This morning it was the bite that assailed her. Since reading about the vagina dentata, she pictured the gnawing sensation as a rapacious woman, all teeth and devouring intent, and sometimes woke with arms flailing against the jagged points of a mouth. I press myself against the battlement of an unforgiving castle. Lean backward, away from the crazed woman. Grey sky looms. Her hair coils around me as I fall.
In one vagina dentata myth, she recalled, the hero broke the teeth out of the vagina of a maiden and made her a woman. So many heroes in these myths … What would the maiden say if she could talk? Did she want to have those teeth cracked out?
She reached groggily for her journal and pen. Turned the pad around so she could scribble on the back of a page of dreams. Her brain stirred, drawing together fragments of thought.
Is the breaking of teeth a way of enabling the union of mature man and woman? A patriarchal fantasy of female subordination? E.g. a means of taming a woman and corralling her sexuality?
A mumbled exhalation, then a cry. Duncan was asleep but protesting his own dreamscape. His long face was candid, childlike, the bristles and hairy shoulders incongruous. Once she would have been able to comfort him. Once she would have wanted to.
There, the bite again. She held herself rigid until it eased. Her disordered body was becoming more familiar: she recognised the way increased pain made it react – the tight throat and drumming heart, the lemon on her tongue and looseness at the base of her belly – and named it panic. She willed her taut thighs and buttocks to relax and reminded herself: long, deep breaths.
Sometimes she woke to the bite, sometimes to the needle or the clamp. The needling made her think of the pink satin of her old nanna’s sewing cushion, its bulges riddled with pinheads. Then the flushed swelling and cruel pins became all that she was – she was nothing but that torn and tearing place between her legs – and anxiety rushed upon her in a wave. The clamp? Her father’s array of tools one of the few childhood memories of him that remained, along with his words: That’s not a clamp, you dill. It’s a Stillson. Duncan had one, too, though she’d never seen him use it. HEAVY DUTY on one side of its handle and DROP FORGED JAWS on the other. The tool rusty with age. Who tightened that jaw so mercilessly? Who pushed pins into her softness?
Perhaps the worst was the iron: that ‘hatchet-shaped’ cautery tool. When Alice first saw the terrible words on her screen and tried to imagine the barbaric procedure, the searing of that iron branded her thoughts. Now, when the burn started up, or when she woke with it, she saw antiquated surgical implements and the men wielding them, and shrank away from herself.
So there was the bite and the needle and the clamp and the iron. There was never nothing. She was starting to forget how nothing felt and berated herself for not giving thanks when she had it. What she would give for the bliss of nothing, in this place of too much.
She slipped from the bed, wrapped her dressing gown around her and lifted the journal and pen from her bedside table. Closed the bedroom door softly behind her and stepped carefully to the kitchen, legs slightly parted. Poured water from the filtering jug into the kettle and took the whistle off. Lit the gas.
A cup of tea, that always helps.
Was it her imagination, or had the pain eased? She thought about the unbearable tumult of those sensations for which she could not find words. Was the amitriptyline starting to work? Or was it simply that the clamour was now so familiar she could name its separate voices? She must not allow this state to become normal. If she struggled against it with all that she was, it must leave – as suddenly and bizarrely, perhaps, as it had begun. She could overcome it. Surely.
The sun edged over the windowsill, bringing the bowl on the kitchen table to life, the oranges heaped within it glowing into and through its glass. The bowl’s heavy solidity had been ugly to her at first, and she’d had to pretend a little when they unwrapped it after the wedding, so Joan wouldn’t guess. But the gift had become reassuring over the years, with its dense, clear glass, more satisfying somehow. And the thought reminded her: she must return her mother’s call. Pick up their conversation where they’d left off – that idea of psychological virginity, woman as one-in-herself. The sharing of insights still new and surprising, but something she had begun to welcome.
Crimson smudges of light grew on the kitchen wall and the sink gathered sharp glints. Alice shifted her weight. It was only morning, but already her body slumped wearily against the bench. She felt insubstantial. Wraith-like. She loosened the tie of her gown and lifted her t-shirt. Her belly was flat, her ribs jutted. Pain had destroyed her appetite and the anti-candida diet had further pared away her flesh. Now she couldn’t retrieve the ability to nurture herself – not the woman she’d become, anyway. She, who was skin and bone and suffering.
Images came to her in glimpses: uniforms and a regimented holiday camp. She opened her journal and wrote quickly, before her dream was lost in the morning’s post-medication fog.
Travelling in a bus with a group of women. Arriving at a ‘camp’ & realising a betrayal. Foreign women, buxom and strong, harvest meat from the newly arrived women – from us – in efficient cleaver swoops to the shoulder. Arms are thrown in vats as we move in line, wearied. Acquiescent …
The rest of the dream came in a nauseating rush.
… I manoeuvre myself to the end of the line, hoping they will have enough meat by the time they reach me. I try to reason with them but they are unmoved & I have no alternative but to have my arm chopped off.
Water was bubbling and hissing at the kettle’s spout, the kitchen window misting. She swallowed her queasiness, lifted her floral mug from its hook and poured boiling water over a teabag. Inhaled deeply and then breathed out, swirling the rising steam.
Six months on the anti-candida diet. Did Gibbs include patients who had not returned in her ninety-five percent success rate? Maybe the doctor assumed that no repeat visit indicated success. Alice recalled the GP’s certainty and saw it now as smugness, felt a spike of anger. She would bloody well send a letter to Gibbs and all the other practitioners she’d seen, now she knew more. Include information downloaded from the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Disease website, print it in large font, underline current terminology, highlight possible treatments in bold. So the next woman in line might be received with some knowledge; so the next woman might be responded to with some fucking compassion. Alice sucked in air. Felt a shudder of fury through her body.
Into the lounge. Cup and journal on the table. Gas heater on: click, click, click and hold. The tearing between her legs as she opened the door. Slowly. Across the verandah and down the red concrete steps. Reach for the Sunday paper, its plastic wrapping wet and gritty with sand. Gently now. A residual nip within the raw ache and a wince on the turn.
She took in the boxy shape of their home. The verandah pillars and the angel finial on the roof. Recalled her tactless words when Duncan first proudly presented his house: It’s a mausoleum! But he had laughed and squeezed her shoulders as they stood together, right here, and it had become a joke. When they believed their love could trump any portent, when they thought it would survive disaster or ruin.
Alice sighed. She seemed to sigh so much now. Like an old person. Another as she climbed the steps, short-breathed. Another as she lowered herself onto the sofa, using her thigh and outer hip to take the weight as she slid into that reclining sideways pose. Like a bloody nineteenth-century hysteric, prostrate on a chaise longue, or whatever it was they used then.
She picked up the CD remote and pressed the repeat and play buttons. Music swelled against the walls and she pressed the volume-down button quickly.
She knew the Bach cantata so well now; she listened to nothing else when she was alone. It seemed to match her mood yet also to hold her, reassure her. The instrumental themes that repeated and grew, the calm voices in counterpoint. She had looked it up on the internet and laughed when she saw the subject of the 1599 hymn on which the cantata was based: the parable of the ten virgins in the Gospel of Matthew. Was this what Joan would call synchronicity?
Alice closed her eyes and sank into the cradle of music. Allowed the recurring question to form: What do you think your body is trying to tell you?
At least she might have a more complete diagnosis from the GP she first saw in April. Who said to call her Susan, not Dr Sutherland. Who admitted, We don’t know much about this condition, yet had known more than all the physicians and gynaecologists before her. She’d listened to Alice intently, waiting till her words and sobs ran dry, had taken samples gently, giving reasons and explaining each action, did not press Alice when she baulked at the sight of a cotton bud and asked, Could we do that Q-tip thing another time?
Susan had run some tests and given Alice words she’d already seen, but turned away from: vulvodynia. Generalised unprovoked vulvodynia. Then she’d given her a new, it would seem more recent, word: vestibulodynia. Alice had protested that these important-sounding terms gave her nothing, really – But vulvodynia just means chronic vulvar pain, doesn’t it? – and the doctor looked sympathetic, suggested she thought of all these words as a description rather than a diagnosis.
Alice sat up and sipped her tea. Cool already. She shifted the cushions to the other end of the sofa, her body onto its other side.
Medication, Susan had suggested. Amitriptyline. An old-style tricyclic antidepressant, she’d said … could sometimes reduce neurological pain … the difficulty of diagnosis … the need to be patient … Then, she’d outlined strategies to help reduce the symptoms: an oral antifungal, and oestrogen cream to thicken the vulvar tissue … abdominal breathing, other relaxation techniques. Again, patience. Because pain caused stress and tension that fed into the pain. A downward spiral, Susan called it. A downward spiral: yes, that’s exactly how it felt to Alice. As if she had been sucked into a vortex that had spun her around and down and into that great, dark maw. We might look at physiotherapy down the track. I think you’re too sensitive just now.
Alice had tried the oestrogen cream, thinking caring thoughts as she smoothed it on, but after a couple of weeks it had begun to burn and she had to stop, well before the suggested three months. She had no idea if the oral antifungal did anything. The amitriptyline, though, was unambiguous. A tiny tablet that levelled her each evening, arriving so suddenly she didn’t even have time to feel sleepy; Duncan had to shake her awake when he went to bed. But, oh, the blissful sleeps! The brief window of painlessness between consciousness and unconsciousness. Waking up in the morning dazed, but rested. Weekends only distinguished by Duncan’s presence, who went to uni each day of the working week now, who no longer excused himself from work functions simply to be with her.
She swallowed her tea, testing residual nausea. Thought about the submission of the women in her dream, lining up to have an arm chopped off. Her own resistance. Still fighting against that invisible enemy who would strip everything from her, leaving only a torso, or bones, or a screaming vulva.
Was there another way? Recently, she’d sensed something in herself. An impression – like the pillow seam ridging her face on sleep-logged mornings. Where was that dream? She searched through her journal till the remembered words caught her eye.
Ugly, primitive cone-shaped creature with shell-like structure & teeth at the mouth. I/the girl know/knows what must be done with it. She lies during the night on a log resting in brackish water with the creature & most of her body submerged. And in the morning, miraculously, the creature has transformed into a little being, like a little pink girl – pink-skinned, large-eyed, with a dot/mark/its name on its forehead.
The pink girl brought an image to mind: cherubic infants in a watery world. She clambered to her feet and scanned the bookshelves. Ah, The Water Babies – there it was.
Placing the book and her journal on the rug near the heater, she lowered herself to the ground, rested her weight on her elbows and was immediately absorbed in the colour plates. The chimneysweep made clean and new. The frilly gills around Tom’s neck and, here, Ellie’s. The two of them embracing underwater. Marked as between worlds. Or initiated into an unfamiliar world and able to survive. Even thrive.
Was that possible? She read the dream again, thinking about the teeth at the mouth of the creature that became this miraculous girl. Was this some form of toothed vagina? She picked up her pen and wrote below her early-morning questions,
The Freudian model: girl-woman abandons clitoris as inferior penis and embraces vagina as primary site of sexual pleasure. Is my cone-creature dream a recommendation to remove the teeth from my vagina? Am I stuck at an early stage of sexual development, my passage to being a ‘real’ woman delayed?
But her written curves were marred by blots and angles, and she wondered at her own reluctance. Something more subtle and interesting was meant, she was sure of it. She considered the dream again, recreating the atmosphere within it and remembering her feelings when she woke. Her excitement at the girl, and the breath of hope.
Is the discovery of these primitive teeth a necessary prelude? My illness the trigger for transformation into a new being? An initiation? Are ‘teeth’ necessary – to protect, to discern, to ‘digest’? And how does this relate to the psychological virgin – whole, self-possessed and the property of no man or woman, independent, yet with the ability to give freely –
A heavy tread reverberating through her belly. Duncan. He walked over to the heater, twisted the knob. Yes, she realised, it was hot and stuffy now.
Alice saw the room through his eyes: the books, the doona, the incense set and ready to burn. Heard the Bach cantata through his ears. The dirge, he’d pronounced when she first discovered the piece of music that sounded, to her, like a story. Strange that two people could hear the same composition in such different ways. ‘Sleepers Awake’: the union of Christ and the wise virgin a cause for joy, surely. Though he hadn’t stuck around for the final movements. She pressed pause and registered the heavy silence, saw that he was dressed already. It felt like an accusation.
Duncan lowered himself into the armchair facing her. Passed a weary hand over his face. A talk, she realised. He is readying himself for a talk.
‘Look. I know how hard this is for you,’ he began without preamble, and stopped. Looked at the ceiling, gathering his thoughts. Did he? she wondered. Could anyone who had not felt this pain comprehend? ‘But sometimes I wonder if you encourage it, indulge it a little with all this, this … self-absorption.’
She dampened the quick rush of anger. It seemed impossible to explain, when his understanding had so many gaps. But she must try.
‘I don’t have any choice about going into this – about going deep. The pain takes me there. The only choice I have is what I do while I’m here.’ She pulled at her tracksuit pants, loosened their clawing at her buttocks. ‘I’ve tried escaping, but the pain is too much.’
‘Can’t you fight it?’
‘Sometimes it hurts so much it’s all I can do to just survive.’ It was an appeal, the first time she’d hinted at the possibility. ‘But, you know, I do fight. I fight against it with all that’s left of me. And I tell myself I will not be this person in pain.’ He was listening attentively. ‘But it’s not getting me anywhere and nobody seems to know enough to help. So then I just feel like shit.’ Could she share the remainder? ‘If I can’t get away from it or fight it, then maybe all I can do is listen. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Through what my body tells me. Through dreams and myths and symbols. And I know that makes me look weird and not like the person you know. But, Duncan, I don’t have any other choice.’
‘Alice, I don’t see that.’ He rested his hands on his knees. ‘Look. I love you – I do. And it hurts me that you hurt. But what I see is this beautiful, smart woman going down a path that just makes her sadder. And I wonder if that’s necessary.’ He leaned towards her. ‘Isn’t it possible that the symptoms are nothing to do with needing to change yourself – that this is just a physical problem that needs to be sorted? That before long you will come across someone or something that helps?’ His voice was clear and sure. So unlike her faltering defence. ‘I don’t want you to look back and think, “What on earth was I doing all that time?”’
‘Duncan, it’s just –’ How to explain. ‘It feels right, you know? Like when you started the biography. Remember?’ She could hear the appeal in her own voice. Its supplication.
‘But think about all your work to build up the teaching. Do you imagine they’ll hold those units for when you’re finally able to return?’ His questions had the bite hers lacked. ‘And think about this research position. I know you’re not being paid for it, but it’s important. It’s a relationship with the university that needs to be nurtured. That will help you in the future.’
So. These thoughts had been circling within him, pent up, waiting for the gate to be opened. But she couldn’t say this, just as she couldn’t tell him that leaving uni also gave her space. From other people, but also from him. How could she possibly say this?
‘If you’re going to stay at home for months on end,’ he continued, ‘why don’t you use the time to submit more stories from your PhD? Or put some energy into getting the collection published?’
‘Because it’s not who I am anymore.’ Duncan’s eyes widened. Even she hadn’t known this till she said it. ‘Or not the only thing, anyway.’ She paused for a moment. Gathered her courage. ‘Maybe I can go sideways,’ she said. ‘Aim to write, but make it about this disorder. Start with some research. About the history behind it. About what it does to women. About the process, the arduous process you’re forced to endure with this relentless, never-ending pain.’
She didn’t tell him that she had already begun: jotting down research topics, propping herself on rolled-up towels when she drove to pick up books from the uni library.
Duncan shook his head. Walked to the window. Placed the flats of his hands against his lower back and leaned into them, flexing his body, easing an ache. He turned to face her again. Spat it out: ‘You sound like your mother.’
The strength of her anger was a surprise. For a moment she felt invigorated, then the energy ran out of her like sand.
Where was she? Wandering where the certain light of his opinion was swallowed by darkness. Alone in an underworld he could not visit. Trapped in a realm for which he had no token.
They watched the program together, hands intertwined. A softness admitted, a peace of sorts brokered.
In the light thrown by the TV, Duncan’s face was unlined – years younger than the man who had challenged her that morning. When she saw her husband like this, it was easier for Alice to believe the best of him. To think again about how her illness must affect him, this man with his sharp, directed thoughts, his ability to shape creative solutions from complex problems. But worrying about his place in this – about how he would love to be the cause of improvement, or how she might soothe his hurt feelings – only made her feel guilty. Reduced. And there was so little of her left, she couldn’t grow smaller. Could she?
On the screen, buffalo forged a river somewhere in Africa. The narrator described the action in a hushed voice: ‘There – predators wait hungrily.’ Opportunistic snouts and eyes poked from the surface of the water. ‘The young and the sick are especially vulnerable.’ Alice did not enjoy these nature docos as Duncan did, especially now. The battles and blood. The fight for survival.
If they could only have sex. Proper sex. Not these fraught encounters in which more and more parts of her body felt off limits, unsafe.
How could she tell him that she could hardly bear his touch? How could he believe in their love while she rejected him? How could she reassure him of her own desire, when, if she moved to touch him, the rawness stabbed, as if she were caught on barbed wire? Her mind, too, was unequal to the task. What she needed was an embrace without demand. This new Alice could no longer meet Duncan’s demand, and she realised – with a start, with a sense of desolation – that he was powerless to help her.
Duncan was absorbed. Alice refocused on the TV. Had the buffalo survived?
It was raptors now. Monkeys screeched and flung themselves from tree to tree and the two birds circled above. ‘They are watching and waiting,’ said the voice-over.
Was the rift between them solely because of her illness? The new, pained Alice questioned all that had gone before. Suggested there was a flaw in the foundation of their relationship. Wondered if the baby she had imagined, it seemed like years ago, would have been a mistake, anyway. But could she trust the thoughts and feelings of the new Alice? Was she a superior version of herself – more insightful, more mature – or a hag who no longer saw the good in her husband? Who now saw the world itself through a glass, darkly? What did she make of herself? Of their marriage? Obscure doubts that had hidden within the folds of her pain, only to emerge now, as she tried to translate the language of her suffering.
‘But the raptors have a strategy.’ The narrator’s voice again. ‘While the monkeys, from their swaying seat in the tree canopy, watch the male disappear, his mate flies in behind unnoticed. Ready to swoop.’
Alice closed her eyes.
From the moment of meeting, Duncan had provided an answer to her world. And she had always believed that he looked to her as some kind of compass. That life made more sense for both of them in each other’s company. For what other reason had they married? She remembered their early melding and nights when he’d recounted his childhood troubles: his mother’s many hospital absences as her body was remade; the loss of his father just as Ena was returned to them, fixed, after a fashion. Alice had held him as he cried, felt his need for her in those boyish tears.
But when she looked back through the eyes of her new self, she read a different story. A young woman in the grip of an older, seemingly smarter, man. A woman who had bent herself into the form defined by his interests – his beliefs. Her thoughts and hopes fenced. The compromises made to bring him pleasure a slow whittling away at herself.
She allowed it to return: the end of that terrible phone conversation with her mother, years ago; the words she had tried to keep at arm’s length ever since. Recalled the phone in the corridor of the share house and the old stained-glass front door through which afternoon sun had poured. Her body bathed in colour and youthful ire.
You understand what I mean, Alice. Duncan took advantage … Nineteen! Why didn’t he go after someone his own age?
Alice looked back at her younger self. Realised that Joan’s dismay only fused her more closely to Duncan. Understood that all of Joan’s misgivings about Duncan – why he was drawn to someone impressionable, naive … why she herself responded – only drove mother and daughter further apart.
She remembered her own righteous anger that day. Her digs at Joan acting the analyst, and then, broaching the news. Anyway, he’s asked me to move in.
There’d been a hush. A pause when she’d wondered what her mother was thinking. Heartbeats when she’d hoped this new status might change things.
But – and her mother’s words had come in a rush – Oh, Alice, I’m worried about his hold over you. She’d gone on, Joan, said something about Duncan himself and who he was in the world, about what he was, grandiosity and needing admiration and excessively demanding flowing like something viscous through the phone line. And then, then, that quiet sentence, Sometimes I look at him and think …
Alice had made her voice weary, she remembered. Ironic. What do you think, Mum? The tears that hid behind.
I wonder whether he is a narcissist – the personality disorder, I mean.
There, they were out. The horrible words a diagnosis. A judgement. And, just as momentously, her decision had been made: she would say yes. She would move in, make Duncan her family. Maybe Joan would come around, she’d reassured herself. But they never had that make-up conversation. And Alice didn’t know if that was because Joan felt too embarrassed, or because she had not come around. Would never come around.
Was it a betrayal to recall the words now? To admit their possibility?
Narcissist. Her bloody know-it-all mother.
Personality disorder. The words that rankled and rumbled, growing more potent with each unspoken year.
Despite their new warmth, she wanted to ring Joan and accuse her, force her to carry some blame. Tell her mother that she could no longer wholly believe in her own husband. That she doubted their ability to recreate that space in which they had affirmed their love and desire. That she might never again trust the embrace that initiated this horror.
Her face was wet. She blotted the tears with her sweater and opened her eyes to a burst of motion.
‘Look!’ The raptor had grasped a small monkey from the treetops. ‘There is no escape now.’ The bird flew with her prey to an outcrop of rocks, then thrust large talons into the belly. Her wings were outstretched; she raised her proud head and scanned the sky.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Duncan’s voice was resonant with awe. She loved that about him: his eager curiosity about the world.
She loved him.
What if this disorder were to disappear tomorrow? Would the crippling doubt in that love reveal itself as a chimera? An effect of pain? Of despair? Surely she could – no, should – work harder to safeguard their marriage. To hold onto the remnants of what had been between them. She called back the memories. The week away last year that had shown her something different: their love and the thought of a living proof of that bond. When she recovered, they would return to that point – even plan that future. They would see the softness in each other and laugh together again.
It had been good. She must remember.
The raptor’s cape-like wings shielded the dead monkey from the view of other predators. ‘Mantling,’ the narrator pronounced. Alice could see the monkey’s milky underside. The scattered splotches of brilliant red. Her skin prickled, top to toe. She could feel the pecks to her belly, the tearing at her innards. Glistening membranes ripping.
She moved closer to Duncan and he put his arm around her. She leaned into his long body. Became heavy and slack. Ah, here it came: that tiny, sedating pill; that nightly bulldozer. Her eyelids dropped. A glowing afterimage: the monkey’s white belly and the raptor’s pale eye, the round absence at its core. Then the heavy surge rolled over her body and she fell into that black hole … going, going …
‘Alice.’ Her shoulder gripped. Shaken. ‘Alice, come on. Time for bed.’
She lifted her eyelids. Saw a shadow hovering over her, its wings darker than the night-filled room. Mantling. Was it shielding her? Preparing to eat her?
She couldn’t move her arms or legs. Couldn’t fight the shadow, or the heaviness. The blackness came again and carried her away.