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Easy, Betty, it’s probably just a break-in. Or maybe God’s worst creation: teenagers.
“The real curse of womanhood,” I tell them as I shrug off my winter coat and snow-crusted boots, still winded from the three-story walk-up, “is that we never get to forget we have a body. And I don’t just mean because we have to look or move or smell a certain way. I mean, biologically. We’re so tied to these stupid, fleshy things.” I grab my midsection. More of it in my hands than ever before. “Every month, they remind us that it’s all out of our control—and we can’t even see what they’re up to!”
Nadine obliges, grinding the cigarette out on a stack of magazines on an end table next to her. The ash leaves a Catholic blessing on the forehead of some generically perfect smiling idiot.
WHAT ROLE SHALL I PLAY TODAY DADDY
“Put your back into it, Mary, I feel like I’m being tongue-fucked by a German shepherd with a brain injury.”
Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.
Once I read about inchworms. They can learn to navigate a maze, then be ground up and fed to another worm who suddenly can also navigate that same maze on its first try, having somehow absorbed the information.
Her mouth is open, and the rim is frosted with the strawberry jam and cottage cheese of dried foamy spittle and clotted blood.
She was probably just following her husband’s wishes. That’s what we’re taught to do, right, Bonnie? Follow the man? You’re doing it; I’m doing it. It’s enough to just have a place and to be protected, isn’t it? Any collateral suffering is just the price of admission. We are predators, but we are also prey.
How broken do these people need to be to need something like this? But even as I think that, I feel the iron tug of (go along go along don’t you want to belong somewhere don’t you want to have a home) because nothing feels safer than when someone else is the victim; especially when the next victim could always be you.
I don’t call them beautiful. It’s not that they’re not beautiful—my God, they are—but that word has too much baggage. It’s an outsider’s word and it was weaponized to render these women invisible in the first place. They are full of so much more than beauty. I tell them they’re amazing. Powerful. I tell them they’re here.
They will always try to condense our complexities into something simple and dismissible, because that’s what being a woman is, being too much for definitions and being defined anyway, out of fear, and my God, will we be fearless!
Just today, a man was sitting comfortably on the subway, and maybe his legs were spread a little too wide, but it’s not like he was really hurting anybody, if you don’t like it you can get up and move, but then suddenly a hole appeared in his thigh and his femoral artery began spraying everyone nearby.
I also can’t claim to know what it’s like to live through this world as a woman, but I’d like to venture that I at least share a common anger with the women in my life. I share it as a son who watched his mother (a single mother with a degenerative disease who had to raise two children on a part-time income) fight for her due respect in her professional and personal worlds. I share it as a husband who, literally while writing this novel, watched his wife deal with a mysterious, occasionally debilitating chronic pain and was witness to innumerable doctors’ appointments where her discomfort was
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The bulk of Mary is narrated in first-person present tense because I wanted access to the voices in the titular character’s head. But the most harmful, poisonous, insidious, domineering-yet-dastardly subtle voice actually isn’t hers; it belongs to the serial killer Damon Cross, a man who (not so subtly) represents the violent patriarchy we’re all of us inheritors of. I felt I could write this book because I know that voice.
That’s why the scariest thing in this parade of ghosts and blood and razor-sharp claws … is a mirror.
