cartography of a girl
Hannah Gordon
hen I was younger, I used to connect my freckles and moles
W
with a pen, creating zigzagging, crisscrossing lines across my body, as
though I were one of those maps that my Father was always hunched
over, trailing his finger along various roads and straits and borders he
intended to cross.
“Here’s Malaysia, where Daddy worked in that orphanage I
showed you photos of,” he’d say, his finger hovering over the map that
spread across his desk.
“Looks like a shark tooth,” I’d tell him.
I connected the moles on my legs in permanent marker once,
the stench of it filling my room and tangling in my hair. My mother
swore the whole time she bathed me, scrubbing me with rough hands.
I was shiny, pink, and raw by the time the lines gave from my skin and
circled the drain.
“And here is India,” my dad would say, “See this dot, here? That’s
Delhi. Where Mommy and Daddy met.”
I let my fingers trace the spot.
“And me?”
“Yes. You were made here.”
Once, in art class, I painted thick lines connecting the dots
along my arms, and the teacher yelled at me. She made me wash up
in the locker room, and I lost painting privileges for a whole week. I
smelled like cheap paint and cheaper soap for the rest of the afternoon,
and when I got home, I didn’t tell my parents what had happened.
“This is Ghana. I helped save little girls here,” he’d say.
“Save them from who?” I’d ask, hand hovering over the globe.
“Bad people. Bad men.”
That night I traced a line on my thigh with my fingernail so
hard that it turned pink, and, eventually, a thin stream of blood trickled
out. I wiped it away, sticking my finger in my mouth. It tasted like
pennies. The next day I wore long pants, even though it was hot out, so
that no one could see what I’d done.
That’s how it always was—me, trying to make connections
visible, trying to be a map that Daddy