First You Break

We lit one contact sheet after another and burned them to a crisp.

Photo by Bekah Russom on Unsplash

When I was a 9-year-old, little girl, my mother would wake me in the middle of the night to get me drunk, dress me up in stilettos, chiffon coverups she wore over slacks, strands of her pearls, and shiny drop earrings. She’d sit me down at her makeup table to play with her liners, lipsticks, eye shadow, mascara and rouge. Often, I just wanted to sleep. But she always had a friend with her, a female photographer, who shot models for a Canadian fashion magazine. Two-three in the morning, the record player would go from Lena Horne to theatrical songs that would stimulate me to dance. Gypsy, La Plume de Ma Tante, Gigi, and more. I knew them all by heart. “Sing out Louise.” When I was really drunk, the photographer would pick up her camera and get up on the mattress of my mother’s bed, to create more angles for the long shoot. There must have been a thousand photographs of me stripping down, flinging off my shoes, one by one, dancing and undressing until my long hair fell over half my face. This went on for two years.

Eleven years later about, my mother got me drunk in her dining room. She let my sister pull down my blouse to expose my breasts. Intoxicated, they each found this funny. I started to cry. I was 22, I think. My mother left the room and came back with a new bottle of champagne, and a thick envelope from her upstairs safe. Hundreds of contact sheets of those days, along with some enlarged black and white photographs that the photographer and she had obviously printed and done who knows what with. I kept these photographs for years, to enforce some truth on myself that bad things can happen, reminders of rage and betrayal, manipulative sensations that kept those memories alive. A survival skill set maybe.

I’ve succeeded in ways that count with the help of a variety of professionals, and eventually had one of them ask me to create a ritual, with my husband and close friends at my side. We chose prayers, and poems, and shared some of our written thoughts about living in a safe world, the deepest well of self-respect, and the honor it is to let go. We had set a large pot of water in the middle of my living room, put on peaceful music, and then one by one we each lit one contact sheet after another, burned them to a crisp. The last was the hardest to let go of. It was of me looking like a wild child, out of focus for the dance moves I was making. It was probably 16”x14”, black and white. My mother had had it framed as a gift to me for my 18^th birthday. Surprise! The hesitation was long and frightening to fire it up, unnerving because I was destroying such an early memory that was also proof that most victims don’t have. “No one will believe me,” I had said to my therapist interventionist when the time came. ‘I believe you,’ she said. After a long moment of silence, with both tears and a crooked smile on my face, I put the match on fire, lit three corners of the antiquity, and watched my image shrink, setting the smallest triangle of the last corner in the pot of water with the rest of the mess. My husband and friends were smiling, so we clapped. Rituals can be fundamental aids in our quest to own our true selves. Mine said to me, “Do not be afraid of letting go of the badness and cruelty that was done. When the time is right, your strength will come. And then your spirit will fly.”

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Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man's Flower was published in the Bogie's Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.

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