Our Lady

by Justine Teu

I once dreamt of a woman, floating against the ceiling of our attic. Her dress was stitched tight with blue sequins, glitter storming loose as she swayed with a smiling song in her mouth. At first, I was afraid because it looked like she was hanging, but hanged women don’t sing, they choke, so I knew she had to be magic, floating up there like that. I still often look for the source of that dream: at first, I speculated that it was the Virgin Mary’s cerulean cloak, not by some miracle, but because of the costumes we used in the fourth-grade play about Jesus’s crucifixion. All the girls wanted to play Mary, but the Blue of my dream seemed more like a pop star’s, like my very own Britney or Christina or Madonna. When I didn’t meet her in dreams again, I settled for dolls I chewed on until they were coated with drool. I daydreamt of her while gnawing on Barbie fingers, Bratz doll feet, peeling the clothes off their plastic bodies. I tried to remember Blue’s outline as they showed us the forms our girlhood was supposed to take: regulation uniform skirts, no shoulders showing, our bodies fenced in for some boy’s manifest destiny.

Sometimes, when a boy happened to me, I still tried to find Blue from under the sweat and testament of his body, up at the ceiling. Blue, I imagined myself calling, in case she ever appeared again: how does one even know your color? Sometimes I strain my neck, in search of your immaculate form in between the clouds, as if this could all just be a matter of wanting to emulate the women we found beautiful. But at the core I know you have no form, that you are what fills my very volume, as if the fluid holding the brain is not bodily but your holy spirit’s hue. As you seep into the folds, all I imagine is your taste, and that it will be like getting thrown in the pool by your father to learn how to swim. I will have no choice but to love you then. I am only what I’m surrounded by.

But then I would remember the boy’s body on top of mine, the songs I learned to sing to keep them happy. I learned how to practice stories for pillow talk. I usually told them about the fourth grade, how we all wanted to be the Virgin, a vision in blue, the impossible woman who always became someone’s Our Lady. Satisfied, the easy ones fell into a deep sleep, like they’d spent their whole lives looking to capture something divine. For the others, I resorted to old dreams; there is nothing more boring, I suppose, than telling strangers you’ve had them.

“Once, when I was a little girl,” I said anyway, “a woman came to me in a blue dress. She was hanging from the ceiling of our attic.”

“Like hanging, hanging?” the boys asked, usually half asleep by now.

“Like, dead?”

“Yes,” I said, in a lie I knew I’d have to apologize for later, if I was ever to meet her. But I saw it as a way to taunt, to lure. She’s dead, I would repeat up to the ceiling. Even so, she scares me more than anything. And it was true: I was told to be awestruck in the face of a good bachelor; I was prostrate when I buried my face in his crotch; I feared loneliness like a god. One night, as a boy lay next to me asleep, I even pried open one of his shut eyelids. I begged for his iris to be blue. Be blue, and the woman in my dreams will not mean anything. Be blue, I prayed, as if she could ever be a false deity. He woke up when his open eye began to sting and water. Squinting in the light of the room I’d already overturned—the clothes and the books and the sheets—he asked me what the hell I was looking for.

All I knew was that nothing in the bedroom was blue so I felt the need to find it in anyone, somehow, when I couldn’t have her. But I looked at him, at a loss for an explanation, especially since we’d only just met, and our connection was tenuous at best. “I must have been sleepwalking,” I said, feeling the words spill out of me from somewhere deeper than my body. I held a hand to my mouth, smiling from under the gaps of my fingers. He didn’t think I was taking any of this seriously, but I was; as he told me to leave, exiling me from his apartment, I wondered if my words were hers, if Blue was teaching me to sing for no one but us. It was for love, she said through me. For if you are sleepwalking, you are in a waking dream; and if you are in a waking dream, you are dreaming of me.

Justine Teu is a Brooklyn-based writer with writing in or forthcoming in The Offing, Pidgeonholes, Pigeon Pages, the VIDA Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Additionally, she has recently served as an Emerging Fiction Fellow at AspenWords, and has received support from The Mendocino Writers Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.