The Chronology of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us.

  After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.”

  I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that.

  When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish of a child.

  I called Mike in Seattle from San Diego to tell him about my man situation. I didn’t call my mother, or my sister, or my father, or any woman friend. I called Michael. I called to tell him that I thought I had fallen in love with a man who was not yet untangled from a marriage gone bad. That the man was younger than me. A lot. That the man was big and beautiful and played the cello and could beat the crap out of pretty much anything. That the man had lived in Spain and witnessed some ETA stuff and that the man had interviewed people from Earth Liberation Front and that the man kissed me so hard in Tijuana I thought I’d swallowed my teeth. That the man was my student. All things that ought to have made another kind of friend go, Lidia, you are making a mess. But you know what Mike said? He said, “Jesus. Thank god you finally got with someone whose story can keep up with yours!” Then he said, “We’re going out of town for a week. You should come house-sit and bring this guy up.”

  I did.

  Our son Miles, my beautiful alive boy, was conceived in Michael’s house. In Mike and Dean’s bed. On the 600 count twill sheets. With Jake the dog loyally guarding our love. In his house, the only house I ever felt the word “home” in my heart, a boy was born.

  In my head and heart I carry so many images of Mike and Dean. Me and Mike on the floor of a Baptist church at midnight, Dean playing Bach on the church organ. Me and Mike and Dean stripped to our underwear, running into the ocean on the Oregon coast. In December. Eating a Christmas rabbit with olives and capers that Andy and Mike cooked - snuggled up in Italy - me and Dean filling our mouths with more than food. Mike and Dean opening the door when I sent my sister to them - my sister whose lost tenure had manifested as a nervous breakdown - how they said, “You can come in.” How they let her live with them until her self returned. Miles and Mike and Dean and Andy on top of the Space Needle. My god. How many ways are there to love men? It’s enough to break a heart open.

  The images in my head and heart. I know what they are. I do. They are a family album. It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.

  A Sanctuary

  THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE miles.

  When my son Miles was born we drove from San Diego to a place near Portland, Oregon. I’d been fired in San Diego and miraculously rehired in Oregon - back toward what I knew, and what Andy knew, the Northwest. Andy drove a U-Haul, and my dear friend Virginia and I drove a used Saab with Miles gurgling and pooing his pants in the back like a little road warrior.

  Virginia. Everything that matters to me is a word. Slowly this woman grew in my life, a beautiful wetted stone turned over years. First she was my student, then my friend, then nothing I’d ever met before. Virginia became a friend who stayed near. She showed me intimacy is a word untethered from sexuality. Unconditionally, I drank.

  The Saab broke down in Weed - yes, Weed, and Virginia and I sort of paced on the side of the road thinking, will he look in the rearview and notice we’re gone? Will this man drive all the way to Oregon? No bars on the little cell of a bitch. We weren’t scared, women like the two of us? That would not scare us. We’d have been excellent pioneers. Like Becky Boone.

  But he did notice, because he’s that kind of guy, and within 20 minutes here came the U-Haul on the freeway coming our direction. Then we all had to cram in the weird front space of the U-Haul and pretend we didn’t have an infant stashed between the seats by the gearshift and cigarettes. Virginia and I sharing the passenger seat, our butts making sweat marks on the strange Burbury. We abandoned the Saab on the side of the road. Marking our exit like a scar.

  When we got to Oregon Miles and I took a bath at a Holiday Inn. He lay against me, his back against my tits and stomach, his little monkey face smiling in between spit bubbles, and his arms and legs floating easily. I have a picture of us like that. My tits are as big as a human head, so it looks a little like a threeheaded creature for a second, until you see his facial features. Then I picked his little bucket of baby weight up and turned him around so we were face to face, and he raspberried me a good one, and smiled, and farted, and I laughed my ass off and held him close.

  With his head against my heart I suddenly felt his lifeforce - not the lifeforce of babies-a lifeforce bigger than a night sky. It was almost like thunder coming through us, just like the night I went into labor during a thunder storm. It was the exact opposite of the heart implosion I felt the day my daughter was born and died. The two of us in the water, thunderhearted.

  At some point that night I walked out onto our little Holiday Inn balcony and Virginia was smoking a cigarette on hers. I looked over at her. My god. This person I had watched go from young woman to warrior beauty. It took my breath away. I never told her this, but what I thought … daughter. I almost couldn’t breathe with the wonder.

  “Those are death sticks, you know,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I love you, you know.”

  “Yeah. I do. Me too.” Her eyes filling with tears across the distance.

  We were driving to a house Andy had found and rented on the internet. Such a risky move - finding the next chapter of your life in cyberspace. But so gloriously risky. Because this was a hacker. A guy who had cybersquatted Bill Gates. When he was at the computer, whole geographies emerged you’d never thought of.

  The house looked filled with light and space when I looked at the internet photos. I knew the value of light and space. And there were trees in the photos. Everywhere. The house was inside something called the Bull Run Wilderness near Sandy, Oregon. When I asked Andy “Why this house? Is it near my job?”

  He said, “No, it’s not near your job. But it is sanctuary.” At the time, I didn’t know exactly what he meant. But something in my skin trusted him.

  The road to the house off of I-84 wound around forests and snuck alongside the Sandy River. I saw a few people riding the river on inner tubes. I saw fly fishermen. Kayakers. I saw the land rise and fall like it does in Oregon wilderness. Alders. Oaks. Maples. Douglas Firs. Everything it seemed, evergreen. I thought briefly of my father - how he loved the Northwest. I thought how maybe that feeling he had was something yet good between us. Then the word father left altogether, since it was nothing about my future. Up we drove. When we arrived at the house I began crying. Gut wrenching crying. A crying that must have taken years, pulled up from the depths.

  The house was made from two octagonals. The first octagonal had the main room and wooden stairs made by a
master carpenter leading up to a sleeping loft. The sleeping loft had 360 degree windows so that if you were, say, in bed, all you saw was trees. The second octagonal had a kitchen with cabinets you’d pay a fortune for in the city - the deep cherry and blond wood like inside trees.

  Outside the house there was nothing but forest. The Bull Run Wilderness hid elk and deer and bobcat. Wild pheasants and coyote and eagles and great blue herons. A freshwater creek trickled at the base of our property - water that ran for miles. To the side of the house, a giant warehouse loomed that the owner had been using as a woodworking studio. The owner made wooden marimbas as beautiful as music sounds. He showed them to us. They smelled like life. The owner had built the house. Crafted the woodwork with the passion of an artist. Inside the warehouse was an enormous woodstove. Inside the warehouse I felt something stirring in me. Something about a self. Something about the freedom to make. The feeling felt older than me. Inside the house, I felt safety. All those trees protecting us. A river curling around us. Something up until that point in my life I’d only felt in water.

  When Andy and I and Virginia and Miles sat down in front of the house, butterflies and dragonflies and a hummingbird accompanied our distance. As if to say, you are home.

  We were 25 minutes from the city I would work in. From people. We were 45 minutes from Portland. Culture and the socius. Virginia walked off a ways to have a cigarette. Then it was just me, Andy, and Miles. I said, “Andy, I can’t believe how beautiful it is here. It takes my breath away.” I turned away from him. I felt small. Maybe like a kid. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, coming up behind me with Miles on his shoulder like a little second man. “It’s what’s next.” Andy has a weird way of making the impossible sound ordinary.

  Our first days that ran into nights than ran back into days in that house in the forest were like what I understand Shakespeare to mean by the green world. Seriously. You know, where the action of a play starts out in normal world and then goes into green world where a magical metamorphosis takes place. Think A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I always wanted to wear that donkey head thing or run around naked in the woods. Actually, Northrup Frye came up with the phrase. Sorry. It’s the goddamn academic in me.

  But my life with Andy and Miles in the green world really did magically change everything for me. For example. Christmas? At Christmastime we didn’t trudge up any godforsaken mountain hill in the shoulder high snow to get a goddamn tree. No one yelled their head off. No one cried their eyes out. We simply went to a tree lot and bought the biggest fucking Christmas tree they had, like a 12-footer, strapped it to the car, drove it to our sanctuary, and peed our pants with joy - the open space of the octagons filling with the smell of Douglas fir and glee.

  And there was no architect’s office with smoke and anger pouring out late into the night while children hid in their bedrooms scared to sleep or dream. Miles slept in a bed 10 feet away from two giant writing desks Andy and I pushed together. So while the parents were writing, the child was sleeping, and art kept us well and space kept us well and trees watched over us so dreams could get born.

  There was no mother you couldn’t find in the house because she was out selling real estate, or locked in the bathroom with a bottle.

  I used to watch Miles fall asleep from drinking boob milk late into the night. I’m guessing all mothers do this. But I bet not all mothers were thinking of Shakespearean sentence structures when they watched their babies drunkenly drift into sleep. I know, watching your boy suck tit doesn’t seem very Shakespearian on the face of it. But when I watched Miles go from mother’s milk to burp to deep and frothy dream, his body heavy in my lap, the blue-black of night resting on us, I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is “love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.”

  As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.

  I didn’t sleep much the first two years in the forest house. Miles, bless his hungry little head, wanted more milk than any man alive. All night. I thought of my mother - and my own unquenchable, milkless mouth. If this boy wanted milk, I would give it to him. Maybe all our lives were being reborn in the forest.

  My exhaustion was of course epic, but only in that way it is for everyone else, too. I taught full-time shooting for tenure so we’d have a shot at a life. Andy too exhausted himself. We taught in alternate waves day and night and parented by passing Miles off like a football between us. Thank god for breast pumps and bouncy chairs.

  The exhaustion of new parents is absurd. Beyond absurd. But I’m not about to get all righteous about that. In fact, it’s something else altogether I want to tell you. I think our exhaustion in the green world brought us to our best selves. Listen to this: the first two years of Miles’ life? When I was supposed to be depleted? I wrote a novel and seven short stories. Andy wrote a novel and three screenplays. Read that again. How is it that so much writing happened inside the least amount of time or energy?

  Green world.

  We had no time. We had no energy. We had no money. What we had was making art in the woods. So when Andy turned to me one night over scotches and said “We should invent a Northwest press that isn’t about fucking old growth and salmon,” and I laughed my ass off, and then said, “Yeah, we should,” we just … did. Which is how the zenith of our depletion changed into the zenith of our creative production. Andy and me, we had another child. An unruly literary press, which we named “Chiasmus.” Turned out, there were lots of writers in the Northwest who were tired of old growth and salmon. Our first publication was an anthology called Northwest Edge: The End of Reality. Because, you know, it was. Everything we were before we were this, utterly transformed.

  Shakespeare.

  In our forest we gave art to life, and life to art made us.

  Angina

  I KNOW. I’M MAKING ANDY SOUND LIKE A MAGICAL MANSAVIOR. You’re going to have to forgive me. It’s an effect of meeting someone who is your equal. It’s an effect of an astonishment: that I love men.

  And it’s not like we have some relationship from a movie. For instance, in the beginning, we fought. Boy howdy. I fought like a woman whose father had betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her. He fought like a man who never had a father and whose mother’s heart didn’t quite reach him. Working out our childhood wounds at each other. Because … because we could take it. Because there was something on the other side.

  People - I guess I mean couples - don’t like to talk much about fighting. It’s not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look… sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.

  When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere - out and away from a body - like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.

  Though like anyone else, our arguments are sloppy and dumb and artless. We look like cartoon adults, just like everyone. Like the time he put all our living room furniture out on the lawn. Or the time I grabbed his computer mouse and bit the cord in half. Yeah. Subtle. But I gotta tell you. People who never get angry frighten me.

  Andrew: man-warrior. From the Greek.

  Lidia doesn’t mean jack-shit, by the way. Figures.

  And then there are the little sufferings that make a bond as strong as love.

  When I was 38 my Andy woke up to pee in the night. I hea
rd him in that wife way, even as I was half asleep. Before we went to bed, we had heard some eulogizing about Ken Kesey’s death on NPR. I’d cried some. Him too. Then we went to bed. When he got up to pee, he turned the bathroom light on and shut the door.

  Then I heard him fall, like a tree landing on the roof. I ran into the bathroom and he had passed out. He was on the white tiled floor, on his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, white as death, seizuring.

  I yelled his name at him. I put his feet up on the edge of the tub and held his head in my lap trying to give him a mini blood transfusion. He came to, dazedly. I called 911. I put a comforter around him. A firetruck full of paramedics came. I dressed my son while they hooked my husband up to wires and electrical machines. They put my husband in an ambulance and my son and I drove in our car - the ambulance took the freeway. I took the back roads. I was there 12 minutes ahead of them. At the hospital he lived. We discovered a triglyceride problem that scared the shit out of us.

  The next week, driving to work in my car, I got an earache and my skull felt like a lightning bolt fracture had cracked it open.

  My father’s voice filled the ball of my head, curled around the lobes and through the canals of gray matter. It closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.

  I began to not only hear my father again, but as clearly as you see the face of your husband, your wife, in front of you, I saw my father’s face at the moment of his drowning. On his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, seizuring.