My first job was at a farmstand with a twenty-five-foot papier-mâché witch named Winnie towering over the parking lot. Eyes like a lizard’s with vaginal slit pupils and a boulder of a nose. She enchanted people. Drivers would pull…
I recently mistook a photo of a hippocampus for the floor of the ocean. Inside this region of the brain, our memories live and they look like algae. Brain cells cluster like blades of green sea plants.
“Pretend We’re Dead” is number 38 in a series of 120 memoir flashes compiled into a list in book form, a project I’ve been assembling for a long time. Each entry emerged from a video I watched on MTV’s Sunday night alternative music show, 120 Minutes. Since MTV and I are close in age, I have always associated a song with its video, a visual representation in motion. Like algae swaying under the water.
“Pretend We’re Dead,” a single by the band L7, wasn’t the only song I listened to while I worked at a farmstand in the middle of Long Island, but it’s the one that triggered my memory of that place, the loneliest job I’ve ever had. On a weekday, there were few customers. It was me and the witch.
Winnie was (is?) a roadside attraction that loomed over the town, hideously ugly. She was so disfigured, she reminded me of the duck-shaped ashtray I’d made in art class, which resembled neither duck nor ashtray. But with her broomstick and her pointy hat, there was no mistaking what Winnie was supposed to be.
Witches are angry, evil women. Unlikable and selfish. Scary with their unknown powers. This monstrous hag was not only a physical manifestation of a witch, but also a symbol of all the things women were not supposed to be. On Winnie’s broomstick handle, she held a captured girl aloft; her little pastel pink dress hung in wrinkles off of her body. How could I think anything other than what seemed so obvious? Witches want to take all the beauty away from the world.
The late 1980s and early ’90s was a weird time. There was an agreed-upon notion that feminism was a thing that happened in the ’70s when women burned their bras. All that was over because women had rights now! We were definitely in the modern world (it was only the women in my family who worked) and yet, there remained a cloud of “traditional values.” Men were in charge and women should first be concerned about their appearance.
I was given my first diet pamphlet from my pediatrician when I was 5 years old. In high school, when I was a “normal” weight, I was dismissed because I preferred an L7 aesthetic—described in a 1993 SPIN Magazine cover story as “hair flailing, tattoos gleaming, cigarettes dangling”—to the light-washed denim, bright white sneakers, and rooster bangs of girls perceived as pretty. I say pretty and not beautiful because beauty seemed to exist only on television and in magazines. I never saw evidence of it around me as a child.
I describe L7 as women “playing ugly,” meaning they were not dressing to be attractive to men. As a girl, pretty or ugly were basically your only choices.
The witch was a constant. As a child I imagined it was always there. A landmark that must have been around when the town was settled like all those tiny rickety buildings we toured on school field trips. The town’s first library, the inn where George Washington slept. Winnie the Witch was a landmark, an icon, and it wasn’t until writing this piece that I realized I was older than her. She is 48, still standing after a refurbishing face lift. I am 49.
MELISSA RAGSLY’s story collection We Know This Will All Disappear was published by [PANK]. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Iowa Review, Joyland, and other journals. She’s a graduate of New York University Tisch School of the Arts and is currently writing scripts, books, and stories and working at an independent bookstore in the Hudson Valley where she lives. Find her on Twitter at @90sMelissa.
