The Chronology of Water Part 3

There were other, not cool times. Like the time I woke up under an overpa.s.s with my face against asphalt in a pool of my own vomit with my pants down around my ankles. Or the time I woke up in some blond and blue-eyed Karate guy's bed with leather twine around my neck. Or the time I fell from a second floor balcony and cracked my head, the woman with the latex gloves touching my forehead in the ambulance saying, "Lidia, can you still see me? Stay awake for me, Lidia. Good girl." She looked like an underwater white octopus lady. Pretty though.

I'm a strong bodied person. And the thing of it was, the things I thought would kill me in my life, maybe even the things I wished had, didn't. What, I distinctly remember thinking, did I have left to lose? Crossing the blood-brain barrier. The mind body barrier. The reality dream barrier. All that euphoria filling up the hole of me. No pain. No thought. Just images to follow.

I was a zombie for a spell in Lubbock. In Austin. In Eugene.

It wasn't epic compared to the other wounds in my life.

Rehab and relapse and remember all start with the letter R.

What It's Not THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STORY ABOUT ADDICTION.

It's not The Heroin Diaries and it's not Trainspotting and it's not William Burroughs and it's not a Million f.u.c.king Little Pieces, OK? I'm not gonna be on Oprah and I don't have a series of meaningful vignettes to relate that can compete with the gazillion other stories of druglife. It's not Crank and it's not Tweak and it's not Smack. No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like ... more like everyone's.

Addiction, she is in me, sure enough. But I want to describe something else to you. Smaller. A smaller word, a smaller thing. So small it could travel a bloodstream.

When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, "Go away, Belle."

Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I'd ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: "Stay away; this isn't anything for you. I'm not talking about anything." And she turned her gaze to the television. General Hospital was on.

I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather than sobbing. I muscled up my bicep and I punched the wall of the bathroom. It left a small crack. My hand immediately ached. How I felt was alone. Like I didn't have a mother. Or a father. At least not ones I wanted. When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.

It scared the c.r.a.p out of me. I didn't call my father. I didn't call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps.

I didn't know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn't know then how deeply my mother's song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn't know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all.

My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor a.s.signed talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, "I'm done." But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it's difficult to tell rage from love.

When I was 17 my mother signed me into an outpatient teen drug treatment center. She found dope in my pants pocket while doing laundry one day. The place I had to go to every day for eight weeks was a soft Khmer Rouge. I was told that "behavioral healthcare" is your "doorway to choice and hope." That was the motto. I didn't find choice and hope through the doorway. I found bibles and Christians with thick gator-mouthed drawls and skin cancer tans counseling me on self-esteem and a purposeful life. They fed me bible pa.s.sages. I brought Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein with me every day for moral support. They always made me put the book at the front counter, but I knew it was there. I knew it had my back. Not like my mother.

Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.

My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholars.h.i.+p papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother's mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman's pain could kill you.

Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a c.r.a.ppy-a.s.s efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange bas.e.m.e.nt of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.

There, I was meant to "find meaning in life's traffic through clearing spiritual barriers." A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named " Dorothy." My mother's name. Or The Wizard of Oz. I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate. Trust me when I say I definitely found "meaning in life's traffic." Eventually.

So then this is not an addiction story.

It's just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.

Her first round.

It's just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.

Her first round.

I know that will well now. It's the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.

It's the will to end.

Crooked Lovesong PHILLIP DID WRITE ME A SONG. HE DID. AND IT WASN'T about how my life was spiraling away from bold swimmer toward comfortably numb. It wasn't about the three abortions I'd had before I was 21. It wasn't even about how much money I'd won drinking Texans under tables. Or all the nights I made him break into other peoples' homes the way my father had broken into me.

The song he wrote for me was mostly instrumental. But you have to understand, and my archangel and his lover will back me up on this - he could play the acoustic guitar better than ... you know, James Taylor. So the song took on a rather epic quality. Way before Windham Hill. But there was one, small, tender refrain that would come out of nowhere, or rather, it would come from the very heart of the music, deeper than anything I'd known, and it went like this: Children have their dreams to hang on to. How they fly, and take us to the moon. They flow from you. They flow from you.

The first time I heard it? Sitting on a driftwood log at our wedding, which was on the beach of Corpus Christi, Texas. And it wasn't just me who couldn't breathe from the jesusf.u.c.king - christknot in my throat and the salted water pouring out of my eyes rivaling the ocean. The whole posse of people there bawled. Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I'd hidden her.

Is that love? Was it? I still don't know. It's possible. But none of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it's the kind of thing that happens in stories.

Phillip and I tried to make a go of it as something called "married." In Austin, Texas. I don't know how to explain why we went busto. OK, that's a big fat lie. I know exactly why we went busto, but I don't want to have to say it. Look, I'll tell you later. OK?

While we were trying to be married in Austin he got a job - the only job he could find - at a sign-making company. That's what happens to artists like him - a man with the talent of the most revered painters in art history has to go work at a sign factory. I got a job with ACORN. Yep, that ACORN. But I didn't give a s.h.i.+t about humanity or common cause or gra.s.s roots. By then, there wasn't much I gave a s.h.i.+t about. I'd so colossally failed athlete/student/wife/woman at that point I felt like something an animal puked up. A human fur ball.

This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it's better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but d.a.m.n close.

So I set to work destroying things.

The first thing I did was get drunk one night and punch Phillip in the face. Yep, I punched the most beautiful talented musician and painter I will ever meet in my life, also the most pa.s.sive and gentle man I have ever met, right in the face. As hard as I could. Wanna know what I said? I said, " You don't want anything. You are killing me with your not wanting anything." Cla.s.sy. Astute. Mature. Emotionally stunning. I am my father's daughter.

The second thing I did was get fired from ACORN. Which is hard to do. But I hated it. I hated having to go out into the hot Texas sun and knock on door after door begging a.s.sholes for money when all they cared about was their next latte and what pair of jeans that cost more than my rent they were about to buy. I'd go to maybe 10 houses or so, enough houses to get beer money. Then I'd sit on curbs and smoke pot and drink beer. Then I'd fill in my canva.s.sing sheets with made up addresses and names.

The third thing that happened is I got pregnant. I'm still not sure why, I took my birth control pills regularly. And more and more JT and I were not making love - shocker. But a seed went up and against all odds, in. Breaking my f.u.c.king heart.

Look here it is straight no chaser. The me I was if I leave Phillip out of it? Abortion. But something about him and something even deeper down inside me - like a hidden blue smooth stone - it all made that impossible for me to choose. And yet, there was no way to keep pretending the life we had together was anything but a sad a.s.s country song, so as my belly b.u.mp turned into a hill, I did the only thing I could do, given the life I'd frankensteined. I called my sister in Eugene where she worked as a Professor of English at the University of Oregon and asked her if I could live with her. Across her leaving me as a child, across the waters of our age difference, across her life as a successful academic and my life as a reckless fireball. The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply in common: the tyranny of culture telling women who they should be.

It's not possible to explain to you how quickly and profoundly she said yes. Maybe she was waiting for me to come back to her. Bringing my big as a house belly with me. To birth and raise a child together, to make a family outside the lines. Because it was the only story I could think of that might live. And though she'd left me to save her life, she somehow knew how to make a s.p.a.ce for sister, child, self. But I know too that it was a sacrifice to bring a daughter in from the cold.

Phillip eventually followed me to Eugene. He lived on the other side of town. We barely saw each other. He worked at Smith Family Bookstore, I went to school in English. Sometimes we'd run into each other, and lock eyes, and I wouldn't be able to breathe. I'd put my hand on my belly to feel what was there between us. It was all I had to give to him.

Here it is. What I didn't want to say before. It's me. I'm the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.

Family Drama WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE'D MAKE me "do" things.

Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it ... her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.

Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.

Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.

Or this: aren't the icicles hanging from the house cool? C'mere. Put your tongue on this one. It's pretty!

I would have done anything.

Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I'd ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of ... Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't pull any hair out of the top of my head.

For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She'd seen the R-rated " Romeo and Juliet" - she had the alb.u.m. She could paint real paintings that went on walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing, she could ice skate. I mean really, really well. Me? Eight years younger, if you discount swimming, about the best thing I could do was dress myself. It was a banner day if I didn't cry, pee, or rock back and forth like a little monkey.

And she had b.o.o.bs.

b.o.o.bs were the magical thing women had. White and full and inexplicably mouthwatering.

But when I say I would have done anything, it isn't exactly these things. What it is: I took naive pleasure in the small acts of humiliation, and I attached them to a feminine form. The things she made me do made my skin hot and p.r.i.c.kly. Her beauty was stern and commanding.

As my sister neared adulthood, my father took a keen interest in her many talents. He'd brag. And put photos of her up in his office. Just her.

Her art teacher guided her more and more toward the world. Her watercolor paintings - giant, s.e.xual looking flowers a little like Georgia O' Keefe's, her art teacher helped her to have them framed and entered into local art shows.

She played guitar and sang in her room with the door shutting out the word family, but out in the world her art teacher helped her and a friend perform together with microphones at local venues for money. When she learned how to make giant flowers from paper, her art teacher helped her sell those, too. Her art was making a path.

I'm not saying I figured all this out at eight. At eight, all I saw was how he looked at her hair. All I heard was his yelling every year of her development from girl to young woman, like a series of earthquakes pounding the life out of things, rattling the floors of daughter.

And anyway, maybe I have the ages wrong. Maybe I was 10. Maybe I was 6. Maybe I was 35 and getting my second divorce. I don't know how old we were as children. I only know my father's anger built the house.

Once in the entryway when she was on her way out of the door for school, he yelled "Christ you look like a b.u.m with those jeans and that dumpy sack s.h.i.+rt - you trying to look like a man? You look like a G.o.dd.a.m.n man." Peering out from behind the door of my bedroom I saw he had his face close to hers. I saw her looking at the ground under a curtain of auburn hair. Then I saw her lift her head and meet his eyes, her literature and art books at her chest like a s.h.i.+eld. They looked almost exactly like each other. It made the fact that I had to pee hurt.

When my sister was older, she started wearing this long, dusted gray-purple antique dress to school. And she went out sometimes with men named Victor and Park, both much older than her, men who would drive her away from our house for hours and hours, leaving my father to make a chain smoker's chimney of our living room. Watching All in the Family. Pounding the arm of the overstuffed sofa chair.

But the big event for me was that she moved down into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the house, into some spooky bedroom we never used down there. There was nothing my father could do but watch, because my mother did it behind his back. My sister was smarter than my never-went-to-college mother by the time she was in high school, but my mother had survivor smartness. Like a savvy animal.

The move, to me, was unbelievable - my sister moved down into the belly of a haunted house. She wanted to. I couldn't even make it to the unfinished cement floors of the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry room without an adult with me. Down the awful blue carpet stairs, down the treacherously dark and unfinished sideboards of the bas.e.m.e.nt hallway. Through those unnamable smells. Those creepy dungeon sounds of knocking pipes and creaking wood. All the way to the other end of the house, into a room that I was sure I would pa.s.s out trying to get to. I remember asking my mother if someone could die from "hippoventating."

Sometimes I'd just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wis.h.i.+ng I could see her, and I'd lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I'd give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I'd start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I'd hold the railing for dear life and say her name into s.p.a.ce. Hoping she would come retrieve me.

If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don't know.

But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother's hand-st.i.tched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or sh.e.l.ls or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers.

In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away.

She'd let me get in bed with her, and we'd move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. " Watercolor covers," she'd say, and I'd nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repet.i.tive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high.

Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she'd escort me, and I'd be back in the upperworld of things.

What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live down there that year. How much I didn't understand where the danger lived.

When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her art teacher Baudette very calmly but with complete certainty that she was not going home.

Ever.

My parents had to go see the officials at the school, and the art teacher, Baudette, who my sister had made into her better family, explained to my ding headed mother that my sister couldn't be around my father. That mandatory counseling sessions would happen. I thought her teacher's names were magical. Mr. Foubert. Mr. Saari. Baudette. I sat in the corner of the school office eating a little piece of paper trying not to cry.

I still remember the counselor's name. Dr. Akudagawa. I remember how I had to stay with friends of my parents when the three of them abandoned me for sessions. How my father never went into the bas.e.m.e.nt. How she rarely came up.

How my sister got closer and closer to the final act of leaving for college: exeunt daughter, stage left.

How my father's rage came to live in the house for good.

How I would be what was left of her, when she gave me a piece of her hair as a keepsake.

How my father's eyes would turn.

This is Not About my Sister THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT MY SISTER. BUT IF IT WERE, I'd tell you again that for two years before she could leave our Oedipal household she carried razor blades in her purse.

I'd tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up - how as a child I sat in the bathroom with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed. Because it hurt that bad to s.h.i.+t.

I'd tell you how she was born with a wandering eye, and what the Dr. who later delivered me wrote about what that might mean for infants like her - how to watch for it as a sign of danger in a child. How fathers or uncles or grandfathers might have had a hand in this particular kind of eye disorder - in certain s.e.xual abuse cases - a p.e.n.i.s coming too close to the still developing eyes of a child.

I'd tell you how, in the end, my sister replaced my mother and father in my mind and heart, how we created a union of survival that means we are both still alive.

If this book were about my sister, I'd tell you how she lived past daughter.

And I'd show you a picture.

A Simca station wagon. Maybe white. Maybe wood paneling.

My father loved the Northwest. He loved to explore the mountains and rivers and lakes. He loved to fish and camp and hike. But his wife had a misshapen leg not good for walking and he had two daughters instead of sons, so his disappointment always came with us everywhere we went. We could never hike far enough. Never carry enough weight. Never go as deeply into the wilderness. We couldn't fish right. We had to pee sitting down and we needed toilet paper. A crippled wife and two daughters. We couldn't even breathe right. Ever.

The Christmas I was four and my sister was 12 we drove and drove. From I-5 to Puyallup. Past Enumclaw. East on highway 7 to Elbe. Onto Highway 706 east through Ashford to Alexander's. Then there is the entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park. I have driven it many times as an adult. That's how I remember the path. Or so I tell myself.

But what I remember then is how bright the sun shone on the white - like an overexposed winter everywhere. How we got out of the car and made a snowman - my sister and my father and I. How we decorated the snowman with plastic Easter eggs that were in the car. How my mother laughed and wore her sungla.s.ses and sat on the tailgate.

But too I remember my father's voice when we drove fur - ther, and I fell asleep, and my sister began to read a book: " What are you two doing, playing with yourselves? I bring you through the most beautiful scenery in the world and you are playing grab-a.s.s? LOOK OUT THE G.o.dd.a.m.n WINDOW." So we did. Silently. The side of my sister's face looked as if it was made of stone. My ears burned.

We were dressed for our front yard - for maybe s...o...b..ll fights with neighbor kids or going sledding. Running inside for new socks and hot chocolate. We had no food or water or blankets or radio or anything. Except a half finished plaid thermos of coffee. And matches. Both of my parents chain-smoked. My sister and I by this point were used to riding in the car like prisoners. Our father drove us to Mt. Rainier to get a tree. A G.o.dd.a.m.n tree. In the beautiful G.o.dd.a.m.n northwest.

The place we stopped to get the tree to me looked like the middle of nowhere. The "road" filled with more and more snow. The drive became steep - switchbacks and a permanent tilt to the Simca station wagon that kept my head pinned to the back seat. The heater in the car blew full blast. On the sides of the barely there road enormous evergreens and firs rose up like giant snow covered sentries. Beautiful but vaguely ominous. To me anyway. I couldn't crane my neck hard enough to see the tops. Where he pulled over the trees were enormous. I remember wondering how we'd drag one back to our house ... with a giant rope?

Where my father pulled over and stopped the car, my mother said, " Mike?"

My father didn't say anything. He simply made ready to get out of the car. So the little women followed him.

My mother wore a wool lined long gray raincoat with a faux fur racc.o.o.n collar and gold metal fasteners. Pointy movie star sungla.s.ses. Her hair in a bun wrapped and wrapped on her head. Red lipstick. My sister wore a light ski jacket and red pants and a white fake fur hat with s...o...b..ll ties and cotton kid gloves and black rubber K-Mart boots. I wore red corduroy pants and a smaller brown version of my sister's hat with the pom pom ties and red galoshes and black cotton gloves - I remember our red pants because they stood out so in the snow. Like blood and urine do. And my mother made them. My father wore jeans and a fleece lined suede jacket and blond leather gloves. He pulled a handsaw from the back of the station wagon. And a rope. And my sister's hand.

My mother and I immediately got behind on the ascent up the snow-covered hill. Think about this - my mother's misshapen steps hobbling up and up. Me only four years old. Within five minutes the snow was up to my hips. Within 20 minutes up to my chin. My mother, again and again, pulled me out of a snow hole until I sunk into the next. The only way I experienced how cold it was happened in my mother's voice when she yelled up to the dots of my father and sister getting smaller and farther up the hill, " Mike! Lidia is blue!" That and my teeth clattering.

I remember seeing him turn and look down at us. I remember his yelling something I couldn't understand, then turning away from us. I remember him grabbing my sister's arm, and though I couldn't know this back then, I know now he wrenched her farther up with him.

" Well, s.h.i.+t." My mother's drawl made me laugh. But I was s.h.i.+vering and I felt wet. All over.

Somehow my mother and I made it back down the hill to the car, though I remember nearly drowning a couple times in snow past my head and my mother yanking me back to air and sky. So much sun I could barely keep my little blue eyes open.

In the car, my mother said " Belle, take all your clothes off." But I just sat there numb like a kid Popsicle. So she took all my clothes off. They were drenched. She placed the red weighted garments over the seats. She turned the car on. She blasted the heater and made me get on the floor where your feet go. She took off that weird coat with the racc.o.o.n collar and wrapped it around me like a tent. When I looked up at her, she said something I never forgot the rest of my life. She said, " Lidabelle. Pretend I am Becky Boone, and you are Israel Boone, and this is our adventure!"

I pretended immediately. Not only did I watch Daniel Boone all the time and love it, but I looked exactly like Israel. I laughed and smiled and forgot about how cold I was. I forgot my father was my father. Somewhere out there was Daniel Boone. A man. A big man.

My mother dug through her coat pocket and found b.u.t.terscotch candies and we ate them. She made me drink coffee from the plaid thermos. It tasted like hot liquid dirt. But she said, " Remember, you are Israel Boone! You can do anything! When we get home I'll make you a buckskin s.h.i.+rt!"

It was a lie. A beautiful, stunningly creative, lifesaving lie.