VIRGINIA AND HER FATHER

 

 

EVERY STORY IS PURSUED by its own end. As in life, the characters do not know their fate. But the narrator knows how the story will end from the moment she begins.

Virginia was born in the shadow of her sister, whom she loved very much. They were close in a way only sisters who have endured sorrow can be. Their mother had died of a then-common disease of the chest flesh that often afflicted women. The night they lost their mother, Virginia and her sister walked to the wood, lit a thick candle, and promised that they would stay forever bound. As everyone knows, women who experience certain kinds of horror and harm overcome it by suturing their lives together.

In those first years without their mother, Virginia’s sister decided she was meant to be a performer. Virginia walked with her to rehearsals in the city and sat at the back of the theatre, where she had the whole performance to herself. She watched her sibling portray other women, and while she recognized that the form in front of her was her sister, she also knew it was, by some kink in the plane of logic, not. From the plush seats, her hands growing damp from anticipation in the moment before her sister stepped from behind the curtain and into sight, Virginia found herself falling for the trick. She felt she loved not just her sister, but also each and every woman that her sister captured and performed. She felt it in the core of her bones and the channels of her blood, the places where her mother had said true feeling is born.

While Virginia admired her sister’s chosen field, she herself preferred the careful folding of paper. She had always found the properties of paper captivating because of its role as both artifact and conduit. Because her mother had studied this craft, too, she used her mother’s work as a guide, unfolding each creation to examine the ways the paper pleated and caved. She started with still figures: a rock, a pond, a tree. Then she moved on to more intricate scenes—a field with an abandoned bathtub, a row of empty and disheveled beds lying on a basement floor—and finally to full narratives. She would fold a story and present it to her father, and each time he read her paper stories, he would nod in gratitude, then gently kiss the top of her head. For through this artifice Virginia was resurrecting for him the woman they’d both lost.

Virginia’s sister grew to be such a fine actress that she left to pursue her art in the region’s largest cities. Virginia stayed at home, and at night she would think of the myriad of women her sister was embodying, a myriad of women her sister was not. At first she believed it was because she so desperately missed her sister and wanted to find sisterhood through them. But she thought of them in ways that were more secretive than kinship. And as the other youth in the city began to speak of that mysterious attraction we deem love, she decided this was the abstract allure she felt.

Because daughterhood requires long periods of being alone, Virginia often visited the river to conduct her folding. On one such day, she came upon a pair of women who were tangled together on the grass. At first she thought they were fighting, but when she moved around the trees to chance a better view, she came to understand that they were kissing. While she realized this was something ambiguous and intangible, something she could not fully unpack, she also realized the tingling in her bones and blood that said one day she would lie with a woman, too. It was something far less than desire but more than mere interest; it was something akin to appeal.

Soon Virginia found her room was full of the story of women loving each other, paper narratives told in the dialect of girl. In this way, her room became a stage, and on it, her imagination was given permission to be made real.

On the eve of her twelfth birthday, her father knocked on her door. Detecting no response, he entered but found the room empty of daughter, full only of the sound of paper speaking in the breeze. He looked around, first in adoration and then in an effort to relive the days when his wife would fold him stories. But as he consumed Virginia’s narrative, knowledge slowly percolated in his mind. He read and reread; he read in all directions. He was a careful reader of folded stories, having learned the craft from his late wife. And this is how his daughter’s message was made clear.

Virginia came home that evening balancing several reams of paper. As she entered the house, she saw in her father’s eyes a kind of fear and defeat that told her to put the reams down.

You thirst for girls, he said. And she looked into his eyes and smiled, for there it was—it had been said aloud—and she felt unsheathed, as though an invisible robe that had been holding her arms across her chest was unfastened and, after a lifetime without them, she could finally use her hands.

She told him then that it was true and not to worry, for love between women is the safest kind. But her father did not understand. How would she carry on a family? How would she create children within her frame?

Virginia told her father then that not all families contain children. She had no intention of ever mothering, for, as she had recently been thinking, she was not sure what children were. Were they the way a person ensured something was left crawling and creeping on earth’s soil when she was buried? Were they the shadowy apparitions of all the people of her lineage? Were they a kind of self-centered pleasure or a kind of self-induced pain? Put less simply, were children the rubric or the body of work?

Virginia was still awake hours later, when her father returned from a long walk around the village. He was quiet for a long while, and Virginia listened, wondering if a daughter chose to be one, or was sentenced upon birth. Daughterhood is a vocation concerned with following carefully prescribed rules, avoiding endangerment, evading threat; being a daughter means mastering the art of defense. The wonder, then, is what would happen to a daughter who rebelled.

What Virginia did not know then but would soon learn is this: anything could happen when daughterhood ceased to be a protected occupation.

Virginia crept from her room.

It had taken him several drafts, but there it lay; the story of what was to become of Virginia, written in a missive to her sister. She read it with a kind of horror and confusion, a kind of disgusted awe. For her mother had taught her that love was rare and when it surfaced, it should be invited very gently into one’s life. Love, her mother had said, was like the thinnest paper; easily torn but capable of the largest number of folds.

Before she left, she placed two folded words upon her bedroom door. For You, a dedication for the paper story her room told. For a room is like a book, in that it is a private province. A room is like a book in that it is most charged with possibility when it is entered alone.

When Virginia’s sister would go on stage to perform the women she was not, she imagined Virginia might be out there in the audience. She hoped that if she were, Virginia would see in her movements that freedom is not a state but a dwelling, a room one of one’s own. And when her sister found a narrative couched between the covers of a book written by Anonymous, she read Virginia in the margins of the story—she read what was left unsaid.

From the stage, an audience looks like a single being that moves uniformly in laughter or through tears, taken aback or pulled in. The players on stage are a cast of apparitions who mimic and mirror the failures and follies of the many-mouthed beast. Virginia’s sister would think this as she took her place in the dark of backstage for her curtain call. As the curtains rose and the lights shone, she would lift her lips into that faux, required smile and the audience would howl and clap and stand. And there, toward the back, would be always her father. He would stop clapping then and leave before being seen, as he was now estranged to both of his daughters. But it was in these moments he came to understand the first rule of narrative: if you break it down and apart, in the end, every story is about a woman and her machine.