Machado’s collection, Her Body & Other Parties, was passed between women I knew over the years – sisters to friends to lovers – to land in my lap. Before reading, I already understood a wisdom had been shared: of how to be a woman of want in a world created by another gender. And of how to put a shape to the intangible fear of being a woman disbelieved.
The first story in this collection, ‘The Husband Stitch’, is part horror, part folk tale, part magical realism – a genre-expanding story that subverts expectations so often considered unchangeable within “our known world”. We follow a narrator’s tale of becoming/unbecoming as she falls in love with a man “she knows she will marry”, as she exerts her deep-rooted sexual desire, as their love deepens, as she becomes pregnant, as she is tricked by those thought she could trust: her doctor her husband, as she bears her son, as she gives herself to her lover without her desire, as she navigates women’s time-old stories of not being believed, as she is betrayed by her husband who cannot bear her having one secret – her green ribbon – being kept from him, who, in the story’s ending, unties this final part of who she is.
“‘Do you want to untie the ribbon?’ I ask him. ‘After these many years, is that what you want from me?’
His face flushes gaily, and then greedily, and he runs his hand up my bare breast and to my bow. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
I do not have to touch him to know that he grows at the thought.
I close my eyes. I remember the boy at the party, the one who kissed me and broke me at that lakeside, who did with me what I wanted. Who gave me a son and helped him grow into a man himself.
‘Then,’ I say, ‘do what you want.'”
First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019
A Personal Anthology 