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A well-seasoned letër
from Helen’s daughter graced the kitchen counter, sitting next to the blender.
That letter was the only reason (apart from the semi-regular trips to the
shower) for her to leave the studio and enter the house. Opening the front door
seemed foreign to her and it was always more difficult than it should have been.
The key had to be massaged in the lock before the door would allow
itself to be opened. She knew the house hated her. The rooms were empty, the
air still and stagnant. It smelled like carpeting and old paint, more so each
time she went in. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to take the letter into
her studio. Even it—that treasured piece of disintegrating paper with that
treasured piece of disintegrating handwriting on it—was a part of Out
There.
Helen had removed the letter from its envelope, read it and folded it
back up a hundred times or more since it had arrived. Maybe she was looking for
it to say something different each time. Or maybe there was some kind of
interpretation she was missing.
It was ripped in the middle because of her haste to get the envelope
open. The fragile handwriting was a thin and tall cursive (just like her
mother’s) in blue ink on white, lined paper that smelled like pencil erasers (Les Gummes, an inside joke). Helen tried to imagine her daughter
writing such a letter. Did she scrawl it out quickly, writing whatever came to
mind? Did she carefully plan it out with earlier drafts? Did she have help from
her boyfriend (whoever he was)? Had there been more to the letter in earlier
drafts, a small story or maybe a hint as to where she was or what she was doing,
only to have been winnowed down to its current version? There was an endless
array of possibilities, only one of which was true, and which probably didn’t
matter. The letter said what it said without requiring further analysis of its
origins. For Helen, it demanded more of her than she was willing to give.
Helen:
I
have a neutral responsibility to write to you. I don’t know if you know
where I am, but I suspect you don’t. I am not at the address listed on the
front of this letter, so please don’t try to find me there.
I
am writing this because my boyfriend says I should. If not for myself, then at
least for you. You are my only mother, he says, so I should at least tell you
that I am okay. So here’s me telling you that I’m okay.
I
didn’t become a prostitute. Some things don’t run in the family. I
haven’t sold my soul to the devil—though He has tried to buy it. I’m
doing fine, and I wanted you to know.
I
also thought you should know how
(rip)
much
you hurt me. And that someday I might forgive you. But not now. I am still
pissed off. So just back off and let me have my own life for now.
I
hope this puts your mind at ease.
Darianalena
Míroslav Mihajlovic
She pictured Dari sitting on a wooden chair at the kitchen table of her
boyfriend’s apartment. (Let’s not get
into that.) Wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and maybe an ankle-length black
skirt with black, wide-heeled shoes. Some sort of calm, quiet domestic scene
while she wrote with a hand that was both careful and messy. Did she shed a
tear? Was she swinging her feet back and forth above the ground like a little
girl? Was her black hair drawn back into a ponytail, or had it been cut short
like all the girls were wearing it?
Draága Dari and her beautiful
face. The smile and scowl of a five-year-old. The awful down-mouthed expression
of a ten, twelve, fifteen-year-old. Gradually moving from adulation to
abrogation. Who had Helen become that the child had turned on her?
The day Dari was born Petr was away with some colleagues in New York. The
labor was difficult. It had been 36 hours of sweat and collapsing pain. The
midwife had fallen asleep twice. It was a grueling trial for her
fifteen-year-old body. One hip was out of its socket for three days afterwards.
Her uterus never quite recovered and she was unable to have any more children.
Something that Petr never forgave her for.
When Darianalena was finally born, Helen fell unconscious into a
dreamless sleep. The darkness enveloped her, cradled her like a mother, allowing
her to breathe once again from its black air. Dari was a lump of flesh, more
useless than the breast of a barren woman. In her baby’s face Helen saw
herself in miniature. With huge blue irises in her eyes, virtually no white,
the world was hers to be seen and captured somehow in a mind that wasn’t ready
for it. With the tiniest of fingers that stretched out in an instinctive gesture
of survival. With a future of torment because of her gender.
Her eyes were initially covered with a thin sheet of flesh that needed to
be slit open, something that the midwife did reluctantly. She was from the old
Yugoslavia, just south of Bulgaria, and thought it was an omen of evil—the
sightless child or some such nonsense. The penknife shook in her hands until her
assistant gave her brandy. She kept muttering “bòjati,
bòjati,” be afraid, be afraid
as she nicked the little girl’s eye-flesh (the scars of which were still
evident on Dari’s lower eyelids). Then Helen fell asleep.
Helen remembered the day Dari left. Or, rather, the morning after she
left at some point during the night. It was a similar feeling to having given
birth to her.
For 38 weeks this extra living organ had been a part of... no, not a part
of... had been the driving force
behind who she was and what she did. And how Petr treated her. Petr had never
once laid a hand on her while she was pregnant. Not after the first miscarriage,
which would have been a boy.
After she was born, however, the baby girl no longer be-longed to her.
For a while afterwards, she may have belonged to Petr, but never to Helen. In a
process that was so slow and so gradual, Dari started belonging just to herself,
and sometimes she belonged to no one at all. Like watching a weed flower bloom
and then die—when you blink you miss the seeds scattering in the wind.
When Dari left, it was like that. When she climbed out of her window
under cover of a crescent moon and an overgrown yard of wild foliage, Dari was
again Petr’s child and no longer Helen’s.
God damn letters.
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