For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Caitlin McCormick—whose story "Eleanor" appears in our Summer 2024 issue—considers a story from Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
During my first semester of college, my childhood best friend and I formed a two-person book club. Bereft at no longer having the same people, places, and things in our lives to chew through at the end of each day, we decided we could at least read the same things. There were no real rules or deadlines to our club, except one: the books had to be gay, because we were gay, and we missed each other.
We sped through Rubyfruit Jungle and Giovanni’s Room, A Little Life and The Price of Salt. In phone calls we didn’t so much discuss the themes of the books we read as we taxonomized them: here were the ones where gay men found love in Europe. The ones where gay women fled home. The ones where gay people died. Over and over again, they died. Put like that, it all sounds dreadful, but I came to love the patterns. At least in our club, after a lifetime of hushed whispers, I knew what happened to gay adults.
Still, in exasperation from the repetition, and on a bookseller’s recommendation, one winter break I picked up Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. Every story in the collection is about queer women, but none of them die for being queer. In one, the last survivor on earth lists an inventory of every sexual partner she’s had during a global pandemic. In another, a retail worker finds the ghosts of missing women hiding in the dresses she sells. Each story seemed to open to me like a secret door, but my favorite in the collection was “Mothers,” in which a narrator (unnamed) is handed a baby by her abusive ex-girlfriend (named Bad), told it is theirs, and tasked with looking after it:
The baby does look like me, and Bad—my pointy nose and red hair, my sulky pout, her round chin and detached earlobes. The open, sobbing mouth—that’s all Bad. I stop, this joke still firing in my brain even as I realize that Bad isn’t here to hear it, to pause whatever she is doing to raise an eyebrow at me, maybe scold me for saying such a thing in front of our daughter, or maybe throw a glass at my head.
On its face, the story is a nightmare. To be saddled with the child of your abuser is to be forever saddled with an albatross of your abuse. Simultaneously, as the narrator recounts the relationship’s highs, lows, and eventual demise—braided into the baby’s imagined past, present, and future—Machado plants a nagging seed: for queer couples who might only dream of biological children, this nightmare is also a fantasy. As the story crescendos, the narrator speaks directly to the now-grown child, begging her to remember:
Ada, remember how you kicked sand into that neighbor child’s eyes? I yelled at you and made you apologize in your best dress, and that night I cried by myself in the bathroom because you are Bad’s child as much as you are mine.
In doing so, Machado dips her hands into the slick heteronormativity that all gay couples flirt with: if you could have kids together, just accidentally, just from a Sunday pregnancy test and not from a fertility clinic, what would they look like? What would you name them? Whose eyes would they inherit, and whose shoe size? At least, she seems to suggest, straight people might one day leave their abuser with biological proof that such violence happened. At least a baby can have its parents’ best traits and defend them both too. At least something concrete, Machado suggests, can come from all that tragedy.