The Wood Places by Ena Kaitch

   “It’s great of you to come and hear me speak. I know that’s not actually what’s going on; saying that makes it seem like this meeting is the product of a request or a personal choice. I like that. I prefer it to the alternative of having to introduce myself and explain a little about why I’m here. We all know why I’m here.”

   She paused, looking into the middle distance and breathing out slowly.

   “The first time I told this story, the one I’d like to share today, people laughed. When they did, I knew I’d told it wrong – left things out, rubbed off the sharp edges and made it anecdotal. I do that when…uh. When I’m ashamed. I should have written it down, I see now that that is what helps but I didn’t know that yet. Instead, I was at a meeting like this, involuntarily, and it was my turn to talk, again against my express will. I was so preoccupied with how I would be perceived and had begged off dealing with this story because of how it would be perceived when—WHAM: a confluence that could only end in catastrophe. Only it didn’t.

   “It is not a funny story; it’s not not a funny story but the point is, whatever it was, it was more what I worried that it might be that governed my tongue and how loose it could be. Worry one: a story about how beautiful and sexy I am without my having to use the words ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ and Worry two: a karmic state of events in which I had no one to blame but myself. So, I left things out and veiled some of the things that needed to stay in. Still, why they laughed…? I must have made it sound silly, conversational instead of confessional – probably in a way to tell it without really telling it. Like the cat-calls.”

  She looked at her lap, at an upward-facing palm, clearing her throat a little before starting to speak again.

 “I’ve told people that I receive cat-calls but I never repeat them. I can’t but not why you’d think – it’s not shame that’s the main barrier this time, I mean. You see, when they’re being hurled my way…there’s a swiftness about them, a razor-sharpness, like a switch singing through the air. Sure, they’re just words but to me they are hard and dripping with a pain that is a bruise on the wind, a bruise long before it appears on the skin. Once, I said them again, the same words, copying the call, and, somehow, the words were clunky and dull, thudding about the way meaty knuckles would on a thing that is hollow. They were empty words so of course they were hollow and maybe they had started out that way but after playing on loop in my head in a cycle that is one half ‘It doesn’t bear repeating’ and the other ‘Oh how it bears repeating’ I realized, I’m sorry to say, it was just too mundane, too ‘this again’. They went around in my head, on the whistling steam of disbelief and doubt and shame and then, simply sailed away. All too easy they normalized, petrified so that it seemed like something I’d found, an insect in amber sap, instead of an event I’d lived through. Hadn’t I heard a girlfriend with a similar story, wasn’t it a plot in a crime drama or detective show, didn’t I have an idea for a short that ran along those lines? Wasn’t it just another sail, catching a good strong wind, bulking it up, and WHOOSH gone?”

Managing to look up, she parted her lips enough to wedge a thumbnail between her teeth; biting down a few times, she yanked her hand away, curving it around and beneath her pooling thigh.

“Some of my ideas for shorts are like that, all juicy and unmistakable, filled with I think call-to-action and pep and greatness, this terrifying greatness that doesn’t seem to lessen as they get further and further away. As I sit there and let them get further away, I guess.”

A sigh.

“‘Your talent is in making things meaningless’. The fat me is always saying that – I mean, I don’t listen but doesn’t mean I don’t hear it sometimes anyway. Anyway…um. There was no cat-call that time. Unfortunately.”

She held her hands up in a warding-off gesture.

“I mean, a heads-up would’ve been nice, in this instance.”

The small smile that had begun to open her features screwed into a frown-heavy grimace.

“So… So I was… I was down to the last pair that fit me, these elasticized skinny-style jeans that had no right to be classified as denim in the first place. ‘Fit’ is also a relative term; the things were practically painted on. I was at my heaviest then, not dangerously overweight but close, and conscious of it while being utterly unaware of it at the same time. Hence the jeans. Stupid jeans. As if buying something labeled ‘skinny’ would say or do anything about my decidedly un-skinny state.”

A deeper sigh.

“…There was this fabric, a sort of muslin cloth they made more than a century ago that was so fine and gossamer, wearing it was like wearing nothing at all. That was how it was, wearing those jeans – only without the airy luxurious Titania connotations. To say that I was uncomfortable seems to imply that once I got home and got to take them off, it would be better but at that stage, peeling away vacuum-sealed clothing wasn’t enough. I wanted the skin to come off as well and the padded yellow fat underneath, bunched up and filling every available space like the insides of a stuffed bear. The skin especially though; I remember—“

The hand she wasn’t sitting on, her fingers claws, raked the top of her thigh. Scowling at it, she tucked it under her as well, both hand-less arms straightening so that her shoulders were round heaps and the gaps made by her collarbones dark valleys.

“And it’s muscle memory, you see? I would scratch at myself, at my stomach and thighs, my nails leaving raised red trails that mingled with the still red tracks of my many stretch marks. It hurt – because I wanted it to but also because by then, my skin was as sensitive as insect antennae. I registered everything through it. I always knew someone was ogling me because I always felt it; I sensed it that day. My skin just…knew. It didn’t tighten and warm the way it does when I’m embarrassed or feel exposed.”

Twisting her right shoulder in a little, she pressed her cheek onto it briefly.

“It… It, uh, rippled and widened? I know how that sounds but like eyes bulging, like I was seeing not with my eyes but with the functions attributed to another organ, the largest one we all have and don’t think of as an organ at all. Skin – my scary skin, stretched out of shape and raw as an open wound, finding a leer or look of disgust or disdain because my actual eyes could only find what was on the floor, they looked nowhere else. Although, on that day, as I was going where I was going,  I glanced up a few times, however briefly, and that’s how I know it was a man in a white van and can say that while I didn’t get a good look, I’m sure he was holding up something to either take a photo or film me. I started to walk faster and slowed at once without stopping, acknowledging the strange vibe and writing it off, blaming the machine that is my imagination. It was quiet, no breeze, the pavement was cracked. As I kept walking, mindful of each step now, the slabs of grey abruptly turned white and unscarred; the mini traffic jam at the crossing inched forwards and came to an indefinite halt. I had reached the cusp of the road, the big blocky white stripes on it hardly visible; I had to turn, face front, and weave my way through the bumper-to-bumper blockade to make it across. As I did, I peered up again: one car down, the bald man who had been leaning on the dash where the driver’s side window was rolled down all the way, now leaned on the steering wheel, looking through something oblong in his hands pointed at the windscreen. That is, I think that’s what I saw because this is where – now and even then, in that moment – I think I might have been creating outside of a work situation. It happens, sometimes. I haven’t figured out how to turn my imagination off outside of…working…”

The dark lines between her brows and their deep set over her eyes smothered the colour in her face until she was ashy pale.

“No, I want to believe I made it up. I make these things up, to avoid the fear-induced seemingly factual theory that I’m to blame for them. I hate that I have those kinds of thoughts, get angry at myself like I do when I think that if it did happen, I probably deserved it, as if I had it coming because I couldn’t keep myself from jiggling in clothing fit to insinuate nudity. Incidentally, ‘Do I deserve it’ is another thought loop linking with the cat-call one the way a magician links two steel rings, making them look like a Venn diagram. Did I deserve to have my pudgy pudenda recorded as it puffed above equally rotund merged-together thighs to be then used as a sort of candid pornography like the women caught on hidden cameras in toilets and changing rooms? Or less perverse, as stock footage on the news as the presenter drones rhythmically about the childhood obesity crisis and Type 2 diabetes? I mean, if any of that was even happening. Oh, I wish I knew.”

She shifted in her seat, bringing out her left hand; rolling her fingers out, she concentrated on the pop of her there-and-gone-again knuckles.

“It must have lasted seconds, crossing that road, but they were hefty seconds and I may as well have been trekking through a dense wood, every tree traded for a million eyes, all following, all staring – every eyelet that was each and every one of my pores staring right back. Three seconds, maybe four, and in the next one, when I was on the pavement again, the crash came from behind me. SMACK—SQUEAK—TINKLE—the eyes in my head squinched, didn’t close. I didn’t turn around; I didn’t need to.”

Slowly, and for the first time since she had sat down in the collapsible chair, she lifted her head and looked around the room, at every person sitting in it in a circle with her.

“The man in the white van, one foot easy on the brakes, both hands on the phone aimed at a zoftig teenager walking on the pavement and crossing the zebra-patterned road in his full view, forgot to keep one eye on the slow but steady crawl of traffic, smashing into the car ahead of him. I do see that it could be funny in the way a person who trips in public is funny, all the uncoordinated flailing easily doubled as slap-stick silliness, depending on the circumstances. And, if you leave out the fact that I was underage, and all the stuff happening to my skin – which I did because it is why this story affects me as much as it does – maybe it is funny, in a slap-on-the-forehead kind of way. I don’t want to say that, though. I don’t want to hear that anymore.

“The instant they laughed, I knew I should have let the damn thing sail away, isn’t that what the fat me wanted: ‘what a stupid story. Blame the stupid jeans, yourself, anyway’. Yes, anyway. I wasn’t ever going to tell anybody else, especially not another bunch of anybody elses when— And then, they found the body of the girl, the one who had gone missing, walking home in the open WHOOSH gone for more than a week. Sarah was her name and didn’t I…know her? Hadn’t I walked with her, we’d walked that same route, day in day out, the way home across the Common and into the small wood, not walking together, exactly next to each other, but close enough that when she wasn’t there, I felt the gap. I feel the gap she’s left, a young woman minding her own business, making her way home as the sun disappeared into the trees around her. A Sarah, one of the Sarahs – now the Sarah. All of a sudden, the wind stopped; the sails hung flaccid and inert, looking like nothing more than a wrinkled sheet lying next to a tall pole.”

Wrestling out her right hand, she brought her palms together CLAP flinching a little at the resounding echo.

“That’s when I saw it, all the over-thinking, all the self-indulgent and self-conscious pitying that had been that wind, fattening those malleable simplified sails, taking the boat to nowhere. I realized if I changed the impetus, used the breath from my lungs, turned the sails into my conviction and gave them purpose and direction, the story could go, not into the void, the cold nothingness from which lessons can’t be learned but into the fray, walking, touching, reaching the minds, the working sails of others, those who sense the gaps and those who don’t. I didn’t know Sarah but just like that I saw, look, it was so plain: I was Sarah. We are Sarah, you and me, the old, the young. We are all stories, walking sailing stories, blending into each other, informing one another, embellishing the gaps of those who leave the waters – the conversation – early, always way too early, not filling in the blank space but giving it a variegated ‘Beeple’ aura like the rays around the depiction of a heart-apparent pastel blue Virgin Mary. Even though something isn’t there anymore, we’ll always know that something – someone – once was.”

She stopped, breathing fast but evenly, finding the middle distance and fixing on it.

“Thinking the things that happen to me, no matter how small or shameful they seem, are just ‘this again’ is like saying that what happened to Sarah is ‘this again’.”

Her eyes found every other pair, fixing on them.

“I don’t care what fat me thinks, I won’t let any of it be meaningless, not ever again.”

A pause.

“But I’ve been going on for a while now, not sure that any of it made sense so—“

Exhaling, she smiled, one that didn’t falter but bloomed all the way.

“Thank you for taking the time to be here today and for letting me ramble out the White Van Story. If you’d told me I’d tell that story again, shared the thoughts I’ve had on a conversation I was longing to be a part of and take my place as a Sarah among us, well. Yes. I would have laughed.”

Ena Kaitch

Image: A white van driving along a road from Pixabay.com

Sarah