All day I sat and watched dust devils kick up at the far edge of the once-lake.54 I was told there was still a bit of water out there, but it would take four miles of walking to reach it. It was like an alien landscape; it made me think of the salt flats of Utah or old episodes of Star Trek. I hiked to some caves where eagles roosted and the earth below their nests was littered with a mulch of fur and bone. An owl left half a rabbit on my doorstep; in the morning, something else had dragged it away and left a streak of gore.
After dinner I went out on the playa with the other residents. First we waded through a soft, undulating field of dry grasses that reached our shoulders. Then there was a rim of soil fine as confectioner’s sugar; it felt as if we were tromping through moondust. Then the soil solidified and broke into thousands, millions of pieces, beautiful, geometric patterns. As we continued to walk, the earth began to crunch in a satisfying way beneath our feet. When we had hiked out far enough, the soil got looser and softer, like the cushy rubber mulch underneath a jungle gym. After a while, the smell changed: it was a little like sulfur and a little like bleach, the scent of a linden tree, the unmistakable scent of—as I said to the other residents, regretting it even as the word was slipping from my mouth—semen. No one else agreed with me, or if they did, they didn’t admit it. I reached down and picked up a chunk of dried earth and the soil underneath was damp: the memory of the lake.
A forest fire broke out on a minor mountain near our horizon. I drove past it one afternoon, watched as impossibly orange flames licked their way up the incline, leaving behind glossy, burnt sage and sticks of trees and still-flaming fence posts and, inexplicably, patches of unburnt space, where chance let something live. A helicopter dipped around like a dragonfly and dropped shimmering sheets of water down to the earth.
I went into town to sit in the library’s air-conditioning. The librarian wanted to talk to me about the fire. She told me that forest fires are a danger to bulls and cows, but not deer. “They never find deer carcasses after these things,” she said. “Deer know how to get out of the way. But bulls and cows, you can’t get them to move for anything. Fire comes, and they just don’t know what to do with themselves.”
On the way back, the toxic amber smoke floated over the sun. That night, it was still burning. I walked out onto my porch to watch, and even as mosquitoes descended to feast I couldn’t look away from the sight: a nearly full moon illuminating fast-moving clouds, and the distant, golden pulse of fire over the mountain, glowing like a second sunrise.
The next morning, while I was writing, something emerged from the grass mere feet from my window: a young buck with velvety antlers and comically long and expressive ears. He did not seem to notice me and settled down comfortably in the shade of a tree. I was utterly transfixed by him, a stray remnant of my childhood love of horses. I left him some baby carrots, hoping to let him know I meant no harm, but he didn’t eat them, and within a few hours the air desiccated them into white, withered sticks.
Every time I moved, he turned and watched me with black eyes. When he stopped noticing me—when I’d been sitting reading or writing for a while—he relaxed as much as a deer can relax. His eyes blinked more languidly. He nibbled greenery, chased flies away, whisked his ears and tail through the air. I even once saw him lick his lips, and then yawn. The intimacy, the trust, would have been almost unbearable, if I thought it was trust.
Once I walked by the window and there were two of them, two bucks, sitting under the tree. Their fur looked soft, and they panted in the heat like large, beautiful dogs. But my foot creaked on the floorboards, and they bounded liquidly away through the grass. Half a mile away, they were still running.
A few days later, the full moon rose—blood-red because of the smoke—and I went for a hike on the lake. As the moon climbed higher and higher, it escaped the smoke and became a bright coin against the sky. Every detail of the cracked soil was surreally crisp; the crevices dark and deep. I wished everything had this much clarity. I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.
When I turned around, my dark silver moon-shadow walked in front of me as I made my way back to the shore.
My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.
53. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type D2161.3.6.1, Magic restoration of cut-out tongue.
54. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types A920.1.5, Bodies of water from tears; A133.1, Giant god drinks lakes dry.
Afterword
In an essay about Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Lee Mandelo calls women’s literary history “written on sand.” I can’t think of a more apt metaphor for the process of writing this book, which relied on finding texts that talked about queer people and domestic abuse; two topics that have, historically, been hidden away, or rarely talked about. At times it didn’t feel like I was writing at all; it felt like I was pinning down fragments of history with well-aimed throws of a knife before they could shift or melt away.
A note about language: Throughout this book, I have made a series of linguistic and rhetorical choices regarding labels and identifying terminology. Here, I primarily use lesbian and queer woman, and I do not explicitly talk about gay or queer men, or gender-nonconforming people, though they too experience domestic abuse. I made these choices for a few reasons. First, I am a more-or-less cisgendered queer woman and feel most comfortable writing through that specific lens. Second, much of the historical source material I found and drew from was primarily focused on cisgender lesbians and their communities. Third, while it is cumbersome to make every instance on the page include every potential identifier, what is even more unthinkable is suggesting that the histories, experiences, and struggles of all queer people are somehow interchangeable, when they absolutely are not. If there are failures within these pages, they are mine and mine alone.
In the Dream House is by no means meant to be a comprehensive account of contemporary research about same-sex domestic abuse or its history. That book, as far as I can tell, has yet to be written. One day—when it is written, if it is written—I hope this very rough, working attempt at a canon will be useful as a resource, in addition to honoring the work that has gone before.
There isn’t a lot of writing about queer domestic abuse and sexual assault. But what I did find, kept me going. I read Conner Habib’s heart-stopping essay “If You Ever Did Write Anything about Me, I’d Want It to Be about Love” in the immediate aftermath of my abuse, and it devastated me and also gave me something to hold on to. A few years later, Jane Eaton Hamilton’s exquisite “Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers” gave me new ways to think about what had happened to me. When I was trying to finish this memoir, Leah Horlick’s lush and devastating poetry collection For Your Own Good slayed me with its beauty. Melissa Febos’s essay “Abandon Me” traced queer relationship trauma with brilliance and candor. A chapter in Sawyer Lovett’s Retrospect: A Tazewell’s Favorite Eccentric Zine Anthology—“Hello …”—came to me just when I needed it. Terry Castle’s The Professor made me laugh out loud more than once, which was a pretty shocking thing to do in the middle of writing this book.
Other useful books and resources included Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering, edited by Kerry Lobel (Seal Press, 1986); “Building a Second Closet: Third Party Responses to Victims of Lesbian Partner Abuse,” by Claire M. Renzetti (Family Relations, 1989); “Lavender Bruises: Intra-Lesbian Violence, Law and Lesbian Legal Theory,” by Ruthann Robson (Golden Gate University Law Review, 1990); “Prosecutorial Activism: Confronting Heterosexism in a Lesbian Battering Case,” by Angela West (Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 1992); Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis (Routledge, 1993); Lesbian Choices, by Claudia Card (Columbia University Press, 1995): “Describing without Circumscribing: Questioning the Construct
ion of Gender in the Discourse of Intimate Violence,” by Phyllis Goldfarb (Boston College Law School, 1996); “Toward a Black Lesbian Jurisprudence,” by Theresa Raffaele Jefferson (Boston College Third World Law Journal, 1998); Same-Sex Domestic Violence: Strategies for Change, edited by Beth Leventhal and Sandra E. Lundy (Sage Publications, 1999); Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement, by Ann Russo (Routledge, 2001); Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity, by Lisa Duggan (Duke University Press, 2001); No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships, by Janice L. Ristock (Routledge, 2002); “The Closet Becomes Darker for the Abused: A Perspective on Lesbian Partner Abuse,” by Marnie J. Franklin (Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, 2003); “Constructing the Battered Woman,” by Michelle VanNatta (Feminist Studies, 2005); and “When Is a Battered Woman Not a Battered Woman? When She Fights Back,” by Leigh Goodmark (Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2008). I was also lucky to be able to access an incredible wealth of gay and lesbian and feminist periodicals with decades of writing on this subject, including Sinister Wisdom, Gay Community News, Off Our Backs, Lesbian Connection, Matrix, and the Network News: The Newsletter of the Network for Battered Lesbians.
To all of these writers, academics, archives, publications, and presses: thank you for your activism, your scholarship, and your wisdom.
Acknowledgments
This book would have been impossible without the resources and support of the University of Pennsylvania, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon, Yaddo, Playa, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and Bard College. Many thanks to Tracy Fontil, for her impeccable and thorough research, and the Bassini Foundation for sponsoring her apprenticeship.
Thank you to Dorothy Allison for her wisdom; Elliott Battzekek and Sawyer Lovett at Big Blue Marble Bookstore for their insight; Jane Marie at the Hairpin for publishing my first writing on this subject; Jen Wang and Jess Row for their musical expertise; Kendra Albert for leading me to resources on archival silence; Kevin Brockmeier for reading and being encouraging about an early draft of this memoir; David Korzenik for his legal advice; Mark Mayer for his sharp line edits and tender encouragement; Michelle Huneven for her thoughtful edits on “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity” when it was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books; Nikki Gloudeman for editing “Gaslight” for Medium and Matt Higginson for commissioning it; Sam Chang for her all-around excellence and also for directing me to Terry Castle’s The Professor; Sofia Samatar for our many conversations about the radical possibilities of nonfiction; Ted Chiang for teaching me about time travel; Yuka Igarashi at Catapult for editing and publishing “The Moon Over the River Lethe”; and the vultures who sat in a tree over my head as I finished this book, for clearing away the rot.
I am, as always, in debt to my editors Ethan Nosowsky and Yana Makuwa (this book is infinitely better for their insight); my brilliant and scarily capable agent, Kent Wolf; and the entire team at Graywolf, for their tireless efforts, boundless faith, and endless good cheer.
I am deeply grateful to Amy, Ben, Bennett, Carleen, E.J., Evan, John, Laura, Rebecca, Rebekah, and Tony for their love, friendship, and stabilizing presence during those days; Chris, Emma, Julia, Karen, Lara, and Sam for listening when my pain was fresh and inarticulate; Audrey, R.K., and all the other members of the weirdest, gayest First Wives’ Club ever, for trusting me with their stories; and Margaret, for putting the pieces together.
And of course, the biggest thanks go to my wife, Val—my plot twist, my fate, my fairy-tale ending—who challenges me and comforts me and allows me to splash details of our lives all over the place. I’d do it all again, baby. It brought me you.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
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