Here Is What You Do

by Chris Dennis

  “I thought you had to use the restroom?” I said.

  She stared at me.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done it,” I said. I stood unsteadily before the tinted hotel window, feeling insane in my cheap slacks. Moments later I found myself being finger-banged on the bed while being called the most terrible names. I did not call her names, but slept on the floor afterward using my ugly pants as a pillow.

  In the morning she offered me a copy of her most recent book, Morphologies: The Undoing of Eden. I asked her to sign it. She already had a pen out, flicked her name in a giant loop across the final page. “You should include a number,” I said, “where you might be reached.”

  Her pen hovered in a bored, reluctant way, but she obliged. “Don’t ever call me,” she said, in a sad tone.

  My partner, Miriam, is dying. Primary peritoneal carcinoma. She’s resigned herself to it and stopped treatment over a year ago, before we even met. Two months into the relationship she decided to reveal this. She didn’t expect us to last so long, she said. Miriam was a new lesbian. Her illness offends me. Of Trisha, Miriam would probably say I’m being destructive. Death ripens the heart, turns it soft and penetrable as rotten fruit. I suppose I want that same: the freedom to destroy myself in whatever manner I see fit.

  Back in Kentucky, I drive directly from the airport to the university. I drink purified water in the Women’s Studies Department where I currently hold the position of the Belva P. Fanny Chair in Sexuality. This is not a title I like to say aloud, for obvious reasons. The office is too dim. The tiny lights of the office equipment blink with tired alarm. I am on sabbatical, and it’s a Saturday, so I won’t have to encounter any chatty colleagues or dumb-eyed, homely students. I clip things from old medical journals. I xerox photographs of vulvas. Vaginas are such varied items. One, a hillside of wheat split by a narrow path. Another, a window gaping out into nothing—some lonely warmer dimension. Others, if you squint, are like gutted rock quarries. At home, I will tack the pages up like wallpaper in the dining room, a collage to the pioneers of modern gynecology. But also, a crime scene, a repository of clinical smut, a pervert’s dossier! This is not the living situation of an adult. But I am writing a book. Working title: The Dyke Pageant. It is an investigation, among other things, into the failures of Albert H. Decker, M.D., D.O.G. He is the source, in my opinion, of decades of misinformation. I was more fervent when I first began. A year has passed. Things are different. I am still waiting for a viable theory to discover itself—something beyond “This guy was an idiot and asshole.” I long to lurch like a mad person from the sludge pit of academia, if one can even use the word “academia” in the same sentence as Eastern Kentucky University. But I am interested in paychecks, unlimited access to the copy machine.

  Another thing: my mother died two winters ago, and I’m living in her house—a rural outpost on three acres of the Daniel Boone National Forest. On the drive home I listen to the university library’s only available audio recording of Trisha Gregory. It is her first book, Substrata of Outsider Erotica, read by the author. I pay more attention to her voice than to the theories. Her tone is even more dramatic on tape, like an oboe filled with gravel.

  Outside of Bowling Green the bald landscape undoes itself, rising into the foothills of the Appalachians. A heavy rain tears ditches along the side of the highway. The house is outside of Williamsburg, off the road, concealed among a row of crooked hemlocks. I turn down the drive just as the last sight of light drains off behind the pines.

  Miriam and her dogs are asleep in the spare room, tangled up like dirty rags on the bed. Miriam is an animal lover. Which might explain why she’s with me. She saves the mangiest strays. Last week, she nabbed a lab from the parking lot at Auto Zone. Being a kind of scientist, I find great sadness in the domestication of animals. She stays in the spare room with the mutts most nights, claiming I grind my teeth during sleep. I retire late and wake before her. She sleeps often. I write and read and take long walks in the woods. Sometimes she’ll get up and ask to come with me. Sometimes I let her. On the walks she asks about Mother: the time she found a finger floating in a can of green beans, details of her rural girlhood and, Miriam’s favorite, the one about Mother hearing voices in the neighbor’s barn. Miriam’s interest in Mother annoys me. With Miriam here, I dream of Mother too often and with an eerie lucidity.

  I like the house. I feel something for it, in the way one might feel toward another human, but with less contempt. It was Mother’s childhood home, where she returned to live and die after her second divorce. It was always a disintegrating place. Her father built the original cabin in 1931. I remember, as a girl, pulling back a loose corner of carpet to see the year carved into a floorboard. The place was once a one-room cabin in the woods but is now an expansive maze of poorly built additions with a crumbling chimney jutting out like a lumpy phallus.

  Dead animals rot in the undergrowth and plants rise up in purples and yellows like colorful claws reaching from the corpses. Algae grows on everything. Lichen suture themselves to rocks and feather out in crooked strands. Decay swells in every direction—like a concerto, or a rash.

  Eastern Kentucky is the Half-South. They say “worsh” instead of “wash.” “Yonder” instead of “over there.” There is something sinister in the clangor of the dialect.

  These are not my people. I run from them. I turn away in public places.

  When I received the call saying Mother was dead, I honestly wanted to feel something. But I was just thirsty. I was sleeping, alone in my bed. I pictured her alone too, sitting in the recliner in the cabin, eating fruit from a can. She had not lived here for many years. It had sat empty, with her in Shepherds Manor. I imagined wild animals had moved in, were breeding and nesting in the bedrooms, pissing on the furniture. I pictured saplings jimmying apart the floorboards. When I did move in, months later, the place was like a water-damaged issue of Antique Living. There were stacks of broken-down cereal boxes and Banquet dinner trays piled like turrets on either side of the stove. A raccoon crawled out of the fireplace.

  It is still saturated with odors, suspended in Mother’s weary attempt to have it seem middle-class. It groans occasionally with an old woman’s desire to return to the dirt and trees.

  I settle into the paraphernalia. The thesis of Trisha’s book, as far as I can tell: “The physical body is a reflection of internal desire. It communicates all emotions through inadvertent gesticulations.” Is this news? She claims that when we are deliberately projecting one emotion, a truer, more private one is exposed, uncontrollably. Albert Decker would agree with this, except he’d call these symptoms of “a delinquent behavioral process.” “Bisexualism in females,” according to Decker’s Office Gynecology, is “characterized by variations toward a masculine constitution: great height, broad and bony shoulders, a narrow and only slightly inclined pelvis; her thighs will not touch, she will possess outstanding artistic talent, above-average intelligence.” Nowhere does he mention absolute lesbianism, the insipid or ignorant butch—only a clever, perverted housewife.

  The refrigerator is full of salad dressings and there is a sad assortment of empty potato chip bags tucked beneath the sofa cushions. Miriam did the grocery shopping again. She is hungry always for these nonfoods. I sneak out onto the deck and phone Trisha but hang up after three rings.

  Miriam hunches like a dope before the dog bowl, scraping bacon off her plate. The idiot mutts nip at each other’s faces.

  I am a particular woman. I have developed a romance with the arrangement of data. All photos and specimens are defined and annotated in the exhaustive legend I keep in corresponding notebooks: the uterine sound, the Pederson speculum, the cervical cannula. Sometimes, in the early hours, while looking at the photos, I am struck by a lustful gruesomeness. Decker too was a fussy record keeper, with an aversion to surgical gloves, one will notice, as he holds back the labia in his patients’ photo logs. Even as I w
allow in his errors, I respect the tenacity. In the X-rays over his light box the stern bones of the dyke glowed like fluorescent cylinders. He could point as easy as if it were on an atlas, to the specific location of her psychic imbalance, her emotional conflict and sterility. His was the premier science of justified homophobia.

  Miriam insists I see the hummingbird feeders she’s hung from the branches of the gingko tree, like a Christmas tree for hummingbirds. There is an infestation. I stand next to the tree in a red baseball cap and the birds rush my head. I keep still. Miriam whispers, “Don’t open your mouth, Adelaide. They’ll fly right in.” She hoots, swats one away with her plump hand. She asks if people can eat hummingbird. “Of course,” I say, “in some countries they eat live hummingbirds, snatch them out of the air mid-flight and bite directly into the breast. Certain quick-reflex, small-handed women and gay men are especially good at snatching the birds.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “You’re a goon,” I say.

  The dogs line up on the other side of the sliding glass door, begging to get out. Miriam is laughing as she slides it back. The bastards charge. The sound of the barking and Miriam’s laughter causes the birds to scatter. They race like a squadron out of the yard and over the frog pond. They’re very nervous animals. “Bitches! Fuckers!” I yell at them.

  After dinner Miriam plays her Eagles CD on the stereo and opens all the windows so that a grass-filled breeze blows through the house. I help her up onto the giant oak dining table. She slides out of her culottes, lays her face on the table and shows me her ass. She keeps her knees tight against her chest. Her backside is like a monstrous, pink beach ball, her thighs goose-pimpled. I press my mouth against the hood, my chin to the opening. I close my eyes and suck her clitoris. I lubricate my hands with oil. And fold them. I insert two fingers, then four. I keep the fingertips together as I penetrate her. It’s like turning down the slickest cul-de-sac. While giving her head I think of a CPR class I took in college, of the plastic doll used to demonstrate mouth-to-mouth. Her vagina has that plastic taste, except more tart, like spring water.

  “What was that about?” she asks later, eating shredded cheese folded in a pickle slice. Toy tacos, she calls them.

  “Did it hurt?” I ask.

  “Was that the point?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it felt good. When I’m with you I feel better for some reason,” she says.

  “I feel unruly,” I say.

  On the rotten deck I read. I call Trisha again but she does not pick up.

  I force myself to work. I sit down and draft an outline of chapter three, which, as of today, I’m calling “The Cunt Curator.” I end up making a long list of alternative chapter titles: “Twat Collector,” “Homeward Bound 4: The Reckoning,” “Toy Tacos.”

  Decker reads the body like a textbook. “Masculine traits,” he writes, “in the modern female, are quite often evidence of a physiological and psychological disorder.” In his photo logs, which I scrutinize too often, the labia part and the vaginal openings distend, as if to venerate their own meticulous architecture. In my outline I write: “Science is a scrupulous attack of the self. Show me an unhealthy craving and I’ll show you a pocketknife.”

  I have no idea what this means. A hummingbird has gotten into the house and snapped its neck during an effort at escaping through the skylight. I sweep it off the floor into the dustpan; it lands in the trash with a tender thud. Minutes later the dogs have toppled the can and are fighting over the soggy corpse.

  When I first met Miriam she was standing beside a truck loaded with yard ornaments, wearing a hot-pink tracksuit, holding a greasy paper sack in front of Big Dog’s barbecue stand. She was crying, in an obvious way. I walked past her with my head down, to order my loose meat sandwich. I could hear her talking to herself while I watched a ragged teen spoon coleslaw into a Styrofoam cup. On the way back to my car she yelled, “Hey! Hey, girl! Hold up. Listen.” She’d locked her keys in the cab. She was still wiping tears off her face when she asked if I’d give her a ride. And there was her neck, like a short loaf of bread, and her forehead, flat as a tabletop.

  She is not a beautiful woman. She is malleable, capable of filling small rooms with her body. I imagine hiding things in her heft. Her voice is shrill as a kazoo.

  Now we’re lesbians of the land: twin valves opening against each other in the darkness of the master bedroom, contrary figures hoeing rows in the garden. We are the cat and the crawfish. Other times, the lady and the friend. I hold the dogs back while she cleans their pen.

  The librarian’s fingers seem swollen. I detect a smell of Lysol as he hands me my ordered books. I read at a little desk made for a child and watch the man climb a stepladder in order to reshelve the reference material. The welfare mothers peck ferociously at their keyboards while their dirt-faced children wander among the stacks. In her third book, Meta Porn Heroine, Trisha writes: “A researcher will often find herself blocked by the biases of her own deductions, even as an object’s meaning mutates before her. One is handicapped, as in life, by the malfunctions of our own prejudices and desires. It should come as no surprise that these personal preoccupations are rampant among leading pornographic scholars.” I want to discuss this with the little librarian. Instead I gather my things. I could apply Trisha’s logic to a mailbox if I thought long enough about it. Every idea lands sharply, and then ripples into nothing. At home I call her again. This time someone answers, a man. He says his name is Landon and he’s feeding the fish. “Trisha is in Bucharest,” he says.

  “For how long?” I ask.

  He claims to take down a message but when I ask him to repeat my number back he says, “I’m off. Thank you!”

  The call throws me into a panic for the rest of the day.

  There are four photos of patient D568 in Decker’s source material, with either her eyes blocked out or the face softly blurred. Her body, though, is always unmistakable and vulgar. At forty-two years old, D568 is as awkward and angular as an adolescent male. Decker charted the patient’s development over thirty years, like a timeline for biological deviance. “Prototypical housewife-queer” he calls her. She looks like me. We’re of the same “sexless” frame. There is a blank utility about her, suggesting only shapes. I feel less lonely when I look at her.

  I take out a sheet of paper and write across the top, “I am my own test subject.”

  Miriam and I go to a bar. My hair is clean and I’m wearing a button-down shirt. What is here for the irreverent dyke? Pole barns, a sad library, Walmart, endless isolated hollers full of coyotes. Miriam is sitting with her girlfriends and wearing a dress she made herself from a checkered tablecloth. There is a hole cut in it for her head. I buy drinks for everyone. “Doesn’t she put you in the mood for a picnic?” I ask her friends. She laughs but her friends hurry toward the dartboard. They seem defensive in their leather skirts and tight T-shirts. Each of their shirts has something printed on it: drama queen, rock star, diva. They are all over forty. “Are those their Christian names?” I ask Miriam.

  “No,” she says. “Those are job descriptions.”

  She shotguns several beers and we attempt a clumsy game of pool. She insists we leave and go for barbecue. We drive and eat the sandwiches. Miriam makes a mess of herself. She is a tablecloth smeared with barbecue sauce. She wants to show me a field. “I’ve seen one before,” I say. We arrive and we get out of the car and she points to some lines cut into the tall grass. “I don’t get it,” I say.

  “Look at it for a minute,” she says.

  So I do. I stare for a long time until suddenly I can see that there are words mowed into the wheat. You have to tilt your head a bit, lean against the grass. “Hello,” it says, and then just a few yards away, “Goodbye.”

  “Ain’t that something? Drama Queen’s husband did it with a riding mower.”

  “Looks time-consuming,” I say. Mir
iam turns to cough. She hacks for a minute and out of nowhere vomits onto the ground. She heaves a few more times, until it seems there’s nothing left. I consider putting my hand on her back but she vomits so casually it seems silly to comfort her. It just falls right out of her mouth. She has the simplest expression on her face. She has done this many times. Her thin hair twirls around her head in the wind. When she has finally finished she says, “I’m sorry I threw up.” She pulls up her dress to wipe off her mouth. I get a full shot of her legs, sturdy and pale and vast. “Do you mind if we go home? I smell like puke,” she says.

  Half-asleep on the sofa, with Miriam in the spare room, I touch myself. I think of her legs and Trisha’s head, of the place where Miriam’s thighs begin to touch right above the knee, her enormous backside, the outline so visible through the thin fabric of that terrible dress. I think of the abrupt transition between Trisha’s waist and her unbelievable hips, her clever insults. I climax to the image of their ghastly hybrid.

  I have clipped Trisha’s photo from the dust jacket of Morphologies and Eden and taped it inside my desk drawer, next to the unsharpened pencils. I open the drawer too often. “Let your life be a document for the world to study and despise!” the prologue reads. Her words are a confirmation, of something: every pervert distinguishes herself by the manner in which she chooses to condemn others?

  Typically, in the earlier stages of theoretical discourse, pages amass until a puzzle appears. I’m supposing here. I’ve never written a book before. I have an inkling and a self-imposed deadline. There is repetition, I know that, and hypotheses extending like slippery tentacles. There are paragraphs lined up like the variables of a long equation with no solution. Drowning comes to mind, a constant sense of doom. In this way you can tell a book is alive.