared shirts and chinos in an array of colors, jeans and graphic tees having been disallowed although the school is public and ostensibly open to everyone. They make homes for themselves underneath the faux-grained writing surfaces, becoming friends with their black metal legs, some of which have been etched to death or are knotted with gum. Survivors of mass shootings are left with lifelong wounds—and mounting bills. News outlets start reporting that efforts to cower in place are tactically flawed, that escaping through the waxed halls is the better course. Kindergarten classes begin practicing throwing picture books at pretended intruders, the little arms of pupils flailing, pages flapping bright and angry against the poster-papered walls. Symptoms of PTSD can include agitation, hostility, hypervigilance, self-destructive behavior, social isolation, insomnia, nightmares, emotional detachment and unwanted thoughts. At the neighborhood playground in the canal-ringed city, blonde children climb red ropes toward an ever-gray sky. The eyes of Dutch mothers and fathers narrow as I tell them. Surely I am exaggerating, they think, and they aren't wrong that the news item sounds made up: like a horrible, very bad dream. Of course this is just one of many reasons. PTSD has been linked to suicide.

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