Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

A cut. Not a trim, but a cut. A simple cut. And then, it is different. It’s all different.

The woman down the hall has cut her hair. We used to call her Barbie, back when she looked like Barbie with all that hair, all blonde and everywhere. We thought her head was a bonfire of blonde, there was simply so much of it. We used to snicker when she walked by, bleach swallowing the whole room, but it wasn’t bleached, no, hers was natural and it illuminated dark rooms with adequate reading light. When she walked by, we would imagine ourselves under all that weight, the way it must have hurt her neck and given her migraines. When she walked by, fresh from the shower, beads of water still translucent along the bend of her slight curls, we would want to yell, to stop her, for surely, she would catch pneumonia going out like that. It would kill us if she were sick. We couldn’t handle it.

But that was before. That was when she was Barbie, back when she still had hair, back when her skin was perfectly cooked and tender, back when she wore mini-skirts, ball gowns, and drove a pink Corvette. But that’s not the way things are now, and even though we watch her with interest, we hate her. We hate her for taking away our joy.

The Great Freud has dreamed of a woman; he describes her to Lou Andreas:

“When she wakes in the morning, she brushes cleans her teeth while facing north, and it is from this direction that she derives her arrivals and departures for her day. She is a woman who believes in neither fate nor free will. She has a beauty that could blind a man, if only her wit were not so toxic, and her limbs are fixtures to be arranged on whim. Her farewells take place in silence, but with tears and malicious grins. She is constantly cold and wears a shawl over her head. She has many lovers and her only husband she will not touch.

“Set out, explore every corner and crevice, and seek this woman,” Sigmund Freud tells to Lou. “Then come back and tell me if my dream corresponds to reality.”

“Forgive me, my friend, there is no doubt that sooner or later, I will leave you in search of this woman,” Lou Andreas tells him, “but I shall not come back to tell you about her. The woman you seek has one simple secret: she knows only beginnings and can never understand endings.”

There were times when Lou Andreas would visit Sigmund Freud in his home, and the two great minds would sit in quiet, conversing in mimicries of chess games. Their eyes would suddenly flare, then subside, then go gray with calm. These were the times they most appreciated each other, when nothing was required or expected.

This was not the norm though. Most often, when the two psychoanalysts intersected in space, there would be idle talk of family and work, one asking the other about spouse or child or lover. One would tell elaborate fictions about so and so who met with so and so and admired him greatly, while the other would respond with admonitions of so and so who should have responded with more respect when meeting with so and so, and these were the times when they both felt that all of this could be condensed into a dream fabric, but neither would let go for long enough for sleep to come.

The woman down the hall is too much. She speaks and we laugh and we laugh until we have burned all the calories we’ve consumed that day. She tells a story, and we are hysterical. She sings a little jig and we vomit everywhere. She makes us sick she is so funny. She will be the death of us, this woman. Already, we are skeletons because of her, and there is nothing we can even do about it but laugh and laugh some more.

The woman down the hall is particularly susceptible to love falling. This is a term we’ve created particularly for her. Her problem, you see, has less to do with the frequency with which she falls in love, which is often, but rather, her problem is her ability to maintain living — here we mean day to day activities, not physical health, although we’ll get to that soon enough — once she is, in fact, in love. What is worse perhaps than her deteriorating hygiene and tendency to forget clothing when she’s in love is what happens when that love begins to dissolve. We do not mean a break up or a divorce. No, the woman down the hall hasn’t the nerves for that much concentrated emotion. Generally, the objects of her affection are inanimate, although sometimes they move. Sometimes, they’re even human, but she is one of those beautiful souls who can love anything, and thus, you see, her downfall.

The woman down the hall, you see, once she sees a pretty flower, one full of bloom and bees, loves it and loves it deeply, but there isn’t a flower in existence that can live forever, and the moment it begins to change, the woman down the hall cannot stand it. There is an intensity about her that frightens us, even as we speak this. In those moments when love begins to wane, the woman down the hall dies and she dies suddenly, passionately, with fervor.

It is true that we have witnessed her death more than two hundred million times, and we must admit that we never tire of it. The spectacle of the crash cart and CPR, the sirens and fireworks of light, the immediacy, it never wears thin. Of course, there are those times when the woman down the hall doesn’t make it, that they cannot revive her no matter how hard they try, and in those moments, we die a little bit too, but we survive if only because we know that tomorrow, she will be back, right where she was the day before and the day before and the day before, falling in love and dying over and over again.

The woman down the hall makes voodoo dolls. She puts black turtle beans in the slots where eyes should be, and when she gets angry, she takes a little needle, a needle with the thinnest point, and she scrapes all the glue from the seams until the small black bean falls like Rapunzel’s hair all the way down to the dusty floor.

The woman down the hall does not have a name. And why should she? Sometimes when we call her Clinger . Other days: Leech . She’s got this scar that runs along the side of her nose, from the ridge all the way to the crease of her smile, when she smiles, which she doesn’t, because even a smile doesn’t make her pretty. She’s ugly and she knows and we know and no one says a thing to her, not because she’s hideous. Because she’s an annoyance to our whole corporeal.

The woman down the hall is a replacement, and she is fine with this. We didn’t think she would be fine with it, and yet, somehow, she is. We thought that she of all women, being as spectacular as she is, would have difficulty accepting that she is simply a replacement, a place holder for the original.

But the woman down the hall has always been a replacement. She was conceived as a replacement, a new baby girl to make up for the mistakes her older sister had made, a better version perhaps, or simply another version to live in the space her sister used to occupy. The woman down the hall, when she got older, became the replacement lover. She slept with men whose wives’ vaginas would no longer whet with want. Sometimes, she would ask her lovers to call her by their wives’ names, but even asshole men can’t stoop to that low level so more often than not, they stuck a gag in her mouth. The woman down the hall didn’t mind that either. In her head, she would imagine these lovers moaning their wives’ names while fucking her, as if that could be a source for her pride, her benevolently loaning her body to salvage sexless marriages.