The Anvil

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 273 Mecca Jamilah Sullivan The Anvil My wild grace and I shift on my right hip. We perch there and tilt towards the airplane window, considering the possibility that I have swallowed an anvil in my daydream. Camera light on my cheeks, red liner sealing thickly my precisely drawn lips, I am sure of it. A rust-encrusted, black-barnacled anvil. And now that it has glubbed its way down my digestive tract, scraping the walls of my trachea and esophagus, ripping my stomach’s lining to the seasick rhythm of my peristalsis, it sits, I’m sure, somewhere between my large and small intestines, dangerously close to my womb. I run my tongue lightly over my teeth to clear away any nasty fuchsia smudges, angle my jaw and smile for the cameras. The Atlantic sky is looking like banana pudding and lemon meringue. It compels me to dive in, reckless and open-mouthed, and perhaps to swallow the air until I am seconds away from bursting and raining myself. I am reminded of the time in the fourth grade when I ate the class gerbil. This, of course, was back when I was a large American civilian , and a carnivore. Mr. Stolz, the nice baldheaded teacher, had charged me with pet duty for the afternoon. I had put up quite a dynamic protest, I remember, stamping my feet on the soft green carpet and sending him my sharpest look of malevolence, all to no avail. But I didn’t eat Galileo out of spite. I did hate him for his alien grunts, which interrupted my dramatic readings in English class, and for the cedar-and-feces funk he emitted , which brought bile to my throat during Science class. Anyone who 274 Mecca Jamilah Sullivan had cared to extend her intellect for thought on the matter could easily have deduced that I would never have intended to put the nasty rodent into my mouth, and that, in fact, I would sooner have taken a running leap over the George Washington Bridge, or worse, run naked and barefoot through Marcus Garvey Park on Halloween night. But, of course, nobody thought about that. The fat girl ate the gerbil. It was quite a laugh. The school called my mother, and she arrived more promptly than she had arrived for anything in her life, ever. When I opened the door to the main office where I was to meet her, Mr. Stolz shook her hand gravely and she muttered long apologies through cascades of mascaraed tears, never bothering to ask me if, after having ingested an entire gerbil, I might need a glass of water or an x-ray. I was whisked onto the A train without so much as a word, and she succeeded in saying absolutely nothing to me until the following night at dinner, when, because my protruding stomach blocked the handle of the cabinet door, she was forced to ask me either to move or to pass her the cayenne pepper. Once this line of communiqué was reopened, I was subject to epics about the embarrassment she felt when her secretary (her secretary!) handed her the yellow message log paper stating that her only daughter had eaten the class pet. I was made to recall that day as the day my mother gave up on ever having grandkids, for what decent black man would marry a girl who would eat a gerbil? What assurance could he have that I would not eat the children and the microwave too? I understand now, of course, that even my mother could not have known the heights of beauty and international fame that I, then an unkempt, sloppy-figured Harlem girl, would one day reach. I look away from the window, tilting my sculptured cheek into three-quarter profile. I notice a pregnant lady with a blonde pig-tail sitting in the aisle seat across the plane. She looks at me with a knowing eye, and any loitering doubts are assuaged. She sees it: just as some fetus grows in her pale, gourd-like belly, so in me grows a terrible blend of...