The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Weird, huh.

  You close your eyes.

  You breathe.

  You are not sorry yet for what you have done.

  You are simply an incarcerated woman.

  Remorse, she came later. Lemme throw it into reverse.

  Let me tell you who I hit.

  Collision as Metaphor

  THE PERSON I HIT IN MY HEAD-ON COLLISION WAS A 5’ tall brown skinned woman.

  In the moment, this did not upset me. In the moment, I was drunk as a monkey, and so the entire scene that night looked a little like things were in slow motion and smeared over with Vaseline. And at a tremendous distance from my heart and whatever it might have said. Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas. Everything just looks blurry.

  My airbags deployed. Pow. If you have never had that experience, it’s quite something. It’s loud. Like gunshot loud. And everything smells like dynamite. If you were holding the steering wheel with both hands, your arms get heat and friction burns on the insides. Your head, because it didn’t hit the windshield, smashes face first into the Michelin Man surface of the airbag; then your head jets back and knocks your noggin against the headrest. Afterwards, you just sort of sit there and wait for the dust to settle and your brains to recollect themselves. It helps to close your eyes and wait for everything to stop moving.

  The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned woman who had no English.

  I know that she had no English because, after I sat there trying to feel whether or not anything was broken or searing me with pain - which it wasn’t, particularly since I had anesthetized myself with the bottle of scotch - I opened my car door and looked around. My car, a red Toyota Corolla, was weirdly angled and had its face smashed in. Her car, a white … I’m not sure - it looked something like those old Gremlins - her car was smashed in on the left side all the way up to the windshield. Something warm and metallic filled my mouth. I’d bitten my tongue. I saw the woman sitting on the guard rail, crying, saying things I didn’t understand. Her hair was more black than the night around us. She had a lump the size of a golf ball on her forehead. No airbag. Her skirt was white and billowed out at times.

  The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English.

  How I knew the woman carried life in her gut is that her belly had the unmistakable mound of a child. Six, possibly seven months of child mound. At the time, this did not alarm me; as I said, I had the sensitivity of a drunk. Though I did feel a prickle of something far far inside my abdomen. I sat down next to her. She began to wail and hold her belly. I said, “Are you in pain?” She did not look at me or answer. Dumbly, I put my arm around her shoulders. I have no idea why she let me do that. She rocked. Inconsolably.

  I didn’t feel anything. No, literally. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, my ass. I couldn’t feel my own face.

  The woman fumbled in her skirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I thought perhaps she was fingering 911, but she was not. I could see she was trying to dial a number. Someone she knew. Someone to help. I couldn’t manage my own cell phone. I looked at it in my hand. I couldn’t see any numbers, or how to activate the thing. It sat like a dead rodent. I noticed I smelled faintly of piss.

  I don’t know how long we sat there. The sound of cars whizzing by comforted me. After a while three cop cars and an ambulance showed up. I remember the sound of sirens trying to out-do one another. The cops blocked off the bit of road we were on - the overpass between north and southbound lanes. I cupped my ears with my hands. I remember the red white and blue lights flashing all around us. Something about the swirls of color looked like we were inside an underwater scene.

  The cops immediately separated us. Her, they took over to the ambulance. Me, they asked me if I felt OK and I replied with a quite obviously soggy yes. They had a paramedic come over and “check me out” but no one was very worried about me since I could walk and talk. I hadn’t a bruise or bump or cut on me, other than the airbag burns on my inner arms. My distinguishing characteristic: shit-faced. The emotions all went in the direction of the pregnant woman and her unborn child. Except mine. Mine floated toward nothingness.

  While the cop put me through my paces, nearly all of which I failed in that ever so slight way that is inevitable given the amount I’d consumed, I thought of my mother. Literally - when the cop had me close my eyes and attempt that finger to the nose thing? I saw my mother’s face. Puffy with drink and covered in sadness … not a maternal, Madonna sadness. A sadness made from joy being siphoned from your life a year at a time.

  I have a photo of my mother when she was a girl. It was between leg and hip operations. In this photo she was not in a body cast. It was probably taken a few years before my grandmother divorced my grandfather for molesting my mother’s sisters. She looks to be about 13. It is the sweetest girl face you have ever seen, but something in the tilt of her head, something in the lowered gaze, you can already see the sadness in her.

  I know this isn’t true, but in some ways, I can see the woman who would pick up a bottle of vodka and never put it down. I can see the bottle of sleeping pills. The marriage that went so horribly wrong, and still she couldn’t leave. I can see the mother whose children drifted so quickly away from her like fish cut loose. I can see the Cancer that came to the rescue, for as her sister said to me shortly before she died, “Every day of her sweet life she was in pain, of one sort or another. At least now she’ll have peace.”

  Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman? Mother?

  I cannot see in her face that her children gave her joy, though she said that to me the week before she died, and I thought, looking at her milk white shrunken body, almost the body of a girl, how?

  When the cop hand cuffed me and told me to sit in the back of his copmobile I was glad. Inside his car it was quiet. It smelled like air freshener and leather. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, very far away inside me, I felt a tiny pang of pain for the woman I’d hit and what was in her belly. But it was too much for me, so I opened my eyes and watched the cop write things down on a small clipboard instead.

  Briefly and without any drama I wished I was dead. But there were no other emotions or thoughts accompanying that. It just sat there like me in the back seat of a cop car, flat and plain and unevolved. Then he was driving me away from the scene to the station to be breathalyzed.

  In my head way back at the base of my skull near the top of my spinal cord I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t, did I?

  Mean to?

  The night stretched out long like it does when you fuck up. It’s like a night that lasts a year. Or like all the years of your life are suddenly in your lap, wailing like needy children. You can’t take care of all of them. You don’t even want to. You want to abandon each yearchild on the side of the road and bolt. I am not your mother.

  After the autopsy of my baby girl, a doctor told me in his office, “There is nothing conclusive to associate with her death. The cord was not around her neck, and there were no identifiable physical problems of any sort. Here is a copy of the autopsy report. I’m sorry. Sometimes this happens, and there is no explanation.” I stared at the white wall behind his head. He handed me a form that encouraged me to attend a special group therapy for parents whose babies died.

  When I left his office, I went into the clinic bathroom. I pulled my pants down and peed. I kept sitting there. Then I began to shred the white form he’d given to me into tiny pieces of paper, and I ate them, crying without a sound.

  The person I hit was a brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English. She sat on the dirty silver guardrail and cried. I watched her shoulders shake. She buried her face in her hands
. She said words I didn’t know into her own palms. She held her belly and rocked and wept. When they took me away I was so relieved I almost thanked the cops-strange saviors. In my head I thought take me away from this woman. I can’t be near her. I can’t look at her. I can’t even accept that she exists. The image of a grieving mother is one that could kill me.

  How to Love Your Mother After She’s Dead

  I FIRST MET MY MOTHER WHEN SHE WAS BORN WITH one leg more than six inches shorter than the other. A scar running kid-eye high up the length of her outer leg. From knee to hip. Stretching upward like wide pearled and waxen tracks. The eyes of a child fix on things. In the mornings while she dressed I would put my face so close to it I could feel my eyes shiver.

  I first met my mother when I was born cesarean. Babies wouldn’t fit through the tilt of her hips and birth canal without their skulls caving in. When they reached in to slice the caul - that amniotic membrane between her body and mine-my eyes were already open.

  I first met my mother in her childhood. In the operating rooms and hospitals that were her home for years and years. Inside the body casts. Next to the ridicule of hordes of gremlin children. Hobbling atop a shoe with a four inch wooden block attached.

  I first met my mother the day my father threw a fist intimately close to her head just missing her cheekbone and instead opened up a gaping mouth in the kitchen wall that stayed like that for years.

  I first met my mother the day my father’s mother said in her presence, “I don’t know why you had to marry a cripple.”

  I first met my mother when she told me the only man who ever loved her right was gay, and he died “a death that laid waste to his body, Belle.” Before anyone knew what AIDS was.

  I first met my mother the day she told me she could see things that weren’t there, except that they were, like armies crossing the freeway at night, like sea serpents over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, like a UFO in the sky above her house in Port Arthur, Texas, like rabid poodles in the pear tree of our house at Stinson Beach. I was 12.

  I first met my mother the night I had to wipe her smear of a 55-year old self off of the casino floor in Biloxi, Mississippi. The skin of her face was as soft and pelted as a baby’s head.

  I first met my mother the night before my first of three marriages, when she turned to me and said, I almost married a rodeo man. His name was J.T. The next morning at my wedding, out on a beach in Corpus Christi, in the stage of menopause wherein your periods go nuts, she bled, a giant red wound blooming behind her if she’d been shot in the ass.

  I first met my mother inside the fury of our arguments - matching each other’s rage all through my puberty and her middle age, how strangely glorious her never backing down, no one ever winning, just two women’s voices like claps of thunder drowning out the world.

  I first met my mother inside her lifelong leg and hip pain. Underneath the arm length scar where a steel plate masqueraded as bone. A body in pain for the duration of a life. Every hour of existence.

  I first met my mother when she signed the scholarship papers setting me free.

  I first met my mother her singing I see the moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees everyone I want to see, god bless the moon, and god bless me, and god bless everyone I want to see. Her voice carrying me to dream. The weight of father lifting, lifting.

  If I close my eyes I can see her.

  I remember the first time I saw her swim, joining me in the deep water, leaving my father standing impotently in chest high water. How powerful her sidestroke. The joy in her face. How beautiful the gleaming white skin of her arms. The long glide of her. The water swallowing the fact of her pain, her marriage, her leg.

  My mother loved to swim more than anyone I know.

  Swan.

  Your Tax Dollars At Work

  Ernesto

  Alejo

  Angel

  Manuel

  Rick

  Ricardo

  Sonny

  Lebron

  Pedro

  Jimarcus

  Lidia

  Notice anything about those names?

  Six Mexicans, one Italian, one African-American, one Jamaican, one white dishonorably discharged Navy guy wound tighter than dynamite, and me. Compliments of the State of California.

  The posse. All in day-glo orange vests on the side of the freeway picking up your trash with sticks that have “grabbers” on the ends of them. At least that was one of the week’s assignments. The easiest and least humiliating. Who we were on paper:

  Breaking and Entering (but not stealing anything. ?)

  Possession

  Possession

  DUI

  Domestic Violence

  DUI

  Possession

  Driving without a License or Vehicle Registration

  Fleeing a Crime Scene and Failure to Produce Identification

  Public Intoxication and Indecent Exposure

  And a big blond

  D

  U

  I

  Doing time on a road crew in the hot asphalt and suntan lotion world of San Diego makes you feel like you are in much crappier remake of the movie Cool Hand Luke. Everybody who is tanned and glamorous - the paid for whitey pretty smiles and the paid for bleached blonde color weaves and the paid for total laser hair removal jobs and the paid for body parts - drives by you like you are ice plant or oleander. The stuff in the divider between the zipping lanes of freeway life. When cars go by your hair blows up and hot wind brushes your face. The sound of all that driving and social surface life can make you feel nuts.

  There’s no Paul Newman challenging the man. You put your trash in shitty plastic bags and when you fill one you tie it off and leave it on the side of the road and move on. You don’t get to stand around. If you stand around, officer Kyle comes over to you and reprimands you verbally. If you talk back it’s simple - you go straight to jail. But you also develop … strategies for moving as slowly as possible. Why hurry? There’s only more trash. There’s never-ending trash. And you are part of the trash - you are a trash advertisement.

  Except for dishonorably discharged Rick, who had the kind of eyes that said I WILL BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF ANYONE WHO TALKS TO ME, me and my homeboys slowly but surely got along. You’d think not, right? Some middle aged bouge blonde woman with sagging tits getting along with a bunch of SoCal thugs? Au contraire.

  People who have been to jail more than once can smell it on each other.

  Men in groups operate through a series of male codes. Movements in the hands and eyes. Stances. Verbal exchanges with triple entendres. Little challenges and invisible battles and hierarchies worked out. So I rarely spoke and I never wore make-up and I wore baggy assed pants and I made goddamn sure my labor was not that of a woman. Luckily, I have the shoulders and strength of a swimmer.

  The second week I lifted a big chunka railroad tie by myself. I hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and even though I knew my spine was crumpling up a vertebrae at a time like little wads of paper, I looked bad ass enough to be … what’s the word. A trusted body.

  I’ve never been treated less like a woman in my life. I remember telling a colleague of mine - one of the only people who knew that by day I was out there with my posse while at night I had a fancy visiting writer job teaching budding young MFAs how to make their words more wonderful and she said: “Do they say lewd things to you? Do they do anything … you know, weird around you or to you? Aren’t you scared to be around those people?” I just stared at her. I tried to picture what she pictured. A bunch of male mostly minority small time criminals - those people - and a blonde woman who … who what? Who did she believe I was? She taught World Lit. and drove a Beamer.

  Who I was. I was the convict with the best English. The day Jimarcus asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I taught English at SDSU, he laughed.

  “Hey mahn, check it out. We got a Professor with us,” he broadcasted one day when we were scraping crap off of the walls of t
he county elections office.

  A slow laugh made its way through the chests of the other men. And smiles. They’d smile like nothing you’ve ever seen before. All that dark skin opening. They slapped my back or put a hand on my shoulder and shook their heads, laughing, laughing. They laughed in a way that somehow felt good. “But you with us now, sistah?” Jimarcus would say, shaking his headful of dreads. After that they all started calling me “Doctor.” You know what they wanted? They wanted me to teach them how to talk more like everyone else. They wanted more English.

  On road crew my hands blistered so badly from hacking down sea grass with giant dull-bladed loppers near Sea World I couldn’t hold a cup of coffee.

  On road crew if there was heavy lifting my scoliosis spastic back hurt so bad when I got home every night I’d go straight to a bath and lay in it and cry.

  On road crew we spray washed graffiti and painted it over with mindless gray paint. We laid tar. We carried concrete and wood and glass away from condemned buildings. Once Rick cut his arm and punched a hole in a wall. He got extra days for that. I surmised Rick was also in anger management classes.

  Our assignments were mostly cleaning up the world so people can pretend it’s not dirty, chaotic, out of control, a giant world-sized compost heap.

  Once we cleaned toilets in day use area parks. You haven’t lived until you have to pull tampons and needles and condoms and cigarette butts out of a john. Yellow plastic gloves just don’t seem to quite make you feel better.

  I got the closest with Ernesto. Ernesto played classical guitar. I never heard him or saw him play but I watched him air guitar it when he described it. I’d ask him about it on breaks and at lunch and he’d Spanglish it out to me - what I didn’t need language for was how beautiful he looked talking about music. Or his hands. After awhile he began to ask me to translate things. A word at a time. “Dr. Lidia. What is English meterse en líos? What is English un llamamiento a la compassion?” To get into trouble. To call for compassion.