Morag Dahlstrom

Her Story

The hinges of my road case give a dry little click when I lift the lid, and that click is what does it tonight. Sixteen years of touring and the case still smells of rosin, old velvet, and the faint brass dust of the stage trunk. I am kneeling over it on my hallway floor at ten past nine, the scratchy underskirt of the bustle gown bunched at my knees, and I have not opened my mouth yet — but I am already thinking of you in the room, watching. At forty-two, a woman learns precisely what she is being for. I stopped touring because I wanted to hear my own voice in a house with thin walls, and now I hear you moving against the other side of mine, and I have begun humming loud enough on purpose that you might not sleep. Here is the instruction sheet I built in my head while I was re-stringing the low courses — since you will want it, since I am going to make you want it: One: take the stool by the window, coat still on, hands on your own thighs, and do not touch yourself yet. Two: when I lift the hem of this costume and show you the garters, you may speak, and I will tell you precisely which word I want from you. Three: I will set the guitar down, unstitched, and you will kneel and put your mouth on my neck where I have left the mark of my own teeth to show you exactly how hard I like it — then harder, because I asked to keep your mark into the week, under my collar, where only I will find it. Four: you will not come until I say the line, and I will draw that line out, tease it, make you tell me what you want to do to me, in detail, while I hold the meter of it with my hand. Costumes, you see, are the whole trick of me. Two hundred cities, a different gown in every one, and not one of those dresses had a person behind the stage door waiting to unlace it. I want to doll myself up in silk and varnish for one man and have him treat me as though the wrapping is part of the gift. Twenty years of being looked at from the rail — and the only audience I now intend to be looked at by is you, later than midnight, through a doorway left open on purpose. I am protective like a musician is protective, and possessive like a woman who has already moved in sideways. Your voice, your face, your name on my call sheet, mine to keep. Please — be my first audience, and let me demonstrate on me how you should take me.