“It’s Selene,” lisping through buckteeth. “I have flu.”
“Oh, my dear…you’ve called the clinic?”
“The doctor forbids me to leave my home.” Home indeed: a heap of brown shingles in an alley in a town forty miles north of Godolphin. Three children and a once-in-a-while man…“My friend Minata will give testimony in my place. From Somalia too, and now she lives on the next avenue. She knows the fee, and that she will stay overnight in the inn. She agrees to come, and tell.”
“And she has…things to tell?” Gabrielle softened her voice. “Was her experience like yours?”
“Ah, worse. Thorns were applied. And only palm oil for the mending. She will take the same bus…”
Thorns and palm oil and two fullback matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart. Horrifying tales; Gabrielle knew plenty of them. But would this Minata touch the heart like Selene? I am happy to be in this town Godolphin, in this state Massachusetts, in this country USA, Selene always concluded with humble sibilance. I am happy to be here this night.
Would the unknown Minata also be happy to be here this night, testifying to the Society Against Female Mutilation, local chapter? Would she walk from podium to chair in a gingerly fashion, remembered thorns pricking her vulva like cloves in a ham?
Gabrielle had first heard Selene three years earlier, at the invitation of a Dutch physician whose significant protruding bosom looked like an outsize wedge of cheese. Gabrielle privately called her Dr. Gouda. Dr. Gouda was staying at Devlin’s Hotel, where Gabrielle was concierge extraordinary — Mr. Devlin’s own words. Gabrielle said yes to guests whenever she could. She’d said yes to Dr. Gouda. She’d accompanied the solid woman to an empty basement room in a nearby church. After a while twelve people straggled in. Then photographs were shown — there was an old-fashioned projector, and a screen, and slides that stuttered forward on a carousel. A voice issued from the darkness beside the projector — the doctor’s accented narration. The slide show — the Follies, Dr. Henry Ellison would later name it — featured terrified twelve-year-olds in a hut. Behind the girls was a shelf of handmade dolls.
The brutality practiced in the photographs — shamefully, it made Gabrielle feel desirable. She was glad that she and her stylist had at last found a rich oxblood shade for her hair; and glad that her hair’s silky straightness conformed to her head in such a Parisian way, complementing the Parisian name that her Pittsburgh parents had snatched from the newspaper the day she was born. She knew that at fifty-two she was still pretty, even if her nose was a millimeter too long and there was a gap between a bicuspid and a molar due to extraction; how foolish not to have repaired that, and now it was too late, the teeth on either side had already made halfhearted journeys toward each other. Still, the gap was not disfiguring. And her body was as narrow and supple as a pubescent boy’s. She was five feet tall without her high-heeled shoes, but she was without her high-heeled shoes only in the bath — even her satin bed slippers provided an extra three inches.
In the basement room of the church there was no podium, just a makeshift platform. After the slide show a white-haired gentleman unfolded a card table on the platform and fanned laminated newspaper articles across it. Dr. Gouda then stationed herself in front of the screen now cleansed of enormities. She wore a navy skirt and a pale blouse and she had removed her jacket, idly revealing her commanding bosom. The width of her hips was apparent to all. In ancient China child-buyers sometimes constricted an infant’s body so that the lower half far outgrew the upper. Gabrielle had read about it: they used a sort of straitjacket. The children thus warped into human pawns often became pets at court.
But the Dutch doctor’s shape was nature’s doing, not man’s. “This is Selene,” she said, and surrendered her place to a mahogany woman.
My mother was kind to me, Selene began that night, begins every time, would begin tonight if it weren’t for her flu. My mother was kind to me. Yes, she brought me to the hut, as her mother had brought her, as her mother her, on and on backward through time, you understand.
When she bears witness Selene wraps herself in native costume — a colorful ankle-length dress and turban. Her face is long and plain. The thick glasses, the large teeth with their goofy malocclusion, the raw knuckles — all somehow suggest the initial maiming.
My mother loved me.
The thing was done for my good and for my future husband. This was believed. I believed it too. I was held down, yes, the body fights back, that is its nature, no one scolded me for struggling. But they had to restrain me. My…area was swabbed with something cold and wet. The cutting was swift. Painful. A small curved knife cuts away a portion of your flesh, it could happen by accident in the garden or while preparing food, that tiny slice I mean, though not in that…area. The wound was salved. There was no shame. All the women in the hut had gone through the cutting.
My mother was kind to me. She was kind to me throughout her life. She procured for me a fine husband, one who would not have taken me whole, as someone might say that piano lessons had broadened her marriage opportunities. I was sorry to leave my husband when I took our children and ran away.
“Your experience of intimacy?” Dr. Gouda usually asks from some dark place.
The lids behind the glasses close, open. “My husband was not at fault.”
“And childbirth?”
“I wished myself dead.”
The listeners are still.
But I love my children, she continues. I have a new husband, not an entirely accurate statement, Gabrielle would learn; but the fellow was as good as a husband, or as bad. It is the same excruciation with him. He understands. No one asks if he spares her. I think of my mother and I do not scream. But the cutting should stop. I hope you can make it stop. I am happy to be in this country. I am happy to be here tonight.
That first time, the Dutch doctor stood at the table and waited until the silence turned into murmuring. Then she said that regrets were unproductive. The challenge was to save today’s victims, tomorrow’s. To that end…She went on to speak of the work of the World Health Organization, of associations in Europe, of the Society Against Female Mutilation she represented, which hoped to form a chapter tonight here in Godolphin, Massachusetts. The noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison would serve on the advisory committee. “And we are looking for more help,” said the Dutch doctor tonelessly.
Many attendees signed up, and several took out checkbooks. Two were elderly women who looked alike, as old friends often do. A pale, emaciated college girl clasped and reclasped her hands; perhaps she felt personally threatened by mutilation. There was a thuggish dark fellow. He probably had a taste for porn. The man who had unfolded the card table now folded it up again. That handsome ruddy face, that crest of white hair — he must be the noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison.
At last Gabrielle approached the Dutch doctor. “I’d like to sign up,” Gabrielle said.
“Of course!”
II.
There was no “Of course” about it. For half a century Gabrielle had avoided Good Causes as if they might defile her. Efficiency and orderliness were what she cared about, and her own lively good looks. She cared about Devlin’s Hotel too, a double brownstone on the border of Godolphin and Boston. Mr. Devlin had transformed it into a European-style inn, Gabrielle its concierge extraordinary, Gabrielle with her clever wardrobe and her ability to say two or three sentences in half a dozen languages…Gabrielle was made for the job, Mr. Devlin had sighed, more than once.