In the Body of the World Read Online Free Page B

to ten?” In the beginning I just say 8. It feels like a good number and everyone will feel fine with me hitting the button. I am sure it is an exaggeration. But I don’t know. Maybe my pain is 8. It all depends on 10. Is 10 wailing, screaming out, bent-over near-dead pain? Then 8 must be close to that. It isn’t really 8 then, but the tubes and the bags account for something, if only just being totally freaked out. Maybe I am 6. The oxycodone keeps me floating, so really there is very little pain. Maybe the memory of the pain is now stored away, like winterclothes, together with the memory of the surgery that was wiped out by the amnesia drugs and, they say, will never come back. It would be awfully scary to be at some fancy dinner party or having sex when suddenly the vivid consuming flash of your stomach being sliced wide open like a fish or pig returns. Did I tell you they cut right through my belly button? Did I tell you I was always afraid of my belly button, afraid even to touch it? It gave me the serious creeps. When I would wash it or clean it with Q-tips, I would always have to hold my breath. Slicing through my umbilicus, the only evidence I was once connected to my mother, the place where her blood and my blood were one. And did I tell you she got very sick right after they cut through my belly button? Right after they removed my uterus, my ovaries, my cervix, fallopian tubes, lymph nodes, lymph channels, the top part of my vagina, and the tissue in the pelvic cavity that surrounds the cervix and all my mother parts. No, that comes later.
    What is most pressing now is, Why cancer in my uterus? Uterus: a hollow muscular organ in the pelvic cavity of female mammals, in which the embryo is nourished and develops before birth.
    I try to imagine my uterus accommodating this tumor the way it might have once held a baby. I almost had two of them. Babies. Is there a point to a uterus ifyou do not make a baby? Was the tumor a way of growing something? Was I growing a trauma baby?
    I remember years ago—when I was going through a period when I seemed to be sick all the time—a shrink friend saying to me in that knowing and slightly patronizing sorry-for-me way, “You somatize, Eve.” Somatize . It was one of those words like individuate. I had to look it up. Somatize : how the body defends itself against too much stress, manifesting psychological distress as physical symptoms in the stomach or nerves or uterus or vagina. I read that women who had suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse tended to somatize more.
    It turns out that somatization is related to hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus,(hysteria). Uterus = hysteria. They always called me hysterical in my family. Extreme feeling. Sarah Bernhardt. Intense. But what is extreme? Again, it depends on 10? I mean, what would be the appropriate level of emotional response to someone beating you daily or calling you jackass or stupid or molesting you. What would be the nonhysterical response to living in a world where so many are eating dirt and swimming in the sewage system in Port-au-Prince to unclog the drains and find plastic bottles to sell? What would be the appropriate nonhysterical response to people blindfoldingother people and walking them around naked on leashes or watching waving people being abandoned on rooftops in a flood? What would be the proper way to experience these things? Hysteria —a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know. A word that has so many implications—hysterical, out of control, insane, can’t take her seriously, raving. Hysteria is caused by suffering from a huge trauma where there is an underlying conflict. What was my conflict? Loving my mother and father, betraying my mother when my father molested me, wanting my father all to myself even if it hurt my mother? Witnessing and hearing the most horrific stories in the world inflicted on women’s bodies and being unable to stop it in spite of