for Helen, and all women made mad
South Shore Chicago | 1936
Her lips hovered over my jawline, gliding morning breath onto my chin. Despite what had become routine over the last year—a ritual, even—time together felt rare. I tried to capture it on my canvas last night. I painted her, us, 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 now, I imagine, in her mahogany home. For Leila, love was everywhere, everyone. Abundant as the shadows cast by my boarding-house 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:
The girdle helped her hang correctly.
Her hair fascinator softened searching eyes.
A new blouse ballooned her figure.
“Gigot sleeves,” the sales clerk had told us the prior afternoon, pointing at the hefty fabric. “Our modern take on a Victorian classic. It means leg of mutton in French. See?” The sleeves billowed at the top and pulled taut at the bottom. Leila paid, slowly unfolding each dollar. The clerk had 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 slipped on my dress and stockings, walked until my stomach met her spine, and fastened the button at the nape of her neck. I turned her to face me.
“No, no,” she said. “There’s no time.”
We walked to the crosswalk before her lakeside house, 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. He looked towards the lamppost inches from my shoulder, but only, always, just the lamppost. He swung their door shut.
Noticing. Neighbors and doctors alike had been noticing Leila for some time. Her shorn-too-close hair. The way her lip curled up, one said. Her condition had many names: proclivity, eccentric nature, contemporary habits.
Hours after I left the crosswalk, he sent her away.
“The only way,” I’d heard he said.
I kept on, a needle in my hand. Tailoring was the closest I could get to art in daylight. A working woman wasn’t a treasure like Leila. A working woman wasn’t noticed. 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 Asylum1.
“An open secret,” another wrote of mounting exposés.
“Indeed causing the very thing it meant to cure,” wrote another2.
In three months, they discharged Leila. The doctors, 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. Her nails trilled her favorite rhythm, a song she would hum in my bed. This rendition pittered rapid and off beat. 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 now, the shirt wore her. Once-bulbous cotton hung slack and bloodied. Crimson dropped onto my floor. Fabric, tight around her forearms, split open like mandolined beets. Her eyes fluttered. She had flayed her body. I saw it glimmer as my needle caught the entry light. Leila held a pocketknife, wet with her vital fluid.
“Stitch me up?” she asked. She lowered to her knees, skirt soaking up her red rain. Her blood looked nothing like I’d imagined. A deep maroon collected in puddles. I looked at my needle, then at Leila.
“No, no,” I said. “There’s no time.”
She sank further while 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 and 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.
“The only way,” he said. He poured bleach over my floors. It 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 her everywhere now: muddy, jammy blood. Last week, I went to the butcher for some lamb chops. Back home, I seared, served, and ate them all. 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.
1 Loerzel, Robert. “Dunning Asylum, a ‘Tomb for the Living.’” WBEZ, 30 Apr. 2013, www.wbez.org/curious-city/2013/04/30/the-story-of-dunning-a-tomb-for-the-living.
2 D’Agostino, Rachel, and Sophia Dahab. “Hearing Voices.” The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2022, librarycompany.org/hearingvoices-online/section3.html.
