The nearby houses were dark and Jeff turned the radio up until I could make out the voices. I was reminded of years before, being parked on a similar road, begging for kisses, wanting the night to stretch out until it ended with him in love with me; and me, older and presumably mature, ready for whatever could happen next.
We talked about college, the classes that I’d chosen, and my decision to focus on English literature and political science. He nodded at me, smiling as I spoke, and I could feel the weight my voice seemed to carry. I had his attention in a different way I couldn’t yet identify.
I listened to him talk about his new job at another private school. I watched his face as he spoke, the gap between his teeth, his glasses, the red in his cheeks and his combed black hair, short and neat for this new school. When he spoke of a woman he thought he was falling in love with, a woman he worked with at the new school, I tried to smile. I remembered the sick feeling I had when he congratulated me for falling in love with Nicholas.
I smiled, nodded. “Wow. I’m glad for you.”
We looked out the windshield at the night, the hanging eucalyptus trees.
“You need to be out in the world, experiencing things,” he said. “I’m going to let you go so you can do that. It’s only right. The rivers will always meet the sea, Wendy, so I’m doing this for our own good.”
An itch of annoyance sprang up in me. I knew enough not to corrupt the moment with questions. The itchiness accompanied an awareness that his words were empty of meaning. The river. The sea. Whatever. I wondered over the years of pronouncements, the declarations of love, the accusations and unspoken scenes that we played out. They finally smoothed out into an uncomplicated silence, the ripples of questions and confusion suddenly flat and quiet.
I stared through the windshield trying to make out shapes in the dark. I closed my eyes shut, trying to maintain the smooth emptiness, the flat dimensions of darkness that flooded my view from the inside of the car. My throat unclenched and I heard a sound come from me. I wished it back but suddenly Jeff was holding me, his voice broken, his face buried in my chest. I let my hands touch his hair, his warm neck, stroking, knowing this would be the last time.
This was it.
“I love you, Wendy,” he said into my chest, his voice cracking.
“I love you, too,” I said.
He pulled back and looked at me.
“I love you.”
“I love you,” I repeated back.
His eyes were the whole world. I felt like I could save the form of his body in my hands somehow, forever.
When we pulled away from each other, I bit my tongue and my hands felt empty. We listened to the music on the radio in silence until he started the car without a word and we wound our way down into the Valley again, the turns and twists wringing my insides, my mouth suddenly dry.
The secret, my secret, what I had never allowed myself to say, was out.
It hung in the air above us, the complexity of it, the impossibility of it, the darkness and corruptness of it, never to be spoken of in one another’s presence again.
NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION:
PRESENT DAY FINDS
In the first few months of my daughter’s life, our usual stroller walk took us in and around La Brea Tar Pits. Our apartment was less than a mile from the grounds and it seemed the most scenic destination within walking distance.
When you approach the tar pits from the southwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Curson Avenue, you are immediately hit with the overwhelming smell of pitch. Caution tape and fluorescent-striped sandwich boards redirect your steps away from a bubbling puddle of liquid asphalt. You cross the street and walk under an archway and there they are. On a breezy day the palm trees clatter. The sound of traffic on Wilshire is lulling. If you lived in Los Angeles as a child, you may have come here to learn about dinosaurs. If you live in Los Angeles as an adult, you come because of its proximity to an art museum and a natural history museum, and because it’s a pleasant walk.
✵
I pushed the stroller and contemplated the sludge. I’m always surprised to hear the goo gurgling, the reminder that this is living material, thriving with bacteria and whatever random plant or animal it sucks up and preserves in its liquid body.
Overcoming the countless fears that popped into my head on an hourly basis, I pushed her stroller through the park several times a week. I wondered if the stench of tar was enough to sicken her. I wondered if it was toxic to be breathing it in so often. I didn’t pay attention to the life-sized mammoths. For the first few months I could only take in so much.
Gone were my usual television cravings for repeat episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Instead I found myself capable of watching romantic comedies, a genre I usually loathed. And yet the shock of a newborn suddenly made me frantic to push past any channel that featured horror, abduction, violence or anything resembling any kind of chaotic scene or situation. I could only consume the lightest, fluffiest of television. Sleep deprivation and constant nursing kept me awake at all hours. The need to feel pinned down to a soft, uncomplicated reality kept me in front of the television.
Even once I was past that phase and started getting more sleep, there were the little fears, the ones that come with caring for a tiny person who is completely dependent on you.
As I pushed the stroller through Hancock Park and out to the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I considered looking up on the Internet whether it was safe to be breathing this air we shared with the tar pits.
As a mother I have tried with every fiber of my being to not become what I grew up with—the mother and grandmother who worried constantly, trying to suffocate me with their projections of what could go wrong, often learned through television and movies that depicted unthinkable acts perpetrated on women.
And yet I had undergone unthinkable acts right under the noses, Perhaps they had suspected. And yet nothing had been done.
Now, with a daughter of my own, I like to imagine I’ll be able to counter every untruth she might try to pull on me when she’s a teenager, that I will be three steps ahead of her, consulting my own catalog of experiences to be able to cut her off at the dangerous pass she wants to take. My worries are magnified by my own experience of women who claim to love you and want to protect you and yet can’t seem to, don’t know how to. I like to believe I know something different, will rise to whatever circumstance is given me.
But of course I want nothing like what happened in my life to happen in hers. To even come close to happening. I want a magical existence for her, one without pain, illness, sadness. I know this is impossible but I still want it. There are always those impossible things we still want, aren’t there?
✵
I could never have imagined the life I have now back then.
I did not run away to Montana with an older man. I did run to the Pacific Northwest for eight years. I did fall in love and out of love and in love and out of love again. Introduced to intuition and how to catalog my own insights, I was able to start looking back at that fossilized time and understand, make correlations, write the history. The history I write is just one prism of a history, a place where a part of me feels trapped in time. In my ancient history, a man arrived as my junior high teacher and metamorphosed into someone I would timidly think of as my lover.
The fossils of a woman have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits. The “La Brea Woman” is about 10,000 years old. The La Brea Woman is thought to have been between the ages of 17-25 when she died. Someone unearthed her, freed her body from the bitumen.
I watch people holding the black fence that keeps them from losing themselves in the lake of muck. We do not want to become a part of the ooze primordial. An ooze that lives on. An ooze that emits bubbles on its surface to this day, bubbles created by bacteria that eat the petroleum and release the methane gas. This bacteria is thought to be compose
d of somewhere in the range of 200-300 previously unknown species. I imagine a microscopic orgy of mystery paisleys cavorting in the black, coloring the oil slicks.
We are talking about alchemical processes. “Destructive distillation,” in which living things decomposing are heated to high temperatures in the midst of little to no oxygen. Natural deposits, rich in matter that is, in altered forms, considered worthy of value. Worthy of wars, even.
My own composition was changed when I met and was taught by this man. He seeped into my existence. I smelled the danger and for many reasons, I wandered in.
Could anyone, anything, have saved me?
The bubbles form, pop the surface. The bubbles fill my computer screen when it sits ten minutes idle, my head suddenly a fog detached from my body, a pleasant but sinister dissociation occurring.
The current era: I live in my home city of Los Angeles. After several years of struggling with an unnamed something, I gave it a name and its name turned out to be queerness.
The sense of belonging I feel in the family I have created is unlike any other feeling I’ve ever had. I belong to this tribe, this small tribe living in a modified Craftsman bungalow in West Adams near a freeway. The freeway and its sound of ocean just like when I was growing up next to one.
The woman I love is . . . a woman. It would take me getting married to a man to remember who I was before.
The woman I love, at times, especially early in our relationship, reminded me of Jeff. I told her so. We understand this as a bizarre and even slightly disturbing outcome, but here we are.
Her charm, her easygoing way of talking to people—the way acquaintances of hers and mine gush to me how much they like her, how hard she works, how sweet, charming, funny she is—all of these claims were once made to me, around me, about Jeff.
In this era, she is a woman who is mere months older than me. We may have had an intense start—both of us ending long committed relationships—but here we are. We remain.
We walk among the palms and the grasses and the fences at Hancock Park. We are a tight little family, we and the daughter we planned for and conceived together. The two of them walk toward the trail that will lead them to the art museum. I linger by the placard describing the asphalt seeps, the fiberglass models of these prehistoric animals that replicate what has been found underneath.
We are walking on fossils daily.
The La Brea Woman is long dead but lives on in a display, along with a variety of creatures. They perished in the tar that also preserved them.
The display is how we tell this story.
Let me excavate. Brush this bone off.
Let me know its story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deep gratitude to Kevin Sampsell and Future Tense Books. I got to have the experience many people wish for: a publisher located my work online, commented, then struck up a conversation with me about what else I was working on. And now we have this book.
Major thanks to Tina Morgan, editor extraordinaire.
For having read and given insightful feedback on early versions of this book since its very first draft in 2000, I thank Bernard Cooper, Paul Lisicky, David Ulin, Emily Rapp, and Hazel Kight Witham.
For over a dozen years of cheerleading, love and support, I thank fellow writer Karrie Higgins.
People who hold my hand across cyberspace, whose texts/phone calls/emails sustain me, make me glow: Sean H. Doyle, Rae Gouirand, Sarah Pape.
Sarah Buller, thank you for being the one person who made me think differently about this chapter of my life at the tender age of sixteen.
Massive love to Sandy Lee, for everything. Everything.
Author Photo: Meiko Takechi Arquillos
Wendy C. Ortiz is a writer born and raised in Los Angeles. She wrote a year-long, monthly column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, and many other journals. She was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, a rural retreat for women writers, in 2007 and 2009. She co-founded the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series in 2004 and has curated and hosted since. Wendy is a parent, an adjunct faculty in creative writing, and sees clients in private practice as a registered marriage and family therapist intern. Visit her at www.wendyortiz.com.
Also available from Future Tense Books:
I Was A Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac
Jamie Iredell
Partial List of People to Bleach
Gary Lutz
Legs Get Led Astray
Chloe Caldwell
I Remember
Shane Allison
Full catalog, including books by Chelsea Martin, Myriam Gurba, Claudia Smith, Elizabeth Ellen, Jay Ponteri, Chelsea Hodson, and May-Lan Tan, available at www.futuretensebooks.com.
Excavation: A Memoir © 2014 by Wendy C. Ortiz
First Edition
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Excavation: A Memoir/ Wendy C. Ortiz. — 1st ed.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-892061-70-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-892061-48-5
An essay entitled “Mix Tape,” which included details from this memoir, was previously published by The Nervous Breakdown.
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Excavation: A Memoir Page 18