Stand and Face Me.
There was this one time when I was a kid–maybe twelve, fourteen, eight…
My mom took my sisters and I into Anthropologie (no I didn’t misspell the word, it’s a bougie, high-end clothing store that my mom loves and can only afford once a year because a dress is close to $150 and a fake fur jacket borders on 200-300).
Anyway, my sisters and I obviously weren’t going to buy anything, nor was my mother going to buy anything for us (except on our birthdays if we wanted one thing–a tradition I loved growing up but one that we no longer do…maybe it was never a tradition, though, maybe it only happened one year for my 13th birthday and that was that…though I think it was actually my 16th birthday, but I can’t remember because I have dissociative amnesia and my memory is more similar to bell-bottom jeans: super popular at one time, soon disappear, then slowly return in style); so, my sisters and I just strolled through the store, hiding in the clothing racks, smelling all the fancy candles in the beauty area, and scavenging through the sale section where all the actually ugly stuff gets put so you’re not really getting a good deal.
At some point I went off by myself to the home decor section. As I wandered around, seemingly aimless >but perhaps with a subconscious goal in mind< I discovered this big book of what looked to be a collection of photography. The cover was really beautiful and I liked the woman on the front who wore a very pretty white lace dress that made her look like a fairy. She had wavy dirty blonde hair, entangled with flowers of a variety. Maybe I was too young–I couldn’t tell if I wanted to be her, or if I simply wanted her.
Being the curious ‘’apt pupil‘’ I was, I thought, cleverly, “Well, it’s a book, might as well open it.” I turned the cover over and immediately my face went pink. Hesitating just a second before pounding it shut, I looked away, quickly scanning the store to make sure nobody saw me: eyes BULGING, heart p o u n d i n g, and sweat already seeping through my adolescent clothes.
As taught, I walked away, knowing I wasn’t supposed to look at the book. I pretended to distract myself with the peculiarly-fragranced candles–gin and lavender, lemon and parsnip, thyme and licorice, much more exotic than the B&BW birthday cake and candy-apple candles I was used to.
But, as Patrick Süskind says (I don’t really know anything about Patrick Süskin except that he’s a filmmaker),
Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.*
Breathing in the lavender, the lemon, the licorice, an evocative heat churned within my lungs, unnamed, untamed. Once it had solidified in my gut, I felt my body moving back toward the sordid artifact resting deceptively innocent on the wooden table.
Tender, plush fingers slinked over the table a second time, traversing the rosy cover of the book. Stealthily, but with feigned restraint, I flipped the beautiful woman over and grazed a page of the book between shaking fingers. So scared, so worried of being caught, each time I turned a page a streak of warm sweat left its residue in the bottom corner.
Seeing that there was nobody near me at the moment, I took the chance to study the photographs more intently.
I couldn’t tell you the order, nor could I explain to you the theme or purpose of the book. All I remember is a few select pictures of the goddess-like woman posing nude in various positions within a field of sage-green grass and motley wildflowers. More importantly, though, I remember how it felt to lOOk at those photographs.
Never was there a more obedient, dutiful daughter or child than the one sneaking her way through forbidden pages (at least up until my family left our church and I was freed from the chains of eternal patriarchal subordination). But, unable to uphold my womanly duty at this moment, I let the waters of temptation engulf me, surrendering my eyes to this unknown woman’s lavish breasts and lucid skin, subtly colored with reddish-brown freckles and groves of hair in places completely foreign to ignorant eyes.
I thought she was beautiful. Each photograph revealed to the onlooker (in this case, me, a naive young girl) a new side to this elegant deity.
On one page she stood in front of the camera, frozen in the moment of her lifting the white lace dress over her head, her face covered, but hair pouring out from the gaps between her arms and shoulders. Nothing below her torso was visible in the frame, but in the somewhat blurry background I glimpsed a man funneling his gaze through an old-timey camera pointed toward the female specimen.
For some reason, glimpsing the intruder in the background made me upset. What was he doing taking photos of her without her knowing? Or, was she even aware that he was there, lurking like a leopard in the shadow of her silhouette? And if she did know, why was she turned toward me and not him?
Then, my heart speeding up, I wondered, Who was it taking her picture, then? Was it a man? Was it…another woman?
I pictured myself snapping a photograph of this stunning woman. Would my hands still be shaking, my fingers trembling over the capture button, making the photo blurry?
Then I envisioned myself in this same setting, but older. Suddenly, my hands no longer shook. They held steady to the camera, focusing it point-blank on the woman before me. Through the narrow lens I looked into her eyes. As she bent down to her knees, she looked back at me (but, in all honesty, she was really just looking at the camera) and smiled. I too dropped to my knees and moved a little closer.
As I adjusted the camera, I saw her begin to lift her dress up over her head, just like in the book. I knew I should look away, but I couldn’t. Then, again, my fingers started to quiver, my hands started to shake, and my heart sang out loud and clear within the dome of my ribcage.
Bare and beautiful, she smiled at me through the magnifying lense. Her lips gently vibrated as she whispered Shhhh, though I couldn’t hear a sound. Watching her press a sturdy finger to her mouth, I felt this woman slowly hushing all my anxieties. With the same hand she reached out to me, open-palmed. Wary, but unreluctant, I extended mine outward and felt it collapse into the folds of her sacred fingers.
I was still viewing her only through the camera lens, so I slowly set it down on the grass below my knees. But as I relinquished the camera to the ground, a wave of fear and guilt plummeted over me. What is wrong with me? I thought. And as a child would do, I threw my gaze toward the ground, avoiding the blatant image of the woman kneeling before me.
Looking downwards, as I adjusted the focal point of my own eyes, I caught sight of two small and round breasts clinging tightly to my chest. In a moment of recognition, realizing the bulbs belonged to me, I grew baffled…confused…repulsed.
My gaze continued down the trajectory of this new, strange body, and gradually my confusion and repulsion turned to amazement. A barren stomach, small and flat compared to the curvaceous one of the woman. I wondered if I could hold a child inside of it. I didn’t understand exactly how one brought a child about, other than by my belief that God bestowed it upon a young woman once she was married. But what if I didn’t want to be married?
I was quickly distracted by the dark shrub of hair poking out from between my thighs, thighs which were thicker than I remembered. Instinctively, I let my hand graze over the softness, brushing through it like one would a horse’s mane.
Suddenly, my movement was halted by the feeling of something wet. I’d felt a similar sensation before, but this time my fingers came up glistening. Moving them closer to my nose, I was reminded of the lemon-scented candle from the store.
That was when my awareness came back to life and a rush of panic instilled a thrum so violent in my chest and head that I thought I might faint. I looked down at my naked flesh and whispered, fearfully, What am I doing?!
Again came that consoling sound: Shhh…but now I actually heard it. Trying to locate the tune, I looked up and saw the radiating beauty of the woman before me, now mounted tall and strong like Praxiteles’s Aphrodite.
Stand, she said, and face me. This time I felt the crystalline voice flow through me as sharp and vehement as a river. As if carried upstream, I stood up.
Though her voice was brisk and piercing, the sight of her in the raw set the surrounding atmosphere ablaze. The closer I moved toward her, the wilder my skin burned. But when I suddenly felt the cool of her breast on mine, I thought the surrounding temperature had quite literally dropped below zero; but it wasn’t the kind of cool that somehow sucks the soul out of your body–it was the kind that nearly burns you to death as the lacerating wind slashes through the subliminal radiance of an auroral zone.
Then came the flash of lightning when I sensed the woman’s hand figure skating along my side. Slowly sculpting the now curvalent outline of my body, I felt a million lifetimes fly by as I stood there, frozen in the nuance of my own. I felt at odds with my body: on the outside, stiffened and cemented in place; on the inside, a seeping infestation of lava across the black folds of an erupting volcano. The woman pressed her hand to the naked skin protecting my heart. Shhh, she whispered.
And just like that, without a realizing consciousness of what I was doing, my lips glued themselves to hers like magnets. With the tender plush of her lips against mine (why do we say lips against each other? If anything, I think they melt into each other), the heat from within reconciled with the frozen solid of my exterior, and through me I felt lubricating my tissue and organs like a smooth honey, her soul falling into mine.
Brinn W.
* Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
