“Be polite,” I said.
He sinks deeper into his chair and won’t look at me. He regressed, and he was predictably easy to fix, but I didn’t want him to act this way in front of you.
You went outside to join Lily. I was more worried about how you might change your mind on us than I was worried about my son’s heart. And when I recognized that, I knew you weren’t ready for us. My baby was still dependent on me. He was even dependent on me to show him he could love you again.
I walked up to him and crouched down to his washed face, and I tidied his hair. He relaxed.
“I know, Isaiah,” I said.
He started to cry, and I hugged him. I quickly turned his emotions to joy when I told him that if he ate the non-crumby parts, we could go to the park.
“How much time we got?” He meant with Casey.
“Hours.” I smiled.
When you came in with Lily he was a different boy. He hammed for you and devoured his food. He asked you questions about everything, from bows and arrows to bears and wolves.
The dinners and the play became a routine. We came over on Friday and spent the night. You treated us well. You occasionally said some rude things to me, and you also guarded your time. Sometimes it was not a good day. I permitted it. Sometimes you were angry with me for asking you to text me more often. I permitted it. It was my fault, after all.
Every time there was a slight against me, I remembered when I reacted to your judgments with uncontrollable crying. I remembered when I hit myself until there were bruises on both sides of my head, and I also remember, somehow, those nights I slept better. Those nights, I wasn’t convinced I was crazy. With you, in the newness of my medication and our agreements, I felt crazy.
I was so subdued. I was convinced that it was good for me. And then you took my son to the park while I cooked something in your kitchen. You left your computer open so I could watch Netflix. There was an open document in the corner of the screen. A letter to a woman named Lillis.
You told her that your departure the other night was awkward. You apologized. You told her that you were not committed to anyone and that you did want to kiss her that night.
When you and my son came back, I was subdued. You would have called me crazy if I inferred too much from a letter about two friends having an awkward encounter. Friends can be attracted to each other. You had called her attractive in the past. I remembered that you told me your ex-girlfriend, the one you left for me, accused you of liking Lillis, and she was “crazy.”
I breathed deeply and made jokes and held you. My son and I left the next day, and I did not hound you to see if you went straight to her.
I decided to give you an ultimatum on our next date. You and I were drunk in your bar. I had my hand wrapped around your wrist and my fingers couldn’t clasp around it completely. I always marvel at your largeness. I was drunk and felt lighter than I normally do. I nonchalantly told you that, in three months, I was going to start seeing other people seriously.
“We can keep doing this. I know we kind of agreed not to fuck other people, but I want a relationship,” I said.
“What?” You looked interested.
“Having sex. Not being serious. After three months I would like to try seeing other people.”
We kept drinking, and my face was in such close proximity to yours the whole night. You are such a home to me.
“Three months,” I said. I furrowed my eyebrows.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why not now?” You said, really asking—as if you hadn’t spent months explaining why.
“Now what?”
“We can do this now.”
Because of my medication, I didn’t cry over breakfast or minor transgressions. You believed me when I said the past was my fault. I believed me. When you were annoyed with me, I had to prove I was sane. I didn’t speak my mind like I used to. You were beaming.
And then you told me that when Isaiah and I are to come for our weekly visit, you would be babysitting Lillis’s dog. I said it was okay. You told me about the dog, and that it will eat gluten-free food. You didn’t say anything about Lillis. I didn’t either.
In my kitchen I turn the lights off again, like I used to. It allows me to feel as nothing as the dark. I know where everything is, like I did before. I become scared because it is this behavior that causes me to commit myself. I still take a knife and I press it against the fat of my palm—in the dark, hoping that I have the bravery to puncture myself, so that the next day I can be more fearless.
I was polite enough, and considerate enough, to hurt myself like a secret. So you didn’t need to question how this kind of crazy would hinder your work or your isolation.
I knew that someone else would have congratulated herself for being contained. I understood how things could be misunderstood. I knew that, whichever white woman you saw while I was in the hospital, she would have let you have friends. She would have trusted that growth hurt but that it redefined the boundaries of the relationship—those boundaries were mutually developed in her mind. She would have convinced herself that permissiveness equated to a voice—like you wouldn’t have fucking done what you do anyway, regardless of her consent or mine.
I turned the light on, and I had not punctured my skin. It was just the cutest red dot that stayed for several minutes—perfectly circular.
I called you. You seemed busy. I told you that I didn’t want you to babysit Lillis’s dog. You swore. You said that I could not do this. I couldn’t tell you that it was impermissible after agreeing. You told me she was traveling, and it was not what friends did to each other. Your word mattered.
“I don’t give a fuck. Fuck her. I don’t like it,” I said.
You yelled at me and hung up. I cried. You didn’t call me back. I know that you felt in the right, because you assumed I had no knowledge of the awkward encounters you had with her. If you had known I knew, you would have had to acknowledge you were committed to me, and I had reason to dislike it.
I call you back after consoling myself. I told you it was fine.
You were so lukewarm the next few days. Those days were heavy for me. I asked my friends what I should do, and it was a unanimous, “Fuck Casey.” Someone said I held some power in my secret knowledge. I told her it felt like the opposite.
Isaiah and I arrived at your house, and you had already started dinner. Rose, Lillis’s dog, was running around. She looked like a white woman’s dog. She was a blond mutt and looked like the type of dog that was meant to be roadkill, but rescue missions for stupid dogs interfered with the natural world.
I was still contained. You sensed anger. You knew I didn’t like the dog or Lillis, but you also knew I had no real reason to be so angry (withholding the letter).
I tried to watch TV, and, behind the couch, the dog shat plainly on the wood floor. I told you to get rid of it. You began to clean, and then I resigned.
I was not going to be Laura or Lillis or Lily. I stood in the kitchen while Isaiah played in the furthest room away. You came to me.
“I read a letter where you said you wanted Lillis.”
“I didn’t say I wanted her,” you said.
“You said you wanted to kiss her.”
“We’ve been friends for years, and it was momentary. I’m not attracted to her.”
It went back and forth, and you were never really sorry. You compared your transgressions to mine. I am erratic and cruel sometimes. The medication helped, I argued. I would have argued that the woman I was, outside of the hospital, deserved better.
We found solace in getting drunk together. At your bar, I told you that I wanted to be chosen. You explained that you were sorry. You told me that you chose me.
After last call, you told the doorman that we were going to make a baby in a pecan field.
We both stumbled
on dirt roads to pick the most lush and soft field. We couldn’t stop laughing. I believed, on this occasion, I was two inches taller than I had ever been. My body was rushing with newness and safety. You laid your coat down, and it was too dark for us to be soft and prepared. I saw your eyes and smiled before you kissed mine closed. We knew there would be a baby, as sure as we knew our love felt impossible and necessary.
The truth of this story is a detailed thing, when I’d prefer it be a symbol or a poem—fewer words, and more striking images to imbue all our things. I can’t turn it into Salish art. I had to fill these pages with the story of our new family, because the merging was so complicated, even I was confounded. I had to write full sentences, and the exposition lent itself to the dialogue, and there can’t be ambiguity in the details of this story.
For you, and our child, and my sons, I said what happened up and down on the page. Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.
5
your black eye
and my birth
Pregnancy didn’t stabilize our relationship. The baby was a Thunder Being inside of me. His growing cells and tissue heightened my awareness and physically incapacitated me.
He took the best parts of my blood. I became anemic.
I told you that I could not take my medication anymore. The risk to the baby was too much. You told me that you were prepared for it to be hard. We want the baby. We decided that Isaiah and I would move in with you.
The night at the pecan field amused us at doctor visits and ultra sounds. We always found a quiet moment to look at each other and laugh. There were good omens of our new family. We walked through a greenhouse with Isaiah. The smallest pots with little sprouts made us feel sentimental. You almost cried when you gave Isaiah a stuffed animal from your childhood: Charlie Chips, a puppy dog. He carried it with him everywhere. Your mother gave us things to decorate the baby’s room.
It only took four weeks for the symptoms to appear. I yelled at my son in a way I never had, for no reason. I had the sense to apologize.
“Hormones,” I said.
“Yeah. Dad Casey told me,” he said, forgiving.
“You know that nobody, not even me, has the right to speak to you that way, no matter what you do?” I started to cry.
“I know, Mom,” he said. He got himself a soda and sat with me on the couch in silence.
The work for my graduate program required me to generate prose and read more than I ever had. I also taught composition, and I didn’t miss a day. When I was in the hospital, feeling crazy, I learned how to manage my symptoms in the external world. The techniques for coping worked outside. In the house, I was unsure how to cope. I wanted to cry, and hurt people, and I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know if what I felt was authenticity, or a disease that would overtake me.
I wasn’t sure I could control my behaviors. My disease was not an excuse to harm you, I knew.
My eating disorder became a full order of every food I had starved myself of. My weak, and easily bruised, deficient body became thicker, like cedar bark or a trunk.
I started to ask you what you meant after you said anything. I started to scratch the back of my scalp, nervously, until I broke the skin. I refused to heal over, and pulled the scales from my open wound. I chewed the top and bottom of my lip so much that I chewed part of my Cupid’s bow off permanently—the most protruding part on my heart-shaped mouth never grew back.
I began to tell you, often, that we were only a family because you chose me on a drunken night—because it seemed like a solution to a fight neither of us could ever win: Do you love me enough? Can I be good to you? I won’t ever put a toilet seat up. You told me to stop.
My aunt said that being in the desert, away from my land, made me sick.
“Go to the river,” she said.
“I will,” I said, knowing I couldn’t.
I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from my heart. It was polarizing to be told there was a diagnosis for the behaviors I felt justified in having. And then, I knew some part of my disease was spiritual or inherited.
I had not stopped wanting to die. It was not romantic because it felt passionless—like a job I hated and needed. Romanticism requires bravery and risk. The obsessive thoughts ruined things. Good news was met with a numb feeling. The voice I heard was practical. It noted every opportunity to die and then noted how I refused to jump out of a moving car. I refused to take all the pills I could find. I refused to drink myself to death. I refused to cut my pregnant body. I refused to buy a gun. I refused to crash my car. And I refused to jump from a spaghetti interchange. I was aware of every opportunity I missed.
I remembered when I thought I could go through with it. I remember being caught slumped against my bathroom door. My friend stuck his finger inside my throat until I purged. I remember waking up with blood and bile in my mouth. My friend said that he just knew I wasn’t okay. It was strange because I didn’t know. I had called him several times crying before that, and I can’t remember how I had such conviction that day.
I was not right to want to die. I didn’t want to leave my family. I liked my mind and its potential. I knew the type of burden I was. I was like my mother.
I have tried not to call her my mother. I started to believe that a person cannot own land or a family member.
“Where is your mother?” A woman asked me at a church thrift store. I was very small.
The woman took me to look for her, and, when Mom was found, she got angry at the white woman for chiding her.
In another store, I was accidentally locked in a bathroom stall in pitch black. I had gone to the bathroom, and a cashier came into the restroom and cleaned it. I sat silently in my stall, and my feet dangled from the toilet seat. I was too small to be seen. She turned the light off and closed the door. I heard a lock. Mom used to shop until stores closed. Eventually, someone let my mother in to look for me. They turned on the light, and I don’t think I spoke. Nobody asked why I didn’t speak. Nobody asked me what I did while I was in the dark. My mother didn’t feel like mine as much as I wanted to belong to her—to be inseparable from her.
She taught me that I didn’t own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don’t own our mothers. We don’t own our bodies or our land—maybe I’m unsure. We become the land when we are buried in it. Our grandmothers have been uprooted and shelved in boxes, placed on slabs of plastic, or packed neatly in rooms, or turned into artifact—all after proper burials. Indians aren’t always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I’d like to belong to that.
“If we can’t die right, how are we gonna live right?” my mother would have asked.
Isaiah needs me more than ever. I tell him that you only want white women. I frighten him and you. There is a reason to live better now, I think, but I can’t. The things I say to you both feel awful. I hear Mom in my own voice.
She is not all wrong. I’m carrying a child by a man who abandoned me for being too emotional and then got me pregnant. My emotions are unreasonable, you say.
You talk to me like you’re teaching rhetoric.
“You’re making leaps,” you say. “There are more pleasant ways of asking what you need from me.”
You carefully explain the semantics of your letter to Lillis. You decide for both of us that, given my transgressions, yours pale in comparison.
My language strengthened through all this discourse.
I asked myself if you chose me, or chose the woman I was when I was medicated. We fought until you had to leave me alone, pregnant, with Isaiah. I somehow panic when I’m alone with him. I turn into the woman I was when Isadore was taken away.
I had always risen to the occasion of Isaiah, eventually, but in your home I couldn’t stop crying. I have every trauma to pull from, to
justify my fear that you don’t really love me.
You come back to the door to explain how you choose me every day. I only respond with questions.
“Then why did you leave me in the hospital? What has changed since then, besides my pregnancy?”
I really want to know, and you can’t explain. So, I can’t feel safe. I can hear my aunt’s voice, telling me that if my security depends on a man’s words or action, I’ve lost sight of my power. I feel like I become worse, the more I know you love me. We are both worse for loving each other, it seems. It can get better. Descending to ascend—they call it. Everything feels ugly, and we are only at three months’ gestation.
I plan for a trip to my low residency program in Santa Fe. We sent Isaiah, alone, on a flight to stay with Vito and Isadore for the weeks I’ll be at IAIA.
I searched your computer and saw that you told Lillis that the world was better with her in it, while I was in a hospital with brochures about my potential disorders. You had never told me before that the world was better with me in it, and I wouldn’t have believed it either.
I found a conversation between you and Lily, where she asked what happened between you and me. You said I was a “cool girl,” but it was just over. You were still fucking me, though.
You asked her if she wanted to hang out, not in a lecherous way. You are a great friend to women.
She told you that she had a problem with a man.
You told her you were a good listener.
Then, every Sunday, even after you and I made the commitment to a new fidelity, Lily goes to your house at night to smoke weed and watch TV. I learned, through the transcripts of your conversation, that moments after my son and I left your house, she was with you. I could not stop obsessing.
I explained to my friends that I don’t think you slept with her. The strange thing is they believed me. I guess I was convincing.
The knowledge proposes I either start each day as new and take you for your word, or I tear the walls down to illustrate my pain. I feel pregnant with burden, and I chose it. I want to take it back.
Heart Berries Page 6