The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  In the space of one month my mailbox presented me with letters exactly like the ones that had come to my home in Florida when I longed to swim to college. Only this time I was the only one who would read these letters, an adult woman who had put something of her busted up self straight no chaser into the world. They came one at a time -white and geometric and smelling of something like what if.

  I was accepted into Columbia University.

  I was offered the teaching job.

  I was awarded a $3,000 grant for my story.

  And I won the Writer’s Exchange prize.

  All in the same month.

  NOTHING in my life had ever happened to me like that. And most likely never will. Like the sea of my life waters had opened up. Like my wounds had something in them besides hurt.

  Me being me, I chose the job over the MFA. This is important - the MFA was what I wanted more than anything. You have no idea. With all my broken little heart. But I couldn’t choose it. I had to survive, is what I chose. I had to take care of myself. No one else would. And so I swallowed the desire to name myself as a writer who would go to Columbia. Like the swimmer who couldn’t go to Columbia, either.

  I took the grant money and bought a car. I wanted to go to Paris but I bought a car instead. A reliable car to get to and from work. I didn’t take myself out to dinner, I didn’t buy myself champagne, I didn’t eat chocolate.

  Thank god the go to New York Writer’s Exchange prize didn’t have a practical alternative for self destructive people or I would have let that go, too. Almost in spite of myself then, I went to New York. Where the writers are.

  The “prize” of winning a Writer’s Exchange grant from Poets and Writers is that you go from one state to another - in my case, Oregon to NYC. You get to choose writers you’d most like to meet and the Poets and Writers folks try very hard to arrange meetings. You get to give a reading at the National Poetry Club, you get to stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel and drink scotch into the night with smart cool people as if you are one too, you get to meet editors and publishers and writers and agents at very fancy lunches and dinners. How fancy? I kept the napkins and receipt scraps. From 1996.

  The person who judged the contest on the fiction side of things was Carol Maso. I only entered because of her. Her writing was considered “experimental.” “Innovative.” “Heterodox.” All I know is that her weird made my weird feel better. The writers I wanted to meet were Lynn Tillman, Peggy Phelan, and Eurydice. I don’t know if you know them like I do, but to me they were the intellectual shit. I didn’t actually think it would happen, I just got drunk, wrote the names down on the form they sent, laughed, farted, and mailed it back to them. I remember thinking, fat chance. My ass. But Frazier Russell collected them all. This is how four of the most humble happy nights of my entire life happened to me. Dinners that cost more than my rent. Food that tasted so good I thought I might faint. Wine that made your teeth melt. And women so intelligent, so creative, so gorgeous and present in their own minds and bodies … I mean I nearly barfed, piddled, and orgasmed all at the same time. Fuck heaven. Puny cloud lie. These women were the loves of my brain life.

  These four women wrote unconventionally. Intentionally unconventionally. Wildly, passionately, blood-bodied, unapologetically blowing up the house of language from the inside out, unconventionally. And all four of them insisted on the body as content. They were not mainstream writers. They were carving out astonishing paths of their own quite to the side of mainstream, quite in spite of the stupid mainstream, maybe the way water cut the grand canyon. I wanted my writing to go like theirs. Follow it. I felt like their writing had parted the seas for people like me.

  I can’t tell you how many times I choked up talking to each of these women. Looking into their eyes. Trying to see an I. I don’t think I said much. It’s possible I went mute. It’s hard to remember anything about me. Though I remember nearly every word each of them said. Of this I am sure: I was never as … happy.

  More magic happened on that trip - there was a poet guy who traveled with me from Oregon. He’d won the poet side of the prize. Turns out, I knew him from the Eugene days. Incredibly wonderful man stunning poet named John Campbell. Among the poets he requested was Gerald Stern, who I will never forget eating and talking with because he’d dislocated his shoulder and wore this sling thing all evening - only able to gesticulate with one arm. Still, he was something. We also lunched with Billy Collins and Alfred Corn. The latter I adored. The former talked to my tits. But my poet friend also requested to go to a jazz club in place of one of his writer choices. So I got to sit about 15 feet from Hamiet Bluiett at one club and about five feet from McCoy Tyner at another. I’m pretty sure when I got back to the hotel that night my underwear was soaked to shit from glee. Thank you forever, John Campbell.

  What an opportunity, huh? Oregon writers in the big city. Still makes me smile and get a piss shiver remembering it.

  But there is a bittersweet in my throat too. A small stone I carry there. The small stone of sad that came from my inability to say yes. I was taken to meet an editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. He talked to me about my life as a swimmer, and he suggested I had a nonfiction book in me about my swimmer’s life. I don’t know, say, like a memoir. I stood there like a numb idiot smiling and shaking my head with my arms crossed over my tits. He waited for me to jump at his suggestion. Nothing nothing nothing came out of my throat. He shook my hand and wished me luck. He gave me some free books.

  I sat at dinner between Lynn Tillman and the beloved W. W. Norton Editor Carol Houck Smith - who sadly has since died - while Lynne tried to convince Carol to publish me at Norton. Carol Houck Smith, who leaned over and said well then send me something. Her bright fierce little eyes staring right through my know nothing skull. Most people would have stepped off the plane back in Oregon and run to the post office. It took me over a decade to even imagine putting something in an envelope and licking it.

  After the reading at the National Poetry Club, the agent Katherine Kidde from then Kidde, Hoyt and Piccard came up to me and asked me if I’d like representation. On the spot. My small sad throat stone. I went deaf and smiled and shook her hand. I thought I might cry in front of all the dressed up people. All that came out of my mouth was “I don’t know.”

  She said, “OK then.”

  All those open hands held out to me.

  You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests.

  I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect.

  I didn’t even think, be a writer.

  Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

  If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.

  I knew even on the plane back to the west as the evergreens and rivers came back into view through the perfect drizzle of home that if I was a woman writer, then I was a broken kind of woman writer. I drank many tiny bottles of airplane feel sorry for yourself. I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, with only a head and heartful of beautiful memories about what it would be like to be a writer, since I’d eaten with them and shared such perfect company. It was the only prize I allowed myself.

  But something in me had been born, still.

  Dreaming in Women

  SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a
blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.

  With Marguerite Duras, you must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city - foreign to you - foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. Lose your name and your language. Lose your identity moorings. Lose your very thoughts. There must be shutters on the tall slightly open windows. The room must be blue. The floor made of stone. You must be naked. Her breath a whisper against your skin. Up the length of your body. Down. You must listen for the sounds of the city moving all around you. You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion. And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover’s skin stories over you. At night, it will rain. Open the windows. Desire wets. There is no inside out but the body. Love unto death.

  With Gertrude Stein there will be eating and paper. Tea and money. She will say it gracefully. She will say it with ice-cream. Eating and paper. A flesh circle. So kind. And then again again.

  Make quiet for Emily Dickinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it.

  In the next room H. D. has brought the walls down, but look how the light dances across the floor of things differently now. Even your feet are new.

  With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.

  Jean Rhys came through the vast corpus of literature like water cutting canyon.

  Adrienne Rich went down into the depths ahead of you. Her dive brought the possibility of language up to your surface. Breathe. And understand the broad shoulders you are standing on to reach the air. Take these objects.

  With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and with whom, when to pick up a rifle.

  Jeanette Winterson will make a small thing enormous as the cosmos.

  Toni Morrison will let you cry home the passage.

  Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything.

  With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night.

  When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong.

  Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling.

  With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless.

  I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

  I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

  V. The Other Side of Drowning

  Run On

  IT’S YOUR SECOND EX-HUSBAND’S BIRTHDAY, YOU KNOW, the one you divorced because he slept with not one but about five gazillion different women, and he calls you at 2:00 a.m. all drunk from Paris where you two used to rent apartments and make art because it’s his birthday and he tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 - By the way, I’m switching to second person because if I say “I,” in your head you’ll just picture Heather Locklear or something so-YOU. You are 37 on your way to the big 4-0. You are divorced for the sad sad second time. You are in SoCal. Living alone. Making sure your blonde is blonde. Waxed.

  So your second ex-husband calls on his birthday and tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 and that they’ve tattooed their ring fingers together and she looks so much like you and acts so much like you and smells so much like you at 23 so you calmly hang up the phone and glimpse the 37 year old skin of your own hand and walk to your writing desk and open the drunk drawer and pull out the bottle and drink an entire bottle of scotch in the middle of the night and drive your car out onto the six northbound lanes of the freeway in SoCal where you now live due to your great new job as the Visiting Writer because you did the strong thing and left him because you didn’t want to be an enabler and so forth and you wanted to rise above it and get on with your life so there you are on this freeway in SoCal in a red car with your blonde hair and your black dress and your stiletto heels to prove to yourself that you are still attractive like a fucking advertisement for Black Velvet and wait a minute, what’s that shiny you see some pretty lights to the right twinkle twinkle little star and WOOSH you are cutting tracks through the thick ice plant between southbound and northbound freeway lanes at 90 literally carving through them with scars that will last weeks and be on the nightly news and spinning out big time and coming to a smoky stop - miraculously - pointed in the right direction in the southbound lanes.

  You know what to do. You floor it. Laughing that maniacal laugh of a 37 year old divorced woman who should be dead but isn’t.

  A little soggy voice in your head goes take the next exit ramp and get your drunk ass home which you see as if you are looking through water up ahead you take it and you let go of the steering wheel like your hands are floating away from things until BAM you drive head-on into another car and your airbags deploy like two enormous fatty sagging breasts and the police come and you are sauced beyond belief and everything smells a little like gunpowder and scotch and it’s ma’am get out of the car and ma’am stand on one foot and count backwards from 100 with your eyes closed and with this stick up your ass and balancing an egg on your left tit and what else?

  You are cuffed and breathalyzed. You blow a number out of orbit. Don’t even try. You are so beyond the legal limit you could power a car. Gimme a D to the U to the I. Oh and in case you were feeling any shred of hotness left in your bones, when you look pleadingly into the young male cop’s rearview on the car ride to the facility and say, couldn’t you just take me home? With what you think are pout lips and bed blond hair, he looks back at you with - you guessed it - woman, you are old as shit pity in his eyes.

  Inside the jail the rerun begins. The first thing that happens that has already happened is that you are inside. You have been in jail before. You have a record. Not very many people know that since you look exactly like a Visiting Writer and anyhow you have always been a snappy dresser.

  The second thing that happens that has already happened is there is another woman in the holding cell who is going through heroin withdrawal. She’s drooling and she’s in a tight ball arms choking knees and she’s banging her head back against the wall and spitting about every eight seconds. Your left arm aches. Your feet go numb. You go sit next to her. You look a little bit like a martyr-ish crappy-ass too white benevolent Visiting Writer on the outside but what’s not visible to the naked eye is that you haven’t been clean all that many years, which suddenly has shrunken to the size of a human head. Weren’t you getting a little cocky about it too, your beautiful recovery, your distancing yourself
from yourselfstory.

  Which takes you to the third thing that happens over again which is how quickly you become the Universal Caretaker when YOU are the sorry ass loser who needs the HELP, giving your socks to the black woman on welfare and holding the hand of the lumpy 50-year old woman who is actually maybe 28. You find yourself dialing the number of the boyfriend of the crack queen with the Alice Cooper mascara drool face. No really, you are on the payphone calling for her even though she has choke bruises around her neck, she begs you to call him so you do, you intervene, you become an objective outside resource, you tell him to call and drop the charges so she can get out since it is so obvious that he has abused her and later in life she will have one helluvuh case, one in which you will be a witness of course, watch out guy, you teach Women’s Studies, and he proceeds to describe to you what she did to his living room and his cat and his motorcycle with a baseball bat and the house on fire before he calls you a fucking cunt whore ignorant bitch and hangs up.

  Undeterred, you find yourself calling the guard to get the fat woman some Tylenol as you listen to the Christian chick with a silk scarf and a screw loose self-narrating her experience with the guy from the hotel bar who she believed was there for the Jesus on Ice convention. All of this activity suddenly takes its psychosomatic toll on you and your morning after green puke bellied nasty kicks in and you realize with a kind of brick to the lower spine feeling that you have to take an enormous scotch shit. Which you take, of course, in front of everyone, like cons have to, no matter how much the outfit they are wearing costs, no matter how beautiful a martyr they make, no matter how pretty the letters Ph.D. look after your dumb ass Visiting Writer name, you still have to shit in the presence of a crowd.