A Tight Bondage Of Sewn Stars
by Kelly Hodge

 
 
She attended school in starched knee-high socks at the age of sixteen. Other girls were bound for uniform referrals with their creased shirts untucked, skirts rolled up to reveal smooth thighs; other girls were graceless and tactless. They were eager for the sickly kisses of drunk boys their own age at the outdoor gatherings they attended in children's parks. The dented metal slides were cold on exposed buttocks and legs on odd, awkward Friday nights. She made no attempt to embroider her petite frame into this skewed tapestry. The smoothing of her white ribbon between my knuckles. The battered copy of Thackeray's Vanity Fair heavy as my heart pressed to her heart in the historic hallways. A red sunset licking at the sash window as her pink peach of a voice requested I escort her home.

Mary Ann. Named after the woman who took the pseudonym of George Eliot in the 1800s for the publication of her novels and poetry. 'The Mill On The Floss', her silvery words swam to me, 'was George Elliott's most complex and perspicacious work'. Tell me—during the sunset like a tipping crock of honey—about the Tullivers. Describe their lives interweaving like ivy on the face of a famous house. Turn your precious tones into a cave of icicles as again you talk of the whirling, rising flood. Sweet dancing only child. Sharp, impossibly beautiful dreamer. Did you love broken things? Did you love me?

Mary Ann's mother was the colour of ivory. Her cigarette holder was the shape of a giant Carrollian teardrop. It was gold-tipped and made of a rich marbelized amber. The brass pop lock made that satisfactory sound. She fashioned Marcel waves into her leathery black hair just with her fingers, having a penchant for the freedom of the twenties look at home, those absurdly long clacking strings of black pearls. She boasted that she could fancy up both hers and Mary Ann's hair even if they were stranded on a rescue boat with no mirrors. Mother and daughter were delighted with each other in the dark drawing room when Mary Ann first introduced me. Chandeliers, a rosewood parlour cabinet, inkwells and dip pens, the glazed jug and wash basin in the downstairs wash closet. Could my hands have done anything but shake in the old house decked out with irregular shapes and cold textures?

There was a burial plot over the fields where Mary Ann's father—a lecturer on Victoriana—lay flattening in his grand mahogany finish, lined through with the white satin lace interior. The opening of China for trade in the late 1840s meant silk became fairly inexpensive and Victorian gentleman could suddenly afford fancy silk waistcoats, even for daywear. Mary Ann's father was buried—in typical late Victorian fashion—with only the top button of his overcoat up to allow the claret waistcoat to be on display.

Tony Blair was declaring war on Iraq and there beneath a rich oil portrait of Queen Victoria in mourning Mary Ann pinned me like an insect specimen with her sweetest kiss. From then on the past was all that mattered. Together we ate bread rolls with marmalade from paper-thin china and read aloud from yellowing antique newspapers. 'The ball given on the Monday night of last week by Sir John Whitaker Ellis, Lord Mayor of London, and the Lady Mayoress, at Guildhall, was a very successful affair'. 'I wish we'd been there', Mary Ann whispered longingly, gripping my hand like a starlet grips the structure of a building as she watches her hardened hero sink into the mist. It was a month of Victorian clothing exhibitions and endearing duets on the square grand piano before Mary Ann showed me her mother's work.

It was an emerald room at the top of the house. The ceiling was as high as a church. It was populated entirely by dressmaker's dummies. Most of the headless antiques were grubby: linen covered with wooden arm sockets on carved box tripods, although a few modern wire mannequins socialised together, modelling the empire lines of beaded flappers' gowns. Most were bound in corsets. 'Occasionally camisoles are requested. That's really Mother's American clients. Last year she made a frou-frou petticoat from scarlet flannel'. Mary Ann placed a small hand over her heart as though lamenting the memory of such a grand creation being boxed up for its owner. 'But Mother is a goddess at corsetry'.

Cording or meticulous quilting stiffened some of the corsets into the heavenly heart shape. Others were longer—the shape of upturned strawberries—moulding the hips. Some glinted with unfinished beadwork. One had a red blossom motif that made it seem blood-spattered from a distance. On closer inspection it had been unconditionally loved with sequins and holy precision. Five of them in a row had been finely boned and black sateen was machined with yellow and black in various stages of fine embroidery. Mary Ann talked smokily of sateen. There are complex processes that give the material a higher sheen. Cheap sateen is simply pressed with heated rollers to give the impressive appearance of sheen but with time and washing only the underneath is there, dulling the beauty like a hostess with a headache. 'Mother always orders the genuine article'.

There were words you gave birth to for me in that emerald room, its deep corners swallowing dutifully the secrecy of sexual desire so sweetened by ribbon measuring tapes, glass jars of bobbles and paraffin-glow buttons with their four miniscule holes for eyes cracking into our teenaged hearts. Whisper again to me the ludicrous list of unknowns: hourglass corset, redresseur corset, wasp waist corset, tight lacing, bustle, crinoline (immodest to an extent as it sways to show the ankles), spoon busk, girdle, liberty bodice, waist cincher. Bring back to me the fortress house of cropped, one-footed figures bound in those tight contraptions of pride and romance. Something beneath. Something a woman could know she had without showing a soul. The beauty nest egg.

Mary Ann Mary Ann, I whispered to you in my unbalanced need on the wooden floor. The tape measure cutting your waist like a slave chain. Wear a tight bondage of sewn stars for me now. Show me how your sweet shape can be swept in and held; your young pink breasts almost free from the deep pressing onto the hungry heart. I have already closed my eyes. That is how I am with you again now amid the frozen crowd of mannequins in your mother's work room, where you were not the ghost of George Eliot and I was no gentleman.

Kelly Hodge is currently studying with the Open University for a diploma in creative writing. This is her first publication. She lives in Buckinghamshire, UK,  with her brooding pet muse. She can be reached at message_for_kelly@hotmail.co.uk

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