(1962; makeshift studio installation; Claremont, California)
They pulled girls from campus sidewalks, cafeteria tables, their dorm room beds. Husky boys with hands like grizzlies’ paws clamped the girls’ forearms, under armpits, escorting, lifting, dragging if necessary. Outside the student union in the early-autumn heat they marched the girls one at a time onto a locker room scale. They wrapped lassos of measuring tape around hips, waist, bust. They moved the metal weight across the top of the scale, forward and back. They called out numbers. Students gathered around. The boys cheered or jeered as if the measurements were football scores. The girls watched with forced smiles or pained smiles or smiles that looked like bright red cuts across their faces.
The weigh-in was a first-year rite of passage, they said. All in good fun.
Jess was eating lunch with a couple of girls from orientation when they heard the mob arrive. The girl beside Jess tensed up; Jess felt her own body stiffen in reply. The girl across the table started to giggle nervously, covering her mouth as she chewed her egg salad. The boys burst into the cafeteria singing some kind of fight song. They went table to table, pulling the girls up from their chairs and ushering them outside while other boys laughed or clapped or looked away.
Jess stood on the scale and they called out her weight, wrapping the measuring tape around her breasts, their hands everywhere, one even on her throat for a moment, a thumb pressed into her windpipe, turning her into position. She just wanted it to be over. The noise around her was an unbroken roar. Then a boy slapped her on the ass and she stepped off the scale and into the cheering crowd. She turned and watched the next girl, the one who sat beside Jess in the union. The girl stood on the scale, her body rigid as a plank of wood but her chin jumping, her mouth dropping open as she moaned, a low sound running beneath the noise. Jess felt the moan enter her body, swirling in her chest and throat to find her own moan trapped there, a wail of disgust and fear and shame.
The next year Jess stood in the crowd and watched every time a girl was weighed and measured. She tried to catch their eyes when she could, to be there on the other side of the noise, and if that wasn’t possible then she would bear witness. Afterward she walked off campus to the little storefront Alex rented as a studio and stalked the space, wanting to cry or shout or break something. At one point Alex handed her a cup of coffee and Jess threw the mug across the room, thrilled by the satisfying burst when it exploded against the far wall.
Gabe brought curtains from the theater department and they cordoned off a corner of the studio into its own room. Then they made a corridor of curtains leading from the front doors, what Jess saw as a soft approach, a velveteen tunnel of deep reds and purples guiding you in. They shopped a weekend’s worth of yard sales and filled a rack of shelves in the curtained room with plates, mugs, glasses, vases. She spread the word in the dining hall, the union, the classrooms. When the first girl arrived, Jess was waiting at the beginning of the curtained corridor with safety glasses and a pair of rubber dish-washing gloves. Five minutes later the girl reemerged into the bright afternoon, flushed and sweating, a small cut on her cheek, another on her calf. She handed Jess the gloves and glasses and then stayed to help clean, to ready the space for the next arrival.
They stayed open for hours after every weigh-in. Sometimes no one came; sometimes three or four girls were waiting by the door when Jess arrived. Some of the girls broke everything they could get their hands on, screaming or shouting so loud their muffled voices could be heard through the cinder-block walls. Some were silent, and when Jess went back into the space to clean she found that nothing was broken, only moved a little, or simply left alone.
Some took off as soon as they finished, but others fell into folding chairs outside the storefront, talking and smoking, then going quiet when someone new arrived, giving them that gift of silence as Jess handed over the glasses and gloves.
Alex asked her what it was called.
“What’s what called?” Jess said.
“This piece. You should give it a name.”
She hadn’t thought of this as art. What she was still trying and failing to do with paint was art, or an attempt at art. This revelation, finally discovering what she had been searching for, was exhilarating. She remembered Aunt Ruth on the night they finished building their breezeway, standing with her eyes closed, her arms out, whole for a moment.
One afternoon a group of football players showed up at the studio, beery and loud, demanding to be let inside. Jess blocked the door, her legs like jellyfish, and told them she was going to call the police. One of the players stepped up and put his hand in her hair as if to kiss her or break her neck. She kept her eyes on his, her voice as steady as she could make it, and told him to leave. He squeezed her hair in his fist, a warning, a reminder, then released her. The boys walked away laughing, weaving down the sidewalk.
The next day, Gabe came by so Jess wouldn’t be alone. They only had one visitor, who had been inside so long Jess had forgotten her until Gabe suggested one of them go in and check.
Jess walked down the curtained corridor, listening for shouts or screams or cries, glass breaking, singing even, which was how some of the girls told her they had spent their time. Jess didn’t know the girl’s name, so she called out Hello? and waited for a response. Her voice died in the tunnel of fabric. She stepped through the last curtain.
Everything was broken—the glassware, the crockery, the shelves. The girl lay on her side in the bull’s-eye of the wreckage, knees to elbows, motionless. Her eyes were open but lightless. Deep cuts crosshatched her cheeks and arms. She hadn’t worn the glasses or gloves. Jess knelt beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder. The girl’s muscles were tensed, her body hard as a rock. She was taking short, shallow breaths, little gasps. Jess stood and called out to Gabe. Her voice broke and then fell to her feet, more shards. She called again, louder, hearing her own wild panic, then she ran back through the corridor toward the doors that Gabe had just come through.
They drove the girl to the infirmary, where a doctor asked them what the hell happened. Jess tried to explain and the man watched her with increasing indignation. When Jess asked if they could stay, the doctor looked at her like she was out of her mind. “Haven’t you done enough already?” he said.
The girl’s name was Bonnie. She was small and blond and fair; Jess had seen the pale blue veins in her neck and wrists when she’d found her on the studio floor. None of the other girls knew her. She was quiet and shy, or at least she seemed that way in those early weeks of the semester, her first time away from home. Within a couple of days she was back in classes. Jess saw her in the library and walking between buildings. But every time Jess thought to approach she held back. She couldn’t explain why she avoided the girl, as if Bonnie had done something wrong. Jess hated herself for her cowardice, her lack of courage to engage, to do more than create something and then step back and watch.
A secretary from the dean’s office came by Alex’s studio and told them to close down the site. Some of the girls continued to meet outside, discussing other actions they could take, a letter-writing campaign or a petition to the dean. Bonnie disappeared from campus; someone told Jess that she had transferred to a school closer to home.
She brought it up with Alex the night they took the curtains down. He listened as Jess let it all out, what felt like a confession, her frustration and sadness over what had happened. When she was finished, he paused for a moment up on his ladder.
“It’s a risk,” he said. “And I don’t think the risk is just to the artist.”
Almost a decade later Jess heard that the college, under pressure from students and alumni, had finally banned the weigh-in. That night, celebrating the news at the Brig with old friends, a gap opened in the noise, and for a moment Jess saw Bonnie there, just the way she remembered. As toasts were made and glasses clinked, Jess looked at the girl curled on the floor of the bar, the floor of the curtained room, drained and pale and broken like the plates.