The Book of Atlantis Black

by Betsy Bonner

  ·

  Nancy liked to taunt Mr. Heller, a history teacher who worked in the attendance office. She was convinced that he was a sexual predator, though she never said how she knew—she just did. She gave him excuse notes that she’d obviously written herself with our mother’s forged signature; she knew that Mom didn’t want to be bothered and would confirm that her daughter was sick. After Nancy racked up more than the twenty absences permitted without a doctor’s note, our father was required to appear in court. Years later, she mailed me a newspaper clipping about the history teacher. She’d drawn devil horns on the head of Roger Heller, who had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the teenage female manager of the basketball team. He would spend six months behind bars. Above the head she’d written “Oi towld yew!” in the phonetic spelling we used to indicate the speech of our low-life neighbors.

  ·

  When we were teenagers—and later, in our twenties, when we shared apartments in New York City—my sister would come into my bedroom, lie down on the floor, and start talking. She told me she believed in reincarnation, and that she felt attracted to the desert because her spirit animal was a coyote. She asked if I had experienced astral projection, and when I said I hadn’t she told me I’d have to be lying down and hovering at the edge of a dream. I didn’t envy Nancy’s out-of-body experiences—she’d earned them, I thought, by her suffering; and most of the time I liked being in my own skin.

  ·

  Sometimes Nancy would chase me with a kitchen knife until I fled to my bedroom, and would drag the knife down my door in long strokes, ruining the paint. The barrier between us felt thin as cardboard. “Pig,” she would whisper, as if in a trance. “Gonna slit you open, slit you open. Right through your little pink stomach.” It might have been funny, but it wasn’t—not with my little pink stomach. Fleet, nimble Nancy tackled me easily when she actually wanted to hurt me. In the piggy-knife game, she didn’t want to catch me.

  ·

  If you could add up the hours, we must have spent weeks studying our own images in the mirror between our twin sinks. Sometimes, when she caught me copying her while she was curling her hair, or applying heavy eyeliner, she’d say: “Don’t look.” If I kept looking, she commanded my reflection: “I said don’t look at me.” When I still looked, she raised the curling iron, singed her hair-sprayed bangs, and made a terrible burning smell.

  ·

  Nancy got her first period only shortly before I got mine, hers at age fourteen and a half, mine at thirteen. I saw that she bound her pads tightly in toilet paper, like the feet of royal Chinese ladies, before putting them back in their plastic sleeves and disposing of them. I followed suit, out of shame over the blood and the odor.

  One winter afternoon, Nancy and I had both taken Advil and were sharing her heated double waterbed. She was listening to Sheryl Crow on headphones; I was reading Jane Eyre. Mom knocked loudly on Nancy’s bedroom door and asked us to come into the living room.

  I was surprised to see the bathroom wastebasket sitting on top of the coal-burning stove. When we walked in, she overturned it, and down rained a dozen or so sanitary napkins that Nancy and I had thrown away. Mom’s hands trembled, and I thought she was having a manic episode.

  “So girls: you don’t need to wrap up your—uh—things in toilet paper. Just use the plastic they come in.”

  “Oh my God,” Nancy said.

  “I had to use a rag, you know, and wash it out every night. Also, you’re changing them too frequently. See—”

  She picked up one of our “things,” took it out of the plastic, unwrapped it like a mummy, and displayed it. “Someone barely used this.”

  “Ew! You’re nasty,” Nancy said. “Come on, Betsy.”

  “You girls are wastrels,” Mom called after us.

  ·

  In middle school, Nancy and I bought paperbacks at Pathmark, the nearest grocery store—a twenty-minute drive—and got every book by V. C. Andrews. In those books, intercourse meant incest and female sacrifice. Mom called them “trash.” The Heaven Leigh Casteel series, where poor Heaven lives in a hillbilly town with some nasty folks, was my favorite; I blushed at the word languorous. Nancy preferred My Sweet Audrina, which features an abused girl, in a rocking chair, with a Swiss cheese memory.

  ·

  In high school, Nancy started having sex with Dave, who was a couple of years older and went to the poorer school nearby in Kennett Square. He also had a girlfriend, Crystal, who used more hair product than the girls at Unionville-Chadds Ford. When Crystal found out what Nancy was up to, she phoned our house with death threats.

  “Don’t pick up,” Nancy said, as the phone rang and rang.

  “What’s sex like?” I asked.

  “It kills,” Nancy said.

  “So why do you do it?”

  “Dave wanted to,” she said.

  “Heather likes boffing. She says it feels good.”

  Heather, my best friend, went to an all-girls Catholic school and was the only kid I knew who knew as much about sex as Nancy.

  “Don’t use that dumb word. God, you sound so stupid. It’s like being ripped in half, okay? You can’t even begin to imagine the pain.”

  I thought she was basking in her secret knowledge.

  “Isn’t that just the first time?” I said.

  “No. Every single time. Dave says I’m small, though. You might be okay.”

  At thirteen, I longed to get as close to sex as I could without actually losing my virginity. When Nancy mentioned that a new boyfriend (after Dave) had a younger brother, we went swimming at their house every day. I spent the summer after eighth grade making out with that boy in his finished basement, while Nancy had sex upstairs.

  ·

  When Nancy turned sixteen, our father offered to buy her a car, and she chose a used white Alfa Romeo convertible. She asked me to photograph her in it. She wore lipstick, a violet T-shirt, white jean shorts with a metal belt, and flip-flops. She had a little brush in her pocket and fixed her hair between shots. When she got out of the car, I thought we were done, but she told me to wait. Right there in the driveway, she stripped to her underwear and put on a tighter shirt, long jeans, and black boots she’d stashed under the seat. She climbed up on the hood and stood with her hands on her hips. Then she lay down on the hood, propped herself up on her elbows, and gazed into the distance. Once she started to laugh and said, “Hold on.” It was hard for her to stop smiling in pictures.

  ·

  Nancy never seemed interested in eventually having a husband, children, a house—the things most girls in our town considered essential. Instead she wanted fame, and she got it: in a limited, local way. By the time she was a teenager, she began to acquire a pack of friends, many of them boys with long hair who went to Kennett. Popular kids—jocks and snobs—called her and her friends “heathens.” Nancy became the girl who could drink boys under the table at parties and still stay skinny enough to walk out of a department store in two pairs of jeans.

  Somewhere there’s a photograph of the mountain of stolen gifts she piled in her room before surprising our family one Christmas; she gave me a pair of Anne Klein sunglasses with tiny golden lion heads on the stems. One summer when she wanted an electric fan, she simply picked up a floor model at Kmart and walked out with it. Her rules about stealing were clear in her mind. It was not cool to take from an individual person, like the Indian woman who sold jewelry from a cart in the mall. On the other hand, it was highly ethical to steal from big businesses and corporations.

  Just once, when she was sixteen, Nancy got caught, by a security manager at Strawbridge’s. She flirted with him in his office; he decided not to call the police, and let her go.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  I wrote eighty-some songs in an apartment in LA circa 1995. I loved the weather, but I hated LA—it was not conducive to my being a performer. So I moved to New York and lived there for about six years. I love New York, and that’s where I really got the band togethe
r. It started out as myself with an acoustic guitar. But then it started metamorphosing into this giant carnival thing. I recorded my first EP, self-produced, in 2002. It was entirely analog. I prefer analog to Garage Band. Digital—you can get it on any Mac. My first album sounds real gritty, but I like the grit. I like the grit a lot.

  5.

  In 360 BCE, when Plato invented the lost island of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, most readers understood that it was not a real place. But in 1882, Ignatius Donnelly, a politician from Philadelphia, published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a pseudoscientific account of Atlantis’s flora, fauna, and history. The theosophists Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner expanded the mythology and wrote about Atlanteans as a “root race” that actually existed ten thousand years ago. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) described Atlanteans as godlike beings who had become human and thereby destroyed themselves. They had psychic powers (telepathy, astral projection) and advanced technology but suffered from hubris, practiced “black magic,” and drowned in a catastrophic flood. Steiner’s Atlantis and Lemuria (1904) claimed that Atlanteans existed in a kind of “dream consciousness” and valued personal experience over traditional learning: an Atlantean “did not think, he remembered.” Despite the use of “he,” Steiner conceived of Atlanteans as genderless: “It had become possible for their souls to fertilize themselves with mind, without waiting for the development of the inner organs of the human physical body.”

  In 1994, my seventeen-year-old sister, with the artistry and self-generation of a true Atlantean, gave birth to a new self; for Atlantis Black to exist, she had to get rid of Eunice Anne Bonner. She never went back to high school. She got her GED and was accepted to Loyola University in New Orleans—she’d set her heart on that city for its musical soul—and said that no one with such a boring name as Bonner would ever make it there. Our father thought this was a slight against our Irish ancestors and initially refused to sign the necessary papers. But my sister was his first child, the one he preferred both to please and to harm, and she was persistent. Two local newspapers printed the legal notice, and the people of Chadds Ford had a month to make known any objections. There were none. Eunice Anne Bonner drove herself to the hearing and emerged Eunice Anne Black. It cost more money to change both names, she said, and getting rid of Bonner took precedence. (“The Boner girls,” boys called us.) Later on, she forged the original document to make Atlantis (not Anne) her middle name. I never knew how she came to choose the name, but it seems perfect: the Atlantis of legend is mystical, self-destroying, and forever lost.

  SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008

  I learned this thing with my voice that I didn’t do in my early music. Instead of just being all wispy, I started to do more inflections. I just made sure it was in tune. I got that from Tori Amos. She—Tori—and I grew up in a similar way. I grew up with that fucking Irish Catholic guilt. I had to go to Catholic school. Actually, I probably have a lot more in common with Madonna. She influenced me incredibly.

  People accused me of fucking my guitar. I say, well, if you’re over the top, then you’ve therefore created a new apex for being the top. I get a lot of heat from one particular song called “I’ll Take What I Can Get.” It begins:

  danger’s such a beautiful thing

  you look so pretty when you come

  all over me

  all over me

  There are always people in the audience who chuckle or shut up or both. Another one, “Parking Lot Queen,” goes:

  hand job queen

  my sweetest dream

  bring it over for the team

  yeah, yeah

  for the team

  I write about reality. That’s what it’s like for a sixteen-year-old girl who wants to escape the misogyny of her small town. It makes me a little nervous, though, whenever I play at a new venue that I’ve never played at. I get nervous and—

  6.

  The year Atlantis left home, my high school science teacher took our class into the woods to identify birds. European starlings, he told us, usurp the nests of scarcer native birds, like chickadees. Best to kill them on the spot. He scooped up an imaginary bird and twisted its neck.

  I had become an outspoken student with a passion for animal rights, and a touch of snobbishness. Back in the classroom, I told my teacher that his attitude about starlings was “speciesist”—a term I’d learned by reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation—and cruel. If I wanted to talk about cruelty, he said, what about the starlings? They didn’t just steal nests but pecked out the baby birds’ eyes.

  ·

  One night at dinner, I announced that I’d chosen to write a thirty-page paper rather than dissect a cat; a friend and I were the only students in our class to demand an alternative. My father laughed and called me an asshole. I said that it took a “real fat asshole” of a human being not to think about the damage he caused to the planet just to satisfy his enormous gut. He called me “rotten,” and I said what was “rotten” was the animal carcass on the dinner table—and flung a forkful of spaghetti at him. He jumped out of his chair, pinned me to the kitchen floor, gripped my hair, and slammed my head against the linoleum. Mom told him to stop but didn’t dare to intervene physically. I horse-kicked him in the stomach, and he let go of my hair. Both of us were astonished.

  I didn’t bother to call Officer Peach, who’d showed my sister and me long before how useless the police were. I stayed with a friend’s family for most of the following summer, and talked on the phone with Atlantis, who was loving life in New Orleans. I told her what had happened, that I was too old for this and didn’t think I could forgive Dad. She said I didn’t have to. My liberation, she promised, would come in the form of a driver’s license.

  ·

  During Atlantis’s first semester at Loyola, she’d found work as a waitress at a strip club. In her second semester, she dropped out and moved to Los Angeles. College wasn’t very interesting, she said, and she wanted to focus on making music. I was worried when she told me that she’d taken yet another name—Roxanne—for a phone sex job, but she said it was the easiest money she’d ever made in her life, and that none of the girls took it seriously.

  ·

  Chris was twenty-one, gorgeous, fresh out of Swarthmore College, and the youngest teacher our school had ever hired. He was the first teacher who lent me books from his private collection: Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, and Anne Sexton. I told my friend Tara that I was in love.

  “Oh, Betsy, no!” she said. “He’s so gay!”

  “He mentioned a girlfriend in Wilmington,” I said.

  “That’s just so the jocks won’t kill him.”

  All year, I tried to entice Chris with my purple prose, wishing he would deflower me—a word and concept I’d gotten from V. C. Andrews. He left Unionville after a year and went on to have a successful writing career; but he stayed in touch and recommended me to my first-choice colleges.

  ·

  In trigonometry class I noticed a boy named Greg, who had silky blond hair and a Pearl Jam T-shirt. After five months of making out, I told him I wanted my first time to be with him, in my childhood bed, with no condom. After my deflowering we’d be more prudent. Greg said that sounded great.

  When we’d been having sex for a few months, Greg’s mother called and invited my mother to lunch and told her she’d found a condom wrapper on her son’s floor.

  “Well,” Mom said, “at least they’re using protection.”

  I’d wanted Greg and me to apply to the same colleges, but I discovered that he hadn’t applied to any of my top choices, as he’d said he had. I learned that he was cheating on me with a girl who went to private school.

  I called Atlantis in Los Angeles and told her about my broken heart. There was something wrong with most men, she said, and this proved it. She didn’t want to tell me sooner because she knew I’d been in love; and she was only now figuring things out herself. She confided in me that Dana, one of her female neighbors
, was teaching her how to have sex with women. Photocopies of work by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon showed up in the mailbox, addressed to me in Atlantis’s serial-killer handwriting.

  ·

  In my last month of senior year, Atlantis called from a pay phone in Albuquerque and said she was on her way home. She’d had it with Los Angeles. She’d yelled at a guy who was getting disgusting on the phone, and told him she was a three-hundred-pound lesbian, and that he must have a tiny dick. She’d pawned everything she could and would be home in three days. She needed a free place to live and hoped to earn some quick cash in Chadds Ford before moving to New York.

  Three days later, I came home from school, saw the Alfa in the driveway, and found Atlantis sacked out in the living room, with a Cybill Shepherd movie on the TV.

  In the year and a half since we’d seen each other, she’d grown her hair to her waist. She wore the same heavy eyeliner and mascara whose application she’d perfected in high school, but no foundation, blush, or lipstick—just a thin dusting of powder. She was still enviably thin.

  “You look good,” I said.

  “It’s the desert,” she said. “You have to go there. The dry heat is amazing—actually clears up your skin. There’s no humidity. And everyone is happy and nice to other people. It’s nothing like Chadds Ford.”

  “What do people do in the desert?”

  “Whatever they want. It’s like a lot of small communities, Native Americans and cool people who don’t like mainstream society. Actually, though, of all the places I’ve been, you’d love Northern California. You applied to Stanford, right?”

  “I’m going to Sarah Lawrence,” I said. “They offered me a small scholarship.”

  “What, are you a dyke now?” she said. “What’s it cost after the scholarship?”