Her Body and Other Parties
“Are you sure?”
I did not look down again, afraid that the answer would change. “Yes.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I do not know.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I am not certain.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I cannot tell.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I don’t remember.”
“And what is through the forest?”
I woke up before I could answer.
The abjections returned. They were more plentiful. They spread to my stomach, my armpits. They grew large and had segments within, so when I lanced them they crumpled chamber by chamber, like a temple from which an adventurer is feverishly tearing. I could hear their insides. They crackled, like Pop Rocks. I could hear them. I remembered from science class years ago that aging stars bloat and swell in their final days, before collapsing and then exploding in a hypernova. Hypernova. This is what it felt like. As if my solar system were dying. I soaked in the tub for a while.
On this same day, I opened up my mind and remembered several scenes from my Girl Scout days. I remembered dropping a roasted marshmallow into the dirt of the fire pit and eating it anyway, the carbonized sugar and stones crunching in equal measure. I remembered sharing with my peers a list of interesting facts I’d memorized: most white dogs are deaf; you should never wake sleepwalkers, but you may be able to gently guide their sleeping forms to bed; cashews are related to poison ivy. I remembered eating all the graham crackers that our counselor had hidden in the bottom of the plastic food tub. When she asked us who had taken them, I did not answer. I remembered, in greater detail, my illness there, sleeping through the day on my cot, listening to the birds and the distant shouts of my comrades. The thought of events passing without my being there—of shared events and shared pleasure from which I was situationally excluded—caused me suffering beyond measure. I became very convinced that I was fine, and when I stood I became so dizzy that I swooned back onto the taut fabric. It were as if I were a minor character in someone else’s play, and the plot required me to stay there at that moment, no matter how I resisted. Perhaps that is what caused my grief.
Here, at Devil’s Throat, everything felt wrong. I became disgusted by my own dramatizations and tried to imagine the opposite of what I felt, that my significant pain in that moment was of no significance whatsoever. That I was dwarfed by the smallest minutiae: The complex comedies and tragedies of insects. Atoms, dancing. A neutrino, tunneling through the earth.
To distract myself from my troubles, I decided to continue exploring the lake. I left my cabin and struck off toward where I’d seen the canoe, which was no longer there. I recognized the pulse of the water, however, and beyond that the shore curved farther. I followed it for another half an hour or so, examining the pebbles and sand at the shore, breaking off tree limbs when they disrupted the outline of the woods. Eventually, I came to a small pier—no boats there, either, but I could practically feel the rough wood grain on the backs of my thighs—and there was a gap in the trees, marked by a slender red ribbon tied to the trunk. A path.
I started down it. I felt certain this was the way. Indeed, before I reached each turn I remembered the turn, but as though I was coming from the opposite direction. Had I taken the boat onto the lake? Or just sat on the pier? And next to me—who had been next to me?
An animal cried out, and I stopped. It was the sound of suffering, of fear or mating, and was objectively terrible. A fisher cat? A bear? But then: a young girl—no older than five or six—was standing next to a tree. Her eyes were wide and wet, as if she’d been crying but had stopped when she’d heard my footsteps galumphing on the forest floor. She was wearing shorts with knee socks and sneakers, and her neon green sweatshirt said “YES I CAN / BE A TOP COOKIE SELLER” in bubble font.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head.
“Are you lost?”
She nodded.
I went over to her and showed her my palm. “If you’d like, you may take my hand, and we can walk to the camp. You’re with the Girl Scouts, right?”
She nodded again, and placed her soft little hand into mine. I did not expect it to be so precise. We started walking. I remembered the Brownies story I’d told Anele and it felt fortuitous that I’d come across a soul who could answer the inquiry I could not.
“May I ask you a question?” I said.
She nodded gravely and did not meet my eyes. Finally—a kindred spirit.
“In Brownies, there’s a rhyme. Do you know it?”
I felt the shudder pass through her body and, via her warm, sticky hand, into my own.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to say it.”
We walked a little farther. The path seemed more overgrown here than would be appropriate for a camp for young people.
“Twist me, and turn me—” the girl began. Her voice was reedy but strong, like a steel wire. She faltered. I did not press. We continued to walk, breaking rhythm only when it was necessary to avoid a patch of poison ivy, where a beam of sunlight struck the oily leaves and they glistened.
“Twist me, and turn me, and show me the elf,” she finished. “I looked in the water and saw—”
She stopped, and I remembered.
“Myself,” I whispered.
Horrifying. It was grotesque in the extreme—no wonder the rhyme had removed itself from my memory. Sending a child after an enslaved mythical brownie, and then providing a rhyme that—assuming the child did not fall into the pond and drown, or get lost in the night—would only serve to tell the child that she herself was the enslaved mythical brownie? And not her brother, mind you, but her? Every adult and speaking animal in that story was suspect—having either not taken proper care of the protagonist or actively sent her into harm’s blundering path.
“I understand,” I said to her.
The path widened, and then there we were, at the edge of a campsite. A ways off, large military-style platform tents circled a blackened fire pit. A fresh stack of wood was nearby, draped in a blue tarp. To our left there was a low, wide building, and in front of it, teenage girls were clustered around picnic tables. Sound gathered over them like smoke: conversation, clattering mess kits, the clank of ladle against pot, creaking benches, howls of laughter. One of them—lean and tan and wearing a baggy T-shirt with a bear on it—leaped up when we cleared the trees.
“Emily!” she said. “How did you—?”
“She was wandering in the woods,” I said. I waited for her to ask me who I was, or where I was from, but she didn’t. She tilted her head a little, and there was something older in her features, something wry and correct. Perhaps she was waiting for me to ask where the adults were, but even though there were none in sight, I didn’t. The question was hardly necessary. If the civilized world ended, these girls would go on forever with their mess kits and bonfires and first aid and stories, and it wouldn’t matter either way where the adults were.
“Thanks for bringing her back,” she said. She took Emily’s hand.
“You all look very happy,” I said. “Very content.”
The girl smiled wanly, and her eyes glinted with an unspent joke.
“Thank you for our conversation,” I said to Emily, who blinked and then ran toward the picnic benches, where the voices of the older girls greeted her in smatters. “Good-bye,” I said to the teenager, and then walked back into the trees.
When I emerged on the other side, the light had changed. I took off my shoes and walked to the edge of the water, and then in. It lapped up and slapped my legs.
“Twist me, and turn me,” I mumbled, circling slowly over the stones. They dug up into the soft arches of my heels. “And show me the elf. I looked in the water and saw—”
When I tipped over and searched for my face, I saw nothing but the sky.
On the first
day of August, I opened my studio door to discover the lower half of a rabbit lying across my porch steps. Behind me, the cursor blinked in the middle of an unfinished sentence: “Lucille did not know what was on the other side of that door, but whatever it was, she knew it would reveal—”
I knelt down before the unfortunate creature. The wind ruffled its fur; the back legs were loose, as if it were sleeping. Its visible organs glistened like caramels, and it smelled like copper.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “You deserved better than that.”
When I had collected myself, I gathered it up in a tea towel. I took the rabbit to the dining room of the hotel, where Lydia, Diego, and Benjamin were laughing over mugs. I laid the bundle down on the table. “What is it?” Lydia breathed playfully, lifting the edge of the hem. She gasped and jumped out of her chair, her chest heaving with the force of a retch.
“What’s—” Diego began. He leaned a little closer. “Jesus.”
“She’s fucking crazy!” Lydia howled.
“I found it,” I said. “In front of my studio.”
“It was probably an owl or something,” Benjamin said. “I’ve seen a bunch of them around.”
Lydia spat. “Oh god. I’m so done. You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You just walk around mumbling and staring all of the time. What is wrong with you? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I took a step toward her. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.” The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. “You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
Lydia began to cry. Benjamin grabbed my shoulders and steered me forcefully into the foyer.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I tried to answer, but my head weighed a thousand pounds. I bent toward him, pressing my scalp into his shirt.
“I feel so sick,” I said.
“Maybe you need to just go work in your studio for a while. Or take a nap. Or something.”
I felt a plug of mucus release itself from my nose. I wiped it on my hand.
“You look terrible,” he said. I must have looked stricken at this, because he corrected himself. “You look troubled. Are you troubled?”
“I suppose I must be,” I said.
“When was the last time you heard from your wife?”
I closed my eyes. So many letters, sent off into oblivion. Never a letter for me.
“You’re the kindest one,” I said to him.
As I sat on my studio’s deck that night, I considered the rabbit. I thought about the wind-strewn puffs of fur that had blown across the wood, the dark entrance to its torso. I swirled water in a wineglass.
Many years ago—the night after I kissed Mrs. Z——’s tall daughter on the mouth on the dock and felt something unfold inside me like a morning glory—I woke up in the darkness.
How could I have known she’d shared none of my ecstasy? How could I have known that she was merely curious, and then afraid?
It was not very different from waking up in my grandmother’s spare bedroom, or on some finished basement floor, surrounded by slumbering classmates. But unlike those moments, where confusion was followed by drowsy recognition of vacation or a sleepover, this disorientation did not resolve itself. For I had gone to sleep drunk on pleasure and warm in a cocoon of nylon, listening to the dry, tinny whispers of the girls around me in the cabin, a sound as soothing as the tide. But I awakened upright, freezing, and surrounded by the kind of darkness insomniacs long for: matte, consuming oblivion.
How could I have known that they’d seen?
Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence: a voluptuous silence that pressed against my eardrums. Then, a pulse of wind goaded the tree branches, and there was a groan, a whispery shimmer of leaves. I trembled. I wanted to look up—for a moon, or stars, or something to tell me where I was—but I was rigid with terror.
How could I have known that they had guided my trusting, sleepwalking body out of the cabin and through the forest? That they crouched mere feet away, watching my form suspended in the clearing, circling slowly in the blackness like an errant satellite?
My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline was evaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.
Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly. I was a creature so small, trapped in some crevice of an indifferent universe. But now, I knew.
I heard a light crescendo of laughter, running footsteps. I wanted to call out to them—“I see you, friends; I know you’re there. This hilarious prank will make me stronger, in the end, and for that I should certainly thank you, friends—friends?”—but I only managed a half-moaned exhalation.
Something pushed through the underbrush, coming toward me. Not a girl, not an animal, but something in between. I came back into myself and began to scream.
I screamed and screamed and when the leaders got there—the beams of their flashlights bobbing in the dark like demented fireflies—one of them tried to keep me from frightening the others by sealing the fissure of my mouth with her palm. I fought her like a wild thing, an explosion of limbs and kicking. Then I went limp. They carried me back to the cabin, and though my numb limbs barely perceived their touch, I was grateful for the assistance.
The next morning, the leaders told me I’d sleepwalked deep into the woods. They let me rest, and when I woke again a fever had taken me. My awakening had been so severe it provoked in my body an immune reaction, a summoning of antibodies that clashed with this new information like armies on a medieval battlefield. I lay there, imagining the script of the conversation they’d all shared as I’d shuffled deeper and deeper into the trees. I slept and dreamt of a roomful of owls regurgitating onto the floor pellets that when opened revealed the skulls of rabbits. I woke up with long scratches down my arms. The tree branches? My own fingernails? No one would tell me.
Once, I awoke to see a body in the doorway, backlit by soft autumn light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You deserved better than that. Better than—”
From behind her, there was a murmur, and the door swung shut. Later, the adults conferred with each other in the next room about my situation, and agreed that I was not ready for camping, at least not that year.
The next day, Mrs. Z—— drove me down the mountain early, back to my parents’ house. I slept on and off for many days, insisting on doing so on my bedroom floor in my sleeping bag. And when my fever broke, I pulled my shaking body up to the vanity, glanced into the mirror, and for the first time, saw who I’d been looking for.
When I came to the table for dinner, I realized Lydia was not among us. There was not even a place setting for her.
“Where is Lydia?” I asked
Anele frowned. “She left,” she said.
“She left?”
Anele was trying not to be unkind, I could tell. “I think she was exhausted and sick, so she left early. Drove back to Brooklyn.”
“And upset,” said Diego. “She was upset. About the rabbit.”
The Painter sliced into her beef, which was rarer than I would have thought safe to eat. “Oh well,” she said, her voice throaty and clear. “Not everybody’s cut out for this, I guess.”
My wineglass had tipped over, though I didn’t remember it tipping over. The stain spread away from me like blood, predictably.
“What did you say?” I said to the Painter.
She looked up from her fork, where a cube of red beef was leaking onto her plate. “I said, not everybody’s cut out for this, I guess.” It was the first sentence of hers that stayed in my mind the way speech should. She pushed the meat between her lips and began to chew. I could hear the crushing, tearing force of her mastication as clearly as if she were gnawing on my throat. A chill rippled underneath my shoulder blades, as if I were under the grip of a new fever.
“Is that—from something?” I asked her. “That sentiment? A show, or—”
She put her fork down on her plate, and swallowed. “No. Are you accusing me of something?”
“No, I just—” The faces of the group were knitted in confusion, glossed with concern. I stood up and backed away from the table. When I pushed the chair back into its place, the screech caused everyone to flinch.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said to them. “I’m not. Not anymore.”
I hurried out of the room and out the front door, down the steps, tumbling onto the lawn and scrambling to my feet. Behind me, Benjamin began to jog down the steps.
“Stop,” he shouted. “Come back. Just let me—”
I turned and ran for the trees.
In the realm of sense and reason it seemed logical for something to make sense for no reason (natural order) or not make sense for some reason (the deliberate design of deception) but it seemed perverse to have things make no sense for no reason. What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it’s all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there’s no furniture? What if you get inside and it’s just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basket of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?