The eighth and final installation of Carmen Machado‘s Her Body and Other Parties, “Difficult at Parties,” follows the protagonist recovering from the trauma of sexual assault, as she tires to re-discover and invent a new sexual norm after her rape.
I’ll admit this was a difficult read, as Machado’s collection of stories “use fiction to explore and examine questions about women’s lives…[with] sex, gender and…mental health;” with this account in particular focusing on the re-establishment of trust in a loving relationship.
The paranoia we experience with the narrator is the beginning to a deeper question; how can women amend and recover from the tragedies of their past, when societal ideals paint women as pinnacle of sexual objectification? Even here, while the narrator’s lover is delineated as patient and gentle, there is still an absence understanding. We see that Paul’s desire for her starts to turn into contempt defeat.
In the bedroom, Paul sits across from me, his fingers tapping idly on the denim of his pants.
Do you remember, he says, what it was like before?I look down at my legs, then up at the blank wall, then back to him. I do not even struggle to speak; the spark of words dies so deep in my chest there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.
You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.”
For me, the emphasis of the narrator’s experience isn’t on the regaining of sexual self, but the acceptance and hope developed, “ending on a note of openness [and] potential renewal.”
Two people stumble in, my finger lifts, the rush-to-now slows. Two strangers fumble with each other’s clothes, each other’s bodies. His body, slender and tall and pale, leans; his pants hit the floor with a thunk, the pockets full of keys and change. Her body—my body, mine—is still striped with the yellowish stains of fading bruises. It is a body overflowing out of itself; it unwinds from too many layers. The shirt looks bulky in my hand, and I release it onto the floor. It drops like a shot bird. We are pressing into the side of the mattress.
I look down at my hands. They are dry and not shaking. I look back up at the screen, and I begin to listen.
I would agree that the recovering from a trauma aspect is one of the harder pills to swallow, which is why it strikes such a dark comparison when thrown upon that white wall of the fantastic. We tend to think of the fantastic as light or miraculous, a type of fantasy or “other” world, and then there is the horrors and violence of our reality. Furthermore, it is also because of this that I am intrigued and confused on her interest on the pornographic videos, going back to them time and time again.