Honeydew: Stories Part 7

"Ah, worse. Thorns were applied. And only palm oil for the mending. She will take the same bus..."

Thorns and palm oil and two fullback matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl's shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart. Horrifying tales; Gabrielle knew plenty of them. But would this Minata touch the heart like Selene? I am happy to be in this town G.o.dolphin, in this state Ma.s.sachusetts, in this country USA, Selene always concluded with humble sibilance. I am happy to be here this night.

Would the unknown Minata also be happy to be here this night, testifying to the Society Against Female Mutilation, local chapter? Would she walk from podium to chair in a gingerly fas.h.i.+on, remembered thorns p.r.i.c.king her v.u.l.v.a like cloves in a ham?

Gabrielle had first heard Selene three years earlier, at the invitation of a Dutch physician whose significant protruding bosom looked like an outsize wedge of cheese. Gabrielle privately called her Dr. Gouda. Dr. Gouda was staying at Devlin's Hotel, where Gabrielle was concierge extraordinary-Mr. Devlin's own words. Gabrielle said yes to guests whenever she could. She'd said yes to Dr. Gouda. She'd accompanied the solid woman to an empty bas.e.m.e.nt room in a nearby church. After a while twelve people straggled in. Then photographs were shown-there was an old-fas.h.i.+oned projector, and a screen, and slides that stuttered forward on a carousel. A voice issued from the darkness beside the projector-the doctor's accented narration. The slide show-the Follies, Dr. Henry Ellison would later name it-featured terrified twelve-year-olds in a hut. Behind the girls was a shelf of handmade dolls.

The brutality practiced in the photographs-shamefully, it made Gabrielle feel desirable. She was glad that she and her stylist had at last found a rich oxblood shade for her hair; and glad that her hair's silky straightness conformed to her head in such a Parisian way, complementing the Parisian name that her Pittsburgh parents had s.n.a.t.c.hed from the newspaper the day she was born. She knew that at fifty-two she was still pretty, even if her nose was a millimeter too long and there was a gap between a bicuspid and a molar due to extraction; how foolish not to have repaired that, and now it was too late, the teeth on either side had already made halfhearted journeys toward each other. Still, the gap was not disfiguring. And her body was as narrow and supple as a p.u.b.escent boy's. She was five feet tall without her high-heeled shoes, but she was without her high-heeled shoes only in the bath-even her satin bed slippers provided an extra three inches.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt room of the church there was no podium, just a makes.h.i.+ft platform. After the slide show a white-haired gentleman unfolded a card table on the platform and fanned laminated newspaper articles across it. Dr. Gouda then stationed herself in front of the screen now cleansed of enormities. She wore a navy skirt and a pale blouse and she had removed her jacket, idly revealing her commanding bosom. The width of her hips was apparent to all. In ancient China child-buyers sometimes constricted an infant's body so that the lower half far outgrew the upper. Gabrielle had read about it: they used a sort of straitjacket. The children thus warped into human p.a.w.ns often became pets at court.

But the Dutch doctor's shape was nature's doing, not man's. "This is Selene," she said, and surrendered her place to a mahogany woman.

My mother was kind to me, Selene began that night, begins every time, would begin tonight if it weren't for her flu. My mother was kind to me. Yes, she brought me to the hut, as her mother had brought her, as her mother her, on and on backward through time, you understand.

When she bears witness Selene wraps herself in native costume-a colorful ankle-length dress and turban. Her face is long and plain. The thick gla.s.ses, the large teeth with their goofy malocclusion, the raw knuckles-all somehow suggest the initial maiming.

My mother loved me.

The thing was done for my good and for my future husband. This was believed. I believed it too. I was held down, yes, the body fights back, that is its nature, no one scolded me for struggling. But they had to restrain me. My...area was swabbed with something cold and wet. The cutting was swift. Painful. A small curved knife cuts away a portion of your flesh, it could happen by accident in the garden or while preparing food, that tiny slice I mean, though not in that...area. The wound was salved. There was no shame. All the women in the hut had gone through the cutting.

My mother was kind to me. She was kind to me throughout her life. She procured for me a fine husband, one who would not have taken me whole, as someone might say that piano lessons had broadened her marriage opportunities. I was sorry to leave my husband when I took our children and ran away.

"Your experience of intimacy?" Dr. Gouda usually asks from some dark place.

The lids behind the gla.s.ses close, open. "My husband was not at fault."

"And childbirth?"

"I wished myself dead."

The listeners are still.

But I love my children, she continues. I have a new husband, not an entirely accurate statement, Gabrielle would learn; but the fellow was as good as a husband, or as bad. It is the same excruciation with him. He understands. No one asks if he spares her. I think of my mother and I do not scream. But the cutting should stop. I hope you can make it stop. I am happy to be in this country. I am happy to be here tonight.

That first time, the Dutch doctor stood at the table and waited until the silence turned into murmuring. Then she said that regrets were unproductive. The challenge was to save today's victims, tomorrow's. To that end...She went on to speak of the work of the World Health Organization, of a.s.sociations in Europe, of the Society Against Female Mutilation she represented, which hoped to form a chapter tonight here in G.o.dolphin, Ma.s.sachusetts. The noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison would serve on the advisory committee. "And we are looking for more help," said the Dutch doctor tonelessly.

Many attendees signed up, and several took out checkbooks. Two were elderly women who looked alike, as old friends often do. A pale, emaciated college girl clasped and reclasped her hands; perhaps she felt personally threatened by mutilation. There was a thuggish dark fellow. He probably had a taste for p.o.r.n. The man who had unfolded the card table now folded it up again. That handsome ruddy face, that crest of white hair-he must be the noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison.

At last Gabrielle approached the Dutch doctor. "I'd like to sign up," Gabrielle said.

"Of course!"

II.

There was no "Of course" about it. For half a century Gabrielle had avoided Good Causes as if they might defile her. Efficiency and orderliness were what she cared about, and her own lively good looks. She cared about Devlin's Hotel too, a double brownstone on the border of G.o.dolphin and Boston. Mr. Devlin had transformed it into a European-style inn, Gabrielle its concierge extraordinary, Gabrielle with her clever wardrobe and her ability to say two or three sentences in half a dozen languages...Gabrielle was made for the job, Mr. Devlin had sighed, more than once.

Really the job was made for her. It left her time to read, to tend her window boxes, to give an occasional dinner party, to go to an afternoon concert. She lived alone. She wasn't burdened with an automobile-she biked to and from the hotel in all but the worst weather, her confident high heels gripping the pedals, two guiches of hair pointing forward beyond the helmet. She wasn't burdened with family either, unless you counted the half-crippled aunt back in Pittsburgh. The old woman loped along on a single crutch, the filthy adhesive that wrapped its hand bar replaced only on her niece's annual visit.

Until that night in the church bas.e.m.e.nt this game relative had been Gabrielle's only responsibility. And yet now Gabrielle was writing her name on a clipboard and undertaking work on behalf of females unrelated to her, unknown to her, half a planet away.

Something had stirred within her. She supposed that a psychologist would have a name for this feeling. But Gabrielle would as soon discuss emotions with a psychologist as with a veterinarian-in fact, she'd prefer a veterinarian, she thought, biking home with a packet of information in her saddlebag. It was as if the kins.h.i.+p she felt to those pathetic girls was that of mammal to mammal, house pet to feral cat. The jungle creatures had been cruelly treated by other beasts, attacked with needles and knives as sharp as flame; whereas she, a domestic feline, had in her two brief marriages only been left cold. Free of s.e.x at last, she was disburdened of her monthly nuisance too. The loss had been hastened by a gynecologist-not the distinguished Henry Ellison, rather a Jewish woman with unpleasant breath who advised Gabrielle to rid herself of the bag of fibroids beginning to distend her abdomen. The hysterectomy was without complications. And now, flat as a book below her waist, dry as linen between her legs, she felt pity for the Africans' dripping wounds...well, curiosity, at any rate.

III.

Gabrielle's chief responsibility within the new chapter was arranging its semiannual meeting-the visit of Dr. Gouda, the visit of victim Selene. The first thing she did was thank the church for the use of its chilly bas.e.m.e.nt; then, in its stead, she commandeered the function room of the hotel, a small cocoa-colored s.p.a.ce with three elongated windows looking out onto the boulevard. She wheedled a promise of wine and coffee and cheese from Mr. Devlin and convinced him to charge the chapter his lowest rates for the overnight stay of doctor and witness. She did other work too. She and the two elderly women-who were in fact sisters, and hated each other-designed a fund-raising brochure. She helped the emaciated girl, who had volunteered to be a liaison with the local university, withdraw without shame. "Suffering affects me too strongly," the goose said, her hand on her meager chest.

"Of course, dear," said Gabrielle, flas.h.i.+ng her compa.s.sionate smile with its friendly missing tooth.

And she listened to the boring conversation of the man with white hair. He turned out to be not Dr. Henry Ellison, as his dignity suggested, but a retired salesman with time on his hands. He was good for running the Follies, though he sometimes got the slides upside down. And she answered e-mails for Dr. Gouda, who hated the computer, and she wrote letters on behalf of Dr. Henry Ellison.

Henry Ellison was the man who looked like a thug. On closer inspection he was merely unwholesome. He had pockmarked skin, teeth like cubes of cheddar. His children were grown and his wife suffered from some malady. He wasn't on the prowl, though. He seemed to welcome Gabrielle's indifference to romance just as she welcomed his pleasure in quiet evenings and good wine and the sound of his own voice. He liked to answer questions. "Is the Dutch doctor gay?" she asked him one night when they were sorting new slides in her living room.

"Doubt it. She's got a muscular husband and five children." A well-trained surgeon, she could have had a splendid practice in The Hague. Instead she was now running a fistula-repair hospital. She drove a van around the African countryside, performed procedures under primitive conditions, sterilized her own instruments.

Henry held a slide up to the light. "Oh Lord, too graphic. Our folks want terrified damsels. They want stories of eternal dysphoria. This..." He kept looking.

"What is it, Henry?" And she did an eager jig on her high heels.

He didn't relinquish the little square. "It's an excellent photograph of the separation of the l.a.b.i.a with a speculum, a wooden one for heaven's sake-the thing ought to be in a museum." At last he handed the slide to Gabrielle.

What a strange mystery lay between a woman's legs. The skin of thigh and pubis was the same grainy brown as the old instrument, but within the opening all was garnet and ruby. "Yes, too...graphic."

Henry adjusted the carousel on her coffee table. He held another slide to the light.

"What's that, Henry?"

"A trachelectomy...a sort of D and C. I hope they used some a.n.a.lgesic, something more than the leaves from the stinging nettle."

"Why is she sending slides we can't show?"

"She wants to remind us that despite our efforts, despite our money, the practice continues." He switched off the lights. They sat in the dark, and Henry clicked, and the wall above Gabrielle's couch-she had removed her Dufy print-became a screen. Gabrielle and Henry watched unseen hands manipulating visible instruments.

"Surgery is thrilling," he mused. "Do you mind if I smoke? These village witches probably get a kick out of it. You divorce yourself from everything except the task at hand. Your gestures are swift, like a bird's beak plucking a worm. The flesh responds as you expect. Someone else takes care of the mess."

Gabrielle imagined herself collecting blood in a cloche.

Click. "An excellent example of splitting the c.l.i.toral hood. Sometimes they excise the external genitalia, too, and then st.i.tch the v.a.g.i.n.al opening closed. This is known as..."

"Infibulation," supplied Gabrielle, who was growing knowledgeable. She too was enjoying a rare cigarette.

Click. "Here's a procedure not yet legal here." An instrument was attacking something within a v.a.g.i.n.a; there was a glimpse of a pregnant abdomen. "They are destroying the infant's cranium," said Henry.

IV.

With her usual thoroughness Gabrielle went beyond her official chapter a.s.signments. Often on one of her days off, Wednesday or Thursday, she visited Selene in her town, once thriving with factories, now supported, Henry said, by the welfare industry.

There were houses in Pittsburgh too that had been home to factory hands-little brick two-stories, near the river. But there they had been rehabilitated and now belonged to young academic gentry. Here they belonged to the wretched. Here immigrants and their children and a stream of relatives packed themselves into the structures and onto their uneasy porches. The railroad station was a mile away. Gabrielle walked from the train along a broad and miserable street, never wobbling in her high heels though she was always carrying two bulging paper bags. She took a right and a left and fetched up at Selene's shanty. She distributed toys and clothing to the children, and delicacies to Selene-it would have been insulting, she knew, to bring grocery items, and anyway there were food stamps for those. She played with the kids, she talked to Selene, she learned songs, she admired the proverbs that Selene had embroidered on cloth and nailed to the walls. A cow must graze where she is tied. Men fall in order to rise. Some were less explicit, riddles, really. A bird does not fly into the arrow. "A woman does not seek a man," interpreted Selene.

At nine o'clock on those occasions Selene's consort drove Gabrielle to the last train in his pickup truck. He had a spade-shaped face, as if his jaw had been elongated by force. One Wednesday he didn't return to the house in time to drive her-as it turned out, he didn't return at all.

"Stay with me," Selene said with a shrug.

The children were asleep. It had been a mild wet spring, and Gabrielle's raincoat and scarf were hanging on a hook in Selene's bedroom. She took off her little dress and hung it on another hook, and took off her strapped high-heeled shoes that exactly matched the pewter of that dress, and in her silk underwear climbed into Selene's bed. A light blanket was all they needed. They fell asleep back to back. But during the night the weather turned cool. They awoke in each other's arms...or, rather, Gabrielle awoke in Selene's arms, her head between warm b.r.e.a.s.t.s, Selene's fingers caressing her area.

V.

"Minata will take the same bus I take," Selene had said.

Gabrielle met the bus. She had no way to recognize the new witness-so many dark-skinned people were disembarking. Perhaps Selene had told her friend Minata to look for a pet.i.te femme, stylish, nice face. Walking toward Gabrielle was a rare beauty. She wore a chartreuse raincoat made of tiny scales. Long brown hair combed back from a broad brow. Wide eyes above a simple nose. "Ms. Gabrielle?"

"Ms. Minata?"

They shook hands. Short skinny white woman with dyed hair and ridiculous shoes, maybe that's what Selene had said to Minata. Brilliant blackie in a coat of fake lizard, she might have said to Gabrielle. Minata wore golden sandals. Her toenails were golden too. She carried a leather hatbox with bra.s.s fittings. "We take the subway from here, yes?"

"Tonight, a taxi," said Gabrielle. G.o.ddesses don't hang from subway straps. She explained that the Dutch doctor and an American doctor and an American lady in pink would join them for dinner in the hotel. In the cab Minata turned her head toward the city lights. "Have you been to Boston before?" Gabrielle wondered.

"Oh, yes, it's not the moon. It's the Cradle of Liberty. My children learn that in school."

"You have borne children?" Did you wish yourself dead?

"Five."

Gabrielle was quiet during dinner. She was thinking of Selene, her spectacles, her teeth, her martyred air. She was remembering Wednesdays. She was feeling the probe of Selene's strong hand, the fingers then spreading like wings. Her own fingers always fluttered in a hesitant way, fearful of causing pain. Sometimes Selene guided them further inward...Minata too said little, was no doubt conserving her energy for the testimony. Dr. Gouda, just arrived from New York-she was on her stateside fund-raising tour-spoke in low tones to Henry. Doctor talk: the gabble of baboons.

After coffee the little group moved to the function room. There they were greeted by a group smaller than the previous one. "Female-circ.u.mcision fatigue," Henry whispered. She shook her earrings at him. To her relief, a few more chapter members wandered in. Perhaps they wanted to hear about the progress of the fistula hospital and the opening of a new clinic. Perhaps they wanted to see the Follies. Perhaps they wanted to listen to the witness. Perhaps they had nothing else to do.

The evening followed the usual pattern.

Dr. Gouda made some introductory remarks.

The white-haired man showed the slides. Some were new, some were old, none were from the batch that Henry and Gabrielle had judged too gory.

Minata's presentation resembled Selene's, though her voice had no sad lisp but instead a kind of lilt. She talked of the cutting, of the women's belief in its necessity, of the children's bewildered compliance. She provided a few extra details. "My cousin-they left her genitals on a rock. Animals ate them." Gabrielle attended, her high heels hooked around the rung of the folding chair as if around the pedals of her bicycle. Her black crepe knees were raised slightly by this pose; her white satin elbows rested on those knees, her fingers laced under her little French chin.

"It causes immediate pain," sang Minata. "Recovery also is painful." She bowed her head.

"And the sequelae-the aftereffects," urged the accented voice of Dr. Gouda.

Minata raised her head. "Ma'am?"

"You must have suffered further...when touched by your husband," said the doctor in a kinder tone.

The head rose farther. "I have never had a husband."

"When touched by a man..." The voice softer yet.

"I do not usually talk about these things-"

"Of course."

"-to strangers. But you are perhaps like friends. To me, being touched by a man is a happiness. Perhaps the cutting made it more so. I also enjoy amus.e.m.e.nt parks."

"Me too!" from the projector, heartily.

"But childbirth," moaned the barren Gabrielle.

"Oh, one of my sons was a breech: awful. The other four children...pus.h.i.+ng and straining, yes, you know what it's like. Pain? No." The listeners were silent. "It is a matter of...choice," said Minata. "You can choose to like, to not like. 'Wisdom does not live in only one home.'"

Gabrielle's aunt too had been childless. She had lived as a scorned spinster with Gabrielle and her parents, part of the dry severity of the family. In Gabrielle's room there had been a few books, a few records, curtains with embroidered b.u.t.terflies, their wings trapped within the gauzy folds. She thought of this squeezed girlhood, her careless husbands, the restrained Henry. She remembered the slides, the jeweled v.a.g.i.n.a.

What had she chosen? Divorce, self-sufficiency, an enameled piquancy-the phrase remembered from some novel. She had achieved it all, hadn't she. But she felt weak. (Later Henry would tell her that her blood pressure had dropped.) She grew dizzy. (He would tell her that she began helplessly to swoon.) The heels of her shoes clawed the bar of the folding chair. She toppled sideways, her shoes still clinging to life. The chair toppled too, but in a delayed manner, as if only reluctantly following its occupant.

"Usually an ankle breaks from a fall because of the sudden weight that is exerted on it. But in your case it was the twist itself that did the work. You managed to wrench your left fibula right out of its hinge. And break a few other things, like the ankle joint, very important, a gliding joint, supports the tibia, which-"

"My left fistula?" she said, turning toward him from her hospital bed.