The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  And then again begin.

  In unending waves.

  I don’t know where my thoughts went. I only know for the first time in my life I felt everything about a body. Every day. There was nothing we didn’t do, and I felt every moment of it in shuddering pleasure. More and more my stupid tumor of a life receded.

  One night he put a blanket on the floor and told me to wait and when he came back he was a big 10 years younger than me beautiful man carrying a cello.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You play cello?”

  He played Bach. The sixth suite.

  I cried. Possibly the puniest sentence I’ve ever written.

  I cried for the force and strength of his body brought to the brink of tender in his fingers straddling the strings. I cried for the violence of hitting as it fell away into the tremor of holding a note. I cried for the man of him-the size and shape of my father - the brutality of muscle and artistic drive - brought to the cusp of such beauty. Bach. But mostly I cried because I could feel something. All over my body. Like my skin suddenly had nerve endings and synaptic firings and … pulse.

  On my birthday he bought me a Beretta 9mm FS and took me out to the desert to shoot. It’s the first time in my life I experienced “glee.” Shooting - I liked it. I liked the kickback going up my arm and shoulder. I liked the sound, drowning out thought. I liked aiming at a target - that could be anything. I shot and shot.

  When Andy Mingo entered my life, I’d walk around at my job or the grocery store or the beach or bars or parties kind of wanting to tug on someone’s shirt and say, “Um, I need to say something about men. Turns out? I was wrong. There’s something … I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something sort of … vital about them. Doesn’t that beat all?” Or I’d be mid-lecture or mid-mouthful of food or mid swim lap and think “Hey - somebody - I want to note that I’m feeling something. It feels a little like my heart is breaking. Like breaking open. Do I need medical attention? Is there a pill? What should I do?” Or I’d be in medias res lovemaking, I mean mind blowing lovewaves with this … this … man creature from another planet and think “I really, really need to go get a different degree to understand this mutual respect and compassion and fleshheartmind hunger business. A Ph.D. just doesn’t cut it. I’m quite clearly under educated. Can I speak to someone in charge?”

  The one thing I didn’t think? Drink it away. Possibly the only strong thing I’ve ever not thought.

  That’s why I say I didn’t get god. Everything I ever loved about books and music and art and beauty all became recollected in the body of the man I met who hit the bag and played the cello.

  After that we started arranging rendezvous all over town. Hungry. Frenzied.

  Did I mention he was married?

  Yeah. Well. What did you expect? I’m still me, after all.

  We met on benches at the ends of piers in San Diego where he’d make me cum with his hands down my pants at the end of a pier while tourists and seagulls and fishermen stretched out behind us. We met on the beach with the surf pounding and the sunset cliffs and one night even when I finished coming and sang my siren song a bunch of hippies in the cliff shadows put down their spliffs and gave me a standing ovation. We met in bars where we sat next to each other on red leather stools and pressed knees and shoulders and mouths together so hard I’d find bruises in the morning. With my fancy job money I bought us weekends back in Portland or San Francisco with rich people hotel rooms and room service and porn channels and 300 thread count sheets that we soiled and soiled. He said “Sometimes love is messy.”

  It’s true his almost not anymore wife chased me in her O.J. white Ford Bronco. But our lovers story isn’t the only story. Though our affair was epic. And sordid. Narrative and passion have that in common.

  There’s a story under that one.

  In addition to loaning me his car, he began driving me to and from my communist re-education drunk driver courses every night for eight weeks. Bringing me a bottle of wine or vodka on the floor of the car when he picked me up. You know, kind of like a best friend would do. A kind, sly one.

  He also drove me to and from my exhausting road crew days for eight weeks. Cooking me pasta when I couldn’t lift my arms. He went to my mandatory AA meetings with me and sat through the 12 steps and nodded and smiled in his black leather jacket all the way up until we’d get home and I’d rage rage rage at god and fathers and male authority and he’d dismantle my rage with funny jokes about jesus and monkeys.

  He treated this thing I’d done - this DUI - the dead baby- the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone - myvodka - my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.

  But there’s even a story deeper than that. After he moved out of his wifehouse and into my little one bedroom seahouse a block from the sunset cliffs in Ocean Beach, after he finished his MFA and I filed divorce papers and he filed divorce papers, after I had to go into the English Department Chair’s office and lie like a rug because his wife went in and spilled the shit, after we both bit the bullet and said the “L” word out loud, something better than sexual and emotional zenith happened. I didn’t know that was possible.

  Night. Ocean sound. In my tiny seahouse. On the sofa. Both of us scotch handed. Mazzy Star playing all night all night all night. We’d been admiring his Karma Sutra book and he’d been explaining the Tibetan Book of the Dead to me. Sexuality and death. Home run.

  He put his hand on my heart. I could feel the heat of his skin diving down into the well of me. He stared so deeply into me my breath jackknifed. I began shaking. Just from that. Then he said, knowing everything I’d told him about myself, he said, out of the blue, “I want to have a child with you.”

  .

  ?

  .

  Well you can imagine how many ways I tried to say “No.” I wanted to pick up a phone. “Um, hello, human race? Can you connect me to the dreaded relationship department? I need to say something. I’ve got this man thing over here, and well, bless his heart, this man is confused. He’s clearly mistaken me for someone else, and he needs rerouting. Different area code. Different address. Different woman. Is there a special number to call? I know. It’s crazy. He thinks he wants to have a family. Yeah. With me. Nuts, huh? So can you just, you know, give me the number to relocate him? He may need prescription medication. I can stall him for awhile, but you may want to send someone out.”

  His argument against all my fluttering resistance? One sentence. One sentence up against the mass of my crappy life mess.

  “I can see the mother in you. There is more to your story than you think.”

  The Scarlett Letter

  FOR A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE I WAS FIRED AS THE Visiting Writer at SDSU, my belly grew.

  Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me.

  My belly grew in the halls of the English Department while colleagues tried not to look at or smell my ever enormous tits and belly bulge when they spoke to me about Cultural Studies or Gender Studies or Women’s Studies. Then they stopped speaking to me at all, and simply nodded or half smiled as they passed me, like you might a mooing cow.

  My belly grew when The Chair signed a paper saying I could never work there again, and I had to sign it too, and while I signed it, instead of looking at the paper, I looked straight into her motherfucking eyes. Old bag I thought. She coughed.

  My belly grew every single class I taught, the undergraduates smirking and nudging each other’s elbows, then turning strangely loyal like beautiful little revolutionaries against the man. My belly grew each week I taught the graduate fiction writing seminar, me staring them all down one at a time until they smiled, me helping them sew the colors of their words into magnificent tapestries no matter what the judgment, them not able to sustain their disdain in the face of my unapologetic radiance.

  My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and
all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.

  And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.

  At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I’d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don’t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a sexuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali - had anyone crossed me I’d have a head necklace. I’d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I’d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don’t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I’d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I’d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man balls and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives.

  My belly grew.

  My belly carried me.

  My belly carried our love, bulging between our shit faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.

  When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers.

  My thirst to go numb began to leave my body.

  At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It’s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.

  That night after the knot tying business? We went home and staged a photo shoot. Me with a black satin ribbon tied around my neck and black satin panties in front of a deep red velvet curtain licking milk from a bowl. I don’t know why. We just did.

  God the sex we had from that photo. Big bellied sex.

  Now that, ladies, is a keeper.

  Because when love comes to someone like me? After all my black holes? You can bet your ass I’m going to grab it. I may be damaged goods, but I’m not an idiot.

  And baby, lemme tell you. I’m no Hester Prynne.

  Sun

  LIGHT.

  Life.

  Beautiful alive boy.

  The night my son Miles chose to come there was a thunderstorm. In San Diego in April a thunderstorm is a gift - as if your soul might be wetted for a moment between days of endless sun.

  When my water broke I walked barefoot in a nightgown down the street a block to the ocean. Andy was asleep in bed. My sister Brigid was asleep in the house. I cried and the ocean within me made way for this boy and the ocean before me opened up. When I got to the water I said “Lily. He’s here.” Then I walked back to the house. In bed next to my sleeping love I counted minutes. It was 5:00 a.m. The contractions felt like sentences before they are born. It is the only time in my life I have experienced a purity of happiness. Because my head was empty of anything about me. Nothing else about my life in the room. Lightning lighting up the darkness. Water everywhere.

  I’ve met many mothers whose children didn’t come right or never came at all. We are like a secret tribe of women carrying something not quite of this world.

  A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - “mizugo” - which translates loosely to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it.

  In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.

  There are no Western rituals for the water children. I am an American woman who does not believe in god. But I do believe in waters.

  The day Miles was born, Andy cradled my body through its crucible. My sister Brigid stitched love in beautiful thread around the room of us - nothing wrong could have entered her fiercely sewn world. When he came I wailed as women do for the child they have carried and brought into the world. But my wail carried another soul in its song. My Miles’ long body was brought up to my chest, the umbilical cord curling its milky grey spiral still connecting us.

  He moved.

  I felt the heat of his body.

  His little mouth made for the mound of my breast and nipple.

  So this is life.

  The first thing Miles saw when he opened his eyes was a father who let out a sound I’ve never heard before. A male sob as big as space. A father with open arms ready for his child, ready to protect him his entire life, ready to love him above anything, ready to be the path of a man before him and hold his hand until the boy goes to man. A father who had no father himself rewriting the story.

  My sister came to us and embraced the three-bodied organism. I do not know what she felt but her face is the word for it.

  In my belly, before he was born, Miles swam. Back and forth and around and flip turns and kicks and such movement - so alive - watching the taught skin of my belly was a little alarming. The force of him took my breath away. And yet we felt inseparable. His body was my body was his was mine. When I went swimming with Miles in my belly, which I did often, people in the lap lanes would marvel at how I could be so fast. So big, so round, so breasted - but fast. But I knew a secret that they did not. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

  It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.

  In the Company of Men

  THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father. My father fractured the hearts of all the women in our home with his rage. And so when I go back through and think about the men I have loved, or thought I loved, it is with a split apart heart. If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry.

  Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don’t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can’t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life.

  The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them … something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a flask and walked up to the glass window and lifted my shirt up and pressed my bare tits up against the glass and knocked. Phillip turned and laughed, pointed. Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked.

  Michael. My father’s name.

  Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in his early twenties?
Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas?

  I didn’t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael.

  There is so much I didn’t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women.

  I didn’t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean’s house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child - warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice - with no father to smash it apart.

  I didn’t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew.

  I didn’t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be … pretty.

  Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record album recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.

  Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in.