Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  I passed through hours of farmland with little to see but gleaming grain elevators and murky creeks scrawled along the roadside. The sun blazed. My body buzzed and sweated. For a few minutes, a bee hovered inside the car, beating gently against the windshield until she found my open window.

  My half sister lives in a suburb of Burlington that looks rich. It looks like the housing developments that have crept through the rural Cape Cod neighborhood where I grew up, replacing the woods that I roamed as a child. The homes are big and similar; the lawns green; the children all white and watched by women close behind them. I cruised by the country club she had chosen for our meeting and parked in the lot of the church across the street.

  I didn’t want to walk into that country club restaurant. I wanted to walk into the cool empty church and close my eyes for a long time. My mind circled for twenty minutes, beating gently against the windshield, my sister, my buzzing body, my home an egg I’d cracked on the lip of that kiss. I listened to one song over and over. Ha ha ha ha Armageddon, the singer screamed. Ha ha ha ha Armageddon.

  I turned up the air conditioner and pressed my hands into my thighs. There were sweat stains under my arms and shadows under my eyes. My heart thrummed. I did not know what I should be feeling. I was in that parking lot, seeking out a woman to whom I did not feel connected. The previous night, I had resisted a woman to whom I felt irresistibly drawn, and failed.

  A sliver of fear turned in me, its tiny blade the scraping thought that I had engineered this meeting. I had brought us here. I would lead the conversation. I would judge the success or failure of our meeting. And then, I would go home to break a heart that I loved. How can I explain this? It was the fear of no God. The fear that I was following a stranger through my life, and that stranger was me.

  The cold inside the restaurant relieved me, and justified the cardigan I’d worn to hide my tattoos and sweat stains. In the restaurant bathroom, however, I found a stain on the front. An old feeling foamed in me: I am too messy for places like this. I am too dark. My body is too obvious. Places like this, where skinny white women lunch, have always made me feel like a swollen thing, uncouth and over-sexual, too animal. In the bathroom mirror I saw my nipples hard under the stained sweater, and a halo of frizz encircling my face—mouth swollen, eyes sunken. In the bathroom stall, I pressed a damp hand against my chest and felt my own breath.

  Half sister. It means that we share 25 percent of our DNA. Half sister is a halved paper doll. An exquisite corpse of a girl—those drawings we did as children: draw half a body, fold the paper, pass it, and let the other person draw the other half blind. She is sister to the half of me beyond the folded edge. Perhaps the shadow half, from which my dark urges spring, these clutching unscrupulous parts that belong to neither of the parents who raised me, this want to drink and smoke and shoot and fuck and puke and weep until the skin peels from my face, to fling myself at hard edges until the life shakes out of my body. I know these drives, but not from where they come.

  I wondered if in her I might find or awaken that lost part. If I have been living in only one half of me all these years, I thought, then God help me should I ever discover the other half.

  3

  Here are the things I knew about my birth father:

  •His name was Jon.

  •He was a career drug addict and alcoholic.

  •He was Wampanoag.

  •He played guitar.

  •He had other children.

  •He raised none of us.

  I was a curious child but I was never curious about Jon. Jon was just Jon. He was a fact the size of a postage stamp, which my mother once wryly suggested he had never in his life purchased.

  Jon was not a mystery. Jon was a small suitcase that my parents unpacked for me as a child. See? they said. Here is what he left you. The neat circular vowels of biological and Wampanoag, the empty bottle with the skull and crossbones on its label, and the endless double helical strands of 50 percent of my DNA, glimmering coils as perfect as the skin of an apple peeled by my mother’s knife.

  Not much to see here, they shrugged. But it’s yours. I ran my fingers along the tops of those letters, felt the spine of the little b, the l’s, and the w. I looked through the glass bottle, my parents’ faces rippled on the other side. I repacked the suitcase and put it on the closet shelf. Over the years my mother warned me about the drinking. It’s hereditary, she told me. But little else was assigned to that half of my blueprint. You probably don’t have much in common with them, she said of my unknown half siblings.

  Then, when I was eight, I started eating my pancakes with butter and salt instead of maple syrup. The first time I reached for the saltshaker, my mother froze.

  Jon used to eat his pancakes with butter and salt, she said, not in her usual voice, but slower, her mouth turning the words like prickly lozenges.

  I put that saltshaker in the suitcase, too, but didn’t forget it like the other things.

  When I was still a baby, my mother packed all our belongings in her car, and we left this gentle mess of a man. Two years later, she married a handsome Puerto Rican sea captain.

  The Captain adopted me when he married my mother, but I never felt adopted. I was still raised by my biological mother. And the Captain felt like my father. My new birth certificate bore his name. Our faces bore resemblance. We are both much browner than my pale mother. We are both athletic. We were both born without the same tooth: our second incisors. We loved each other unreservedly.

  In my twenties, just after I’d kicked heroin but before I learned to feed myself, when I was still working as a professional dominatrix, I told a therapist that I often forgot the Captain was not my biological father. I told her that I had never been curious about Jon, that I often forgot he existed at all. That, she said, was the mark of a successful adoption.

  4

  I returned to the empty restaurant’s bar. My sister was waiting. I recognized her by her nervousness, but she is a lady who lunches at such places. She is blonde and pretty, her body fit and modest. If we were two halves, I was the darker one. Maybe I should have been comforted to find this tidier half. Of course, no one is one of those ladies who lunches. We are all animal, all these fearing, sleeping, shitting beings. I was her exquisite corpse, too, and while I couldn’t say what lay beyond her fold, I saw her peering around that bend, to see where I was coming from, and if it looked familiar.

  You have a younger brother? I asked, though I had already found a picture of his face and seen the resemblance to mine.

  Sort of, she said. He’s not, she paused. Curious about you. The way that I am.

  I nodded.

  You have kids? I asked.

  Two boys and a girl, she said. They were campers and skiers. The husband in business.

  Symmetries emerged. We both have replacement fathers and a bruised quality I could see under the patina of her prettiness, her nice life, her manners. She ate her bunless burger and I my salad, so careful not to splatter vinegar on my already stained sweater.

  I work at a college, I said. I’m a professor. I did not mention the memoir I’d written about when I worked as a dominatrix. I did not mention my girlfriend.

  I imagined kissing her. It did not surprise me. I must always glimpse the worst thing, the thing I must not do. The worst thing is so often sexual. That jolt of shock, as the phantom self steps forward and does it. A shard of time in which I cannot be sure if I have done it or not—quick and convincing as the waking moment before the dream and the real are teased apart. Staring over the edge of a city rooftop, suddenly afraid I must jump, that to even contemplate such a thing might mean yielding to the part of me that would do it.

  I imagined kissing her as a test. If she were my sister, my real sister, if sister really meant something, if biology meant something, wouldn’t I feel magnetically repelled by the thought of kissing her? It was a cracked hypothesis. I didn’t want to kiss her, but it proved nothing.

  Toward the end of our meal
, I ran out of questions and realized how few she’d asked me.

  I read your book, she said, finally. And then I knew: she had all the answers. She knew everything that one would never think to tell a stranger. She knew the things I’d done that I still cannot say aloud.

  You did?

  Of course.

  I knew also, then, that she had seen all the rest. At that time there was little of my external life not available on the Internet.

  How is your partner’s health? she asked, and I blanched inside.

  She’s better, I said, though she had been doing very poorly the whole time I’d been at the conference and would soon be doing poorly in a wholly different way.

  We stared at each other then, over our empty plates, and something parted. Or rose up in each of us enough for the other to see. It started with shame. Not the word, or any I could have named in those moments, but the fizz of embarrassment that she could see me—my queerness of so many kinds, my unwieldy body, my life an open chest of drawers whose dirty things spilled out.

  I don’t know what she saw across the table, but when I looked up at her, she looked down at her plate. Her forehead creased, and that bruised part of her flashed its purple back, and I saw not my own reflection, but that same shame in her.

  We don’t know any artists, she said, pinching her napkin with two manicured fingers. I’m just a mom. I’ve never even been to New York.

  Before I drove away, she stood outside my car’s open window and squinted into the humming afternoon. We agreed to stay in touch but both knew we might not. In those last moments something had loosened, or been loosed. When she met my eyes, I felt it move between us.

  I’ve always wanted a sister, she said. And then she smiled. I smiled back, both of us shy but wry in our knowing how little that word, or any, could name us.

  5

  The first time Amaia and I spoke on the phone was a Sunday. I sat in my apartment, which had just been emptied of everything but sunlight. My ex had left a single fork and mug in the sink. I was waiting for the new bed to be delivered. I had a one-word list of things I needed: everything.

  Years earlier, as part of the Twelve Steps, I wrote a list of all the people against whom I held resentments. I wrote a list of all the people I had ever harmed. I wrote a list of all the things I wanted in a partner. Someone with tools, I had written. A good communicator. Trustworthy. Physically and emotionally available.

  I had seen my own part in those resentments and they had been lifted. I had made amends to all the people I had harmed. It is easier to have insight about the past, when you decide to look at it. A list of the future is just a wish.

  On the counter sat a vase of flowers that Amaia had sent me. She had also sent a birthday cake, a CD of love songs, three green notebooks, a pack of strawberry Mentos (the candy she’d been eating when she first wrote to me), and a pair of headphones. There was more evidence of her in my apartment than of me, or anything that came before. It had been three weeks.

  In our first conversation, Amaia told me how that morning her whole family had watched her oldest brother, a heroin addict, get arrested outside of their church. She said this the way that I told people my biological father was a drug addict who, last I heard, lived in a trailer in Florida. The way I told people that I used to be a heroin addict, a dominatrix.

  Tell me about the room you’re in, I asked her. What’s on the walls? She described a painting of a woman in bondage. A set of silver longhorns, their gleaming tapered points.

  What’s on your walls? she asked me.

  Nothing, I said.

  We wrote long e-mails every night, and at first the lyrical nature of her letters struck me. Really? I thought. They were all image and intensity. Lines broken like those of a poem. Weighted, as if she were already imagining our correspondence in retrospect. As if she were building the myth of us. It was an alluring perspective; in it, I was a tragic beauty, herself a doomed hero. It was the kind of story that I’d loved as a girl, when everything seemed tragic and romantic, the kind of story that only ended in a wedding or a funeral.

  I wasn’t surprised to find that her favorite books were the Iliad and the Odyssey. Like Homer’s stories, ours began in medias res. It was full of passion and conflict and tears of all kinds. Like Achilles returns Chryseis to her father, she would eventually return me to mine, and also for a price. In Greek dramas, every gift comes at a price. Like Odysseus, she crossed the country for me. But Odysseus’s name means trouble in Greek, and his heroic gift is metis (μῆτις)—cunning intelligence, not good communication or physical and emotional availability. Odysseus is a deceptive wordsmith. He is prone to disguise. He is proud and passionate, but not loyal. Amaia was not Odysseus, but she loved such heroes, and her sense of narrative was epic.

  After that first conversation, we spoke on the phone almost every day, though never at night. Her wife was an elementary school teacher and home by midafternoon. I didn’t ask about the wife. I told her what I loved: the city, my family, powdered coffee creamer, the cigarettes I’d recently begun smoking again. No one in my family loved cigarettes or powdered creamer—among them, I had always been an outlier in my tastes.

  Powdered creamer? Amaia laughed. You are such an Indian.

  My ears tingled. You are is a powerful thing to say to a person. All my life I had insisted: I am, I am, I am. But privately, I never stopped looking. Compulsive bibliomancer, I opened to random pages in books, ran my blind finger down the page—looking for words to live by. I read the dictionary looking for a definition that fit. I took personality tests in magazines. I read horoscopes. I scoured the DSM–IV. I scrutinized the gaze of others, of mirrors, of lovers.

  I told her about my days and the things that filled them. I told her about my friends.

  I can’t keep track, she said. I paused when the subway rushed by, a wave crashing over us. You are a blur, she said. You are a train. You never stop moving. I wonder if I could stop you.

  Stop me, I thought.

  6

  My first diary was full of lists. Behind its wintergreen cover and exquisitely miniature lock, on its gold-leafed pages I maintained comprehensive records of the books I read. How else would I know when I had finished them all, as I intended? I listed the books I wanted to read, art I wanted to see, albums to acquire, films to watch. I kept meticulous lists of songs I loved, places I wanted to travel, projected earnings from summer jobs, my friends in descending order of endearment, and later, with an elaborate code signifying the degree of my physical accomplishment—the people I wanted to seduce.

  It was an early form of self-soothing. I listed myself to sleep. I ticked off items on my fingers on the school bus. As a teen, I made mixtape after mixtape, agonizing over order and annotating their playlists in the finest tipped pens.

  In March of 2014, I saw Lorraine Hansberry’s notebooks in an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The writer of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also a lister. Every year between her late twenties and early thirties, she repeated inventories with the headings: I like, I hate, I want, I am bored with. At twenty-eight, the year before A Raisin in the Sun debuted, she likes Renee Kaplan’s legs, slacks, being hungry, conversations with James Baldwin, and Eartha Kitt’s eyes, voice, legs, & music.

  She hates loneliness, pictures of myself, and people who don’t appreciate Kitt; is bored by A Raisin in the Sun, and most sexual experiences. She wants to be in love.

  At thirty-one, she loves the sweet innocence of certain raucous lesbians I know, hazel eyes apparently, the first drink of scotch, the second, and the third.

  At thirty-two, she loves 69 when it really works, the inside of a lovely woman’s mouth, some ideas of Brecht’s, and those rare mornings when I wake without unhappiness.

  At thirty-two, she hates my fears, my god-awful fears of almost everything, and introduces the new category: I regret.

  Read sequentially, they make a bildungsroman of lists—a story of sexual awakening in which maturity is signified
by the discovery of regret. My story did not include regret until thirty-two, either, the age at which, like Hansberry, I came to truly know my own fear.

  I spent a long time at the museum that day, hunched over the glass boxes that held her notebooks. Her lists helped me understand my own impulse to inventory. Hansberry was studying herself, tracking her own patterns, interrogating her tastes—trying to know herself. She was chasing down her hidden parts, arranging their clues in comforting rows, lining up the evidence like bruised cans on a pantry shelf, or suspects in a lineup.

  Hansberry was always a political writer—an outspoken Civil Rights activist, she was friend to James Baldwin and Nina Simone (who wrote the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in memory of her)—but she was never a lesbian writer. At that time, there hardly was such a thing. Maybe being a black writer was marginal enough. She wasn’t even sure that she was a lesbian, until later in her career.

  The unseen parts of us have the most gravity. They repel and compel us. My entire life, I’ve dreamt of chasing and being chased. I’ve felt like a specter haunting my own life, though I know that objectively I appear substantial and defined.

  The urge to list is an urge to locate and to contain. A list is an attempt to organize the chaos both inside and outside of us into something manageable, finite. It is the same urge that drives diagnoses, blood quantum, gender definition, IQ tests, rubrics, personality types, and self-quizzes. I’ve read the word “compulsion” defined as an action repeated to relieve a mental obsession. A list, like a drink, is a symptom. It is the scratch at an itch on the scalp of a whirring brain. It is a worrying, and like a worry, it is a sign of some deeper concern.