ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
The series runs weekly, most often on Tuesday afternoons. Each week, we will highlight different voices and stories.
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Undomesticated Dances
Andrea Bianchi
What were the steps to that Sunday-morning bedroom dance? You spun the tall spine of the floor lamp into a dramatic dip and let her crash. Arced your palm forward through the air to meet my cheek, arched my neck backward to the hardwood planks by my long hair. Box-stepped to block the doorframe so I could not pass. And I—waltzing right, left foot atop our bed, jazz fingers grasping, shaking to part the door—could only try to improvise.
*
I’d made up choreography before, shuffling disparate letters together like mismatched dancing pairs in spelling lessons with my mother when I was a child, beside her at the kitchen table for her makeshift homemade school. She diagnosed those misspellings as stubbornness, then took the stick and splintered it across my small behind. Ten more for tears. And ten additional for the sin of silent angriness. The bruises, blooming purple to the span of a parent’s palm, stemmed from a bike accident, my father said. Or perhaps I fell while dancing, untaught, on my roller skates.
*
Little girls, practicing for ballet classes that I had never had, twirled in the theater aisles at the intermission of contemporary, ballet, and jazz companies’ performances where I secured a solo seat almost every Sunday after our bedroom dance. What were the steps? I did not know the difference between a plié and a pirouette. But through the beauty of the bodies’ movements, maybe I thought that I could grasp the motives of your motions, more monstrous and yet similar in desperateness. That turning to the physical, the corporeal, when words—fleeing, dancing—run out.
*
I took your words for figures of speech, like the figure eight of a figure skater, dancing a representation of the literal. “I’m going to kill you,” leaping, like a grand jeté, into the air across the high-top table at that bar. “I’m going to break your neck,” jabbing like your finger, down at me on the floor of our first apartment on moving day. I looked up as if I were still a child, when I heard my mother’s frequent, empty threat: “I’m going to wring your neck.”
*
My mother’s fingers danced across my neck’s bumpy vertebrae as she braided my brown hair daily down my back. Sometimes she’d rest my spine, bony against her breasts, or hold me in her lap. Like the way you held me almost every day when I awoke and quickstepped down the hallway to your chair, where I tucked my legs into your sturdy chest, my nose into your neck, and then you smiled and rocked my body in a slow, close dance.
*
Maybe the intimacy of possessing—holding a body inside a womb, entering a body at its opening—confuses categories, so that a caress can turn, almost by accident, into a stroke.
*
The first time that your fist struck my stomach and dislodged from my diaphragm the laughter we had exchanged until your defeat in that game of chess in the coffee shop, the sudden—and literal—punch in the gut felt familiar. What were the steps back in memory? To the sadomasochistic experiment of my younger years, when pinches, punches, and restricted air bonded pain and pleasure in a slow, macabre dance? The difference then was that just one word would arrest the whip. I could enact a control I’d never had against my mother’s manipulations of the flexile dowel rod, arcing through the air with its whooshing wind, knocking out mine.
*
I thought my mother would smile at me if only I were beautiful, beside her in my kitchen chair. Like on my barstool beside the man I danced with after you, when in an argument he said, “I want to punch you in the face right now.” Figure of speech, I told myself. But maybe my figure, my weak-chinned profile, somehow provoked these blows. And so I asked a surgeon to correct what I never could in the bathroom mirror of my girlhood home, when I could only wash my pale face and put a ribbon in my hair.
*
Maybe my disfigurement was deeper, though—my shouted rant that Sunday morning, while I rouged my cheeks and curled my hair, enraging you. Bitch, cunt, emotional, you said. Original sin, my mother believed. “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him,” I memorized from the Bible to forgive her stick. Later, I repeated to myself the killer’s cruel eulogy for the irksome old lady in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “She would of been a good woman,” he says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I’d never understood that line until the flatness of your slap leveled out my words and smoothed the erratic dances of my emotions.
*
There were clumsy confusions, blank spaces in that Sunday-morning choreography. What were the steps from toppling on the mattress edge to standing in the center of the bed? Did I black out? I called it a black eye, a few days afterward, but the pale purple blended with the black liner that I always stroked beneath my thin lash lines. The skin that did ache, though, as if after a whiplashed accident, showed no marks at all. My neck a blank white space, like an empty stage.
*
“Once the hands are on the neck,” an expert writes in an article I find online, “the very next step is homicide.” I called it choking, like S&M breath play. I thought I would need only say the word and you would stop. When I realized my vocal cords could not reverberate, I knew that all I had was hope, dangling on the mattress’s precipice. Break your neck, you had predicted. Strangulation, the experts said. And though my fingers later danced over slightly different answers in my attempts to take an online quiz that would assess the escalation of a domestic threat, the results always ended in my leaving you. Or in your ending me.
*
The online articles, the hotlines, women’s shelters, legal aid—all there for me. But I didn’t need the help; you did. I didn’t want to leave; I wanted you to change so I could stay. What were—what are—the steps for rehabilitating abusive men?
*
Much later I saw your mug shot—arrested at a bar, for battery. No “domestic” prefacing. Because I saved you from all that. What were the steps I could have taken? Could have returned violence for violence with the order that restrains, the charges that are pressed, the verdict that comes down, like a blow, for attempted homicide. I could have left you confined in solitary, the way that finally you left me, all alone, even after I had stayed against my wisdom and my mother’s pleas. Instead I let the statute run, the way you let your words run out the apartment door, and you stayed with me, with just your angry hands, in our picture-perfect home.
*
When I reentered our apartment to gather up my clothes, my mother with me, we measured out the steps down the hallway to the bedroom where you carried me—the whole weight of my dangling body—by my neck’s delicate vertebrae. She could not comprehend how you did not snap my spine. Just one different move, she said. Wring your neck, I remembered.
What are the steps to forgiving you, her, me? Maybe written in the duets that danced across the stage and moved me most to tears. When the man would bend his knees for a sweeping lift, his hands would be secure around the woman’s waist, the way yours both held me long before. Borne aloft, the ballerina would point her toes and let her legs go still, with no more steps to decipher or improvise.
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Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.
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ENOUGH is a Rumpus original series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We believe that while this subject matter is especially timely now, it is also timeless. We want to make sure that this conversation doesn’t stop—not until our laws and societal norms reflect real change. You can submit to ENOUGH here.
Many names appearing in these stories have been changed.
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