Experimental Nonfiction, Gina Twardosz
They caged the Bean.
They put a fence around it—Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate—to keep visitors out so they could clean and restore this iconic installation to its former glory. It’s not so much art as it is a mirror others use to see themselves. But that’s all art is, isn’t it? My frustration is that tourists often use the Bean to take pictures of the skyline when they could just as easily turn around and look up. Usually, I’m more forgiving, or less pedantic, but my impending gynecological appointment has made me anxious. I find the Bean’s restoration inspiring: In honor of its transformation, I’ve taken my bean for a little tune-up, too.
(Is that too cute?) Let me speak clinically: My clitoris needs inspecting by a licensed professional—my whole vagina needs diagnosing. (Better?) I remember my childhood friend’s mother who called bras over-the-shoulder boulder holders. It made me too embarrassed to wear one. Our universal desire to speak to young women like children fascinates me. That’s not a vagina, it’s a coin purse or a clam with your little lady pearl inside. Ma’am, that’s my vag, my pussy, my flesh pocket, turn it with a key like a locket. Vagina, vagina, vagina—let’s get it all out of our systems. I can no longer play these silly girl games: I’m a woman, so I must go to the gyno.
I’ve never had this kind of freedom or insurance, so I’ve picked the nicest gynecologist available to me. It’s 23 floors up and towers over lesser buildings; the office looks out over the lake that sparkles like aquamarine gel. When I was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming a mermaid so I could freely explore the ocean safely. I think of the former me and try to conjure that same wonder. I consider jumping out of this long, tall glass window and into the lake. My legs will fuse into one large, iridescent fin on the way down, and I will become a naiad. I do not need to keep this gynecological appointment as I no longer have a vagina.
But that’s all make-believe. I’m standing against this wall of windows and I just see my reflection. No tail yet, so I keep my appointment. I stare down at the seam where the road meets sand and water. What’s it like for everything to be gone? I can see the sign—there’s a Starbucks in this hospital’s lobby.
I sit down in the waiting room and wait for my time. There are a lot of pregnant women sitting with me and they make me feel so small and young. I should go and only return when my body has more purpose, but now they’ve called my name, so I take my body to the back room. The nurse weighs me in like a prized pig. She checks my vitals—all good—and then instructs me to strip.
I feel full of overstuffed teddy bear fluff. I am too much body crinkling this crispy hygienic paper. My breasts fall into the crevices of my armpits, pinched and sweaty. My scraggly bush pokes through the posh purple modesty sheet. This is all supposed to feel normal, right? I’m not supposed to feel like a pimple awaiting a rush of puss. It’s not supposed to feel strange to lie back on the table nude. I’m not supposed to feel this vulnerable, like a speck in a clearing with an eagle-eyed marauder waiting patiently to pry its beak-like speculum into my innards. I’m supposed to just lie there and take it.
The gynecologist enters wearing a mask. She snaps purple gloves and tells me to relax. I adjust my knees for her. I do my deep breathing exercises and feel sad that I need to calm myself down for a routine pap smear. I hear the cranking of the clamp as its jaws unwind. Inside, outside, inside, outside; I let my breathing take the shape of another me who was born without pain or fear. This creature is not a woman, then. This is no one. Nothing.
I stop looking down at my vagina and level my gaze at the art on the wall. Why is there a painting in here? It’s abstract—globs of pastel paint overlap, like cotton candy clouds or a pitifully superficial homage to Monet’s Water Lilies. I stifle a laugh as my vagina clenches anyway. I wonder who chose this piece specifically for a gynecologist’s examination room; I wonder why it was chosen. Is this—a sickly sweet arrangement of color and light—womanhood? Am I meant to find myself within this piece, or is it meant to calm me down from whatever horrors might take place in here? I stare into its origins until I see canvas or the artist’s hand. I see nothing now. I see no art and I feel time passing and I feel her start to pull out of me and I wince.
“Almost done,” she says, politely.
I know, I want to say, I can feel you. When she finally pulls the speculum out, I’m embarrassed because the paper beneath my gaping maw is wet. I’m supposed to keep everything inside: tidy and away. I’ve made a little mess and I’m sorry.
“You did great,” she says. I feel like crying, but I don’t.
She instructs me to get dressed. She’ll knock twice before reentering. I throw on my sweater and jeans and sit and stare at the space my body previously occupied. The paper is creased and crushed into the shape of my form. There are splatters of wet across the latter half. I feel disgusted with myself. I should’ve been smooth and dry. I should’ve been light and airy and giggling and jumping and soft and carefree like the bunny Hugh Hefner used as inspiration for his models—his girls. I’m sullied with these organs that squelch and bleed; they’re damp and porous. They’re all of me, again and again.
She knocks twice, then enters. “Everything looks okay, but we’ll get the test results back in a week or so.”
I nod as if I’m game for anything.
“Do you have any questions?”
I have a lot of questions for her. Why did she choose this particular profession? How does it feel to look at vaginas all day—to perceive them biologically or innocuously, as one would an arm or knee? Does this bring her closer to her own womanhood, or further away? I can’t imagine being elbow-deep in anatomy all day, but maybe this belies my faulty upbringing. I was raised in a misogynistic culture of sexual shame that was equally, paradoxically, very sexually explicit. When my mother cheated on my father, I learned about sex at a young age, but this was not a good nor healthy way to stumble into a knowledge of intercourse. I gleaned that sex destroys; a vagina is hungry and sometimes, it can’t be tamed—a vagina is like a second vindictive brain that occasionally leads women astray.
“You have to be better than that,” my father would tell me. He meant better than those women, promiscuous women, but he might as well have been saying I had to outwit my vagina and curb its monstrous appetite. I would only get ahead if I kept men out. I needed to shut the door on desire. My father didn’t date anyone after my mother left as if he was emotionally castrated. He always used to say, I’m setting a good example as if celibacy after a loss was healthy and not masochistic.
Here is what I learned about Women from Men: they deceive; they cheat; they lie. Sometimes, the carpet doesn’t match the drapes. For this, I atone. I am perfect if I stay in the box. I am doll eyes and doll hairs. I am just legs attached to a torso. Smooth like butter—you barely even know the slit is there.
Because he didn’t have a partner, my father leaned on me for emotional support. We’d watch R-rated movies where women suffered as if this was a perfectly respectable way for a father and daughter to bond. In college, he showed me 8mm. In the film, Nicholas Cage plays a detective hired to investigate a snuff film that a wealthy widower finds in her husband’s collection. Thus, Cage’s character begins to explore the seedy underbelly of illegal porn and gratuitous violence. I remember my confusion at trying to figure out what a snuff film actually was—it’s not like this is something that’s ever explained to someone, even when they’re adults. Stumbling upon the word feels as illegal as stumbling upon the object itself. I initially believed that a snuff film was just an extremely explicit porno, but a snuff film is actually a porno where someone, typically a woman, is murdered. There are plenty of fake ones out there, and Cage’s character is trying to figure out whether or not a woman was really murdered. Is it better to somehow derive pleasure from fake violence that is perpetuated as real? ‘Better’ isn’t the right word. There are no words; there are only people, choices, and actions. Actors and voyeurs. Those who do versus those who sit, wait, and watch.
A few years later, I watched David Fincher’s Seven by myself and had to stop the movie when the detectives arrived at the crime scene depicting the sin of lust. In this scene, a sex worker is literally fucked to death with a large knife. This seemed like the worst way to die, and as I’ve grown older and more experienced in the ways that evil manifests in the world, I still consider this fictitious death among the most gruesome.
Crime and women are almost synonymous. Don’t go outside alone at night or during the day in a desolate part of town. Don’t talk to strangers—although intimate partner violence is the number one killer of women. Do not breathe, or show leg, or refuse to show leg, or let out a little scream, or be talkative or silent and haughty or misguided or unloved and lost.
“You can’t be so sensitive all the time,” I remember my father telling me, “This world will chew you up and spit you out.” I tried never to cry in front of him, but some days, all I do is cry as if the tears built up through the years and now they have nowhere else to go. My father was punished by my mother’s infidelity; he interprets femininity as a punishment inflicted on others. Don’t cry. Don’t whine. Always carry a pad so you don’t bleed through your jeans. I am no one’s burden. I am as ephemeral as dandelion fluff: I pass through your fingers inconspicuously. I am yours until I am nothing. I am floating along with the wind. I am enjoyable—I live to be enjoyed.
When I started having sex in college, I didn’t enjoy it. Nobody enjoys their first time, friends of friends told me. I nodded as if this made perfect sense. There were always whispers of the hymen, this internal yet foreign body that hung over talks of sex or sexual encounters. The hymen breaks upon penetration—sometimes this hurts; often, it bleeds. Across the spectrum of womanhood, the seepage of blood means that you are, again and again, a woman. First menstruation. First time having sex. First (and second, and third) time birthing a baby. To live as a woman is to lose, bodily fluids or otherwise. Everyone wants women to bleed as if the world has a vampiric lust for our essence. We are just bodies with fluids, nooks, crannies, and cranks.
After college, I let men choke me during sex even though I didn’t want to be choked. Am I only safest when I deny myself pleasure? It’s my fault for pretending to like it. Forgive me for my girlish beliefs: I thought sex was a soft kind of comingling. I didn’t know I was the rock from which the sword is freed. Excalibur’s push and pull knights Arthur a king; the rock is merely an obstacle—the rock is a challenge to be beaten.
“Let’s schedule your next exam before you head out,” the gynecologist breaks my silent reverie. I will have to do this again and again until I die. I nod so that she knows I’m thrilled.
I feel as though she should hold me upside down and spank my bottom like I’m a happy, healthy, beautiful, bouncing newborn baby girl, but if anything, this exam has made me realize that I’m not a girl anymore: I have calloused into a woman. I’m an adult or something like it, so I leave the examination room and walk back downstairs as if nothing happened. Everything is normal. I duck into Starbucks and sit down, but I feel weird taking up space when I haven’t warranted it so I purchase a small clementine. It sits on the table before me. I’m scared to peel this fruit in public—to make a mess of my skin and surroundings—so I get up and walk outside. I cross the street and head to the beach which is just a strip of sand against the water. I pull out the clementine and start peeling.
I dive my nail under its skin and pull up. It unravels for me graciously. I rub my thumb over its porous rind. I admire the stringy membrane coating the slices. How strange that this fruit comes pre-sliced, prepped for sharing, ready to be devoured. Fruit does not feel its sweetness, however, as I do now, tasting the tart zing that stings my tastebuds, my gums, my tongue. I eat each pulpy slice until the clementine is gone. I finger the rind in my hand, unconsciously flattening it. I toss it away, and seagulls descend on my scraps.
I’m so sticky, tender, and juicy—will the seagulls descend upon me next? The sweet meat of my body does not entice them, though, because I’m alive; I fight back. My stirring provokes their flight. I do not melt into seafoam. I am a woman standing at the edge of the lake. I look out and see blue. I am somebody you hear and then see. I am like you and you and you.
Gina Twardosz (she/her) is a writer from Chicago, IL. She writes about herself to reach other people. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and Best of the Net twice.