“But if the rituals aren’t that important,” Katja asked, “then what’s the point of them?”
“How they help you focus your will—your intent. That’s what magic is, you know. It’s having a strong enough sense of self and what’s around you to not only envision it being different but to make it different.”
“You really believe this, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Teresa said. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. You make it sound so logical.”
“That’s because it’s true. Or maybe—” That smile of Teresa’s returned, warming the room again. “—because I’m willing it to be true.”
“So would your ritual work for me?”
“If you believe in it. But you should probably find your own—a set of circumstances that feels right for you.” She paused for a moment, then added, “And you have to know what you’re asking for. My birds are what got me through a lot of bad times. Listening to their conversations and soliloquies let me forget what was happening to me.”
Katja leaned forward. She could see the rush of memories rising in Teresa, could see the pain they brought with them. She wanted to reach out and hold her in a comforting embrace—the same kind of embrace she’d needed so often but rarely got.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice soft.
“I don’t want to remember,” Teresa said. She gave Katja an apologetic look. “It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Katja assured her. “Just because I’m putting you up, doesn’t mean you have to explain yourself to me.”
There was no sunshine in the smile that touched Teresa’s features now. It was more like moonlight playing on wild rosebushes, the cool light glinting on thorns. Memories could impale you just like thorns. Katja knew that all too well.
“But I can’t not remember,” Teresa said. “That’s what so sad. For all the good things in my life, I can’t stop thinking of how much I hurt before the birds came.”
5
I know about pain. I know about loneliness. Talking with Teresa, I realize that these are the first real conversations I’ve had with someone else in years.
I don’t want to make it sound as though I don’t have any friends, that I never talk to anyone—but sometimes it feels like that all the same. I always seem to be standing on the outside of a friendship, of conversations, never really engaged. Even last night, before I found Teresa sleeping in the doorway. I was out with a bunch of people. I was in the middle of any number of conversations and camaraderie. But I still went home alone. I listened to what was going on around me. I smiled some, laughed some, added a sentence here, another there, but it wasn’t really me that was partaking of the company. The real me was one step removed, watching it happen. Like it seems I always am. Everybody I know seems to inhabit one landscape that they all share while I’m the only person standing in the landscape that’s inside of me.
But today it’s different. We’re talking about weird, unlikely things, but I’m there with Teresa. I don’t even know her; there are all sorts of people I’ve known for years, known way better, but not one of them seems to have looked inside me as truly as she does. This alchemy, this magic she’s offering me, is opening a door inside me. It’s making me remember. It’s making me want to fill my head with birds so that I can forget.
That’s the saddest thing, isn’t it? Wanting to forget. Desiring amnesia. I think that’s the only reason some people kill themselves. I know it’s the only reason I’ve ever seriously considered suicide.
Consider the statistics: One out of every five women will be sexually traumatized by the time they reach their twenties. They might be raped, they might be a child preyed upon by a stranger, they might be abused by the very people who are supposed to be looking out for them.
But the thing that statistic doesn’t tell you is how often it can happen to that one woman out of five. How it can happen to her over and over and over again, but on the statistical sheet, she’s still only listed as one woman in five. That makes it sound so random, the event an extraordinary moment of evil when set against the rest of her life, rather than something that she might have faced every day of her childhood.
I’d give anything for a head full of birds. I’d give anything for the noise and clamor of their conversation to drown out the memories when they rise up inside of me.
6
Long after noon came and went the two women still sat across from each other at the kitchen table. If their conversation could have been seen as well as heard, the spill of words that passed between them would have flooded off the table to eddy around their ankles in ever-deepening pools. It would have made for profound, dark water that was only bearable because each of them came to understand that the other truly understood what they had gone through, and sharing the stories of their battered childhoods at least reminded them that they weren’t alone in what they had undergone, even if it didn’t make the burden easier to bear.
The coffee had gone cold in their mugs, but the hands across the table they held to comfort each other were warm, palm to palm. When they finally ran out of words, that contact helped maintain the bond of empathy that had grown up between them.
“I didn’t have birds,” Katja said after a long silence. “All I had was poetry.”
“You wrote poems?”
Katja shook her head. “I became poetry. I inhabited poems. I filled them until their words were all I could hear inside my head.” She tilted her head back and quoted one:
Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main,—
Wail, for the world’s wrong!
“That’s so sad. What’s it called?” Teresa asked.
“ ‘A dirge.’ It’s by Shelley. I always seemed to choose sad poems, but I only ever wanted them for how I’d get so full of words I wouldn’t be able to remember anything else.”
“Birds and words,” Teresa said. Her smile came out again from behind the dark clouds of her memories. “We rhyme.”
7
We wash Teresa’s dress that afternoon. It wasn’t very white anymore—not after her having grubbed about in it on Gracie Street all day and then worn it as a nightgown while she slept in a doorway—but it cleans up better than I think it will. I feel like we’re in a detergent commercial when we take it out of the dryer. The dress seems to glow against my skin as I hand it over to her.
Her something old is a plastic Crackerjack ring that she’s had since she was a kid. Her something new is her sneakers—a little scuffed and worse for the wear this afternoon, but still passably white. Her borrowed is a white leather clasp-purse that her landlady loaned her. Her blue is a small clutch of silk flowers: forget-me-nots tied up with a white ribbon that she plans to wear as a corsage.
All she needs is that missing word.
I don’t have one for her, but I know someone who might. Jilly always likes to talk about things not quite of this world—things seen from the corner of the eye, or brought over from a dream. And whenever she talks about dreams, Sophie Etoile’s name comes up because Jilly insists Sophie’s part faerie and therefore a true dreamer. I don’t know Sophie all that well, certainly not well enough to guess at her genealogy, improbable or not as the case may be. But she does have an otherworldly, Pre-Raphaelite air about her that makes Jilly’s claims seem possible—at least they seem possible considering my present state of mind.
And there’s no one else I can turn to, no one I can think of. I can’t explain this desperation I feel toward Teresa, a kind of mothering/big sister complex. I just have to help her. And while I know that I may not be able to make myself forget, I think I can do it for her. Or at least I want to try.
> So that’s how we find ourselves knocking at the door of Sophie’s studio later that afternoon. When Sophie answers the door, her curly brown hair tied back from her face and her painting smock as spotless as Jilly says it always is, I don’t have to go into a long explanation as to what we’re doing there or why we need this word. I just have to mention that Jilly’s told me that she’s a true dreamer and Sophie gets this smile on her face, like you do when you’re thinking about a mischievous child who’s too endearing to get angry at, and she thinks for a moment, then says a word that at least I’ve never heard before. I turn to Teresa to ask her if it’s what she needs, but she’s already got this beatific look on her face.
“Mmm,” is all she can manage.
I thank Sophie, who’s giving the pair of us a kind of puzzled smile, and lead Teresa back down the narrow stairs of Sophie’s building and out onto the street. I wonder what I’m going to do with Teresa. She looks for all the world as though she’s tripping. But just when I decide to take her home again, her eyes get a little more focused and she takes my hand.
“I have to . . . readjust to all of this,” she says. “But I don’t want to have us just walk out of each others’ lives. Can I come and visit you tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I tell her. I hesitate a moment, then have to ask, “Can you really hear them?”
“Listen,” she says.
She draws my head close to hers until my ear is resting right up against her temple. I swear I hear a bird’s chorus resonating inside her head, conducting through skin and bone, from her mind into my mind.
“I’ll come by in the morning,” she says, and then drifts off down the pavement.
All I can do is watch her go, that birdsong still echoing inside me.
8
Back in my own living room, I sit on the carpet. I can feel a foreign vibe in my apartment, a quivering in the air from Teresa having been there. Everything in the room carries the memory of her, the knowledge of her gaze, how she handled and examined them with her attention. My furniture, the posters and prints on my walls, my knickknacks, all seemed subtly changed, a little stiff from the awareness of her looking at them.
It takes a while for the room to settle down into its familiar habits. The fridge muttering to itself in the kitchen. The pictures in their frames letting out their stomachs and hanging slightly askew once more.
I take down a box of family photos from the hall closet and fan them out on the carpet in front of me. I look at the happy family they depict and try to see hints of the darkness that doesn’t appear in the photos. There are too many smiles—mine, my mother’s, my father’s. I know real life was never the way these pictures pretend it was.
I sit there remembering my father’s face—the last time I saw him. We were in the courtroom, waiting for him to be sentenced. He wouldn’t look at me. My mother wouldn’t look at me. I sat at the table with only a lawyer for support, only a stranger for family. That memory always makes me feel ashamed because even after all he’d done to me, I didn’t feel any triumph. I felt only disloyalty. I felt only that I was the one who’d been bad, that what had happened to me had been my fault. I knew back then it was wrong to feel that way—just as I know now that it is—but I can’t seem to help myself.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the moment’s locked in my brain, just like all those other memories from my childhood that put a lie to the photographs fanned out on the carpet around me. Words aren’t going to blot them out for me today. There aren’t enough poems in the world to do that. And even if I could gather birds into my head, I don’t think they would work for me. But I remember what Teresa told me about rituals and magic.
It’s having a strong enough sense of self and what’s around you to not only envision it being different but to make it different.
I remember the echoing sound of the birds I heard gossiping in her head and I know that I can find peace, too. I just have to believe that I can. I just have to know what it is that I want and concentrate on having it, instead of what I’ve got. I have to find the ritual that’ll make it work for me.
Instinctively, I realize it can’t be too easy. Like Teresa’s dream-word, the spell needs an element to complete it that requires some real effort on my part to attain it. But I know what the rest of the ritual will be—it comes into my head, full-blown, as if I’ve always known it but simply never stopped to access that knowledge before.
I pick up a picture of my father from the carpet and carefully tear his face into four pieces, sticking one piece in each of the front and back pockets of my jeans. I remember something I heard about salt, about it being used to cleanse, and add a handful of it to each pocket. I wrap the fingers of my left hand together with a black ribbon and tie the bow so that it lies across my knuckles. I lick my right forefinger and write my name on the bare skin of my stomach with saliva. Then I let my shirt fall back down to cover the invisible word and leave the apartment, looking for a person who, when asked to name a nineteenth-century poet, will mistakenly put together the given name of one with the surname of another.
From somewhere I hear a sound like Teresa’s birds, singing their approval.
Passing
Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.
—William Wordsworth,
from “The World Is Too Much With Us”
1
The sword lies on the grass beside me, not so much a physical presence as an enchantment. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s too big to be real. I can’t imagine anyone being able to hold it comfortably, little say wield it. Looking at it is like looking through water, as though I’m lying at the bottom of a lake and everything’s slightly in motion, edges blurring. I can see the dark metal of the sword’s pommel and cross guard, the impossible length of the blade itself that seems to swallow the moonlight, the thong wrapped round and round the grip, its leather worn smooth and shiny in places.
I can almost believe it’s alive.
Whenever I study it, time gets swallowed up. I lose snatches of the night, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, time I don’t have to spare. I have to be finished before dawn. With an effort, I pull my gaze away and pick up the shovel once more. Hallowed ground. I don’t know how deep the grave should be. Four feet? Six feet? I’m just going to keep digging until I feel I’ve got it right.
2
Lucy Grey was a columnist and features writer for The Newford Sun, which was how she first found herself involved with the city’s gay community. Her editor, enamored with the most recent upsurge of interest in gay chic and all things androgynous, sent her down to the girl bars on Gracie Street to write an op-ed piece that grew into a Sunday feature. Steadfastly heterosexual in terms of who she’d actually sleep with, Lucy discovered she was gay in spirit, if not in practice. Sick of being harassed by guys, she could relax in the gay clubs, stepping it out and flirting with the other girls on the dance floor and never having to worry about how to go home alone at the end of the night.
Her new girlpals seemed to understand and she didn’t think anybody considered her a tease until one night, sitting in a cubical of a washroom in Neon Sister, she overheard herself being discussed by two women who’d come in to touch up their makeup. They were unaware of her presence.
“I don’t know,” one of them said. “There’s something about her that doesn’t ring true. It’s like after that piece she did in The Sun, now she’s researching a book—looking at us from the inside, but not really one of us.”
“Who, Lucy?” the other said.
Lucy recognized her friend Traci’s voice. It was Traci who befriended her the first night she hit Gracie Street and guided her through the club scene.
“Of course Lucy. She’s all look, but don’t touch.”
“Sounds more to me like you’re miffed because she won’t sleep with you.
“
She doesn’t sleep with anybody.”
“So?”
“So she’s like an emotional tourist, passing through. You know what happens when the straights start hanging out in one of our clubs.”
It becomes a straight club, Lucy thought, having heard it all before. The difference, this time, was that the accusation was being directed at her and she wasn’t so sure that it was unfair. She wasn’t here just because she preferred the company of women, but to avoid men. It wasn’t that she disliked men, but that her intimacy with them never seemed to go beyond the bedroom. She was neither bisexual nor experimenting. She was simply confused and taking refuge in a club scene where she could still have a social life.
“You’re reading way too much into this,” Traci said. “It’s not like she’s seriously coming on to anyone. It’s just innocent flirting—everybody does it.”
“So you don’t want a piece of what she’s got?”
Traci laughed. “I’d set up house with her in a minute.” Sitting in the cubicle, Lucy found herself blushing furiously, especially when Traci added, “Long-term.”
“What you’re setting yourself up for is a broken heart.”
“I don’t think so,” Traci said. “I try to keep everything in perspective. If she just wants to be friends, that’s okay with me. And I kind of like her the way she is: social, but celibate.”
That was a description Lucy embraced wholeheartedly after that night because it seemed to perfectly sum up who she was.
Until she met Nina.
3
It all starts out innocently enough. Nina shows up at the North Star one night, looking just as sweet and lost as Traci said I did the first time she saw me on Gracie Street, trying to work up the nerve to go into one of the clubs. She has her hair cut above her ears like Sadie Benning and she’s wearing combat boots with her black jeans and white T-shirt, but she looks like a femme, and a shy one at that, so I take her under my wing.