Free Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz Page A

catch my breath and breathe again. I think about my fingernails, and then I think about using something else to do the picking—maybe something made from metal.
    Mama pulls a permanent marker out of her bedside drawer and starts drawing on the fake Barbie. She draws little black arrows all around the doll’s breasts, stomach, thighs, and buttocks. The marks remind me of sewing stitches. Mama must assume all Barbies, fake or not, come naked, because she never once asks where her clothes have gone. Instead, she makes her perfect arrows, and I can tell she’s really concentrating by the way she works her tongue back and forth. This is what she does when she works on her art.
    â€œThere!” she says, her tongue normal again. “Do you know what I did?”
    Mama tells me she did exactly what a plastic surgeon does to a woman’s body before she goes in for surgery. She explains how all the areas marked are the parts of the body women are made to feel most ashamed of, and she points at the arrows on the fake Barbie’s tummy and says, “Nip and tuck!” She says it so the p in “nip” pops and the k in “tuck” clicks.
    I think about the long, purple scar on Mama’s tummy from when I was born. Sometimes I wish I could unzip that scar and crawl back inside. I’d find a new way out, and this time she wouldn’t have to get cut open. “Butchered,” Mama sometimes says to describe the operation.
    Mama holds the doll and points at her feet. I think about the tiny rubber heels I took off. I worry a rabbit will try to eat one and choke to death. Mama is not just a feminist but an environmentalist as well. I see how the doll’s feet were made to only wear high heels. Mama touches the pointy toes on each foot and asks me if I’ve ever heard of Chinese foot binding.
    Her words are no longer flat. Now they come fast, and overpronounced.
    â€œThe term ‘binding’ is very misleading,” Mama says. “Binding implies the cloth kept the girl’s feet from growing, but there is much more involved. The ideal age to begin was when a girl was three. You’re much too old,” she says, smiling as if to comfort me.
    â€œFirst, the girl’s feet were broken. They tried to do this during the winter so the cold would help to numb the pain.” Mama pauses to take a drink of her water. “The cold also helped to stop infection,” she says. And then she hands me the naked fake Barbie doll.
    I know she wants me to examine it, so I do, and I find her feet are nothing like my own.
    â€œIt was the mother’s job to break her daughter’s feet and do the binding,” Mama says. “She’d fold the broken toes under and wrap the binding cloth around the foot as tight as she could. At night, she slept on top of her daughter’s feet to cut off the circulation and thus ease the pain.”
    Mama is talking way too fast. I try to keep up.
    Mama explains how the mothers had no other choice. In their own way, they were being very kind. She uses the word “compassion.” Mama tells me the practice of foot binding has lasted about one thousand years. “There is no way to unbind a bound foot,” she says. “Trust me, the communists tried.” The most desirable size was no longer than three inches. “These feet were called golden lotuses,” Mama says. “Anything bigger was ridiculed.”
    Mama says large feet were called lotus boats, but then she stops talking. She stops in the middle of a sentence, and her hazel eyes have caught on fire. And I realize that Daddy has returned.
    He must be standing in the doorway. I can smell the cold air and the manure. He steps into the room and ruffles my hair. He is looking at the doll I am holding. There are bubbles of spit on Mama’s bottom lip.
    â€œGood night, Fig,” he says. And I say good night too. I say good night as I grab my backpack, and I leave as