That led us to a weird section—NIPPLE SELECTION.
There were like two dozen different types of nipples—all different colors, from black to the lightest pink, all different sizes, with words like “Perky” and “Ripe” underneath them.
“Who the heck is buying these things?” I said again.
Louise clicked on a random pair of nipples.
PUBIC HAIR was the next selection. NATURAL, TRIMMED, SHAVED.
I pointed to TRIMMED, and she clicked on it.
After that came a selection titled LABIA.
“Are those . . . ”
“They’re vaginas,” I said. And that’s when Louise and I figured out what kind of people would buy these dolls.
“They’re for sex,” said Louise, her voice dropping an octave when she said sex.
“How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know.” She clicked off the LABIA page, and then she shut her browser, and then she shut her laptop. A second later she opened it again and cleared her browser history. “Gross,” she said.
It was gross. All of it, disgusting. But that didn’t keep me from returning to the website—alone, at home, in the days and weeks that followed, clicking on each and every option for lips, hair, breasts, nipples, labia, building and rebuilding women, imagining who might buy them, and imagining, too, what it would feel like to be them.
???
Two years later, standing with my mother in La Specola, staring down at the wax bodies of dead (undead?) girls, a thick, heavy wave of déjà vu washed over me. I remembered the website, the choices we could make—HAIR, EYES, BREASTS, LABIA. In the museum, the saints around me held their heads, their eyes, their breasts in their hands. The girls in the glass coffins lay still, unable to cover their heads, their eyes, their breasts, their intestines. Exposed, flayed, placed on pedestals. Girls made of beeswax and latex and animal fat and gore. Of curiosity and desire and maybe hatred, too.
Men made these girls—the saints, the Dissected Graces, the Wishbone Dolls. All of them, made by men. Eros and Thanatos.
She arrived in a plain pine box, six feet tall by two feet wide. The repairman stood the box on its end, pried it open, and peered inside. There she was, attached by a hook sticking out of the back of her neck, hanging there.
Right away he could see some of the damage—her mouth was pulled down on the left side as if she’d suffered a stroke, and the hinge of her jaw was slack. The fingers on her right hand were broken, the silicone skin pulling away from the metal bones underneath, and the pointer finger was barely hanging by a thread. It was clear what had happened here—bite marks circled each broken digit like cruel rings.
The right breast was damaged as well; were those cigarette burns? And her vagina was like pulp, the labia pulled away from the pubis.
The repairman hefted her up and off the hook and maneuvered her out of the box. Slinging her over his shoulder, he carried her across the room to the table he’d prepared for her. A strong bright light burned over the table. At the table’s far end, near her feet, were the repairman’s tools—screwdrivers, a handsaw, a scalpel. A clear, thin-nosed bottle of silicone glue.
The repairman articulated each joint and made notes on a yellow notepad: which were loose—left ankle, left knee, right wrist—and which might be broken altogether—left hip.
He made a list of all the repairs that she would need, triaging them in order of difficulty. The vagina, though badly damaged, would be the easiest to fix, as he could slide the whole thing out and replace it with a new one. The breast repair would be largely cosmetic, just filling in the burn holes with silicone mixed to match the surrounding skin. The joint replacements and reinforcements would require surgery. The jawbone—well, he’d just have to get in there and see what he could do about that.
Humming happily, in his element, the repairman picked up the scalpel and fell to work.
When I was fourteen, my mother took me to more museums in two weeks than I had ever been to in all the years of my life that came before.
“I’m sick of museums,” I told her finally, and it was true. I was. I was sick of the smell of them—the sharp tang of too many visitors pressed close, the ages-old dust in the drapes and in the corners. I was sick of the height of them—the lofty, gracious curves of old churches, the weird-pitched closeness of the smaller, boutique museums. I was sick of the tickets and the audio tours and the worn spots down the middle of the hallways, proof of all the other shuffling feet that had preceded me.
“Just this last one,” Mom said, and I followed her—because that is what I was good at, following her. I had followed her all through Italy, and now I followed her into this museum, the very last one, she promised, in the medieval town of San Gimignano.
From the outside, it looked like any of the other old stone buildings she’d dragged me to—tall, worn, sand-colored monoliths, bricks worn at the corners, dotted here and there with mosses or something growing impossibly where there seemed to be nothing for them to grow on.
Through the door, though, things were different. The first thing I saw, front and center, was a skeleton arranged into a steel cage, each leg straddled into its own compartment, hanging from the ceiling. And to the left, the wall was weird and bumpy—I blinked, and then I saw that each bump was a skull cemented in place. MUSEO DELLA TORTURA, a plain wooden sign announced, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“I’ve always wanted to visit this place,” Mom said, “but I didn’t get the chance until now.”
Why anyone would have a torture museum on their “always wanted to visit” list was a mystery to me, but I followed. I followed her down the hallway, past the glass display boxes, each lined with red fabric, each with something terrible inside. The chain belt, spiked with fishhooks. A wax figure of a woman, held down by her throat with a leather strap, mouth stretched around a giant candle. A claw-tipped pincer, designed for tearing away breasts. Branding irons. A Scold’s Bridle, a muzzle with a spiked tongue plate, to punish and quiet gossiping women.
The Pear of Anguish.
The Pear of Anguish was actually kind of beautiful, and propped up on a red velvet pillow in a glass cabinet, it looked like something precious. Its iron handle was an ornately carved heart; its four petals, though sharp tipped, were each decorated with delicate filigree. Someone had worked really hard to make this thing.
“That one,” Mom said over my shoulder, “was inserted in the vagina. It’s pear shaped when it’s closed, but there’s a handle you can turn—it’s a screw, see?—that spreads apart the four petal-shaped sections. The sharp tips, of course, and the metal petals would tear a woman to shreds.”
“Why would anyone do that?” I whispered, feeling my thighs clenching tight with dread.