Medusa, Bernini
Once upon a time there was a girl who was born with a knot on her head. Not a hair knot, although I can see why that’s what you imagined: no, she was born with a pink, ribbon bowtie sitting neatly at the top of her cute little head. Nothing else there - not a trace of that cute little fluffy duvet babies came out of the womb with. Her parents were puzzled, to say the least.
The doctors were a little bit concerned, of course - who had ever heard of newborns that grew silk? - but after a few weeks of monitoring and no incidents, they resigned themselves to taking some samples and sending her home.
The doctor who had helped deliver her had suggested, joking, that it was better for her to grow ribbons than snakes and her parents, with a soft irony, had decided then and there to call her Medusa.
The knot, it turned out, wasn’t dangerous at all, but it grew more and more ribbons all over the little girl’s head. Every single one was a different color, a different shape, but one thing never changed: as soon as her mood changed, the ribbon tied itself up in knots. On a good day she might walk around with flowing locks of pink and green, but let her get sad or angry or hurt and the ribbons bunched up, screwed tightly into little sailors’ knots that did not care how hard you tried to undo them.
In desperation, her parents even cut one or two off - but it seemed the little girl’s named was, in fact, deserved, and they grew back twice as fierce.
Look: a baby with bow tie for hair was the cutest thing her parents could think of. But have you ever tried giving a toddler anything even remotely delicate? I don’t even have children and I can imagine how much of a carnage a 2 year old with Hermes locks must have been.
Washing all day and night, it turned out, was an absolute nightmare - and do you want to know what the worst part was? If you tugged on them even a little bit, you risked creating even worse knots, and dirt would get stuck in those, so you would try to scrub harder, and you would tug…
They gave up, is what I’m trying to say. One day when she was calm they gave her a long, soaking bath; they cleaned out the hair with everything they could; dried it with great love and care; put her in her cute little poney-themed pyjamas. Then, with the same tenderness, they grabbed a black, silk pouch from behind them and quietly, quietly sowed it to the outermost ribbons on her head.
It took them hours to get it right, and Medusa was fast asleep by the time they tugged at the bonnet, breathed a sigh of relief and put their oblivious daughter into her bed.
She was too young to really remember what was under the bonnet so, when she got old enough to ask, it was with barely repressed guilt that her parents told her the story they had started rehearsing together on that fateful night.
She was born with ribbons on her head, you see, but ribbons that had a terrible secret: whenever she got upset, they turned into dangerous snakes that lashed out at anyone close to her. Didn’t she remember that time she had attacked them two, and they had nearly died? That was the reason why they had fastened that thing on her head. Although it broke their heart, they couldn’t bear the thought of her poor 4 year-old self all alone in this world without parents to take care of her.
To their great relief, she bought it and, without another word, she took to treating her own head with a care they could have never imagined.
The night she heard that story for the first time, they found her standing in front of her bathroom mirror before bed, big black eyes staring into big black eyes as she frowned at herself:
“You’re safe in here”, she whispered to her own head as she checked the silk for loose seams.
It took everything within them not to come clean right then and there and again when, a year later, she asked if they could fasten it more solidly to her had so she might sleep soundly at night. The next year, she came back from school crying; panicked because some of her classmates had tried to see what the silk was hiding and still they comforted her through their self-induced heartbreak. Children, they told each other, hated difference either way, and they would have probably tugged at her ribbons just as meanly as they had at the bonnet. Every time they thought about coming clean they remembered knots that took entire night to clean and weeks to straighten, the panic of how obvious her displeasure made itself and they thought the same thing: it was for the best, both her and theirs.
Things got more complicated once she got to middle school: fitting in was the name of the game so she took to wearing long, elaborate wigs they got her from the puzzled town hairdresser before she even thought to ask.
By the time she reached high school; she had dozens of them arranged in a neat little cabinet, and every girl in her class envied her the pink, blue, green locks on her head that changed every day. She was still scared of what lay underneath, of course, but when you’re fifteen and you’re the most popular girl in school because your parents, for one, will let you play with your hair, it’s easy to see the glass half full.
She couldn’t explain why, exactly, but she never told anyone the true reason for her ever-changing hair. To her best friend she said she had been born with no hair at all and damaged skin. To her boyfriends (and throughout her high school years she had many, all fascinated by the ease with which she became alternately a blonde princess, a punk rocker, an anime babe) she said don’t question it - and they never did, so happy were they to even be allowed close to her.
Sometimes the secret weighed on her. Whenever her friends, at sleepovers, shared their deepest and darkest thoughts, she could feel hers at the tip of her tongue waiting, just waiting for someone to ask her “what about you, M, what’s one thing you’ve never told anyone?” But first of all, she had built herself a reputation for being tough as nails and quiet as a prison door, so she knew they wouldn’t ask her but listen with baited breath as she told them some inanity about sex she’d interrupt them with and, second of all, you couldn’t exactly follow up “I can hear my parents having sex at night” with “my real hair could probably kill all of you”, could you?
So her secret stayed right there, safe behind her closed lips everywhere but at home where her parents treated her with an infuriating mix of condescension and fear.
By the time she was getting ready for college, the story she had built for herself, the persona that so impressed her classmates tired her. She yearned for something - she didn’t quite know what but she knew it involved living around people who didn’t so obviously cower in front of her standoffish demeanor.
She did relatively well at her exams, partly because she was lucky and also because she was desperate to get out - at some point in her last year she had read about New York, its eclectic inhabitants, its constant outlandishness and she got two marks above Columbia’s requirements on her SATs just to make extra sure she’d get in. Her personal essay wasn’t directly about her hair but, like most things in her life, it couldn’t really be about anything else either: she wrote about the power of hurting others, the risk of hurting yourself in hurting others and the need for compassion where other people’s weaknesses were concerned.
It didn’t just get her into Columbia: it also won her school’s prize for personal essays - hell, the local newspaper even asked if they could publish it, and she allowed herself the pleasure that admiration made her feel. A little taken aback by her success (although very pleased), she collected her praise and got to work preparing her move to the city that, or so she’d heard, never slept.
That summer was pure torture for her worried parents. After all this time, should they come clean? She would soon be alone in a big city full of possibilities and the idea that she might find out on her own, and the ways she might react to finding out on her own in New York City, kept them up at night until the day she left home.
That morning, they woke up to find that neither of them could speak of anything else and they resolved, before they stepped through their bedroom door, not to open their mouths until she was safely on the plane.
They made her breakfast - her favourite, corn fritters and maple syrup - in complete silence. When she walked in their eyes were full of pain and their jaws carefully clenched and she assumed that they were just worried about sending their only daughter off to college in a big scary town they had presumably never visited - this was the middle of nowhere, Illinois after all.
They drove her to the airport, eyes watering but still mouths shut, and as they exchanged silent, teary goodbyes her mothered mustered up the strength to speak.
She drew in a long shaky breath. She wanted to say so much: how sorry she was for all the ways she knew they had messed her up, how proud she was of where she was headed despite that, how much she wished her daughter would let others take care of her, even though she knew she was the one who had imposed those self-enforced defenses her daughter grew so fast. After an expectant pause, and with as much pain as a mother can show without breaking a little, she finally spoke:
“I beg you, watch your head.”
For months after she had left, it would break Medusa’s heart every time she remembered the scene. In that moment, though, she squared her shoulders, hugged her pitiful parents and strode off into the terminal.
If she wanted to live beyond her hair, she had a plane to catch.
The first year in New York was refreshingly exciting. Everyone had a story, in college, and it was fine if you didn’t want to share yours - that made you all the more interesting. Acceptance and understanding were the name of the game for this new generation of American thought leaders, and they told each other “I love you” while holding hands in the middle of dimly, colorfully lit nightclubs that smelled of sweat, weed and something dirtier. Nobody knew exactly who they were, which was reassuring, and they didn’t seem to be in any particular rush to find out. Being a student in the city that never sleeps meant cherishing these years when they didn’t have to play the busy businessmen who bumped into them in Union Square, disorientated, already stuck on an important phone call after they had just stepped out of the subway.
For a little while, at least, they didn’t need to take that many decisions or make that many calls, and they would enjoy every last drop of that freedom while they still could.
Boys were different in college, too: they read books and knew poetry and wanted to know about you, no really, not just the wigs though they had to admit that was pretty hot. There were fuckboys, too, those guys who manipulated your emotional intimacy while never really engaging with you, and she learned that was probably exactly how she had behaved in high school. She learned cynicism, utilitarianism at the hands of Wall Street bankers who wanted to buy her drinks so they could get a little of the freedom she represented, if only for a little while. She learned trust from friends who came to bars the moment she texted them to rescue her from a bad date or looming loneliness. She learned carelessness, waking up at 3pm because she hadn’t gone to sleep until 9am to see the sun rise on Central Park, and the camaraderie of roommates cuddling when they woke up with a pounding headache and yesterday’s makeup smeared on the pillowcase.
She came home for holidays, of course, but everything felt a little duller, a little less flavourful in her little town in the middle of butt-fucking-nowhere, Illinois. Her old friends looked the same, just older, as did her parents and everybody else there. They all seemed powerless and bland in the face of New York fucking City where she got to spend all of her days, and the moment the plane landed home she knew she would spend the vacation yearning for the home she had made herself there.
One more thing that seemed to happen when she visited: by the end of the year most of her high school friends had started talking about their college boyfriends, the trips they were planning together for summer and the inevitable meeting-the-parents-jitters.
She didn’t resent them for it - she knew that, when you couldn’t live in constant movement, the second best thing to do was to settle down, put down some roots quick, before you had time to contemplate whether you were missing out on anything else. But still, that fundamental thing she thought she had escaped by leaving was still hot on her heels, and for all her New York happiness she had yet to tell a single soul about the snakes under her bonnet. Hell - New York had almost made her forget them. But opening up was a process, as her therapist always reminded her (and had she mentioned she’d gotten a therapist? Columbia offered free mental health counseling and it was the first time she’d actually spoken about how she felt to someone). So she let the process run its course without hurrying it along.
In her second year she joined a sorority. An only child, she relished the idea of a house full of sisters. In it she found: sometimes acceptance, sometimes not; people who would yell at gross frat bros at parties for her and hold her hair when she puked; the subtle competition of a house filled with college overachievers; girl fights with pulled hair and cried and tears that you solved with sniffly ‘I’m sorrys’; a look at men at once cold and so longing, manipulative and manipulated. She also discovered “experimenting”, that greatest of American concepts that really means bisexuality but you’re a little WASPy and you’re scared of what your parents might think. She liked it and, although she knew coming out would earn her no friend while in the house, she wasted no time in doing it as soon as the year was over.
Third year: back with her old friends, those that didn’t know who they were but liked to live, really, except now they knew a little bit more and so did she, and they were curious still but some of it was getting chipped away by the prospect of summer internships and the holy grails of grad scheme offers behind them. They knew it was happening, too, but they accepted it as a normal part of growing up in a way that Medusa wasn’t quite ready to do yet. She hadn’t finished her discovery, she hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of why she couldn’t tell those people she loved so much about that thing on her head that terrorized her so.
She felt like she was running out of time and, to beat the clock, she crammed all the discovering she could into her last year and a half: acid, ayahuasca because people spoke of trips that cured all your fears (she saw long winding snakes glistening off the walls and cried for three days straight). Therapy, experimental therapy, acupuncture, hypnosis, but all those practices proved useless in the face of her fear, her desperation, her anger at herself. She even tried religion for a little while - until she got tired of the Hail Marys and painful pews.
Spring of her final year came round and still Medusa couldn’t claim that she was, like, ready to go into active life, you know? But nothing had seemed to work and nobody seemed to struggle like her. So she signed on the dotted line for a contract with Goldman Sachs, bought ten nearly identical, professional-looking dirty blonde wigs and moved into her first grown-up New York apartment.
She felt a little bit sadder, a little bit quieter, but when her friends asked about it she frowned and told them she was worried about adult life and they all nodded, a glimmer of fear in their eyes as they, too, got ready to act like they hadn’t just spent four whole years getting high and laughing in the face of corporate America.
She started work. The hours were long. The tasks were mind-numbingly harrowing. She learned that past 3am, she couldn’t distinguish between an 8 or a 0 let alone read a formula on an Excel spreadsheet. She also learned that Red Bull could delay that for a little while, pushing her mental limit to 5am when she really had to. She learned she could be better than others by being lazier than everyone, not trying to impress seniors with fancy formulas but just getting the job done fast, and she used that lesson ruthlessly. SHe learned that when you’re really good at your job you can get promoted once, twice, three times and it’ll make you feel amazing. She learned that didn’t work as well for her friends - that some burned out, others hated it and most transitioned out of their big graduate jobs after a few years, settling into lower-speed companies that made them happy as they put on that layer of fat so commonly called the middle-age spread.
She learned that her corporate, for one, had big plans for her and she went off to a bank-sponsored MBA, then executive training, then higher and higher up strategy meetings until one day she was touted to become the youngest woman to join Goldman’s Executive Committee.
She stood all-powerful and, every morning, she put on her wig as automatically as she did her makeup. She’d had her bonnet extended a couple of time to accommodate the sprawling mess of ribbons that still sat on top of her head, but she had largely stopped thinking about it. She was pretty happy, incredibly successful, and she felt fulfilled with her group of friends and a sprawling network of colleagues who thought she was great. All in all, she was satisfied.
She got an intern. Nothing particularly surprising there; she got interns every summer by the dozen, but either she was getting older (she was) or interns were getting younger (they weren’t) because this one genuinely looked like she could be her daughter and, when they ran into cabs together, before the drivers heard the staccato-clipped tone with which she listed off all the to-do items, they frequently asked.
The intern was called Athena and she seemed so soft, so unhurried that Medusa couldn’t help but remember her own internship days, her thirst for self-definition, her contempt in the face of grown-ups. Athena was really fucking good at her job, too - better than any intern Medusa had ever had. They spent the summer building up cozy office routines and checking each other’s teeth after client meetings.
But when came the time for Athena to accept the very generous Goldman offer, she refused:
“I’m sorry, M. I can’t see myself in the corporate world. You’ve been incredible but I can’t.”
A little stunned, Medusa asked why.
“It’s clear you’ve been protecting yourself from others your whole life, or others from yourself, although I don’t really know if there is much difference between the two, and maybe that’s why you can’t see that, apart from you, this office is soulless. I can’t do soulless! I want my work to be full of friends and vulnerabilities and cake on Fridays, and I don’t see how that would even begin to work here.
Shocked, a little heartbroken, her would-be boss let her go. After all those years it turned out all it took was a 22-year old with a little courage to reach into your chest, grab your heart and point its exact failures out to you.
A little winded she went back to work and, although she missed a companionship she never knew she wanted, she fell back into her old rhythm.
Still, though, she couldn’t help but think of Athena’s words, how clearly she had seen through 16 years’ worth of professional gloss.
A few months after the rejection, on an impulse she couldn’t quite place, she emailed the soon-to-be-grad:
“Hi A,
Long time no speak!
How is the non-corporate world treating you? Have you decided on what you want for next year?
I’ve been thinking about what you told me. What you want to grab a drink someday?
Best,
Medusa”
She pressed send.
She hoped it didn’t sound too weird, or like she was trying to ask her out on a date. Oh god - would she think that? She was half her age! She could only hope her former intern still thought well of her.
She did, and they made plans to meet up at some speakeasy called Bathtub Gin which, strangely enough, had been cool for long enough that Medusa remembered it from her own college days.
For sixteen years she had worn the same wig - changing had become exhausting and superfluous once she had setted into her work persona, but for the occasion she picked a short, sharp, platinum bob she hadn’t laid eyes on since the last time she’d gone clubbing.
Bathtub Gin was the same as she remembered it, except a lot more popular and way more expensive. She didn’t see any point in dilly-dallying so, after downing a surprisingly strong cocktail, she got straight to the point:
“Those things you told me really surprised me. Not that they were hurtful, although some of them probably were, more that I was surprised to hear you describe them. What made you think of them?”
Athena rolled her eyes, smiling:
“Look. It’s clear that the power you hold on others today is at least in part due to the fact that, any time you speak to someone, you take charge. You always manoeuver the conversation exactly where you want it to be. I don’t even think you realise you’re doing it, at this point, but it’s clear that people can only discuss what you want them to. What are you so afraid of people asking?”
Medusa’s stomach dropped to her ankles. It was true, of course, but nobody had ever confronted her for doing that and she felt exposed and a little lost.
“There!” Athena exclaimed. “You did it again! Did you know that, every time you feel uncomfortable, you have the same gesture? You reach for something underneath your wig.”
That was too much. With a sharp movement Medusa got up; dropped $100 on the table and ran out, leaving behind her a bemused Athena.
She was already in a cab by the time she realized she had left her coat on the back of her chair - but oh well, she thought, better a coat than her dignity. She got home, barely breathing for fear of letting too much out. She ran in, closed the door, collapsed behind it.
How could she have been so stupid? How could she have left 16 years go by without so much as trying to address what she had always known was there? And how was it that in all this time, none of her friends - not one! - had ever picked up on what a 22 year-old had so easily excavated?
She stayed there for a while, alternatively crying, shivering, panicking as she thought about how long she had spent lying to herself.
When she was spent, she picked herself up off the floor and dragged herself to her bathroom.
She stared, hard into the mirror. What was staring back didn’t look great.
She saw two eyes red from crying, a nose that needed to be blown, lips that had been pursed her whole life to keep her from saying the wrong thing and eyebrows furrowed in an eternally worried frown.
Her wig had started slipping off and she got herself out of it slowly, painstakingly, pulling at the pins one at a time as she pulled it away. Her black silk bonnet was still there, of course, holding her safely together.
She put her fingertips against it. The motion felt strange, deliberate. She was sure she touched it every day - she had to in order to get her hair on - but she couldn’t think of the last time she’d laid hands on it really, by choice.
All she felt was trepidation. She could make out the outline of the long ribbons that undoubtedly slithered against her skull, their broad outline, the bumps where they bunched up like so many scaly skins. They were heavy, she could feel them weighing against the back of her neck and with a flash of dread she wondered if the bonnet might break, letting a horde of giant snakes loose of Goldman Sachs’s executive floor. She looked for a crack, an opening but the black silk was as safely sewn on as ever. She thought she could feel something move against her hand - she shivered and hugged herself.
She spent the next few days at home. She couldn’t explain exactly why, but the idea of facing everyday life as if nothing had happened felt unbearable to her.
After three days, someone knocked on the door. She checked the peephole: it was Athena and she was holding the coat she had left at Bathtub Gin.
“Medusa? I heard you come to the door. Could you let me in please?”
I couldn’t describe to you the gut-wrenching fear Medusa felt as she gripped the door handle. Still - she couldn’t quite open it.
“Medusa. Please.”
She twisted it. A click.
Athena gave the door a gently push. It gave. She opened it fully.
Her former boss was leaning against the opposite wall, hair covered in a black silk bonnet, crying silently.
She let herself into the insane penthouse flat Medusa had bought herself with her first exec bonus package, dropped the coat on the first chair she found.
Medusa hadn’t moved. Cautiously, Athena came up to her:
“Do you want to sit down?”
She nodded, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand as she pushed herself off the wall and guided them both to her living room.
In passing, Athena noted just how cold it all looked - Medusa must have paid some designer to decorate it all and it felt more like a luxury showroom than it did a home. They sat down on a large blue sofa.
“I’m sorry I’m behaving like this. I just - I had stopped thinking about that part of myself a long time ago.”
“What part of yourself?” Athena prodded
Medusa looked away, one hand self-consciously flying to her head. The bonnet looked weird, like she had put some sort of paper or cardboard underneath it.
“Is this about your hair?”
“I don’t have hair.”
“What do you mean you don’t have hair? What’s under this bonnet?”
She squinted to get a better look - under her stare, whatever was on Medusa’s head seemed to recoil and shrink.
“We’re not sure, exactly”, Medusa started with a shaky voice. “When I was born my parents thought they were ribbons, but as I grew older it turned out they could turn into snakes.”
What the fuck had she been smoking? Was Medusa too high to realise that story was basically copy-pasted from ancient Greek mythology?
“Feel it.”
And so she did - it didn’t feel like snakes, exactly, but whatever lay under that bonnet certainly didn’t feel like normal hair.
“Can I see?”
Medusa shook her head:
“I haven’t taken this bonnet off since I was 2 years old. It’s sewn to my head.”
She explained what her parents had always told her, what she knew to be true because she felt the movement on her scalp every time her emotions went south.
Athena shook her head:
“But you’re upset now, right? And maybe I haven’t touched enough snakes in my lifetime, but that’s not what they feel like to me - just weirdly moving ribbons, right?”
Medusa shrugged: if she was being completely honest, she had never really tried to figure it out.
Tentatively, Athena pushed:
“Could we undo one stitch?”
“And risk your life? Are you insane?”
“What if I undid it and then locked myself away? I wouldn’t even stay to look at them. Would you let me do it then?”
A long, drawn-out pause. Medusa couldn’t really pretend that she was thinking about it: at this point, her mind was basically just white noise.
What did she have to lose? She shrugged.
Athena took that as her cue. She left the room in search of some scissors and came back ten minutes later, holding a tiny pair of silver ones.
The stitching was precise and undoing it was hell: whoever had sewn this knew what they were doing, and they clearly hadn’t wanted to take any risks. It took her nearly an hour to clear the path and for one ribbon to start peeking out - a full hour during which, as she watched the bonnet twitch and shimmer, the fear grew in her stomach, too: what if she was wrong? What if a snake really did slither out onto Medusa’s neck?
One she had cleared enough of the stitching, she pulled on a slightly garish-looking piece of hanging ribbon. It contracted in her hand, twisting itself into an impossible knot.
It took her a minute to understand but not much more. In one fell swoop, she grabbed the top of the bonnet and snipped at it, letting a blooming bouquet of constricted, angry, multicolored ribbons down onto Medusa’s tense shoulders.
“Medusa”, she said, half crying herself from relief. “They were never snakes!”
Medusa was frozen in place, some knots hanging in front of her eyes. She was shaking a little, although she couldn’t tell if it was from shock, fear, relief or some odd mix of the three.
She ran into her bathroom.
The woman staring at her from her mirror had a head full of silk - every color of silk, somehow bunched up into ugly, mean twists that seemed to be relaxing by the minute.
She didn’t know exactly how long she stood there. After a while Athena came in, too, and she saw knots that seemed to be letting themselves loose as their host stared on.
She hugged Medusa’s shoulders. To both their surprise, Medusa hugged her back.
When they let go, she had long, flowing ribbons down to her hips: not one knot in sight.