Queen of the Owls Page 18

  She opened the door to the children’s bedroom, engulfed at once by the sweetness that seemed to radiate from their sleeping forms. Oh, she loved those two. It overwhelmed her, sometimes, the realization that she’d created these perfect little beings—well, she and Ben, as if they’d loved each other best through their children, a lavish and generous feast of love they couldn’t seem to bestow on each other.

  When Daniel was born, she had been giddy with happiness, entranced by watching him yawn and twist and flail those fierce little fists. She hadn’t cared about the sleepless nights, the howls, the spit-up, the spray of urine right in her eye or the mustard-yellow shit that oozed out of his diapers. It didn’t matter; she loved it all. His first gummy smile, the first time he held up his head and looked around. Impossible to imagine feeling the same way about a second child, but she had. Katie was a different kind of baby, delicate and watchful where Daniel had been round and exuberant, yet just as enchanting. She’d look right into Elizabeth’s eyes and melt against her chest with a blissful sigh.

  Elizabeth knelt by Katie’s bed. She still slept in a toddler bed, low to the ground, with padded bumpers made of pale green flannel. Katie was scrunched in the center of the mattress, her round little rump high in the air, the bunny under the chin. Tiny sleep sounds, like bubbles, punctuated the air.

  Elizabeth watched her daughter sleep, marveling at how complete she seemed. Was it easier when you were the only girl, no sister to get half the gifts? She and Andrea had divided the available traits—or maybe their mother had divided them, and they had taken what they were given. It was so long ago, she couldn’t remember how it started, but once established, the division was immutable. Lizzie’s our little bookworm and Andie’s our little pixie. Every time she ventured out of her assigned role, she had been reminded of who she was.

  She lifted a strand of hair from Katie’s cheek, smoothing it behind her ear. And what about Andrea? Had she ever resented being cast as the pixie, the daughter with the lightweight gifts? Elizabeth had always felt like the one consigned to the least attractive role, but maybe Andrea had felt that way too, barred from the more valuable spot because her sister had already claimed it. She longed, suddenly, to call Andrea back and ask if she’d ever wished they could trade roles.

  Then she sniffed, dismissing her own thought. Who would possibly want to be solemn straight-A Lizzie, when you could be a minx, a butterfly, a vamp?

  Either way, though, it was only half a person.

  As if sensing her mother’s presence, Katie stirred in her sleep. Elizabeth bent closer. “Ssshh,” she whispered. She put her palm on the curve of her daughter’s skull and bent her head until her lips brushed the pink-and-white edge of Katie’s ear.

  Don’t be half, she told her.

  Be everything.

  Anything less was wrong, the same as being nothing.

  Sixteen

  “I’m in a play,” Daniel cried, rushing toward Elizabeth when she arrived at Lucy’s house. “I’m going to be a super hero. With a cape.”

  “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. Lucy had, apparently, scooped the children into a whirlwind afternoon of costume-designing and song-learning.

  Katie pulled on her sleeve. “So fake,” she whispered.

  Elizabeth’s heart jumped. Her daughter was calling her a fake? Katie had seen through her lies about running a student tutorial and having to stay late for a special Tai Chi class?

  Of course not. What in the world was wrong with her? Snowflake, that’s what Lucy had told her.

  Elizabeth knelt and took Katie in her arms. “Yes, my darling. You’re going to be the most wonderful snowflake.” Then she turned to Daniel. “And you have a real cape? That’s awesome. What color?”

  “Yellow,” he said proudly. “And a sword.”

  “Wow. I can’t wait.” She hoisted Katie onto her hip and took Daniel’s hand. “Come, let’s rocket on home and you can tell Daddy about it too.”

  “Rex has a red cape, but I wanted yellow. Like gold.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Elizabeth laced her fingers through his.

  “Know what else?” Daniel said.

  “What else?”

  “The play is a surprise,” he confided. “For the parents.”

  “That makes it even better.”

  Elizabeth adjusted Katie’s legs around her hip and guided Daniel down the path to the curb where she had parked the car. “Into your car seat, my dove,” she told Katie, who let herself be tilted into place. Daniel climbed in after her.

  “Elizabeth!”

  It was Phoebe. Elizabeth suppressed a groan. The woman was always there, like a new part of Lucy’s child care program. Pick-up time, drop-off time. Wherever she turned, there was Phoebe’s too-cute asymmetrical haircut and insipid grin.

  Elizabeth lifted a hand in greeting, then checked Daniel’s seat belt and closed the car door. “We’re about to leave, but hi.” The message was obvious, maybe even rude, but Phoebe didn’t seem to notice.

  “Soon as I round up the twins, I’m right behind you.” Phoebe’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Isn’t it the sweetest thing ever, their little performance?”

  Elizabeth couldn’t help smiling. “The surprise for the parents?”

  “The very same. Good thing we don’t know about it.”

  “Lucy’s a genius. Somehow she’s managed to combine Star Wars, Robin Hood, and Frozen.” Elizabeth shook out her car keys.

  Phoebe kept talking. “Wine and cheese was fun, by the way. We should do it again. Maybe we could try a movie or a concert, or something like that?”

  Elizabeth gave a noncommittal murmur. “After the play’s over would probably be best.”

  “Sure. Let’s pencil in the Saturday after.”

  God, the woman was pushy. There was no getting out of this. Elizabeth threw her bag onto the passenger seat. “Sounds good. I’ll check with Ben, see what he’s up for.”

  “Oh, the men are useless.” Phoebe laughed. “Let’s you and me set it up. They won’t care what we do.”

  “All right. Fine.”

  “I’ll see what’s on and let you know.”

  Daniel rapped on the car window. Hurry up, or hi Rex’s mommy. Elizabeth gave an apologetic shrug. “I’d better get going. I’m running late today.”

  “Me too. See you later.” Phoebe blew a kiss and hurried into Lucy’s house.

  Elizabeth watched her disappear. Phoebe was probably used to people liking her, with her adorable combination of tech wizardry and foxy little skating skirt, but her cuteness was getting on Elizabeth’s nerves.

  She slid into the car, her eyes darting to the rearview mirror as she clicked the seatbelt into place. Daniel was flicking the wheels of a tiny sports car as Katie gazed out the window, singing to herself. Elizabeth wondered what she saw.

  Or didn’t see. The notion stopped her cold.

  Katie never saw her father wrap his arms around her mother or give her a spontaneous kiss or tell her she looked beautiful. She wouldn’t think that was something men and women did.

  Her daughter was already watching, taking note. This is how a woman acts. This is what a woman expects. This is what a woman is.

  Not a fake. Not a super-hero. Real.

  Two dozen students faced Elizabeth the next afternoon, eager to talk about art, power, and the feminists who had incorporated their own bodies into their work. Her Body as Art, that was today’s topic. It was the highlight of the syllabus, and no one was absent.

  Naomi’s challenge rang in Elizabeth’s ears. “I’m asking you, specifically. How far would you go to use your own body to make a statement about what you believe? How far, if everyone knew it was your body?”

  How far, indeed.

  Elizabeth surveyed the class. “Since the early 1970s,” she began, “feminist artists have been challenging our notion of what constitutes art by disrupting the distinction between creator and creation. By using their own bodies as the medium—the canvas, as it were,
the clay—they’re stepping into the art itself, insisting on their right to be an active part of the viewer’s experience.” She paused, leaning against the oak desk. “A lot of them did that by taking the objectification of women to an extreme. It’s the opposite of what you might expect. Why do you suppose they did that?”

  “To take control.” It was Naomi, before anyone else could answer.

  Elizabeth turned her head. The spikes in the girl’s hair were now a neon orange. “How so?”

  “It’s like, if we do it, instead of letting you do it, then we own it, not you.” Above her nostril, the jewel sparkled.

  “Good. Any other ideas?”

  More students raised their hands. “To show how ridiculous it is to objectify women like that?”

  “To show they didn’t care?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “They’re trying to shock the viewer, aren’t they? And then, through that shock, dismantle our notions of the feminine, undo our perception of a woman’s body as a thing.”

  “People don’t want to admit they have those perceptions, but they do.” Naomi again. “When you take it to an extreme, you can see it.”

  “Well said.” Elizabeth flipped on the projector. “Let’s look at four women from four different countries, all working with conceptual photography and feminist performance, back in the 1970s. As you’ll see, none of their work is static. It’s in movement. A chronicle of transformation.”

  The first slide lit up the screen. Her Body as Art, Act, and Agency. “Let’s see how these artists used their bodies as the vehicle for what they wanted to say.” She waited, letting the students settle in. “It was a rejection of the way women’s bodies had always been the passive subject of male art—from Titian in the 1500s to Renoir in the 1800s, and all the way to the present. Men were the artists, the makers. Women were the models, the subjects, like apples or boats.”

  She thought of Weston’s nudes, faceless and exposed, stretched out on the sand devoid of agency—worse, really, than the voluptuous Venus of Urbino, or Goya’s coy and strangely awkward Naked Maja, or the fleshy pink bathers of Rembrandt and Renoir.

  Georgia, unlike all of them, had claimed her portraits. Stieglitz may have composed the photographs, but it was Georgia who entered them and made them hers.

  When I make a photograph, I make love.

  Elizabeth bit her lip. A ripple of longing filled her body.

  She brought up the next slide. “Renate Eisenegger,” she said, “from West Germany.” A woman’s face filled the screen, eyes darkened like a raccoon’s, mouth taped shut. “Isolation, 1972. Eisenegger started by taping cotton over her mouth, depriving herself of speech.” Elizabeth clicked through a series of eight pictures. “In each frame, you can see how her senses are eliminated. Each one, in turn, is bound, restricted, obscured. Even her hands. Finally, her face is gone. She can’t take in impressions, and she can’t act. She’s completely dehumanized.”

  Elizabeth waited for the class to absorb the final disturbing image. “It was meant to convey a message about the oppression of women, but apparently it was a profound experience for Eisenegger herself. She said, afterward, that it made her feel as if she’d been purified, free from everything that had gone before, just by submitting to the enactment—which she herself had devised, of course.”

  One of the students recoiled. “That’s creepy.”

  Another student waved her arm, the girl with the blonde buzz-cut on one side of her face. “Objectifying the body means de-personalizing it, cutting yourself off from it, right? So I don’t get it. You’re saying these artists did it on purpose, to make a point?”

  “Yes, Exactly.”

  “They disconnected from their own bodies?”

  “They did it to make a point, just as you said. Because they thought it had been done to them.” She pulled up the next slide. “Ewa Partum, from Poland.”

  Partum’s face, grave and Madonna-like, was bisected down the middle. “In a 1974 performance that she called Change, Partum had a makeup artist work on half her naked body in front of a live audience. By artificially aging only half her face, Partum wanted to show— and protest—the standards of beauty, established and perpetuated by men, that equated desirability with youth.” Elizabeth angled her head to study the photo. “She plastered the image on posters all over Poland, with the words: ‘My problem is the problem of a woman.’”

  Naomi gave a loud sniff. “1974? Nothing’s changed.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  Naomi gave Elizabeth a secretive look. “In general. Not for people who aren’t afraid to stand up and be seen.”

  Elizabeth wanted to ask Naomi what she meant but the class was waiting for her to continue. She turned back to the screen. “Let’s look at the next artist. Karin Mack. Austria.”

  The slide showed a 1950s-style woman against a floral background, cradling a jar of jam tenderly against her cheek. Pins pierced her face and body.

  “Demolition of an Illusion, 1977. Mack used self-portraiture to investigate the constructed self. We can see how the false image of a contented housewife is systematically torn to shreds until only a few bent pins remain.” Elizabeth clicked through five more slides. “In her preface to the exhibition catalogue, she wrote: ‘The death of the image, the destruction of the photograph, is at once the end of an illusion and an act of liberation.’”

  The girl with the buzz-cut waved her hand again. “That’s cool. It’s like she’s demolishing people’s illusion that women love domesticity. You know, the way she’s hugging the jam?”

  “You think the nails are supposed to mean she’s a martyr?”

  “I think they’re, like, sewing pins. Destroyed by domesticity.”

  “One more,” Elizabeth said. “Hannah Wilke, from the United States.” The next slide was a collage of ten images of the same woman—in a cowboy hat, sunglasses, necktie—her naked torso covered with darkish blobs. “Wilke’s body art, S.O.S. Scarification Object Series, 1974 through 1982.”

  “What’s that stuff on her body?” one of the students asked. “Does she have a disease?”

  “It’s chewing gum,” Elizabeth said. “If you look closely, you can see that each piece is folded into a shape meant to resemble female genitalia. She was juxtaposing a kind of pin-up girl seductiveness with tribal scarification. The idea was to invite the male gaze while disrupting it at the same time.”

  “It doesn’t work,” Naomi said, folding her arms. “She’s too gorgeous. You can’t disrupt anything if people can’t get past how hot you look.”

  “That was exactly the problem Wilke encountered. No one wanted to take her seriously, especially when she started using her own nude body, because they said she was too beautiful. They accused her of being narcissistic and inauthentic. They said her self-portraits looked more like Playboy centerfolds than feminist nudes.”

  Naomi flicked a strand of orange hair from her cheek. “When you put it that way, it’s not fair. It’s not her fault she’s so great looking. It’s just another way of dismissing her.”

  “What do you think?” Elizabeth asked, looking around. “Is the body simply a container for the person inside, or does it have its own meaning?”

  Naomi gave Elizabeth another private look. “You know better than any of us.”

  “So what did she do?” someone asked. “Hannah Wilke?”

  Elizabeth returned to her notes. “Let me read this to you. It’s what Wilke said when critics complained that her body was too beautiful.” She read slowly. “‘People give me this bullshit of: what would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous? What difference does it make? Gorgeous people die, as do the stereotypical ugly. Everybody dies.’” She looked up from the paper. “Wilke was oddly prescient, as it turned out. Because the critics shut up about all that in the early 1990s when she began documenting the ravages of chemotherapy on her own cancer-ridden body.”

  Elizabeth could feel the class’s stunned silence. She clicked the remote. The next slide showe
d a bald, naked woman on a commode, her body sagging forward. She clicked again. A woman with a bloated and bandaged torso, her left breast clamped with an IV. A naked woman with gauze pads taped to her hips, hands framing an absurd flower arrangement. A bald head, palms covering the mouth and cheeks—a visage that could be man or woman, old or young, it didn’t matter. The face of someone dying, solemn and terrified and resigned.

  “When Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma, she decided to document her degenerating body in a series she called Intra-Venus. The last photo in the series was taken in August of 1992. She died in January of 1993.”

  “Jesus,” a girl whispered.

  Elizabeth’s voice was quiet too. “I think Wilke just wanted to be seen. It wasn’t political any more. It was personal.”

  Naomi shook her head. “The political is always personal.”

  “I suppose it’s up to the individual,” Elizabeth said. “If they want to be taken that way.”

  “No,” Naomi answered. “You’re responsible for the political impact of whatever you do.” She lifted her chin, pointing the jewel at Elizabeth like a laser. “Anyway, you have nothing to worry about on that score.”

  Elizabeth’s discomfort was acute. She had no idea what Naomi was doing, with her hints and innuendos, but she wasn’t going to take the bait. She looked at her watch. “I see we’re out of time. So, for our next class, pick an image that speaks to you from what I showed today—the Power Point will be on the class web page—and write a paragraph about what you think the artist is trying to denounce and what she’s trying to affirm.”

  She gathered her papers, shut down the podium. She was done talking about women who had incorporated their bodies into their art.

  Georgia hadn’t stuck gum or pins or tape on her body. She’d shown it to one man. That was enough.

  It was Sunday morning, the day Elizabeth had promised Andrea that she would play undercover agent at the coat drive. Now that Sunday was here, the ruse filled her with distaste. Leave Michael in peace, she thought, irritated with her sister and with herself for getting involved. Why did Andrea have to know everything her husband was up to?