Call My Name Melissa Febos (bio) Winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by Judge Lia Purpura (Runners-up: Barbara Hurd, “Listening to the Same River Twice: Theme and Variations,” and Gary L. McDowell, “There are Manuals for Those”) When I was seven, my sea captain father at sea, my mother a strobing lighthouse of missing, I stood alone in my bedroom, renaming all my toys Melissa. You, and you, and you. A child’s narcissism, maybe. A punishment for my dolls. I didn’t choose my name, but I could choose to give it away. A small triumph. But no matter how many dolls I christened Melissa, the sound of my name still shocked me: hum of M, soft L, hiss ending open-mouthed. Melissa, my teacher called each morning. Here, I flinched. It was a ribbon of sound, a yielding sibilant thing. Drag it along a scissor blade and it curls. I wanted a box, something whose corners I could feel. Zoe, Katrina, Natalie. Those girls ruled the school bus. You could press your fingers into Melissa. It was hum and ah, and esssss— more sigh than spit. On family vacation in Florida, after days pickling in the hotel pool, eyes pinked from its blue brine, my mother asked me, Melissa, why, when the ocean was steps away, Why the pool? Because the pool has sides, I told her. I was already spilling out, grasping for edges. And what chance did I stand against the ocean? How many times had the sea taken my father, and left her beating the shore with her hands? It was an early lesson. The ocean disappears things. It is a hungry, grabbing thing. In its deep, there is nothing to reach for. Next to it, I was a girl gulping a woman’s grief. Jean Piaget believed object permanence to be learned within the first two years of life. That is, a thing disappeared continues to exist. But what if it [End Page 9] never appears again? Or disappears long enough to learn to live without it? By two years of age I had already learned two fathers. One addict. One sea captain. My birth father was Tom, a name like him, just a man. The captain had two names: Robert for the merchant marine, and rounder Bob for his intimates. Bob, so close to Dad. Both taught me how to watch someone leave and not chase them. When I asked my mother, why Melissa? I already wanted a new name. Jackie, Britt, Tina. You could drill a hole with Jackie, slingshot a rock with Britt. Even Tina could hurt somebody. Melissa was bringing that ribbon to a swordfight. Melissa was leading with my softest part. My mother told me it was Tom who chose my name. Or did I already know that when I began hating it? A word shapes the mouth with want and wonder for its object. By six, I knew that Jessie down the street fit her name. Fast and blond, Jessie was a streak of girl, hook of J, dot of i, bared teeth of long e. It is no wonder that to hold Jessie in my mouth came to feel like holding Jessie in my mouth. On her knees on the bedroom floor, Jessie pressed two naked dolls together, clicking their immovable parts. What are they doing? I asked. You know, she said. And I did, so I told her. I named the sex parts I knew. She repeated them back to me. Those strange sounds turned in the space between us. And they were ours. I used to repeat words under my breath, on the way to school, in the bath, chanting their sounds until they detached from meaning. The moment when those sounds fell free of their object—like the moment the swing hangs horizontal to its frame, the body weightless, just before gravity clutches it back—giddying. It unlatched something in me, the proof that anything could be pulled apart, could scatter into dumb freedom, a bell ringing not for dinner or church or alarm, but for the simple pleasure of making it ring. Any word could be...
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Oct 23, 2024
D.V Khveshchenko 
Open Access