Creative Nonfiction – July 2019

(Brent) #1

14 BODY LANGUAGE | M.G. LEIBOWITZ


Penis, I said. Penis. Vagina. Penis.
Clitoris, he said. Vagina, penis, clitoris.
I made us say the words until we could speak
them without laughing. Even after, though, we
found different words: words that were not lifted
from medical dictionaries or locker rooms or songs
that made me blush when I tried to sing along.
Together, we built our own language—knew
what a single word or sound meant, only between
us. There was no shame.
The problem with a private language is that no
one else knows it.
He remembers the words, and so do I. But we
don’t talk anymore, and I can’t speak this lan-
guage—body language—to anyone else.

vi.
A friend asks me if I think words lose some of
their power when they are used freely, if perhaps
body language is like ancient blessings, which
sound different beyond high ceilings and stone
floors.
I tell her this strikes me as possible. There are
holy words and unholy spaces. There are words
that lose their sheen, the way butterflies or moths
lose their scales when they are too often handled.

Still, I say, I want to be able to talk about this. I
gesture to my chest.
Once, I visited Ellis Island with my family and
found the stone where my great-grandmother’s
maiden name is engraved, evidence of her trans-
plant from the old world to the new. Her name
was Pearl Brest. My father laughed when we found
it. Lucky she married, huh? he said, and I imagined
going along in life with this word attached to me
almost as intractably as these two milk-secreting,
glandular organs are attached to my chest.
Now I say Brest, and it does not feel right to me,
but neither does it feel quite as wrong. Yes, there
are words that lose their meanings with use—lan-
guage that grinds down like chalk— but perhaps
there are also words that gain meaning with
speaking, one association altered by another.
Breasts, I say aloud. I find it different now. The
lights are on, and we are not two people in love
but two friends sitting across from each other in a
poorly ventilated dorm room. I steel myself again.
Breasts. It leaves my lips a little easier this time,
though the tail of the word still catches against my
teeth.
Brest.
My breasts.
There is some power in the word, I feel now,
which I have never noticed before. The way the
“b” brushes itself from my lips. The way the
end of the word becomes part of the air almost
immediately. It is sacred, somehow, the way things
that are intransigently part of you are sacred.
Almost holy. This word is for bedsheets, yes, but
maybe it could also be for ancestors, for voyagers,
for conversations between friends.
Brest, I say again. Breast.
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