Woman with Cannonball

Jonah studied American History for four years and came out of his degree still a patriot. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe that America had done some stuff that wasn’t so great, he just believed that America was still America at its core. He still believed in the American Dream. Two years after getting his degree that dream had failed him. He had reached out to grad program after grad program and talked to old professors looking for teaching assistant jobs. They all politely declined him.

He’d begun posting on reddit daily about how academia is destroying the America he knew. His comments were full of people decrying critical race theory and psychology ruining the American way. He wasn’t quite sure if he agreed with all that. But it made some sense to him, something had to be blamed for his not being able to get a job.

He only got one call back. It was a desperate application to a local Museum. In fact it was the Museum of American Art. The application had mentioned room for promotion and if he couldn’t find work in academia then perhaps he could find a life in American Art.

However, when he arrived at the museum for his interview it was not the patriotic artscape he was expecting. There were no old men gathered around curled parchment, no men standing atop a mountain peering out into the mist below him, and there were no solid marble statues of men in stoic positions. Instead there were shapes and lines, interactive art exhibits to get lost in, there were statues, however they resembled the lines of people or had holes cut through them missing their vital organs. To Jonah it all seemed to undermine his vision of America. But he needed a job.

–

“This has no bearing on your interview but we’re just curious what’s your favorite piece of art? If you have one that is.” Was Tati’s final question for Jonah. She was interviewing him in the employee break room. This room did have americana splattering the walls with an american flag trim on the tops and bottoms of the wall. It had been there since the museum was built, when it had been just an American History Museum. She was now the manager of hospitality, but she had used to work the same position that Jonah was applying for. When she had done her interview she’d told her, now, boss that she didn’t have a favorite piece of art. He’d told her then, “Well hopefully if you get this job then you’ll learn more about art and maybe have your own favorite piece one day.”

And that was just what happened. The piece that became her favorite was the one that sat across from the front desk for the majority of her time there. It was called Woman with Cannonball, a bronze sculpture of a woman screaming. The source of her pain being a big gaping hole in her chest presumably caused by a cannonball.  But the cannonball itself was not present in the piece. To be a complete piece of art by being incomplete, moved her in a way she couldn’t articulate. Sometimes when she was sitting there at the desk hours on end she’d imagine that by her being there she could make Woman with Cannonball a little less incomplete or lonely. She hoped that whoever took over her position would fulfill the same service for the statue.

She specifically wondered what Jonah would think of the sculpture. In the course of the short interview she had quickly caught onto the type of person Jonah was. She figured his favorite painting would be something patriotic, maybe the Crossing of the Delaware or perhaps he’s a Norman Rockwell fan. But what he said instead was, “The American Flag.”

“Are you serious?” She didn’t mean to judge so harshly, but c’mon. She didn’t even know if that could count as art.

“Yeah why not,” He seemed to expect her reaction, “It’s easily the most iconic piece of art ever made, instantly recognizable. Plus everything it stands for means the world to me.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she accepted it and put down The American Flag as his favorite piece of art on his application. She shook his hand, knowing that she’d hire him, but told him to wait a couple of days. As he headed out the door she wondered what Woman with Cannonball would mean to him when he became her companion.

–

Everyday she looked for her cannonball. Even though she’d never seen it. It was her namesake. She liked to imagine that it had passed through her abdomen and was held in the wall behind her. She didn’t blame the cannonball for the wound in her stomach. The cannonball was her’s after all, she couldn’t fathom hating something that was a part of her, even if it did cause her to eternally scream. And scream she did, all the time. It was all she knew to do and yet no one heard her, no one knew how much she wanted the thing that hurt her.

–

Jonah stared out from the desk at Woman with Cannonball. When he had first applied for the job he had been bewildered by the lack of americana in the space but this one piece felt distinctly American to him. Bronze sculptures often did. He thought about the history of gunpowder. An invention that made its way from the far east all the way here to the Americas. He thought of the horrors that gunpowder wrought on the people of the Americas. The role of gunpowder in the conquest of the Americas was much smaller than disease or diplomacy. But gunpowder always felt like more American horror.

The woman depicted in the sculpture did not experience that horror. Jonah thought of it as a sculpture depicting the plight of parents in the workforce. The hundreds of mothers and fathers kept distant from their children to keep them both alive. Jonah thought about his own mother. He had always thought that she liked her work more than him. She had been in architecture. She would spend hours in her study designing and building. She had even hired an in-house maid to raise Jonah, Annie. Annie had always been much more of a mother to Jonah than his own mother. Jonah often wondered how these two women in his life fit into Woman with Cannibal. They both felt the opposite of her. The woman who didn’t want to raise a child so she could work and the woman who raised a child to work. Neither of them had their children ripped from each other by the American Dream.

–

Tati became frustrated by Woman with Cannonball. When she had sat at the front desk all that time it had been her favorite piece in the museum. But now that she was Manager of Hospitality she had more chances to explore the museum; to wander and stare at other things. To point at one piece of art and to claim it as her favorite seemed impossible. Least of all Woman with Cannonball.

The person who had sculpted Woman with Cannonball had left out a statement of intent. Preferring to leave the meaning of the hole in this woman’s abdomen a mystery to all. So Tati asked people what they thought the piece meant. Each person had a different idea and each person thought their interpretation was the most obvious. Some thought it was about abortion, but some people thought it was for and others thought it against. Others thought it depicted the mothers who lost their children to gun violence. The cannonball combined with the women’s modern clothing, led others to believe it said something about the generational trauma stemming from the violence of the colonial era. She didn’t even bother asking Jonah what he thought it meant. She figured he probably connected it to something American. When something is so broadly interpretable it loses meaning all together.

Sometimes Tati’d be wandering the museum and be particularly struck by a random painting. She’d be filled with wonder at the mastery and the meaning that a piece of art can exude. Then the wonder would subside and grief would take its place. A grief for Woman with Cannonball, it had once been her favorite piece in the museum and suddenly it wasn’t. Woman with Cannonball had no more meaning to her beyond once being her companion at the museum front desk.

–

The nights are lonely for Woman with Cannonball, without her cannonball she is always lonely, but the nights particularly so. During the day people pass her by and study her. They admire her and give her attention. It does not sate her loneliness as having her cannonball might but it is something in comparison to her loneliness at night when she stares out into the dimly lit hallways and no sight to be her companion. She does have a companion. They had once been a woman and then it became a man. He sat across from her at that desk sitting so still in his chair that he could sometimes be mistaken for a statue himself.

Occasionally he’ll come over and speak to Woman with Cannonball, but only when there’s no one around. He’ll come over and run a cloth over her skin, freeing it from the dust made of skin particles she could never let go of. He asks her questions. Questions she doesn’t think are meant for her. To him she is merely a reflection to speak into without expecting a response.

“Are you lonely?”

Yes

“Why do you scream?”

My cannonball was taken from me.

“What was taken from you?”

You would know if you could hear me.

“You are a piece of art, you can’t simply be in pain because of this hole in your chest, so what was taken from you?”

My cannonball

His questions made her weary. She knew that even then she was still just a reflection.

So what was taken from you?

“I don’t know.”

What?

“Something was taken from me, but I don’t know what it was. I want to say it was my childhood. But I know it’s something more. Something I gave to myself and was taken away.”

He ran his cloth along the hole in her abdomen. Being bronze, she could not feel pain but sometimes the absence of the pain is just as painful.

“There is just something missing, and I don’t think I’ll ever know what it is.”

–

It was a wine night at the museum. All the rich donors came and when they left the staff all got to have a few drinks. Toward the end of the night, Tati found herself wandering the museum with Jonah. Neither of them thought that the other would be their ideal walking partner. They passed by different pieces of art and each of them quietly admired whatever they saw. Tati had never sought out his company after his initial interview and every conversation they’d had since circled around some kind of patriotic bullshit which usually ended in an argument. But right wandering the museum that night the quiet they shared was nice.

When they stopped to admire a landscape painting. Tati observed Jonah as he observed the painting. His eyes tracked the mountains at one point he even held out his . It’s hard for Tati to imagine someone such as Jonah to admire art the way that he was now. But he experienced that painting in its totality.

But here he was, so she asked him, “What is your obsession with America anyway?”

“I live here, so I guess I love it,” he said, with confidence.

“I live here and I don’t love it.”

“I know but it’s easy to hate this America,” He didn’t take his eyes off his painting as he said it instead he just held his hands up, “I love the other America.”

“The other America?” Tati had an inkling of what he meant. There was the real America defined by police brutality, racism, sexism, poverty, the military-industrial complex, and the capitalist hellscape. Then there was the idealized America.

“You know the land of the free and home of the brave,” Jonah said smiling, “That America.”

“But that America doesn’t exist.”

“Yes because it was taken from us,” Jonah said clenching his fist.

Tati turned to him and said, “Taken, taken by who?”

“No…” Jonah put his head down and said, “I don’t mean it like that. I shouldn’t even say taken.”

He actually looked sad. Unsure of her anger, Tati asked him “Then what should you say?”

“Coming here to this museum and seeing all this art, I’ve come to realize that Art is nothing more than a promise. A promise of something that is not in this world. I had believed in America for so long. Honestly, when I had that interview and I’d said that the American flag was my favorite piece of art it was bullshit. I didn’t actually think that the American flag was the greatest piece of art I’ve ever seen. But now, I don’t know.”

–

She could hear their voices as they carried through the hallways. Her two companions leaving her in the dark Woman with Cannonball thought about when she was sculpted. Hands bending and twisting her into shape only to tear a hole right through the middle. She remembered every detail of her being built but she doesn’t remember her cannonball being cast. Although she bore its name, the cannonball did not exist.