How It Felt

Even if I still had the clothes I wore, those first twelve years, even if I had the clothes I would take off before my mother climbed the stairs toward me: the glassy Orlon sweater; the cotton dress, under its smocking my breasts-to-be accordion-folded under the skin of my chest; even if I had all the sashes, even if I had all the cotton underwear, like a secret friend, I think I could not get back to how it felt. I study the stability of the spirit — was it almost I who came back out of each punishment, back to a self which had been waiting, for me, in the cooled-off pile of my clothes? As for the condition of being beaten, what was it like: going into a barn, the animals not in stalls, but biting, and shitting, and parts of them on fire? And when my body came out the other side, and I checked myself, 10 fingers, 10 toes, and I checked whatever I had where we were supposed to have a soul, I hardly dared to know what I knew, that though I had been taken down, again, hammer and tongs, valley and range, down to the ground of my being and under that ground, it was possible that in my essence, at the center of my essence, in some tiny chamber my mother could not enter — or did not enter — I had not been changed.