Two Stories by Jenessa Abrams
Because of Necessity
Stop fighting it. Open your legs and relax.
Open your legs and let me place my hands underneath your skirt. You can hike it up if you want.
I feel you. You are fighting me. This will be easier, if you just give in to me.
I am on a medical bed. The word bed means a piece of furniture for reclining or resting. The word bed means a mattress. The word bed means a place for sleeping. The word bed means a place for lovemaking. The word bed means a plot of cultivated land. The word bed means the bottom of a body of water. I am a body of water. I am a body made of water and blood and excrements. To lay flat. To put to bed. To arrange in layers. To embed. To have sexual intercourse with, as in: to take to bed. This doctor has taken me to bed, but when he puts his hands in me, it is not because of wanting. It is because of necessity. Isn’t it always?
When a man is about to put his fingers inside you, a woman is present to tell you to let him. To tell you to stop fighting it. To tell you submission is necessary. To tell you they know what is best for you.
This time, the man is a doctor. This time, the woman is a nurse.
You will feel something like urine, like blood, only it won’t be. Something is going to come out of you and you will have no control over it. Look. Look at it. Look at the magic trick. The doctor holds it all victorious. This part won’t hurt. This part hurts.
You’ve never been a woman. You’ve been inside a woman, but you’ve never been a woman with something inside of her. You are inside of me. You marvel at the shape of my bladder. You like my organs. They are magnificent. Look at how small, how delicate.
Are you okay? You ask. You never ask: Will you be okay?
No, I am not okay. Will you stop if I ask you to? Will you stop? I am begging you.
Slide your legs open. You can keep your skirt on. You can lift it up. Here, let me put my hands underneath your dressing gown.
Be still, this part might hurt.
Female Chronology
My mother used to say: You remember it differently.
She meant: No one poured broccoli down my pajama top or threatened to put their hands around my neck.
She meant: I stuffed all of the green vegetables in my mouth and tried to gag myself.
She meant: You remember things to suit your version of the events.
But that is not true. I remembered them as they happened. She remembered something else.
I read once that trauma is inherited. There is a theory that it is passed down from parent to child. That it bleeds between generations.
Take this for example: A woman is raped on a playground. At the time, the woman is still a teenager. She has long thick shiny black hair. She has a backpack. It does not matter what she is carrying. When her body is opened, skin peeled back like an orange, when her insides are hard-pressed by fat thumbs, when juice trickles down her legs, things like purple pens and floral scented deodorant become irrelevant.
Years later, that woman will pass a playground. She will be holding her daughter’s hand. The daughter will have just turned four. The woman will dress her daughter in clothing that is difficult to remove, overalls with many buttons and zippers. The daughter will not be a product of the rape; but in other ways, each time the woman’s body is unfastened, the rape will be there. It does not disappear. Each time the woman parts her legs, traces of the wood chips and the swing set will be there.
When the woman and her daughter are close enough to hear tiny squeals coming from the top of the slide, the woman’s hands will get sweaty and her heart will thump hard in her chest. Sometimes, she will snap at her daughter and sometimes she will walk too quickly away from the playground and sometimes she will pick a fight about nothing and sometimes she will lead the two of them into the street where they will narrowly miss being run over.
The woman might think: Maybe that would be easier.
When the daughter is grown, she too, will avoid playgrounds. She won’t have the language to say why, but when friends ask to meet her after school, she will refuse.
In this way, the daughter will find herself walking home alone and, as happens with mothers and daughters, her inheritance will be bestowed.
Jenessa Abrams is a writer, literary translator and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Guernica, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. Currently, she teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University.
