Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

But she said nothing. She said nothing and slept for days and days, and when we saw her once again, she was changed, colors faded.

If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you where she went to college, what her roommate’s name was, how they had the exact same majors and minor. She will tell you that she did not graduate at the top of her class, but she was a solid student all the same. She will tell you about all her sorority sisters, tri-delt! their wild parties, how at one of them she managed to kiss three boys she crushed on, in one night! She will tell you about her first college boyfriend, Ben, how she was such a bitch to him because he liked her more than she liked him. She will tell you about the asshole fratboy who raped her and then she will tell you how she’s never told anyone else about it, not even her best friend, her roommate. She will confess all this to you, and then she will tell you about her favorite Professor, how he wore mismatching socks and smoked a pipe as soon as he walked out of the classroom. She will tell you how this reminded her of her father, who also smokes a pipe, and maybe she will laugh and say how she doesn’t even like her father because he’s a jerk but no, don’t get the wrong idea. She loves her father, she really does. She’s not the type of girl to not love her own father! She will tell you that in all reality, she didn’t even like his class, that she can’t remember a single lecture he gave, that she doesn’t even know which department he taught in. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you about all her college projects, study groups, late night writing sessions at the local diner, smoking way too many cigarettes and drinking enough coffee and eating enough addies to keep her awake for days. She will tell you about the crush, the one guy she never got. She’ll tell you his name was Josh and he had long curly brown hair and the longest eyelashes, like ever. She’ll go on about how he was Vice President of Feminist Voices and she was just a freshman and he was a junior and what happened when they happened to cross eyes, whew. She’ll tell you about the serenity in his eyes and how real it was and that made her happy and jealous and angry all at once. She’ll say this earnestly. She’ll say that everyone else around her had flustered and overwhelmed eyes but not Josh. Never. She’ll tell you about this time he wore a skirt into Stats. The woman down the hall will tell you how she was so shy that she’s never even had a whole conversation with Josh, she was always choking out words if she was talking to him. She will tell you that in the end, after all her anxiety and dreaming, he probably — to this very day — has no idea who she is, but she’ll tell you that she’s fine with it, that she’s happy now, that every few months she’ll check in on him on Facebook, never friending him, just taking a quick peek. If asked, the woman down the hall will tell you the most minute of details about all her memories of her college experience, her first time away from home, it changed her forever, just like in the movies, it’s the one place that’s made her who she is today, but all of her stories are lies. She never went to college.

The truth of it is that the woman down the hall went away and her life was forever altered, just like she’d swear up and out, but she didn’t go to college, no matter how much she insists, because all of it, every single bit of it, is a lie that she embroidered into her memory, into fact.

The woman down the hall is never home, and when she is, she pounds the wooden floors with her hammer shoes, galloping here and there in constant battle with some voice in her Bluetooth. We wish it didn’t sound like a carpenter’s shop up there when she is home, but we respect the reserved anger in her voice, the steady metronomic clop of her step.

She is the woman that all women want to be. She is what they desire. She is strong and powerful. She is rich.

She is lonely.

Rather than sleep, she computes this or that argument until it rests itself resolved, but once this or that mess has been untangled, the woman down the hall finds some other flaw and starts pacing anew.

The woman down the hall doesn’t have any wrinkles. She’s older than this very building and she doesn’t have a single wrinkle at all. Her hair is the same buoyant blonde that it was when she was seventeen. Her stomach is lined with muscular ripple. She’s a total babe, and we all wish she would stay like this forever.

The woman down the hall is a piece of silk. Rather than walk, she flutters in variable patterns. When there is wind, her bones become fluid and she stretches. Often, when we seek her most, she is difficult to see. We look for slight shifts in sunlight and shadow, and there, right there, we catch the arc of her back, and then, just like that, she has sifted away again.

The Great Freud’s methods flourished, and although there were others who disagreed, his ideas moved their way into even the most remote provinces. As such, it was as though Freud possessed an entire envoy, who would return periodically, to the International Psychoanalytic Congress, to tell of their lessons and struggles, and in those cold halls of sterility Freud strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Germans, Syrians, Copts, Turkomans; the doctor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through those objective foreign eyes and ears could their knowledge manifest existence to Freud. In languages incomprehensible to Freud, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the histories of women and men, suffering with unknown ailments, forced to walk in patterns, bound by head and back aches, plagued with unrest. All of this, the Great Freud listened to with passing interest. But when Lou Andreas made her report, a different communication was established between herself and the doctor. Newly arrived but not totally ignorant of the language of psychoanalysis, Lou Andreas could express herself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings and hootings, or with objects she took from her purse — ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes — which she arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the patients to which Freud had sent her, the ingenious Russian improvised pantomimes that the doctor had to interpret: one woman who would only allow keys to sit in doors in the vertical position, another who could not leave her home without powder smeared across her eyes, a third who could love but only with frigidity. The Great Freud deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the women Andreas saw remained uncertain; he never knew whether his student wished to enact what her patient had experienced in reality, a dream designed through fantasy, their parents’ occupations, the prophecy of an astrologer, or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure and obvious as it might be, everything Lou Andreas displayed had the power of emblems, which once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In Freud’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each patient, the words evoked in Lou Andreas’s stories.

As the seasons passed and her missions continued, Lou Andreas mastered the psychoanalytic language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now her accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Freud could wish and there was no questions or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a patient recalled to the doctor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Andreas had designated the patient. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Freud thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.