Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  •

  I got to keep the navel ring. My father never saw it. One night, having sex with D, it fell out. I waited a few weeks, then had it re-pierced. I called D from a pay phone afterward to tell him where I was. He was angry that I’d gone to do something without his permission, and he told me to get on the next train back to Yonkers. As I stood on the sidewalk, the receiver against my ear, I felt as though I were talking to my father.

  •

  When he picked me up from the train station, he was apologetic and kind. I didn’t want to have sex that night, so I asked him to take me to my dorm. He wouldn’t. I slept in his basement apartment, and in the very early morning, almost at dawn, he drove me on his motorcycle, my arms tight against his waist. I saw a classmate walking through the college gates, back to her room. She was a stripper in the city; I’d always admired her for that. It was how she supplemented her income and paid for part of college. I never felt that I could be a stripper, could never own my body so fully that I could make a living from it, charge people to look at it, have no shame over doing any of it. I desperately wanted to be a typical, normal college student again.

  I climbed into my own bed and wept.

  •

  Things got worse. D demanded that I call him and let him know where I was if I was ever out of my dorm room after nightfall. If he called and I didn’t answer, and he hadn’t been told where I was, he would show up on campus to find me. One evening, I went out to dinner with my friends, and I called him from a pay phone at the restaurant to let him know where I was. He screamed at me. A few minutes later, while my friends and I were still waiting for a booth, he showed up; screamed at me in front of the waitresses, diners, and my friends; pulled me by the hair; and took me to his car.

  I wanted out. At his basement apartment, I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He said he would contact my father and tell him all about what a whore I was. That he had proof—photos of me, items of my clothing. When I cried and begged him not to do that, he pinned me against the wall and told me not to ever go out without asking him again.

  It was worse than with my father.

  •

  He bought me flowers. He took me to dinners. He cried and held me and told me he was sick and that he loved me. He said that he always felt abandoned by his birth mother, whom he’d never met, and whose name he didn’t know. He invented histories for her. She was a First Nations woman in Canada. She was a waitress in New Jersey. She was a housewife in Connecticut. He said he would never hurt me again.

  At a movie-rental store a few days later, he lifted a video up and asked what I thought, and I nonchalantly said that I’d read how the actor had to bulk up for the role. He squeezed my hand so hard it later bruised and walked me out of the store, into his car, and slapped me twice, hard, for talking about another man’s body. If I appeared to be staring at a man on the street, he slapped me. If he saw that my blinds were drawn open at my dorm, he would slam me against the wall and ask me why I wanted other men to see me change.

  •

  When I was eleven, twelve, fifteen, I would lock the door to my bedroom and dance, lip-synching, pretending. I didn’t know yet what a drag queen was, but my dream was to lip-synch and perform on small stages. Stadiums seemed too daunting. I dreamed small. I wanted wigs and makeup. I wanted short tutus and hose and to color my hair. I wanted my own body to be my own body. Whenever my brother or mother knocked on the door and told me to open up, I would lie and yell, “I’m changing!”

  •

  But I was changing.

  And being with D, I changed again. I became less talkative. On campus, I often drifted off during seminars. My friends disliked him, wanted to know why I was still with him. I was afraid of him, and I was afraid of my father. I knew my father would take me out of college if he found out I had a boyfriend, someone I was involved with sexually, and I didn’t know how I would finish college without his financial support. I was essentially trapped between an abusive man and a very abusive man, but I had no concrete way to verbalize this or to even recognize it.

  I was at work at the diner when the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced that fall. I clapped, and my boss, the Greek owner of the diner, made a face. He was filled with sadness. I was siding with Simpson because he was a person of color. Because the Rodney King beating had happened right after I’d moved to the U.S. Because my family told me not to be involved in politics, to squeak by on my light-skinned privilege. And my boss was second-generation. He believed that Simpson had murdered his wife. He believed that Simpson had battered her for years. He believed that Simpson should have faced proper justice.

  And although we all had email at this time, there were no handy links on domestic violence for my friends to share. No social media to reach out on. No top-ten lists of red flags to watch out for. It was the nineties, and Snoop Dogg was saying that bitches weren’t shit but hoes and tricks, and I was locked up in my room, dancing along. And hadn’t my mother martyred herself and survived? My father beat her when he liked. She never complained, and in fact, she always spoke about how much she loved him.

  That was what love was.

  •

  In February of 1996, D and I had unprotected sex, and I became pregnant. I remember cooking him a meal the night this happened, and he came home, saw me at the stove, then peeked his head out of the front door to check the address. Am I at the right place? he joked.

  He held me from behind and covered me in kisses. He was affectionate and kind and he hadn’t hurt me in weeks. After we ate the pasta I cooked, we got in bed, stayed there for hours. He was tender toward me and came inside me. I never came with D, except once, the first two weeks we were fucking, because I was tied to the foot of his bed and he was eating me out.

  I was still working at the diner. D drove me there in the morning, and I walked to campus after my shift. The road to the college was green and leafy and windy, and I listened to a cassette on my Walkman. At my dorm room, I changed out of my diner clothes and read my art history assignments, started writing a paper. I know that this day didn’t happen the day right after D got me pregnant, but in my memory, it does. I felt nauseated. I stood up from my desk and went to the bathroom, which I shared with M, my suite-mate. I vomited, but all that came out of me was bile. I knew I was pregnant.

  Fear: that was all I felt for a while. On the weekend, out in Connecticut, I stole a pack of pregnancy tests from CVS and peed on all the sticks, and they all came up positive. I called my high school best friend and asked her to drive me to the hospital because they administered free blood pregnancy tests.

  D picked me up that night and noticed the Band-Aid on the inside of my left arm, in the crook of it. He knew right away and became furious. He slapped me and told me I was a liar for getting a test without him. He dragged me out of his apartment by my hair and threw me down on the front lawn. I got up, terrified, and thought of walking back to my dorm room, but he grabbed me by my clothes and brought me back inside.

  The next time I went to work, I looked through the yellow pages for an abortion clinic and called, made an appointment. But in bed every night—and D insisted that we spend every night together—D told me to keep the baby. He said that every woman he had gotten pregnant had gone to get an abortion behind his back. This didn’t click for me at the time, that he wasn’t supporting their decisions to terminate the pregnancies. It didn’t occur to me, at all, that he had forbidden them from getting abortions. And it didn’t occur to me, then, that he had gotten them, gotten us all, pregnant on purpose.

  •

  Reproductive coercion is what people call it. What happened to me has a name. A label. For years, I have felt only shame about my cowardice, about the fact that I didn’t really want my baby, not until he was born.

  •

  Then, when I was about seven months pregnant, I bumped into a friend of my mother’s at the clinic. Tante V was Egyptian—like my mother—and had lived in America for more than twenty years. I c
alled her Tante, Egyptian French for “aunt.” She had struggled with cancer for as long as we’d known her.

  I understood why she was there. Routine blood tests.

  And she understood why I was there. My belly was enormous. I was waiting for the results of a glucose test.

  Tante V asked me where my mother was. I wanted to tell her that my father had stopped talking to me when he found out I was pregnant, and that my mother was supposed to do likewise. She still called and took me out for burgers and gave me an old purple jumpsuit she wore when she was pregnant.

  But I didn’t tell her any of this. Instead I said that my mother was probably at home.

  Tante V smiled at me. I could tell that it exhausted her to talk, and even to smile.

  We got our test results at the same time. Tante V asked me if I wanted to come over to her house for lunch before driving back to my apartment in Yonkers. I agreed.

  She lived in a pretty but modest home in the woods in Connecticut. Her kids had gone to prestigious private schools there. Her house was cold, as it was every time I visited. She always wore thick socks and sweaters indoors. I loved the cold of her house. My parents’ house was always too hot. They turned the heat up so high that my hair and skin dried out all winter and I couldn’t breathe.

  Tante V was tall and very slim, and her movements were always slow and coordinated. It never occurred to me that chemo had contributed to her physique. I sat in her sunroom and ate a pasta salad as she made tea. She spooned sugar into my mug and then wiped her palms on her pants. This inelegant move surprised me, and I liked her for it.

  Before I left, Tante V asked me when my baby shower was.

  I was silent. No one was giving me a baby shower. My college friends had classes and lived in dorms. My mother couldn’t give me one because she wasn’t supposed to be talking to me.

  “I will give you a baby shower,” Tante V finally said.

  •

  A few weeks later, a friend picked me up to take me to the shower. I wore a black outfit I bought at Sears on sale. It had a pretty red bow, which sat at the top of my belly, so that I resembled a present to myself.

  When we arrived at Tante V’s house, balloons greeted us. Inside, it was uncharacteristically warm, and a caterer had left delicious food on the dining room table. My mother and some of her friends sat in the living room. One of my friends from high school showed up. But Tante V was missing. My mother told me she was not feeling well and was lying down in her bedroom.

  I went up to say hello and thank her. She was in bed, looking pale and in pain. She hugged a blanket against her small belly. She didn’t speak. I sat with her for a few moments until she shooed me away and told me to enjoy my shower.

  The presents were better than I expected: a stroller with a built-in car seat. A highchair. Onesies galore.

  The cake, blue and yellow, was my favorite part. It was in the shape of a baby over a moon. No one had bought me a cake in years, not since the last time my father let me have a birthday party. He disliked the chaos of birthdays and banned them at our home following the mayhem of my eleventh.

  Tante V’s living room was covered in gift wrap, and my mother took a photograph of me in the middle of it. Soon the caterers left, my mother rushed home, and my friend loaded my gifts into her car.

  In all the excitement, I almost left without saying goodbye to Tante V. But before I could gather my things, she came downstairs to her sunroom. Maybe the festive mood in her house reminded her of when her boys were little or of a time before her illness, because she was smiling. She asked if I’d received good presents, things that I could use.

  I told her I had. I wished I could give Tante V something in return, something that she could use. Perhaps sensing my sadness, she reached over to me, and I embraced her, my baby between us.

  •

  I gave birth via C-section. The anesthesiologist gave me an epidural, not a spinal block, and I ended up feeling a lot more pain than I should have. I have written my experience of childbirth as fiction over and over. I read Toi Derricotte’s memoir-poem of childbirth in the West Texas desert. At the end of it, her son reads the book and says he didn’t know she suffered so much. My spine warms and radiates at the point where that needle went in, almost twenty years ago, every time I experience a sense of assault, or deep fear, or physical vulnerability.

  •

  My son nursed quickly in the small room off to the side of the OR, where my body convulsed with pain. I felt comforted by his nursing, but I was still weeping and terrified of the pain I was experiencing. He’d been covered in goo when he was born, and was dark, as dark as my grandfather. He had black hair and a beautiful nose. His feet were crunched and I was worried about his toes. I wept and shook from fear and nursed my new baby. I asked that he be kept near me in the room I would eventually stay in. D either did or didn’t spend the night that night. He went out to celebrate and I didn’t see him again until morning. On the third day I wheeled myself to the shower and washed myself. My hair was long and knotted and felt impossible to unknot. I stopped trying. My body was still heavy and puffed as if it were still carrying my baby. Every few hours a nurse came in to wipe down my bleeding vagina and give me a new thick pad to lie in. I had a catheter and could slightly feel it on my urethra. I nursed my son and did not want to leave the hospital, ever.

  •

  When we left it was snowing and I was terrified of caring for my son under D’s abuse. I hoped he would not continue to hurt me now that I had given birth to his child. I hoped that he would help me, as the doctor and nurses reminded us both that I was not supposed to walk long distances or carry anything heavy for thirty days. I hoped that things would be different, and they were. The sky was filthy dishwater and we had to stop at CVS because D hadn’t prepared the house at all; we had no diapers, no baby wipes, no balms or blankets, nothing a baby would need. When we got to the apartment D behaved as though the baby seat was a constant obstruction, as well as the baby. I didn’t own any maternity bras. I nursed and afterward I wadded up some tissue to absorb the leaks from my nipples. I changed the baby and burped the baby and held the baby and loved the baby. D picked up the baby once and said he stank. I wanted to ask him to give the baby a bath but was afraid. We bathed him together. I felt as though I were hallucinating the baby and the bath and D. I was on Percocet, and it was the only thing keeping me alive. D would go out every night, and a week after I gave birth, I went to the grocery store. I took the baby with me. I carried him and the groceries back into the apartment with me, as though there were no possibility of my abdomen coming open like a broken zipper on a skirt. I cooked dinners and ate what I could. I was always hungry and nursing. A month later D took me out. We went to the Met in Manhattan with another couple. I looked at the Ancient Egyptian statuettes and longed to feel mighty.

  •

  A few weeks later that couple found out that they were pregnant, and the woman, only a year older than me, had an abortion. I was struck with the sense of envy I felt. That it was so easy for her. That no one had threatened to kill her if she had an abortion. My son was six weeks old and his father was almost never home. I went back to school, filling my bra with toilet paper between classes while D’s mother and father watched the baby. Sometimes I took my son with me to class. D’s father drove me to and from campus, a distance that I could have walked, but it was winter, and D’s father was kind.

  •

  Four months. I raised my son with D in the apartment for four months. D would shout when my son woke up to nurse, saying to keep him quiet. I did everything. D would go out and drink and come home and sleep for four hours, then go to work. This became the routine, every day. I didn’t have access to a car. It was winter, Yonkers cold and dreary and wet.

  My friend J would drive over from college and help me with the baby. She was there one day when D was home. D started a fight with me. I don’t remember what it was about, only that he wanted to antagonize me. I was holding the baby. J a
sked if she could hold the baby. I handed him to her; he was warm, and small, and D slapped me, then pushed me against a wall and into a closed door. I tried to fight back but he kept hitting me. J took care of my baby and didn’t get involved. I managed to get to the phone in the kitchen and called 911. He grabbed the phone from my hand and told the operator that I was stupid and hung up. Police showed up a few minutes later. They asked D to give me his keys and leave but didn’t arrest him. He left with them, his key on the kitchen table. I lay next to my son and slept the deepest sleep I’d slept in a year. At dawn, D came back in with a second key he’d kept and mocked me for thinking I could keep him out of his own apartment.

  •

  In early spring, I went for a walk and noticed, a few blocks away, D’s car in a random driveway. A few days later, he told me he had found someone else and was leaving me.

  •

  I moved into my parents’ basement. D would try to harm me, to harm us, over the next few years, but we moved farther and farther away from him after that first move underground. It was over. I was free. I was safe. It was over.

  Years later—my son an adult, my body much larger than it was when I gave birth to him—I sometimes received ineffable messages from my spine, from the part where the needle went in. My body remembers the needle. It remembers the months I spent carrying my child. It remembers my son’s father kicking it. It remembers my own father’s eyes on it, watching it move farther and farther away. It does not remember my mother’s hand caressing it. At this time, I am unsure whether or not she caressed it. Perhaps I am mothering myself as I write by imagining my mother caressing this part of my spine.

  This is the part of my spine that was meant to go numb. This small section of my spine that was sunk with a syringe and meant to fall asleep. Instead it woke up and is an insomniac. Its eye is wide and glassy, cracked, and aches in a broken and burning exposure. My son was pulled out of my uterus after the doctor cut a slit at the bottom of my abdomen, stretched my skin, took out some of my organs, arranged them on a metal tray nearby, cut open the sac where my son was growing, and pulled him out of me. I felt the pressure of the pull, my body not wanting to let go. I no longer feel that pull now, nor the pain at the bottom of my abdomen. The scar, from the cut and the stitching, is still numb. This is why my body believes I gave birth to my son through my spine. And this strength is also why I now believe that my body is all mine.