She grew up behind the stage with her parents, who were traveling actors. I once attempted to explain “gay people” to her because, you know, as a relic she wouldn’t understand such things. She spun around to face me in her house robe and said, “I grew up behind a vaudeville stage in the twenties. You think any of those people were straight?” I never tried that shit again.
She had five children from 1945 to 1955. They were raised largely by her father-in-law while she ran her newspaper, which she and my grandfather purchased in 1956. Bonny Jean would attend every local city council meeting, critiquing what she saw in scathing weekly editorials, which she would often dictate over the pay phone in the city council hallway. She once fought the head of the San Francisco plumbers’ union, a man with rumored Mafia ties, who was trying to take over her small town’s water council. When she broke the story and refused to back down, he threatened her. I once asked how she managed to fight a man like him as a woman in the 1960s. She said, “Oh, that was easy, honey. I was not afraid of him. The truth is a strong defense.”
When I told her about the pregnancy, I thought I heard a touch of sadness in her voice, despite her congratulations, because for a split second, they sounded like condolences.
The hardest person to tell was my father. I was barely old enough to handle him knowing I had sex, and yet I had to tell him there was an actual human growing in my body, deposited there by the sperm of a man. Telling him felt something like bra shopping with my mother at fourteen: uncomfortable in a deeply shameful, yet unknown way. Everybody has sex. Everybody gets boobs.
Still, somebody please kill me.
I had always felt my father saw me as a kid who was going to do something impressive in life, who was going to become a lawyer or doctor or at least make a lot of money. Instead, I was joining the Mormons in the kitchen. I knew he wouldn’t say it, but he would be disappointed in me. He knew how many times I had stood at family functions declaring my plan, and he knew I never consciously abandoned that.
It’s hardest to fall in front of those you’ve convinced, through years of tone moderation and personality suppression, that you are not the type to falter.
• • •
I stopped smoking and drinking immediately after my balcony denial, which felt wholesome and deeply mature, despite Mac’s and my decision to move out of our apartment and into his parents’ house on their ranch. They lived in a dome-shaped house about ten miles outside of Davis, California, the clean, well-manicured town where I went to college and met Mac.
Davis boasts the second-highest per capita number of PhDs in any city in the nation, and a special tunnel for frogs so they don’t get killed on the road. The town is teeming with students, artists, and intellectuals on bicycles, but also suffers from an epidemic of highly educated, splendid liberals. I learned to spot and avoid the latter from a distance of approximately one hundred feet, having had many years’ practice. The problem is not that they’re liberal—surely one can learn to live with that—it’s that they can’t quite understand why a person wouldn’t dress her child in only organic cotton, or shop solely at the co-op, where they sell nineteen dollar olive oil pressed from olives grown on blessed trees in sacred Native American valleys.
These are the kind of people who call gentrification “restoring the neighborhood” and spend four years on a waiting list for a $1,500 a month preschool while claiming to deeply understand the plight of the underprivileged. Davis is the kind of town where everyone breathes social justice via diversity stickers on their Priuses, but many citizens request that the kids from the Mexican enclaves surrounding the town simply stay in their schools. It’s not about race. It’s just…you know…let’s talk about public radio. Do you support it? It’s kind of my cause. That, and the ACLU.
Most of the mothers in Davis were married, in their late thirties, and living in $700,000 houses when I showed up at age twenty-one, unmarried and pregnant. When I realized nobody would talk to me at the park, having dismissed me immediately as some sort of teen-pregnancy situation, Mac and I bought a pink diaper bag with a giant rhinestone Playboy bunny on the front. It was my subtle “fuck you” to everyone who wouldn’t talk to me anyway, and it almost convinced me I didn’t care.
I turned twenty-two that March and finished my last semester of college in September of 2001, two months before our baby was due. Mac worked at his father’s slaughterhouse on the ranch, and our bedroom was where Mac had played with Hot Wheels and G.I. Joes as a boy, and hid his weed at fifteen. We shared the home with five other people: his parents, two sisters, and his sister’s boyfriend. All the bedrooms were upstairs and opened into a shared center hallway, kind of like Foucault’s panopticon only without the glass. His family was kind and relaxed and pretended we weren’t kids about to have a kid, but I felt exposed and watched—too close to people who weren’t quite mine, humans I knew but didn’t understand, and whom I was still trying to impress. They were family, but I didn’t want them to see me naked, or notice I stunk up the bathroom or yelled at their son. I self-regulated, even though there was no guard in the watchtower.
We bought a crib and an oak dresser, which we wedged together in a corner of the bedroom. I lined each drawer in lavender-scented paper with tiny pastel pink flowers on it, and I bought clothes from Baby Gap and Gymboree and Marshalls. I bought most of them in “newborn” size because they were the cutest and least expensive. I didn’t know they were discounted because babies outgrow them in twelve minutes.
We had a keg of beer at our baby shower, and Mac came because we were “too in love to be apart.” I received about seventy-five various bath items because when my stepmother asked, “What do you need for the baby?” I answered, “Bath items.” I didn’t know you were supposed to “register.” I didn’t have any friends telling me about pregnancy or babies because only losers had babies this young. And I never hung out with losers.
My pregnancy was like living in a dream, a sort of ethereal fantasy ticking by in nebulous form. While my belly grew, I spent my days petting hand-smocked outfits with embroidered ducks and imagining our little threesome. Mac and I played pool at my local university’s student union, and I wasn’t even embarrassed of my belly. I wasn’t embarrassed of my age, or Mac’s lack of career, or that we lived in a room in his parents’ house. Those things weren’t in the dream.
But I couldn’t help but feel inklings of shame as I walked to class during that last semester, when I barely fit in the desks, because the sidewalks and grass and offices on campus were the places where women like me rarely succeeded, and nobody was impressed with expanding uteri. These were PhDs and MAs and lovers of Derrida. They could see right through me: I was the kid who lost, the girl who failed. As I walked I remembered maybe I was going to be more than this, but then I thought of Mac and the baby girl to come. I thought of that love and squared my shoulders.
We went to peaceful birthing classes and breathed together and when Ava came it was fast and insane and Mac sat by me and held my hands and never broke my gaze. The nurses said we were the most beautiful birthing couple they had ever seen.
I wasn’t surprised. It was the only way it could be.
• • •
I met Mac for the first time in my living room the night before Halloween, thirteen months before Ava was born. I was living in a converted garage in a house I shared with four eighteen- and nineteen-year-old males I had found in a newspaper. Three months before I responded to their “roommate wanted” ad, I returned home from a year studying abroad in Spain. I tried living with my mother up north in Mendocino, California, and found a job waitressing, but got fired after two weeks for counseling the owner on how she could improve her business. I found myself bored, embarrassed, and broke, so I moved back to Davis in the fall and began waitressing at an “Asian fusion” restaurant and drinking too much.
I had long before decided I could not live with women. They were too complicated. They needed things like talking and support and genuineness. I needed t
hings like rum and Coke and silence. So I asked those boys looking for a roommate if I could move in, and they said yes immediately upon hearing I could legally buy alcohol.
Three months later, a man I had never seen before sat stoned against our living room wall, next to the television. He had a beard that stuck out in every direction and a head of hair that looked exactly the same. It was as if somebody had taken a donut of three-inch-long black curly hair and popped a face into the center of it. He was a high school friend of my roommates’, a newcomer, thin and tall and quiet, and I would not have noticed him at all had he not said something witty. In our house of drunk eighteen- and nineteen-year-old man-boys, nobody was saying anything witty. I beamed my eyes at him from across the room in curious surprise and locked them with his. They were the kindest eyes I had ever seen. I remember that moment exactly as it happened, in slow motion, as if it were a scene in a Meg Ryan movie. The Eye Lock. His were deep brown with eyelashes that carried on ridiculously, but it was their gentleness, their steady calm, that made me want to know more.
So naturally, I decided to get him drunk and shave his beard off to assess his jawline. He drank Bacardi out of the bottle until we ended up in my roommate’s bathroom. I borrowed a razor and went to work on the facial hair while he called me “Mary,” eventually passing out facedown on my futon. He woke up the next day at dawn to go work at the ranch, hungover, after just a few hours’ sleep. I had never seen anybody get up that early and go to work in that condition. Except me.
Mac was a worker, I learned, and highly attractive without the hair donut. I was intrigued, and since that day happened to be Halloween, I figured we should probably head over to Chico to take some drugs and fall in love. Before he could get out of my room that morning, I said, “Hey. Want to go to Chico tonight? It’s crazy on Halloween. Everybody’s loaded in the streets.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Let’s do that.”
I remember the way the gray morning light fell on his face as he buckled his belt and pulled on his shirt, and I wondered if he’d kiss me. He didn’t. We hadn’t touched at all other than my fingers against his face and my shoulder pressed against his chest as I shaved. He seemed indifferent to me, which made me wonder if perhaps I was already in love. It wasn’t until he walked out my bedroom door that I realized I had just committed, in the heat of mad passion, to dressing up in a goddamned costume.
I barely knew how to dress myself as myself. As a child, my idea of fashion was pairing a green print with a green solid and brushing my hair. In high school, I wore jeans, Doc Martens, and tight white v-necks intended for boys, until my father suggested I “try a little harder.” After that, I’d walk into Gap or J. Crew and buy an outfit featured on a mannequin, figuring that must mean the clothes matched.
Dressing as somebody else was an unbearable enhancement of an already agonizing lifelong struggle. But for Mac I wanted to appear confident and cool, so I cradled my hangover, drove thirty minutes to a costume store in Sacramento, and eventually selected an ensemble that could only be described as “slut Egyptian.”
On my way to Sacramento, my former boyfriend of three years called to ask if I wanted to see him that night. He and I used to hang out together in Chico, but we hadn’t seen each other in a year. I was struck by the synchronicity, and strangely sensed that the choice I made in that moment would alter the course of my life, but I dismissed the thought as ridiculous. It’s just a Halloween. I suppose somewhere I knew if I saw my old boyfriend I would return to him, because he was safe and comfortable, and the sound of his voice said, “I’ll still have you if you’ll have me.” But there was something about Mac, his quiet strength, the way he cinched his faded leather belt that morning.
I told my old boyfriend, “I’m sorry, I already made plans,” and then turned up the Grateful Dead on the stereo and rolled the windows down as the October sunset called from across the farmlands.
• • •
My costume consisted of a beaded headdress and beaded crop top that highlighted my impossibly flat midsection, which I believed needed toning. I paired the beaded top with blue silk pants—because I had blue silk pants—and then I ate some ecstasy. That pill was the key accessory to my outfit, for mine was always a problem of perception. I knew I’d look exquisite as soon as I was high. No longer a scared girl without sartorial confidence, I would be a devastatingly attractive woman prancing in beads.
While sitting on a park bench that night in Chico, watching drunken masses of college students flop down the streets, I told Mac’s buddy, “I think I’m in love with your friend,” but I said it loud enough for Mac to hear, because it had been 24 hours and I was tired of the bullshit. Let’s do this. Mac was shy. I was not shy. I had no problem barging into your life and demanding a fixed place in it. Right now. Step aside, assholes. Slut Egyptian has arrived.
At my house later that night, and after taking more ecstasy, I dropped my head onto Mac’s chest while we lay on the floor and planned our lives together. I suggested we have four children: two biological and two adopted. (I was going to save all the children.) He told me about his two sisters and a pot-bellied pig on their ranch who couldn’t fit through a fence. He chuckled so hard my head bounced on his chest and I looked up to see him grinning while he described the pig balancing on his belly trying to push himself through.
I remember thinking only an excellent and loving man would tell a story about a pot-bellied pig getting stuck in a fence. It made him laugh. It made me want his babies.
“Mom, I think I met my future husband,” I told her the next morning while circling the lawn, possibly still high, definitely smoking a cigarette and squinting under the morning sun.
“He’s from a ranch around here. Really kind. I think his parents might be Republicans. He gets up and works every day at five a.m.”
“I like the sound of him,” she said, and I took a stunned drag off my smoke, because my parents hadn’t liked the sound of most of what I’d been saying for the previous eight to twelve years. “He really sounds like a good man for you.”
Within a few days I was bringing Mac meatball sandwiches while he worked—chasing unruly chickens with goat blood in his ear, butchering animals and cutting meat, smelling of lanolin and yesterday’s Captain Morgan. He wore thick canvas pants or overalls with rubber boots over them, and ripped, bloodstained T-shirts and old button-down flannels, layered up to keep him from the cold or block him from the sun. After work, he smelled so intensely of animal guts and lanolin I could hardly be near him, but I watched him from afar and thought, My God, he’s tough. Still, it was some ineffable tenderness that made me wonder if he was even human. He was a ranchman with tattoos and piercings, and he wasn’t even a Republican.
I had never met a man like him. A man so classically macho without the machismo, a country boy without the puffed-out chest of country boys. Where was the posturing? The guns? The huge truck with a “Piss on Chevy” bumper sticker?
Mac didn’t even watch sports. He drove a small, dented red truck, sang songs from Broadway musicals, and whistled to himself in the shower. But he could punch the hide off a sheep in three minutes and work eight hours without a break in a frigid slaughterhouse. He would fall asleep every night ten seconds after his head touched the pillow, and I would watch him. He was always so, so tired.
My roommates told me I had somehow landed the best man in the world, and the only person they were ever truly afraid of in high school—not because he was mean, or a fighter, but because he was the kind of person who would break a bottle over someone’s head if necessary. He wouldn’t like it, but he would do it.
I saw that. I saw loyalty that defied reason and ignored facts. I saw loyalty that was decided. Etched. Right there in the bones, and that was what I needed. I needed a love that couldn’t see me.
We were never a decision. We were already made.
In January, three months after we met, we rented our apartment together. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, he p
ulled out a ring as we returned home from dinner. He killed the engine and opened a little box. I smiled, knowing what was about to happen. “I’ll marry you,” I said, “but put that thing away and ask me again. This is not romantic. This is a parking lot. And you have to ask my dad first.” I was a real stickler for tradition.
So he asked again, after we knew I was pregnant, this time in the middle of the restaurant where I waitressed. He walked in with flowers, wearing a dress shirt and tie. The restaurant was packed with a Friday night dinner crowd when he got down on one knee and asked. I said yes, and everybody cheered. We were engaged and I was pregnant with our love child and in the movies this was all going to be quite perfect.
And it was. Even the nurses said so.
• • •
For two days in the birthing center the dream went on. Our baby girl slept in my arms and nursed while our friends came and went. We took a thousand pictures. Mac slept in that chair “bed” and I dressed my baby girl in outfit after outfit, all scented, all carefully chosen, while I wondered what the fuck happened to my vagina and how I’d ever pee again. One of the outfits was pink and fuzzy on the inside with a white bear on the front. It made me think of the nine months and several days of perfection I had just experienced—until I stepped outside the birthing center as a mother, and the rest began.
My story wasn’t untrue. It was simply unsustainable.
2
Stop Drinking When Your Lips Go Numb
I did not start on that balcony. I did not wake up one day dropped into a life of pregnancy, cigarettes, a three-month-old relationship, and an almost college degree. I built that, one moment at a time, while I thought I was building something else.
I probably began on a two-week trip to Honduras when I was sixteen years old, which I heard about one day in my public speaking class. I attended an all-girls Catholic school in Santa Rosa, California, in the middle of vineyards, where winery owners and their offspring lived. The trip was “an opportunity to learn about the rainforest and conservation,” but more accurately it was a chance to send privileged kids to a “third world” country to learn guilt, American exceptionalism, and how local ignorance caused the destruction of the rainforest (as opposed to, say, global capitalism).
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