tracings

She is the same age now as her mother was when they went to Harvard University for the summer. Her mother took a women’s studies course, and she took a choreography workshop. She made her first dance. It was about Pablo Picasso’s painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which she had just seen for the first time. She remembers when the workshop teacher whispered in her ear while she was developing movement for the dance, Try to come up with movements that you’ve never seen before. This whisper, a revelation.

Her mother was 50 and she was 17 that summer. Her mother’s mother died while they were at Harvard. She remembers they were renting a room in a woman’s house, a woman with dyed jet-black hair and a clean, thick line of bright white roots down the middle of her scalp. The woman’s name was Nancy and she had seven cats. When her Aunt called to tell her mother that their mother had died, the cats were pacing the floor. Her mother was on the phone speaking in crisp soft clips saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and crying silent tears. Nancy stood there on red plush carpeting, petting.

Many decades later, after her own mother died, her father told her two things. One was about that time her mother broke her arm. He said it was because she had fallen because she had been drinking too much wine. The second thing he told her was about the big, infamous fight her parents had gotten into when she was younger. He said it was because her mother had made a pass at her father, which he had declined. In both cases, she felt that her father was telling on her mother. She noted the fact that he chose to do so after her mother was dead.

She remembers her mother telling her that summer at Harvard, I just realized that you can’t really find a good man at a women’s studies workshop. She had made the dance about Picasso’s painting from the perspective of the women in it, cubed. In the final show, she had stood in front of people, her mother one of them, and cut a line with her hand, tracing from the bottom of her crotch up the middle of her torso, through half her face, to the top of her head and up into the air above her, the sky, the cosmos. She looked each audience member in the eyes, one at a time, movement she had never seen before.