Nobody seemed to know how to get me home, not even God.
It didn’t matter how clear the world seemed when I sat in the church room listening to very kind women explain the way to heaven, I still walked around the playground at school eyeing the other kids with fascinated skepticism, a twenty-foot invisible wall between us, wondering how they knew how to be kids on a playground. How do they know how to play tetherball? What is happening with these people? I wanted so badly to join them; I wanted so badly for the ball to smack them in their adorable little faces. I figured God had handed out a Playground Manual before he sent us all down here, and I, unfortunately, was absent that day.
But I couldn’t tell you that, and I couldn’t ask, “Hey, could you teach me how to play tetherball?” I couldn’t let you know how much I wished you’d sit with me at the lunch table, so I squared my shoulders and straightened my backpack and walked somewhere very important, like the library, to prove I had a place to go. There’s a chance you didn’t notice me leaving. There’s a chance I was proving it to me.
When I got home, I would go straight to my bedroom, and make myself the smartest and most capable person in the room by lining up my Cabbage Patch dolls and playing “school” with the door shut. I did this for definitely too many years. My favorite book to teach was The Miracle of Life, because it involved new life and vaginas, even new life exiting vaginas, so it was educational plus dirty. Nobody bothered me in there, not even my mother when she got home from work. I felt better after a couple of hours of solitude and fantasy, sometimes even good enough to see what the crazy kids were doing on their bikes out on the street.
I had no idea how to join them.
Maybe I didn’t even know I wanted to join them, that I wanted to feel a sense of unity with the people around me, that I wanted to not feel fear, that I wanted to feel better inside. I tried the church for many years, and it almost worked, but all that Mormon preaching and black-and-white Truth was a pathetic substitute for what I really wanted: relief. A deep exhale. A sigh in my guts that let me rest, fully, completely, secure and unafraid. And whole.
I yearned for that acid in Honduras with my whole self, with every single moment I lived before that day, but I didn’t know it until I saw the tiny tabs in front of me, and God became the ability to feel different. To feel free.
• • •
When the acid began wearing off, I was lying on the edge of the man from the beach’s bed, aware of the movement next to me. Stacy was in the middle. He was on the other side of her. I was terrified of men and sex, so when they started kissing, I panicked and headed to the bathroom (if I’d had a backpack, I would have straightened it). I figured I’d take a shower to wash off the evening, but this turned out to be a questionable idea. The black mold spots on the white tile refused to stop shaking. My eyes told me they were bugs. My mind told me it was the acid. There was no hot water, and no plumber to fix it.
I got dressed and sat on his couch until he and Stacy joined me. It never occurred to me that it would have been rape if he slept with her. I was merely grateful to be alive and out of that bed. He explained he was a graduate student from San Francisco studying marine biology, and that he was from Sebastopol, a tiny town about fifteen minutes from our city of Santa Rosa. I could not believe it. He said he saw us rolling in the surf in front of a bar and knew we were high and not safe, so he stayed with us. He left out the part about hoping he could take advantage of a couple of young, dosed girls.
I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the motel. He said, “Walk straight down the beach, that way,” and dismissed me with a hint of disgust in his voice, probably because I wouldn’t fuck him. I was useless to him now.
I thanked him and laughed, thinking how his directions reminded me of the “straight and narrow.” How far I had strayed from the iron rod now.
As I walked back to the motel alone in the heavy morning air, I worried about Stacy, who had refused to leave the man’s house with me, but I walked faster and faster, running to get away from him, from the night, thinking of the silent motel room, and of getting there before the teachers woke up. I thought about rolling in the surf on acid and how I wasn’t raped or mauled or dragged into a cave for my passport or any other reason. As I unlocked the motel room door, I thought, Wow, I can do really stupid shit and not get in trouble for it.
But mostly, I thought about the weed I had smoked a couple of months before, and how I was absolutely convinced something spectacular would happen in that moment. I thought the sky would crack or shatter, or clouds would gather or part. I didn’t know what would happen exactly, but I knew it would be mighty. Surely, I would be punished somehow.
And yet, nothing.
I began to suspect my aunts, my mother, and the entire Mormon church were lying. They all but promised a volcanic eruption on the day I blackened my temple, and here I had quite clearly at least grayed it out with intentional marijuana, and not one single fucking thing happened. Nothing fell out of the sky. No lightning. Not a word from the creator.
I didn’t even feel different.
But still, I wanted to believe. I wanted to be a holy person, and for them to be right. I wanted to reach my potential—and there was so much, you know? I was a shining star at school! I would be the first person in my family to graduate from college! I would do better than my parents! My father moved in and out of drinking. I heard stories of their friends shooting up heroin in their necks, of junkies burning up in their own houses, of drunken fights and limb-crushing car accidents. I knew better.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling of having been lied to, of being hoodwinked. And I wondered what else they were wrong about. I suspected everything. So I set that acid on my tongue, and gave up trying.
It was my last sacrament, my last communion. I had spent so many years believing that if I could figure out how to be good enough, I wouldn’t be the person who chased loved ones with knives or craved Jerry’s cracked desperation as a salve greater than salvation. I thought any minute now my external reverence would manifest in internal peace, and all the darkness would be cast out through my grand gestures of morality. The sinner, the darkness, gone, and me, unified in good.
But it never worked.
And if there was a God, he knew the truth about me, so fuck it.
I’m tired.
• • •
Later that day on the island, after a short half-hallucinatory sleep, I talked to Stacy, who told me “everything went fine” with the marine biologist after I left. I was never quite sure what that meant. I told myself to believe her.
I walked outside my motel room that day as the sun was going down across the water, casting orange light on my face and shadows in long, peaceful strokes across dusty roads.
I went snorkeling with the other students that evening as usual, but for some reason this time I got going way out there in the ocean, kicking along for what seemed like twenty miles. I don’t know why, I just kept going. I was scared I’d get eaten by a shark, but I kept kicking anyway because it was too damn beautiful to stop and the fear made me kick harder.
I was entirely alone now but I kept kicking. The reef was down below me and then farther and farther away until it came to an end. I kept kicking past that, but it was just blue and blue and blue in every direction, so I turned around. When I did, I saw a wall of black before me, but a little below me, the reef stretched in every direction in front of me, and the crystal blue water above it. And me, hovering there like a speck of flesh in nothingness, a mass of dark that stretched forever into the bottom, though no bottom. I felt like I was looking at God and death and I shuddered. I felt like I was hovering above an abyss that would swallow me at any moment, as if I were taunting it with my squirming little body. The water above the black looked like a sliver too shallow to hold me, and I thought I could not cross back over. My eyes darted down, right, left until the terror of the black overtook me, and I threw my head up and ripped my snorkel off to suck in the air and st
are at a spot on the beach—to swim back, and remember I was still alive.
I didn’t look down again.
Until I got home, and began my descent into the black.
• • •
Two months later, my friend handed me a bottle of peppermint schnapps and said, “Stop drinking when your lips go numb.”
But I never did. I had found what I was looking for.
3
Sylvia Plath Put Her Head in the Oven over This Shit
On our first day home as a family of three, Mac woke at dawn and went to work at his father’s slaughterhouse, just like every other Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday since he was ten years old. This particular day, the day I walked around in pajama pants over a bulging hospital diaper with a colostrum-sucking newborn in my arms, happened to be Thanksgiving. Twelve hours before, we had walked into the dome through the pouring rain, with Ava in her car seat, and everybody cheered for us. For some reason, they clapped when we made it home. Perhaps it was the rain.
After dinner, Mac went to sleep. I did not.
In the morning, Mac left.
I did not.
Leaving for work was not something Mac thought about, but rather something he simply did, no matter what day it was, or who was just born, or how sick he was. Only absolute incapacitation would keep him from that slaughterhouse. I did not grasp the magnitude of this commitment until the first time we tried to take a vacation beginning on a workday. This was evidently the first workday he had missed for something as frivolous as “rest.” He spent the first nine hours physically ill in the bathroom of our San Francisco hotel room while I sat on the bed wondering how he could possibly ruin my experience in such a selfish manner.
“Mac, I don’t understand. People are allowed to take vacations,” I said, as he crouched against the wall near the toilet. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and I believed him even through my fury. I never understood how a person could grow so intricately entwined with a job. On the day I told his mother I was pregnant, she said, “You can take the man off the ranch, but you can’t take the ranch out of the man.” Her words seemed true, but still, I wanted to extricate him from whatever sickness festered between him and his work, or whatever it was that gutted him for taking a day off, but he couldn’t explain it, and I soon learned the source was invisible. It tore through him years before we existed together, and planted itself beyond reason’s reach.
But on that day, the Thanksgiving he went to work leaving a two-day-old newborn and mother, it did not occur to me to be angry. Luckily, my mother was there, and she didn’t tell me a father shouldn’t leave the mother of his child two days after she gives birth, especially if it’s Thanksgiving. I wonder if she knew and withheld that information, or, slightly more awkwardly, didn’t realize it was weird either. Maybe she craved time with just the baby and me, or maybe my father would have done the same to her, or maybe we were all so fucking overjoyed by the baby we didn’t notice his absence. I think it was the latter.
Perhaps it would have been nice for somebody to say, “Hey, Janelle. You should ask Mac to stick around a bit.” Then again, logically, something we don’t know must be benign. Unless it burns under the surface, like a wound growing larger right beneath our nerves, where we didn’t even know we had nerves or needed help at all, until one day we find ourselves doubled over a toilet for taking a day off work. Maybe that’s what happened to Mac. Maybe that’s what happened to me.
Maybe that’s what happened to me three days after we brought Ava home, and I sat in a rocking chair in the middle of the November night under our bedroom window, out there in the country, where the sky is so clear it makes the cold seem colder. Light shone onto my face and Ava’s, and I guess it was moonlight. I tried to nurse her. My nipples cracked against her petal mouth, but I nursed her anyway, because she was tiny and just right, and I refused to not breastfeed. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth through the rush of fire in my breast. The nurse had told me, “If she is latched correctly, it won’t hurt,” so I figured I was doing it wrong, but the milk spilled out around the edges of her little mouth. Seemed to me something was working.
I was drunk at the sight of her, almost too much for my eyes, swaddled in my arms as my mother had taught me with my dolls years before. You put the baby’s head a little below one corner, and then you pull up the bottom corner, pull the right one over the chest and then the left, and then tuck it in tight like a little burrito. But as we rocked, and as I glanced at her and back at her snoring father, maybe I rocked one, two, three too many times, and nudged some pain I couldn’t see right up to the last layer of my skin, where the moonlight touched and her newborn head met my flesh. Because on the final glance at Mac, a truth settled into me like a sheet of ice.
I had made an irreversible mistake. Not any mistake. The greatest mistake.
Her. Him. The love. The pregnancy. It was all a horrifying error. I looked at him and her and back again and hated them both.
No. Not her.
Him. Him, there, free, alone on the bed while I sit spitting milk and pain and blood with the beautiful tucked-in bundle. His body his own. His dick his own. His future his own. And me, decimated.
I don’t want this, I thought. I don’t want him or motherhood and I don’t want this body or man or house but now I am stuck, dragged and chained through a lie.
My own, or yours? Did I do this? How did I do this? I was conned. I was wronged. I was betrayed.
I knew I had only myself to blame, but it was too cold to stay in that knowing. So I blamed him.
You wanted this, Mac. Now you’ve got it, and I’m gone.
• • •
My jealousy of people without children, of people I viewed as still free, became a living, breathing entity. My rage palpable, dizzying, smoldering always in my chest, and yet it was not alone. If it were, I could have walked coolly away from him, that life. If all I felt were sorrow and rage, the kind that engulfs you like a warm black cloud, seeping into every pore until even your breath feels leaden and ugly and wrong, I could have simply walked out on the bastards. In the dark of midnight, I imagined doing exactly that, but every day, at every moment, alongside my frantic desperation, was a love and fixation and pull to that baby more powerful than anything I’d ever known. Beyond me and utterly nonnegotiable.
I could never commit to anything in life, except her. Fully, undeniably, against my every desire, her. It was a love that had me checking her ten times a night. A love that had me burying my nose in her mouth to inhale her milky breath, bathing, nursing, and holding her with arms that ached if she were not in them. When apart, I missed her the way we hunger for food: immediately, physically, and for survival.
But while I drove into town and she slept in the car seat, or screamed as if the devil himself were gouging her in the eye, I felt the weight of my sagging belly and tits and thought about Mac working at his going-nowhere job, and our little corner of the big ranch house, and how it all had become sad and heavy and boring. I would think about where I was supposed to go with my life instead of the car, and I would get lost. My grief drove me around in circles. I’d drive as long as I could, as long as Ava slept, because at least the time was mine, some solitude, some untouched mental space. Sometimes I drove by places I used to frequent in college, old bars and friends’ houses, to remember my former life as some sort of masochistic lamentation. Sometimes I drove by my old boyfriend’s house, the one who called that Halloween, and pondered what it would have been like if I had made the decision to meet him that night instead of Mac.
He was with somebody new. I hated her too, even though she was a former high school friend and I was the one who broke up with him. I hated the childless happiness they occupied in my imagination. I fantasized about running off to some Midwestern motel, where I would change my name to Charlotte and bartend for a living, simply pretending none of this had ever happened.
For I always had a next move,
a way out, a backdoor exit plan. Another man, another drug, another town. Another job or friend or lie. I always had a posture or scheme to get out of a life that wasn’t working. But motherhood, motherhood is a trap. It’s like the goddamn “Hotel California”: You can check out, but you can never leave.
If I stayed, I faced a ruined life. If I left, I faced taking care of Ava alone, and sharing her with Mac and whatever slut he ended up with. The thought alone made my stomach flip. I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t leave, and when the permanence of motherhood dropped onto me, when I understood that no matter where I physically went I would not escape it, my panic was indescribable. I was a feral cat in the first moments of capture, scrambling and clawing and screaming as she realizes there’s no exit to her cage.
So I married him, as I said I would, because it was the only thing I could think of.
• • •
We took our vows on a cold, gray December day under a tree outside a courthouse in a town called Woodland, which is probably the nicest part of the town. My mother wore four-week-old Ava in a black sling across her chest. Our plan was to get married “technically,” then have a fantastic wedding a year later.
I wore all black. I was planning on wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, but my mother-in-law said, “Oh you can’t do that. You’re getting married!” and kindly took me to a boutique clothing store the same day, but I had recently given birth and felt betrayed by my body, with its giant belly hanging low, withered and stretched beneath alien milk tits. So I bought a black skirt and blouse, as if it were a funeral, though I merely wanted to hide behind cotton shadows.
I told myself I didn’t care. I told myself I was so in love I didn’t need a wedding, but this was probably a lie. I knew it wasn’t the “real thing.” I knew if we treated it as a gesture for taxes and insurance, if I wore regular old clothes and nobody gathered in feigned joy, it would remain a flash in the grand scheme. This almost worked, but my father showed up.
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