She would cower in the corner and he would break bottles of Chanel on the soft surface of her kneecaps. She took me to this place she’d never taken another soul, said she’d never had a beating smell so beautiful. It was the most expensive pain that she had ever known. He would put out Dunhills on her slender wrists, her shrieks dismissed. She sometimes felt the rasp of her thorax up against her mother’s backyard fence.
There are less sharp turns in her anatomy when she dances. It is the waltz of a girl browbeaten. Her hair tied back less tightly and her makeup more nonchalant. Even her whisper is more difficult to pick up but I know she remarks that her breath is more shallow though also more gratified, her steps more content, herself more intact. “Some of us are made this way.”
I could barely make out the words, “That emptiness is gone, and the cavity was so much more harrowing than a few mortal scrapes and bruises. I’m not trying to excuse his antagonism, but I am finally somewhat happy. All of us have handicaps, his no less sufferable that my own.” I had never heard her plead so hard.
She seemed to have done too much living to be the owner of her puerile features. “There is nothing wrong with straddling the fence. There are those who would give anything for a whiff of something as sublime as Chanel No. 5.” And you know, she lifted her chin as she explained the way he would cry with his head on her abdomen and tell her that he’d become his father, his own ribcage still imperfect from a childhood that scared his personality the worst.
I said, “You know, you have the right to get away.”
She counted, “I know, I know, I also have the right to stay.”
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