Tulle

If there exists a more offensive fabric than tulle, I’m quite certain that I don’t know it. Have never known it, and absolutely do not care to know it. It’s a horrible, garish fabric, tulle. Gauzy and itchy and stifling. Condemning the wearer to a smothering cocoon of crumbled glass gritting against flesh. To the tongues of feral cats licking up the bare of my legs, all the way to the sensitive skin across my belly. 

And the rustling. My god the rustling. The rustling is incessant. Deafening and inescapable. The rustling seems to drown out the words of the minister, who speaks in the rasps and croaks of an elderly man amidst a state of unsettled death. Too old and crumpled to be called living, not in the strictest sort of terms anyway. Used tissue too wet with age to handle and disintegrating, but still, he refuses to pay up to the Riverman. The reaper. The darkest of angels. I’m not ready, he screams. So the tender can not be resolved. He idles. He loiters, in a not quite settled sort of stagnation, rasping beneath the toll of all that tulle.

In fairness, it’s quite likely that even if the minister were young and spry, he would still have difficulty being heard above the rustling. In fact, the peal of my mother's trilling giggle might be the only sound on earth capable of ringing out above such cacophony. Which it does, is currently doing, far too often to be completely genuine. But it is her wedding day, so I’ll do my best to suspend my disbelief. 

I have heard that giggle my whole life, but each time it still rattles me anew. As though an intentional sort of amnesia grows a plaque over the hollow of my mind in which it settles. The giggle is breathy and forced. Shrieks out a startling overture, before rising and cresting and breaking in a full, belting crescendo. Then it peters out to something warbling and throaty, before the rustling can resume its featured position in my ears. 

It truly is unbearably frequent, the giggle. My mother apparently finds a good many things about her wedding vows humorous enough to let that giggle fly. I haven’t been paying attention myself. It’s far too much work to strain a patient ear over all that rustling, so I don’t know precisely what those many things are. But if I am to believe my mother’s reaction, they must be good. I make a mental note to have someone recount for me the details of the ceremony when I am no longer distracted by the ream of fuchsia sandpaper soldered to my skin. 

It's my mother who did this to me. Who chose the tulle, I mean, who apparently loves the tulle. Or else, who simply hates me enough to allow that hatred to dictate the texture of her to-be-wedded wardrobe. To use that wardrobe to punish me, in her distinct brand of passive-aggression. I would believe either, honestly. Both are equally as likely to be true. She really is the type of antiquated, middle-aged woman who would genuinely love tulle, but she also hates me. Fiercely. So either explanation would be believable. 

The hatred has been simmering for a while now. For years, actually. I know this. Have even come to my own form of grips with it. She’ll deny it up and down, center and sideways too, but we both know the truth. We both know that the only reason I am standing beside her as she marries Dave, husband number six, is so she can condemn me to a night of purgatory in rustling tulle. 

I used to believe that the hatred began in my teens. Which is, after all, the standard era known for parental hatred to flourish. But upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that it can be traced much further back than that. All the way back to the age of three, if I had to guess.

What kind of woman could hate her three-year-old child? One might ask. To which I would answer with my fullest chest: my mother. That kind. The mid-western, evangelical with an outdated bouffant of platinum, and casserole dishes that never seem to run dry. The kind who blames her child for her own father running off with the Lithuanian nanny. The kind who does not, and never has thought of that man as said child’s father. He was her husband, and if not for the daughter she never actually wanted, the one who ruined her body, thwarted her dreams, and required a buxom nanny for tending, that husband would have stayed.  

She’s reminded of her husband's betrayal every time she looks into the pale blue of my eyes. The eyes that look a bit too much like his. The ones that rest above his slim nose and fat, rosy mouth. She hates me because I’m an artifact of the life she’ll never have, and because I am the leeching ingrate who sucked that life from her clutches. I am both the thing she covets, as well as the thing she would cast into the fiery bowels of hell if the opportunity was ever to present. That is, if such an act wouldn’t make the ladies in her Wednesday night prayer circle choke on their ambrosia.

For this dichotomy, I am mildly sympathetic, because honestly, what does one even do with that much dischord? How does one reconcile all the disparate feelings stirred up by that sort of amalgamated contradiction? A strong woman might try to piece it all out. To separate her own feelings of malcontent from the love she should hold for her child. To not let those feelings seep into the groundwater of that love, and muddy it all the way to non-potable. 

But my mother is not a strong woman. She is simple and small. She relies on the promise of her divine goodness delivered by the church services she attends on Sundays to soothe any prickle of true self-reflection. Then smashes the remaining irksome thoughts down into some deeply guarded tomb of her mind. She lets the pressure of her chosen ignorance condense those thoughts into something more manageable. Something shiny, that she can hold onto, that she can make sense of. She hates. 

I understand this about her. The way I understand that the sun rises in the east, and the world will forever spin on tilted axis. The way I know the brilliant heat of Summer will always precede the Fall, and that tulle was surely crafted by horrible, sadistic hands. I understand these truths about my mother because I need to, and because they have always been. I shimmy into them like a second set of skin. Stroll around the halls of my life in their unyielding possession, and do whatever necessary to ignore how badly they pinch. 

There aren’t many ways to accomplish this, to disregard such an unnatural kind of hurt. To force my sanity to remain. Ways to derive a feeling powerful enough to replace a mother’s love. There aren’t many, but I’ve found a few. Though each one requires its own measure of sacrifice. 

When I was young, when I was reactive, and still clung to the foolish impetuousness of youth, I believed it was my own suffering that was required for such immolation. So I offered up the virginal pallor of my wrists. I offered up the untouched smooth of their skin, first. I dug into them with my nails. Etched their surface with open staples. Carved them up to bloody oblations with hair trimming shears and safety scissors. 

I was twelve then, when the hurt took my wrists. It was still in its nascency, so still able to subsist on such meager tidbits at that point, but it grew. It demanded my knees only two years later. 

Those I sacrificed to the biting herringbone pattern of the bathroom tile, as I knelt before my porcelain shrine. The hurt took them quickly and begged for more, so I threw in my burning esophagus too. Then the scratches against my tonsils, and the crescent shapes shaved raw into my knuckles by my front teeth, as I drove my fingers ever further down the back of my throat. 

I gave the hurt my echoing belly next. The hollow ache that follows a constant kind of self-inflicted hunger. I gave the hurt my sallow skin, the peaks and ridges of my starving bones. I gave it my famine, but still, it craved something more.

So at sixteen, I began to allow the hurt to nibble against my liver. To suck up countless brain cells at its pleasure. I drank. I drank long and often. I drank to numb myself, so the hurt could feast its fill. 

These methods were not sustainable, I knew that. My body would simply disappear someday, I knew that too. Soon, I would have nothing left to give. Nothing left to trade in exchange for the brief bursts of respite from all that gnawing pain. Someday, I would fade off into the gaping maw of the hurt. All swallowed up cold, and soon forgotten. 

I had accepted this. I had resolved that sinking into the obsidian depths of my sorrow would inevitably be my fate. Until Matthew came along, that is.

Matthew was my mother’s third husband. Matthew was slick and oily. Matthew was butter. Slippery and smooth. Matthew married my mother in the summer of my junior year. I wore tulle then too.

It was the height of the August heat and unbearably sticky. I stood beside my mother as she wed Matthew in a gazebo by a lake that smelled of algae scum and brackish waters. Whiffs of decaying frog roe and the beached carcass of maggot-flattened carp. All of it baking to a putrid slurry beneath the beating rays, and I wore tulle. 

It was colored chartreuse then, and formed pockets of briny sweat beneath the layers. Sweat that spilled over the netting, and dribbled rivulets down my legs. Sweat that drew in stippled clouds of gnats to my orbit, alighting and sticking like fluttering freckles against the squelching sheen of my skin. I remember flailing and scraping at them. I remember rubbing my supple thighs together beneath the tulle, desperately attempting to sop up the growing flood. I twisted and writhed, and I rustled, doing my best to remain subtle. To not to attract my mother’s sharp eyes. 

I chanced a glance toward the podium, seeking to ensure that my wriggling had gone unnoticed. My mother remained blissfully oblivious, but Matthew’s crooked smile had found me. Lay parted for me. The fans at each corner of his inky, indigo eyes creased into an accordion style pleat, and those eyes were watching me. Ambivalent to the veiled woman before him, to the minister, who, at that point, still retained his full footing in the mortal realm. Those eyes ignored the various scriptures recited, the vows to be made, and watched my young body move instead. 

I stared back. I stared back with an unabashed intrigue. I locked into those eyes, and felt myself spreading watery through their depths. Saturating their whites with something wicked. I lingered there, and the hurt began to purr. 

I made Matthew love me. I supplanted the love my mother denied with the love that Matthew thrust upon me in our secret corners. It wasn’t a true kind of love, I knew that. It wasn’t the love of story books, or even highschool promises. It was a carious kind of love. A love predicated on lust and reprisal, and the foul lies we whispered to fill in the gaps. A rotten, fetid kind of love, but it worked, for a while. It worked until the hurt grew bored of the monotony, and the reedy tedium of repeated shame. 

So then I took Matthew away. I took him away from my mother, and gave him to the hurt instead. I snuffed him out. Then I bathed in the ecstasy, the vicious elation that rained down from his newly stiffened corpse. I basked in the strange power that sloughed from his broken body like too tight scales, and the hurt was content again. For a while. For a long while, then. Content to savor the potency of my kill, but even such sinister tributes eventually fade. 

Fortunately for me, my mother is never alone for very long. So after Matthew, there was Jeff. I made Jeff love me too. I soaked up that love. Drained his reservoirs all the way to dry, and then I fed his shriveled husk to the hurt. Michael followed soon after. I did the same with Michael, and then came Dave. I now smile at Dave.   

I smile demurely at Dave. Beguilingly and innocently at Dave. Dave, the man who now stands beside my mother. Who holds her hand. Whose sun-beaten face looks bored, and indifferent to the words rasped by the minister. He stands paunchy and pot-bellied. A strained tuxedo, topped with a crown of dark hair peppered with salt. A man lacquered in black cloth, and cream filled. Resting in the comparative comfort of men’s attire, gloating amongst all that tulle.

I smile at him, and watch with pleasure as a rosy bloom rises amongst the crinkled skin of his cheeks. I smile, and I begin to feel something familiar and malefic scuttling up from my toes. Soon, I think. Soon, I tell the hurt. Soon, we shall both be back in our solace…

Sometimes I wish that I were a stronger person, a kinder person. That I could shake myself loose from the violent refuge I find in the shadows. More commonly, I wish that there was a more lasting way to sate the hurt. That perhaps there is a more appropriate key to turn that lock, and bolt the door closed.

Someday, I think, I will test that theory. I will play with the small piece of conjecture that has long been percolating in the dark crevices of my mind. One day soon, rather than morsels of men, I think, I will feed my mother to the hurt instead. 

I used to be fearful of that day. Resistant to its call. But lately, I’m beginning to warm to it. I’m beginning to see all the beautiful and wondrous sense it makes. Lately, I find, that I am almost longing for that day. No. Not almost— I do. I have begun to long for that day. I do, long for that day. Deeply and truly— I do.