Garbage is as garbage does, the jury says of Aileen Wuornos. When I’m watching the fake rage of boys screaming in bands I think only of Aileen’s real rage. I would take away their stage and give it Aileen’s familiar anger instead. Her palms are red from sleeping in the snow-covered woods as a girl. On the video screen, where she now lives, Aileen raises cuffed wrists to her neck and fish guts seem to spill out onto my lap. Herring, herring everywhere, but not enough to eat.
Amy Fisher becomes a mother and writes a book about this new meaningful life as a caregiver and citizen recovering from her haunting experiences of sexual and physical abuse in prison. She is hoping that family life will save her, launch her into a new realm, give her peace, make her whole again. It sounds like a postscript. Like her life had already been lived with Joey Buttafuoco and now she is healing from the grave, dirty fingernails and no soap. She’s never going to stop being involuntarily douched by the media, by us, by the memory of him.
Wounded girls—some ripped open for you to see clearly, some hidden and left in the ditches of a battlefield we don’t dare notice. After reading the headlines about the impact of Malala’s new book, I Am Malala, in the paper one Sunday morning when I am heavily pregnant with Franny I stare at the wall and imagine what it would be like to be shot in the head, and have a yearning horde of competent adults wanting to take care of you, root for you, talk about how smart and special you are—your life made precious by tragedy. It is not so for girl prostitutes, for the Amys and Aileens and Valeries. What it often takes for the world to think that girls are important is a bullet in that freedom-loving, precocious brain of yours. These would have to be the right kind of girls, though. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.
In this daydream I’m lying there, of course unconscious, as English doctors work on my injury, the beep, beep, beep of my heart steadied by a pump, but I’m really fully present, watching myself from above. This happens because I’ve read and have seen video footage of my rescue. The chemistry and the narrative of trauma are completely altered by what you are told had occurred by witnesses, and then retell in the days, months, and years after the event. That’s how you can make something up and believe it for self-preservation, or think something real is made up because it is way too much to have actually lived through.
My name is Gretel, yeah; I’ve got a sloppy slot. I am an Aileen with a father who cares to keep me alive and schooled. I am an Amy who didn’t fall in love with her daddy, her john, her pimp. I am a Valerie without more Andys to humiliate and use me. I am a mother to a girl who will stand on all of our smeared shoulders, some that can’t be brushed off. Franny will have object constancy, her own revolution, her own potty mouth, her own army.
XXXVI
Right after Franny was born, the elementary school shooting happened in Fairfield County, in Newtown, close enough to where my half-siblings live to obsess me past my limit. I watched it on the hospital television as the glue-wet baby head bobbed for the ripe apple of my tit. I was told to concentrate on my lovely, helpless child and turn away from the gruesome news of children shot like fish in a barrel. I found a way to let myself mourn when expected to be jovial.
Home with the baby I listen to the radio as always in the mornings. The news of the gang rape on the bus in India rolls through every forty-five minutes. The girl dies from severe internal injuries.
My womb is shrinking and draining itself of the blood that cushioned my daughter onto witch hazel–soaked pads I intermittently grab from the freezer. My pelvic floor muscles inverting back in like the rope of a tire swing pulled over a tree branch. The bed is a swamp again.
I leave the kitchen and walk to the laundry basket. My husband reminds me that this is my time to rest. I do not recognize the meaning of the word inside my body or mind. I reach in for tiny pink pants and my lower back seizes up and I go into spasms, flopping around on the oak floor. My back goes out in the same place where the frozen fish was once placed by my ass crack, where the wood once met the bone. I remain on the floor for days nursing Franny, padded by pillows, Mike changing out my soiled underthings.
To whom do I owe the woman I have become?
I bind my torso right before Christmas and use the wall to learn to wobble-walk again so I can make it to the toilet on my own, but mainly to be the kind of mother who wraps presents and makes a lamb roast and has friends over. A hostess who can’t pass up the chance to play against type. It’s not enough to heal and be available to my baby, I must also create an atmosphere with the smells and sounds above and beyond the nuclear family. A love buzz a pitch higher than what I had the gall to aim for in the first place. My youthful fantasies at the Kirov Ballet, not the damsel in adult diapers eating takeout on the floor with out-of-town friends excusing themselves to leave early.
Four weeks postpartum, I take my newborn to class with me in January—Elena’s month—refusing to skip a beat. I nurse Franny with the reliable left breast and take notes with my right hand. I know what I must look like: a beast. Or a woman not suited for certain public spaces. The baby spits and farts. With her gummy flesh strapped to my chest I wiggle out of my Velcro back brace to go pee, to change the giant pad. I change and reswaddle her. I bring up Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in between tending to our bodily needs, and the discussion about humor and erasure infuses my daughter’s milk. I can’t stand the silent milk of staying home.
× × × ×
Mary Ruefle, Agnes Martin, and Emily Dickinson were born to worship art only. They are born in our eyes. God knows what they really worship. Maybe it’s something that stuck in Catholic school, maybe a tree, maybe aisle five at the Goodwill before it gets picked over, maybe a special kind of off-white paint and the grids it etches into the brain and then the canvas. But that something is definitely The Voice, their own or God’s, or rather the joining of the two and the ensuing dialogue mushed together like warm stool in a diaper, the kid going down the slide, arms up in the air, ready for more at the bottom. It must come. It’s pleasant and scary and necessary.
Ruefle called her process of writing poetry having to “go pee, but in your brain.” The room where she announced this lit up at this statement. It was wonderfully childish. She was serene and sublime. She was goofy and deadpan. Naughty and nice. Poignant and casual. You want to be her to be yourself. The snakeskin found on the road might give you shelter for a while until you find your own way.
Here’s what I know: I want to be Ruefle, but my son has been accidentally soiling himself at school nonstop for at least three weeks now. Leaks everywhere. He is diagnosed with encopresis.
I tell my husband that the same thing happened to me when I was a child. “How long did it last?” he wants to know, half concerned and half unable to hear what I am about to tell him, which is that it lasted for most of my childhood. I held it all in and then I spilled it out, bit by grim-youth bit. It’s a disease, having to go like that. It’s not like having to pee very badly and it’s only in your head like for Ruefle, and bless the Lord, it’s a poem. It’s the thing that stops the poem. Encopresis trumps writing deadlines. I want to pen my own Soiled Dove Plea in defense of that smeared girl.
I break away from my writing desk again and go to the elementary school to bring my child home and shower him. He’s crusty. He’s embarrassed. He can’t seem to stop himself. I can’t write like this, not while my boy suffers. Everything smells like I’m too small to write. And in small there was death; the potential to be vaporized from the waist down.
I think poetry is in the rectal canal. I think it’s in your pelvic floor. I think it’s in your sphincter. It’s in your anal glands. Are you stretched out? Are you sore? Are you bleeding? Are you comfortable? Do you have to go? Do you know when it’s time? Are you indeed pleased with the world down there? I would rather have a knock on my head that says I gotta go, and out come the words, but I must hold words back. I want to say monstrous things, speeches I have heard in a stomach frightened like a body bag. I want to ask why, and can yo
u smell yourself and how did this happen to you, and is it because it happened to me?
Chris Kraus says, “It’s all fiction.” Once you type anything, once you say anything, make a speech, a show of yourself, it all becomes a made-up tale to tell, and all attempts at finding proof become scratchy recordings of gossip—multiple holograms.
A poem is knowing when to go, if you can. Sit up straight and deliver.
× × × ×
A guy sits next to me, too close, even though he’s far enough, at Powell’s coffee shop where I seek escape in between nursing sessions to write about conceptual art made by women. He is staring at me, staring at my piles of books. Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit is at the top of the pile. He looks like a lot of hot guys around my age who don’t give a shit; who are really deep, but would laugh at that sentiment; who smoke a ton of weed but don’t seem to get that high because they are always hovering above the smoke; who look dirty because maybe they are filthy in the sack, or “loving” in an almost too wet of a wetness when they get you into bed, or, most likely, they make you get them into your bed because they never want to try hard at anything.
And they know, they must know you are rigid and coarse and see right through them. They want the opposition for sport but expect submission. They will tame you and find your mellow side in the end. He asks me, finally, leaning in, if I’m a writer and what kind of stuff do I write, what kind of stuff do I read. I say things that I know will turn him off. I have two children. Not enough time to be magical. I’m trying to get him to go away without calling the police of my siren-blaring mouth and my eyes, onerous and slightly ridiculing when he says that he loves Rimbaud, of course.
He borrows my Ono book and gives it back too soon without a word. I say that I mostly like derivative and autofiction writing by women. I begin to fantasize that planes are landing and leaving from the bookstore and that he’s now getting on the wings. I hallucinate his departure, my static descent.
This scene here has happened to me so many times before in other coffee shops or bars or on buses or whatever public area I sit in and try to carve out my own space in the world while fearing I’m taking up too much, taking on too much. And the guy there, here, everywhere is ripping my seams open with a tiny little penknife. Can we have the envelope, please? I’m glitter spilling out. He hates the show.
As I approach forty, the number of men telling me to smile, cheer up, to not look so sad, is getting smaller. As my tits sag and the bags under my eyes point to my sagging tits and the glimmer in my eye says I have been there and done it too many times already with no variation on the theme’s outcome; the more my body and its language express a climb to an age, a woman losing the girl, the more this happens, the more invisible I will become to this guy and to the world that loves Rimbaud and tits and smart women writing alone in coffee shops so long as they look unavailable and disinterested and busy and tight, above all, tight and smelling of spring.
Above all, spring.
XXXVII
It’s around four o’clock every day when one of us must go fetch the children from school.
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Jake chants over and over at the bus stop, and jumps on me unexpectedly as I almost buckle. But I tighten my stomach where the doctors taught me to locate my core and hoist him up for a piggyback ride home. A man I frequently run into around my building asks me, in a cheerful and almost leering way, if I am the live-in nanny for the two kids he constantly sees me with.
Jake’s head is all rye. Eyes of April fields and hair of fall harvest haystacks. He studies my dark olive skin and blue-ringed eyes. He rubs my black locks between his fingers, pulling at a foreign soil. When angry, his green eyes are rock quarry swimming holes, algae rage in still waters. I pet him with the grain.
Colors have a direction and a corresponding number in eastern numerology practices. The number for green is four.
My skin is somewhere between Russia and Iran. My father was born in Azerbaijan. He was the fourth and last surviving child his mother had. There are four countries that border Azerbaijan: Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Iran. But there is an ongoing war in the region over a heavily disputed territory, so the borders shift their shape with blood and fire.
I check the “white” box for myself on our OHP application. I check the “white” box for my son on his kindergarten forms at Chapman Elementary. How can we be in the same box?
My son had a bris to honor my father’s family. And so a fragment of his manhood was removed to be nearer and dearer and cleaner for God while I looked away and bit the side of my cheek. After nursing him to sleep I went swimming in my father’s pool with all of his friends looking on in disapproval, as it was only about a week after I had given birth. I went down the pool slide with my younger half-siblings and waved at them cheerfully, chlorine and infections be damned.
Both of my children also had a baptism, because I imagined she would have wished for this. And so your grandson was dunked in a cauldron of cold water, chilly and clear like vodka.
I’m a traitor to no one because no side can have me. I could light a candle for my mother in a church, but I wasn’t taught any of those prayers. I do know the prayer to light Shabbat candles, but I shouldn’t have bitten that fruit, shouldn’t have illuminated my own empty space. There is a word for fatherlessness—bastard—but what is the word for your kind of absence, one without a grave or a phone number to call?
I am unspeakable, as Kathy Acker was unspeakable, and I ran into the fire of others, for the gleam of light is a dry psyche, wisest and best, according to Heraclitus. The ancient Greeks believed that a wet psyche, a dampness in the body from drinking alcohol, made a person useless, foolish, and an outcast within their intellectual society. Mainly, it made you lose your direction and you followed people around inappropriately without any sense.
As a displaced root system too wet to live under your muddy soil I will teach my children about exile, helping their seedlings adapt to a drier climate.
× × × ×
Numbers are a way of arranging the chaos. Anxiety pieced out. Resistance examined.
Our primitive caveman stance remains, passed down stallion to foal; mare to colt. The human that lived in constant danger of snakes and bears invading his shelter was on the kind of hypervigilant alert we have come to understand as post-traumatic stress. Man was dying of paranoia. The real monsters were so terrifying and potent in the way they haunted his waking and dream life that he created phantoms to battle, myths and stories about invented creatures and bad luck. The notion of the evil eye, that someone can cause damage just by looking at you in a harsh manner, has carried on through centuries.
All Russian children follow a superstition about wearing your clothes inside out, because if you do, you will receive a beating. Your friend should tell you right away if your seams and tags are showing and give you a symbolic punch to ward off a real one.
If an adult has an itchy nose, they will be getting drunk soon. If a child has the same itch, they will get hit on the nose.
A person eating from or licking a knife will be possessed with anger like a rabid dog.
Opened bottles must be drunk until the liquor is gone. Empty bottles cannot stay on the table or be placed on the floor. There should not be a pause between your first and second shots. Latecomers to the party should drink a large penalty glass.
We believe ourselves to be castaways, abandoned by the gods, forgotten by the muses, lost souls, and that others in our midst have the power to channel these curses onto us. That we deserve harm for thinking about naughty things. That the darkness in us will be found and punished, or that we will simply fail to be born to the right person or be at the right place at the right time. That another human can cast a spell on us. That wishing harm is equal to doing harm. That curses shall find the cursed at last. That we need to be in charge of goodbyes while we still can.
A compass is a device used to determine direction on the surface of the Earth. East and
West. North to South.
The magnetic compass, which relies on the fact that objects tend to align themselves with Earth’s magnetic field, is the most common. My children love to watch the arm dart around in circles. There are other kinds of compasses that determine direction by using the position of the sun or a star. Some use a gyroscope, because a rapidly spinning object tends to resist being turned away from the direction in which its axis is pointing.
Early compasses were shards of lodestone on a piece of wood or a reed floating in a bowl of water. It was known that lodestone attracted iron. Eventually, a needle of lodestone was pivoted on a pin fixed to the bottom of a bowl of water. When suspended in gimbals, the compass remained level and was used aboard a ship being tossed around by the ocean.
Magnet a metal. Brace a neck.
Survivors of catastrophes are like deer roaming narrow pathways with a dart in their hind leg. When my children hit or pinch me it’s like brush snagging the ends of phantom arrows. Rupturing more flesh where the meat grew around the wood.
The deer survives the predator, but it doesn’t survive the effort of running faster than itself. Even with the lion finally left behind, the deer dies from her survival, too shaken to enjoy silence, always listening for danger.
Not everyone is fit to live with silence. That’s what the protagonist in Marian Engel’s Bear tells herself upon finding solace within a cabin on an island way out north, knowing she can’t stay, reveling in the stay precisely because of the impermanence.
And you ain’t gonna get lost on an island. But you can be stranded.
A shoal is an island without a tree. A body in the water with no root system. All mud and weeds. And you ain’t gonna swim home in them winter waters, either.
Mother Winter Page 14