I’m Done With the Costumes That Hid the ‘Monster’ Beneath
I wish I could remember the costume that saved me. In my imagination, it’s a volcano of lace and furbelows, white on white with a scatter of tiny pink bows and satin flowers like roses in snow. A dress, but not a dress; a disguise.
My mother used to tell the story of my liberation this way: I was 2 years old, a patient at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital since the day I was born. My doctors told her I was so disabled that I would have to live in an institution. Mom decided we should put on a little show for my doctors, something that might change their minds. She had written a script and taught me my lines, but for her, costumes were key — that floofy white dress for me and a spiffy outfit for her.
That dress had a single purpose: to hide my body. She wanted the doctors to forget, for just a moment, what lay under the froth; a baby monster, a greenish-pinkish body so massed with surgical scars back and front that it looked like it’d been run through with a pike.
Mom disguised me so that my doctors would picture me as a new person. And I guess they did, because suddenly there I was, a child in the world.
Still a monster child, though.
Which was why my mother continued to costume me for the rest of her life. I don’t mean the usual get-ups for Halloween parties and school plays, though she made those, too. I’ll never forget her spectacular rendition of a Gretel outfit for a third-grade performance. (I have no doubt I got the starring role on the strength of her willingness to sew a dirndl skirt.)
I was 7 or 8 when I realized that she’d stopped dressing me up so I’d be pretty, and had started dressing me so that I’d be safe. My disability was becoming more obvious with each passing year. Mom chose baggy dresses to cover the curve of my spine, hemmed my pants loose and long to conceal my orthopedic shoes.
Soon, her own dresses weren’t so different from mine. Mom had suffered a spinal injury when she was 28, and I was 4. Pain, immobility and depression doubled her weight within just a few years. She’d always made her own clothes, but now the patterns shifted from fitted frocks to roomy caftans, decorated with trim and embroidery that guided the eye where she wanted it to go, and away from her size.
Neither of us qualified as “normal,” not in 1960s Cincinnati. We concealed what we were to avoid the harassment and humiliation that came our way. Which happened anyway. At least our garments gave us enough courage to leave the house.
I’ve never dressed up all that much for Halloween. I remember once slathering myself in makeup and going as a Mary Kay saleswoman, and another time covering a leotard with several hundred Band-Aids and going as the self-destructive performance artist Chris Burden, infamous for crawling over broken glass and having himself shot with a gun. I see now that every costume dealt with the history of my body, whether I knew it or not. Covering myself with makeup, trying to feel female; covering myself with bandages, trying to wink at my wounds.
Then, in my thirties, I hit a wall. When friends asked, “What are you dressing as this year?” I’d reply: “I am a costume of the future! My task is to perfect the details of being me.” It was a joke, but also a response to a lifetime of being stared at, for my curved spine, orthopedic boots, arrhythmic limp, being short — in short, all the things that made me unacceptable. I felt that no matter what I wore, viewers just subtracted the costume right off my body. What was the point of putting a monster over a monster?
Why do I say “monster?” Because that’s how I’ve been treated.
But now I have claimed “monster” for myself. I wrote a book, “Golem Girl,” that came out last year. In it, I trace the history of the legend of the Golem and how the concept of the artificially constructed creature has been woven into Western culture. That’s how I see myself — as a rough body fashioned from clay, a being as much built as born.
Halloween is the time of monsters, of course. Creatures with damaged bodies, scarred faces, lumbering gaits, missing limbs; brutes that drool, emit miasmas, bleed, leak, manifest psychiatric conditions that put them beyond the pale of acceptable society. Frankenstein (a Golem); his Bride (a Golem); the Borg (a Golem, and so is Mr. Data); Dracula (infectious); the Wolfman (infectious); Darth Vader, Captain Hook (amputees); Freddy Krueger (facial disfigurement and mental illness) … I’ll stop there. If I listed every disabled villain, I’d be here till I was not a Golem but a ghost.
One real-life disabled person who does show up in costumes — at Halloween and year-round, for that matter — is Frida Kahlo. But you’d never know that she was disabled, injured by a trolley crash in her youth, and later by surgeries, gangrene and chronic pain. A “Frida Kahlo costume” image search turns up hundreds of Fridas in her Tehuana dresses, Frida holding cigarettes and monkeys, Frida eyebrows, Frida flower crowns, even Beyoncé as Frida — yet not one back brace, plaster cast, cane or prosthetic leg among them.
I first encountered Frida Kahlo’s work 40 years ago, when I was a young painter searching for a visual language that would allow me to explore my own experience. Her work showed me that one could portray disability with beauty and honesty. I know that Frida asserted her allegiance to her Mexican heritage in the Oaxacan dresses, but I think that she was also finding poetry in the losses of her body. The more she was in pain, it seems to me, the more she decorated herself, as if sending up prayers for pleasure. Her costumes let her be seen as she desired — and as desirable.
She knew, as I know, that it is so hard to leave the house if you don’t want to be seen. Open my closet. You won’t see any floor-sweeping ruffles, but there is plenty of offbeat garb. Dramatic black coats. Bright printed jackets. Beaded and sequined evening gowns, including a bright-red formal with a cape on its shoulders. Three velvet cocktail dresses (one studded with pearls). Garments that are the opposite of hiding.
The most telling are my boots — knee-high black leather with thick rocker soles. The left is several inches higher than the right, because of my considerable leg-length difference. When I was a kid, I tried to hide those legs, to deny that I wore huge orthopedic contraptions. But a Golem is powerful only when it marches through the world, not when it hides in the dark. So now I decorate my boots with an entire wardrobe of shoelaces, from Pride-Flag rainbow to gold-and-silver glitter.
My mother died many years ago, but she taught me well. Everything I wear, from jeans to ball gown, from red-and-white striped hair to rainbow-star laces, is carefully chosen to distract from the parts of me that make strangers call me freak.
My clothing is my shelter, my sonnet, my sign that I know what I am.
For so many of us, every day is Halloween. We balance between mirrors: the one on the bedroom wall, and the one in other people’s eyes. Why not throw our own Monsters’ Ball, where only we know that we are secretly costumed, down to our very toes?
And after those nighttime hours of masquerade, revelry, mock horror and hiding, mundane life will return, and I, as always, will return to my daily tasks, still perfecting the details of being me.
Riva Lehrer is an artist and the author of the memoir “Golem Girl.”
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