Ave Maria paces in tiny circles with her eyes closed, humming to herself.
I reach inside my Dora purse and turn on my H4n. Little Teena rattles off sailing terms.
“Blue peter. Chafing gear. Chain locker. Cheeks.”
I look at the digital time on my iPhone. Marlene’s been in there three hours. There are basically three kinds of sex reassignment procedures once you go through the years of therapy and cross-dressing necessary to complete a sex change. Marlene’s been pre-op ready for quite a while, just saving up money.
The first type is called penile inversion vaginoplasty. That’s where they turn the wang skin inside-out and use it to line a vag.
The second is called scrotal graft vaginoplasty. That’s used when there’s not enough wang skin to create the vag and vag lining, so they use scroti skin too. Apparently you get more wang depth this way.
The third is the sigmoid colon vaginoplasty. Pretty much what it looks like. They use part of your bunghole skin to help create vag. Kinda tougher skin. More … rubbery. But it has my favorite name.
In each case the surgeon constructs the labia majora, sensated labia minora, clitoral hood, and sensated clitoris.
You are looking at between ten and twenty-five grand.
Drop in the bucket when you’ve got $1.7 mil.
Ave Maria begins to sing. She’s holding her fist up to her mouth in the classic air microphone way.
It’s not an original, it’s better. It’s Velvet Underground. I turn the volume recorder up on the H4n in my purse. I hold my iPhone up and videotape her. She turns slowly in circles while she sings, eyes closed, her free hand pulling at her strings of hair.
I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you’re home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
’Cause I see you
“You missed your calling,” Little Teena says. “You shoulda been in a band.”
“Hell yeah,” I say. “Daughters of Eve.”
“Wicked,” Ave Maria pipes. “Let’s get T-shirts!”
I’ll be your mirror.
Great fucking line. Seems so fucking … APT right this second. For Marlene. When she’s out, we’ve got to bust ass to be good mirrors for her. But also for us. We gotta keep reflecting back to each other else get caught in this pop money death culture’s gaze. We gotta make our own families and write our own sexualities our own selves. Story it.
Ave Maria pumps up the volume. Orderlies get curious and sniff near us. There’s only one thing to do – I stand up and reach my hand out to Little Teena. He accepts my invitation. We dance. Like punks let loose.
Sing it Ave Maria, sing it.
Because I Know You Want to Know
YEAH, I SAW THE SIG.
Three times after that, to be exact.
The first time I went to see him was the day after the Holiday Inn meet. He was still being held for molestation and arson. Apparently it took a while for the paperwork to go through after my mother dropped the charges. So I spoke to him through Plexiglas at the Seattle jail. I picked up the black phone on my side, circa 1968. He picked up the black phone on his side.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“You look positively radiant,” he said. “You have hair. Sort of.”
I ran my fingers through my crop of barely there hair. It did kind of feel like hair.
“You know I told them you are my doctor, right? I mean for real?”
He put his other hand on the desk in front of him and rapped his fingers like he was playing piano. Immediately I felt like a dumbass. “Am I supposed to thank you?” He said without looking at me.
We sat there like lumps with shitty black phones in our hands for a minute. Then I knocked on the window. He looked backup at me. “Can I ask you something?” I went.
“Certainly,” he said.
“ What are you gonna do with your rack of case studies?”
“I’ve not decided,” he said quietly. Then, “My career has careened as of late … I’ll have to sort a few things out, if you know what I mean. I may leave the country.”
“You got hot lawyers I bet,” I went. Which seemed suddenly like a tard and infantile thing to say. You got hot lawyers? After everything we’d been through that’s what I said to him? I stared at him. I could see the blue veins at his temples and on the tops of his hands. His eyes pocketed inside folds of flesh and lines. I don’t know why I never noticed before, but his ears are enormous and saggy. Also old man ear hair is jutting out.
Goddamn it. I can’t remember what the fight was about. Why’d I fight him? He looked like somebody’s grandpa – in sad little orange pajamas.
It was a draw of sorts. An old man behind Plexiglas in orange pajamas. A young woman with a vag bag.
“I just want my stories to be mine,” I went, holding up my Dora purse. Why’d I even say that?
The Sig coughed. Then he coughed a lot. But he kept the phone at his ear.
“I hear that coughing is a diversion tactic,” I said, smiling like ha ha jokey.
Sig coughed some more, then smiled, then just looked like the saddest old man balls in the universe, then he hung up the phone.
“Bye then,” I went.
And that was that.
The next time I saw him I was thirty.
To be honest with you, he didn’t look all that much older than he did behind the Plexiglas. He had his old man on but more neatly-trimmed. And smaller and thinner. Like a shrinking Sig. I saw him in his office, if you can believe it. He made me tea. He asked me politely about my life, so I told him Obsidian and I had started our own vineyard and were producing organic pinot. That we hoped to build an artist colony for girls with a bunch more A-frames. I told him I built a small filmmaking studio to the side of our home. Everything seemed to please him. He seemed calm and gentle, though each time he raised his teacup to his mouth, his hand tremored quite noticeably.
At one point he produced a cigar from his jacket pocket, and so I stood up and crossed over to him and lit it for him. Between puffs of smoke he said “So kind.” His cigar? It just looked like a cigar.
We talked about my story. About how my father had betrayed me, how my mother had neglected me, how I needed to pass through a psychosexual crucible of sorts to work things through. The sentences seemed effortless and without drama.
“Thank you for believing me,” I remember saying to him. “I think it was important, that you never called me a liar,” I said.
“Your lies located themselves in deeper places. No doubt part of the reason you are an artist,” he said. “Though I always felt our time together had resulted in …”
I waited.
“Failure,” he said. “On my part.”
I stood up and moved toward him and opened my mouth to protest or something but he put his hand up between us like a five-fingered stop sign. And anyway, what would I have said? Done? I sat back down.
When the top of the hour of the visit came, his old cuckoo clock erupted, and to my surprise and delight, a cuckoo came shooting out. We laughed.
“My cuckoo is mended!” He announced, and we laughed more, but I suddenly saw that in spite of his age he looked exactly like a wizened child, nearly engulfed by his camel back chair, cigar smoke giving him a dream-like elfin quality.
I never made the film of his phallic adventure. The footage is archived, stored in several different forms in my studio. Sometimes I watch it like other people might watch home movies, and I smile. It’s not mockery. It’s nostalgia. For a drama that was a girl.
The third time was at his gravesite. In Vienna. Obsidian and I were visiting my mother in Europe. I’d heard that he had died there from her. His collected case st
udies were being compiled and a wing of the library would be dedicated to his life’s work. Beautifully archived and taken care of like the work of Franz Shubert.
Sigmund Freud smoked about twenty cigars a day all his adult life. He developed malignant oral cancer, but hid it for years. He underwent nearly thirty surgeries. The rest is all just a story passed like gossip between doctors, but the story goes that a well-known fellow doctor assisted him in suicide. That he wanted to die inside imagination, inside the act of reading literature, that the last book he read was a novel by Balzac. That his doctor friend pumped him with enough morphine to drop a horse, until he died inside a lovely, dizzy, exquisite interpretation of a roman à clef.
I know what Sig would say. He’d say we live out classic family romances, and there’s no way around it. On the other hand, goddamn it, is everything in life really all that fucking oedipal?
Because if it is, you know, just shoot me.
Acknowledgements
RHONDA HUGHES REMAINS A LITERARY HEROINE TO ME for her bravery and integrity; no better collaboration between writer and editor/publisher exists. Anywhere. Here it is straight-no-chaser: this book would not exist without the help of the posse. So: Thank you Chuck Palahniuk for the idea about you know what and that other thing and especially the part that is going to creep out everyone but you and me. And for laughing. Thank you Monica Drake for already being as nerd-girl obsessed with Dora and Freud as I was. Thank you Chelsea Cain for liking Ave Maria – parts of her I made pretending you and me grew up best friends. And for the title. Thank you Suzy Vitello for “getting” the psychology stuff and the Gemini stuff and forgiving me for being the daughter I probably was and liking me anyway. Thank you Erin Leonard for writing weird things that make the weird things I write seem less foreign. Thank you Cheryl Strayed for loving those mother and father pages we both know I made up from a deep wishful place. Thank you Diana Page Jordan for understanding how big a deal it is to survive and then tell about it through stories. Thank you Mary Wysong-Haeri for the secrets we passed back and forth and the sneaker wine dates. And thank you to the Mingo, who read every damn word, every page, and told me how to better kick ass before I brought them to the posse. All quotes from Sigmund Freud from Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Touchstone, 1997).
Copyright©2012 Lidia Yuknavitch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form orby any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-983-85047-2
1. Teenage girls—Fiction.
2. Psychotherapist and patient—Fiction.
3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
4. Women artists—Washington (State)—Fiction.
5. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.
6. Psychological fiction.
I. Title.
[PS3575.U35D67 2012]
813.54 – DC23
2011030738
Hawthorne Books
& Literary Arts
9 2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue
8 3rd Floor
7 Portland, Oregon 97212
6 hawthornebooks.com
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Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase
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