But something in me had been born, still.
Dreaming in Women SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn"t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.
With Marguerite Duras, you must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city - foreign to you - foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. Lose your name and your language. Lose your ident.i.ty moorings. Lose your very thoughts. There must be shutters on the tall slightly open windows. The room must be blue. The floor made of stone. You must be naked. Her breath a whisper against your skin. Up the length of your body. Down. You must listen for the sounds of the city moving all around you. You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion. And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover"s skin stories over you. At night, it will rain. Open the windows. Desire wets. There is no inside out but the body. Love unto death.
With Gertrude Stein there will be eating and paper. Tea and money. She will say it gracefully. She will say it with ice-cream. Eating and paper. A flesh circle. So kind. And then again again.
Make quiet for Emily d.i.c.kinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are s.p.a.ces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it.
In the next room H. D. has brought the walls down, but look how the light dances across the floor of things differently now. Even your feet are new.
With Helene Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your s.e.x. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.
Jean Rhys came through the vast corpus of literature like water cutting canyon.
Adrienne Rich went down into the depths ahead of you. Her dive brought the possibility of language up to your surface. Breathe. And understand the broad shoulders you are standing on to reach the air. Take these objects.
With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and with whom, when to pick up a rifle.
Jeanette Winterson will make a small thing enormous as the cosmos.
Toni Morrison will let you cry home the pa.s.sage.
Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything.
With Anne s.e.xton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night.
When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong.
Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left ... they are awake and growling.
With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a sh.o.r.e, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless.
I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
V. The Other Side of Drowning.
Run On.
IT"S YOUR SECOND EX-HUSBAND"S BIRTHDAY, YOU KNOW, the one you divorced because he slept with not one but about five gazillion different women, and he calls you at 2:00 a.m. all drunk from Paris where you two used to rent apartments and make art because it"s his birthday and he tells you he"s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 - By the way, I"m switching to second person because if I say "I," in your head you"ll just picture Heather Locklear or something so-YOU. You are 37 on your way to the big 4-0. You are divorced for the sad sad second time. You are in SoCal. Living alone. Making sure your blonde is blonde. Waxed.
So your second ex-husband calls on his birthday and tells you he"s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 and that they"ve tattooed their ring fingers together and she looks so much like you and acts so much like you and smells so much like you at 23 so you calmly hang up the phone and glimpse the 37 year old skin of your own hand and walk to your writing desk and open the drunk drawer and pull out the bottle and drink an entire bottle of scotch in the middle of the night and drive your car out onto the six northbound lanes of the freeway in SoCal where you now live due to your great new job as the Visiting Writer because you did the strong thing and left him because you didn"t want to be an enabler and so forth and you wanted to rise above it and get on with your life so there you are on this freeway in SoCal in a red car with your blonde hair and your black dress and your stiletto heels to prove to yourself that you are still attractive like a f.u.c.king advertis.e.m.e.nt for Black Velvet and wait a minute, what"s that shiny you see some pretty lights to the right twinkle twinkle little star and WOOSH you are cutting tracks through the thick ice plant between southbound and northbound freeway lanes at 90 literally carving through them with scars that will last weeks and be on the nightly news and spinning out big time and coming to a smoky stop - miraculously - pointed in the right direction in the southbound lanes.
You know what to do. You floor it. Laughing that maniacal laugh of a 37 year old divorced woman who should be dead but isn"t.
A little soggy voice in your head goes take the next exit ramp and get your drunk a.s.s home which you see as if you are looking through water up ahead you take it and you let go of the steering wheel like your hands are floating away from things until BAM you drive head-on into another car and your airbags deploy like two enormous fatty sagging b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the police come and you are sauced beyond belief and everything smells a little like gunpowder and scotch and it"s ma"am get out of the car and ma"am stand on one foot and count backwards from 100 with your eyes closed and with this stick up your a.s.s and balancing an egg on your left t.i.t and what else?
You are cuffed and breathalyzed. You blow a number out of orbit. Don"t even try. You are so beyond the legal limit you could power a car. Gimme a D to the U to the I. Oh and in case you were feeling any shred of hotness left in your bones, when you look pleadingly into the young male cop"s rearview on the car ride to the facility and say, couldn"t you just take me home? With what you think are pout lips and bed blond hair, he looks back at you with - you guessed it - woman, you are old as s.h.i.t pity in his eyes.
Inside the jail the rerun begins. The first thing that happens that has already happened is that you are inside. You have been in jail before. You have a record. Not very many people know that since you look exactly like a Visiting Writer and anyhow you have always been a snappy dresser.
The second thing that happens that has already happened is there is another woman in the holding cell who is going through heroin withdrawal. She"s drooling and she"s in a tight ball arms choking knees and she"s banging her head back against the wall and spitting about every eight seconds. Your left arm aches. Your feet go numb. You go sit next to her. You look a little bit like a martyr-ish c.r.a.ppy-a.s.s too white benevolent Visiting Writer on the outside but what"s not visible to the naked eye is that you haven"t been clean all that many years, which suddenly has shrunken to the size of a human head. Weren"t you getting a little c.o.c.ky about it too, your beautiful recovery, your distancing yourself from yourselfstory.
Which takes you to the third thing that happens over again which is how quickly you become the Universal Caretaker when YOU are the sorry a.s.s loser who needs the HELP, giving your socks to the black woman on welfare and holding the hand of the lumpy 50-year old woman who is actually maybe 28. You find yourself dialing the number of the boyfriend of the crack queen with the Alice Cooper mascara drool face. No really, you are on the payphone calling for her even though she has choke bruises around her neck, she begs you to call him so you do, you intervene, you become an objective outside resource, you tell him to call and drop the charges so she can get out since it is so obvious that he has abused her and later in life she will have one h.e.l.luvuh case, one in which you will be a witness of course, watch out guy, you teach Women"s Studies, and he proceeds to describe to you what she did to his living room and his cat and his motorcycle with a baseball bat and the house on fire before he calls you a f.u.c.king c.u.n.t wh.o.r.e ignorant b.i.t.c.h and hangs up.
Undeterred, you find yourself calling the guard to get the fat woman some Tylenol as you listen to the Christian chick with a silk scarf and a screw loose self-narrating her experience with the guy from the hotel bar who she believed was there for the Jesus on Ice convention. All of this activity suddenly takes its psychosomatic toll on you and your morning after green puke bellied nasty kicks in and you realize with a kind of brick to the lower spine feeling that you have to take an enormous scotch s.h.i.t. Which you take, of course, in front of everyone, like cons have to, no matter how much the outfit they are wearing costs, no matter how beautiful a martyr they make, no matter how pretty the letters Ph.D. look after your dumb a.s.s Visiting Writer name, you still have to s.h.i.t in the presence of a crowd.
Weird, huh.
You close your eyes.
You breathe.
You are not sorry yet for what you have done.
You are simply an incarcerated woman.
Remorse, she came later. Lemme throw it into reverse.
Let me tell you who I hit.
Collision as Metaphor THE PERSON I HIT IN MY HEAD-ON COLLISION WAS A 5" tall brown skinned woman.
In the moment, this did not upset me. In the moment, I was drunk as a monkey, and so the entire scene that night looked a little like things were in slow motion and smeared over with Vaseline. And at a tremendous distance from my heart and whatever it might have said. Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas. Everything just looks blurry.
My airbags deployed. Pow. If you have never had that experience, it"s quite something. It"s loud. Like gunshot loud. And everything smells like dynamite. If you were holding the steering wheel with both hands, your arms get heat and friction burns on the insides. Your head, because it didn"t hit the windshield, smashes face first into the Michelin Man surface of the airbag; then your head jets back and knocks your noggin against the headrest. Afterwards, you just sort of sit there and wait for the dust to settle and your brains to recollect themselves. It helps to close your eyes and wait for everything to stop moving.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5" tall brown skinned woman who had no English.
I know that she had no English because, after I sat there trying to feel whether or not anything was broken or searing me with pain - which it wasn"t, particularly since I had anesthetized myself with the bottle of scotch - I opened my car door and looked around. My car, a red Toyota Corolla, was weirdly angled and had its face smashed in. Her car, a white ... I"m not sure - it looked something like those old Gremlins - her car was smashed in on the left side all the way up to the windshield. Something warm and metallic filled my mouth. I"d bitten my tongue. I saw the woman sitting on the guard rail, crying, saying things I didn"t understand. Her hair was more black than the night around us. She had a lump the size of a golf ball on her forehead. No airbag. Her skirt was white and billowed out at times.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5" tall brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English.
How I knew the woman carried life in her gut is that her belly had the unmistakable mound of a child. Six, possibly seven months of child mound. At the time, this did not alarm me; as I said, I had the sensitivity of a drunk. Though I did feel a p.r.i.c.kle of something far far inside my abdomen. I sat down next to her. She began to wail and hold her belly. I said, "Are you in pain?" She did not look at me or answer. Dumbly, I put my arm around her shoulders. I have no idea why she let me do that. She rocked. Inconsolably.
I didn"t feel anything. No, literally. I couldn"t feel my hands, my feet, my a.s.s. I couldn"t feel my own face.
The woman fumbled in her skirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I thought perhaps she was fingering 911, but she was not. I could see she was trying to dial a number. Someone she knew. Someone to help. I couldn"t manage my own cell phone. I looked at it in my hand. I couldn"t see any numbers, or how to activate the thing. It sat like a dead rodent. I noticed I smelled faintly of p.i.s.s.
I don"t know how long we sat there. The sound of cars whizzing by comforted me. After a while three cop cars and an ambulance showed up. I remember the sound of sirens trying to out-do one another. The cops blocked off the bit of road we were on - the overpa.s.s between north and southbound lanes. I cupped my ears with my hands. I remember the red white and blue lights flashing all around us. Something about the swirls of color looked like we were inside an underwater scene.
The cops immediately separated us. Her, they took over to the ambulance. Me, they asked me if I felt OK and I replied with a quite obviously soggy yes. They had a paramedic come over and "check me out" but no one was very worried about me since I could walk and talk. I hadn"t a bruise or b.u.mp or cut on me, other than the airbag burns on my inner arms. My distinguishing characteristic: s.h.i.t-faced. The emotions all went in the direction of the pregnant woman and her unborn child. Except mine. Mine floated toward nothingness.
While the cop put me through my paces, nearly all of which I failed in that ever so slight way that is inevitable given the amount I"d consumed, I thought of my mother. Literally - when the cop had me close my eyes and attempt that finger to the nose thing? I saw my mother"s face. Puffy with drink and covered in sadness ... not a maternal, Madonna sadness. A sadness made from joy being siphoned from your life a year at a time.
I have a photo of my mother when she was a girl. It was between leg and hip operations. In this photo she was not in a body cast. It was probably taken a few years before my grandmother divorced my grandfather for molesting my mother"s sisters. She looks to be about 13. It is the sweetest girl face you have ever seen, but something in the tilt of her head, something in the lowered gaze, you can already see the sadness in her.
I know this isn"t true, but in some ways, I can see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down. I can see the bottle of sleeping pills. The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn"t leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away from her like fish cut loose. I can see the Cancer that came to the rescue, for as her sister said to me shortly before she died, "Every day of her sweet life she was in pain, of one sort or another. At least now she"ll have peace."
Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic ma.s.s made of emotions that didn"t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?
I cannot see in her face that her children gave her joy, though she said that to me the week before she died, and I thought, looking at her milk white shrunken body, almost the body of a girl, how?
When the cop hand cuffed me and told me to sit in the back of his copmobile I was glad. Inside his car it was quiet. It smelled like air freshener and leather. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, very far away inside me, I felt a tiny pang of pain for the woman I"d hit and what was in her belly. But it was too much for me, so I opened my eyes and watched the cop write things down on a small clipboard instead.
Briefly and without any drama I wished I was dead. But there were no other emotions or thoughts accompanying that. It just sat there like me in the back seat of a cop car, flat and plain and unevolved. Then he was driving me away from the scene to the station to be breathalyzed.
In my head way back at the base of my skull near the top of my spinal cord I didn"t mean to I didn"t mean to I didn"t mean to I didn"t mean to I didn"t mean to I didn"t, did I?
Mean to?
The night stretched out long like it does when you f.u.c.k up. It"s like a night that lasts a year. Or like all the years of your life are suddenly in your lap, wailing like needy children. You can"t take care of all of them. You don"t even want to. You want to abandon each yearchild on the side of the road and bolt. I am not your mother.
After the autopsy of my baby girl, a doctor told me in his office, "There is nothing conclusive to a.s.sociate with her death. The cord was not around her neck, and there were no identifiable physical problems of any sort. Here is a copy of the autopsy report. I"m sorry. Sometimes this happens, and there is no explanation." I stared at the white wall behind his head. He handed me a form that encouraged me to attend a special group therapy for parents whose babies died.
When I left his office, I went into the clinic bathroom. I pulled my pants down and peed. I kept sitting there. Then I began to shred the white form he"d given to me into tiny pieces of paper, and I ate them, crying without a sound.
The person I hit was a brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English. She sat on the dirty silver guardrail and cried. I watched her shoulders shake. She buried her face in her hands. She said words I didn"t know into her own palms. She held her belly and rocked and wept. When they took me away I was so relieved I almost thanked the cops-strange saviors. In my head I thought take me away from this woman. I can"t be near her. I can"t look at her. I can"t even accept that she exists. The image of a grieving mother is one that could kill me.
How to Love Your Mother After She"s Dead I FIRST MET MY MOTHER WHEN SHE WAS BORN WITH one leg more than six inches shorter than the other. A scar running kid-eye high up the length of her outer leg. From knee to hip. Stretching upward like wide pearled and waxen tracks. The eyes of a child fix on things. In the mornings while she dressed I would put my face so close to it I could feel my eyes shiver.
I first met my mother when I was born cesarean. Babies wouldn"t fit through the tilt of her hips and birth ca.n.a.l without their skulls caving in. When they reached in to slice the caul - that amniotic membrane between her body and mine-my eyes were already open.
I first met my mother in her childhood. In the operating rooms and hospitals that were her home for years and years. Inside the body casts. Next to the ridicule of hordes of gremlin children. Hobbling atop a shoe with a four inch wooden block attached.
I first met my mother the day my father threw a fist intimately close to her head just missing her cheekbone and instead opened up a gaping mouth in the kitchen wall that stayed like that for years.
I first met my mother the day my father"s mother said in her presence, "I don"t know why you had to marry a cripple."
I first met my mother when she told me the only man who ever loved her right was gay, and he died "a death that laid waste to his body, Belle." Before anyone knew what AIDS was.
I first met my mother the day she told me she could see things that weren"t there, except that they were, like armies crossing the freeway at night, like sea serpents over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, like a UFO in the sky above her house in Port Arthur, Texas, like rabid poodles in the pear tree of our house at Stinson Beach. I was 12.
I first met my mother the night I had to wipe her smear of a 55-year old self off of the casino floor in Biloxi, Mississippi. The skin of her face was as soft and pelted as a baby"s head.
I first met my mother the night before my first of three marriages, when she turned to me and said, I almost married a rodeo man. His name was J.T. The next morning at my wedding, out on a beach in Corpus Christi, in the stage of menopause wherein your periods go nuts, she bled, a giant red wound blooming behind her if she"d been shot in the a.s.s.
I first met my mother inside the fury of our arguments - matching each other"s rage all through my p.u.b.erty and her middle age, how strangely glorious her never backing down, no one ever winning, just two women"s voices like claps of thunder drowning out the world.
I first met my mother inside her lifelong leg and hip pain. Underneath the arm length scar where a steel plate masqueraded as bone. A body in pain for the duration of a life. Every hour of existence.
I first met my mother when she signed the scholarship papers setting me free.
I first met my mother her singing I see the moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees everyone I want to see, G.o.d bless the moon, and G.o.d bless me, and G.o.d bless everyone I want to see. Her voice carrying me to dream. The weight of father lifting, lifting.
If I close my eyes I can see her.
I remember the first time I saw her swim, joining me in the deep water, leaving my father standing impotently in chest high water. How powerful her sidestroke. The joy in her face. How beautiful the gleaming white skin of her arms. The long glide of her. The water swallowing the fact of her pain, her marriage, her leg.
My mother loved to swim more than anyone I know.
Swan.
Your Tax Dollars At Work Ernesto Alejo Angel Manuel Rick Ricardo Sonny Lebron Pedro Jimarcus Lidia Notice anything about those names?
Six Mexicans, one Italian, one African-American, one Jamaican, one white dishonorably discharged Navy guy wound tighter than dynamite, and me. Compliments of the State of California.
The posse. All in day-glo orange vests on the side of the freeway picking up your trash with sticks that have "grabbers" on the ends of them. At least that was one of the week"s a.s.signments. The easiest and least humiliating. Who we were on paper: Breaking and Entering (but not stealing anything. ?) Possession Possession DUI.
Domestic Violence DUI.
Possession Driving without a License or Vehicle Registration Fleeing a Crime Scene and Failure to Produce Identification Public Intoxication and Indecent Exposure And a big blond D.
U.
I.
Doing time on a road crew in the hot asphalt and suntan lotion world of San Diego makes you feel like you are in much c.r.a.ppier remake of the movie Cool Hand Luke. Everybody who is tanned and glamorous - the paid for whitey pretty smiles and the paid for bleached blonde color weaves and the paid for total laser hair removal jobs and the paid for body parts - drives by you like you are ice plant or oleander. The stuff in the divider between the zipping lanes of freeway life. When cars go by your hair blows up and hot wind brushes your face. The sound of all that driving and social surface life can make you feel nuts.
There"s no Paul Newman challenging the man. You put your trash in s.h.i.tty plastic bags and when you fill one you tie it off and leave it on the side of the road and move on. You don"t get to stand around. If you stand around, officer Kyle comes over to you and reprimands you verbally. If you talk back it"s simple - you go straight to jail. But you also develop ... strategies for moving as slowly as possible. Why hurry? There"s only more trash. There"s never-ending trash. And you are part of the trash - you are a trash advertis.e.m.e.nt.
Except for dishonorably discharged Rick, who had the kind of eyes that said I WILL BEAT THE f.u.c.k OUT OF ANYONE WHO TALKS TO ME, me and my homeboys slowly but surely got along. You"d think not, right? Some middle aged bouge blonde woman with sagging t.i.ts getting along with a bunch of SoCal thugs? Au contraire.
People who have been to jail more than once can smell it on each other.
Men in groups operate through a series of male codes. Movements in the hands and eyes. Stances. Verbal exchanges with triple entendres. Little challenges and invisible battles and hierarchies worked out. So I rarely spoke and I never wore make-up and I wore baggy a.s.sed pants and I made G.o.dd.a.m.n sure my labor was not that of a woman. Luckily, I have the shoulders and strength of a swimmer.
The second week I lifted a big chunka railroad tie by myself. I hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and even though I knew my spine was crumpling up a vertebrae at a time like little wads of paper, I looked bad a.s.s enough to be ... what"s the word. A trusted body.
I"ve never been treated less like a woman in my life. I remember telling a colleague of mine - one of the only people who knew that by day I was out there with my posse while at night I had a fancy visiting writer job teaching budding young MFAs how to make their words more wonderful and she said: "Do they say lewd things to you? Do they do anything ... you know, weird around you or to you? Aren"t you scared to be around those people?" I just stared at her. I tried to picture what she pictured. A bunch of male mostly minority small time criminals - those people - and a blonde woman who ... who what? Who did she believe I was? She taught World Lit. and drove a Beamer.
Who I was. I was the convict with the best English. The day Jimarcus asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I taught English at SDSU, he laughed.
"Hey mahn, check it out. We got a Professor with us," he broadcasted one day when we were sc.r.a.ping c.r.a.p off of the walls of the county elections office.
A slow laugh made its way through the chests of the other men. And smiles. They"d smile like nothing you"ve ever seen before. All that dark skin opening. They slapped my back or put a hand on my shoulder and shook their heads, laughing, laughing. They laughed in a way that somehow felt good. "But you with us now, sistah?" Jimarcus would say, shaking his headful of dreads. After that they all started calling me "Doctor." You know what they wanted? They wanted me to teach them how to talk more like everyone else. They wanted more English.
On road crew my hands blistered so badly from hacking down sea gra.s.s with giant dull-bladed loppers near Sea World I couldn"t hold a cup of coffee.
On road crew if there was heavy lifting my scoliosis spastic back hurt so bad when I got home every night I"d go straight to a bath and lay in it and cry.