Notable American Women Read Online Free Page B

quiet American citizen, teaching her the new silence. The girls would form a line and slice through the air like the arm of a carnival ride. A heavyset young lady anchored the unit, while an eggy little handful of a girl flew in the windy end position. If she lifted high enough on the swinging limb of bodies, she twirled her rope and created vocalizations up there in the air, grabbing leaves and singing, often catching scratches about her face from tree branches that didn’t much abide her kind of flight. Sometimes she zoomed by my window and I would reach out and try to touch her, like sticking my fingers into a fan. At night, I could hear the hum of bodies whipping through the air as the girls waited outside for instructions from Dark.
    Except Dark did not speak at night because the darkness lowered her voice so much, it frightened her women. She slept in a sentry harness outside my mother’s bedroom door, her hands dangling like roots, wrapped in the translucent linen that was starting to fill our house, baffling every sound-making thing until nothing more than the smallest whimpers could escape from it. She rested and kept watch. Even sleeping, she muted our house with her long, soft body, a silence that lasted well into the morning.
    Ms. Dark came into our house like an animal who owned something. She walked upright and carried a scary cloth. When she approached some of our furniture or pottery— including old bowls my sister had made, which held her private smelling salts—Dark held the cloth to her mouth, swallowing and coughing at once in a gesture of inventory. For each piece of our property, she raised the cloth to her lips and worked her mouth into it, as though it were a radio she could talk to. I tried to hide from her, but her girls set up so many picks and body barriers that she found me at once and the cloth rose again to her mouth—a dirty white linen, like a rag from my father’s shed. All I could see of her face were her flat eyes, puddles of oily color in her head. My mother accompanied her, held the hem of her shirt, and whispered a mouth-straining message into Dark’s hood that sounded like the end of a sick animal’s breath. I felt sorry for my mother, whose neck wrinkled up in back like an old man’s face. From behind, she looked like someone else’s father. I had not heard her whisper before, and it sounded as though she might be in trouble, wheezing at the high, desperate end of her breath, where words sound like a failing engine. Dark stuffed the cloth between her lips as she listened, and for a moment it sounded as though she were sobbing, because a heaving arose from within the hood, a stuttering intake of breath seizing her shoulders as if she were feeding from her hands. But when the cloth finally revealed her face and she moved once again among our furnishings, Dark’s mouth was dry and bloodless, rimmed with a powdery saliva, and she herself seemed as much without feeling as anyone ever had been in our house.
    I stood still as the retinue continued to survey the objects of our home. Two girls slid toward me and pinned a small tag to my pajama top. Their fingers were buttery on my neck and their hair scratched at me like wire. The tag was fastened just under my chin, and I had to scrunch up to see the long code embedded on it, a set of numbers and letters spelling nothing I had read before. I touched the symbols, and they made more sense under my fingers, but before I could figure out a message, my hand was slapped away. Dark lowered her arms as she passed me, and for a second I could smell the cloth go by my face.
    The reception carried on in this manner for far too long. When Dark arrived at a window, she took slow postures there in the light—reducing herself so much in space that another woman could have been tarped around her—and we were all supposed to wait there as though we were looking at a painting that might suddenly prove