My Name is Mary
When my great-grandmother was a teenager, she wanted to be a nurse so badly that she cut into her own knee to see what was inside. This is what she found.
Skin
My mom says that Nanni always wanted to be pale. In the 1930s when she came of age, her warm Italian skin was something to hide rather than embrace. Mom says that she would always be lurking in the shadows during the summer, watching from afar as her family gleamed in the sun. It’s ironic, the way that people burn cancer into their noses in attempts to be tan, while Nanni did everything in her power to let her naturally golden skin wither into winter.
When my sister was born, she was a baby so dark that it seemed like she’d spent nine months tanning through the skin of our mother’s belly. Mom says that Nanni loved holding and burping and playing with my sister. Mom says that Nanni would have adored me, too, if she’d ever had the chance to meet me. I was born a few years after my sister, but this time, the baby was pale as a ghost. My mom joked that they had handed her someone else’s kid, that I couldn’t possibly have come out of her. Infant held against mother’s chest like snow against sand. When I was little, I would always be lathered up in far more sunscreen than anyone else in my family, much to my dismay.
It seems, however, that I was born with the exact skin that Nanni had coveted for all those years. Somehow I had inherited the hopes of a dead woman and the beauty standard of generations past. As I grew older, I learned to appreciate my fair complexion. And now, I make sure to take any opportunity I have to turn my face toward the sun, close my eyes, and feel the warmth on my cheeks. I do it for Nanni. Partially in spite of her, and partly because she never allowed herself to do the same.
Flesh
Nanni’s first of many jobs over the years was working at the Dey Brothers department store. Mom says that one day the artist who sketched advertising posters recruited Nanni to model for him. She had long, pretty legs, and they were illustrated in shoe ads several times for the store, a fact that Nanni was supposedly very proud of. The scar tissue on her knee must have been covered up by stockings, leaving only elegant lines and curves for the artist’s eye.
Around the time I was in kindergarten, I fell on the sidewalk in front of our house and scraped open my knee. I was ultimately fine, but the amount of blood on my leg and the pavement was alarming to a five-year-old. My mom had seen me fall and rushed right over, but not before I’d started to wail. I believe that she picked me up and brought me right inside, doing her best to clean the wound and calm me down. Then weeks later, just as the scabs on that knee were almost healed, I managed to fall again and scrape up the other one. Mom seemed to empathize with my bad luck, and I’m sure I got some kind of treat because she felt so bad for me.
Anytime my mom bends down, her knees make a little popping noise. Even as a child I could identify her immediately coming down the stairs. Light on her feet, but on every step there was a distinct short moment of pop rocks on a tongue, or rice crispy cereal crackling in milk. She claims that her knees got messed up from dance classes in college. She says that she was in this one piece for the dance ensemble where she had to fall/jump onto her knees from a standing position. Over and over again they practiced, and her knees were never the same. I’ve seen pictures of some of her dance performances from college. Though the costumes were painfully 80s, they always seemed to show off her long dancer’s legs.
Now I attend my mom’s alma mater. I take dance classes in the same building, same room, with the same ancient professor who taught my mom decades ago. Of course the professor probably likes me better than she ever did my mom, for the sole reason that I am a boy. At barre in ballet class, I need extra room around me, because my legs are so long. I bend my knees into plié, worrying that I too will leave college with a popping sound. I sit on the tiles, stretching my legs in a building that doesn’t seem to have changed much since my mom left it in the early 90s. In those moments, I live in cycles of the past, covering up the faint scar tissue on my knees with tights, so that the long lines of my legs can be seen distinctly as I dance.
Muscle
Nanni’s father was a bootlegger. He was cold, he was explosive, and he made moonshine in the basement of their house on the north side of Syracuse. He would make Nanni and her sisters answer the door whenever someone came to buy booze. All the curtains to the windows were kept shut so that nobody outside could see any illegal activity. The whole family had to live in that dark and sunless house. Maybe that’s where Nanni’s habit of lurking in the shadows began.
Nanni’s real name was Mary. She was one of eight children: four boys and four girls. The sisters only ever stuck with each other, so even my mom doesn’t know much about the brothers. But the sisters, Annie, the oldest, then Agnes, Mary, and Genevieve, the youngest, had a practically unbreakable bond for all of their lives. They raised each of their own families only a matter of blocks away from each other, if not at times in different floors of the same house. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all braided into interwoven lives, their love expanding through the generations and creating a lot of close-knit cousins. That love, however, first grew out of trauma.
One night, their father drunkenly pulled a gun on one of the brothers, threatening him. Thankfully, it didn’t escalate enough for anyone to get hurt, but all the siblings—brothers and sisters united—vowed to kill their father if he ever pulled a stunt like that again.
I think of Nanni, teenaged Mary, having to answer the door for complete strangers. Strange men, greasy men hiding their faces in their hats and collars, eyeing up Nanni and her sisters as they handed them bottles of bootleg liquor. Couldn’t their father have asked one of his sons to do it? Couldn’t he have spared the girls the humiliation, the tensing muscles, the danger?
I think of my mom, out to lunch with her boss, inching her feet closer to her chair as her boss tries to play footsie with her. He holds a conversation as if he wasn’t slouched so far down in his chair to reach her with his legs that he was almost under the table.
I think of myself, of being afraid of men when I was kid. Not because I felt in danger, but because they simply felt foreign to me, like creatures from another planet. I was sort of scared of other little boys too. I recognized from a very early age that I simply wasn’t like them; I was not them. I felt different from little girls too, but the girls seemed to welcome and accept me in a way that boys never did.
I remember being dragged along grocery shopping with my mom when I was very young. We passed by large sets of kids’ shampoos and soaps, branded with cartoon characters. There was one set that was all pink and purple, and one all blue and orange. I imagined buying both of them, and being able to change between boy and girl whenever I wished by washing my head with shampoo from the pink bottle or the blue one.
Of course using the boy shampoo wouldn’t have really been a return to myself; in fact, it would have turned me into someone very different. I didn’t like boy things growing up, so much so that my mom often asked me if I liked my body, if I liked my name, if I wanted to be a girl. Now for many queer kids that kind of support would have been amazing, but for me it grew annoying. My answer was always yes, yes, and no, and I grew tired of having to analyze how I felt rather than just be. Nowadays, however, I question frequently what I think it means to be a man. I hear stories of how men have interacted with women in my family, how they interact with my friends and strangers, how embarrassed and disgusted I am to belong to that group. Maybe I don’t want to belong to it, and maybe I never have, at least fully.
As an adult, I find much more comfort, inspiration, and strength in the feminine divine. I hold onto the stories of my female ancestors. I most look up to my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother Nanni. Generations of mother after mother.
Bone
Nanni’s mother was considered a saint by all who knew her. Her kindness balanced out the temper and the trials of their father, and all the children adored her. She was the sunshine in their shadowed house. But unfortunately, even the brightest fires must fade.
Nanni’s mother died in 1931. Nanni was fourteen years old.
Their father, in addition to being a bootlegger and a gun puller, was also a drunk. He and their mother were out one winter night, and on the way home he lost control of the wheel and crashed their automobile. The father was just scraped up, but the mother was stuck in her seat.
Her legs had been crushed by the collapsed car front. Nanni’s father pulled her out of the car himself, and instead of calling an ambulance or rushing to a hospital, he brought her home, scared to get caught drunk driving. She suffered in front of her children for a day or more, what was left of her legs laid out in front of her with little medical attention. Eventually the father brought her to help, but far too much time had passed, and she died in the hospital bed.
The kids all blamed him for their mother’s death, as does the whole family to this day. Some of the brothers were old enough to have moved out of the house, but the sisters were trapped there, at the will of their father, with no light left to care for them.
They learned to look after each other; Annie, the oldest, in particular became a mother to her own sisters. Even still, Genevieve, the youngest, fell into a peculiar delirium immediately following their mother’s death. She could not move her legs for months on end. Her body was haunted by horrors of her mother’s death, her bones crushed by a phantom car. As for Agnes and Mary, my Nanni, both were forced to drop out of high school to support the family. By fourteen, Nanni had lost her mother, her refuge from their father, and her education. This is when she got her job at Dey Brothers.
After months, Genny finally was able to stand and walk again. Because she was the youngest, she was allowed to stay in school and received her high school diploma. Nanni resented Genny for that opportunity for the rest of her life. More than anything, Nanni wanted to be a nurse. Maybe it was the career she’d dreamt of since she was a little girl, or maybe she was inspired to study medicine after watching her mother suffer in their own home. Either way, the dream consumed her brain, as did the many barriers that blocked her from achieving it. One day she decided that she was so desperate to learn about the human body that she sliced into her own knee to examine what layers were inside. She must have done it with a kitchen knife. She probably sewed up the wound herself, too. She probably put on several layers of tights and walked into work the next day.
Blood
Nanni didn’t live far from my parents around the time when my mom was pregnant with my sister. Nanni would often stop by and hand her granddaughter a container of food. One of the most frequent dishes was veal stewed in tomato sauce and served over rice or pasta. The most important ingredient however, was the wrinkly black olives—salty and rich—used to flavor the sauce. It’s certainly not a popular Italian recipe, but each time my mom has made it, I savor every bite.
Sometime after my sister was born, Nanni started to get sick. She cooked less and less until one day she must have stirred with her wooden spoon once more, not knowing that it would be her last time. She was moved into some sort of assisted living home, and around that time, my mom got pregnant again. The baby was due on Valentine’s Day, but that birthday is not mine. By early August, the doctors told my mom that she had miscarried. My mom had to visit Nanni in the home to tell her that there wouldn’t be a second baby.
Not very long after that, Nanni got much, much worse. She was moved into hospice care, where she lived for several months. My mom hadn’t stopped trying for another baby, and by March, she was pregnant again. One day she showed up to the hospice home in tears, recounting to her own mother that the doctors thought my heart beat was too faint, that she might miscarry again. But Nanni had begun dying, so my mom didn’t say anything about it to her grandmother.
Around a week later, Nanni entered her final few days. My mom knew this, but wasn’t able to be there through the night, because she had a follow up appointment in the morning. The morning of March 13, my mom sat on the doctor’s bench crying because she knew that she might not make it back in time to say goodbye. “I don’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, I’m gonna name it Mary!” she sobbed to the nurses, only half joking.
They started the ultrasound, searching for my heartbeat. One of the nuns working at the hospice home held Nanni’s hand and whispered “Your granddaughter needs you right now.” Moments later, Nanni was gone. The doctor found my heartbeat.
It was loud, healthy, and my mom would be able to carry it to full term. My mom looked up at the clock when they told her the good news. She later learned that it had been only a matter of minutes, if not seconds, after Nanni died. My great-grandmother hadn’t even known I was there, and yet somehow, Nanni gave me my life.
The last time my mom made Nanni’s veal recipe, I cried as I ate it. It must have occurred to me that I didn’t have many other ways to connect to her, to feel the love that motivated her to feed my adult mom. Maybe I cried because I was tasting something that I’d known in another lifetime, something I hadn’t realized I missed until it sat on my tongue.
Maybe I was never meant to be a man because Nanni lives inside me. Or maybe she chose to live on in a great-grandson in order to experience the privilege that she and her sisters, her daughter, her granddaughter were never allowed. Maybe my connection to the feminine is meant to change the world in some small way.
If one was to cut into my imagination, at the core they would find shadows of red and pink like the calm of a mother’s womb. Long pretty legs bend and glide, bleeding knees creating scarlet lakes in powder pink tights. Sun shines warm on faces, and olive scented tomato sauce wafts into the air. Blood drips over skin both pale and tan, glistening like rubies next to diamond tears. Operations on hospital beds, car crashes, and christening robes, lace and white. Mother Mary draped in velvet, nurturer to all. She is not a deity that I grew up worshiping, but my mom did, Nanni did, and now so do I.
In some moments I think that my name has nothing to do with the actual me, the part of me that has lived much longer than itself. In those moments my name is Mary.
Evan James (he/they) is a senior at SUNY Geneseo, dual majoring in musical theatre and English (creative writing). He is very interested in many aspects of the arts and performed in the world premiere of A Christmas Carol at Geva Theatre in Rochester. He was also the first place winner of a flash fiction contest at his high school, hosted by SUNY Oswego. He grew up in Baldwinsville, a small town outside of Syracuse, NY.