The Chronology of Water (18 page)

Of course somewhere around five minutes later I snapped out of it and thought AHHHH what am I doing and thought JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I jumped off, and military rolled through some ground gravel until I came to a scraped to shit stop, laughing and laughing the high of organics and free. I walked home. Devin was exactly where I’d left him, kind of passed out like a giant drunk Caucasian Buddha.

The night after my gravel roll I sat at my computer with my fingers on the keys. My hands were all scraped up. My forearms and elbows, too. My chin and cheek. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation chapter on Kathy Acker, who by then I’d met. I stared at lines of hers I had typed and referenced as part of my critical discussion on the screen:

When I went to write words over the top of hers, kind of I felt like I might throw up. Instead of the dissertation chapter, I began to write a story. The first line that came out of me was: “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”

Please understand, I loved reading literary theory - I mean I devoured the primary texts as if they were romance novels - I
dove into the discourse as if its waters were mine alone - my body song swam in between currents of language and thought. But trying to write critically, academically, hurt.

A lot.

Why would someone do that to novels? For what purpose, other than a sadistic impulse to hush, silence, incarcerate art? It seemed like a violence to me to write that way about literature. It seemed false at best and repugnant at worst - murderous even.

In my dissertation the novels I’d chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art.
White Noise
and
Almanac of the Dead
and
Empire of the Senseless
- a book which I promise you, if you’ve never read it, will scrape your eyeballs. Books in which culture towered and collapsed, border identities defied the cult of good citizenship and revolutionaries turned back on their liberators with fire for hair. Wars of militarization and wars of race and wars of gender and wars of fathers and language and power and wars of just the human heart played out page after page, taking my breath away.

When I set my hands to writing literary criticism - that act of writing so legitimized by white male knowledge - I felt like I was a torturer. A killer. A Betrayer. An abuser. I slept with three of my professors - two men and one woman - I think trying to get the body back into discourse. HEY! What about bodies? The noisy, wet, rule-breaking body that seemed erased by all that lofty thought. It didn’t work.

OF COURSE I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn’t let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I’d never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman.

To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. And I’m here to write a dissertation.

Yeah. Right. Whatever. And anyway, where did you even come from?

Oh, I think you know. I’m from your father. Now open the goddamned door.

My father. Whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film. Whose intellect I carried in my blood rivers. That’s when my two mes had it out. The me I’d forged to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me I’d never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in my hands, hiding like the crouch of dreams in my fingers. My father’s daughter.

“I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”

The night after I jumped from the train of things, at the computer my heart raced. My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt - bruised and cut from falling from a train - or a marriage - or a self in the night - I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book.

Until my very skin made screamsong.

SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book
Her Other Mouths
. In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.

I did finish my dissertation though. It felt like walking through fire. A crucible. I called it
Allegories of Violence
. By some bizzaro twist of fate it got published too. I still think it happened to someone else. But something weirdly good came from it. The two mes? We began to get to know each other. Intellectual me and blood bodied me began to hang out. Brush each other’s hair. Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other’s backs and clink glasses late into the night.

But there was a cost.

I was in my eleventh year of marriage with the Devin. I was a teacher of things, having achieved a doctorate and publications. But that woman I’d let into the house ravaged who I had been. Her zany brain force would not go. I didn’t want to fuck. I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go numb every night. I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head. I didn’t want to drink until I dropped. I wanted to write. A whole other book. My husband became like a willful unruly child to me. A submerged one. And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places.

Devin’s life moved bedward, fueled by alcohol and woman need. On one of his travels to another country for the first time without me, he found a foreign bed. While he was in Vietnam I waited for the word “husband” to come back. Days and nights. Then weeks. Then one morning I didn’t get out of bed. Days and nights. When I had to pee, I did. When I was hungry, I cried. When I was awake, a white nothing. At night I ate small white sleeping pills. Something I learned well from my mother. More and more of them. When I slept, I hoped to die.

Finally a gentle friend broke into my house because he was worried about me. He and a bull dyke named Laurel broke down the front door of my house when I stopped showing up at work. He put me in the shower. Then he wrapped me in blankets. Then he fed me. Literally. Then we watched old movies for three days until I looked at him and said, OK.

I thought of Brody and his clarinet and beautiful black kid hands. I thought of my best friend in Florida, the one my mother had outed out of my life. Of my arch angel, Michael and how we both left the Lubbock and made up lives. There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you.

Devin did come back, but we were never again together.

He drank himself ever womanward. I entered my female family lineage - a suffering that once I again claimed it, felt as familiar as a mother. Daughter. Sister. Home. Her name, depression.

In that long thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman. Not a wife. Not a mother. No one’s lover. No job or book gave me value to myself. I felt like a pointless woman sack. I lost pounds of flesh having no one to share a body with. My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else. Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I’d smile, but I felt like an insect. In the morning I’d lose interest in washing my hair or brushing my teeth partway through, and find myself standing naked dripping
in the bathroom staring at the floor or holding my toothbrush in the air, foam dripping from my mouth.

When I wasn’t teaching or driving to and from teaching, I was at home. No, not home. An empty woman in a house. I’d sit in my living room alone grading student papers and stare out the large window onto the street. There were always more papers. I could picture a forever like this. Thoughtless and small and requiring me only to perform tasks with a pen. I’d drink only enough to not feel. Every day. About a bottle a day, roughly. Evenly. Sometimes wine, sometimes vodka. At night I’d watch T.V. until sleep saved me. Or didn’t. This is my life is what I felt. It is slow like still water. There is a dull hum in the ear and a softheadedness best used for napping or making coffee. There is a neighborhood and a house and a refrigerator. The comfort of appliances and going to the gas station. There is a car in which I ride to work and then come home. There is a linear and accessible story to follow. You don’t have to do anything. Or be.

But then there was another woman on the other side of the glass.

Staring numbly out the sanctity of the living room plate glass window one day I saw a woman with ashen skin and dirty blond hair walk by in denim cut-offs and a tube top and cowboy boots. Her arms looked like maps. The circles under her eyes weren’t shiners but could fool you. She had a jerk to her right shoulder every third step or so. Walking by woman. Then I saw an emaciated man in jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt walk after her. He hunched. He had darty eyes. He smoked. His hair hung down in a rat tail to the middle of his back.

The thing is, I’d seen them before. Lots of times. For about two years. She was a hooker. He was her pimp. This was their beat. The alleyway behind my house. We’d been living this way - me on the inside with my ever safening bouge life. Them on the outside with some trace of my past in their skin and hair.

This time when I saw her though, I felt something in my chest that hurt. It felt good to feel something for someone else.
Even pain. Maybe especially pain. Sitting there as they went out of view I tasted something warm in my mouth. Then I realized I’d bitten the inside of my cheek.

I didn’t do anything but grade papers, that day. My chest and cheek aching. That night I threw up for no particular reason. Which was not eventful for that time.

But the next time I saw her, something very small and specific caught my eye. An important detail. A bruise at the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t the bruise. It was the bruise that let me see … her eyes, were blue. Like mine. I let the papers I was grading slide to the floor. I watched her walk by and wondered how much she weighed. I wondered her age - impossible to guess. I wondered what jobs she’d tried and failed, this walking woman in cut-offs with dangling maps for arms and a bruise and blue eyes. I tried to picture how much money I had in my wallet in my bookbag by the front door. I watched her ass hanging out of her shorts - it hung limply - two little flesh commas. Then she was around the corner. I waited for her dance partner to come into view. Without thinking I knocked on the window. Without thinking I got up and walked to my front door and opened it and walked outside and walked up to him and said “ How much.”

In the short story I wrote about what happened next I ask her in. I tell her to sit down. She sits down. In the story she smokes and bobbing machines her left knee. Her hand shakes. In the story I say this is what it feels like to be me a woman who teaches English looking down at a woman who sucks dicks all day and all night every night as she sits on my couch smoking. This is what me an addict upwardly mobile given something infinitesimally small to believe in called words thinks looking at her: she looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body. When I see an image of christ I picture a Mary so drawn
and gaunt and tired and angry to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face.

In the story I say, what do I think I’m going to do, teach her?

People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn’t lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn’t it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind’s powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?

An exchange happened. Woman to woman. If she is still alive, she can back me up on this.

Was it possible I had something to give? Out of the nothingness that was my life? Really, what the fuck did I have to give? Woman with too many holes in her. And yet there was something.

Words.

With this woman in me I went to my teaching job and talked to students about ideas. The ideas got into my heart some. And then my heart began to pump. The talking with students about ideas had a pulse. Some of them cared, some of them could care less, but it didn’t matter. I was so happy to get to stand in a room with words and ideas I would have talked to myself alone in a classroom. But I was not alone. I was with what youth should be. I was with artists and writers and scholars and bartenders and musicians and nurses and strippers and lawyers and mothers and some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who’d wronged us and everyone we’d been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.