Bian Lian + “Sherry Baby” by the Four Seasons + Skeletons
Before I left my boyfriend, I begged him to stop drinking for a week. I tried to plan out movie nights, or board games, and one night I thought we could draw portraits of one another, but he sat on the couch miserable and I penciled drawings of him in my diary as he moaned about how much he needed a drink. The drawings of him: his face, two of him, one larger and angry, one smaller, confused, vulnerable, childlike. His two faces. His eyes, sometimes the green of caterpillars, sometimes the sad khaki-colored eyes of a spaniel.
“He’s a Gemini,” I said, of my boyfriend.
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s got two distinct selves.”
“What are they?” I could feel his stare.
“Angry and sad,” I said, taking a sip of Jameson looking straight ahead.
The break-up started with a secret apartment. I went and got an apartment in a neighboring town and didn’t tell my boyfriend where it was. I had a sleeping bag, some bottled water, a toothbrush, a phone charger, changes of clothes, some plants. I needed a place I could go where he wouldn’t find me. I would drive there in the middle of the night to escape his anger.
Some mornings waking up there, it was so quiet I was sure I was still dreaming. I’d fallen down some rabbit hole onto a peaceful brown carpet. I was a baby bunny, hopping towards daily tasks. It was only on nights I stayed with him that I felt like prey.
⦿
Physiognomy is cropping up again. The junk science of reading faces for personality traits. Face as honesty, face as a map to the “true” self. Charts and graphs on the internet reveal the secrets of a person from the arch of their eyebrow, to the fattest part of their lips. If we have one face, we have one self, and the face becomes the route to the one true being. If a person is destined to fail at love, if a person is a criminal, it’s in their face. According to astrological physiognomy (at the corner of false and junk), Cancers look like crabs or moons. When I look in the mirror each morning, I think about which I am that day; something so bright, so obvious, cyclical, or am I something hard, covered, fighting.
After my relationship ended, I listened to podcasts about authenticity, how to be your most authentic self. I had lost myself to the point where I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. I spent hours walking and listening to the advice of others. The argument for authenticity was against multiplicity, for something Americans are obsessed with: the one true self, and how to really find it. But doesn’t that imply sifting through multiple selves to find the one, or dusting away fake selves to uncover the true self? The idea is rooted in the belief that being multivalent is deceptive. If you’re more than one thing, you’re not only inauthentic, but you’re evil, and no one can truly know you.
I think multiplicity can save us. I once saw someone performing Bian Lian, the artful dance of face changing that originated in Chinese Sichuan opera. The audience gasped each time the performer’s face shifted into something new; it was magical, spectacular, part of the art, yet also a mystery — when the face shifted we could not predict, we could only perceive the change, not the effort or method. We saw many dancers in one body. How many more sides can there be? I’d like to learn. How many changes? How many faces? Keep going, I want to see the many yous. I want to know people long enough to see how many more faces they can grow and cultivate. Who wouldn’t want to?
⦿
The first person I kissed after my break-up had spent time in jail. He told me the last song he’d heard before entering the intake was Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons' “Sherry Baby.” He was intense, intelligent, very beautiful, but also stuck. I was stuck too. “Intake this time around wouldn’t have been so bad without that song stuck in my head. You’re all alone, and there’s no other sound to get it out. That song has three lyrics. It played over and over for four days until I got moved.” We were watching a documentary on YouTube about the exploitation of factory workers in denim production, his suggestion after seeing my closet. “You have too much stuff.” We climbed on one another as the documentary continued. I could see the bunked beds of the girls the documentary was following out of the corner of my eye. Our tongues darting in and out of one another’s mouths to the sound of how much these workers suffered, how little they were paid.
“Are we really making out to the sounds of other people suffering?” I asked,
“Other people are always suffering whether you hear it or not, so we might as well continue.”
Legend has it, “Sherry” was written in fifteen minutes by Bob Gaudio and the original lyrics were “Jackie Baby” after Jaqueline Kennedy. Then it was “Terri Baby,” then it was “Peri Baby,” Then finally, “Sherry Baby.” One woman substituted for another. The specific becomes the general. Woman is woman. It was The Four Seasons’ first nationally released song and their first to go number one on the Billboard charts.
“Please won’t you come out tonight,” the chorus begs. Any woman, anywhere. Come outside. We are waiting.
⦿
A potter lived next door to my little apartment. I had even purchased some of his pottery myself, before he invited me to tour the various structures on his lot, his “compound.” Each was filled with the most calm light, and air lay softly around his pottery in various states of completion. Plates and mugs and cups from lump to firing all lined up neatly, rows and rows of tables carefully in-process. Each structure, quaint, just big enough, just comfy enough, homey and lovely with essentials and nothing more.
The final structure towards the back was large, and we passed rows of pottery to climb stairs to an attic. He seemed to want to show me their domestic spaces as well as the work spaces, or maybe it was that there was barely a line between the two? As we topped the stairs I saw a full skeleton hanging in the corner.
The color stopped me. Not the bleached white I’d seen before. A delicate pale yellow with brown shadow, missing teeth, broken bones.
“Yes, she’s real,” the potter laughed. “We’ve known one another a long time, me and her.” He walked towards us and, taking her hand, I noticed some fingers were missing.
“My sons had a field day with her.”
Who belongs to this body? Why was he gendering the skeleton? He knew it was a woman? Or he wanted it to be a woman? Do you objectify the moment you harm someone and then humanize them the moment you are harmed? Did he consider the skeleton an object as his sons played with it, and a woman when he took ownership of her? If I accept this woman’s body in this man’s attic, am I giving permission for any man to keep any woman’s body in an attic? Or is it that because she was for sale, he bought her, and that’s the permission--did he name her? Sherry? Jackie?
I do not know her, but she could be any and every woman. Once we decide we know someone we stop learning about them. We stop looking for signs of change. When we are presented with difference we say “no, not possible, I know them.” This is a tool for control and oppression. We take away the multitudes of a person in order to control and punish them. The skeleton was a woman, one thing, ownable.
⦿
We have been in grief and pain for so long now, we are taught transformation comes next. We long for transformation. I see people crying out for an end to the pain of 2020. I see 2021 as the same face from a different angle. The camera lens shutters and shifts but it’s looking at the same thing. We are not finished. We go from flesh to bone. We go from solid to vanishing. We go from dancing to resting. From sound to silence, from Jackie to Sherry, connected to disconnected.
Winter is a sculptor. It molds the world around us to its liking. Things solid now, encrusted in exoskeletons of ice. Things lumpy and square, now smoothed by snow. In the deepest, most painful parts of winter with snow that snows upon snow, so quiet the land feels like a grave, I saw lights on in the woman’s room. I squinted to see her through the window, her body, her bones, her. You may be saying if he did not buy her, take her, keep her, use her, she would belong to no one and that’s worse. But I would argue she would belong to herself and even if that is lonely sometimes, it is free.
