27. “I go to sleep at night in the arms of my lover dreaming of lesbian paradise. What a nightmare, then, to open my eyes to the reality of lesbian battering. It feels like a nightmare trying to talk about it, like a fog that tightens the chest and closes the throat…. We are so good at celebrating our love. It is so hard for us to hear that some lesbians live, not in paradise, but in a hell of fear and violence” (Lisa Shapiro, commentary in Off Our Backs, 1991).
28. “What will it do to our utopian dyke dreams to admit the existence of this violence?” (Amy Edgington, from an account of the first Lesbian Battering Conference held in Little Rock, AR, in 1988).
29. From a review of Behind the Curtains, a 1987 play about lesbian abuse: “By writing the play [and] by portraying both joy and pain in our lives, [Margaret Nash rejects the] almost reflex assumption that lesbians have surpassed the society from which we were born and, having come out, now exist in some mystical utopia” (Tracey MacDonald, Off Our Backs, 1987).
Dream House as Inventory
She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break.
You can be an incorrigible snob. You value intelligence and wit over other, more admirable qualities. You hate it when people say stupid things. You have an ego: you believe you are good at what you do. You’re neurotic and anxious and self-centered. You get impatient when people don’t understand things as quickly as you do. You’ve definitely done some dumb things because of horniness—embarrassing things. You’ve degraded yourself in front of more than one person. You secretly want to be a man, not because of any doubts about your gender identity, but because you want people to take you more seriously. You love squeezing zits. You’d rather have an orgasm than do most things. Occasionally—and often without warning—your ability to give a fuck drops to exactly zero, and you become useless to anyone who needs you. You’ve had sexual fantasies about the majority of your friends. You wish someone would call you a genius. You’ve cheated at board games. You once went to an emergency doctor’s appointment on Christmas Day because you thought you had herpes, but it was just a zit. As a child, you were a tattletale, and you remain an unflinching rule follower. You’re a prude about drugs. You’re a hypochondriac. The only way you can focus during prolonged meditation is thinking about an orgy. You love a good fight.
Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons
She is always trying to win.
You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.
Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?
Dream House as Epiphany
Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.
Dream House as Legacy
She goes on a ski trip to Colorado with her parents, and you are not invited. She calls you from the lodge while you are at home, writing.
“I’m taking a hot bath,” she says. “Drinking a gin and tonic. Thinking about you. I’m going to get myself off. I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” you say.
“Do you want to get off with me?” she asks. The idea is tempting—your cunt clenches and relaxes, a reflex—but your roommates are in the kitchen, feet from your door, and you don’t trust yourself to be quiet.
“I don’t know if I can, right now.”
“You know,” she says, her voice leaking through the receiver like gas, “if you’re not turned on by me, you can say so.”
“I’m not—what?”
“If you don’t find me attractive, maybe we shouldn’t be together at all.”
You are sitting up straight now. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“I’m saying that it’s really hard to be with someone who isn’t into you, and I don’t think I should be.”
“You are breaking up with me.” You feel a sudden ballooning in your chest, somewhere between panic and elation. You hang up the phone. She calls back immediately, and you reject the call. Again, and again. You start sobbing, and John comes in. He asks you what’s going on.
“I think she just broke up with me,” you say.
The phone keeps chirping. John gently pries it out of your hand. “Why don’t we turn this off?” he says. You try to turn it off but you are having trouble remembering how, so you open up the back and remove the battery. The whole thing goes black, mercifully silent. You are sobbing in disbelief, your body aching from the whiplash turn of the conversation. He hugs you tightly, and you sit there together.
After an hour, you put the battery back in the phone. Almost immediately, it rings. You pick up. She is weeping.
“Why weren’t you answering my calls?” she sobs.
“You just broke up with me,” you say.
“I didn’t break up with you!” she howls, and then from the background you hear her father’s voice, enraged. “Is that that fucking bitch? Get off the goddamned phone—”
And then she starts screaming at him to go away, and the phone goes dead.
John stares at you but doesn’t say anything.
You will eventually lose track of the number of times she breaks up with you like this.
Dream House as Word Problem
Okay, so, there’s this woman, and she lives in Iowa City, and then she moves to Bloomington, Indiana, 408 miles away. And her girlfriend, who loves her very much, agrees to do the whole long-distance thing. She doesn’t even pause, it’s what she would call a no-brainer. (The pun is lost on her, in the moment.) She spends the entire second year of her graduate school experience shuttling back and forth to Bloomington. She does it gladly. In one trip, she can listen to 75 percent of an audiobook. If she is driving at sixty-five miles per hour, and the average length of an audiobook is ten hours, how many months will it take for her to realize she has wasted half of her MFA program driving to her girlfriend’s house to be yelled at for five days? How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself?
III
And because you are of a kind, the house knows
you. When you cry out,
the lights flicker, ghostly blue and ragged.
When she says you are shut off,
the light switches nod their white tiny
heads. Tiles creak yes beneath her
edicts—something bad must have happened
to make you this way, the way
where you don’t want her. But the windows
rattle, disagree. In their honeyed,
blindless light, they see it—something bad
is happening.
—Leah Horlick, “Ghost House”
Dream House as Man vs. Self
Your mother once owned a tiny, trembling schnoodle named Greta, whom she rescued when you were in college. Greta was rotund and gray and the most neurotic dog you’d ever met, prone to fits of ennui and anxiety. When Gibby, your family’s cockapoo, died from choking on a plastic bag, Greta mourned by moving elaborate piles of stuffed animals—some of them bigger than she was—around the house. “She just keeps doing that,” your mother said mildly when you asked her about the behavior.
You once dogsat Greta when your mother was out of town and you were profoundly unnerved by her malaise; she spent most of the day lying in a particular spot on top of the couch, her face flattened into the fabric—except she wasn’t sleeping: her dark eyes were open and fixed on nothing. She looked dead. Every time you moved her, she dangled limply, not extending her feet when you put her on the ground. When you took her outside to use the bathroom, she went to the closest spot, keeping her eyes on you the whole time, and peed with more lassitude than you experienced in the entirety of your teenage years. When you were out walking her on a leash she wo
uld lie on the ground and refuse to move, and more than once you had to carry her home.
One day, you picked her up, put her by the door, and opened it. “Greta,” you said, “go on! Be free! Run!” She just looked at you with the saddest, most mournful expression.
She could have run. The door was open. But it was as if she didn’t even know what she was looking at.
Dream House as Modern Art
That winter you go to the Brooklyn Museum, to an exhibition called Hide/Seek. You’re in duress, in the city against your will. You did not want to go to New York, even for a few days, but she insisted. You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.
Inside, you wander ahead of her, far ahead so you don’t have to feel her presence weighing on you like a pillow on the face. You find Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban American artist. When you first see the installation—a pile of candy wrapped in multicolored cellophane, tucked in a corner—you almost laugh. It is so strangely out of place in this space. But when you get closer and read the description, you understand: it is the weight of the artist’s late lover as he began to die of AIDS. Viewers should take a piece of candy, the description says, and at some point it will be replenished. Someone has been replenishing the lost ones since 1991.
In 1991 you were five. You didn’t know you were queer. You were living in a Pennsylvania suburb and you didn’t know what AIDS was. You were muttering stories to yourself. You were resentful of your little brother and had newly welcomed a baby sister, of whom you were also resentful. You were so afraid of balloons you invented a device made of a soda bottle and straw that would keep the latex bladder from being sucked into your lungs. You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you.
In the new days of 2012, as you stand in front of the pile of candy you feel a direct line to its hopelessness, rage, grief. You read the placard. “An act of communion.” You pick up one, spin the sweet from its wrapper, and put it in your mouth.
At that moment, she appears next to you.
“What are you doing?” she hisses.
You gesture to the sign, the explanation. She doesn’t look. She gets so close to you it’s like she’s going to kiss your ear, except she’s berating you under her breath, a steady stream of rage and profanity that would be indistinguishable from sweet nothings to a nearby stranger. You can’t look at her. You can’t look away from Ross, who is also Untitled, who is also dead, who will also always be alive, immortal. You suck and suck and suck on the candy, which you’re realizing has no identifiable flavor beyond its sugar, and she’s still telling you you’re the worst, you’re worse than the worst, she can’t believe she brought you here. (This exhibit? This museum? This city? Her bed? You’ll never know.) The candy goes from pebble to ice chip, and then it’s gone—one more step toward Ross’s disintegration. One more step toward resurrection.
Dream House as Second Chances
One day you are both napping off a hangover in the Dream House when she turns to you, wide awake—more wide awake than you thought she was.
“What would you say if I told you I wanted to apply to Iowa again?” she asks. “So I can move back, be with you.”
It is hard to identify the sensation in your chest, the simultaneous leap of excitement yanked back by a leash of panic. You smile, quickly, but she has seen something in your face, and hers collapses with displeasure.
“What, you don’t think I’m good enough? Or you don’t want me there?”
“No, I just—you spent all of this time and money getting to Bloomington, and you love it here. And you love your friends—why would you leave? This is such a great program. I think we’re making the long-distance thing work, don’t you?”
She pushes herself up off the bed and walks away. She doesn’t talk to you for the rest of the day. Not until you muster up all your sweetness and agree to help her. “I can’t wait for you to be there with me,” you tell her. You don’t question her logic again.
But you know. You know that, somewhere deep down, it isn’t about you at all.
You help her edit her stories for her application. One of them is about a man who is so possessive and jealous he wrecks all of his relationships. It’s pretty good.
Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun
You’d been staying at the Dream House for weeks over Christmas break, carless, careless. You shouldn’t have been so stupid; the warnings were already there, but the prospect of endless days of fucking for hours in a lavender bed and eating decadently and being with her was too tantalizing. You have always been a hedonist, and she is there to indulge with you, with an animal hunger that matches your own.
In the final week, you go to the local bowling alley with her and her writer friends. You’d driven there in her car—a sleek, luxury thing gifted by her parents—and she was supposed to be the designated driver, for once. So you’d been drinking freely of the pitchers of pale beer, the sort you don’t drink, except you never get the chance to get drunk around her anymore and you’re eager for that looseness in your limbs. She has a single beer, sips it slowly, smiles at you. You bowl the way you always bowl; your turns generally ending with no pins down at all, because you get too excited and the gutter slurps up the ball. But then every so often, a strike; so beautiful and devastating a crash that you get the sensation of being good at something, a sliver of confidence. You turn the ball in your hand, pearlescent and peach, and whip it down with that beautiful thunk-whirr.
She sits there, looking butch, and pats her lap. You sit. You haven’t had many boyfriends or girlfriends, and none of them—and certainly no flirtatious people in your past—have ever gestured to you like this. You feel calm, content, a little high. Just a girl sitting on her girl’s lap.
Her hands are running up your breasts before you can do anything about it. You clasp them in your own and push them down gently. She puts them up again. When you move them a second time, you can feel her anger; you can’t see her but the smell of her changes, like a cheap dish towel left on a live electric burner. She snaps around you like a Venus flytrap, pinning your arms against your torso.
She leans in to your ear. What are you doing, she says. It doesn’t sound like words, like a question; it sounds like a purr.
“Don’t,” you say.
She tightens her grip on your arms. “I fucking hate you,” she says. She sounds, suddenly, drunk, even though you’ve been watching her and you know she’s had only the one beer. But you’ve had beer, too, and you don’t know what to do. “I fucking hate you,” she says again. The sounds of the bowling alley are coming from very far away; you feel like your heart is going to stop. You are not a parent; no one has ever told you that they hated you.
You stand up and look around wildly at the others, who are studiously looking elsewhere. “I think we need to go,” you say. “I think—”
But when she stands, she does look drunk. How will you get home? You reach for your wallet, but you have no cash, and after a few minutes one of the poets comes up to you. “I’m so sorry,” he says a few times, his speech slurred, though sorry for what he does not specify—but then he presses a twenty-dollar bill into your hand for a cab. You tell him you’ll pay him back, but now that you think about it, you never did.
When the cab pulls away from the bowling alley, you see her car gleaming in the parking lot and pray that it doesn’t get towed before morning. In the back of the cab, she closes her eyes, begins to mutter a monologue that lasts for the entire drive home. You fucking cunt I fucking hate you goddamn you Carmen fuck you fuck your mother fuck everything you cunt you goddamn fucking slut fuck you …
The sensation of pulling a sheet from the bed is terrible. You will sleep on the couch. That’s what people do, when they’re mad a
t the person who would otherwise sleep next to them. You’ve never done it but you have heard of it happening. You’ve seen it in movies. You can’t find your pajamas. You go out to the living room, strip down to your underwear, and curl up on the broken couch with the springs pressing into your side. You pull the sheet around you. It’s that soft, wonderfully stretchy jersey fabric, the same type you had in college.
She peels the sheet away from your body; you shiver.30 “What are you doing?” she asks, standing over you. You don’t say anything. Then, when she doesn’t move, you tell her, “I’m angry, and I’d like to sleep alone, please.”
She kneels at the side of the couch like a supplicant with an offering. You think maybe she is going to try to kiss you, or maybe fuck you, though you won’t let her, though you won’t let her you won’t let her you won’t—
She leans over and begins to scream directly in your ear, like she’s pouring acid out of her mouth and into you. You try to scramble away, but she is pushing on your body, howling like a wounded bear, like an ancient god. (An ancient bear; a wounded god.)
It is as if something has been cut loose. You roll off the couch, stand, and dart to the other side of the room. She vanishes into her bedroom and comes out again with your suitcase. With a tremendous yell, she hurls it across the room, where it crashes into the wall. She reaches down and grabs something—your very fancy ModCloth boot, the first pair of shoes you’ve ever spent that much money on—and throws it at you. It spins, misses. She throws the other one, and it also misses you but takes a framed picture off the wall, and later you will try to figure out if she never landed a throw because you were so quick to dodge them or because she couldn’t aim for shit, but you will never come to any conclusion.
In the Dream House Page 9