The Reckonings Read online

  * * *

  Back in the bedroom, the documentary I was watching before I fell asleep has continued to play. Werner Herzog is leading his camera crew down a ladder into the limestone cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, in the Ardèche region of southern France, where a group of spelunkers has discovered the oldest cave paintings in the world. Herzog and his crew make their way through the cave single file. They are instructed not to touch anything, not even to step off the two-foot-wide metal path. In the last and deepest chamber of the cave, the camera focuses briefly on a hanging stone outcrop, on a triangle etched in black charcoal. It’s supposed to be a female body, the oldest painting ever found.

  Standing in the very back of the farthest, deepest chamber of the cave, the scientist explains that on the other side of the outcrop, the black triangle of the Venus is joined by a second figure, The Sorcerer: a bear-man or mammoth-man who appears to be crossing over the female, consuming her, taking her body for his own.

  “And here we are,” says the scientist, “some thirty thousand years later, with the myth that has endured until our days.” Female and bull. Woman and beast.

  * * *

  I wake up when a hand grabs my nightgown and pulls. My son is climbing into bed next to me, insinuating himself under the covers, laying his head down on my arm. It’s bright outside the window already, and we nearly drift back to sleep before I sit straight up, note the time, and then we are all racing to eat and dress and tumble out the door. We drive too fast to school while my son sings a song he has learned and my daughter talks over him about the lessons she will have today. A talk show plays on the radio: “It’s not so much the attacks on the villages but specifically the abductions of girls that is telling them that they should not be going to school. They say girls are supposed to be married and in the home,” the guest says before I turn off the radio. My daughter stops talking to listen, then says, “Wait. What happened to the girls?”

  I change the subject back to her lessons, to geometry and multiplication and plot maps, to the research she has been doing on the world’s smallest island nation, the Republic of Nauru. As she begins telling me about pandan cake, we pull into the parking lot of her school.

  She likes to walk to her classroom alone, so I hug her at the gate and watch her go. Today she is wearing leopard-print leggings under floral-printed jean shorts with high-tops and black socks pulled up to her knees. She hasn’t brushed her hair in days, and it forms a kind of ratted halo at the back of her head. She tucks one strand of matted hair behind her ear, hikes her backpack over her shoulders, and walks toward her classroom in long, confident strides. She never waves to me, never even looks back.

  My son likes to have his hand held, his backpack removed, to thumb-wrestle and win, and then to give me an elaborate high five with one and a half turns, three kisses, and two hugs before he will allow me to leave him with his most beloved teacher in the classroom. By the time I return to the car, the radio segment is over, so I search on my phone for the video that has apparently surfaced. It is fuzzy, out of focus. A man stands in the center of the frame, a machine gun slung over his shoulder. He is flanked by two armed soldiers, both wearing balaclava, both standing still as stone. There’s an armored vehicle in the background. The man is laughing and scratching his head. Subtitles scroll at the bottom of the screen while news anchors provide commentary: what the Nigerian government is and isn’t doing, the ways the Nigerian military is and isn’t corrupt, the role the US government does and doesn’t play in all of this. The man in the fuzzy video laughs and gestures and scratches his head while he says: “I repeat, I took the girls! And I will sell them off! In this world there is a market for selling girls!”

  * * *

  No one is in the office when I arrive. I unlock the door, turn on the lights, and put on a pot of coffee. I leave the lights off in the room where my desk is so I can see anyone who comes in before that person sees me. It’s one in a set of self-protective habits I have, all of which I do without thinking. There are scissors in a cup near my monitor; I keep them visible and sharp.

  I drink a cup of coffee while reading the news and learn there is some controversy surrounding an upcoming retrospective in Japan of the now-deceased Polish-French painter Balthus. Throughout the many decades of his controversial career, Balthus’s paintings reflected an ongoing, even obsessive infatuation with prepubescent girls. In one painting, the young girl has her eyes closed, her fingers locked above her head; she raises one foot on the stool in front of her, revealing her white underwear. In another, a partially dressed adult woman holds the undressed school girl across her lap, pulling her hair with one hand, strumming her genitals with the other. The child appears nearly catatonic except that with one hand, she reaches up to pinch the adult woman’s right nipple.

  Over three years, the painter made ten portraits of this girl, the adolescent daughter of his neighbor; over his career, he painted dozens of portraits of girls around her age, always in some state of vulnerability and undress. He famously claimed a quality of sacredness for his “angels”—that’s what he called these girls he painted—rejecting all accusations of eroticism as a perversion in the mind of his viewer. In each painting, the girl closes her eyes, or looks away from the painter’s gaze. The violence is insinuated but not explicit. It is art, after all, and art must be, above all other things, beautiful.

  * * *

  I admit: I do not understand what about these paintings is supposed to be beautiful. There is violence here, a brutality that annihilates, that destroys. They give me the same hunted-animal feeling as that painting at the back of the farthest, deepest chamber of the Chauvet cave. The cave was discovered by spelunkers in 1994, when I was sixteen. That same year, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered just inside the front door of her Brentwood home. I remember coming home from my after-school job each day to see a recap of the televised murder trial. The chief suspect was her ex-husband, the former football star and actor OJ Simpson.

  At the time, I knew very little about Nicole Brown Simpson. I learned from the trial that she had been beautiful, a former model, the mother to OJ’s two young children. She had been crowned homecoming queen by her high school football team, had met OJ when she was a girl herself, barely eighteen and just out of high school, working as a waitress in Beverly Hills. After they married, she was a dutiful mother, her friends told reporters, waiting for her children in the car pool lane, shuttling her son to karate and her daughter to dance. “You beat the holy hell out of me & we lied at the X-ray lab & said I fell off a bike,” she wrote in a letter to OJ before their divorce.

  Photographs from the crime scene appeared on the cover of nearly every tabloid at the supermarket where I worked: photos of the bloody footprints on the floorboards of the white Bronco OJ had driven through Los Angeles in a low-speed chase. Photos of Nicole Brown Simpson’s bloody legs sprawled across the sidewalk. The men in my checkout line would gaze—blankly? longingly?—at these photographs while they waited for one another to pay. As one walked out the door, the next approached and turned his gaze to me.

  According to the prosecutors’ version of events, the murderer knocked Nicole Brown Simpson unconscious, placed his foot on her back, pulled her head up by her hair, and slit her throat, a wound so deep that her severed larynx could be seen through the opening. I remember the day OJ tried on the leather glove found at the murder scene, how he stood from his seat behind the wooden table and tried to pull the leather glove over a white latex glove he wore to protect the evidence. He smirked when he realized it couldn’t be done. I remember how he held his partially gloved hand up for the jury, the cameras. See? See?

  * * *

  My students don’t see the brutal connection between the Balthus and the Venus painting in the Chauvet cave. I have gotten off topic. Today we are talking about the evolution of feminist art in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly about the history of women painting naked, dancing naked, fighting naked men, rolling on the f
loor naked covered in raw meat. I am showing clips of Marina Abramović’s early performance work; in this video, she is smashing her naked body into the gallery walls. It is upsetting one of my male students. “How is this not pornography?” he asks. He’s almost had it with this class, and especially with me, with the “weird sex art” I keep showing them, the “uncomfortable conversations” I keep asking them to have.

  “It’s rage,” I tell my student. “Or perhaps the symptom of it.” He’s unconvinced, just as frustrated by Expansion in Space as he is by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which she allows audience members to use a pair of scissors to cut away her clothing. A recording of one performance in 1965 begins with women from the audience climbing onto the stage to snip a portion of Ono’s sleeve, a button, a square inch of her collar. They are not practiced in reducing one another in this way. Soon men also join in, one at a time, and cut off long strips of her skirt, her sweater; one cuts off a whole sleeve, and another in the audience cheers him on. One cuts off the front of her sweater, exposing the slip she wears underneath; he is applauded by other men. Throughout all of this, Ono’s face is expressionless, and remains expressionless until a man cuts her slip along the line of her cleavage, revealing her bra, and goes on cutting. She moves her hand slightly to cover her body, an instinct toward modesty. He cuts her bra straps, and she moves her hands up to keep herself covered. He is still cutting when the recording stops.

  I watch this performance now, fifty years later, and I can’t help grinding my teeth. Here is the lesson all women must learn beginning in girlhood: how to accept the brutality others are willing to commit. Girls are taught that to show anger, to yell, or to fight back is “unladylike.” To curse or shout is to be “vulgar,” and unattractive and undesirable; and if we are undesirable, we have no value or worth. At all times every day, we are saturated with an ideal of the woman we are all supposed to become: a woman who is soft and pliable, who is round and supple, who is easily overcome, is penetrable, vulnerable—someone who is small and powerless and weak. Each day we see this ideal projected at us from movies; it is sold to us on billboards and in magazines; it arrives as fact each day in the headlines and is reinforced by the mythology of our most ancient art.

  There is nothing more sacred in our culture than precisely this: that a woman’s body belongs more easily to any man than it does to herself; that every man is allowed to be not only a full and complete person but also, whenever he wants, a total beast.

  My student doesn’t like Cut Piece, and he doesn’t like Marina Abramović either: how she yells and curses naked, fights her male collaborator naked, and dances naked to the point of exhaustion, to the point where her nudity doesn’t even seem like nudity anymore.

  “Why do they always have to be naked?” my male student wants to know.

  I ask whether he has this same objection to any of the many traditions of European art by men for other men that take the nude female form as their primary subject. “Think, for example, of The Birth of Venus,” I say. The nude goddess emerges from the ocean, freshly born and fully mature, covering her body with her hands. Or the Sleeping Venus, in which the nude goddess reclines on a pile of blankets on a hillside, one hand behind her head, the other covering her genitalia. Or the Venus of Urbino, which depicts a naked woman reclining coyly on an ornate couch, one hand curling inside herself, the other around a cluster of flowers. She looks directly at the viewer, meets his gaze with what we are to understand is a blush of shame or desire. Or both, in turns.

  “The artists we are talking about today intervene in the myth of that tradition,” I tell my student. He shakes his head. “I just don’t get it,” he says.

  He is being intentionally difficult, I think, because he has been allowed, all his life, to be however he wants. It isn’t that he is scandalized by what he sees but by what he refuses to. Earlier this semester, after one of our first classes, he approached me and asked whether I would be interested in “hanging out.” Whatever possessed him to proposition me—his professor, a woman nearly old enough to be his mother—it wasn’t any idea he has of the woman I am, but his idea of the person, as a woman, I could not possibly be.

  * * *

  I tune into the radio show while I am driving to my children’s school and hear the guests agree that there likely won’t be justice for the girls. Boko Haram has split them—the nearly three hundred of them—into dozens of groups of maybe five or six. One suggests that many of the girls, if not all of them, have now been smuggled across the border from Nigeria into Cameroon, Chad, or even farther. Another video has apparently surfaced in which the girls recite the first chapter of the Quran. They are dressed head to toe in gray and black veils, eyes down, palms up, their lips barely moving. The leader of Boko Haram is joyous and exultant: “These girls you occupy yourselves with . . . we have already liberated them!”

  Boko Haram might use the girls as ransom, the guests say, asking for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in exchange for the girls’ return, and if anyone pays it, chances are they will use the money to kidnap more girls, whom they will also ransom. Meanwhile, the kidnapped schoolgirls serve Boko Haram as human shields, preventing the Nigerian Air Force from attacking Boko Haram camps.

  The guests on the cable news show agree that as days turn to weeks, which turn to months, and then into years perhaps, the greater the likelihood is that the girls will be used as a form of twisted compensation for new recruits. The leader of Boko Haram has threatened to sell them into marriage “in the market.” The guests do not say, but we all know, that a time will come for that final brutality: when we cease to refer to them as girls.

  * * *

  My son runs into my arms as soon as I turn the corner and his embrace nearly knocks me down. I gather his lunch box, and school supplies, and the worksheets he has completed and stuff them into his backpack. The two of us walk hand in hand across the playground in search of my daughter, who likes to hug me only after we are out of sight of all of her friends. She has had an “interesting” day at school, she says.

  On the way home, she wants to know what sex is. It’s not the first time she has asked. She’s in a mixed-age classroom, and her older friends have begun to develop breasts and body odor, moving toward a border she hasn’t fathomed yet. I try to deflect the question. I say, “We talked about that the other day, remember? Dad and I said that sex is a way we describe our bodies.” She says that isn’t what the older boys in her class say. I want to know what these boys say. She looks out the window, furrows her brow, and says, “Something else.”

  * * *

  I hear the dog barking even before I open the door. He is barking and barking up to the moment the door is open, and then his tail is wagging, and he is so relieved that he rubs his muzzle over every inch of my legs, and all over my children’s faces and in their armpits as they drop their backpacks by the door.

  While my son gets a snack from the kitchen, my daughter goes into her room to play with her dolls. She sits on the floor with her long legs folded under her while she changes their shoes and brushes their hair and moves them through a tiny beautiful house. In the tiny kitchen, the dolls decide what kind of tiny cake to eat. In the tiny bathroom, they apply makeup and look in the tiny mirror. This is how it begins, I think, playing along at the game of being beautiful, captive, small.

  I read the mail and water the plants in the garden and put the children’s dirty lunch kits in the dishwasher while my son crawls between my legs taking bites of his food and growling like an animal. There’s a torn piece of construction paper folded at the bottom of his backpack. Inside is a crude sort of drawing: a wide cloud of black scribbles next to a stick figure that looks vaguely like a dog, or maybe a small bear. He says, “It’s you and me, Mommy,” his smiling mouth full of apple and string cheese.

  Female and bull. Woman and beast. That myth I am supposed to believe haunts my past, and present, and also my future—a threat, or maybe a promise, that is fulfilled in a
ll our days. What kind of man does this myth ask my son to become?

  My daughter cries out, “Help!” and I rush to her room, to find that only the dolls are in danger. She has tied the tiny beautiful feet together with rubber bands, the tiny beautiful hands with long pieces of ribbon. She has put all the tiny beautiful dolls together into a box and placed it on a very high shelf.

  They call out with my daughter’s voice: “Help! Help!”

  * * *

  At night, the dog shuffles with me toward the back of the house where my son sleeps soundly in his room, one hand around his blanket, the other under his cheek. My daughter hears me passing her doorway and asks for a glass of water with ice in it. When I hand her the green plastic cup, she asks what a terrorist is, a word I am at first surprised to learn she has heard. “A person who does terrible things to make other people feel afraid,” I say.

  “So he’s a bad guy,” she says with her mouth to the rim of the green plastic cup.

  “Yes,” I say, thinking it is better, just now, to keep things simple. “A terrorist is a bad guy.”