Invisible Women

Women & Memory 1

The woman down the hall isn’t dead, but her apartment is a mausoleum. If viewed aerially, it is clusters of polka dots. Flip it landscape and her apartment is filled with statues in her image, one for every year of her adult life. This is something she began decades ago, back when she still had dreams of being a student at some fancy art design school or another. Her creations are antipodal to originality — they’re mere facsimiles of herself — but she’s accurate. Each pore on her face is there, each vein along her leg, each thread of limping hair.

The woman down the hall never made it into art school, but if she had, her senior thesis might have been a variant of this very project. Each year, on her birthday, she buys a large block of marble or wood or clay, large enough for her to stand in, wide enough. And so she begins with a chisel, a new version of herself, life-scaled and nude. She is always nude. It takes her three-quarters of the year to complete herself, and by the time it is finished, her body has already changed. Here there is this new abrasion, that new haircut, that new sag.

Once a year, the woman down the hall invites us into her room for the unveiling of her new statue. We wind our way through all these manifestations, a garden of women, all paying some sort of homage to her, waiting for her to die so they alone can remain the original.