C4 Issue 1: Winter 2011

by Chamber Four

  Naïve and enthralled with the sea, my friends and I packed up one Saturday afternoon and headed out through winding back roads to North Beach. We dressed in wetsuits because the water was frigid. Still, the water pierced through my heavy cladding and stung my skin. No one knew how to surf and so instead we decided to head out into the sea and body surf, letting the waves swell around us and carry us back to shore.

  I was good at it, crawling my way across the waves and riding them until they tapered out into sea foam and washed me up on shore like the slippery pieces of seaweed that lay scattered across the sand in glittering heaps. The sky was a menacing accumulation of thunderclouds that day and the ocean began to brass over in a murky color. On the last trip out, I failed to catch the wave my friends caught back to the shore. I wasn’t that worried. I could just catch the next one. I looked back over my shoulder to an oncoming wave, but instead of being able to position my body on top of it, I watched as the darkened water curled over on itself and came crashing down on my head. I plunged beneath the ocean and inhaled a deep breath of sour seawater.

  I knew nothing about undertows, rip tides, currents, eddies, or the treacherous ways that waves can push you down under the water and hold you there. All I knew was that I had to get to the air. I frantically pulled myself to the surface. But just as my head lifted from the water, another wave came roaring down on me and instead of breathing in air, I took in another mouthful of water and sea foam as I was thrown below the ocean for a second time.

  When humans enter the water, they can automatically hold their breath longer than they can on land. Maybe it is because we know that on land, we always have air, but underneath the water, it’s a matter of survival. The body goes into oxygen-saving mode. The heart rate and blood flow slows. People have survived over thirty minutes of submersion after their bodies have shut down without any physical or mental damage. But panicking humans cannot hold their breath; they intake whatever element surrounds them.

  Beneath the water, I tried to stabilize my feet on the bottom of the sea, but as I stretched my toes to hit the sand, I felt nothing, just a vast expanse of more water. I began to panic. I remembered what it was like to swim, how you move your arms and legs in opposite and simultaneous motions all at once, pulling the water so that you commanded it instead of it commanding you. I had never felt helpless in the water before, had always been able to manipulate it, moving my body through it effortlessly; gracefully. Now I was being tossed and heaved. I had lost my instinct for swimming, for the underwater breathing I had so meticulously worked on since I was a child.

  Suddenly, I remembered that you should swim diagonal to the shore if you were caught in a rip current, or rip tide, or were just drowning in the ocean in general. I began to wedge my body sideways and thrashed beneath the water, trying to gain a handle of my surroundings and to see if maybe I could begin to transverse my way back to the shore. But just as I hit the surface again, another wave slapped me back under.

  This happened for a long time and I spun around as if stuck in a washing machine. I became so weak that the thought of swimming my way back soon vanished. I didn’t want to accept that this was the way that I was going to die. It was so ironic wasn’t it? Swimming had been such a huge part of my life and in the end it would fail me. This is how people drown, I thought. It really wasn’t peaceful at all, but terrifying and exhausting, to be restrained beneath the waves like a still-living butterfly pinned down in a glass display case. Finally, I was too fatigued to care. I closed my eyes.

  I don’t know if I passed out. I can’t remember anything up until I was on a man’s back and almost to shore. I looked up at the overcast sky and noticed a flock of sea gulls flying . I watched as they slid across the air lithely and with ease. Their wings stretched out before them, dark feathers at the tips spread wide like fingers. It was as though they were swimming through the air, pulling themselves along smoothly; elegantly. Birds are not made for the water, although they fly like they are.

  I thought back to the small water-sodden bird I had found in my red wheelbarrow as a child and imagined the seagulls trying to fly beneath the sea, theirs wings struggling to rise under the water, feathered bodies failing to drive forward and eventually drowning. I realized how alike both water and air are, both fluid in their structures; easy to move through.

  Once back on the beach, I still couldn’t breathe. Air surrounded me but I was unable to take any of it in. It was a strange feeling, as though I was still trapped beneath the water. I didn’t need CPR and my friends quickly took over as the man laid me on the sand. I don’t know who he was or what he looked like, and when I was finally able to breathe again, he was gone.

  As I sat up, saltwater surged out my nose and ears, stinging them and streaming down my face. I had taken in so much salt that my throat felt like it was on fire. I looked up again at the clouded sky as a few more seagulls flew by.

  * * * *

  Although I am no longer a lifeguard, I still enjoy swimming. A few times in the summer I’ll slide into a placid chlorinated pool, lowering my body slowly until the tips of my toes reach the rough bottom. I still like to swim laps, body bending through air and water, goggles in place to see beneath the smooth surface, the beige walls and antiseptic tiles creating a kind of human aquarium, a whole sterile world of water. Gliding through, I can still feel the way my bones and skin ache for the water to be mine again, for me to be able to pull its strings like a puppet, the whole of it moving and warping around me. I can still command it, can still tumble through it effortlessly, but something is different now. The water no longer bows to me. Now water is no longer an art to me but has become mysterious and unknown.  I have lost the poetry of movement, the slow melody of swimming. I have lost my water song.

  Shriveled

  By M.J. Fievre

  Mother stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom. She started taking off her blouse, then hesitated, scanning my reflection in the glass.

  I nodded, insisting, “I want to see.”

  She looked at me pensively. “It’s not pretty,” she said.

   “I still want to see.”

  She undid the hooks of her bra and showed me where Dr. Chandler had opened up both her breasts to get rid of the fibroids.

  “My tits are all shriveled now,” Mother said.

  The operation had been carried out several weeks ago, but until that morning, when I was seventeen, I hadn’t been able to muster the courage to look.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay,” I said.

  I felt the wave of emotions, the thumps inside my chest that betrayed them. I turned away, showing a sudden interest in Mother’s zippered pouch on the dressing table. Inside a mirrored plastic compact, the once fluffy cotton pad was flat and frayed around the edges.

  Mother put back her clothes and leaned against the mirror, facing me, squinting, as if evaluating an expensive purchase. “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t.

  When Mother had told me that it was going to be a “simple operation,” I had not believed a single word. After all, both my grandmothers have died of cancer. It runs in the family, as they say.

  We have bad hormones.

  Before they were diagnosed—separately, each when it was already too late—Grandma Simone and Grandma Clara were the very picture of blooming health: rosy cheeks, impervious to germs, hearty creatures.

  I can still clearly see Grandma Clara lying on the hospital bed, fat pillows holding her head upright, and a pastel floral blanket pulled up to her chin. Her face had lost its fullness, and when I took her hand, it was cool, the pulse slow and unsteady under my fingers. A nurse strode into the room, eyes shuttered and noncommittal.

  Ever since that day at the hospital, Death has not ceased breathing down my neck. I always believed that everyone—every single one of the people around me—thought about Death every day. Turns out that’s not the case.

  I’ve been obsessed by breasts since I was ten.

&
nbsp; I was envious of Barbie’s breasts—the upturned, pointed cones would never cause her any trouble. Barbie, stiffly beautiful and happy, would never share the curse of real womanhood.

  At the market, I stared at the chests of the female vendors who kept their money in a folded wad in their dresses, against their breasts, so that it was soft and creased and warm when they lay it out on the car nose to count it. Did they worry about death by breasts?

  When my older sisters and their friends talked, I made myself small and listened. They all remember me as a tenacious eavesdropper. What a wealth of information they must have provided about the changes in the female body. But somehow the few conversations I do manage to remember all involve tits.

  As a pre-teen, too often I lifted my t-shirt and looked at my chest. I was horrified when my nipples started to get bigger and darker, and the puffiness turned into two small, but definite bumps. I didn’t want a training bra, the wearing of which I feared would urge my chest to grow titties, but my friend Fanny told me, “If you don't wear a bra, your breasts will grow forever.” She threw back her head, laughing.

  My father brought me my first real bra, helping me to put my arms through the straps as he tried to find out how to fasten the back, how to snag up the shoulder straps. The elastic cups pulled against my chest, my bumps looking a little higher and bigger. I stood in front of the mirror, staring, twisting and turning in shock and awe.

  My obsession intensified, my hands moving over my chest more often than ever before, probing, inquisitive. Is that a lump? My forehead creased, my upper teeth scraped my  lower lip as I tried to locate a cyst, a fibroid, some kind of tenderness.

  One day, I felt a sharp cramp. My jaw unhinged. I was in so much pain I thought I was going to die.

  “Where is the pain?” Mother asked with furrowed concern, swatting a mosquito on her calf.

  I shifted from foot to foot. “Right there,” I said, pressing one hand under my belly. “And my breasts—they’re about to explode.”

  I mocked my own anxiety, but while both of us sat by the phone waiting for the doctor to return our call, cross-legged and reading, I chewed my already gnawed-at cuticles down to the bloody quick.

  At the gynecologist’s office the next day, I lay back on the paper scroll on a table, the cold rod of each metal stirrup pressed into each foot arch. I felt bare inside the paper gown. It wasn’t the office of the sweet, sensitive Dr. Chandler, who was out of town, but that of some other doctor one of my aunts had recommended.

  The doctor examined my breasts first.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked disapprovingly.

  “No.”

  He looked at me doubtfully, his teeth very straight and white, although one of the front ones had what looked to be a hairline crack in it. Apparently, I didn’t have a virgin’s breasts.

  “Are you sure?” he asked again, still probing my tits. His top lip had a natural outward curl that kept his face in perpetual sneer.

  “Yes, I am sure. I am not sexually active.” My tone was harsher than I intended it to be. “I’m only fifteen,” I added, as if it really meant anything. And, “Are my breasts going to be okay?”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said days later, when some lab results came back. “Your hormones are...wild! That explains your acne and your very thick hair... We found some micro-cysts. Don’t worry. You’re not going to die or anything.”

  He put me on the pill, and the manufactured hormones did seem to work some magic. No more pain. No more swollen breasts.

  I was no less obsessed.

  I startled when my first love traced his fingers over the swells of my breasts. I felt butterflies flutter and float under my bellybutton.

  “You have the most amazing tits,” he said.

  “Will you love me when I don’t have them anymore?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—if they have to cut them off.”

  “And why would they have to do that?”

  “Never mind.”

  Fifteen years later, I am still obsessing over my breasts.  My mother is visiting this week and she’s standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom, examining her breasts. This makes me uncomfortable.

  “I don’t do this anymore,” I say. “I used to find lumps every single time. They were everywhere.”

  I’m drinking a glass of milk with Milko in it—a crunchy, sweet, supposedly chocolate tasting-powder. I take a gulp, set down the glass on the night table and cross my arms over my chest. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  “I’m afraid of breast cancer,” I say.

  It’s the first time that I’ve really expressed my fear.

  And somehow saying these words take the power away from them. I am overwhelmed with relief.f

  Mother walks toward the bed and sits next to me. Her face seems to be dissolving in sweat. It glows a shiny film. She curls her fingers into mine and I feel the heat of her palm. “Don’t worry,” Mother says. “I’ll show you how to self-exam properly.”

  the presence of others

  by D.H. Sutherland

  “What I aim at in the Other is nothing more than what I find in myself.”

  - Jean-Paul Sartre

  ...on streets and roads unseen

  the presence of others,

  a manifest presence

  of gestures, ticks, walks that unify

  the ground of their experience

  I hear them moving, listen to

  their stories, affairs and politics

  affirmation of a solitude

  an out-of-closet solipsism

  a growing on, outside of me

  in open mouthed recitations

  speaking on the streets

  the corners and avenues.

  Deny it if you can,

  conform, pretend, act

  as if you are not alone

  and the others will act as well,

  for what they are not, between us,

  I am not, but will practice.

  Grace

  by Gale Acuff

  When she crosses her legs, Miss Hooker, my

  Sunday School teacher, I lose my mind but

  I'm only 10 to her 30 or so

  and don't know why I feel the way I do

  but I'm willing to learn. I even come

  to church early just to get a good seat

  smack in front in our class semi-circle.

  I'm pretty sure that I'm in love. At night

  I hold my pillow close because my dog

  can't sleep in the house and whisper to it

  Good night, Darling, but it never replies

  because she's fallen asleep.

  Last night I dreamt we ate out

  at the Dairy King, then went to the show

  —monsters chasing teenagers—and she clung

  to me even through the closing credits

   

  —and then to the duck pond in the moonlight

  and then home in time to watch the late news.

  Miss Hooker fell asleep in my arms so

  I carried her to bed and then lay down

  beside her and when I woke,

  she was bringing me my breakfast,

  bacon and eggs and toast and Tang and more

  bacon. Nothing's too good for my darling,

  she said. Thanks, I said. Then she said, Let's have

   

  a baby. I swallowed my eggs and said,

  Okay. How? And then I woke, I mean for

  real, and dressed and ate (I wasn't hungry,

  though), and was first in class in Sunday School

  and sat in front of her and stared and stared

  all through David and Bathsheba, which was

  over my head anyway. After class

  I stayed to clap erasers and she asked

  me if I felt alright. I feel alright,

  I confessed—I dreamt about you last night.

  Oh, Miss Hooker breathed. That's funny, because

 
I dreamt about you, too—you were my son.

   

  Oh, I said. Well, in mine, you were my wife.

  Gracious me, she said. Yes, I said. Praise God.

  To an Old Poet Dying Young

  by William Doreski

  In memory of James Neylon

  In your L.L. Bean crewneck

  and fizzle of white hair and beard

  you look as two-dimensional

  as the maps on which I trace

  your fractures and seams of travel.

  Paris, San Francisco, Crete,

  Japan; and now upstairs

  overlooking Paradise Valley

  you run your fingers over the spines

  of dusty books and profess

  your lack of profession at eighty,

  women your only profession,

  if I must account for you. Thira,

  a sullen little volcano,

  blew apart thirty-five hundred

  years ago, clearing a space

  where the suffering of flesh

  against stone became your subject,

  where the Mediterranean changed

  blue to grey to amber. So what

  if you lied? We all lie. Now,

  with death a sure bet, you linger

  over troubled sheets of paper

  and watch snow fuss at the window

  and brew tea of perfect amber.

  I know you’re thinking of burning

  your papers again. You’re thinking

  about repose, how restless

  your corpse will feel, how shivery

  in that fresh new sweater, how soon

  your books will outlive you, how young

  Paris seemed in the Forties

  when your dying had hardly begun.

  A Sargent Portrait, Maybe

  by William Doreski

  As I climb the hills above Walpole,

  snowlight filling the valley,

  I think of you reading Tolstoy

  with one hand shading your face

  from the glare of the window. Maybe

  you live only in a painting,

  a Sargent portrait; maybe

  I’ve imagined your small-boned

  repose, your curved black lashes

  a serious punctuation,