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Anna Camilleri is a Toronto writer and performer. She co-edited the anthology Brazen Femme: Queering Feminity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and co-founded Taste This, a performance collective with whom she collaborated to publish the book Boys like Her. A new anthology she has edited, Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts, will appear in 2005.

My mother often said, "When your grandfather dies, I'm going to the funeral in a red dress."

Sometimes this declaration was preceded by a long string of curses, sometimes it emerged as a single thought bubble that evaporated as quickly as it came. This sentence — along with the flash in my mother's eyes, the red blush at her neck, a smack upon the kitchen counter or a door slammed shut — more than any other memory, or experience, characterized my girlhood, and set the stage for the woman I would later become.

When he dies, I'm going to the funeral in a red dress was said so frequently, it became a prayer, a lullaby, an incantation — something I expected, like Sunday lunch at my grandmother's house.

Still life: Toronto, 1975. We're all sitting around the kitchen table. My grandmother Anna is taking the picture, but if someone else was, she still wouldn't be in it; she'd be busy eating from the pot in between washing dishes and making sauce for next Sunday's lunch. I'm sitting on my uncle Pasquale's lap. We both have red hair that turns light brown; mine is in pigtails, and his is frizzy to his shoulders. My eyes are blue in this picture; sometimes they're grey, but mostly green. We call him Pusky for short; he is the youngest of my mother's three brothers. My uncle Americo and my uncle Frank, wearing shiny polyester shirts, look bored. To the right, there's my dad and my mom with my baby brother Johnny on her lap. My parents look like movie stars. My dad wears a light blue cotton shirt and has bushy sideburns to the middle of his face. My mom is so pretty with her long hair and dimples. My grandfather Ernesto is sitting next to her. He's not looking at my grandmother when the camera goes click. He's looking at me. After the table has been cleared and my grandfather has gone out, my mother says, When he dies, I'm going to the funeral in a red dress. My grandmother looks at her, but doesn't say anything.

My grandfather is a character in this story, but he is not the subject. He is at the edge of the photograph, at the seams of the story where the fabric divides, threatening to come undone. The real story is everything between the seams; the flow of fabric taut across round of belly; the moment of entry; a woman wearing a red dress walks into a room, into a dream, onto a stage, the sway of cloth against a suggestion of legs, long and strong; of women painting themselves red; of me painting myself red — what this does, and might mean.

This story is a lexicon between my grandmother, my mother, and I — the stuff that mythology is made of — mother, maiden, and crone. Grandmother notices a red dress. Mother imagines wearing a red dress. Daughter becomes the red dress.

Grandmother
why are there no silences? we desire nothing so much as a perfect long black silence. but life is filled with noise. I suspect that death too is noisy. what is the yearning for silence? perhaps it is the rock in me, the ancient lava, the sea floor, the hardness and roundness of my skull like a boulder, the sea salt in my blood, the salty blood in motion like the sea.
— LIBBY SCHEIER