At nine o’clock on those occasions Selene’s consort drove Gabrielle to the last train in his pickup truck. He had a spade-shaped face, as if his jaw had been elongated by force. One Wednesday he didn’t return to the house in time to drive her — as it turned out, he didn’t return at all.
“Stay with me,” Selene said with a shrug.
The children were asleep. It had been a mild wet spring, and Gabrielle’s raincoat and scarf were hanging on a hook in Selene’s bedroom. She took off her little dress and hung it on another hook, and took off her strapped high-heeled shoes that exactly matched the pewter of that dress, and in her silk underwear climbed into Selene’s bed. A light blanket was all they needed. They fell asleep back to back. But during the night the weather turned cool. They awoke in each other’s arms…or, rather, Gabrielle awoke in Selene’s arms, her head between warm breasts, Selene’s fingers caressing her area.
V.
“Minata will take the same bus I take,” Selene had said.
Gabrielle met the bus. She had no way to recognize the new witness — so many dark-skinned people were disembarking. Perhaps Selene had told her friend Minata to look for a petite femme, stylish, nice face. Walking toward Gabrielle was a rare beauty. She wore a chartreuse raincoat made of tiny scales. Long brown hair combed back from a broad brow. Wide eyes above a simple nose. “Ms. Gabrielle?”
“Ms. Minata?”
They shook hands. Short skinny white woman with dyed hair and ridiculous shoes, maybe that’s what Selene had said to Minata. Brilliant blackie in a coat of fake lizard, she might have said to Gabrielle. Minata wore golden sandals. Her toenails were golden too. She carried a leather hatbox with brass fittings. “We take the subway from here, yes?”
“Tonight, a taxi,” said Gabrielle. Goddesses don’t hang from subway straps. She explained that the Dutch doctor and an American doctor and an American lady in pink would join them for dinner in the hotel. In the cab Minata turned her head toward the city lights. “Have you been to Boston before?” Gabrielle wondered.
“Oh, yes, it’s not the moon. It’s the Cradle of Liberty. My children learn that in school.”
“You have borne children?” Did you wish yourself dead?
“Five.”
Gabrielle was quiet during dinner. She was thinking of Selene, her spectacles, her teeth, her martyred air. She was remembering Wednesdays. She was feeling the probe of Selene’s strong hand, the fingers then spreading like wings. Her own fingers always fluttered in a hesitant way, fearful of causing pain. Sometimes Selene guided them further inward…Minata too said little, was no doubt conserving her energy for the testimony. Dr. Gouda, just arrived from New York — she was on her stateside fund-raising tour — spoke in low tones to Henry. Doctor talk: the gabble of baboons.
After coffee the little group moved to the function room. There they were greeted by a group smaller than the previous one. “Female-circumcision fatigue,” Henry whispered. She shook her earrings at him. To her relief, a few more chapter members wandered in. Perhaps they wanted to hear about the progress of the fistula hospital and the opening of a new clinic. Perhaps they wanted to see the Follies. Perhaps they wanted to listen to the witness. Perhaps they had nothing else to do.
The evening followed the usual pattern.
Dr. Gouda made some introductory remarks.
The white-haired man showed the slides. Some were new, some were old, none were from the batch that Henry and Gabrielle had judged too gory.
Minata’s presentation resembled Selene’s, though her voice had no sad lisp but instead a kind of lilt. She talked of the cutting, of the women’s belief in its necessity, of the children’s bewildered compliance. She provided a few extra details. “My cousin — they left her genitals on a rock. Animals ate them.” Gabrielle attended, her high heels hooked around the rung of the folding chair as if around the pedals of her bicycle. Her black crepe knees were raised slightly by this pose; her white satin elbows rested on those knees, her fingers laced under her little French chin.
“It causes immediate pain,” sang Minata. “Recovery also is painful.” She bowed her head.
“And the sequelae — the aftereffects,” urged the accented voice of Dr. Gouda.
Minata raised her head. “Ma’am?”
“You must have suffered further…when touched by your husband,” said the doctor in a kinder tone.
The head rose farther. “I have never had a husband.”
“When touched by a man…” The voice softer yet.
“I do not usually talk about these things—”
“Of course.”
“—to strangers. But you are perhaps like friends. To me, being touched by a man is a happiness. Perhaps the cutting made it more so. I also enjoy amusement parks.”
“Me too!” from the projector, heartily.
“But childbirth,” moaned the barren Gabrielle.
“Oh, one of my sons was a breech: awful. The other four children…pushing and straining, yes, you know what it’s like. Pain? No.” The listeners were silent. “It is a matter of…choice,” said Minata. “You can choose to like, to not like. ‘Wisdom does not live in only one home.’”
Gabrielle’s aunt too had been childless. She had lived as a scorned spinster with Gabrielle and her parents, part of the dry severity of the family. In Gabrielle’s room there had been a few books, a few records, curtains with embroidered butterflies, their wings trapped within the gauzy folds. She thought of this squeezed girlhood, her careless husbands, the restrained Henry. She remembered the slides, the jeweled vagina.
What had she chosen? Divorce, self-sufficiency, an enameled piquancy—the phrase remembered from some novel. She had achieved it all, hadn’t she. But she felt weak. (Later Henry would tell her that her blood pressure had dropped.) She grew dizzy. (He would tell her that she began helplessly to swoon.) The heels of her shoes clawed the bar of the folding chair. She toppled sideways, her shoes still clinging to life. The chair toppled too, but in a delayed manner, as if only reluctantly following its occupant.
“Usually an ankle breaks from a fall because of the sudden weight that is exerted on it. But in your case it was the twist itself that did the work. You managed to wrench your left fibula right out of its hinge. And break a few other things, like the ankle joint, very important, a gliding joint, supports the tibia, which—”
“My left fistula?” she said, turning toward him from her hospital bed.
“Fibula. A bone. Poor Gabrielle.”
“What pain I was in.”
“You had every right to be in pain, the nerves in the foot…”
“A different kind of pain,” she muttered.
“…you’d be in pain now if it weren’t for that lovely drip. You won’t be able to walk without assistance for a while, old girl.”
“Minata,” she said. Now she turned her head away from him.
“Minata had several drinks afterward with the doctor and the projectionist.”
“Minata betrayed the chapter.”
“Dear Gabrielle, we surgeons can never confidently predict the outcome of our work. The midwives of Somalia…likewise.”