My children are contaminated even though they hardly know anyone on my side of the family well enough at all.
I haven’t found a way to teach them my mother tongue. “Oh, but they must learn a foreign language, especially if their mother speaks fluently,” a well-meaning poet once said to me at a reading. I lied and promised that I will. She is right: only the young have the ability to master new tongues.
× × × ×
“I always tell my kids that you were the golden child,” Luda informs me one winter when we are both grown women. I’m still not supposed to call her a step. It’s a siren call back to the missing one. The one she calls a prostitute within earshot of my kids. My reflex is to say that prostitute rhymes with substitute, the way I would have when I was a child, but she needs me to say less, not more.
To her, I’m an appalling elegist of limbos, provoking spectators, for shame.
In Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook Anna is a divorced mother who keeps four diaries, Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue, because she “has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness.” Anna eventually harvests the jumbled recollections she organized and compartmentalized into her “golden notebook,” a prisoner no longer dusting her cage.
She bleeds. She fucks. She breaks down. She reintegrates.
And so did I as tarnished, fake gold, a changeling underneath the paint. The person I grew into displeases my parents. I’m too angry. I don’t take making money seriously. I have no solid plans. I live too far away. An abandoner. A coward. An infidel. As though there were a battlefield and I fled without dragging other wounded bodies to safety. A runaway, still, after all these years of them hoping I was somehow forging anchors in their basement apartment in Brooklyn, still a stray thing, which can’t be petted to stillness. Dock here, they say, but I see no land in their faces. They scowl and look at each other when I explain that I’m settled in Portland. My stepmother cries and wonders why I reject them, why the miles between us. What is it that I’m looking for in a city they can’t pronounce and have never visited? Will I ever stop running? I was abducted by her in the end to be sure.
Leningrad, Lida di Ostia, New York, Olympia, Seattle, and Portland are all port towns where I have continued to wait on a sinking ship, on a lost parcel, on a body to be sewn into canvas and sunk to the bottom of the sea like in a proper naval burial, seeking her out to the exclusion of all other parts of my life, never asking for directions, rejecting quaternity.
The Greeks did not portray the Sirens as sea deities but as meadow creatures starred with flowers, who loudly lured nearby sailors with their enchanting voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.
By the fourth century, the Christians discouraged belief in sirens.
This Lie Box is a trunk stamped with your songs: Baku, Pushkin, Leningrad, Vienna, Rome, Philadelphia, New York, Olympia, Seattle, Cannon Beach, and Portland.
XXXIV
Now that I am a mother, I see my two closest friends—Matt and Sarah—about twice a month. We try to get a lot of catching up into as many vodka sodas and cheap beers as we can. The night always costs me an extra day and an old lesson. During one of these outings, Sarah playfully told me that my daughter can be a tiny terror, which is a term I have used myself when she wouldn’t sleep. She is my kids’ godmother and her sarcasm is harmless and meant to be supportive. She sees that I have been wistful and hard on myself. It’s difficult for my family to go away on trips with our friends; it seems impossible because everyone has to be quiet when the kids are asleep early in the evening. Our schedules are different. I have been pretending otherwise to not get left behind, even though I’m the one who moved ahead in her eyes.
I walk home from the dive bar sucking steam and repeating “I have children” over and over. I don’t wish to fear my blessings, but I warned you, I’m a Believer, too. The only religion that’s left for me now seems to be motherhood, performing the ritual of the unseen, hovering spirit above me.
What happens to people who are born into a fate of instant adulthood; who are molded from the get-go to be self-reliant and then a caretaker? Their eventual resentment creates the chaos of not finding the right escape hatch. You can either be a child in the beginning like you should have been or become a child when the ticket for that ride expires. The former is not up to you.
My dad told me that if I ever get too drunk—and I shouldn’t get too drunk because I might end up like my mother—but if I do get too drunk, I can make myself throw up. He said it to me when I was stomach sick, and I was sick to my stomach quite a bit as a teenager with what the doctors said was a bacteria called H. pylori and took rounds of antibiotics to cure with no avail.
I might have been pained in the gut by the absence of a mother. This mother—I was told from the time anyone can remember anything so frightening and simply put—was no good, and a drunken whore.
When I was sick to my stomach as a child, my dad would take me over to the bathtub in our Leningrad communal flat. The toilet and tub were in separate quarters. He said that he didn’t want me to throw up in the toilet because it’s dirty to look at, and you need running water to drink. One needs running water, to take little gulps and cool off your wrists as you rinse your hands to properly throw up. He explained that he would be putting his two fingers down my throat and all that has festered in my gut would be gone, and I could sleep afterward.
You need to get all the poison out, girl. If you ever drink, and please don’t, you should just make yourself throw up like this . . . and you will feel better.
Sour cherries stomach. Stained pits.
“I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire,” Barthes proclaims of his conquests, like a spoiled brat, always a mama’s boy, inserting her into all of his affairs with an insistence that he mattered more in rejection than in acceptance, because the thrill of the chase held his interest like a rascal aiming for birds with a slingshot.
× × × ×
Sarah, Matt, and I are what they call in China the three friends: Plum Blossom, Bamboo, and Pine Leaves—holy and noble; these hardy plants survive the winter.
Matt and I met in Seattle. He used to scurry home from cheating on his boyfriend while there was still cum on his hoodie, maybe even a variety of strands. He was a spank bank, crawling into bed with his nerdy soon-to-be-lost love. I would come out wearing only a towel from the room next to his and say hello, but we rarely talked about anything back then. We were not best friends, yet. I just happened to be this fast girl that his roommate brought home. Matt thought that I was full of sass and freedom, so free that I constantly forgot to put my clothes back on after having sex with J and only managed to wrap up in a soiled towel to use their bathroom.
J was my only boyfriend to have shared his sexual abuse history with me. We had the same knotholes. He shrunk, and he shrunk like Alice instead of taking his shame out on women. I spent many nights in his room trying to console him, trying to get him to stop shaking, then helping him have sex with a steady hand and eye contact after he confessed that maybe he can’t, but really, really wants to, because his dad had molested him. He’s all liquid, inside and out. I fuck him back to solid form.
I keep doing this after we fly out to visit J’s parents and hang around listening to Simon & Garfunkel in his old bedroom where he used to go soft before we met, where I kept his secret as promised and nodded to his dad when he asked me if I want seconds of dinner, but tried to never look him square in the eyes. I then made his son feel better again because he can finally get it up, because he finally got this out into a safe deposit of a girl.
Maybe he was sprouting glossy fresh leaves on dead wood, but did he know how I liked to fuck? Not like the giving tree. Not like the giving tree at the end of the children’s book. Not like the giving tree in the children’s book in his childhood bedroom where his dad hurt him and now sits in the living room watching Letterman.
Matt thinks he knows how I like it. Maybe
this guy or that girl thinks they know. Sometimes they were strangers and sometimes they were old customers at the peep show and sometimes they were friends, but rarely were they people with whom I was intimate who asked how I wanted to be touched, or knew what to do with me.
“I thought you were more of a whips-and-chains-dominant type. You probably rule in bed and spank your boyfriends,” an old friend wonders aloud, and then tells me that she loves pulling a cucumber out of her fridge and maybe finding a hole for it. She makes a fiddling gesture with her hand and says that she likes it when her husband cums inside her. “No, no, no.” I shake my head and make my mouth stretch hard against the O sound. We both laugh because I am overly direct, yet still a bit of a prude in her eyes. I can see the things that grow in the ground and how they go in the fridge and then my friend’s face as she cums safely in her bed with the man she loves. I’m grateful for a new schema to internalize.
Matt, Sarah, and I go to Seattle. At home I leave behind these small children, ever-growing, unlike fruit in a basket. It seems like they go all over the house as they please, as they should—diapers get full during meals, diapers come off behind the couch. I get to watch them, smell them, and wipe them, and that’s a blessing that they can do this near me, instead of in a rape field. I drive away with my two best friends to Seattle to party, to temporarily not wipe them while my husband does double duty.
We call this trip, which we have taken many times before, The Boner Jams tour. Like hot guys tour as bands of boners, we tour as those who would jam these boners, who listen to these boners jam, who collect stories about hot boners—our own tour. We are boy-crazy and love rock ’n’ roll. It’s a weekend of satire. Matt and Sarah are single and can flirt with boys without much drama as we visit our friends up and down the I-5 corridor, always Olympia, always Seattle.
I can only look, and so I only look. Maybe kick the can down the road. I visit old boners. My old boneyard. The harem of my ex-boyfriends scattered like the contents of an urn along I-5. Bars, bars, bars. I meet their new girlfriends. They tell me about the breakups and I listen to their new plans. I meet their fiancées, who tell me about managing the brewing wedding chaos.
I want to cum, but the TV is on, and bridges over troubled water, and the giving tree, and the mango tree, and cucumber seeds, and pulp, and ripe, and dirty hoodie, and greasy omelet, and hole in my back, and at least they had each other, and cut-out tongue, and sticky hands, and my son’s empty orange bowl, and I’m looking and looking, and the bone yard, and it’s back to that tree on the radio.
XXXV
The national anthem used to blast from the mounted radio every Monday morning at 6:00 a.m. at my father’s Leningrad apartment. I fell asleep to that radio, one state-run channel that went to dead air at midnight. It was ostensibly my alarm clock and parent to get me up for the long commute to boarding school.
I will listen to the radio when I arrive in America and Prince eggs my right hand on to slide inside my pants. I stop turning it on for years. After Mike and I are married he flips on NPR every morning while making oatmeal and it becomes my habit, too. I will listen to the radio while cooking breakfast for my kids. I like to play this game of chance and switch around channels on my old Volvo’s stereo with the rickety tape deck. I mute it every time the words rape and murder are uttered if the kids are in the car, then hold my breath temporarily, hoping I didn’t traumatize them, but still needing to know the whole story. While I pop a Quasi, KARP, or Bikini Kill tape in to distract them I mumble the details about the segment, so I can look it up as soon as we get home. How many ways can it really end?
Whenever men sing love songs to women on the radio I don’t think they are for me. I picture myself as the guy and I’m speaking directly to my mother. If the lyrics seem sexual I bypass those words by humming and concentrate on the need, the want, the chase, the absence, the raw and base desire to be one with another. This has nothing to do with fucking. It’s about symbiosis.
Before loneliness will break my heart, send me a postcard, darling. How can I make you understand, I wanna be your woman.
Sappho was a lyre player, a singer, an accomplished musician who was summoned to serenade important weddings and grand parties. She ran a boarding school for girls and threw elaborate graduation parties to see them off on their new journeys as artists, philosophers, and musicians. She sang freely about women and love because in her time platonic relationships were celebrated as much as sexual bonds.
Your basic hot rock star.
Out of sheer necessity—being called a slut by girls who didn’t realize we were provoked into a dogfight, bets placed, nothing to be gained—I would evoke my own rock stars. Women had already lost watching the Rolling Stones instead of being them. Who would sing about women like my mom? Why aren’t there like five thousand songs about heartbreak over your drunk mother, instead of dumb boys and breakups? What if that’s the real reason your heart hurts?
How come there aren’t more songs about losing your girlhood to a nasty troll? Or more sad songs about losing your best friend for the first, second, third time to a pack of piranhas who play guitar, tell you to take it easy, and never call you back?
× × × ×
In Olympia, the riot grrrl movement asked us to share our skills, reassured us that there is enough shiny stuff, enough ephemera and magic, for all to go around. That we should puke it out if we are nervous but get up there anyway and take our shirts off in the pit when we get sweaty at that show. Radical honesty and vulnerability in art were not only genuine acts of revolt, but also served up a tongue-in-cheek posturing and agitating tool that was pleasurable and political, a teasing, bratty kind of taunting, a deadly serious game of hide-and-seek.
Olympia is where I met Penny Arcade—the woman with the heaviest swinging balls of steel—when she came to the Capitol Theater to perform her Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! show. I ran backstage immediately after she sang, danced, and monologued through a skin-peeling performance and found her gathering up her props, sweaty. As a typical New Yorker, she had her belongings stuffed in a white plastic grocery bag, which dangled on her right wrist and now swayed back and forth with my sobs like a buoy out at sea as she held both of my hands. I found my place with her in that moment, unspeakable. And then I immediately ran away. I went home and fell asleep in the middle of the day, seasick from becoming known so wholly for once.
A mother by proxy to many lost girls already, Penny didn’t kiss ass or hold back her tongue; mercilessly candid rather than odious, she made art alongside the Warhol crowd, the 1970s punk scene, the gay liberation movement, and the various junctures of feminism. A goddess to girls who walk around with a scrim of missing with a capital M, not just a certain someone, but a life less stiff, organized into neat piles of success and failure. That was longing we were experiencing, not nostalgia, said Penny. We don’t ache for an imagined utopia, but are livid over the theft of our friends, identities, cities. We are allowed our anger over this lost pavement, the scrubbing out of the families we made away from our own. That urbanity is to be worshipped, because we runaways want to be stacked and slapped together while having the solitude and space to reinvent ourselves outside of claustrophobic homes built by anxious immigrant strivers. Maybe we are staring at and dwelling on a sinkhole where we think our vanished people might be, where our cities might be, but Penny is unsparing in her approach; her lack of nuance is refreshing. She’ll give you the belt, buckle side out. Through much loss she recognized that we can choose interdependence without the masks, our mourning within the collective. You can’t break off her pointed finger, you can’t balance and meditate and belly-breathe her out.
She birthed the hot feminist artist, the conundrum of the Valley girl genius, the one who doesn’t fit into what’s considered smart or understated—she wants to crack jokes about French feminist literature and smoke weed and have sex and demand to come first and then take up space in a way that keeps flipping what brainy women are allowed to do and look like
on its head. She is sad in her valor, refuses to wipe noses. I’m thinking of Chris Kraus being called an egghead intellectual, a soft-boiled critic, of Chris herself, calling Native Agents, which she edits, “the dumb cunt” imprint of Semiotext(e). I’m thinking Karen Finley here. You accused the megaphone of whining, but it’s catcalling you back, baby. This girl-woman with sometimes “fake” bravado and the stains of thrown tomatoes on her see-through dress reinvented and launched by fourth-wave feminism—the movement of my youth—to live on in the literature of the future. The motherless future, the auxiliary mothers future.
× × × ×
Amy Fisher is being pushed and pulled through the crowds in handcuffs. Her long, wild, wavy hair is draped like a curtain of shame in front of her face. Her baggy white T-shirt is tucked into light-blue frayed cutoff jean shorts. Amy is walking very fast and it’s sunny and breezy outside. The wind forces her shirt to cling to her barely-there breasts. The hair in front of her face makes it hard for her to see where she is going and so she holds her knees together like a grasshopper and leans back as she moves rapidly toward the courthouse where they will sentence her to jail time longer than they would ever consider cumulatively giving to all the men who paid money to fuck a child, or took money as a pimp and lover of a child.
Valerie Solanas thought Andy already had the guns and the bullets and the army and the horses and the whole damn war room. She was the smart coward who didn’t bother challenging him to an actual duel. The lesbian prostitute writer, excluded by the girls she wished badly to impress in Andy Warhol’s glamour art army, shoots the general. She was pushed around and laughed at because she was ridiculous, power hungry, and yearning for the undying affections of all of these hot and stoned girls she wished to mobilize. She was ridiculous because she wanted to be Andy Warhol, and there was no other desirable script, no Valerie Solanas yet to be.
Mother Winter Page 13