Notable American Women (12 page)

Would It Hurt If You Mimed Your Father?

Miming a member of one's own family (ambush) can create an interesting behavior minus that can nearly last forever, particularly if the family can work as a team to mime one another's behavior (a figure eight), doing so in real time throughout their daily lives, swapping roles during those hard hours between sleep sessions. A camouflage mime occurs when several family members suddenly mime a single person (bull's-eye), as when parents mime their son, for instance, and do not relent or admit that they are doing so; this is also called “overmiming,” or “love,” and can cause a very durable behavior minus in the boy whose behavior is being imitated, particularly if he goes by the name Ben Marcus. The overmime absolves the boy from being himself, given that his behavior is so well covered in the actions of others. He can watch his parents acting as he would, imitating him, until his head and heart become so quiet and small that quite possibly no one in the world can see him, and he can make his exit from all visible life without report.

Dates

1852

WOMEN IN MIDDLE DENVER seize celebration rights to the annual Festival of Stillness, previously observed and dominated by men. They travel in groups to mountainsides and forests outside of town, drink girls' water, attire themselves in stiff sheets of weighted cotton, and seek a final, frozen posture, hoping apparently that the mountain weather will fossilize their bodies into a “one true pose,” to represent them for all time. Their bodies are displayed in a traveling exhibit called “Women's Behavior Statues,” and teenage girls are asked to study and rehearse the more basic positions. The slogan “Action is harm” is coined that year and the Festival of Stillness becomes a dominant women's holiday.

1934

Early Ohio weather is first captured and preserved, then played back later through a simple AM radio. These radios can be taken on picnics to the lake, for customized weather and simple wind performances, benefiting the other families parked there to eat sandwiches and cast pebbles into the water. If several families stationed on blankets along the shore play their radios in a simulcast, calibrating the tilt of their antennas to focus their broadcast just over the water, the sky appears stronger, the children's words are clearly enunciated, and the currents in the water ripple more realistically. Every family has a favorite weather style, and a radio that will play it back for them. Sometimes it sounds like the shortest words of the American language, in particular the first names that are used to summon people up from sleep, to groom their heads with a softly blowing oil, preparing them to be addressed by the largest person in the house, often the mother or father.

1939

Long Island physician Valerie James, thirty-six, and a sister begin a practice devoted to what they call “Women's Fuel.” She has studied anatomy with a local medical group for three years but is otherwise untrained. Before she develops her notorious line of medical drinks for women, the James Liquids, or Water for Girls (1955), she and her sister will attempt several techniques of altering the disposition of women: the water chair, bolted to the floor of a medicinal pool, which holds a woman underwater until her lungs give out and “expel from the body all toxicity”; a sleep sock slung over the doorway, that women might sleep “in the fashion that they stand”; high volumes of wind shot at a woman's body to “massage the senses”; and endurance speaking (or language fasting), in which the woman speaks rapidly until collapse, to “deeply fatigue the head and free it of language pollutants.” Only the sleep sock, which enforces a female sleeping posture, will prove to have lasting credibility, although the language fast is adopted and modified by Sernier, who requires his students to undergo it before attending his lectures.

1966

A clear sock is devised by the body-sleeve specialist Ryman that will protect a woman's head from men's language, the so-called weapon of the mouth. The sock also works to block the entrance of television and radio transmissions, certain man-made aromas, and men's wind. Because breathing is difficult when wearing the Ryman sock, fainting often results, and it is through this accident that the Listening Group discovers what it will term the “revelatory power of willful fainting,” and adopts the belief that regular drops in consciousness allow women to hear something deeply secret in the air. The Ryman sock will be fitted posthumously to the heads of dead Silentists, to aid their attainment of a possible women's afterlife.

1968

The first official version of the “Promise of Stillness,” a vow against motion, appears in January in Albany. The document argues that motion and speech disturb the atmosphere and must cease before a “world storm” is generated that could destroy America. The Women's Congress, which fled to Albany from Boston in December, has commissioned local radio announcer Katherine Livingston, twenty-six, to risk her job by reading the document on the airwaves while, throughout the country, the signatories take their final positions, mostly in their homes, before ceasing all motion and speech. Emily Walker, the most vocal of those women to take the promise of stillness, issues a statement, declaring, “If I die, it will not be of hunger. I am not hungry or thirsty. I refuse the false promise of motion. I stop.” She dies in six days after shedding a brittle layer of skin, the Walker Pelt, which hangs still in a New Jersey home. Her cause of death is listed as starvation. In the years to follow, Walker Pelts will be marketed to families as small body rugs to be thrown over children, either to immobilize them or to reduce the falsity of their motion.

1971

Silentists attack Fort Blessing, Texas, July 19 and kill five members of the Listening Group before kidnapping seventeen-year-old Caroline Ann Parker. She will live peacefully with the Silentists for four years (until “rescued” against her will by the Texas Mounted Police), marry Quiet Boy Bob Riddle, and stage spectacular, noiseless demonstrations in the Texas desert. As a professional Listener, Parker will be employed by the Silentists to discover an American territory with broad parameters of silence, a region where silence will not only be possible but required. They will settle in Ohio.

1972

Martha Ferris develops Women's Sign Language and tours the country, demonstrating the technique at schools and churches, proposing a women's bilinguality that will not only allow for private utterances but possibly enable new forms of thought not available under current systems of grammar and syntax. Her younger sister, Katherine Ferris-Watley, has pierced her own eardrums during a local show of silence and refuses to learn American Sign Language, keeping her hands swaddled in cloth, and often “signing in tongues,” a form of gibberish sign language thought to have religious significance. It is from Katherine's blunt and frustrated semaphore that Sign Language for Large Hands emerges, a system of forceful prop-aided sign language meant to be read from a great distance, utilized by Silentists who have injured or burned their own hands in protest but who still must enact a basic language. Women's Sign Language will be rejected by the deaf communities, since much of it requires that the hands of a woman be pinned against her hips while she jumps and spins in the air, actions that deaf women, with their compromised sense of balance, are unable to perform safely. The Listening Group, seeking further difference from the Silentists, will establish a new but troubled relationship with the deaf communities, believing that their skin is receiving the sound that their heads cannot, leading to the Deaf Pelt Thefts of 1974, an action of massive scalping and skin theft against deaf persons.

1980

Sernier kills Burke and is acquitted. He says that if he had it to do over again, he would have killed Burke more slowly. He wishes he could “continue killing Burke.” Burke's family silently walks through their Akron neighborhood while people jeer at them with the chant “Burke is dead.” Burke's scholarly works are no longer widely stocked in bookstores. The grammatical tense that Burke has proposed—Burke—is rejected by the Omaha Language Council on the grounds that it renders improbable things too plausible, because it “makes no linguistic distinction between what can and cannot happen. ” In August, Sernier's students attack seven men and women who were said to have been students of Burke, forcing them into a Thompson Box, a clear cell with a speech tube attached, where the input of language disrupts the rhythm of their bodies, leading to seizures and ultimate physical arrest. Sernier applauds his students in an editorial, asking readers not to forget that he killed Burke. He promises that the word “Burke” will hereafter create a “lasting wound to the skin.” Jane Dark promptly adopts the word as her first language weapon. She demonstrates that by shouting “Burke!” at a small dog, it will not be able to walk and will soon collapse with fatigue.

Names

[Erin]

THE ERIN IS A KEY GIRL in many American houses. It is often misnamed Julie, Joanne, or Samantha, and sometimes it is clothed as a man. As a man, it is still beautiful, although less visible, and prone to lose color during sleep. It makes love and has slender legs, while persons that see it are eager to palm the spot where the woman parts would be, to sweep and pan their hands over the heat of the man that is hiding her. Persons pry a finger into its mouth and feel weak and sweet in the legs, deriving pleasure through this gateway into Erin, breaking through the husk of a man's body into an inner body named Erin, sometimes breaking past that also to touch at the smooth core and stain their hands on it. There are text versions of Erin, as well. Reading them is similar to seeing Erin. It takes a day to read the full version of Erin, and the process is exhausting. The text cannot be memorized and sometimes the ending comes abruptly and frightens the reader. The first lusciously bright pile of Erin that the others feed from is located in Denver and kept warm by a man named Largeant. It must be swallowed quickly or it will cut and wound the mouth.

Statistics for Erin:
My sister refused all clothing but an old beige throw rug. She crawled around under the rug, mostly at night. No real language was exhibited, though she made rudimentary attempts at Burke. She seemed concerned to exhibit clean geometries with her body beneath the rug: circles, triangles, squares. We could not get her to wear a sleep sock. If she fainted, she did so without our knowledge.

[Tina]

The Tina will die. It will emerge in Chicago and reside in chipped white houses of wood and warped glass. It will die quietly. When it does not emerge in Chicago, there will be something uncertain and weak to its shape, a rough tongue, and hair that a father has unjustly handled. It will die on a Tuesday and the hands will go blue. There is promise to the newer Tina shape. It is blackened through ancestral practice, but it can be watery in color. There is a milky storm nearby this Tina figure, and girl versions often dive into the heart of the wind for cleansings. Nothing by way of an answer is ever found in it. On its back is a mark, a freckle, a blister, a scar.

Statistics for Tina:
My sister walked upright and spoke basic English. Her face approximated gestures of “happiness.” Her nocturnal actions were mostly low-level postures of sleep. Excellent wind resistance. She showed confusion when we stopped calling her Tina. She had already decorated some of her belongings with this name.

[Patricia]

It isn't the most willing shape to swim or lunge or use force to motion over the road. The body prefers the easiness of a chair and a stick to point at what it likes. It is most fully in the Patricia style in the evenings, with brittle hairings and admirable mouth power. They have a Patricia everywhere now, sometimes many. There is no conflict in an abundance of it, which can be considered the chief difficulty. There are many and yet it seems as though there are none. It will be born in America and will exist most successfully as a child. Often the Patricia system lives well into the last posture before demise, beyond the view of childhood. Age falls all over it and makes it walk down into the ground and sleep as though it lived in a grave. It calls out from its grave phone, but the ringing sounds only like a sleeping dog and is ignored. It is then allowed to witness itself as an earlier thing, a thing best seen young. The older Patricia fights off the young girl Patricia. It will kill it down again and again, achieving nothing, but killing it nevertheless, creating space for something else that is new and wildly bodied. The young Patricia eats a large bowl of corn for pleasure. It weeps at the sight of water.

Statistics for Patricia:
My sister was mostly pliant as Patricia. She willingly posed in several behavior statues for my mother. No resistance to the Brown Hat, which allowed her to converse fluently with several of my mother's assistants. They spoke a language that sounded like slow laughter.

[Carla]

There are fabrications that go forth under the Carla tag. They are smallish and brown-hued. There is an actual Carla at a school, and it will learn to beat away the fake occasions of its own number. It will see one coming up the road, one little brown Carla, with fingers like American bread and a hairdo cut right out of the afternoon. The real Carla circles the false object and places fire on its living parts. Many times, an American fire contains glittered fragments of a combusted Carla. There are fires in Ohio and girls are leading their dead parts into them. Every morning in every city young women are seen chancing a look back down the road. Sometimes a sluggish fat-skinned fake is sulking back there, waiting to take over and fail in Carla's place. When the Carla makes comfort with boys under trees and farther out on the landscape, there is an apology to the movement of its hands. It touches a boldly upright kid's penis and then palms the dust, the soot, the soil, feeling for the tremor of legs approaching.

Statistics for Carla:
A name regularly used on my sister. She showed frequent bloating and could not fit into the sleep sock. A Ryman sock was used with much discomfort. Her evening mimes were striking as Carla. Often she could calm the entire household.

[Nancy]

I saw one at a bed. It kneeled; it leaned. There was hair and a body and no such thing as weather, no window broken onto a wall, nor water rushing behind us, or a road to remind me I could leave. Something like this is waiting to happen for everyone. A room somewhere sweetened with a Nancy system. You can approach it and examine its teeth. They are the color of an old house and have chewed their way through something—a trap, a net, a man's hand. I let my arms operate like they did when I was a little boy. I “held” it. It did not bite; it did not speak. I stumbled. It gestured for me to rest. The Nancy shape cannot be detached from the woman it stands for. It can be released, to drag a bed—from a rope looped over its hips— into the city, putting to sleep the visitors that approach it and speaking to them certain facts, certain secrets as they dream, until they can rise from the sheets and move away from it into the distance, toward an area lacking all Nancy, dull and shoe-colored and simple, an American city with other kinds of “people,” and life beyond restriction.

Statistics for Nancy:
No skin was shed after my sister used this name. My father repeatedly scoured her body with the pelt brush, to no avail. The only language she exhibited was to say “Nancy” until she collapsed with fatigue. A highly harmful name. Possibly a harmful word. None of us enjoyed calling her this.

[Julie]

There is probably no real Julie.

[Linda]

From 1984 until the winter of 1987, an absence of significant registered Lindas spurred a glut of naming activity in that category by parents eager to generate unique-seeming figures into the American landscape and thus receive credit for an original product, the Linda. The resulting children are emerging mostly out of Virginia, with a possible leader, or group of leaders, working through Richmond. Examples have been seen in the West—small and shockingly white, with delicate eyes— but they have been in poor health and have not lasted. Weather cuts them down and hides their lives until it is too late, and they die. Sometimes rain is blamed. Sometimes nothing but wind. The adult community—too old to register their names and therefore unable to receive the benefits of official status— has nevertheless been supportive of the surge. The tall and stately Lindas, with plenty of money and a husband, have politely vacated their homes, allowing the new Linda children in for full access to their men, their things, their lives. The older ones enter a sack and wait.

Statistics for Linda:
High-level exhaustion during the Linda phase. My sister showed bewilderment and frequently made evasive maneuvers. Quick on her feet and difficult to catch. Often we could not find her. She seemed inclined to play dead. A nonuseful name for her. Highly inaccurate. May have caused permanent damage.