Exhibit A: a young girl experiences immediate affection following accidental pain. A small naked girl-doll with only one arm and unbrushed hair stands inside a painted Christmas scene made of paper and glue. Shoebox diorama.
When my sister-in-law slammed my fingers in the door, it was the first time an adult comforted my pain without making me feel like a burden for hurting. We were going to a Christmas light display at Thomas Edison’s home in Fort Myers, and I was getting out of the truck behind her, but she closed the door on my nine-year-old fingers. The crunch of those small seconds before she opened the door to release my hand still reminds me how pain is both pressure and release, crush and throb.
This was the first time someone held my hand and kissed it, and it would be the first time I learned how to manipulate pain for affection.
*****
Exhibit B: a young girl witnesses domestic violence. Shards of bloody, broken dinner plates glued to an overdue hospital bill. Mixed media.
It was always the rising noise level that made it clear my father was beating my mother in the kitchen. It would start with an argument over something I never understood because I was six and already trained not to listen too much. I would huddle on the bed I shared with my sister, 7, listening to the argument, waiting to see if the sounds would die down or rise again. Eventually, my oldest sister, 16, or my brother, 17, would have to step in—our mother tried to give as good as she got, but when her angry yelling turned to a cry, a whimper, and a please-stop-please-stop, it was separate them or wait to see if this would be the time he followed through on his promise to kill her.
Affection follows episodes of abuse, a temporary balm applied to the most recent bouquet of bruises. The affection is syrupy, too sweet to be anything other than artificial. My mother wrote in her journal that my father was the love of her life, but was that before or after the fists and fights? I have no memory of him touching her in any way resembling honest love, only anger, only fists and face slaps, only a kiss on her swollen cheek the next morning when she let him back in the house.
*****
Exhibit C: a young woman experiences domestic violence. A wall with fist-shaped holes in the outline of a woman’s body, in the background, the woman chokes her own shadow with one hand and holds a bleeding heart in the other hand. Oil on canvas.
The first time someone attempted to make me carry out my mother’s legacy, I was twenty-two and barely functioning as an adult. My on-again-off-again girlfriend was staying in my new apartment. I had decided we shouldn’t live together after the last breakup, but she needed a place to stay. It was only a matter of days before she was back in my bed again, but then things went wrong in slow motion like always—small transgressions pent up until they became a conversation. The conversation became a heated argument, and the tension stove of our relationship reached its boiling point. For the last four years, she had occupied my life like an inoperable tumor, and yet I loved her, so when she threw me against a wall and took my throat in her hand’s angry grip, it felt like part of me was being pulled out with no anesthesia. I heard please-stop-please-stop, a mother’s cry reverberating off the walls as the hand tightened around my throat.
*****
Exhibit B continued: a young girl seeks love where it doesn’t exist. A small bed floats on rushing water, a small girl clinging to the bed frame, her father is under the bed, not drowning but not helping. Watercolor on cardstock.
My mother didn’t leave my father so much as the family was evicted, and she didn’t tell him where we were going. He would continue to drift in and out of my life for years, a not-father father I told other people (other kids and adults) was “away” on business (always a lie), maybe in jail or rehab (a possibility), or dead (soon enough to be true). He would show up when it was convenient for him: he needed money for booze or a place to store his shitty belongings or park his car for a few days to keep his tag off the roads. I knew what he had done to my mother, but I wanted at least one parent to take an interest in me, so when he would come around, drunk-buzzed and not yet angry, I would try—try to be a good daughter, the daughter someone could love. I even tried to celebrate Father’s Day with him when the other daughters knew better. He showed up late, drunk before he reached the doorstep. He drove the two of us to dinner while I felt the swerve-and-honk-anger of the other cars when he couldn’t stay in his own lane. He yelled at me during dinner, and then we spent the rest of that rainy night at a storage unit where he drank more and tinkered with some project. I had glued my little girl socks into my mother’s high heels so they would stay on my feet because I wanted to look fancy. The rain filled my heels, and the soggy socks came unglued.
*****
Exhibit A continued: a young girl seeks control over her own body. A severed finger sits next to the naked doll from earlier. The finger is real, fleshy, and donated by the artist of the piece. Shoebox diorama.
The night my sister-in-law slammed my fingers in the truck door, the cold air felt like an assault on the throb, so she kissed my hand then told me to keep it inside my pocket to stay warm. I curled and uncurled my already purple fingers from inside the jacket pocket, like a secret button only I could push, my own sensory control to press the ache closer, the tendons and tissue throbbing from their soft hiding place. I played with pain like it was something earned, the badge of how well I could hide something, the brave face my mother taught her daughters. Christmas lights sparkled, children laughed, holiday songs played overhead, and I focused on the pain my body could create because I wanted to be in control of it.
*****
Exhibit C continued: a young woman ponders what her body is for. A naked female body with rubber dildos of all different sizes and colors sprouting from every inch of skin, a chain around her neck, and a bleeding rose in her mouth. Oil on canvas.
The Fairvilla store was a rite of sexual passage for Orlando locals. With its two stories of every possible sex toy and accessory for any kink, it was a mecca for those looking to explore desire or obtain temporary satisfaction. Whips. Studded paddles. Nipple clamps. Standing in the section for sex meant to hurt, a girl there for her first time (18ish, a few years younger than me at the time, still innocent and shocked by everything her boyfriend showed her) exclaimed, “Oh my God, why would you want it to hurt?” a hint of fear masked by her girlish giggle and pout. I wandered off to find my definitely-not-bisexual-or-any-type-of-queer girlfriend in the dildo section. Silly girl, don’t you know love always hurts a little?
*****
Exhibit B continued: a young girl seeks love but finds more violence. A small naked girl-doll sits in a muddy scene, her left leg now missing, so she only has one limb on each side of the body. She holds a small bottle of red liquid between her thighs, and small dollar bills hang from the ceiling. Shoebox diorama.
My family spent a lot of time in storage units. This was just a way of life for poor people in Florida. A storage unit was a place to store belongings when we were evicted, living in a car, sleeping on someone’s couch or floor. It was also a workspace for my father, a barely employed television repairman. He would sit in a storage unit, with an orange electrical cord running to a power outlet around the side of the unit to power his fan and lamp, tinkering with small pieces of metal and hot wire. Mostly, he pretended to work so he could drink in peace. I wanted to watch him work and be near him because I was still the wrong daughter who didn’t know better yet. He was already annoyed, verging on angry after the first few beer cans were crushed and tossed to the pile on the floor. He said if I could catch a twenty-dollar bill before he snatched it away, I could keep it. I caught it because a seven-year-old girl would always be faster than a drunk old man. He grabbed my arm above the elbow, squeezed, twisted, pulling me to his sweaty drunk face, called me “a little bitch just like your bitch mother” before releasing his grip. I fell on rough concrete, the twenty still in my small fist.
*****
Exhibits A, B, and C continued: a young woman confuses physical pain for love, offers her body to anger. Interactive exhibit section with moving pink mouths large enough to walk through as they open and close, a fabric art piece of the woman’s neck where the scar from her lover vibrates visible and then disappears, a wall of shiny white touchable teeth next to a bowl of smaller individual teeth with a sign: TAKE ONE, PUT THE TOOTH IN YOUR MOUTH, ROLL IT AROUND, CHEW THE TOOTH SOFTLY, (you may either spit the borrowed tooth in the disposal bucket at the end of the exhibit, swallow it before leaving the building, or take it home with you outside of your mouth.) In this exhibit, please do touch the artwork. It wants to be touched. Mixed Media, Interactive.
I learned sex was tender and rough, another complication, something done in the dark and denied in the morning—a new way to play with pain. It would happen without warning, sudden and sharp. Her fingernails dug into my thighs, leaving behind red crescent moons, small bruises from her forceful grip. Her teeth bit my neck and shoulder so hard that she would make me bleed. The memories are a fever dream – pressure and release, the unexpected pain inflicted as I reached climax, confusion as I crossed a new threshold of what I was willing to endure, her inability to tell the difference in my crying out. Did I not tell her loud enough to stop? Did I ride out the pain mixed with pleasure willingly, allowing one for the sake of the other? When I asked her why she did these things, she said it was her way of claiming me as hers and that she loved how easy it was to leave marks on my body. The part of me that didn’t like it, the part that questioned why I let her hurt me, rationalized it away—she only hurts me during sex. That isn’t abuse.
My not-girlfriend found other ways to push and pull me in half: denying our relationship in front of our friends, withdrawing affection to make me submit to her will and whims, telling me she couldn’t live without me, and then ignoring me for days. I was sick to my stomach all the time, constantly consumed with her. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or do anything other than win her back an inch at a time, only to be pushed away again. Her words: “I’m not gay, damn it.” Her hands would reach for me at night, a question I knew how to answer. Her justification: “It’s just you. There’s something about you.” Was this her way of saying I was special, or just her blaming me again for this constant dance of desire and denial and the way she manipulated love? Her whisper in my ear: “I’m so in love with you.” In the morning, a new coldness like I had done something wrong the night before. She would push me away: “I only said I’m in love with you because that’s what you want to hear. I’m really not gay.” That same night and the nights that followed, her hands fed the hunger of my body, her mouth beckoned me to its soft heat, and I allowed it to keep happening.
*****
I should have seen it coming long before she tried to choke me. There are always signs, tiny hints of what is waiting to bubble to the surface when fed enough anger. Before they finally hit you for the first time, they hit walls near your head, grab you with enough force to scare you but leave you questioning if it even counts as anything close to real abuse. They learn how to control you through emotional responses before they control your body with force – testing the waters of fear to see how much you are willing to forgive.
We were driving in my car and having an argument about something of so little significance it’s now erased from my memory. Our voices were equally raised against one another in that small, moving space as we went down the highway that night. Something snapped. My girlfriend punched the windshield, the force of her fist so strong that the glass shattered in a spiderweb of cracks on the passenger side. My voice was suddenly small until it was gone, anger replaced with something more complicated. I stood next to her at the ER while the doctor examined her hand, bloody knuckles, a fracture that would heal but no broken bones. I said nothing when she lied about how it happened. I said nothing later when she reached across the bed, pulling me to her body and apologizing for the windshield. I said nothing when she kissed the back of my neck and whispered that she loved me, but I made her so crazy sometimes.
When the windshield was being replaced, and the repairman asked what happened, I didn’t stay quiet, and I didn’t lie—my girlfriend put her fist through it because I made her mad – the echo of every woman (my mother included) who had ever said, it was my fault. I made him angry. We broke up again even though she wouldn’t admit we were even together. To her, it was, my girl won’t sleep with me because I broke her windshield and not the real issue: my girl won’t let me touch her because she’s afraid of my hands. She didn’t understand it would never be about the windshield.
*****
Exhibit B: a young girl lets anger control her, an act she will shame-carry for years. She stands barefoot on black pavement, a police car floating in a river stream flowing behind her. Oil on canvas.
When I ran to tell my mother what my father had done, my skinny arm already had his large hand imprint in the crook above my pale elbow. I forced myself to cry by the time I reached my mother because I knew tears would get a reaction instead of her brushing me off. She called the cops on my father since he had a warrant out for his arrest at the time. I told them what happened, but I added something—a slap to the face. I lied to the cops, my mother, sisters, and, more importantly, my father. I looked right at him after I said he had slapped me so he would know I was the exact thing he had called me—a little bitch. After he was taken away in the back of a police car with his stupid twenty in his pocket, I cried real tears into my pillow that night.
*****
Exhibit A, B, and C continued: a half-furnished apartment; the young doll-girl stands behind the young woman. The girl holds the sharp pointed end of a knife to the back of the adult version of herself. The adult woman has one arm wrapped around her back to hold the young girl’s arm as she steadies the knife from breaking the skin. Oil on canvas.
After putting me in a chokehold against the wall, she tried to apologize as soon as her grip loosened, but please-stop-please-stop played its drumbeat—a warning that I knew how to hear now without mistaking danger for love, pain for a plaything. I grabbed my car keys the second she let go and ran to the front door. Standing on the outside because I knew enough to always give myself an escape exit, I told her to get her shit and get out. I told her if she wasn’t gone in a few hours, I would call the police to remove her. When she texted an avalanche of apologies, I replied once before turning off the phone. When she showed up on my doorstep a few weeks later with her charm turned up to eleven, I told her a goodbye I finally meant and closed the door one last time.
