We met on benches at the ends of piers in San Diego where he"d make me c.u.m with his hands down my pants at the end of a pier while tourists and seagulls and fishermen stretched out behind us. We met on the beach with the surf pounding and the sunset cliffs and one night even when I finished coming and sang my siren song a bunch of hippies in the cliff shadows put down their spliffs and gave me a standing ovation. We met in bars where we sat next to each other on red leather stools and pressed knees and shoulders and mouths together so hard I"d find bruises in the morning. With my fancy job money I bought us weekends back in Portland or San Francisco with rich people hotel rooms and room service and p.o.r.n channels and 300 thread count sheets that we soiled and soiled. He said "Sometimes love is messy."
It"s true his almost not anymore wife chased me in her O.J. white Ford Bronco. But our lovers story isn"t the only story. Though our affair was epic. And sordid. Narrative and pa.s.sion have that in common.
There"s a story under that one.
In addition to loaning me his car, he began driving me to and from my communist re-education drunk driver courses every night for eight weeks. Bringing me a bottle of wine or vodka on the floor of the car when he picked me up. You know, kind of like a best friend would do. A kind, sly one.
He also drove me to and from my exhausting road crew days for eight weeks. Cooking me pasta when I couldn"t lift my arms. He went to my mandatory AA meetings with me and sat through the 12 steps and nodded and smiled in his black leather jacket all the way up until we"d get home and I"d rage rage rage at G.o.d and fathers and male authority and he"d dismantle my rage with funny jokes about jesus and monkeys.
He treated this thing I"d done - this DUI - the dead baby- the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone - myvodka - my scarred as s.h.i.t past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.
But there"s even a story deeper than that. After he moved out of his wifehouse and into my little one bedroom seahouse a block from the sunset cliffs in Ocean Beach, after he finished his MFA and I filed divorce papers and he filed divorce papers, after I had to go into the English Department Chair"s office and lie like a rug because his wife went in and spilled the s.h.i.t, after we both bit the bullet and said the "L" word out loud, something better than s.e.xual and emotional zenith happened. I didn"t know that was possible.
Night. Ocean sound. In my tiny seahouse. On the sofa. Both of us scotch handed. Mazzy Star playing all night all night all night. We"d been admiring his Karma Sutra book and he"d been explaining the Tibetan Book of the Dead to me. s.e.xuality and death. Home run.
He put his hand on my heart. I could feel the heat of his skin diving down into the well of me. He stared so deeply into me my breath jackknifed. I began shaking. Just from that. Then he said, knowing everything I"d told him about myself, he said, out of the blue, "I want to have a child with you."
Well you can imagine how many ways I tried to say "No." I wanted to pick up a phone. "Um, h.e.l.lo, human race? Can you connect me to the dreaded relationship department? I need to say something. I"ve got this man thing over here, and well, bless his heart, this man is confused. He"s clearly mistaken me for someone else, and he needs rerouting. Different area code. Different address. Different woman. Is there a special number to call? I know. It"s crazy. He thinks he wants to have a family. Yeah. With me. Nuts, huh? So can you just, you know, give me the number to relocate him? He may need prescription medication. I can stall him for awhile, but you may want to send someone out."
His argument against all my fluttering resistance? One sentence. One sentence up against the ma.s.s of my c.r.a.ppy life mess.
"I can see the mother in you. There is more to your story than you think."
The Scarlett Letter FOR A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE I WAS FIRED AS THE Visiting Writer at SDSU, my belly grew.
Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me.
My belly grew in the halls of the English Department while colleagues tried not to look at or smell my ever enormous t.i.ts and belly bulge when they spoke to me about Cultural Studies or Gender Studies or Women"s Studies. Then they stopped speaking to me at all, and simply nodded or half smiled as they pa.s.sed me, like you might a mooing cow.
My belly grew when The Chair signed a paper saying I could never work there again, and I had to sign it too, and while I signed it, instead of looking at the paper, I looked straight into her motherf.u.c.king eyes. Old bag I thought. She coughed.
My belly grew every single cla.s.s I taught, the undergraduates smirking and nudging each other"s elbows, then turning strangely loyal like beautiful little revolutionaries against the man. My belly grew each week I taught the graduate fiction writing seminar, me staring them all down one at a time until they smiled, me helping them sew the colors of their words into magnificent tapestries no matter what the judgment, them not able to sustain their disdain in the face of my unapologetic radiance.
My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.
And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.
At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I"d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don"t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a s.e.xuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali - had anyone crossed me I"d have a head necklace. I"d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I"d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don"t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I"d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I"d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man b.a.l.l.s and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives.
My belly grew.
My belly carried me.
My belly carried our love, bulging between our s.h.i.t faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.
When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers.
My thirst to go numb began to leave my body.
At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It"s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.
That night after the knot tying business? We went home and staged a photo shoot. Me with a black satin ribbon tied around my neck and black satin panties in front of a deep red velvet curtain licking milk from a bowl. I don"t know why. We just did.
G.o.d the s.e.x we had from that photo. Big bellied s.e.x.
Now that, ladies, is a keeper.
Because when love comes to someone like me? After all my black holes? You can bet your a.s.s I"m going to grab it. I may be damaged goods, but I"m not an idiot.
And baby, lemme tell you. I"m no Hester Prynne.
Sun LIGHT.
Life.
Beautiful alive boy.
The night my son Miles chose to come there was a thunderstorm. In San Diego in April a thunderstorm is a gift - as if your soul might be wetted for a moment between days of endless sun.
When my water broke I walked barefoot in a nightgown down the street a block to the ocean. Andy was asleep in bed. My sister Brigid was asleep in the house. I cried and the ocean within me made way for this boy and the ocean before me opened up. When I got to the water I said "Lily. He"s here." Then I walked back to the house. In bed next to my sleeping love I counted minutes. It was 5:00 a.m. The contractions felt like sentences before they are born. It is the only time in my life I have experienced a purity of happiness. Because my head was empty of anything about me. Nothing else about my life in the room. Lightning lighting up the darkness. Water everywhere.
I"ve met many mothers whose children didn"t come right or never came at all. We are like a secret tribe of women carrying something not quite of this world.
A j.a.panese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in j.a.pan, there is a two-term word - "mizugo" - which translates loosely to "water children." Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it.
In j.a.pan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.
There are no Western rituals for the water children. I am an American woman who does not believe in G.o.d. But I do believe in waters.
The day Miles was born, Andy cradled my body through its crucible. My sister Brigid st.i.tched love in beautiful thread around the room of us - nothing wrong could have entered her fiercely sewn world. When he came I wailed as women do for the child they have carried and brought into the world. But my wail carried another soul in its song. My Miles" long body was brought up to my chest, the umbilical cord curling its milky grey spiral still connecting us.
He moved.
I felt the heat of his body.
His little mouth made for the mound of my breast and nipple.
So this is life.
The first thing Miles saw when he opened his eyes was a father who let out a sound I"ve never heard before. A male sob as big as s.p.a.ce. A father with open arms ready for his child, ready to protect him his entire life, ready to love him above anything, ready to be the path of a man before him and hold his hand until the boy goes to man. A father who had no father himself rewriting the story.
My sister came to us and embraced the three-bodied organism. I do not know what she felt but her face is the word for it.
In my belly, before he was born, Miles swam. Back and forth and around and flip turns and kicks and such movement - so alive - watching the taught skin of my belly was a little alarming. The force of him took my breath away. And yet we felt inseparable. His body was my body was his was mine. When I went swimming with Miles in my belly, which I did often, people in the lap lanes would marvel at how I could be so fast. So big, so round, so breasted - but fast. But I knew a secret that they did not. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.
In the Company of Men THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father. My father fractured the hearts of all the women in our home with his rage. And so when I go back through and think about the men I have loved, or thought I loved, it is with a split apart heart. If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry.
Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don"t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can"t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life.
The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them ... something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a flask and walked up to the gla.s.s window and lifted my shirt up and pressed my bare t.i.ts up against the gla.s.s and knocked. Phillip turned and laughed, pointed. Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked.
Michael. My father"s name.
Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas?
I didn"t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael.
There is so much I didn"t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women.
I didn"t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean"s house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child - warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice - with no father to smash it apart.
I didn"t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew.
I didn"t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be ... pretty.
Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey"s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record alb.u.m recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.
Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like a.s.s. He had his suitcase with him. He said, "I can"t stay in that f.u.c.king efficiency. It reeks. There"s cat p.i.s.s and s.h.i.t and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn"t live like a human." And I let him in.
It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, pa.s.sive hands. It was a sacred truth between us.
After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, "All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he f.u.c.ks the womanchild. I don"t give a s.h.i.t how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It"s so juvenile." The next day he called again and said, "Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean"s CDs. He"s never staying here again."
I know it"s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that.
When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I"m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon "We should live closer together," the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It"s the wish of a child.
I called Mike in Seattle from San Diego to tell him about my man situation. I didn"t call my mother, or my sister, or my father, or any woman friend. I called Michael. I called to tell him that I thought I had fallen in love with a man who was not yet untangled from a marriage gone bad. That the man was younger than me. A lot. That the man was big and beautiful and played the cello and could beat the c.r.a.p out of pretty much anything. That the man had lived in Spain and witnessed some ETA stuff and that the man had interviewed people from Earth Liberation Front and that the man kissed me so hard in Tijuana I thought I"d swallowed my teeth. That the man was my student. All things that ought to have made another kind of friend go, Lidia, you are making a mess. But you know what Mike said? He said, "Jesus. Thank G.o.d you finally got with someone whose story can keep up with yours!" Then he said, "We"re going out of town for a week. You should come house-sit and bring this guy up."
I did.
Our son Miles, my beautiful alive boy, was conceived in Michael"s house. In Mike and Dean"s bed. On the 600 count twill sheets. With Jake the dog loyally guarding our love. In his house, the only house I ever felt the word "home" in my heart, a boy was born.
In my head and heart I carry so many images of Mike and Dean. Me and Mike on the floor of a Baptist church at midnight, Dean playing Bach on the church organ. Me and Mike and Dean stripped to our underwear, running into the ocean on the Oregon coast. In December. Eating a Christmas rabbit with olives and capers that Andy and Mike cooked - snuggled up in Italy - me and Dean filling our mouths with more than food. Mike and Dean opening the door when I sent my sister to them - my sister whose lost tenure had manifested as a nervous breakdown - how they said, "You can come in." How they let her live with them until her self returned. Miles and Mike and Dean and Andy on top of the s.p.a.ce Needle. My G.o.d. How many ways are there to love men? It"s enough to break a heart open.
The images in my head and heart. I know what they are. I do. They are a family alb.u.m. It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.
A Sanctuary THERE"S SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE miles.
When my son Miles was born we drove from San Diego to a place near Portland, Oregon. I"d been fired in San Diego and miraculously rehired in Oregon - back toward what I knew, and what Andy knew, the Northwest. Andy drove a U-Haul, and my dear friend Virginia and I drove a used Saab with Miles gurgling and pooing his pants in the back like a little road warrior.
Virginia. Everything that matters to me is a word. Slowly this woman grew in my life, a beautiful wetted stone turned over years. First she was my student, then my friend, then nothing I"d ever met before. Virginia became a friend who stayed near. She showed me intimacy is a word untethered from s.e.xuality. Unconditionally, I drank.
The Saab broke down in Weed - yes, Weed, and Virginia and I sort of paced on the side of the road thinking, will he look in the rearview and notice we"re gone? Will this man drive all the way to Oregon? No bars on the little cell of a b.i.t.c.h. We weren"t scared, women like the two of us? That would not scare us. We"d have been excellent pioneers. Like Becky Boone.
But he did notice, because he"s that kind of guy, and within 20 minutes here came the U-Haul on the freeway coming our direction. Then we all had to cram in the weird front s.p.a.ce of the U-Haul and pretend we didn"t have an infant stashed between the seats by the gearshift and cigarettes. Virginia and I sharing the pa.s.senger seat, our b.u.t.ts making sweat marks on the strange Burbury. We abandoned the Saab on the side of the road. Marking our exit like a scar.
When we got to Oregon Miles and I took a bath at a Holiday Inn. He lay against me, his back against my t.i.ts and stomach, his little monkey face smiling in between spit bubbles, and his arms and legs floating easily. I have a picture of us like that. My t.i.ts are as big as a human head, so it looks a little like a threeheaded creature for a second, until you see his facial features. Then I picked his little bucket of baby weight up and turned him around so we were face to face, and he raspberried me a good one, and smiled, and farted, and I laughed my a.s.s off and held him close.
With his head against my heart I suddenly felt his lifeforce - not the lifeforce of babies-a lifeforce bigger than a night sky. It was almost like thunder coming through us, just like the night I went into labor during a thunder storm. It was the exact opposite of the heart implosion I felt the day my daughter was born and died. The two of us in the water, thunderhearted.
At some point that night I walked out onto our little Holiday Inn balcony and Virginia was smoking a cigarette on hers. I looked over at her. My G.o.d. This person I had watched go from young woman to warrior beauty. It took my breath away. I never told her this, but what I thought ... daughter. I almost couldn"t breathe with the wonder.
"Those are death sticks, you know," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I love you, you know."
"Yeah. I do. Me too." Her eyes filling with tears across the distance.
We were driving to a house Andy had found and rented on the internet. Such a risky move - finding the next chapter of your life in cybers.p.a.ce. But so gloriously risky. Because this was a hacker. A guy who had cybersquatted Bill Gates. When he was at the computer, whole geographies emerged you"d never thought of.
The house looked filled with light and s.p.a.ce when I looked at the internet photos. I knew the value of light and s.p.a.ce. And there were trees in the photos. Everywhere. The house was inside something called the Bull Run Wilderness near Sandy, Oregon. When I asked Andy "Why this house? Is it near my job?"
He said, "No, it"s not near your job. But it is sanctuary." At the time, I didn"t know exactly what he meant. But something in my skin trusted him.
The road to the house off of I-84 wound around forests and snuck alongside the Sandy River. I saw a few people riding the river on inner tubes. I saw fly fishermen. Kayakers. I saw the land rise and fall like it does in Oregon wilderness. Alders. Oaks. Maples. Douglas Firs. Everything it seemed, evergreen. I thought briefly of my father - how he loved the Northwest. I thought how maybe that feeling he had was something yet good between us. Then the word father left altogether, since it was nothing about my future. Up we drove. When we arrived at the house I began crying. Gut wrenching crying. A crying that must have taken years, pulled up from the depths.
The house was made from two octagonals. The first octagonal had the main room and wooden stairs made by a master carpenter leading up to a sleeping loft. The sleeping loft had 360 degree windows so that if you were, say, in bed, all you saw was trees. The second octagonal had a kitchen with cabinets you"d pay a fortune for in the city - the deep cherry and blond wood like inside trees.
Outside the house there was nothing but forest. The Bull Run Wilderness hid elk and deer and bobcat. Wild pheasants and coyote and eagles and great blue herons. A freshwater creek trickled at the base of our property - water that ran for miles. To the side of the house, a giant warehouse loomed that the owner had been using as a woodworking studio. The owner made wooden marimbas as beautiful as music sounds. He showed them to us. They smelled like life. The owner had built the house. Crafted the woodwork with the pa.s.sion of an artist. Inside the warehouse was an enormous woodstove. Inside the warehouse I felt something stirring in me. Something about a self. Something about the freedom to make. The feeling felt older than me. Inside the house, I felt safety. All those trees protecting us. A river curling around us. Something up until that point in my life I"d only felt in water.
When Andy and I and Virginia and Miles sat down in front of the house, b.u.t.terflies and dragonflies and a hummingbird accompanied our distance. As if to say, you are home.
We were 25 minutes from the city I would work in. From people. We were 45 minutes from Portland. Culture and the socius. Virginia walked off a ways to have a cigarette. Then it was just me, Andy, and Miles. I said, "Andy, I can"t believe how beautiful it is here. It takes my breath away." I turned away from him. I felt small. Maybe like a kid. "I don"t know how to thank you."
"You don"t have to thank me," he said, coming up behind me with Miles on his shoulder like a little second man. "It"s what"s next." Andy has a weird way of making the impossible sound ordinary.
Our first days that ran into nights than ran back into days in that house in the forest were like what I understand Shakespeare to mean by the green world. Seriously. You know, where the action of a play starts out in normal world and then goes into green world where a magical metamorphosis takes place. Think A Midsummer Night"s Dream. I always wanted to wear that donkey head thing or run around naked in the woods. Actually, Northrup Frye came up with the phrase. Sorry. It"s the G.o.dd.a.m.n academic in me.
But my life with Andy and Miles in the green world really did magically change everything for me. For example. Christmas? At Christmastime we didn"t trudge up any G.o.dforsaken mountain hill in the shoulder high snow to get a G.o.dd.a.m.n tree. No one yelled their head off. No one cried their eyes out. We simply went to a tree lot and bought the biggest f.u.c.king Christmas tree they had, like a 12-footer, strapped it to the car, drove it to our sanctuary, and peed our pants with joy - the open s.p.a.ce of the octagons filling with the smell of Douglas fir and glee.
And there was no architect"s office with smoke and anger pouring out late into the night while children hid in their bedrooms scared to sleep or dream. Miles slept in a bed 10 feet away from two giant writing desks Andy and I pushed together. So while the parents were writing, the child was sleeping, and art kept us well and s.p.a.ce kept us well and trees watched over us so dreams could get born.
There was no mother you couldn"t find in the house because she was out selling real estate, or locked in the bathroom with a bottle.
I used to watch Miles fall asleep from drinking b.o.o.b milk late into the night. I"m guessing all mothers do this. But I bet not all mothers were thinking of Shakespearean sentence structures when they watched their babies drunkenly drift into sleep. I know, watching your boy suck t.i.t doesn"t seem very Shakespearian on the face of it. But when I watched Miles go from mother"s milk to burp to deep and frothy dream, his body heavy in my lap, the blue-black of night resting on us, I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is "love"s fire heats water, water cools not love."
As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.