Winnie and I drew inspiration from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (at the Brooklyn Museum); the creative process used by The Associates, whose play, Sheila, we saw together (courtesy of Girls Write Now); and—of course—each other.
Whose idea were the white lace curtains? My sisters’, probably, but they make the room look garish, encased as they are by coal-black wooden walls in an aching, old house. Ditto the faded, flowered bedspreads, the threadbare cotton sheets like girls’ dresses in summer.
Marcella and Sophia, away now at college, their bedroom frozen like a single slide of film, caught between frames, just before the light shines through. My room lies at the end of the hall. No lace or flowers, just pages ripped from books, from magazines, tacked into the supple walls and waving their words, like flags, in the wind.
All of us female by birth, double X, though Sophia and Marcella more typically so. They are Mom’s blood-daughters, betrayers of her womb, their very existence an affront to her Self. “It felt,” she once told me, “like being possessed.” She had thought that she couldn’t bear children, hence: me.
The adopted daughter, “The Chosen One” (they used to tease me), who is here to wipe up. Back home for the first time since turning eighteen, taking care of Mom, postoperatively. No longer Virginia, but Vinci (like Leonardo). She waited for this surgery, like the way some kids’ parents will wait until the kids are grown up to divorce, not wanting to split up the family.
What she split, though, was time, right down the middle, so that never again would there be a house without a Before and an After. What she split were the seams of her very skin.
He told me he’d felt “imprisoned” in an “empty soul,” “of which the very windows are shuttered,” and I said, “So what? So you redecorate? Doesn’t that smack of women’s work?”
Later, she—he—tried again, via text: “I need to clip the wings of my vulvar butterfly, in order to be truly free,” she wrote. I misread the word as “vulgar,” which now I can see as the actual sentiment. I wonder, did the dazzling and dramatic installation of a new phallus, which continues to stain the bandages, give him what she had wanted? Does it rise up against erasure? Will it create the desired tension between historical conditions and the life that she—that he—wants to lead?
I think of the doctors’ fine needlework; I think of my mother’s face, breast, and arms.
I never knew she had a sacred heart.