for Helen, and all women made mad
South Holland, Illinois | 1936
Her lips hovered over my jawline, gliding morning breath over my chin. Despite what had become routine—a ritual, even—time together felt rare. I tried to capture it the night before. I painted her, us, how we intertwined these evenings and mornings, my bedsheets bundled between us.
“Where should we go today, love?” she asked. She twirled a strand of short hair between her fingers and blinked her eyes open. This was always her question—in my bed, in her ward cot, even, I now imagine, in her mahogany home. For Leila, love was everywhere, everyone. Abundant as the shadows cast by my bedroom’s grated windows, our kaleidoscoped cage.
“We should drop you off,” I said. The clock ticked on the table next to my easel. We had thirty minutes. Just enough time to lace up, repair, prepare. Leila reached for her accoutrements. Her hands trembled. She assembled:
A corset kept her right size.
Her hair fascinator evaded eye contact.
A new, ballooning blouse gave her shape.
“Gigot sleeves,” the sales clerk told us the prior afternoon, pointing at the hefty fabric. “Our modern take on a Victorian classic. It means leg of mutton in French. Don’t you see it?” I nodded. The sleeves resembled a sheep’s hind legs: billowing at the top, taut at the bottom. Leila paid, slowly unfolding each dollar. The clerk fidgeted, eyeing Leila’s patient purchase. But that was the point for Leila: a halo she wielded, demanded. Noticing.
Morning shadows flickered across Leila’s back as she pulled the shirt over her head. I helped her secure the final buttons at the nape of her neck. I turned her to face me.
“No, no,” she said. “There’s no time.”
We walked the short distance to the crosswalk beside her home, their home, him. She went to their door; I remained. This I knew: Letting her go was giving her away.
“Where should we go today, love?” she asked him as she entered their building, his arms. For a moment, he looked my way, but not at me. The door swung shut.
Noticing, noticing, noticing. Neighbors and doctors alike had been noticing Leila for some time. Her shorn-too-close hair. Even the way her lip curled up, one said. Her condition had many names: proclivity, eccentric nature, contemporary habits.
Hours after I left that crosswalk, he sent her away—”the only way,” I’d heard he said. I kept on, a needle always in my hand. Seamstress was the closest I could get to artist in daylight. A working woman wasn’t a treasure like Leila. A working woman wasn’t noticed. Any idle time after the sun disappeared, I painted, I read, I sought, I sorted. Leila’s life came to me in spurts.
“A tomb for the living,” one reporter wrote of the Dunning Asylum.
“An open secret,” another wrote of mounting exposés.
“Indeed causing the very thing it meant to cure,” wrote another.
In five months’ time, they discharged Leila. The doctors, all eminent in their fields, agreed: Remarkable progress, her release papers read. Signs of remission. Symptoms reduced, but patient requires careful observation, should perversion reemerge.
She came for me just after the dinner hour. She rapped her knuckles at my door. Then her nails, trilling her favorite rhythm, a song she’d hummed in my bed all those months ago. She knew I was there, knew I could hear. I opened my door, needle in hand, my workday unfinished.
“Where should we go today, love?” she asked. Her arms still donned gigot sleeves. But the shirt wore her. Once-bulbous cotton hung slack, soaked with blood. Crimson dropped onto my floor. Fabric, tight around her forearms, split open like mandolined beets. Her eyes fluttered, her body flayed.
“Stitch me up?” she asked. She lowered to her knees, her skirt soaking up the fountain she’d made. Blood was nothing like I’d imagined. A deep maroon drenched the ground. Inky. I looked at my needle, then at Leila.
“No, no,” I said. “There’s no time.”
She sank farther towards the floor. I remained upright. Her collar wilted to one side, the top button undone. No one had helped her dress. With Leila’s signature patience, blood crept onto and into her clothes, saturating the shirt. I walked to my desk, drew circles in the rotary—that number she’d written on scrap paper, just in case. I called him. He made quick and sterile work of things, of her.
“The only way,” he said. The bleach covering my floors smelled like chlorine, like hospital corridors.
The local paper made it fit to print—a hysterical incident. Her, the affliction. Me, almost her victim. Pages inked, read, forgotten. Leila, buried.
I see it everywhere now: muddy, jammy blood. Last week, I went to the butcher for some lamb chops. Back home, I seared, served, ate them all—belly full of my own gigot.
To keep her here, to fill my hollow nights, I paint. Where should we go today? I grab my brush. Love, we can go anywhere.
