Dear Girl
by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON
Dear child of undetermined sex:
This is Mozart – here, I’ll bring my belly close to the speaker, a shiver of cold contact, there – his Soave sia il vento, yes, it’s vibrating all through me and through you. Listening to Mozart is like running a comb through my brain. You won’t know yellow or red, the ecstatic whiteness of the sun through leaves and over water or the remarkable formation of ice on black branches, the full-body sensation of roast beef sandwiches when you’re ravenous, or lips on your skin. But you feel the vibrations of Mozart, and maybe the sensation of cold when I’m outside a long time, and the itch of heat while I drowse by his fireplace. He says don’t get attached, but how can that be? You’re neither asleep nor awake but alive, growing helplessly and amazingly on whatever I ingest – however you lie in my amniotic sea.
Dear child of undetermined sex:
Here’s how you erode someone’s love for you, your love for them, the love between you both that – not unlike a child – throbs with life: you lie still when he begins roughly kneading your breasts with frustration, and indicate that you feel nothing aside from guilt. You chastise him for snapping at you and inform him he’s difficult and testy, though when you were happier you deftly elevated him, and felt pride in understanding him better than anyone else. You say, wearily, that his limited emotional intelligence is wearing you down. You ruin a winter walk in the icy dark, the snow under streetlamps illuminated in beautiful colors; you begin shivering and focus on the limits of your body, you wish the rabbit crouched near the frozen pond could make you feel something. You say so, and watch him stifle a sigh.
You realize that you’ve been a loser all your life – a wealth of evidence glows in your memory – and you’ll become more and more of a loser as you go. Just like your fucked-up father but far worse off because he’s a man and a baby boomer and had the goddamn world at his feet as your mother used to say, long after she’d had her decade of giving up and had come out the other side. Your face will fade and by 40 you’ll be invisible, unhirable, the seeds of pariah-dom your father sowed within you and your mother didn’t bother plucking the poisonous shoots from will grow around you entirely, the vines are already curled around your wrists. You voice this to your companion, who is expected, he knows, to be really empathic and understanding about this development, instead of exhausted. When he finally cracks and tells you there are people in the world with real problems and demand you tell him what’s so wrong with your life, you laugh and tell him OK you get the picture, you’ll go home, as soon as you get back to his place you’ll gather your stuff, and you’ll go home – but for now he’s stuck with you. Poor him.
You’ve gotten a little fat and you don’t shut up about it, and watch the rabbit twitch its head and lope towards a larger tree, and you think if you had to live the life of a rabbit yeah it’d be hard, but at least you’d be skinny. You think, if I walked into traffic right now and got killed it might make the news and a lot of fuss would go into saving my life, but who cares? I’m just one animal, and a terrible one: I’ve used so many resources and given back very little, and now I won’t even allow myself to reproduce. You walk briskly into the street and feel the relief of the dark, of the pavement – no ice – and he yanks you back, screaming. You scream at each other. You suddenly stop screaming, stop speaking, stop looking at him and curl gently down, lie down on the slushy sidewalk and become immediately soaked. Might the squirming life within you register cold, might it flip or twist faintly, might it shiver? He looks around quickly, steeped in sudden social agony – you recall, from the ground, that he hates humiliation more than anything.
You feel heavy sobs come out of you, you start wailing, you shriek like that rabbit might in the jaws of a dog – horrible, horrible the thoughts you have. Guts and dying. Violent, violent thoughts. One day your father will die. This is how. This is how: he loves you so much that to ruin your love, you must become completely unrecognizable. But you know the truth: this is the real you, it’s just taking over. You’ve always been sick, haven’t you?
Dear child of undetermined sex:
I realize I’m addressing you as a girl. I’m addressing you as myself. I’m being hard on you, I was imagining you imbued with all my neuroses and crevices and sex spots worn threadbare and brain spots rubbed blank, with the crusted-over gashes and heavy milky bulges I nurse and pick at, not yet born but curled and ready to adopt them as soon as your lungs open and dry, born into them without a prayer of becoming anything else. A girl. Already I resent you, but I feel for you too. If I’d begun addressing you as a boy I’d become coy and a little distant – halfway flirting and halfway maternal – an arrangement of ciphers, nothing of me. It’s dangerous to ascribe you humanity but I can’t help but think: so you’re a girl – or at least, you would be. Could have been.
Just now I was pitying myself through pitying you, but at least I’ve been alive. Even the bus ride to the clinic had its pleasures. Even the dreary repetitions structuring my life aren’t repetitions at all, every morning is new and my will and that of others makes them newer still. Despite the nurse’s tone and her tiredness her wrists glittered with rhinestones, and his phone vibrated in his jeans as if the outside world was nudging us along. Even in the clinic there were reds, there were yellows. And knocking against the window an icy, dripping bough.
Dear girl,
I was sitting on his couch, and he had his arm around me but twisted up, with his hand pressing my head to his shoulder. The TV is flashing in front of us, and between us and the TV a bag of ketchup chips sit half-eaten, and I am locked against him and cannot reach them. I felt a deep pain like hunger – amazing to have different pits of self, one full and one empty – but even if it’d be OK for me to move, I’d know not to reach for the crinkly bag. He’d understand this eating as dutiful maternal fattening, eating for two, which is contrary to our decision.
A news story comes on and I forget about chips: just this afternoon a woman of about thirty had run staggering from a home, clung to a postman and hadn’t let go. She’d been kept in a heavily insulated basement for thirty years, it turns out, deprived of everything except for what her twisted captor brought her in on grimy plates. And I can’t help it – though you’ll never know different, you won’t in fact know anything – you have a face now and it’s that woman’s face, her eyes squeezed shut against the unimaginable brightness of day, shaking and clinging to the postman’s big body like an impaled matador struggling for breath. I ask him to turn off the TV.
Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Dear Girl is an excerpt from her novel manuscript I Have To Tell You, for which she gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an an archive of her writing on This Recording here.
Paintings by Vincent Giarrano.
"Don't Smoke In Bed" - Peggy Lee (mp3)
"I'm A Woman" - Peggy Lee (mp3)
