A Happy Childhood.
I AM SIX.
My friend Katie in the water my friend Christie in the water Phantom Lake Bath and Tennis Club and summer is every day every single day in the water we swim in the morning we swim in the daytime we swim in the afternoon we swim at night we swim every day we eat rainbow popsicles we eat fudgesicles creamsicles we go and go underwater laps hold your breath back and forth and back again three times no boys we stay under - water swim goggles look at each other blow your air out sit on the bottom we dive from the low dive we dive from the high dive we find pennies at the bottom of the deep end we laugh and laugh we race at swim meets in evening we race we win and win little gold medals beautiful blue ribbons we dive off of starting blocks we fly in the air we enter the water with the glee of girl splashing.
I AM EIGHT.
My sister my adoration my sister my awe my sister"s room world of art world of music world of poetry and dried flowers and watercolor covers and long auburn hair.
I AM 10.
Vacationing at Salishan. My father calm, cigarette smoke curling around his head as he gazes out at the Oregon ocean. My mother humming. My sister and I swimming in the pool of a resort, laughing, like other peoples" children.
I AM 11.
I play clarinet with my friend Brody and we tap our feet three-quarter time our mouths around the instruments our fingers between the struggle of learning and the dance of music our knees our lives nearly touching.
I AM 13.
The family of my friend Christie my best friend my world miraculously take me on their camping trips with them in their big Winnebago at night in the little Winnebago attic where we slept in our sleeping bags I stare at her while she sleeps my skin hot and itching I have to pee I put my hands between my legs like an anxious little monkey I go to sleep I pee my pants hide my PJ"s in one of the stow cupboards in the Winnebago and listen to her parents all day wonder "What smells like fish?" and Christie smiles and we run and play with frogs in the weeds knee-deep in the water of our lives.
I AM 15.
In the women"s locker room after swim practice and skin and wet. Little girls holding in youth in V-shaped torsos. Almost women shaving their legs. The bodies of women and girls safe in a room with heat and steam and let loose hair. My head swimming, swimming. I want to stay. I want to belong to something besides family.
Illness as Metaphor KISSED A GIRL AND MADE ME CRY.
When I kissed Annie Van Leewan and got mononucleosis I was 11 years old. My skin took on a yellowish pale color and the blue veins in my own hands looked as if I"d colored them with one of my father"s architectural felt tipped markers. I lost 10 pounds the first week and a half. My eyesight became slightly blurry. I had none of my swimmer strength - I remember wondering where it went - why couldn"t I lift my own arms? What had happened to my legs? I could not get out of bed or stand without fainting. I could not eat, or walk, or go to the bathroom, or dress, undress, on my own. I could not bathe. I could not reach water.
My mother at that time was in the prime of her real estate glory. My father at that time had chosen to try his luck as a freelance architect. His office the bedroom next to mine -the room that had been my sister"s. Before she left. In other words, it was my father who was home with me. For four weeks.
I"m trying to think how to tell you how four weeks can be years. It isn"t possible, I know. But it happened. It"s language that"s letting me say that the days elongated, as if the very sun and moon had forsaken me. It"s narrative that makes things open up so I can tell this. It"s the yielding expanse of a white page.
In my sickbed my father removed my sweat soaked clothing. My father redressed me in underwear and pretty nightgowns. My father stroked my hair. Kissed my skin. My father carried me to the bathtub and laid me down and washed me. Everywhere. My father dried me off in his arms and redressed me and carried me back to the bed. His skin the smell of cigarettes and Old Spice cologne. His yellowed fingers. The mountainous callous on his middle finger from all the years of holding a pen or pencil. His steel blue eyes. Twinning mine. The word "Baby."
Late at night, my mother would come home from selling beautiful homes to other people. She would come into my room and sing I see the moon. And kiss me. And say, "Don"t you cry, Belle, everything"s gonna get better. You"ll see." And leave early the next morning.
There is only one other time in my life that I have experienced the delirium I entered during those weeks. Because there are times when a soul has to leave a body, times that are not death. Some people know this like a hymn. I knew she - my body - was still there, but I left her lifeless in the arms of a father.
I went into a white. Inside the white, there were sunflowers. And lapis colored gla.s.s. And deep aqua pools. There were beautiful rocks everywhere - but you had to find them. Small and exquisite journeys that took all day. Like in a very good dream. Inside the white too there were stories. As if written on the walls or floors or sky of the white. The words. You could see them. Reach out and touch them. Just like the rocks. You could pick up the rocks or words and carry them. Sometimes the wordrocks sang. After a while I believed in them more than my own life. I thought, it would be possible, even beautiful, to die.
But even girls whose strength has abandoned them are made to come back. And so I began to eat again. Taking the fork or spoon from my father"s hand. I began to get up out of my bed and walk - wondering, is this what my mother felt like after all those months as a girl in a body cast, finally touching the floor and moving her legs, breathing in something called will? And mercifully. I again entered the water. To swim. Away from my father"s house, every day I swam a tiny piece of self returned. And the strength of ... the strength of a girl.
Everything about him was in his hands.
A Burning WHEN I WAS 13 I CONFESSED MY FATHER SECRETS IN the black box of catholic to another father in the house of our father who told me I should not tell lies.
Honor thy father.
Say seven Hail Marys.
It"s wicked to make up stories.
For three days and three nights I prayed to the thing called G.o.d so hard I choked on the spit in my mouth. I clenched my hands until they went red. I dug my fingernails into flesh so hard little scarlet moons appeared. I shut my eyes so tight I thought my forehead would bleed. My head, my heart, everything on the inside was burning.
No matter how many times I entered the cool waters of the pool, I left the wet with a fire in me.
Mercy did not come from G.o.d the father. Mercy came from a book. That was the year I read Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West. My sister gave me the book when she left our father"s house.
At 13, I found most of the book terrifying. And I had to skip many words and pages that I did not understand. But I already knew who Joan of Arc was, because my sister had explained it to me. Girl woman with a war in her. Voice of a father in her head. And so I knew if I kept reading I would come to her burning. I didn"t want to and I couldn"t not.
Joan of Arc"s burning scene is on page 341. Instead of a crown of thorns they placed a tall paper cap on her head. She did not die until the fire reached her head. People saw all kinds of things - one person saw a dove leaving her skull. Despite the oil, sulphur and fuel used, her entrails and heart would not go to ash. The executioner had to throw them in the Seine.
I could see her. How it looked. How it smelled. How her hair went to flame. How the bone form of her skull appeared, until her jaw and teeth shown, a terrible smile or a scream, before she burned to c.r.a.p.
I"m 13 reading that. Honor thy father. It is wicked to make up stories.
I"m the rest of my life a burning girl.
That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.
I didn"t hate the fire. I hated the people who did not believe her. And I hated the father that let her burn. And I hated the men who... I think I hated men. The more I was around them, the more I came close to spontaneously combusting. Drawing them dangerously close to the flame.
The Hairy Girls GIRL SWIMMERS ARE HAIRY.
I don"t know how much you know about these things, but compet.i.tion swimmers don"t shave their legs unless they are preparing for the big meet, Regionals, State, Senior Nationals, for instance. So when I was a girl who barely had any hairs looking up at the towering corpus of Nancy Hogshead from the puny viewpoint of the pool, their leg hair was downright scary. And they had p.u.b.e hair sticking out of their suits up at the top of their thighs and going into their business. Boy. Talk about terrifying.
OK that"s a lie. It wasn"t terrifying. It was mesmerizing. I couldn"t stop staring. It made me into a mouth breather.
When Jo Harshbarger showered in the locker rooms, all I saw was her legs as something I longed to pet, and her stuff as a little furry special place, especially since as a girl I was afraid to look at t.i.ts or t.w.a.ts or even faces.
That"s a lie too. I stared at t.i.ts and coochie as hard as a drunk eyeballing a fifth of vodka.
These hairy women - they were - they were mythic. As a kid, I had no idea what they were in real life - students, girlfriends of something, females who used hand-held hairdryers, people who shopped at the mall with purses and drove cars around - but at the pool and in the locker rooms they were mythic. I think that"s why I remember so many of their names, these larger than life to a kid women - Jo Harshbarger and Evie Kosenkranius and Karen Moe and Shirley Babashoff.
Lynn Collella Bell.
I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom"s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I"d ever seen. Making me hippoventate.
Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I"m pretty sure drooling ... it"s a wonder I didn"t pa.s.s out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open.
For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I"d get on my stomach and b.u.t.terfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating - this whatever it was I had in me - I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap.
Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up.
You know, now that I"m thinking of it, it didn"t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn"t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman s.e.x thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my s.l.u.tty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.
Look I"m trying to say I didn"t have little girl crushes like you are imagining. And I didn"t have the cliche swimmers are all d.y.k.es deal - though lots of swimmer girls regularly spanked twinkies, I was to learn later - no, it was much more serious. I mean I was in pain. Whatever blue b.a.l.l.s were, I was pretty sure I had them. Every day at practice, in the showers, with all that girl stuff right in front of my face. All the soaped up torsos and b.o.o.bs, all the uninhibited washing of you know whats, the bubbles sliding down their a.s.ses and legs. If a kid could coronary from want, I"d be a dead woman.
No, I didn"t want to have a slumber party. I didn"t want to go to the mall.
I wanted to use my hair brush and rubberbands and make someone ... whimper.
I did consider girls my age. Evie Kosenkranius had a kid sister my age. Tina Kosenkranius. I ... christ. Will you look at those names? I can"t even look at those names today without going all p.o.r.no in my head - hey, Evie Kosenkranius has a sister. I mean my G.o.d, why couldn"t I just be a 16 year old blond boy with raging hormones and a spanky new flagpole that everyone wants to sit on?
But I wasn"t. I was me, a painfully shy girl kid with a hidden girl bomb in her panties not knowing what the h.e.l.l to do with it who really, really wanted to ... eat someone.
OF COURSE I tried the neighborhood girls my age. I"d invite them into my room to play doctor and they"d just lie there, letting me do anything, sometimes giggling, until they clamped their legs shut. The best I could get out of the deal was to put a blanket over us so the smell would intensify. Something like hay and apples. Then they"d get dressed and want to go do something dumb that girls do. Like ice skating or talking on the phone or mall bulls.h.i.t.
What I needed was a girl who was older than me. Bigger.
Sienna Torres was a troublemaker young woman from a troubled household making trouble wherever she went. She broke the rules at school, she broke them at home, she broke them at Albertson"s and Nordstrom and 7-Eleven, and she broke them at swim practice. She came late, she skipped laps, she got swatted with a kickboard in what was perversely known as "licks" for her rebelliousness.
I was terrified of her. The missing ingredient.
Sienna Torres was always late to practice but the much more important thing was that she was always the last one to get dressed. No matter how slowly I dressed, no matter how much I tried to comb and blow-dry my fuzzy white non hair (which took about 20 seconds), I was always dressed light years ahead of her. This meant that all I got was Sienna Torres in my Mom"s rearview sauntering out of the building where a couple of boymen would be loitering. Sienna Torres getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until she was gone, and I was just a stupid kid in the back seat of a car I couldn"t drive. My hands shoved between my legs. My face red.
Sienna Torres was 17 and came to practice with vodka on her breath. I knew it was vodka because her face and skin smelled like my mother"s minus the Estee Lauder. Plus I"d see a flask in her swim bag sometimes. Also black lace panties and a black silk bra and a curling iron and mascara and car keys and cigarettes and Diet Pepsi and tampons and lip gloss and a Walkman and Certs and a very large ... hairbrush. I was 12. I was 13. I was 15. I was 35. See? I can"t even remember just from writing about her. She made my breath jackknife every time I was anywhere near her. She made my mouth water. She made me dizzy.
Then a miracle happened. Coming out of the pool and on the way to the locker rooms one evening, I slipped and fell on my a.s.s, spraining my ankle. Not bad enough to alert medics, but bad enough to get attention. A lot. Think about this. Not only did I have every girl swimmer in locker room heaven taking care of me, helping me to shower and get dressed, but when they finally believed I could handle the rest on my own, there were only two of us left in the entire locker room.
Uh huh, that"s right. Me and Sienna Torres.
Sienna Torres was still in the shower, and all I had left was my shoes. So while I tied the slowest, like r.e.t.a.r.d slow, most careful giant looped bow on one of my sneakers, over and over again, I watched Sienna Torres shave her p.u.s.s.y in the shower.
Soaping up the triangle, her hand making circles where I wanted to put my face. One foot up on the shower stand, her toes curled around the faucet, a palm sized peach peeking out from between her legs. A razor making paths through the white drifts of suds, then nothing but skin folding inward to that dark and daring other mouth.
I"m pretty sure at some point I went cross-eyed.
Terror takes strange shape in a h.o.r.n.y girl. It weaves it way up her boy b.u.t.t and up the V of her torso and settles in her shoulders and jaw so she can"t act right or talk without twitching. After Sienna finished and dried off and put most of her clothes on and blow dried her hair and put rings back on her fingers, when I finished tying the one shoe and tucked the shoe laces in on the other and then pretended my swim bag had something confounded in it, I hop hobbled over to her. She was pulling her hoodie down over her black bra. She was running her ringed fingers through her blow-dried feathered hair. She was turning her head to look at me - only a few inches down from her. Her quadruple pierced ears staring at me going, what?
I may have been excruciatingly shy but I had a gushing in me the size of a swimming pool and I was smart - smart as any of those G.o.dd.a.m.ned boys loitering outside the building-who I suddenly wished were dead - so I said, not quite believing my mouth would even work, "Um, can you help me?" Holding one foot slightly off the ground.
Sienna putting all her c.r.a.p in her bag not looking at me.
Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma.
Sienna taking a hit off of her flask, then without warning, pushing it over at me, saying "This will cut the pain, I bet." Smiling her Sienna Torres smile. "Can you handle it?"
You have no f.u.c.king idea how close I came to lunging at her leg and humping it like a little monkey. You have no idea how close I came to sucking on her hip bone and crying "mamma."
But I didn"t do those things. Sometimes you grow up in the s.p.a.ce of a minute.
I quite calmly took a big old swig of vodka viper"s flask just like my genetic code knew I could, and I never took my eyes off of her watching me, and I liked it, her watching I mean, because it certainly wasn"t the taste of vodka, which though I didn"t show it, like at all, tasted like what I suspected Estee Lauder must taste like if you drank it.
Then she said, "Being bad is good, huh." And laughed. I bit the inside of my cheek trying not to cough or barf. Trying to be bad, good.
And then Sienna Torres put her arm around my waist. And I put my arm around her shoulders and neck. And I could smell her skin. I didn"t bite her or anything. I didn"t hump her like a little monkey. And she helped me all the way to my mom"s car which miraculously didn"t kill me with embarra.s.sment, bypa.s.sing the boymen waiting for her as always.
I was so happy in the back seat of my mom"s car I thought I might make a water s.h.i.t in my pants. I watched her in the rearview but this time she watched back. I was drunk with her touching me. I could still smell her: chlorine and vodka and Nivea and sh sh sh shaving cream and Suave conditioner. Nothing, nothing nothing nothing else went in my head all night, all week, all the next year. But that night, about halfway home, I reached down and felt something in my sweatshirt front pocket. I slyly put my hand in there behind the head of my driving mother.
It was Sienna"s flask.
Nemesis ANGER IS FUNNY.
It sits snarling in you your whole life just waiting for perfect ironic moments to emerge. Wanna know why I got a Ph.D. in literature? Because in the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Oregon Chang Rae Lee told me my story was "trite." I had infiltrated the writing workshops as a grad student in literature because I couldn"t stop wanting to write stories after the Kesey thingee. When Chang Rae Lee told me my story and its sentiments were trite, know what I thought? I thought I wish I"d meet you in a dark Eugene alley out the back door of a bar so I could punch your smug face in you little p.r.i.c.k.
I"m not saying I"m proud of that. I"m just saying that if the things we really thought showed up on paper we"d all be ... way busted.
All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn"t know how to own her own intellect and blames it on men. I knew how to make a sentence hum. But my Kesey credentials didn"t get me very far, I hate to say. Pretty much everyone at U of O who wasn"t in that wild wonderful "cla.s.s" hated everyone who was, and thus belittled the c.r.a.p out of us. Punks. Plus our "novel" was a piece of c.r.a.p so I simply had no literary currency. The story that had drawn such condescending mouth poo from Chang Rae Lee was from the point of view of Caddy from The Sound and the Fury. One of the last things I said to Kesey was how I wanted to write that story - probably every young woman who reads it wants to - so I did, and that"s what I brought into the MFA workshop. And that"s what Chang Rae Lee called "trite."
As I made my way through literary history as a graduate literature duck I also wrote a story from the point of view of Dora. Joan of Arc. Emma Bovary. Hester Prynne. Helen of Troy. Sade"s mistress. Medusa. Eve. And the statue of liberty. Notice a motif?
In my story, Caddy is in the present. She lives next door to a tard neighbor boyman. Because she is s.e.xually insatiable, and because he both scares her with his too white skin and his too big for his body head and his giant pants bulge and the sounds that come out of him instead of language and his pure physical brute force, she goes over to his house one day and takes her clothes off in front of him.
He bellows that Benjy bellow.
Then he attacks her and f.u.c.ks her and nearly crushes her.
She loves it. She laughs until she cries and an ambulance comes.
Trite.
So after fantasizing about the dark alley and stomping around and cursing all things Chang Rae Lee that day, I decided to get a Ph.D.
f.u.c.k all y"all "writers." Woo Hoo.
I took a break from creative writing workshops - though I have to tell you - I positively HAUNTED the halls of the creative writing department. I don"t know why. I"d just find myself there, looking at bulletin boards, seeing what readings were coming up, grabbing random fliers from the office nerds. Twice I walked by a gorgeous tall guy with a ponytail who looked seriously like Marlon Brando but I didn"t talk to him. Writing student.
Sometimes the choices we make come from jealous lame petty places. But they are as real as it gets.
I entered the Ph.D. program. I went on to gloriously immerse myself in Derrida and Lacan and Kristeva and Foucault. In Homi K. Bhabha and Ed Said and Gayatri bad a.s.s Chakravorty Spivak. In d.i.c.kinson and Whitman and Plath and s.e.xton and Adrienne you want some of this Rich and Ai and Eliot and PoundBeckettStoppardDurasFaulknerWoolfJoyce (though he kinda always made me want to p.i.s.s on his grave) SyngeCortazarBorgesMarquezClariceL"InspecteurHenryMillerAnaiss.e.xatiousNinDerekWalcottBertoltBrechtPynchonSilko WintersonDjunaBarnesOscarWildeGertrudethemanSteinFlannerymotherf.u.c.kingO"ConnorRichardWrightBaldwinToniMorrisonRayCarverJohnCheeverMaxineHongKingstonSapphireDennisCooperKathyyoumakemefeellikemyskinisbeingsheeredoffAcker - cascades of authors kicking Chang Rae Lee"s scrawny little a.s.s. Take that.
Yeah. Up until he won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1995 and it was his book I was a.s.signed to read. I can"t tell you how great that felt. But what nagged at me no matter how far into the literary intellectual pool I ventured, no matter how well I swam its waters, was the story I had yet to write. Itching my fingers like fire.
Two terms later, I tried again. Graduate fiction writing workshop. This time the story I brought in wasn"t about voiceless women characters from literary history. This time the story was about my life. About fathers and swimming and f.u.c.king and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments - how I understood my entire life. In the language - image and fragment and non-linear lyric pa.s.sages - that seemed most precise. The story I brought in was called "The Chronology of Water."
Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language.
Chang Rae? Sorry I thought those things. Thanks for p.i.s.sing me off all those years ago. Beautiful random nemesis.
Love Grenade II WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere.
I was using my body as a s.e.xual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I s.e.xualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn"t have to think or feel anything but MMMMM good.
Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy - hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely there t.i.tties. More like M&M S. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn"t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between cla.s.ses and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we"d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we"d drive back and go to cla.s.s. Or I would. Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred s.e.x and club dancing.