Story Focus: "Gone"
Yesterday, I did Father's Day. Babies are everywhere in my family right now. My sister-in-law is in town this month with her 1 year old. My other sister-in-law is 6 months pregnant with their first. My cousins just welcomed their 3rd into the world last month. Babies. Everywhere.
I will never understand a woman's body. You ladies. You can build another person inside of you. You realize that, right?
I mean, I get it. Sperm. Egg. 46 chromosomes. Embryogenesis. Trimesters. All that.
But, I mean, that's a tiny human splitting and piecing and splitting and piecing itself together inside your bellies. And your bones turn soft. The baby moves around inside of you, through your skin, you can make out feet, elbows, heads. You talk about your bodies unabashedly; you discuss what they crave, where they hurt, what is swelling and stretching.
I think about all this, and my mind reels. I am at once amazed and terrified. I think about all this, and I think about what I wrote earlier in the month about the artist in the story "Gone" in Cut Through the Bone:
“Gone” reads like a retelling of Robert Hass’s classic “A Story About the Body,” in which a woman reflects on the loss of her breasts to cancer, and bares herself to an artist attracted to a body she knows he does not understand.
Have you ever read "A Story About the Body?" If not, you should. It's a quick read, only a few hundred words. Go ahead and read it. We can wait.
Read it? Okay. I just wanted to make sure. There's no quiz, nor am I really going to make any comparisons beyond what I already have. I just wanted to make sure you'd read it.
Onward.
In "Gone," which I unfortunately couldn't find published online for those who don't yet have the book, a lady stares at herself in a mirror, traces scars along "the memory of [her] breasts" and another scar vertical down her belly, which I'm guessing is from a hysterectomy. She gets a phone call from an artist, Jason, who frequents the diner where she works, telling her that he has drawn her portrait, that he wants to show her. Her insides churn, feeling invaded, "he'd no right to draw me without my permission, to take from me like that." This lady, who has already had so much taken from her.
He insists on coming over, and she flees to her neighbor's, where their colicky baby is hurling fits. She encourages the bedraggled mother to take a break, have a shower while the narrator does what she can to soothe the baby. She coos and hums into its soft smell, its harsh shrills, and this line--holy damn this line breaks me--"His large, bald head pushed and rooted at my prosthetic bra and his greedy grunts turned frantic. I had only my baby finger to offer. The force of his suck hurt and frightened me, could rip my finger right off."
The baby quiets, the mother returns refreshed, and she reluctantly goes back to her home, where Jason is waiting on the doorstep. She invites him inside where he shows her his drawing, and she says, "It's not me." In the final lines, which I don't want to reveal verbatim here and lessen the sparse, cool wonder of them for those who've yet to read them, she bares herself to him, and he marvels and marvels with his pencil.
It's this same marveling I feel when I consider the female body. And it's not in a sexual way that I marvel, but simply wondering at the whole human mystery of us. Sometimes when I'm around babies, I make the joke, "Babies are weird, man. They're like little humans." It gets a laugh. But really, there's a lot of truth under the humor. Babies amaze me. Humans amaze me. Bodies amazes me, the way they bend and fold and wrinkle, the way they tear and mend and heal.
It's this amazement I see throughout "Gone," how the narrator marvels at herself in the mirror, at the force of the baby's hunger, the mother marveling at the narrator's ability to quiet the baby, at Jason's initial artistic rendering of the narrator, and the final wonder in the pencil, dancing and dancing.
