Centuries of Womanhood — or on Metro-North Headed West
There are faces smiling at me.
Six of them.
Looking down at me over the headrest of the Metro North Train as it barrels towards Grand Central. It’s another hot day after a number of hot days, the world slowly reaching towards a boiling point until someone somewhere finally decides to do something. I’ve felt helpless for a while now about it, careening towards apathy faster than the express train away from my hometown, feelings duller with each mile further I travel. I feel as if every time I travel to my childhood home I’ve disappointed myself for thinking things’d be different, better.
For now though I feel sweat pool on my upper lip, under my arms. Despite the heat I packed a sweatshirt as the cool breeze of the air-conditioned train begins to kiss my perspiration cold.
The girls- women I assume- are frozen and grinning. Power stances, chanting into a microphone.
“Best new musical.” The poster says. “Breakout sensation.”
Henry VIII’s wives, my brain provides, unearthed from their graves and dressed up as pop stars to sing in 2022’s hot new broadway musical. Before that was The Other Boleyn Girl tv show, syndicated across all pay-per-view customers to housewives everywhere, and before that the book, no doubt translated into every language humans had ever had the wherewithal to conceive.
I remember I participated in the voyeuristic phenomenon myself, sat in front of his palace on the outskirts of London. I watched the documentaries that argued that actually, he was a brilliant tactician, that Henry VIII loved- that he turned sour in age, like spoilt milk. That there was good in all his murderous intent.
Would the Catherines approve, I think, of such a musical? Their pain made pretty again, their stories told and told and told again and again until they became part of this weird pantheon of women whose pain is put on display the same way as men’s accomplishments. Henry VIII killed those women- he’s remembered as complicated. His victims merely died, made martyrs whose story was deep as a painting of a weeping Madonna, just a few layers of oil until excavation reaches blank canvas.
Would Catherine Howard, beheaded at sixteen by her quinquagenarian king, be besotted by the portrayal? Mystified? She was an adulteress who paid the price with her life, would she be seduced by the whispers of fame that a broadway musical would produce?
Would Margaret Pole smile? Happy to relive chop after chop of the ax? It took eleven tries to cleave her in two. Her last cries echoed throughout fifth fucking avenue as the executioner tried to pry her head from her shoulders. Was it fair retribution? When all she was guilty of was her family disagreeing with Henry’s divorces?
Or would they prefer this rumination? Their pain on display like some sort of pity poem from another person half a millennia after them?
No. I don’t know what they were thinking. But I do know that I am a woman, and that Anne Boleyn died at the age I am now, and that none of these women really truly ever had a say in what happened over their own bodies, or their own history.
I know how I feel now. How I feel see-through. How I feel both expected to perform and to fade away. How I am meant to live my life in a lane that lets others think of me less. How I want to bring my hands to my face. How I want to cover my eyes.
“Don’t look at me.” I want to say. “I’m not here.”
“Please stop looking at me like I fucking owe you something.” Anne might shout.
She doesn’t, in the broadway show. It would make no sense for this image of idolatry to say something like that. When in reality all she was was a woman. Was a woman who was probably just as terrible and complicated as her aggressor. Instead, her likeness is plastered across the city, smiling. All I need to do is take my nail and scrape her image away- simply a piece of paper now. I don’t. Instead I look at Anne as she smiles down at me, glittering gems so close to her eyes they look like tears.
