The woman as: a fuckable thing an undead, dead thing Gabrielle E. Capone

The woman as: a fuckable thing an undead, dead thing

Gabrielle E. Capone

The sand is hot on the soles of my feet. I like the way it warms my skin—almost, but not quite burning it. It feels nice to be touched somewhere so private. I grew up and suddenly, touch could only ever be sexual. I didn’t and still don’t understand why we must have “private” parts or why we teach kids about the “good” or “naughty” things their bodies can do when they are still too young to understand what exactly that might mean. It was the men who taught me what my body was or wasn’t worth, and how it could change within a second if I were to make an incorrect move, cheapening myself. I have asked myself many times, “Who was I before I was beautiful?” I have never been able to come up with an answer—if anything, the original question allows for more to spawn, “What was I before I was beautiful, and could I ever get back to that?” There is a time in a girl’s life when she is most concerned with being a fuckable thing, and if you are not desired you might as well be dead.

My friend Annabel is dead. I don’t know that I could even call her that—a friend. They found her body folded up in a suitcase. And I don’t want you to think that she isn’t really my friend because she’s dead or anything like that, but because I hadn’t seen her since we were in elementary school and even then, we had only met once or twice by accident on the beach by my aunt’s summer house. And I think what’s bothering me most about her death, which is an incredibly selfish thought to even have, is that if I were to have found that suitcase, I wouldn’t have recognized Annabel. I would not have seen the corpse and wept for a friend or a girl whose grandmother had fed me and let me eat on the plastic covered sofa in her sunroom, but as a woman afraid of my inevitable fate. I would’ve called the police with a shaky voice and choked

My aunt said the house would be free this week, that she and uncle Jimmy had to stay in Massachusetts for a wedding. So, this morning I woke up in their bed in a sort of trance that made me feel both unconscious and static in my skin. I was awake, but only in the physical way and the only thing driving me into movement was a survival instinct which demanded I walk, not drive, to Williams Beach where Lucy almost drowned so many years ago. Lucy who taught me that I could love someone more than myself, that my body didn’t have to be sexual to be savored—that sex could be soft and patient, that there’d be someone out there who wanted me alive, with a mouth wet with life. And of course, Lucy didn’t actually drown—she’d ironically join the Navy just a few months after the incident but even now, I still think about it. I had brought her here to show her what childhood looked like on me, a vain desire of mine—to be seen as young, which to women had always meant beautiful and again, I am asking myself who or what I was before I was taught to care about beauty. But god, those awful few seconds where Lucy bobbed up and down in the waves like some dead thing. I swear, I would’ve thrown myself in right next to her if she didn’t float back up. What would be the point then, to live without her? They’d have to fish our bodies out together, that’s what I know.

The sand has begun to scald my feet, no longer hot but scorching. I want to move, but can’t—I’m not ready to go for a swim and I’m not ready to walk back to the house. When I was a little girl, I hated the sand—I wished there could be such a thing as a sandless beach and my brother would say, “That’s what the ocean is for.” Ezekiel loved the sand. He’d dig for hours, building castles or whole towns and sometimes, I would run through them afterwards—destroying everything he’d built. We’d fight, screaming at each other until we were both in tears. But Zeke would get back on his knees, with his little red face, and start working again. My brother has never been afraid of beginning, it’s something that comes easy to him. He was always the leader. As soon as we got to the beach, my brother would take off in a sprint, taking the longest possible route to the water—zigging and zagging across the shore, leaving small footprints behind. And despite the

grainy clouds he’d kick up, I would run after him—coughing and squinting in his dust storm. It seems that, my whole life, I’ve been following men.

The sky is a single pale shade of blue today. I dig my feet deeper into the burning sand, savoring its sharpness and thinking of the ways it’s making my skin softer. I can feel the salt inside of my nose before I can taste it in my mouth. The ocean has a way of settling into your body like that, it’s not enough to smell it—you need to be completely covered in it. The wind blows sand upwards at me. I close my eyes, the sky disappears from view, and I press forward until my feet find the darker, damp muck and eventually, until the water laps at my skin.

The current moves sideways against my ankles, splitting into thin streams around my body like branches, or maybe I’m the tree and the wispy currents are roots. I laugh and it sounds foreign, like it came from someone else and I cast a nervous glance around the beach. I am the only one here. I laugh again and this time it is familiar. My feet sink into the ocean’s fleshy floor and I pretend that the water and I are toying with each other. We push and pull at one another the way kids do when there is no game at hand except the one that is invisible to the adults—what is so often mistaken for mischief or poor behavior, but is really just the extension of friendship in its simplest form. A game which has no name, but exists to say, “Would you like to be friends? I’m looking for someone to play with, and you look kind.”

My favorite part of going to the beach as a girl was the people I would meet. How many boys would let me borrow their boogie boards, how many girls would help bury my small body in the shore? How many Annabels did I befriend and love, if not briefly, and how many of them are dead? Everything is so much easier when you’re small. I know that childhood is a lonely thing, but there is no word for that yet—not like when you’re older and have shed those last few years of smallness and know what it is to feel unworthy of love, even—if not especially, platonic love. Now, it’s all too easy to name your loneliness, it’s something you’re familiar with—and your childhood friend is dead, and Lucy is on a ship somewhere in a different sea, and Ezekiel is too busy being an adult to play with you anymore.

Panic builds in my chest. My heart speeds up and my breath catches and now, the salt is in my lungs. I do not want to be a tree. I do not want to plant myself in one place or let the ocean swallow me whole, even though sometimes that sounds nice. I trudge forward until the water settles around my waist. Like the sand on the soles of my feet, this feels nice—to be touched by something that doesn’t want to fuck me, to be held by something that could kill me if it wanted to, and still not feel afraid of it. I walk until I can’t walk anymore and my legs float up behind me. And then, all I have to do is swim.

The water is cold and clean—I like the way my skin looks underneath it, unblemished and glossy. I twist and kick, putting my head below the waves and letting the salt get stuck in my hair. I don’t even care that it burns my eyes to keep them open, I do it anyway. There’s nothing I can bear to miss, no single crab or piece of driftwood that I can spare. They’re all so beautiful that it brings me to tears, and as I break the surface I am gasping for air. I am wiping water from my face and it’s unclear what is from the ocean and what is coming from my eyes, but this doesn’t bother me. And I’m wailing so loudly that I wonder if the fish will come check on me, or if the sharks will swim away as fast as they can because they’re not sure what to do with such big emotions. I don’t know how to stop crying, it feels too good coming out of my body and in this way, crying is a sort of fuckable thing—like beautiful girls or dead girls or Lucy who almost drowned here. I want to scream, I want to yell, “Look! Look what I can make, what I can shed for the world—how I can be something other than my beauty. I can be miserable and still matter, with an ugly, flushed face and smudged eyes and sadness weeping out of my body.”

I swim until the sun feels shy and hides itself behind the horizon. On my way back to shore, I take my time—a leisurely backstroke guides me to the shallow water where I pause and exhale as if to say, “I’m done now. I’ve cried and it’s over, and my friend isn’t coming back. And it’ll pass.” With the last of my strength, I get out of the ocean and throw myself onto the sand, loudly panting. The sand is cool on my back, and still rough enough to make me softer. It’s been feeling like life too has ground me into something mousier, more fearful. I wish I hadn’t let the men tell me what I

It is too dark to see in front of me, but I can hear the tide coming in. I listen to the waves build and deflate as they hit the shoreline. I will the water to meet my body, flush under me and pull me back out. I think of Lucy. I want to tell Lucy that I’m glad she didn’t die, that if it had to be a girl I’ve loved then I’m glad it was Annabel. Or that if anyone needs to drown at this beach, it’ll be me. And I know this is wrong, but it’s how I feel and I cannot change it. And I’m thinking of all the men who’ve touched me, or fucked me, and feeling self conscious about my mind, because it is so often an ugly place. But Lucy made her way into my body, my head, and my chest. She had seen it all—everything that was gross or warped or cruel, and she loved me in spite of it all.

My whole life, I’ve only ever wanted to be beautiful. I think what I need, what we all need, is to be loved in spite of it all.