My boyfriend and I say, “I love you,” to each other every single day, more than once. I don’t know why he loves me, but he does. Sometimes I question this love. Sometimes I wonder if we will get married someday and have a family and live in a big house with a big yard or if we will break up after a big fight and move out of the togetherhome we have right now because until death do us part is not realistic for a raped girl like me. Maybe after our big fight, he’ll ask his boss to relocate him to another state because he wants to move out of California because California is where we became us and where we destroyed us.
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I hear scratching coming from behind me on the couch. I live on the third floor of an apartment complex, with nothing above me. Woods surround my tiny balcony and cover my living room and bedroom. The noise, it sounds like scurrying, and I think maybe it’s just a squirrel or a raccoon crawling on top of the roof. Whatever it is sounds like it’s running off the roof, leaving me wondering why it would be doing such a thing this late at night. I don’t know much about nature. I don’t know much about what happens in the dark.
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The day after my twin sister's wedding I curled up in the corner of my parent's kitchen and fell asleep. At the time I said I was sitting there because the rest of the house was already overtaken by relatives. I said I was sick because my adrenaline had finally run out. As maid of honor, adrenaline was all I had been running on for a long time. But I've had a long time to think about it now.
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Everything in Maine was blissfully damp, from the sheets to the mornings to the paperbacks. Blueberries, by the time they made it into our pancakes, were still wet. Ponytails remained lake-stained all the livelong day. It was only when we laid our heads on the moist flannel pillowcases that we felt something akin to dry. Even then, one good squeeze and we could have wrung juice from the blankets.
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I grew up listening to my mom criticize her stomach. Having children had done this, she would say as she ran her hand over her loose stomach. Being pregnant and giving birth had changed her body forever, leaving behind stretch marks and large breasts and a stomach that jiggled and bulged. She didn’t like how her stomach looked, but she didn’t starve herself or excessively exercise. In every fitting room we shared, she commented. If only I could get rid of this, she’d say as she patted her stomach. Look at this, she said, as she shook her head and looked at her side profile in the dressing room mirror. If I didn’t have all this, these would fit better, she would say, while pulling down the pair of pants that didn’t fit. She saw, and continues to see, her stomach as a negative, a defect.
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A couple of months ago you were going to several Overeaters Anonymous meetings a week, sometimes every day. But when Elaine told you she couldn’t sponsor you anymore after your suicide attempt, and when she and a friend whom she also sponsored asked you not to attend a couple of their regular meetings, and after your therapist came to the facility you were hospitalized in to tell you she couldn’t work with you anymore, you stopped going to meetings altogether.
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The evening before you came into this world we endured the longest blackest night.
Winter. The hibernal solstice. Our slice of Earth turning her back to the sun, head bowed, submitting to the dark.
That night imprinted its suffocating length onto my birthing body. Within the week, wrapped in tendrils of dread
postnatally deeply depressed.
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You stand with your husband on the balcony of a hotel room in Ao Nang, Thailand. Together, you watch the sky turn from pre-dawn pink to blue. It rained during the night and the air smells like damp teakwood and salt. Your hotel sits at the edge of town on top of a steep hill. As the sun rises, you contemplate the serenity of the Indian Ocean—a sea without waves.
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It was time for our one rehearsal, the day of my daughter’s wedding. A group of family and friends who had been practicing alone now gathered, anticipating the thrill of voices blending and harmonizing, woven together by the glistening thread that is my daughter’s life force. In the run-up to this event, all said, “Yes, we will sing…We are honored to sing…We are thrilled to be part of this special surprise,” a touching tribute to a father long dead. All coming together from different places, different times, different experiences, to fuse in song.
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I used to place Ken’s hand right on the mound of Barbie’s breast. It fit, almost precisely, as if the rounded palm was created for this small act of intimacy. Of course, further south it was merely a place where two legs connected, a smooth sweep of plastic that neither confirmed nor betrayed pleasure. But that didn’t stop me from imagining. I used to sit on the floor between the two twin beds in the upstairs bedroom at my grandmother’s house.
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I stare out at the sky. The man next to me is snoring, mouth wide open. His head drops forward, jolting back upright. It’s February. If the year had gone as planned, I would not have been on this airplane. I would have been finishing breakfast with my roommates and walking to class. Tonight, they will make dinner without me. We won’t dress up together this weekend, sifting through each other’s closets, to attend a party where we drink too much and laugh too hard. I am leaving home.
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In the early morning hours after John Lennon was shot and killed, people began gathering in front of the Upper West Side apartment building that he shared with his wife and their young son. For more than a week, from everywhere and of all ages, they came to keep a vigil. Watching the local news channel, I hear them referred to as Beatle fans. But what I see are mourners. Crowded together, hemmed in by police barricades, they weep and hold candles and signs, cleaving to the spot where Lennon left this earth.
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Six weeks before the wedding
At forty-eight, I was an older bride, but the Blazy U Ranch was a newer wedding venue, nestled in a valley framed by the Colorado Rockies.
Deb and Jen ran the place, so I met with them to review my to-dos and due dates. While scanning my planning spreadsheet, Deb laughed.
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A few months ago, my right breast was dabbed and smeared with a brown liquid that I now know is povidone-iodine (thanks Google), though no one explained that to me at the time. It was part of the preparation I underwent for a biopsy on a mass of tissue found during my annual well woman exam and deemed suspicious by an ultrasound two weeks later.
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“Guess my score,” my son Tom prods as he drops his busted backpack on the kitchen island.
I know this game. We haven’t played it in a while, not since his middle school days. The game means that he’s done well on a test but is not quite sure how to voice it.
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The first memory I have of our camping friends is of the day our daughters started kindergarten. We weren’t camping friends at this point, just parents of two children apiece. Their daughter—crying quietly at her desk. Mine—bright-eyed in her blue/green/white plaid skirt, matching headband, white polo.
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Every week she asked me how I felt and every week, while, in general things were “fine,” I always told her there was almost always a day, or a couple of hours a day, where despondence grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. It was as if someone, something, was wrestling me and trying to get me to give in, to tap out. We were in different weight classes though. I was the lightweight and the despondence was the heavyweight and I didn’t have any agility or tricks up my sleeve to counteract the weight disparity between us.
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I.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
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I’m still sitting in this car going nowhere, staring at the side of our house with its mildew stains branching across the siding because we’re overdue for a power wash. The car was a splurge purchase several years ago. A Volvo with peanut butter leather interior which, every time I run my hand over, brings me all the way back to an elementary school friend, whose parents drove a similar car, had oriental rugs, and a dog too designer for our cocker spaniel neighborhood. A time when I thought it might be possible to live forever, or at least frozen in time like Harrison Ford in Star Wars, to be thawed out later. The hero never really dies.
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Something bad happens when you’re eight years old, maybe nine, and you don’t understand it, you don’t have the words, but you do know—with throbbing certainty—what it means. Your dolls will be your only kids, because now you will never have one. Your insides have gone all wrong.
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