by Linda Heller
Carla remembers the time when she was four years old, and the force of her mother’s words pitted her cheeks. She tried to ignore the pain as she readied herself for the perilous time when she too would be a wife and a mother. She did this by carefully moving raw lima beans from one bowl to the next and back again. Her mother’s rage was relentless. If she ran, she would catch her and so she stayed where she was, crouched in the kitchen with her hard little beans and her large yellow bowls and tried to remember the terrible thing she’d done that prevented her and her parents from ever being happy.
She’s seventy-eight now, a tough number to swallow and one that means she was born at a time when men were expected to dictate how a woman lived. During her girlhood, husbands sat at the head of the table and if they were as successful in business as her father was, they claimed this exalted position throughout their day.
When Carla’s first grade teacher asked the class to draw their families. Carla drew a little girl who only had eyes. The mother’s lips were sewn shut and the father stood off to the side to allow room for the bolts of lightning that sprung from his head.
Her father hadn’t been born angry. His outbursts were the result of being dragged out of school at fourteen and made to support his family after his own father, for all intents and purposes, had cannonballed into the void. Hampered by a stunted education, forced to work in a junk yard, tramp through rotting trash in summer, brutal cold in winter, he’d kept himself as sane as he could, eighty percent sane early on, seventy percent later, sixty percent, if that, during his late teens, by plotting how to eventually call the shots.
At twenty-five he bought the junk yard for half its value and turned it into a business that successfully reprocessed metal scraps. He’d made a name for himself but before he allowed himself to think of anything beyond increasing his already enviable profits, his mother, a brassy, brick of woman, forced her way past his secretary, dragged a chair next to his and sobbed.
“I’m crying over Aaron,” she said with the same aggressive whine that had ruptured her marriage. “He's a beautiful being with the soul of an angel, not a machine gun like you. You could have done a lot better by us. You gave with closed fists. Here’s your chance to make things right. Send him to medical school.”
A bomb detonated inside his chest. “You have one hell of a nerve,” he shouted and reached for a sample block of steel to crush her skull, but his was the kind of mind that was always two steps ahead. He saw the shattered bone, the slivers of brain, the handcuffs, the jail time. “God damn you,” he said, and wrote a sizable check. She kissed it and tucked it into her bra. On the way out, in lieu of a thank you, she gave him one of her sly, come-hither looks.
And Carla’s mother? When her allowance ran out and she had to ask for more money she stood on tippy toes to reach her towering husband. Her request was denied, and she’d flee to the loveseat where she’d sob like a child.
Carla blocked out her parents’ skirmishes by constructing doll houses deliberately left empty to guarantee peace. At eighteen, adept at painting scenes to escape into, she enrolled at an art school three states away.
Students at party schools marked time until the weekend when cashmere-clad girls sprawled on sofas, drunk and vibrating with hope, while beer-guzzling frat boys played rock, paper, scissors to decide who’d pounce on whom.
At her school, such behavior was abhorrent. Art was the highest calling, and her teachers stressed the importance of sacrifice. A true artist cut off his feet to stop himself from chasing after fame and fortune. He bought paint rather than food, and if his hand froze while he rendered an icy landscape, he ignored the risk of frostbite and tied the brush to his arm. Jesus preached love. Art was a deity that insisted the worshiper cut out his heart and place it on the altar he’d embellished with what was left of his blood.
Carla found these speeches absurd. Her teachers were salaried. They lived in nice enough houses and drove nice enough cars. If none had yet managed to hit the big time in Manhattan, they consoled themselves with group shows in lesser cities.
Raised to submit to male authority, she didn’t accuse them of hypocrisy, or complain when they played favorites, their favorites being boys who, freed from their parents’ restrictions, had grown beards, wore the same jeans well past the time they stiffened and stank, and roared around town on second-hand motorcycles until a leg-crushing fall crippled them. These boys earned A’s while girls with long hair and full lips received slightly lower grades if their ambitions led them in their calculated, youthful splendor to bed down with professors. Carla, who’d arrived like a dress-up doll with a huge trunkful of clothes, was presumed to be shallow.
A teacher called her efforts pretty, pretty being the worst insult he could think of. Another, an alcoholic with a red, pitted face, ordered her to hurl herself down the stairs to toughen herself up. A third said she lacked guts. She consoled herself with the thought that her use of buttery colors to compose scenes stripped of inhabitants but filled with Rococo furniture were too refined for their taste.
An assignment dealt with ancient myths. Students were to familiarize themselves with Greco-Roman paintings and bring them into the modern era. Carla chose the story of Leda and the Swan, with Leda as a sweet if gaunt teenager curled on a tufted couch. The swan dreamily perched on her hip. Its long neck circled her arm several times like an extravagant bracelet.
Her teacher winced when he saw it. “My God, for the first time in Western history, Leda’s a kid hugging a stuffed animal. Where’s the rape, the lust, the bestiality? How old are you? I doubt that you’re twelve.”
Possibly because she was premenstrual, her teacher’s critique broke through her defenses. She’d considered herself a cynical observer. Now she realized she was regressed and obtuse.
That night she propped several blank canvases against the wall and moving from one to the next, hot with embarrassment, she painted scenes of faceless men traipsing over the nude, ravaged bodies of women. Her teacher praised her effort. Classmates applauded her breakthrough. But the images struck a disturbing chord in her psyche. When she blinked, she saw a small child oozing dark, clotted blood. Upended by her unexplained grief, she hurled the paintings into a dumpster, and crept back to Candyland.
She would have stayed at school for the rest of her life, immersed in her efforts to elevate her work. Yet ready or not, she thought not, and would have taken her case to court if reluctance was a winning defense, on a warm June morning in 1966 she received her diploma and as though the dean was a wizard and had cursed her, she instantaneously, permanently, regretfully became an adult thrust into a world which revolved around money rather than dreams.
“Your free ride is over,” her father said on the drive home.
The tangible results of her four years at college were jammed in the trunk. The overspill took up most of the backseat. Her mother sat pinned between these boxes. As for the sky above the dorm, the walks along the river, the classes, the friendships? She felt as though she’d been savagely torn from the things she loved and forced to leave before her wound was stitched.
“I succeeded with an eighth-grade education. But I was a fighter with an ersatz championship belt around my waist. You wanted a worthless degree. I allowed it. Now find something that pays.”
Carla had hoped he’d support her until her paintings sold but she knew not to petition a pressure cooker with a very loose lid. “OK,” she said.
She’d grown up tagging after her mother while she chased the fantasy that jammed between misguided items on a sale rack, she’d find a strikingly beautiful dress or coat or suit that would transform her into the woman her husband wanted. While she waited for her mother to give up the hunt, Carla would finger the beading on the evening gowns and open the elaborate frames on alligator handbags that had been dyed to add oomph to the beasts’ original shade. In this casual way, she learned about fashion.
She saw a want ad for a handbag designer. Based on a ten-minute interview, half of which he spent on the phone with his back to her, she was hired by the first man to copy Italian handbags in Asia for a quarter of the cost. This brainstorm coupled with his readiness to do anything to get what he wanted apart from … he’d yet to draw that line, had made Ezra Shirazi a millionaire.
He was shorter than she was with a comic book character’s round, oversized head. He hunched his shoulders against his enemies and clothed his too small for liking body in bespoke Italian suits. On her first day of work, he took her into the showroom and displayed his wares on the floor in the way that her mother had once, in a fleeting moment of happiness, spread her mink coat on the carpet to show off the pelts.
His last name had inspired him to call the company RazzleDazi. “There’s no RazzleDazi without me,” he said, his words emerging in nasal bursts. I’m the Prime Mover, the four-star general who leads the attack. I expect you to stay at my heel. Give me styles that fly off the counter. If they don’t, you’re out.”
The cleaning woman failed to meet his standards. He interrupted a sales meeting to hurl a metal wastebasket at her head. He was a poor athlete, another thing he despised about himself, and the weapon fell short of its target. Carla had witnessed her father behave the same way.
She and he boarded a jet for the twenty-four-hour slog to Hong Kong. As demanded of women in 1966, she wore a dress, high heels, and stockings, and sat the way she’d been taught to, with her back straight and her knees pressed together.
“When we land,” her boss said, as they fastened their seatbelts, “get ready to be the first people off. I don’t wait. Understand?”
She panicked as Manhattan disappeared below the clouds. She’d caved in too quickly. Art was her reason for living, the thing she loved most. She’d forego food and live in a closet. This, her first business trip under the rule of a crude despot, was scheduled to last for seven weeks. “I can’t do it,” she thought. Yet, if she obeyed her impulse to quit on the spot, she’d become free-falling ice.
His travel agent had arranged for her to have a window seat. Her boss had the aisle seat. The space between them was empty. “I want to stretch out. Sit somewhere else,” he said.
“What?”
“Sit somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Just go.”
The Prime Mover slash four-star general slash importer of knockoffs, lay in a fetal position across the three seats, warmed by the airline’s synthetic blanket, his head on the airline’s facsimile of a pillow, complimentary eyeshades blocking the light.
Demoted to the status of a stray dog, she wandered up and down the aisles as the plane crossed New York State and sped west over Canada. Passengers glared as she came toward them. At midnight, the flight attendants in keeping with the rapidly changing time zones passed out chunks of scrambled eggs. Her boss signaled to her. She climbed over his legs and stared out at a sky as dark as her apprehensions.
Under the British rule, Hong Kong consisted of the island of Hong Kong and a larger, poorer area on the mainland known as Kowloon. Hemmed in by Communist China and the South China Sea, overcrowded to begin with, it had recently been further put upon by eighty thousand starving refugees who’d left Mainland China on foot.
Carla knew none of this. She did know that the plane was descending smack in the middle of a squalid city. The abbreviated runway jutted into the water.
Her mother would blame her father, the weight of her grief squashing her inhibitions, their sham of a marriage dying the way she had, from a fast fall into infinite nothingness.
But the pilot skirted the skyscrapers and applied the brakes at the proper moment, thus preventing worldwide headlines about massive drownings and the costly loss of a carrier.
Her boss rushed her through customs and into a taxi. She blinked with fatigue as they rode past three-sided buildings blackened with mildew. Heavily made-up women loitered in doorways.
For a list of reasons, Carla knew only part of them then, and blamed her mother for trembling with fear when Carla had gone on dates in high school, and her father for generally being a hot-headed, insensitive brute, she’d been too skittish in college to keep a boyfriend. Yet here she was in a place where it was as easy to buy sex as it was to rip open a pack of cigarettes. When she ate in the hotel coffee shop in her miniskirt and turquoise tights a la Carnaby Street, a requirement for a fashion designer, even of cheap copies, men put their room keys next to her plate or slipped them into her pocket in the elevator, as though she was the equivalent of a mechanical horse that would rock them after they inserted a quarter. Too flummoxed to speak, she froze until the men moved on.
Her boss’s influx of money elevated his status to that of a visiting dignitary, a position that entitled him to be driven around town in a car that had little glass bud vases affixed to the windshield. This made their rides doubly haunting for Carla when beyond the closed windows she saw legless beggars and deliverymen yoked like oxen.
She and her boss went to a factory where toddlers, red-nosed and coughing, camped at the seamstresses’ feet. The women and their children wore pajamas as if they’d been wrenched from their beds, dragged to the factory, and forced into round-the-clock servitude. The women stared as Carla slipped off her 14 karat gold earrings, witty little mobiles she’d bought on Fifth Avenue, and hid them in her pocket.
And if she mentioned her grandfather’s desertion, described her parents’ appalling marriage, repeated her teachers’ insults, listed the ways her boss humiliated her, would they still want to switch places? Of course, they would. She’d done nothing to be spared their lives and everyone knew it.
Her boss’s childhood friends, the boys as he called them, lived in a tight little Brooklyn community. They’d goofed their way through high school and now imported sheets, towels, cutlery and whatever else was cheap. When they were in Hong Kong, they stayed at the same hotel and palled around with the bawdiness of lifers who’d just escaped prison.
One night he gathered a bunch of these friends and asked Carla to join them. A launch waited. “I’m doing this for you,” he said. “Taking you to the see the local culture.”
They set off from the Kowloon side, sailing between ferries draped in lights. Carla was charmed by the sight of this seemingly vast, bobbing party.
They reached a cluster of half-open boats. Middle-aged women with blank eyes sat on soiled mattresses. Their robes were open, exposing their overused bodies. None reacted as the launch puttered toward them.
“Presenting Hong Kong’s floating prostitutes,” her boss said.
One of his friends shouted to the women that they wanted a group discount.
The women mechanically stroked their breasts.
“Bang them? Are you kidding?” her boss said. “I’ve had enough of this zoo. Let’s go eat.”
Carla wanted to push the men overboard, rescue the women and revive the parts of them that had chosen death over shame, but the most she could do was to turn toward the women, and whisper, “I’m sorry.”
The oldest of her boss’s friends had a bulbous nose, a clown’s world-weary expression and as though he purposely adhered to this circus motif, a clown’s fringe of hair.
He phoned Carla from a higher floor in the hotel. “I need your trained eye. Come up to my room.”
“OK,” she thought, anxious to be an artist again.
He was eating an orange. He licked the juice off his fingers and asked what she thought of the tee shirts he’d spread across the bed, each decorated with a jokester’s map of Atlantic City--a boardwalk as wavy as a rollercoaster, grinning saltwater taffy, off-kilter hotels.
“What’s the best background? Green, hot pink or red?”
“Does it matter?” She fought back her tears.
“Of course, it does. I don’t deal in schlock.”
He ate more of his fruit.
“I’m sorry about what I said. I like the hot pink. It’s a happy color. What other colors are happy?” She couldn’t remember.
He sank to his knees. Oblivious of her shock and disgust, he pawed her legs with his sticky hands. She broke free and ran from the room.
Her boss hoped to hire a certain buyer who worked for a conglomerate of discount stores. Since this man placed large orders, her boss assumed he instinctively, conclusively knew what would sell.
Carla was in the lobby when they left the hotel’s restaurant. Her boss rushed off.
“May I?” the buyer asked. He sat next to her on the couch, a Midwesterner with a milk and cereal wholesomeness she rarely saw. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how can you work for that jerk? I was curious about his offer, but that’s all. The industry hates him. Is he different with you?”
She shrugged, unwilling to say that her odious boss with his attaché case filled with various currencies fit her description of a successful man. Or worse, that he’d triggered something vague from her past which, against all reason, made her care for him.
Five weeks into the trip her boss began to miss his family to the point where he stopped cheating on his wife and lay on the floor of his suite’s living room, while Carla, as part of her job, listened to him complain.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be away for so long, how much it hurts.”
A French bestseller had recently been translated into English and reprinted in Hong Kong without observing the copyright laws. He gave Carla the additional task of reading it to him.
Titled A Lover’s Awakening, it told the story of a model who at the behest of the sadist she adored, was trained in the art of submission by his masked associates.
“Oh Master, Lord of Desire, allow the scent of my pain to enter your nostrils.”
The book was preposterous. And still it sparked him.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“You know.” He tilted his head toward the bedroom.
“What are you saying?”
He, who’d never treated her as anything but a work necessity, a pencil or sheath of paper, jogged into the bedroom all lightness and fun. He lay under the covers.
She stood in the doorway, paralyzed. He glanced at his gold watch. He bought a new one each week, tax free, at a discount. It was something to do on a Sunday. “I’m waiting.”
She took off her clothes as though there was a gun to her head or some other equally inescapable impetus that had nothing to do with love or attraction or even a cash payment. She climbed onto the first man to see her naked, appalled that she’d robotically obeyed someone who treated her badly.
Despite the circumstance, the cast of characters, she hoped, as though she’d stepped into a fairy tale which in their case could only be about an aging red riding hood and a thieving wolf, that the act would be tender and revelatory. Instead, he raced through it, put on his pants, and went to his desk. “I need more sketches of clutch bags. Good ones. You need to do better. Tomorrow at breakfast, give me things I haven’t seen.”
She should have quit that night or after they landed at JFK, or even better, on her first day of work when he’d said he’d fire her without a warning, but her heart insisted on preserving the bind it was in.
He hired a comptroller, a balding man with a big stomach and penchant for wearing Hawaiian shirts. He’d close the door to his office and insist she kiss him before he surrendered her paycheck. She did what he asked. The air in the office and outside it reeked of exploitation. Those with power pressed it to their breasts, guarding it, loving it above all else. Men ruled women. The haves grinded the life out of the have nots.
It took her father eleven years to buy the junk yard. His brother Aaron became a pediatric surgeon seven years after he entered medical school. Two years later he narrowed his specialty to babies born with conflicting genitalia. When questioned about the wisdom of these surgeries, he said repositioning a clitoris or forming a penis, eliminated the catastrophic shame that would have ruined the child’s life. Shame, he insisted, was far more destructive than the infinitesimally small possibility of a mistaken gender assignment. Asked if he had children, he answered, “Not yet,” without mentioning the fact that he’d just bought a house in Neponset with a wing for him and another for his mother.
Carla beat her father and uncle in the race to achieve professional satisfaction. Eight years after she’d started at RazzleDazi, her thoughts continuously riveted to her goal, she’d saved enough money to buy a small place in the Catskills and spend her time painting. She shelved her old, barely remembered ideas, and painted landscapes en plein air. Opposed on principle to anything finicky, her new work was gesture driven and composed of bright vertical lines meant to be trees.
Properties had to be a minimum of twelve acres. Carla had a single neighbor who lived at the top of the road in a dwelling so plain, with such a simple peaked roof that he joked he’d snatched his little green house from a monopoly board. An engineer by trade, he also wrote poems and slipped them under Carla’s door.
“Untethered,
I jammed my feet into the ground.
With feigned bravery
I raised my arms.
My fingers forked like branches.
Aching to bud.”
He was thin boned, thin haired, his barely visible lips seemed drawn with a fine point pen. After several divorces, he’d also pared down his character until all that remained was a gentle, easy-going spirit.
Coyotes crossed her grounds at night. He volunteered to sleep in her spare room until she got used to their activity. A few weeks of having breakfast together, her heartbeats slowing to match his, his comments on the news initiating a string of enjoyable conversations, and she invited him into her bed. His lovemaking was tender and if she couldn’t relax and would have preferred to skip sex altogether, men craved it, and women gave in.
He always asked what she wanted to eat, wanted to do, wanted to go, and still she lobbed his questions back at him with the speed of a ball machine. “What do you want to eat, do, go?” she’d say, strangled by her ingrained compulsion to submit.
The Women’s Lib Movement roared into town. She went to a consciousness raising session held at a bookstore. The moderator, a big woman with pendulous breasts that hung free under her shirt, stood in front of the crowd.
“From the time of our birth, we were brainwashed by mothers who themselves were brainwashed, and by fathers who refused to relinquish control. Like Eve, we were told we were created to be man’s helpmate and put his needs before ours. Who in the audience finds it hard to speak up? Who buries her wishes to maintain the peace? Who’s been demeaned or physically harmed?” Hands shot up to be counted.
As Carla listened and realized she wasn’t inherently a good little girl who had to tie herself to the railroad tracks to make it easier for men to run over her, decades of buried, searing, ungovernable rage surfaced. She felt murderous, capable of using a gun to shoot indiscriminately. Afraid of what she might do, she ran from the meeting and raced home to end it with her neighbor, live a life of isolation and escape into her work.
A poem arrived in the mail.
“In this the activist winter of 1972,
I wrote on a placard,
‘Teach dogs to enunciate.
Slow the sun’s arc.
Eliminate parting glances.
Connect neighbors at the wrist by a sinew,
That coils like a telephone cord.’
Too private to publicize my demands.
I folded the sign into a puptent and crawled in.
Stop by.
Bring glue.
My heart is in pieces.”
She ignored his note.
Her mother died. Her father, wild to experience the gratification that had always eluded him, dated women half his age and suffered a fatal heart attack in one of their beds. Carla skipped his funeral but accepted her inheritance as restitution for all he’d withheld.
She added houses to her landscapes, dark lurking presences set back behind branchless trees. Without knowing why, she stopped giving the houses doors and added bloated worms that crawled out from beneath the foundations. This work upset her as much as her college paintings of faceless men and ravaged women had, still she adhered to the theme.
Her uncle died. His obituary made the front page of the Times. A photograph showed him standing next to the bronze bust of his likeness that had been installed in the lobby of the hospital where he’d reigned.
“God, how my father hated you,” she told his image.
She remembered a Sunday when she was a teenager. Her grandmother had phoned to announce that she was on her last legs. “You’ve never visited,” she told her son. “Are we that inconsequential?”
The thought of meeting a man who sliced into, and refigured newborn’s genitals made Carla gag. She begged to wait in the car.
“This is a family effort,” her mother said.
Her grandmother answered the bell. With her gaudy caftan and gold high heeled mules, she seemed over-dressed for someone about to leave the earth. She nodded toward Aaron’s study. “I told him you were coming. ‘No can do,’ he said. He’s writing a paper to deliver in Zurich.”
Her father pounded on the study door. “Let me get this straight,” he shouted. “You’re too important to see me?” He tried the knob. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be emptying bedpans. That money didn’t come cheap. I had to live in shit to support you leeches. The things I did turned me into a sociopath.” He rammed the door with his shoulder. “Come out and face me, you coward.”
“Leave him alone,” his mother said. “He’s busy. His speech will be televised throughout Europe. While you were electroplating garbage, Aron corrected a terrible birth defect.”
Carla’s father grabbed a vase from a table. It sailed toward his mother. Carla and her parents rushed to the car.
A gallerist asked Carla to be part of a show. “I’ve titled it Autobiography. I want to celebrate the things that form us. My only stipulation is that you include at least one family portrait, be it formal, informal, or crayoned on newsprint. Please say yes. I love your work.”
“I don’t paint figures.”
“Then this will be a lovely first.”
Her parents hadn’t posed for wedding pictures. Her father hadn’t cared to capture his family on film. The little photos she’d sat for in grade school smiling because she’d been told to, had disappeared.
She phoned the gallerist. “Sorry to back out, but I have no reference materials.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not expecting representational art a la Rembrandt.”
“Even so I don’t use my life as subject matter.”
“Please dear, do it this once for me.”
She painted her parents swinging her seven-year-old self by her hands the way parents do to please their child. In her version, they stood at the edge of a cliff. Her father and mother swung her high in the air. As she flew out over the drop, her mother said something that riled her father. They argued, forgot where they were and let go of her hands.
She painted the outside of their house at sunrise, with a sky as gaily colored as she wished her parents’ hearts had been, a sight she judged too saccharine to be believed.
She rendered their house at night. A vision of a large man and a child so small, she could have stepped out of a walnut shell, superimposed itself over her painting. In her distress, her exhaustion, her anger at being forced to go against her wishes, something broke inside her and a memory surfaced.
She was almost five. He’d come to the house unannounced. Her parents were out. The babysitter was asleep on the couch. She’d answered on the first knock.
It was the first time she’d met her uncle Aaron. He had the same voice as her father, the same height, the same features although his were slightly thinner.
He’d leaned down to shake her hand and she’d thought, and this was new information, a thing she’d proudly figured out by herself, that when brothers sounded alike and looked almost alike, if they wanted to, they could become one person until they got tired of playing that game.
She said, OK, when he asked her to go behind the house and search for worms in the dark. He had a flashlight. They walked on the grass. And then had he put something in her hand? In her mouth? Inside her? Had he made her promise not to tell anyone? Did he do it again the next week and for weeks afterwards while her parents were at the movies?
The memory solidified. She reexperienced it as though she was five and it was happening again. She felt the pain, the terror, the shock of his forcing an enormous never-before-seen part of himself into her mouth.
She’d thought he was punishing her. At seventy-eight she still felt guilty without knowing what she’d done. He’d stunted her development, conditioned her to obey terrible men, made it impossible for her to have a caring relationship. Her father had been blighted by his father’s desertion and his mother’s demands. He’d gone on to destroy the woman he married. This sorry, miss-matched, ill-equipped pair had unintentionally wrought havoc on her. Her uncle, however, had known what he was doing when he’d cemented her conduct.
On television and in the news, well-known actresses were accusing movie producers, directors, and male entertainers of raping them. The men feigned shock and groused that the couplings had been consensual. “She chased me,” they whined.
“Liars,” the women said and landed strong left hooks.
The men fell to the floor. The referees started the count. Aware of all they’d lose, the men rose to their feet, staggered to their corners, and ordered their public relations teams to further sully the women so that they, the faux victims, could stage a quick comeback.
More women came forward. Could she do the same? The child she’d been deserved a champion.
Fueled by an anger she could control, made larger by it and resolute, she phoned the hospital where her uncle had practiced and she told the director in a tone that defied contradiction, that her famous Uncle Aaron had sexually abused her when she was child. She hung up with a new sense of power and influence. Then as though she’d been hired to mete out a punishment for the crime of speaking up, painful sores covered her tongue. She couldn’t eat or sleep for a week. And still she stood watch while the workmen removed her uncle’s likeness and the accompanying plaque that described a savior who’d never existed. She’d rightfully destroyed an ogre’s reputation. Her only regret was that her father hadn’t lived to see what she’d done.
She drove to Brooklyn and voiced what she’d been afraid to voice forty years earlier. Her boss, deformed by arthritis and supported by a cane, retaliated by shouting obscenities.
“You no longer hold sway,” she said.
An artist at work is a temporary God who creates worlds to fit her specifications. Time can be layered, the dead revived, and justice and joy doled out at will. Carla used a large canvas to compose a group portrait. She painted herself at various ages, each of these selves able at last to choose their actions. Her mother held a bouquet, a gift from her husband who’d been healed from his traumas and was now able to love. In this, her first illustration of fairness and optimism, she rendered the floating prostitutes and the Chinese factory workers freed from captivity and possessing money, honor, and health.
She stepped back to study the piece. Did it merely illustrate a wish? Or was it a sign of an internal change that could take root if she threw off and kept off the prohibitions that had been heaped on her? The choice was hers. Despite almost eighty years of allowing crippling notions to form her identity and govern her actions, she vowed to do whatever it took to live as her real self and to help others follow suit.