Body Composition

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Kelley E. Evans

June 2008 2

This dissertation titled

Body Composition

by

KELLEY E. EVANS

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Joan C. Connor

Professor of English

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

EVANS, KELLEY E., Ph.D., June 2008, English

Body Composition (232 pp.)

Director of Dissertation: Joan C. Connor

Kelley Evans‘s dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays, which foreground the experience of the body. In four sections—Sensation, Chaos/Control,

Movement, Inward/Outward—she considers her body and the bodies of loved ones in states both elevated and debased, in social space and in the mind. In her critical introduction, ―Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay,‖ Evans proposes a reflexive and constantly reinvented personal essay canon as a corrective for the hegemony of memoir in the field of creative nonfiction. Examining texts by Eliza Haywood, Margaret Fuller,

Jamaica Kincaid, and Etel Adnan, Evans seeks to add diverse voices to the canon and to add innovative techniques to discussions of craft.

Approved: ______

Joan C. Connor

Professor of English 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

―And you will be consumed‖ was originally published in Harpur Palate in

Summer 2007. ―Body Composition‖ is forthcoming in the Spring 2008 issue of Fourth

Genre.

I wish to thank my professors at Ohio University and beyond for their exacting attention to my work. Thanks to the members of my committee, Joan Connor, Dinty W.

Moore, Janis Butler Holm, Pepo Delgado-Costa, and David Lazar. Joan Connor encouraged me in my desire to write about my experiences as a woman, while reminding me of the essentials of good prose. Visiting professors Carla Harryman and Eloise Klein

Healy awakened me to new possibilities in prose and poetry. Thanks especially to David, who taught me that I had been following Montaigne‘s winding path all along.

Thanks to my parents, Jan and C. Stephen Evans, for their encouragement and wisdom. This manuscript would not have been possible without my husband Jamey

Bouwmeester, whose unflagging support and sound editing were indispensible. Thanks, finally, to my daughter, Imogen Pearline Evans Bouwmeester, who birthed me as a person and a writer anew. 5

For Jamey

6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3

Acknowledgments...... 4

Critical Introduction ...... 8

Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay ...... 9

Sensation ...... 42

And you will be consumed ...... 43

El Malpais [The Badlands] ...... 56

On Touching and Not Touching ...... 70

Body Composition ...... 82

Chaos/Control ...... 97

Say A Prayer ...... 98

On Birth Control ...... 112

I Want to Drive a Bus ...... 128

On Absence ...... 140

Movement ...... 142

In Which I Move Again ...... 143

On Rest Areas ...... 155

In Transit ...... 173

Inward/Outward ...... 185

Feet ...... 186 7

Side Effects ...... 188

Betrayal, Betrothal ...... 204

8

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

9

Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay

Discussion among creative writers of nonfiction, in conferences and in corridors, often steers toward the issue of what can be claimed as truth. Witness the ongoing debate about the factual misrepresentations in James Frey‘s memoir A Million Little Pieces, or only slightly further back, the uproar about the conflation of characters in Vivian

Gornick‘s autobiographical work Fierce Attachments. Oprah and large publishing houses raise objections to their work, sparking national debate and intensifying the argument already present in classrooms. Writers wring their hands and ask, what is the limit?

Where is the line? And how can I get around it? Recently on the Diane Rehm show I heard Molly O‘Neil discuss myth and story in her memoir Mostly True: A Memoir of

Family, Food, and Baseball; she champions ―emotional truth‖ as well as factual truth

(―11:00 Molly O‘Neil‖). On the other side of the debate, Aaron Hamburger writes in

Poets and Writers, ―A memoir is a serious attempt to reconstruct true events, or else it is fantasy. Not both‖ (28). I think they could both agree that the fact v. fiction celebrity boxing match will be dominant for years to come, largely because memoir as a subgenre of nonfiction is so popular, and memoir brings the issue of truth in storytelling to the forefront by its very nature.

One may speculate about the larger cultural significance of the current truth(s) debates, but I will not. You probably are thinking that I will take a stance or side, but I do not wish to do that either. I do want to talk about what this conversation means for the larger field of creative nonfiction. I believe that the constant attention on fact versus fiction indicates that something is lacking in current studies of creative nonfiction— 10 namely, a knowledge of the history of the personal essay. If we give more attention to the study of the personal essay from Montaigne to the present, this dominant discourse about the blurred line of truth and fiction will develop into a more productive conversation about the craft of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, in studying this history, we have the rare opportunity to create an inclusive and elucidating canon, one that can enlarge our expectations of creative nonfiction as well as the smaller subgenre of the personal essay.

Though I doubt my suggested course of action will change the larger public obsession with the reliability of memoir, it can improve the texture and depth of discussions among creative nonfiction writers, and, ultimately, help us to be better writers.

First, a description of this slippery genre is in order. My provisional (brief) definition is derived from Montaigne (and to be revised below). The personal essay is a piece of writing where the author‘s self is apparent, usually through the use of ―I,‖ in which the author explores his or her mind and/or larger issues through his or her experiences. The author allows, even embraces, self-contradiction, and lets ideas unfurl in a digressive manner which, while highly sculpted, appears close to the way in which those ideas are thought.

Certainly a personal essay would be an apt entry into a discussion of memory and its construction. However, when we discuss whether or not memories are true, or if the author has told the truth in recounting them, we immediately focus on nonfiction‘s commonalities with fiction, or how a story is being told—how the writer has employed scene, character, and narrative arc. The facts in question—those nails that snag the cuffs on the frayed jeans of truth—are the facts of the story: where, with whom, how many, 11 and so on. What went through the author‘s mind at the time, and what the author is thinking now, cannot be subjected to a fact-finding mission.

It is precisely the author‘s mind that Montaigne sought to display. When story is employed in his work, he aims to discover what it means, not simply to recount it. The distinction of the personal essay is its ability to comment on the action of the past. While current creative nonfiction has done much to incorporate for its benefit the best of fictional techniques, it has ignored its biggest strength—the ability to tell rather than show and get away with it.

In the larger field of creative nonfiction, storytelling for storytelling‘s sake does serve a purpose. (I can hardly think of an example of creative nonfiction, however, that doesn‘t reflect on itself in some way). Sometimes my concern as a writer is simply to tell a story, rather than to use it as a springboard for self-questioning. However, if as an author I am aware of the tradition of the personal essay, whose project is to make honest inquiry into the self, then I am less likely to obfuscate my self in the telling of the story— to use the story as a scrim to hide behind. Likewise, a greater awareness of one‘s self and one‘s biases, as well as a knowledge of the craft techniques of the personal essay, are essential for good reportage, literary criticism, and all forms of creative nonfiction. For these reasons, I recommend that anyone teaching creative nonfiction, at the graduate or undergraduate level, include in his or her courses a history of the personal essay. Another way to put this is that students should have at least a cursory knowledge of the personal essay canon. 12

My argument that Montaigne is the founder of the personal essay is generally accepted by its practitioners. I realize that in adhering to this idea I put myself in the awkward position of a feminist arguing in favor of a white male as the father of a genre.

Speaking about the use of the personal essay in composition studies, Joel Haefner, in his

1992 College English article ―Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay,‖ claims that such an argument falls into ―originative fallacy,‖ which ―commits the genre (and critical approaches to it) to radical individualism and to patriarchal myths of fathering and genesis‖ (510). Since we see the narrator of Montaigne‘s writing continually contradict and undercut himself, Haefner‘s description of ―radical individualism‖ seems difficult to support. There is, however, a danger in contributing to what he calls

―patriarchal myths of fathering and genesis‖—a danger, but not a certainty. The personal essay has been ripe ground for planting the seeds of feminist revision, the ―I‖ of the personal essay complicated to include not only many selves (as we can see even in

Montaigne) but a larger group. Rachel Blau du Plessis, for example, illuminates this increasingly complex ―I‖ in her essay ―ƒ-words: An Essay on the Essay‖:

Indeed, what essayists mean even when they claim ―the personal‖ is often

the reverberations of collectivity. Adrienne Rich knows this: ―I wrote and

signed my words as an individual, but they were part of a collective

ferment‖ (Rich, 1986, xi). (Blau du Plessis 31)

As I argue below, we may yet find a person of color or woman contemporary of

Montaigne who will complicate our sense of fatherhood of the personal essay, and I 13 would welcome that. For the meantime, I advocate for Montaigne‘s prominence in the canon as well as for the potential for revision he represents.

But where is this personal essay canon? Lynn Z. Bloom‘s 1999 article ―The

Essay Canon‖ takes a stab at outlining a teaching canon (which she distinguishes from a critical canon [401]). Bloom does not define ―the essay‖ as a genre but rather adopts the word ―as a catchall term,‖ (404) as have the readers she compiles; she catalogues essays from composition readers, which may not necessarily be the type of anthologies used in creative writing classes. While the canon includes authors such as E.B. White, Orwell, and Didion, it also includes many pieces of nonfiction that could not be construed as personal even in the broadest sense (―The Declaration of Independence,‖ for example)

(426-428). In his 1996 article ―Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay,‖

Penn State University Professor Wendell V. Harris points out only two works dedicated exclusively to anthologizing personal essays: Philip Lopate‘s The Art of the Personal

Essay and a 1964 collection by Warren S. Walker entitled Prose Lyrics: A Collection of

Familiar Essays (941). A search on Amazon.com turned up the Norton Book of Personal

Essays, which came out a year after Harris‘ article, but it includes only works from Mark

Twain on.

Lopate‘s anthology, as the most recent compilation of the personal essay from antiquity to the present, may provide the closest we have to a personal essay canon. In full disclosure, let me say that I studied under David Lazar, who was a student of

Lopate‘s, and I readily admit my bias for Lopate‘s (and Lazar‘s) definition of the personal essay and for Lopate‘s collection. My description of the essay largely stems 14 from the introduction to Lopate‘s anthology and from my classes with Lazar, and I myself have taught from The Art of the Personal Essay in creative nonfiction workshops.

Having perused many creative nonfiction readers, I came back to Lopate‘s anthology for its historical depth and out of my conviction that knowing the personal essay is a solid grounding for creative nonfiction in general.

As much as I rely on ―the Lopate‖ as I‘ve come to call it, the book is not without its foibles or without the problems that any such a compilation contains. The collection makes an attempt at diversity, but few women and people of color are included before the twentieth century. (For example, between Montaigne and Virginia Woolf there is one woman, Maria Edgeworth, among eight men.) The Art of the Personal Essay is a useful starting point, and it broadens the canon list that usually begins ―Montaigne, Bacon,

Addison and Steele, Lamb, and Hazlitt.‖ But much work is needed to increase inclusivity, such as has been done with recent revisions of eighteenth-century literature, which have moved women like Aphra Ben and Mary Lady Chudleigh to the forefront, or revisions of the rhetoric canon, which have re-included works by Aspasia and Diotima from the

Greeks.

Wendell V. Harris argues that the personal essay is an elusive and rare animal and that it is ―all the more valuable‖ because of this scarcity (934). Harris‘ definition of the personal essay is similar to Philip Lopate‘s. Nevertheless, Harris calls a few of Lopate‘s choices for The Art of the Personal Essay ―dubious representatives.‖ For his own definition, after reviewing characteristics of the essay as observed by authors such as

Alexander Smith, William Gass, and Russell Sanders, Harris adds these exclusions: 15

It is useful to say what the personal essay is not. The much larger groups

from which I am distinguishing it are the informational, which includes

the instructional, technical, analytical, and advisory, and the

programmatic, which includes the didactic, admonitory, and hortatory.

The personal essay does not have as its primary goal the presentation of

fact, instruction in how to do anything, the making of recommendations

about how to handle a current problem, the judicial evaluation of anything,

the construction of an argument for any theory, or the inculcation of moral

rules. (936)

He says that informational or programmatic aims are not the primary goal of the personal essay, which I take to mean that those aims can and do have a role, if a supporting one.

Harris also acknowledges later that he is defining only one end of a wide spectrum of essays (937). I immediately think of exceptions to his criteria, however. The essays of

James Baldwin, for instance, have the strongest hallmarks of the personal essay and have an equal if not dominant goal to speak about racism, personal and institutional. The main thrust of Harris‘ argument is that the personal essay is read mainly for pleasure and should be valued for such. While I also advocate for enjoyment in reading, I don‘t see pleasurable reading as incompatible with informational or programmatic objectives, as

Harris might seem to believe from the passage above. (As I will discuss below, Harris does eventually allow for more ambiguity in his definition.)

Wendell Harris and others might argue that while there were women writers in

17th–19th century England, they were not writing personal essays. (Here I‘m focusing on 16 the English tradition, jumping over the channel after Montaigne.) For example, Mary

Wollstonecraft argued eloquently for the rights of women, but she did not write personal essays. That does not mean, however, that women personal essayists are not out there.

Part of the reason we miss women is that we use a narrow definition of the genre.

If we adopt too strictly the notion that the personal essay speaks for the self and not the group, we make the personal essay into an elitist institution. Who else but the most powerful in society would have the luxury of searching out their thoughts on the page?

How could women and people of color, to whom so many rights were and are denied, indulge in mind meanderings, rather than use a position of limited power to advocate for their (and others‘) improved status? We also need to open ourselves to the possibility that self-exploration can be revolutionary, especially if one explores one‘s relationship to social structures.

I propose that we revisit the history of personal essays with a frame of mind close to that of Rachel Blau duPlessis; let‘s listen to ―reverberations of collectivity.‖ Let‘s see how the questioning self in the personal essay turns into a multiple, fragmented chorus, or how the self can emerge from speaking for a group. Furthermore, let‘s not set our hearts on picking out the ―best‖ example of a personal essay. Taking characteristics outlined in

The Art of the Personal Essay‘s introduction—a conversational element, confession, contrariety, and so on—let‘s look for the sundry ways they might be employed.

Furthermore, let‘s not call it a canon; call it a canonicle. Not canonical, as in of the canon, but canonicle, like an icicle. A canonicle as I‘m proposing is the solid form of the fluid personal essay, a beautiful formation dangling from the eave of literature. Like 17 stalactites, a canonicle may accumulate slowly over time, or like the intricate drips down a candle, it may melt and be reformed. A canonicle is, like the personal essay, self- reflexive.

We can see a good example of what I‘m calling canonicle strategy in Wendell

Harris‘ same article, ―Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay.‖ He contends with a statement R. Lane Kauffmann made that in England the personal essay

―dropped out of sight between Lamb and Beerbohm‖ (Kauffmann quoted in Harris 947).

While agreeing that the personal essay in its ―purer‖ form was not present in Victorian

England, Harris then demonstrates how the Victorian essayists wrote powerfully because they used techniques of the personal essay. He cites quotations of Carlyle, Arnold,

Ruskin, and Pater that portray very ―personal‖ voices. Their essays also digress and find pleasure in the tangent; ―authoritative as they sound, they are as much calls to ‗think on these things‘ as ‗do these things‘‖ (948). He even finds uncertainty and ambiguity amidst didacticism. Harris looks at the Victorians and finds Montaigne.

This is exactly the sort of revision I am advocating. The canonicle includes essays that are not personal essays at first glance, but upon study, are personal essay-ish. Like the personal essay itself, these works require us to slow down, to complicate, to consider paradox. Below I offer examples of two pre-twentieth-century women, Eliza Haywood and Margaret Fuller, who could be added to the canonicle of the personal essay. I acknowledge that they are both white and privileged in their own ways, and that I look forward to searching for women and men of color, different ethnicities, physical abilities, and sexualities. After Haywood and Fuller, I turn my attention to contemporary writers 18 and examine two works: Jamaica Kindcaid‘s A Small Place, and In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country by Etel Adnan.

Addison and Steele and their serial publications the Tatler (1709–11) and

Spectator (1711–14) have long been a part of the essay canon. Writing in the early 18th

Century, their periodical publications included many instructional pieces on emerging middle-class morés and fashion. Several of their more reflective essays are included in

Lopate‘s anthology. Thirty-three years after the Spectator ceased publication, Eliza

Haywood commenced the Female Spectator (1744–46), the first periodical written for and by women (Haywood ―Selections‖ xii). Haywood‘s amatory and epistolary fiction have been the subject of recent scholarship, but, from my library and journal article searches, it would appear that the Female Spectator has been less studied. Like the

Spectator, which was supposedly authored by ―a group of gentlemen from different walks of life‖ (Haywood ―Female‖ 8–9), the Female Spectator was allegedly written by four women, but scholars generally believe that Haywood wrote most or all of the essays

(Haywood ―Selections‖ xiii). This façade of authorship represents an intriguing development in the persona of the essay, allowing Haywood to hide in the group, and also, at least in theory, to address more points of view.

In the practice of the Spectator, the Female Spectator received and answered letters, some of which were probably written by Haywood herself (Haywood ―Female‖

12). The correspondents‘ names are either fictions or pseudonyms. For example, Sarah

Oldfashion solicits advice on how to discipline her daughter (42–45); and Curioso

Politico chastises the Female Spectator for not writing more on government and its 19 actions. Fictitious or not, each letter introduces polyphony to the essay, allowing

Haywood to create and engage in a dialogue. In the introduction to The Art of the

Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate describes the dialogic stance writers of the personal essay take: ―In its preference for a conversational approach, the personal essay shows its relationship to the dialogue, an ancient form going back to Plato. Both forms acknowledge the duality, or rather multiplicity, of selves that human beings harbor‖

(xxiv). In the case of Sarah Oldfashion, the letter lets Haywood step aside, allowing other points of view to be raised that she would not champion herself.

Oldfashion, who wishes to curtail her daughter‘s constant appearances in public society gatherings, writes that she is considering sending the young girl to a relative in the countryside to isolate her. In her response to the letter, Haywood begins by expressing sympathy for the difficulties child-rearing poses: ―The Case of this Lady I must confess is greatly to be commiserated, and must be felt by all who either are, or have been Mothers‖

(Haywood ―Female‖ 45). Haywood disapproves, however, of the use of force to curb the daughter‘s behavior because, she says, it might cause more harm than good. She further recommends that Oldfashion not send the daughter to the country:

A young Lady of her Vivacity, and who seems to have so high a Relish for

the Pleasures of the Town, finding herself snatch‘d away from every thing

she thinks a Joy in Life, and plung‘d into so frightful a Solitude, would

certainly be able to preserve no Degree of Moderation. (47)

Haywood fears that extreme measures would excite excessive passion in the daughter. If she is a sensitive girl, her emotions would ―render her both stupid and diseased,‖ and if 20 she is a willful girl, would cause her so much resentment that she would throw herself into worse activities than those in which she is presently engaged (47). Oldfashion‘s letter has given Haywood an opening to put forth nuanced ideas about disciplining children and women‘s conduct, working her way around several sides of an issue. Though she doesn‘t examine her own life explicitly, she does assay a personal example from her (probably fictional) correspondent.

In addition to allowing Haywood to explore a complex issue in another voice, the letter provides an occasion for the essay, simply the opportunity to address the topic— and the chance to muse on other topics that arise from its mention. Before Haywood makes her suggestions to Oldfashion, she wanders through several related topics in a brief space, demonstrating another characteristic of the personal essay: ―digression and promiscuous meanderings‖ (Lopate xxxvii). Haywood bemoans the fact that children are unaware of the anxieties and genuine efforts of their parents for their betterment; for a paragraph she dwells on the popular meeting places of the day; she argues that people really go to public gardens only to appear fashionable; she admits that the desire to appear modish is not confined to the young, but claims that it can affect them more severely. Only after all this does Haywood give her advice. The dialogue between letter writer and answerer has opened up new space for Haywood, letting her to embrace a variety of topics in a wandering style.

What do the ―multiplicity of selves‖ in the Female Spectator have to bear on our own essays in the present? How do we (or how can we) entertain our many selves within 21 the essay? How does this look in practice? What other techniques besides the epistolary do we have to allow other voices into our essays?

In my own work, I often write about the body—how it changes, transforms, goes through cycles, breaks cycles. In a sense, I am many bodies belonging to one as I observe my body going through different states and stages. I take physical changes as occasions to reflect, to meditate, one body to another. In my essay ―In Transit,‖ I essay the pregnant body, one that is the definition of change, and I use the essay as a sort of letter to myself

(and hopefully to others):

I ask my mom for hints, clues, signposts. Did you feel . . . ? Did you have .

. . ? Most often she says, ―Honey, that was 32 years ago.‖ I‘m frustrated. I

want the guidebook, the Baedekker. What I haven‘t found in the tens of

books I‘ve read. So I‘m laying out breadcrumbs for the next person, for

myself, if there is a next time. As a souvenir. A travel log.

I contemplate my ungainly breasts, the kicks and punches my fetus gives me, my fragmented sleep and my fragmented thoughts. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call the essay a series of postcards, since I mimic my disjointed thought process by writing brief sections spaced with line breaks. In these, I find my body as I thought about it at the time, recorded so that my not-pregnant body can remember.

In another essay, ―Body Composition,‖ I address the concept of multiple bodies quite literally, as I describe modeling nude for an art class in sculpture: ―You‘re in a sitting pose today, so you can see yourself being assembled all around. Your body is multiple. Your body is twenty-five bodies spread across the room.‖ (I will address the use 22 of the second person further below.) Among issues the job brings up for me, such as how to be naked among clothed people and my desire to be beautiful, I describe what it is like to be rendered in artist‘s material and to watch that process unfold. I negotiate others‘ perspectives of me through the essay, recording the visual dialogue in my own words.

Another writer with a strong dialogic quality is Margaret Fuller in Woman in the

Nineteenth Century (1845). In Annette Kolodny‘s article ―Margaret Fuller: Inventing a

Feminist Discourse‖ in the book Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical

Tradition, she cites contemporaries of Margaret Fuller who damned the book as wanting in method, as having too conversational a tone, and as lacking organization. For example,

Orestes Agustus Brownson, a Bostonian social reformer who was one of the louder critics of Fuller‘s book, said, ―It has neither beginning, middle, or end, and may be read backwards as well as forwards, and from the centre outwards each way, without affecting the continuity of the thought or the succession of ideas‖ (139). Kolodny meticulously refutes the idea that Fuller was an incompetent rhetor, arguing that her writing is ―an intentional experiment in a feminist discourse that refuses premature closure‖ (163).

Fuller, Kolodny claims, deliberately uses a writing style based on a rhetoric that evolved from her time as a teacher, from the conversations she hosted among women in Boston, and from rhetoric texts she studied and taught. I would add that, in this feminist discourse, Fuller also demonstrates characteristics of the Montaignian essay, especially its dialogic qualities. Looking at the book with the tradition of the essay and particularly with Eliza Haywood in mind can help us understand the tactics Fuller uses. 23

Like Haywood, Fuller introduces other voices in her text. For example, Miranda,

―A woman, who, if any in the world could, might speak without heat and bitterness on the position of her sex‖ (21), illustrates in a personal way several arguments for the rights of women, while maintaining a distance needed to remain credible in patriarchal culture.

―I was talking on this subject with Miranda [. . .]‖ (21), Fuller begins conversationally, and then describes Miranda‘s history. Miranda was raised by a father who had ―a firm belief in the equality of the sexes‖ (21); she subsequently grew up to be a strong woman who did not depend on men for judgment and well being. ―The world was free to her,‖

Fuller writes, ―and she lived freely in it‖ (21). Fuller then writes a dialogue with Miranda, in which Fuller questions her about the origins of her independence, and Miranda speaks the argument Fuller wishes to make—that women can be self-sufficient. The passage does not interrogate the self as intimately as Montaigne might, but it does offer a personal window into a larger subject. Fuller also creates a dialogic and multiple sense of self as

Eliza Haywood did, even as she has the more programmatic goal of enlightening society about the rights of women.

After Miranda has made her point about self-sufficiency, she comments on the ambivalence of men in helping women to attain that goal:

―[Men] seemed so glad to esteem women whenever they could.

―‗The soft arms of affection,‘ said one of the most discerning

spirits, ‗will not suffice for me, unless on them I see the steel bracelets of

strength. 24

―But early I perceived that men never, in any extreme of despair,

wished to be women. On the contrary, they were ever ready to taunt one

another at any sign of weakness with,

Art thou not like the women, who—

The passage ends various ways, according to the occasion and rhetoric of

the speaker. When they admired any woman they were inclined to speak

of her as ‗above her sex.‘ (22–23)1

Miranda (but, of course, this is Fuller writing Miranda) goes on to give an argument about the masculine bias of language (including an example from Ben Jonson), one that would not seem out of place in a third-wave feminist paper. From here, Fuller speaks directly again, not to Miranda but to the reader, examining other instances, in literature and in life, where men fail to ―discern[] the destiny of woman‖ (24) as equal to man.

Fuller looks at the issue of women‘s rights not in a straightforward sense, but in an essayistic sense, circling her topic, allowing one thought to lead to the next.

Fuller demonstrates how a conversational style and topical recursiveness can serve to argue through the personal. Conversely, I can see in Fuller‘s work how I might artfully employ personal essays in the service of a larger goal. What might a larger goal be? I ask the question of myself, and I ask other practitioners to ask themselves as well.

Not because the personal essay should address broader issues, but because it can, and because I think the genre already does, whether we realize it or not, through absence as well as presence. A contemporary example of nonfiction with an objective other than

1 I have normalized British quotation marks and clarified those in the second paragraph; here the quotation of the hypothetical man is attributed to Miranda, but the quotation marks are vague in the original. 25 personal probing is A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid. On its dust jacket the 81 page book is termed an ―essay,‖ ―prose,‖ and provocatively, ―a jeremiad.‖ While some might not consider the piece to be personal, I argue here for its inclusion in the Personal Essay

Canonicle.

The first quarter of A Small Place exclusively addresses ―you,‖ the ―I‖ of the essay appearing only briefly and parenthetically. ―You‖ are a tourist who has come to

Kincaid‘s native island of Antigua, and ―you‖ are of white North American or European heritage. Kincaid introduces ―you‖ to the island through her eyes—shows ―you‖ the beaches and pristine-appearing ocean (she hints that the sewers empty into it), takes

―you‖ in a taxi from the plane to the hotel. Kincaid continually holds the reader at arm‘s length, and her form is unabashedly didactic; she interpolates what ―you‖ think and what the islanders think of ―you.‖ The ―you‖ of the text is a pasty, fat colonialist who doesn‘t think about how he got to his place in the global economy (that is, on the backs of slaves and post-colonial laborers, which Kincaid reminds ―you‖ of in due time):

[Y]ou make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in

your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting

heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to

being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking

and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then

remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person

marveling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is the 26

backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other

people) have with nature. (16)

Some (perhaps most) might argue that Kincaid‘s use of ―you‖ in this distancing way is antithetical to the personal essay. As Phillip Lopate describes in his introduction to The

Art of the Personal Essay, the use of the general ―we‖ or ―you‖ is often employed to

―move from individual to universal‖ (xl)—to facilitate internal exploration by connecting to the larger world, and vice versa. But, Lopate cautions, ―The jump from ‗I‘ to ‗we‘ or

‗you‘ can seem presumptuous if taken too quickly [. . .]. It requires preparation and timing; personal essayists must always watch their pronouns carefully‖ (xl). Lopate speaks of a more rhetorical use of ―you,‖ and not the address of that ―you‖ as emanating from a narrator ―I,‖ as Kincaid does in the passage above. Still, the observation holds; whether the narrator makes a passing observation about a general ―you,‖ or constructs and addresses a monolithic ―you,‖ either can be alienating to the reader.

The use of the second person address in the personal essay is a complicated one since, on its face, it doesn‘t allow for the doubting posture necessary for the essayist to interrogate, to second guess. However, second person can also conversely allow a greater intimacy with the writer, putting ―you‖ in the driver‘s seat, so to speak. In essays such as

Brenda Miller‘s ―How to Meditate,‖ which is written in the imperative tense, ―you‖ are commanded to experience what the author has, in this case a silent meditation retreat.

Admittedly this might be off-putting to some, but Miller‘s quirky and self-deprecating voice undermines the imperative: ―Breathe. Notice yourself breathing. Notice yourself noticing yourself breathing‖ (Miller 79). The essay has more akin with memoir, and as 27 such, I believe the use of the second person works well here, letting readers adopt

Miller‘s narrative as their own. But, I would argue, Miller‘s essay doesn‘t go too far into personal essay territory, simply because the directions keep her moving forward in linear time, without, ironically, much time to meditate.

I have dabbled with the second person address, as I quoted above in my essay

―Body Composition,‖ in which I describe my experiences and musings on being an artists‘ model. I wanted to find a way to let the reader inhabit my body, and to give an immediacy to the writing. The forcefulness behind using ―you‖—the imperative—also thrusts the reader into the situation, and I hope that the uneasiness the reader feels conveys some of the awkwardness I felt at first in my role as model. In addition, addressing ―you‖ obliquely as myself, I create a mediating space around the ―I‖ of the piece. Writing in the second person provides, then, a dual sense of pulling the reader in while keeping the essay space estranged. However, I found the use of ―you‖ to work against what I wanted to do in the larger essay—ponder on my experiences—so I confined its use to brief sections that describe my actual physical act of posing. These brief sections alternate with longer sections written in the first person, which expand on ideas brought up by the sections written in second person. In the end, I hope that the reader grows accustomed to the ―you,‖ and that it helps the reader to identify with the persona in the essay.

Such an effect is the opposite of what Jamaica Kincaid desires in A Small Place.

Kincaid‘s use of ―you,‖ directed outward towards the reader (―you‖ out there) rather than as representative of herself (―you‖ standing in for the narrator), appears at the outset as 28 controlling to the nth degree. Certainly she tests the patience of readers; like it or not, we must accept (or at least entertain) the mantle of first-world ―boob‖ to enter the essay. (I offer my experiences as a white reader here; I will not pretend to know what the affect of the ―you‖ has on the fellow Antiguan or other minority reader.) However, I would argue that, if one can embrace her strident tone, interrogative spaces do open up, not necessarily for Kincaid herself, but between readers and Kincaid via the text.

Kincaid does not set out merely to depict or to interrogate herself, of course; her goal is to illuminate the plight of Antigua and Antiguans as they live in the shadow of

England, tourism, and a past of slavery. She is not concerned with her specific experiences (as a memoirist would be) so much as how they represent and demonstrate the problematic existence of the islanders (and by extension other post-colonial peoples).

Her engagement with her self in the context of her community performs the reverse of the movement Lopate describes: ―The concrete details of personal experience earn the generalization (often an aphorism), and the generalization sends the author back for more particulars‖ (Lopate xl). Kincaid‘s aphorism ―A tourist is an ugly human being‖ (Kincaid

14) appears early in the book, before we hear about her childhood experiences with a racist doctor (who suspected all his island patients were dirty), before we learn about her mother‘s involvement in political opposition in Antigua. Starting out in the general and moving to the personal might be difficult for some readers to overcome as they are put on the defensive, but the hostility is calculated, I believe, to make the white reader understand (or at least begin to) the alienation of the oppressed self. The post-colonial subject necessarily constructs an identity that is other than the colonists, and in order to 29 understand her identity, ―you‖ the reader must understand the part of the Caucasian person (the individual ―you‖ as opposed to the colonial institution) complicit in that colonial entity. In this way, Kincaid uses the ―you‖ to create the ―I‖ in her piece.

Through this estrangement and entanglement, the white reader learns about

Kincaid‘s positional identity through the process of reading, from experiencing the polarization she creates in the text. (I bring a white reader‘s perspective; reading the text in a diverse class would stimulate a more complex discussion of the relationship of reader to writer.) In addition, we as writers learn a new way of writing the self in the essay. The text brings up questions of craft which, while they might not be new, are seen newly through the lens of Kincaid‘s work. Where is Kincaid in the text? What does Kincaid‘s use of ―you‖ mean for our discussion of the personal essay? How might I create an essay that causes readers to negotiate text differently, and thereby to negotiate identity and its exploration differently?

The concept of the self in A Small Place is further complicated as Kincaid struggles with the rootlessness that colonialism has left in its wake. Kincaid demonstrates how, through colonial rule, the English have deprived Antiguans of their own narrative:

I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North

America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is,

with all its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person

passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions

of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no

fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love 30

which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings,

and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (31)

If we are looking for a narrative that must be resisted and tested in some way—a typical vector in the personal essay—we will not find it here. Kincaid declares that Antiguans, including herself, lack a history, so there is nowhere to gain the traction that one might in a personal memory. One might say that Kincaid does not enter a dialogue with the self because that conversation is compromised by the chatter of a foreign language, a foreign identity imposed upon her. Her position as a post-colonial subject prevents even the desire to self-interrogate:

As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods

of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex

civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who

were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what

happened to me, what I became after I met you. (37)

Kincaid further complicates the notion of the self in the third section of the book, where she recounts the stories Antiguans repeat among themselves—in essence, what substitutes for collective history, a series of ―small event[s]‖ that are ―isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday‖ (52). She begins by introducing the people she ―was bought up by‖ as either

children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in

a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own

lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three. 31

For it is in a voice that suggests all three that they say: ―That big

new hotel is a haven for drug dealing. The hotel has its own port of entry,

so boats bearing their drug cargo can come and go as they please. (57)

And so on. And on and on, from backroom business deals, to foreign takeovers, to covert political assassinations. An eleven page litany of stories follows, and the narrator does not comment as to whether they are myth, conspiracy theory, or fact. As I read the section, I kept going backwards to see if I had missed a change in narrators, because the voice often sounds plausible as Kincaid‘s own voice, echoing stories she has mentioned earlier. The voice (and it is notable that she uses the singular here) speaks, and its thoughts are a torrent, with only one paragraph break over the multitude of topics it covers. Kincaid‘s voice unmistakably returns in page 68 after a paragraph break (―And it is in this strange voice, then—‖ [68]), but there are no closed quotations to mark off when the chorus ends and she begins. (The beginning ones are those quoted above from page

57.) In the end, I think Kincaid would like to see herself as a commentator, as having some distance, or at least more than most Antiguans as she portrays them. Ultimately, she knows she can‘t separate herself from them, and she essays this embroilment. Said another way, Kincaid uses the essay to test the concept of the self itself, rendering confusion and grappling with the consequences.

A Small Place appears to stretch boundaries of the personal essay, almost to the breaking point. Why not just let the book be simply an essay? Furthermore, am I diluting the overall political purpose of the book by focusing on issues of rhetoric and craft?

Possibly. But I also believe that asking questions about the selves in the text—―you,‖ ―I,‖ 32 and the larger ―voice‖—keeps us focused on her greater goal, revealing how the self is political, how the self cannot be separated from the tribe, and how the tribe cannot be separated from other tribes. I also believe that A Small Place is intensely personal, and that not to consider the personal in it would be a disservice. She uses ―I‖ for a reason, and she has a stake in her text. In his essay ―Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the

Memoir,‖ David Lazar, in response to the dominance of autobiography and especially memoir in the field of creative nonfiction, suggests that we need to enter new, subterraneous ground: ―Perhaps we need a separate camp, of destructive nonfiction, a wider, wilder, grayer zone, in which the essay and other fugitive forms, known and as yet undiscovered, can ply their wayward trades [. . .]‖ (49). Kincaid‘s essay might be a contender for the category of ―destructive nonfiction,‖ taking us to new places in the genre via Antigua.

A Small Place stretches me as an essayist by forcing me to ask questions about my goals, my allegiances, my political position. On the whole, my writing is not overtly political, but as I have accumulated a body of work (pun intended), I have begun to view it as political, specifically how I write about the body. I see any honest writing about the body as political in US culture, but especially writing about the female body. With all of the literature written by women about issues important to women, not to mention the gamut of sensational memoirs, I can‘t argue that I have broken new territory with my work. Still, I work with taboos that still exist, and I believe that each time I defy the voice in my mind that says, ―Nice girls don‘t write about that,‖ I erase some of its power—at 33 least over myself. If I consider myself a political being, as Kincaid urges me to, then I can see how my voice might speak for more than myself.

For example, in my essay, ―On Birth Control,‖ I write about my reproductive control or lack thereof, and in the process, I discuss my genitalia. These are no abstract

―two lips in continuous contact,‖ as Luce Irigary writes about (24); I mention my actual unmentionables. But I speak explicitly about the body not just to irk, unsettle, or unnerve;

I write, as I quote Jean Sulivan in my essay ―Side Effects,‖ ―in order to breathe, to enlarge my space, to meet brothers and sisters, to practice a new kind of freedom‖ (27).

In this essay I address directly my penchant for dwelling on the baser functions of the body. My hope is that the reader will bear with me and forge a connection out of the discomfort I may create in the text. I realize that I risk losing the reader. Here, again, I take a cue from Kincaid, attempting a boldness she demonstrates in A Small Place, albeit in a muted way, since I come from a place of privilege. In addition, reading Kincaid‘s essay helps me bring anger into my writing. I have difficulty harnessing this essential essayist‘s tool, but occasionally I allow it to break through, such as in the essays ―On

Birth Control‖ and ―Betrayal, Betrothal.‖

The ―wider, wilder, grayer zone‖ of nonfiction David Lazar speaks of could take an infinite number of forms, but the description strikes me as particularly apt of Etel

Adnan‘s book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. She borrows the ―fugitive form‖ she writes in from the title piece in William Gass‘s story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories—a series of headings followed by a paragraph, sometimes several, sometimes a couple of sentences. She writes in the 34 introduction, ―I began by taking over [Gass‘s] headings and ‗answering‘ them. They became magic keys, no longer to the B . . . . that was his city in his country, but to the city of Beirut, a harbor in Lebanon‖ (xiv). The first section, eponymously entitled, records her thoughts of moving back to Lebanon from California after a seventeen-year absence. The second section, written twenty-five years after the original piece, repeats her project after a move back to San Francisco, and the third through sixth sections do the same, though with not so much time between them. (I will not address the final piece, ―To Be in a Time of War.‖) The headings are simple, non-specific words—―Place,‖ `―Weather,‖ ―My

House,‖ ―A Person,‖ etc.—many of which repeat exactly or in slightly altered form:

―People,‖ ―The First Person,‖ ―That Same Person.‖ Her prose is sometimes poetically tangible:

My House

It‘s when I sold my parents‘ house that I realized all the things I could

have done with it. It felt mine just after I had practically given it away.

Now, my ghost wanders in it, and I try to call it back and it refuses to join

me: from now on we will lead separate lives. (21)

Other times the paragraphs approach the headings at an oblique angle, and her prose is at turns lyrical, abstract, and cryptic:

35

Business

Some people, probably most, die many times . . . not each time for a better

life. They carry a halo, which is the remembrance made visible of the dark

zones they have entered, the crossing over, that surrender. (36)

The headings fall in roughly the same order from section to section, but the headings themselves never fall into any logical pattern. The paragraphs do not connect from one to another. The reader has the repetition of the headings, the knowledge of the two places—

Beruit and San Francisco—and knowledge of the passage of time between sections to guide her understanding.

Time is an important element to Adnan, not in the chronological sense that one might expect from an autobiographical work, but in the way she works against it. The past is all important, but only insofar as it allows her to move where she wants in the present tense. David Lazar, in his essay mentioned above, investigates the relationship of desire and memory, which are intertwined but fraught: ―What kind of bedfellows can memory and desire be? How is memory colored by desire? How does desire inflect and infect memory? How do they joust, or caress, or repel or require one another?‖ (36) The essayist provides ―resistance‖ to memory, he writes, questioning its accuracy, its function in the text, its purpose or anti-purpose in the writer‘s project (37). Adnan describes her work in similar language:

[T]he whole endeavor was close to writing an autobiography, the past

mixing with the present, each distorting the other, opening into the

tensions of repetition. A cycle was formed, comprising two currents: on 36

the one hand, the recurring key words established an anchor as if given by

destiny; and on the other, the responses, the paragraphs going their own

chaotic ways. (xiv)

Her writing drifts from present to past to present again—dwelling on a memory, essaying some idea that has stuck her in the present, sometimes performing the two at once. It is difficult to summarize her path at any one point, so I include a lengthy quote:

Weather

It‘s always back to my favorite thing: the weather. Since childhood, I‘ve

listened to thunder because it is awesomeness itself. I also always loved

soft rains, their sexual appeal with no sex involved . . . no jealous lover

can ever suspect the competition they represent. When one cloud passes

over another, I tremble and when a patch of blue pierces a grey sky I soar

like an angelic figure.

Some rains are deadly: they announce an apocalyptic meltdown, the

cosmic ocean‘s self-destruction. They make us lose all points of reference

by creating pools in which all specifications drown. They push us back to

our abstractions and in that dismal state of affairs we err in cities, carrying

the knowledge of that disaster as baggage. Hotel clerks get suspicious and

refuse to give us a key. We wander for a while in some train station and

when we have a change of mind we re-enter the city and spend the night

walking. 37

But what about the inner tempests where high seas of anger unleash their

fury against the mind? Mind and stomach merge in those times, fuse into

deadly rays, probe the inner soul as no hurricane can do to the Atlantic

coasts. These inner lands sometimes take the shape of real territories,

Syria, Lebanon, California . . . where we live inside and outside the self,

not distinguishing a missile hitting a house from some devastating

thought. The onslaught of History on the brain creates storms that batter

the imagination with more destructive power than any cataclysmic

weather. Some of us are familiar with these private disasters which

accumulate and become daily bread and daily experience. (42–43)

Adnan begins with the by now familiar heading of ―Weather,‖ a recurring theme in her life, yet the previous heading of ―Weather‖ has nothing to do with this memory and its extrapolation. Her entry starts in the past, in childhood, but quickly moves into the psyche—not the memory of the rain, but what she desires of the rain, a pure sex. Then rain as metaphor becomes more abstract, disorienting, still tainted with want, but a less wholesome one (―Hotel clerks get suspicious‖); perhaps this rain is one that mediates between ourselves and our environment, or perhaps the description of the city is only in the mind—the dark passages of the mind. She moves to the general ―we,‖ losing her particular memory to the collective she envisions. The third paragraph describes rain as a personal turmoil that resembles and reflects the outer landscape, one that cannot be separated from it. Adnan accumulates impressions, desires, and thoughts, and they 38 portray her life, but in a unique way. One usually asks of autobiographical writing, what change has happened? What transformation has occurred in the narrator? But Adnan turns this question on its head by refusing a linear path, following instead her desire, portraying life as the series of repetitions ad infinitum. In the passage above she feels oppressed by History; she creates a text that performs her desire to live outside of it, resisting an outside overarching narrative.

One might be hard pressed to categorize In the Heart of the Heart of Another

Country—one part essay, one part prose poem, one part abstract dictionary, one part expressionist painting. Reading the book as a canonicle personal essay, however, can give us a fresh sense of what the form might do. Adnan‘s work prompts questions such as, how do I conceive of time in essays? What happens when chronology is undermined?

How is the essay rooted in the historical, and how does it change the essay to detach from it? How can forced repetition—or any formal shape for that matter—serve to enlarge the goal of an essay?

I experimented with Adnan‘s (and Gass‘s) form in my essay ―In Which I Move

Again.‖ What resulted was different in scope, but liberating for me. I began with the idea of conveying what it was like to live in nine states and two foreign countries, with a lot of travel in between. I did not deal with the issues of nationality Adnan raises, but I worked to achieve a similar sense of displacement, of never being quite at home, or of only being home in the memory of those homes. I did not attempt to emulate her prose style, but I did give myself permission to be brief, offering snapshots of the whole. I also further experimented with the occasional use of the second person, which I intended to further 39 disorient the reader, replicating the experience of location that I have felt in my nomadic life. The paragraphs, however, turned mostly into small narratives rather than mini- essays. As I accumulated the stories, I found myself to be writing not about living in different places so much as in the strange set of ungovernable rules that each place held, how I often seemed to be thrown (sometimes literally) into the path of oncoming traffic.

Instead of essaying this directly, I let the arrangement of the anecdotes and the spaces between them speak this for me. While my essay is not as poetic as Adnan‘s, I appreciate where she led me, into the heart of yet another country.

So where have we landed? Are we still in the heart of the personal essay, or has the canonicle led us too far afield? I began by exhorting creative nonfiction teachers to push the personal essay canon in their classrooms, but then I destabilized that canon, both historically and contemporarily. The beauty of a canonicle is that we don‘t need to agree on a list. But in place of consensus, a canonicle requires vigilance in researching the past and constant revision on what is possible in the present. We should keep asking questions about what the personal essay is and does, where we can find it, and how it can enrich our writing. Think of it as a challenge; what books would you rather talk about than A Million

Little Pieces? 40

Works Cited

―11:00 Molly O'Neill: ‗Mostly True‘ (Scribner).‖ The Diane Rehm Show. Narr. Diane

Rehm. NPR. WOUB, Athens, OH. 30 May 2006.

Adnan, Etel. In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. San Francisco: City Lights,

2005.

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

Haefner, Joel. ―Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay.‖ College English. 54.2

(1992): 127–137.

Hamburger, Aaron. ―Imperative.‖ Poets & Writers. May-June 2006: 27-31.

Harris, Wendell V. ―Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay.‖ College

English. 58.8 (1996): 934–953.

Haywood, Eliza. The Female Spectator: Being Selections from Mrs Eliza Haywood’s

Periodical, First Published in Monthly Parts (1744–6). Ed. Gabrielle M.

Firmager. London: Bristol, 1993.

---. Selections from The Female Spectator. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Oxford

UP, 1999.

Irigary, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, 1988.

Kolodny, Annette. ―Margaret Fuller: Inventing a Feminist Discourse.‖ Reclaiming

Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A Lunsford.

Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. 41

Lazar, David. ―Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the Memoir.‖ Pleiades. 25.2 (2006):

35–49.

Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to

the Present. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Miller, Brenda. Season of the Body. Louisville: Sarabande, 2002.

Sulivan, Jean. Morning Light: The Spiritual Journal of Jean Sulivan. Trans. Joseph

Cunneen and Patrick Gormally. New York: Paulist Press, 1988.

42

SENSATION

43

And you will be consumed

My first quarter of teaching freshman composition was punctuated by sharp pinches in my colon, parentheses of heartburn, and the bloated semicolon of my stomach between meager meals. I didn‘t have time to think about my gastrointestinal distress on the days I taught, all hours until 4 p.m. eaten up by preparation—thinking up exercises, perfecting handouts, and choosing homework. My stomach, acidic from the anticipation of standing before twenty students, would admit only the bare minimum of bland food.

Afterwards, I replayed the class over in my head while eating a light supper, if I could tolerate it. The khaki straight-leg pants I had bought in a thrift store that summer—chosen to project an image of casual authority—sank to my hipbones. I spent the entire class period pulling them up, or I excused myself to run to the bathroom and to adjust the safety pins in the waist-band. As the quarter drew on and the silences during class discussion grew longer, my confidence ebbed with my weight, and I began to think I was constitutionally unfit for the work. How ironic, I thought—too fragile for life in the ivory tower.

Once in a while I‘d catch myself feeling smug because my body shape was beginning to approach those of the svelte eighteen-year-olds in my class. But I knew it was a ruse, something I told myself to palliate the reality. Weight loss, when it‘s not needed and unintended, is poor compensation for the loss of control. I could not quell my fear.

I couldn‘t figure out how to be in a classroom, physically, as a teacher. As a student you can be more mind than body. Hidden behind a desk, you slump in your chair, 44 tilt it backwards, relax or lean forward; these postures do not call attention to themselves.

Your movement is limited to craning your neck to see the student speaking behind you, or you don‘t turn and just listen to the bodiless voice.

But the students‘ bodies point towards me. I cannot escape the attention, which is as much directed at my body as my mind. If I gesture, their heads follow my hand. If my shirt rides up, exposing a sliver of belly flesh, all eyes go to my midriff. If I burp, I must excuse myself in front of twenty people.

Perhaps that is why I couldn‘t eat—at some level refusing to accept that my body had to stand in front of a blackboard. The less of me that had to be there, the better. But why was I unnerved by freshmen, who were as clueless about college as I was about teaching? I would look out at their bodies, also being tested as they hadn‘t been before, eating dining hall food, surviving on little sleep, walking through rainstorms in flip-flops, ingesting new levels of alcohol. As their eyes fluttered closed mid-class, I wondered who would go under first, and if somehow, we exhausted each other.

While I prodded my stomach along with acid reducers and yogurt and watched my weight diminish, my husband Jamey‘s stayed the same. As the quarter ended and my weight returned over Christmas with shortbread cookies and sweet-potato soufflé, his remained stable.

In addition to eating a normal diet, Jamey takes nine pills a day. In the morning he swallows three brown pills, an orange and yellow capsule, and two dingy gray ones in a 45 diamond shape. When I come to bed a couple hours after him, he rolls over and sleepily asks if I‘ll grab him three more brown ones.

The pills keep his intestines from eating themselves. Not literally, but almost. His overactive immune system fights off the good bacteria in his digestive system. That was how the doctor explained Crohn‘s disease to us after Jamey had been hospitalized, as he showed us pictures from the colonoscopy. But ―fighting‖—the verb he used—seemed too tame a descriptor as I viewed the walls of Jamey‘s intestines. Illuminated by the unnatural light of the scope, uncomfortably asymmetrical and wet, his insides looked as if they had devoured themselves. Amorphous burnt orange splotches contained red centers, surrounded by browns and blacks. The delicate surface, like the underside of the tongue, looked too soft and too alive. Now, in retrospect, I contain the images in language, and the regular curves of the letters make them more distant, safe. At the time, the terror I felt while thumbing through the photographs was just as sinisterly shapeless as the sores themselves.

No one knows exactly what causes Crohn‘s disease. Some think you can inherit it, but there are many cases where none is detected in extended family. The doctor said that people in the third world don‘t get Crohn‘s, by and large; they develop the appropriate amount of intestinal bacteria from reacting to parasites and pathogens. People in first world countries—nations who consume the majority of the world‘s resources—develop

Crohn‘s.

The pills have been a part of our rhythm for more than two years now, more regular than my menstrual cycle. The clear amber bottles are depleted, and then there is a 46 computerized voice on the voice mail saying his prescription is ready for pickup.

Containers replace containers, the old ones go in the trash, and there is no evidence of what he has taken, except for the absence of illness.

Back before the bottles, he was sick and we didn‘t know why. He had lost twenty pounds by the time he was admitted to the hospital. Weeks of irregular eating had turned into a near fast; he vomited nearly everything he ingested, and the bit he could stomach came out in a bloody mess. Half lying, half sitting on the mattress on the floor of our dark bedroom, he sipped the Gatorade I forced on him whenever I could, and passed time by watching brainless movies and Comedy Central. Every hour or so, he would leap from his dormant position and run to the bathroom. (We later learned that an ulcer towards the end of his lower bowel caused the spasms.)

He would always flush, so I didn‘t see the extent of his illness until I viewed the colonoscopy photos, and even then they seemed abstract and removed. More difficult to confront was the toilet and the soiled pair of teal-blue boxer briefs he left in the bathtub the night before he was admitted. Since I was accustomed to taking showers at the gym after swimming, I didn‘t touch the bathtub and its contents for a good week, just ignored the shit. But eventually, I donned rubber gloves, filled the tub with an inch of water, and attacked the briefs with detergent. Horrified by the fecal matter released and floating in the tub, I doused it all with toilet cleaner and scrubbed. My back soon hurt from hovering low enough to clean but remaining high enough that I wouldn‘t splash myself. Squinting, lips pursed, I concentrated on not gagging, because I was afraid that if I started I might 47 not be able to finish cleaning. I feared my fear of not finishing. If Jamey‘s body was eating itself, mine was slowly succumbing to my anxiety—that he would have his colon removed at such a young age, that I wouldn‘t be able to keep up the regimen of his care and my job and schoolwork, that the stress would break us as a couple. I worked as hard and fast as I could, assaulting the toilet, scouring the caked-on layers, splatters of dirt brown, black and dark red. I hated them, the colors, and the ache in my arms, and the chemical sting in my nose—the evidence of his evisceration.

The day after cleaning, I sat with Jamey. I watched nurses check LED displays and the cooks take away uneaten food, a welcome distraction from his drawn face. You do a lot of sitting in hospitals, which isn‘t so different from the rest of life if you‘re an office worker, except that it‘s more uncomfortable. I worked as staff at a university, sitting at a computer for a good portion of the day, and late at night I typed at my computer at home, writing a paper for school. But my back ached most after coming home from the hospital. The chairs were either slippery plastic that didn‘t hold me, or old-style living room armchairs that were made to look comfortable but weren‘t. They never pointed in the right direction—couldn‘t with the limited amount of space in a hospital room—so I twisted my back and neck to attend to Jamey. Or I‘d sit next to him on the bed, half falling off, giving awkward hugs.

Occasionally I would get into bed with him and watch TV, the bed tilted up into

―recliner‖ position, becoming a mini love-seat. But I disliked being in bed when the doctor came in, or even the nurses. Being discovered in this position felt almost worse than being caught making out. Watching television together is more mundane, and its 48 interruption is a painful reminder that normalcy (or at least its appearance) is beyond you.

I wondered if watching TV would ever be normal again. The fact that I fit into bed with him was also an uneasy reminder of how much weight he‘d lost; he‘s 6‘4‖ and not skinny, or wasn‘t before he became ill. Even so, the most pleasant times were when we sat, hip to hip.

I could touch him when we were in bed. His thigh against mine, our forearms pressed together. Touching someone in a hospital is more difficult than sitting. To hold a hand, fingers have to navigate around IVs and tubes. The nurses come between you and him to take his blood pressure, or he has to go to the bathroom again. And there‘s the unattractiveness of the beloved‘s sheer skin, sallow and pale pink when it should be ruddy tan, as if something has evaporated just below its surface. It feels moist, betraying ominous heat or sinister cold. Unprotected, its hue is visible through the nubby hospital gown. Skin slips out between flaps that won‘t close, or is too obviously bare because the pants reach to just below his knees. Touch it to make sure it exists, but the doubt remains when you let go.

I can‘t remember who was with us when I told him—doctor, nurse, relative—but someone else was present, so I had to say it obliquely. ―I cleaned the bathroom. And the bathtub,‖ I blurted, apropos of nothing. I had planned on telling him. I wanted him to know that while his body wasted away, mine walked to work, made my dinner

(something he did most nights before his illness), drove to visit him for a couple hours, came home and did homework, and then drank a glass of wine while it sat blankly in front of the Style Channel, trying to divorce itself from the images of the hospital. 49

Though one might think that the act forgetting is not the domain of the body, the mind must still have the body‘s permission to erase. I remembered Jamey‘s disease in my body; I ate less and slept fitfully. And I wanted Jamey to know that, to feel my physical presence (even though I could not always be with him) as much as I wanted him to know the resentment I felt at being so joined to him.

I didn‘t even know if he would remember the soiled underwear, but as soon as I mentioned the bathtub, he turned sharply (or as quickly as someone very ill moves), looked straight at me, and said an almost inaudible, ―Thank you.‖ His eyes were watery, though it could have been the glassiness that had been there for weeks. The look he gave me, however, was unmistakably gratitude. And I felt wretched. My confession had leaked out of me under the pressure of his care, and I resented myself for it.

Almost two years later, during the winter break after my first quarter of teaching,

I walked with Jamey through the Art Institute of Chicago. As we entered a contemporary art wing, a pile of candy in the corner caught my eye, instantly appealing on a number of levels: shiny, colorful, chaotic, unframed in an environment of frames, and—it was candy. A small group of people contemplated this controlled mess, and I let go of

Jamey‘s hand to go join it.

The placard next to the installation read ―Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) 1991/

Multicolored candies, individually wrapped in cellophane. Felix Gonzalez-Torres,

American, born Cuba, 1957–1996.‖ I‘m always drawn to these little informative blurbs when I‘m in a museum, and often I read them before giving the art my full attention. 50

Perhaps it‘s my constant urge to verbalize, contextualize the visual within familiar symbols, or at least make it more manageable. At least with sculpture, reading the descriptions allows me to retreat to two dimensions. One would think that, since my body has height, width, and depth, I would be able to negotiate all three, but I find myself displaced in depth. My shoulders run into door frames, and my thighs hit desk corners. I prefer the contained space of the printed page or the canvas (though when I paint my images appear flat and distorted).

The small square of text beside the candy continued (yes, I wrote it down, copied it into the notebook always at my side in museums): ―This installation is an allegorical portrait of the artist‘s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in

1991. The 175 pounds of candy correspond to an ideal body weight.‖ The mixed blue, green, orange, silver, red, and pink looked like the ―wrong‖ end of a kaleidoscope, light reflected in thousands of sparkling angles. The pile reached its apex in the corner of the room at about two feet and spread out in a skirt between the walls. It didn‘t look any heavier than I was, even after I‘d gained back some of the weight I‘d lost while teaching.

The word ―ideal‖ jarred me, as if this silvery mountain could somehow be a more perfect substitution for a living being, a loved one and his body, however diseased.

The final portion of the placard read: ―Please help yourself to one piece of candy.

As the pile diminishes, candies will be replaced.‖ As soon as I had read it, I acknowledged the urge to take one, suppressed since first seeing the installation in my peripheral vision. I salivated, and my face flushed with desire—the urge for the sweet, the compulsion to consume, and the impulse to transgress. 51

But no one moved forward, and my feet would not budge. Had the other spectators not read? Was the imperative of the museum too heavy? Not 45 minutes ago I had seen a guard tell a young woman, ―Don‘t touch the paintings please,‖ the ―please‖ increasing the severity of the admonition rather than softening it. Or perhaps it wasn‘t the museum, but Ross that held us back—Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘ longing for Ross, for his body, a body poured out before us: 175 pounds. I pictured Ross in a room similar to the one Jamey had at the hospital, with pine green curtains and carpet and cream colored walls. How often did Felix visit Ross? Every day after work? Maybe he moved his studio into the hospital so he could be with him. Maybe Felix took Ross home to die. Did he surround Ross with bright colors? Could you see them reflected in Ross‘ skin?

Maybe I would come back when others weren‘t around.

I moved on to Andy Warhol‘s giant portrait of Chairman Mao, taking in the garish colors, but I only thought about eating them. Was it okay to eat art, ever? I thought of the butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair, which I attended in my teens. Every year a woman carves near life-sized busts of the Dairy Princesses out of huge slabs of butter. The royalty would sit bundled in the refrigerated, rotating ―butter booth‖ while the carver worked her magic on the churned cream, the beaming smiles evoked in semi-solid state. Would I, could I bring myself to butter my toast from the likeness of Princess Kay of the Milky Way? Spreading the corner of a cheek or chin on whole wheat. Gouging the forehead or the clavicle. Would it be pleasurable?

Jamey caught up with me, and I told him I wanted a piece of candy.

He laughed. ―Dare you.‖ 52

―No, you can, it says you can. Will you do it with me?‖ Not a courageous gesture, but at least I would get to do it. He agreed, and as soon as the last person left the corner, we returned to it. Although the edges of the installation were not defined, spectators had created a defacto border, and stepping into the ―don‘t touch‖ art space thrilled me. Jamey quickly took a candy—a green one—but I couldn‘t decide which color I wanted. As I hovered over the pile, it occurred to me I shouldn‘t rummage through it like a child over a

Halloween candy bowl (I heard my Dad‘s voice saying, ―Just pick one‖), so sooner than I would have liked, I took a blue one from the edge of the pile. A guard watched us with boredom.

As I twisted the wrapper and slowly peeled it off, a delicious crinkling of cellophane echoed on the high ceiling. This in itself felt enjoyably naughty, the same feeling I get when disrobing a particularly luscious piece of fruit. When else do we get to see under the skin? Or more to the point, when else is this desirable? The wrapper had two layers, a blue translucent one over a shiny silver one, a skin over the skin. The candy was purplish and large, larger than a life-saver, with no hole in the middle to save you if you swallowed it whole. It stuck to my fingers as I placed it in my mouth, and on my tongue it melted bitingly sweet—the corn-syrupy and slightly acidic taste of a grape lollipop.

As my mouth filled with liquefied candy and saliva, I had another urge, this time to camp out in the museum until I could see the pile replenished, as the installation placard promised. How many pounds had Ross lost today? How many had I eaten from his body? I wanted to ask the museum guard but was too intimidated by her vacant stare. 53

When did they refill it, after the 175 pounds was gone, or every day? Or was it once a month, like communion at the Baptist church I grew up in?

We passed wide metal platters with round loaves of white bread baked at the local grocery store, and each of us pinched off a morsel. I took as little as possible so as not to appear as hungry as I usually was by that point in the service. Up and down the rows, we passed heavy, stainless-steel trays with individual communion cups, smaller than shot glasses, held upright in sockets. It took my full concentration to hold my small vial of grape juice while passing the tray on, watching the levels of purple in the glasses tilt and jiggle. I knew that the sharing of the ―cup‖ was symbolic, if a bit more germ-phobic and sober, of the one Jesus shared with the disciples. We waited until the trays were passed back up to the front, the pastors taking the last vials, and then we all drank at the same time. But I always thought it an intensely personal moment, one in which I dredged up all my worst offenses—most of which were known only to me—and laid them before God.

He washed me clean and sweet down the back of my throat; I didn‘t much care about my neighbor‘s sins. Afterwards, I placed the cup in the small circle holder on the back of the pew in front of me. Pressing the glass down into the rubber ring next to the hymnals, I touched the last drop of juice, which I spread around my fingers until it dried. On the way to the car after the service, I touched my fingers together to feel them stick slightly together as I pulled them apart, skin cleaving to skin. Perhaps it was superstition, the belief that the juice somehow protected me—at least until it washed off—from sinning again. Mostly, I think, it was a way to personalize the transaction. I had blood on my hands. 54

My acts of communion, however sincere and familiar, did not prepare me in any way for the kind of intimacy I experienced with Jamey in the hospital, a communion wrought with real bodies. And it‘s a peculiar kind of intimacy we had, one that felt like it was ripping us apart as much as it forced us together. Finally, his illness consumed us, and we got through the shit together. We married a year and a half later—a public testimony to the bond we forged. But that makes it sound as if it was our efforts that carried us through the ordeal. If my love for Jamey had resilience, it was given to me, just as healing took over Jamey‘s body, though we don‘t really know why. I‘m not sure what would have happened if Jamey hadn‘t recovered. I don‘t know that I would have created as sweet a memorial as Felix.

In the Gospel According to John, Jesus claims that ―no one has greater love than this, to lay down one‘s life for one‘s friends.‖ He has the right to claim it, I suppose, since he actually went through with it. But what about those who lay down their lives in front of their friends? Are they deprived of this greatest demonstration of love? And what of us who care for them, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who laid his lover‘s life out for us in art?

He made their private communion public again; Ross provided the body, and Felix the medium of consumption—millions of candies to see, to feel, to taste. Is this not also love, one wrung out of us? As Ross‘ body disintegrated in my mouth, I waited for my throat to clench as it had the day I cleaned the shit-filled bathroom. But I swallowed, and saliva replenished itself just as easily. I reached for Jamey, put my arm around him, searching for a memory. I felt his love handles. He had weight, and Ross had dissolved.

[line space] 55

I taught my tenth college course this past quarter. I still haven‘t gained back all the weight I lost my first year of teaching, though about half of it returned. My body seems to have found stasis at this new point—a recovery, but not without scars. Where did the fear go? Eased away by time, through practice teaching? Or did my body simply determine that teaching was ultimately not worth the calories I was expending over it? I try simply to be grateful for my body‘s adaptation, for my sense of being more at ease in the three dimensions of the classroom. I‘ve begun to bring snacks to class, as my students do. I take pumpkin muffins that I bake with whole wheat flour and butter crumbles on top, and I break them into small pieces, slipping a bite in when I finish speaking. I tell them to let me know if I have any crumbs on my face.

56

El Malpais

[The Badlands]

The normally confident doctor looked puzzled during my last appointment, asking me again and again to contract a muscle that isn‘t there. My left thigh still hasn‘t regained strength since the knee surgery six months ago, so he has given me a machine, a small gray box with a digital display and two pairs of arrows pointing up and down. Wires inserted into the top connect to electrodes—white rectangles (2x4 in.) and squares (2x2 in.) with a gummy substance on one side—which I slap onto my thigh with an ah! because they are cold. I adjust the force at which I must contract my muscles before the machine fires. I set the electrical stimulus by first pressing the up arrow until I feel a contraction in my muscle, next slowly punching the button, feeling the tingle increase to a burn and a sharp pinch. Then I press the down arrow twice. The machine counts off six seconds, and I contract my thigh, hoping that I‘m strong enough to trigger the electrical impulse that will help my body grow the muscle.

Sometimes I accidentally shock the hell out of myself. As I depress the up arrow,

I check the time or adjust the position of the wires, and suddenly I‘m jolted out of my distraction, more by my own yelp it seems. Once I forgot to turn the machine off while I changed the position of the electrodes, and I badly shocked my fingers. I sat on the couch for a quarter hour, my eyes watery. Then I returned to my set, a wary lab rat in my own experiment.

Each day I inflict minor pain on myself in order to decrease the chronic, more severe pain in my knee—a grinding bite at times, a severe soreness at others, sometimes a 57 dull ache. How does this work? My muscles are developing slowly, and my stride feels less lopsided. But I still have pain when I walk and when I exercise, causing me to wonder if I aggravate the problem in its rehabilitation.

My surgeon says that I was destined to have this problem because of the way my legs are naturally misaligned; ―God gave you bad knees,‖ he told me, repeatedly, on my first consultation. I can say with confidence, however, that the pain began when I over- trained for high school track and field and cross country, running distance and sprints when I felt a stabbing under my kneecaps with every step. In order to win races, you drive your body past a previously set limit. In training, you push and let up, push and let up, building endurance. I ran beyond my body‘s capacity, did not let up. I miscalculated this strange algebra of pain against pain.

Of course, it‘s not a simple equation. When the body senses jeopardy it releases endorphins, blocking the body‘s ability to feel pain. In its place, euphoria. The so-called runner‘s high. When I ran I felt emotionally buoyant, and like I was physically floating.

My elbows swung at my sides, my feet hit the pavement at even intervals, and my whole body was engulfed in a soothing rhythm. Focusing on the sensation of lactic acid burning in my leg did not obliterate my mind, but it did give me a comforting distance from my thoughts.

I have many theories as to why I ran to excess, and none of them satisfies me.

Certainly I got positive reinforcement from receiving medals and accolades in our small town newspaper; I can still remember smiling in the middle of a race as my mother‘s soprano voice rang out in a cheer. But I ran compulsively, and what explains 58 compulsion? Endorphins? I believed the pain was justified, good, in the service of a noble goal. Although compulsion gripped me, I felt in control of the amount of stress my body endured, unlike the sadness, the anxiety, and the never-ending stream of thoughts in my head. I didn‘t realize then I was condemning myself to a life of hobbling down stairs. Or does it matter that I ran too much? Did the alignment of my legs seal my fate? Surely my knee pain isn‘t, as my surgeon implied, God-given.

*

Describing an injury is much easier than describing the pain that comes with it.

Scrapes, bumps, and bruises. Sometimes a scratch. There are incisions, gashes, lacerations. Bones break, ankles sprain, shoulders dislocate. Disks slip. Cells grow malignant, organs are punctured or cease to function.

The language for pain slips and stumbles. Stabs, licks, punches. The slow creeping ache of arthritis when the weather changes, the pounding ache of a hangover headache. Twinges, shivers, pangs. Sharp pain, the leg cramp that wakes you in the middle of the night. The growing pressure of a bladder filling on a long car ride. Hunger, another kind of pinch, sometimes modified with the adjective gnawing, a synonym for chewing—which would stop the gnawing. The debilitating pinches of gas. The warm burn of newly pierced ears. The almost pleasant burn of cold feet in a hot bath.

To describe agony is even more difficult. The enormity of the sensation crowds out words, and we fall into repetition: ―It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.‖ Words become moans, yells, tears, or soft, stifled grunts. This is not the kind of pain I dwell on. I avoid suffering that I think will be intolerable. In order to know one‘s threshold, one must go beyond 59 what is bearable, and I am not willing to entertain pain that would make me wish for death. I need to feel as if I could endure more, but that I choose not to.

*

The physical pleasure in body piercing comes from endorphins that fly around the body during and immediately after the act itself. The pain lies not in being pierced but from the healing process—the searing feeling when you apply antiseptic. Healing is also more psychologically satisfying than the initial injury. Each day, each cleaning reminds you of what you have done to break the body, and reminds you that the body mends itself, that you aid in its healing. A seam in the flesh appears at your own design.

*

When I was in high school, my church built a new sanctuary with a high, white ceiling and burgundy carpet, good for masking grape juice stains. In this memory I must be twelve or fourteen, because my mental picture shows the old sanctuary with its green carpet and bright green and yellow stained glass. I loathed the colors, though I didn‘t know why. My family was attending a service for Maundy Thursday, the day Jesus ate his last supper with his disciples. He gave them bread and wine, told them it was his body and blood, and that they should eat and drink it. Later that night, Judas kissed him. We were present to commemorate.

We sat in silence and passed the trays of grape juice, a wine substitute that no one questioned. The pastor gave us over to our thoughts, asked us to meditate on our sinful nature, to consider that we were the reason Jesus had to die. We needed the salvation he provided with his self-sacrifice. I hunched over, my elbows on my knees, one hand 60 holding the tiny glass, the other hand cupping my forehead, muscles tensed. My eyes closed. My family and church friends surrounded me, but I had this sense that I should be alone. I thought about how bad I was, so wrong, so awful to have made Jesus die, and there was nothing I could do to make this better. I felt wretched, but I did not feel bad enough. I thought harder and harder so that I made myself cry: You caused the crown of thorns to be placed on his head. You made the blood trickle down his face. It was all my fault.

How could a child have felt so responsible? Why didn‘t I believe the pastor when he said, three days later, that my sins were forgiven? Why was Maundy Thursday so much more believable than Easter? I paid little attention to the Israelites‘ deliverance out of Egypt, and focused on how Moses was kept out of the promised land because of one arrogant error. While the pastor preached on the wedding feast, the water Jesus turned into plentiful wine, I preferred to meditate on John the Baptist and his diet of locusts and honey.

The sadness made so much more sense than the joy, in part because I was sad, all the time, ever since I could remember. And where did the sadness come from? A bad genetic hand, mismatched neurotransmitters and receptors? (Was this God-given as well?) Or, as a child, maybe I sensed the sadness of the adults around me at church and took it as proof that redemption would never come. For me, none of these hypotheses fully explains why I found the ascetic side of Christianity to be so seductive, why I was convinced that self-flagellation was necessary. 61

Christianity offers, as religions do, a way to manage the uncontrolled pain life brings. The Evangelical corner of Christianity in which I was raised offered a pain-free after-life. My Sunday School teachers told me that as we experience death, the disintegration of relationships, and illness, we are not tested beyond what we can withstand. We suffer for a reason, though only God knows what that is. We are better people for going through our trials—more godly.

But I was convinced that I deserved the trials, that they were punishment, not the inevitable heartbreaks of life. I followed the equation of ―suffering equals better person‖ to its logical conclusion: the more pain I experienced, the better I would be, so I took matters into my own hands. I tortured myself with thoughts such as the ones I had in the

Maundy Thursday service. My status as a sinner, sinning more every day, made pain necessary. A belief in a righteous God, which was meant to make life bearable, made mine intolerable.

*

After my knee surgery, I woke up to the woman in the next bed wailing, ―Oh

God! Oh God! Nurse! Nurse!‖ The nurse explained that they had given her pain medication, that it should be taking effect. All of this is hazy, mind you, both myself and my neighbor still drunk with anesthesia. But I remember, in my stupor, trying to reach out across the bed to touch her, to comfort her. The nurse brusquely pushed my arm aside and said I should be careful. The woman asserted again: ―Oh God!‖ Her voice filled the recovery room and terrified me. The nurse calmly asked her to rate her pain on a scale of 62 one to ten. ―Twenty!‖ she cried. ―A twenty,‖ the nurse repeated with irritation in her voice.

Occasionally doctors ask me to describe the sensation I feel when I say ―it hurts,‖ but primarily they want to know location, frequency, duration, and whether it‘s a two or a seven. How can a profession depend so much on something so arbitrary as a Lichert scale? Of course, medicine deals with bodies, which are never discrete, so the more fruitful question is: How can doctors expect people to quantify what we experience?

When the nurse asked me, I guessed, ―Two? Maybe three?‖ What did that mean for her?

What did it mean for me?

I don‘t think I‘ve ever rated anything higher than a six, simply because I could conceive of pain more intense. I‘ve never begged for drugs, but I could imagine a tear in the skin that that would drive me to do so. Our own culture puts childbirth at the top of the scale, something I have not experienced. I have friends who claim to have felt pain worse than delivery. But I wouldn‘t know.

*

When the doctor said I would never run again, I believed him. But when he said I would never be without pain in my knees, my stomach tightened, resistant. Dread coalesced in an ache behind my eyes. Will you believe me if I—when I—say that I don‘t want the pain?

*

When I was 16, a psychiatrist advised me to put my hands in a pitcher of ice water until I could feel the cold burn. One day, she explained, you will not want the scars, the 63 reminders of the inch-long cuts you make on your skin. I was surprised at her candor and attitude, that she acknowledged implicitly that the need for pain must be satisfied. I hadn‘t really considered healthier ways to satisfy the urge. I had only thought of myself as deserving punishment, not as someone with needs that could be met.

What she didn‘t understand was the importance of the physical manifestation; the marks gave me proof I had done enough. A self-deception. I had never done enough. That was why I was in the psychiatrist‘s office.

I didn‘t want death. I wanted more life, and somehow the pain seemed to provide that. More specifically, I wanted to live life without guilt, without the thought I couldn‘t stop thinking: I am vile. Like any addiction, cutting provided immediate satisfaction, and it perpetuated a cycle of need. Endorphins seduce; they temporarily lifted my thoughts from deep inside and made them ruptures on the skin. The cuts began at one point and ended at another. They healed. I did not. When the wounds reopened in the shower I had distinct and simultaneous sensations of pride (I have done this) and shame (I have done this).

The impetus for cutting varied each time I did it, but the first time was on a night after I made out with my first boyfriend. We had kissed and petted before, but not in my house, in my bedroom, with the lights off and the door closed. After he had gone, while I could still feel the sting from hours of his lips too hard on mine, my mother called me into the living room. We sat on either side of an L-shaped couch. She told me that I should not be on a bed with a boy until I was married. She said I should not have the lights off and the door closed. 64

I knew not to have sex before getting married; my youth pastor said this explicitly. I intuited that I was bad when my boyfriend touched my breasts, that these should be saved for my future husband as well. As his hand crept towards my nipples, I winced even as I craved his fingers on my skin. I was the oldest child, a good child, and my behavior rarely needed to be modified or punished, so I was shocked at my mother‘s frank rebuke. More than shocked. Appalled. I was sure then: I am vile.

I know now, of course, that she was trying to protect me physically, morally, and spiritually. She wanted to spare me pain, but she did not know me. Years before, I had become quiet in the house, and she did not know how my mind was a vicious translator that turned her words against me. I don‘t remember exactly what my mother told me that night, but the bed and lights were definitely in there, and the word wrong, spoken sternly and slowly. Something like ―What you‘re doing is wrong,‖ or ―This is wrong,‖ or ―It was wrong.‖ It was the wrong I couldn‘t stand. I turned it into you are wrong. I needed to do something about it, because I couldn‘t bear the words clanging in my mind.

After the first time, cutting became much easier. I didn‘t even have to feel bad to begin. I could feel bored or sad or despairing. The wrong in my body was on my body, already broken.

I hid all of it, choosing places that would not show.

*

Why can‘t I get beyond these fragments? They start at one point and end at another, but they are on the skin. I want to know why I still desire pain, and how at the 65 same time I want to be free of it. I thought that the writing would be healing in some way.

Instead I‘m only tracing the bumpy ridge of scars.

*

My husband and I recently made love after a two week hiatus. It was Saturday and we were earnest, looking each other in the eye, grabbing. I was on top. I furiously squeezed his shoulder with my free hand. When the moment came, I did not reach for a condom.

Afterward I lay on him, a couple of tears falling onto his chest, not wanting to take him out of me. I was relieved to feel that good, that connected. When I finally lifted from him, I looked down to see what was pouring out of me. Semen mixed with blood. I froze there, hovering above him, afraid I had done something wrong.

*

Two years ago, when my husband (then boyfriend) and I lived in New Mexico, we volunteered a weekend for the Continental Divide Trail Association. Most volunteers worked for a good eight hours with pick axes and shovels, making a visible path across the desert through El Malpais National Conservation Area. Worried that my knees wouldn‘t make it through the day, I volunteered to make dinner for the crew, exempting me from most of the hard labor. The following day we would go on a hike to visit petroglyphs in the area—a private, five-mile tour through a bit of backcountry.

Volunteering was his idea. I knew that my knees would be more sore than usual the week afterward, but I agreed to the trip. I hadn‘t seen nearly enough of New Mexico, and we 66 were moving later that summer. I wanted the desert, the landscape, and hours of outside air. Will you believe me when I say I didn‘t want the pain?

As the group of volunteers ate a lunch of granola bars and peanut butter sandwiches, clouds the colors of bruises swept in from the direction of the road. From our vantage point on the side of a small mountain, petroglyphs behind us, we could see the storm gather and hear thunder bouncing off the hills to our left. We had avoided the worst of the previous afternoon‘s downpour under tents, eating chili I helped to cook. But the desert can be unforgiving, and that day we had no cover. We decided to go back early.

The hail began about five minutes into the return hike, about two miles from our cars, two miles of wide, flat space flanked by rugged hills. The temperature dropped within minutes. I didn‘t feel the hail at first; I realized that the cold drops of rain had become bluish-white pellets by the way they bounced off the sand like miniature popcorn. I laughed nervously, walked faster, not believing that I could be caught in such a real-life situation. We expressed futile wishes to each other; maybe it would blow over; maybe it wouldn‘t get any worse. I tried to disguise the excitement in my voice as worry.

The cold from the rain seeped through my clothes, outpacing the warmth my muscles generated from a quick walking pace. The pellets began to sting my face like a hard blowing blizzard, the kind that makes your exposed skin feel like it‘s covered with paper cuts. As the particles grew larger, from marbles to peach pits to ping pong balls, my exclamations grew louder: ow and ow! How ridiculous to say it, how disproportionate to the shock of the ice hitting my skin. When I couldn‘t stand the impacts on my skull, I took off my backpack and held it over my head. The ice felt like bones hitting the bones 67 of my knuckles. Kitchen utensils hitting my forearms. I thought only of cold, ice, my stinging skin, the hurt in the layers beneath, getting to shelter, out of this.

While some of the group pushed on, others stopped at a juniper bush for shelter, for respite from the constant bombardment. Though the bush towered twice our height, we couldn‘t stand under the tangled branches so much as against them. The leaves, which are needles, scraped the back of my thighs below my shorts. A pungent veil surrounded me, the medicinal smell of the berries. I feared that lightning would strike the bush, the tallest object on the desert floor. We decided to walk again. I concentrated on the backs of my calves, where I could feel ice pounding into my flesh. The desert rushed with water, and my boots became heavy with sandy mud.

As we neared the road, the hail changed back to rain, but I don‘t remember when it happened. We couldn‘t go back under the fence where we had entered; that space had become a small river. Yards down, each of us lifted the lowest strand of barbed wire on the fence for the next, others offering steadier hands for balance. After I passed through, I waited for the last of us to come across. Then I walked to my car and undressed beside it, not caring about nudity now that the hail had stopped. I only wanted to be warm. After stuffing my wet clothes in the trunk, I crawled into the passenger seat of my car. As I put on sweatpants, I fingered the lumps forming on the backs of my legs.

We caravanned back to the ranger station, where the sky was clear, though we could see sheets of rain from where we had come. We said anticlimactic goodbyes; no one knew what to say after the hail had gone. It didn‘t matter. They had made the hail bearable—my church for an afternoon. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. 68

*

I see my surgeon every couple of months, so he can check my progress. He asks me to extend my leg as I sit on the edge of the examining table, something that makes my kneecap pop. Every time I do it I wince and let out an involuntary grunt. Then I list for him all the exercises I am doing and how often. He tells me that I‘m doing a good job, but that I have a lot of work ahead of me.

After every appointment, I go into the bathroom and I cry. The next day, when I feel the twinge in my step, I wonder if that pop in my kneecap made the problem worse.

*

Yesterday I noticed a bruise on my thigh, where I place an electrode.

*

The ripe berries of a juniper tree are deep purple in color and the size of peas. The berries can be distilled into a volatile oil used to make gin, or they can be crushed to make tea that rids the body of toxicity, helping the kidneys release fluid. Juniper berries have been used to treat congestive heart failure and urinary tract infections, and to stimulate menstruation. In veterinary practices, the oil is mixed with lard and used as antiseptic.

*

The week after the desert hike my knees did hurt more, but I didn‘t pay much attention to them. The patellar pain was, and is, mundane. It drains me. I feel it when I step too quickly or turn too sharply, very easy to do. I feel it every day when I exercise with the electro-stimulus machine, above and beyond the pricks of the electrical impulse. 69

But the week after the hail fell on me, I watched with satisfaction as my bruises and bumps healed. I could press on my skin and feel a slight hurt linger. It was a full body memory. It is a full body memory.

I think of the hail as a gift. I hadn‘t asked for it, hadn‘t brought it on myself; it was given to me. The marks on my skin were proof that I had passed a test. And the pain was tolerable. If I had broken a bone or been knocked unconscious, I doubt I would be thankful. I would be angry that I had been asked to bear too much.

70

On Touching and Not Touching

My optician—the one that most frequently adjusts my glasses (and they seem to require constant adjustment)—is a wiry, short, older man with grey-white hair that touches his collar and thins on the top. He smells faintly of cigarette smoke and has a tattoo that‘s usually visible because he rolls the sleeves of his Oxford. I don‘t remember what the tattoo is, just its bluish purple fading into his skin. He has the placid demeanor and patient voice of someone who‘s been through a lot and isn‘t going to tell you about it.

He is not, at first glance, the sort of person you would want to touch you, as far as strangers go. He‘s not a complete stranger, of course, not some passerby in a crowded city. He‘s the sort of acquaintance you make out of necessity in a small town, whom you never see for more than a couple of minutes every six months. Unless you have glasses like mine.

Still, it was on the first visit that he touched me, as an optician must if he or she is going to assess the fit of glasses. As he gently brushed aside my hair to observe where the curve of the frame touched my head, I noted how slowly, yet unhesitatingly he accomplished the gesture, as if he knew he was intruding but had resigned himself to it. I found it not unpleasant, and this ruffled me. Who else touched me like that? My hair stylist lifts my hair from my shoulders matter-of-factly since hair is her domain. My lover has a similar, much more tender gesture, one that expresses intimacy and care with confidence. Surrounded by empty eyeglasses, feeling his fingertips rest gently on the thin skin of my ears, I felt that I should bristle at his touch, but didn‘t.

71

I have been called a sensitive person—a writerly disposition I suppose.

Occasionally the term has been thrown at me as an epithet. I have learned how not to be easily offended (or to keep offense to myself), but I cannot stop seeking information in people‘s faces, in slight intonation. Funny that those who are sensitive are called ―thin- skinned‖; my skin is probably not more receptive than others‘, but perhaps I notice it more, am fascinated with it, am more obsessed with cataloging the information it gives me. I get goosebumps at the slightest drop in temperature. Twinges of pain in my ovary tell me I‘m ovulating. And I enjoy touch. When I was little, like many children, I used to take the fringe of my blanket and brush it over my lips and my forehead, or trace the outline of my hand for the almost unbearable tickle of it. Sometimes I still fish my baby blanket out of its closet storage and draw it across my nose, my eyelashes, my cheek. In museums, I always, always have an urge to touch the art, to feel the undulating brush strokes of paintings, the grain of wood, the cold, smooth marble, the rough, papery plaster of sculpture.

I crave touch.

This does not mean necessarily that I want you to touch me.

When I listen to music I love at the right volume (Moon Safari by AIR blares as I write this), when I hear my favorite parts—usually wide chords in a dissonant series—I feel a cool whirlpool of chills, waves of pleasurable tingle that sweep down my spine, through and over my thighs, into my calves, and then circle back up to my clavicle and my skull. 72

In high school, these fleeting, sensational moments listening to my stereo were one of the few ways I could jolt myself, temporarily, out of deep melancholy. I admit that

I would, at times, exacerbate my moods by playing dour bands like the Cure (a cliché to be sure, but their music was and is anything but; I still find them thrilling, and even less depressing then I used to). More often than not, however, I played music that released me from sadness. I would stand directly in front of the stereo, put in ―Pride (in the name of love)‖ by U2, turn up the volume knob (itself a satisfyingly smooth plastic cylinder), place my hands on the cool, metal-mesh speakers to soak in all possible vibrations, and let the waves of sound pulse through me. Or I would dance in the privacy of my room, jump up and down, pump my arms wildly, thrash my head to the driving rhythm of the

Lemonheads‘ ―Confetti.‖ My eyes would water from the intensity, and then I could cry, so glad to be out of my head and in my body for a couple of moments. Music was safe touch.

My friends and I had a system of touches, which we created, at least in theory, to relate our sexual encounters (limited as they were). My memory claims that my friend

Naomi and I made it up, but I remember joking about it with all my friends, male and female. Simple and efficient, the scheme classified touches into three groups, each one said with a certain inflection and in the same order:

Oooh, good touch.

No! Bad touch!

I don‘t know . . . Do it again. 73

I don‘t think I invoked it to describe any specific situations, but I do recall rehearsing the system with the group, giggling each time as if we‘d just come up with it.

The system was equal parts premature irony, leftover childhood silliness, astute perception, and blatant denial. On the surface, it provided neat categories for our unwieldy experiences—groping in minivans parked in cornfields, knees brushed under

McDonald‘s tables, back rubs we pretended were platonic. But it also expressed some profound absurdities, especially that third one; it captured the tension of guilt and pleasure, and the knowledge that although touching was presented by our elders as a choice, we felt it as an imperative. The system also masked our fear (or let us express it subtextually). We could laugh off the theoretical unwanted advance (bad touch!) with laughter, but in reality, we wouldn‘t know most of them until they were on top of us.

In retrospect, the first category—good touch—did not actually exist for me. All touch seemed awkward, even if (or perhaps especially if) desired. Sexual exploration was, by default, flustering, but other touches were just as fraught, if in different ways; I blundered into hugs with parents I didn‘t talk to and received unwanted pats on the shoulder from teachers. I ached for safe touch, good touch—wanting to hold my friend

Paula when she was sad and hold hands with my boyfriend and not have it lead to foreplay. I wanted sexual pleasure without shame. I don‘t know if I suffered simply from the universal adolescent condition, small Midwestern town mores, or evangelical guilt, but whatever its origin, I felt unable to really touch—like a mosquito zapper that shocked anything that got close enough to feel my heat.

74

I was not deprived of touch as a child. My younger siblings and I played games where we piled on top of each other. On long car trips, my sister and I would fall asleep in the car with my head on her lap, she folded over me with her head over my back. My mom hugged me for no reason at all, and Dad rubbed my back during long church sermons and before bed every night, finishing always with three pats. Dad and I also played a game I loved where he would ―write‖ a letter on my back, and then I would guess it. As my reading skills increased, I ―read‖ the words written out in the letters.

(What better way is there to fall in love with language than to feel the hairs stand on your arms as letters are traced into your skin?) I never wanted the game to end. Though touch was given liberally, I could never get enough.

The summer after seventh grade I stayed in Minnesota while my family moved to

Atlanta, not wanting to leave my friends behind; I would move down in the fall before school. Staying at friends‘ houses was more difficult than I had thought it would be—too many slumber parties in a row, like birthday cake every night. I learned that some families sort their silverware as they put it in the dishwasher, and others don‘t let you eat after dinner. I missed my family, but I‘m not sure if that was the sole cause of how despondent I became. In retrospect I was experiencing a deepening of a general and constant gloom that had settled in around age nine, after we had moved to Minnesota.

In the middle of the summer I went to church camp for a week in the northern part of the state, a place for our particular flavor of Baptists to congregate in aging wood cabins, next to a lake. (It‘s hard not to be next to a lake in Minnesota.) Camp had new 75 hazards, communal showers being my most feared; I showered only once that week.

Nonetheless, being at Trout Lake Camp relieved me of being a guest in my friends‘ homes, and when they asked for babysitting volunteers for family camp the following week, I signed on.

Outside of the craft classes, Bible lessons, and games I helped to monitor, I watched an eight-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy for a couple of hours a day. My favorite task was reading for story hour—one of the Bunnicula books—and I practiced each chapter out loud beforehand to perfect my inflection. These camp kids were on my back, holding my hand, playing with my hair, asking me to read it one more time. One would sit on my lap, and others would prop their heads on my legs as they absentmindedly picked at carpet fibers, lost in the words I spoke. When they placed their small fingers on me, my skin prickled, and I felt warm at the base of my skull. I had become so used to being the one with greasy hair and straight As, I‘d forgotten how to be admired as a child admires, with quick and fierce devotion. I had forgotten how to be touched, or how to touch without apprehension. I had learned to fear touch as an anorexic or bulimic person fears food, fears eating too much or too little, fears her fear of food.

That which sustains her is terrifying. At twelve I had gone on a touch diet without realizing it, recoiling from the caress that would feed me.

When do we forget that touching is essential? When does it become uncomfortable? What happens? It must have to do with the body and feeling at home in it. The over-sized t-shirts and jeans I wore hid my angular frame. The seventh-grade touches I anticipated were always loathsome—Troy trying to snap my bra, Grant (sitting 76 behind me in math class) attaching a pen to one long hair. Can these even be classified as touches? Doesn‘t the word touch, even the sound of it, imply tenderness?

Say it out loud, let your mouth move over all the phonemes slowly. In the language of articulatory phonetics, the t is an unvoiced plosive, a firm initiation of sound, but softened by the absence of vocal tone—a loud and beckoning whisper. The short u brings the tongue back in the mouth, like a hesitant ah. The final ch lets the sound linger like a memory.

My body remembered comfort when the children I babysat touched me. But I also realized that I wasn‘t a child, and that I couldn‘t touch in that unpremeditated way.

I have a friend who lost his wife. Once, in mid-conversation, he grabbed my hand and held it. He told me that touching was the most important thing in the world. He had come to this conclusion while grieving, and he was still grieving. (When does one stop grieving?) I knew it was important for him to tell me, to tell everyone he met.

When our fingers touched, electricity ran through me, like something had broken. And what do you think when you hear that phrase ―our fingers touched‖? That‘s what actually happens when you hold someone‘s hand, but it sounds sexual. Can I say definitively that it was not? Is it that the energy exchanged between two people in a loving way is by default sensual, or does it simply resemble a sexual encounter, and in its resemblance, is taken for something that it is not? I am inclined to believe that eros is always present in love, however platonic a relationship may be in practice. Touch is scandalous even in its 77 most innocent form. We want touch to be compartmentalized, but as in any communication, it is always messy, blurry, muddled.

I‘ve been avoiding a fuller description of this sadness, despair, or loneliness I keep mentioning. It warrants explanation, but I have none to give. I could say depression, and perhaps you might have some experience with that label; you could nod and I wouldn‘t need to say anything more. To get underneath the label is the challenge.

Intense, hours-long fits of crying, my stomach heaving so much from sobs that acid burns at the back of my throat, making it difficult to eat for days after. Then the numbness that takes its place. How do you describe a lack of feeling? How do you convey that the opposite of sensation is a relief from the pain, yet worse than pain at the same time? Turning over and over in bed until 2 in the afternoon, finally stepping out of bed to feel as if I‘ve run a race, lactic acid weighting my calves to the floor. The paralysis of a decision—of a thousand decisions. In these states, a kind touch, even an unintentional touch, can be lifesaving.

Such as the one Nancy Mairs describes in her essay entitled ―On Touching by

Accident.‖ The night she tries to commit suicide she has a chance encounter with a stranger—a drunken Halloween reveler dressed in a clown suit, who asks to use her bathroom, the same room where Mairs soon begins to take an overdose of pills. Though the incident doesn‘t prevent Mairs‘ attempt on her life, it does give her pause afterwards:

―And I wonder whether I have done just the same thing myself, wandering through some other‘s desolation in my costume—tight jeans, soft shirt, dusky velveteen blazer, cane— 78 needing some quick favor on my way. How many times? And when?‖ This could be read a number of ways: is it a macabre meditation, entertaining the fantasy of hearing someone‘s last words by accident? Is it a note-to-self to be aware of the pain of others, an antidote for the narcissism of suicide? Perhaps she wouldn‘t agree, but I prefer to see her question as evidence of her will to live—the life-giving spark of imagination—that keeps her alive, and possibly kept her alive even in the act of suicide. A self-projection to be sure, but one I‘ll stand by. My hunch is based on the use of ―touch‖ in her title, not ―on meeting by accident,‖ not ―on a visit from a stranger,‖ but ―On Touching . . . ,‖ a word implying intimacy, grounding the encounter in the body. The word ―touch‖ acknowledges that it takes another person to create life and to create the desire to live.

At the beginning of my college semester in Honduras, the professors warned that random male passersby might grope me on the street, on the bus. When it happened to a some of my fellow American students, it strengthened my sense that something bad was always just about to happen. I was perpetually on edge.

Over Thanksgiving I went to Guatemala with two friends from the program.

Outside a bar in Antigua, a guy grabbed my ass on his way out the door. I yelled at him. I swore. I had another drink. I was angry at him for giving me a reason to continue to be on my guard, and for reminding me that, in the absence of his grappling, I had hardly any human contact. I yearned for touch. I was lonely, wishing letters would come from the

States, resentful of the distance I felt from their authors when letters did come. 79

On the way to and from school, I probably could have afforded the directivos or communal taxis, but I usually used the bus around Tegucigalpa—old school busses with orange-brown or pine-green seats, vinyl patches and plastic fibers fraying; they chafed my elbows and calves. I noted in my journal that my knees were getting calluses from sitting in the too-small benches. If I didn‘t get a seat, I would stand, hands bracing against the seat backs or ceiling for balance, others bracing against me as the number of persons on the bus increased. As the bus bumped and lurched, bodies pressed against me. I felt pressure and release, pressure and release on my arms, shoulders, and back as we swayed with the turns and the brakes. I would silently thank the woman whose back pressed against my shoulder and hip, the man whose large bag forced him to back up against me, so grateful for the contact.

To exit a bus this crowded was nerve-wracking; fearing I would miss my stop I inched forward, nudging this child and that woman to the side with a mumbled permiso.

After the squeeze of finding my way to the folding door, I was spat out on the sidewalk, free to breathe again, exhilarated and bereft.

I had a friend in college whose therapist recommended she get a massage for

―touch therapy.‖ I would have kneaded the tension out of her shoulders myself, but she didn‘t ask, and it was also obvious to me that this would not be a welcome offer. This struck me as tragic on so many levels: that I was not bold enough to transgress the perceived awkwardness this suggestion might engender; that she would have to pay for something she should be getting for free, not just from myself but from all her friends; 80 that she felt deprived of this necessary element, bad enough that some sort of remedy was necessary in the first place. But the massage therapist was a viable alternative, someone safe in a way that I was not, the exchange of money for services and the professional/client relationship blanching out possible sexual overtones. Or at least, it would be easier to pretend that innuendo evaporated when fingers touched the back of the thigh.

We drifted apart as friends, but I can‘t say whether it was due to a lack of touch or spark between us, or the natural route of college friendships, when interests, schedules, and emotions are in such a state of flux. I don‘t know if she ever did get a massage; maybe it was touch she feared, love of any sort.

Just as I can‘t explain her inability to touch, I don‘t know how my embrace of all sorts of touch, including that of strangers, came about. (It‘s as murky as the nurture/nature debate—did I inherit neurons that craved stimulation, or did my family nurture those receptors into accepting it?) To be sure, I don‘t go out of my way to seek it out; ―bad touch‖ experiences and a healthy sense of propriety and safety keep me on my guard. I have refused to return to a particular dentist because his dental hygienist rested her hand on my chest while chatting at me. Acquaintances would not describe me as

―touchy-feely.‖ Just as with intimates, touch from those whom you don‘t know well can be scintillating or terrifying and everything in between. Nonetheless, I take pleasure in the good, and I don‘t run from it.

But I feel I have to hide that pleasure, and why is that? When a hair stylist washes my hair, I leave my eyes open a slit because I figure that closing them would reveal that 81

I‘m enjoying it too much. I don‘t want her to get the wrong idea. And what idea would that be, that I‘m sexually stimulated? Or that I have that capability, that I am a being able to be turned on. Perhaps the hesitation lies more in my own perception of my feelings;

I‘m too afraid to feel good in general.

During my bi-weekly visits to the physical therapist (chronic knee problems), he stretches out my left quadriceps. I lie face down on the table, and he grasps my bare ankle

(I wear cuffless socks with my running shoes). He holds firmly but gently, never pulling the skin. With his other hand, he braces the small of my back to prevent it from curving and aggravating an old back injury. He brings my foot towards my buttocks, holds it for

30 seconds or so, and then releases. As my ankle rests, pointing toward the ceiling (I can‘t see, but I can feel), he rocks it back and forth. I face the table, so I can safely close my eyes.

82

Body Composition

When you are sick, you don‘t want to be lying naked on dirty blankets, with only a portable electric heater to warm you. And twenty-five people staring at you. But modeling for university art classes, even when you are ill, is one of the many things you will do if you cannot find a job as a writer, web designer, or secretary, and your rent is still due on the first of the month. You prefer modeling to retail, fast food (although this university doesn‘t pay much better), and waitressing. It involves a modicum of discomfort as you hold positions for long periods of time, but the students are pleasant, and the professors are mostly pleasant. You can do almost anything for three hours, even lie naked in a cold room while feverish waves of heat and chill run through your body.

Thank God you‘re horizontal; the strain of holding a standing or even a sitting position today would be onerous. As it is, the knee of your bent leg is stiff, and your neck and lower back ache from the lack of support. The blankets provide little cushioning between you and the plywood platform on rollers. The cold of the room settles into your stomach and chest (never mind your pale feet and hands) and your teeth begin to chatter.

You try to hold them still, but then the rest of you shakes. You want to stay still for the artists, but you also wouldn‘t mind letting them know how uncomfortable you are, because you feel sorry for yourself. In the end, there isn‘t much you can do about the shaking anyway.

You reason with yourself: this was your choice, to model, to come to work on a day you were sick. But the growing cloud in your head and the chills eventually overwhelm reason. You stare at the ceiling not even feeling the artists‘ eyes as you 83 normally do. To occupy your mind you often compose haiku, but today you think of nothing. Nothing except the minutes until your next break, until you can walk through the dry winter back home, where you will turn up the heat and stand in front of the vents until you thaw.

*

Among the several professions that involve the renting of one‘s body for money are fashion and artist modeling, prostitution, letting a medical company test drugs on you, selling your plasma, having someone else‘s baby, performing stunts for movies, and playing a sport. Of course, all employment requires you to be bodily present in some way, even if it‘s just at the other end of a telephone; we lease ourselves for a good part of the day. But some jobs, like the one I had chosen (temporarily I hoped), happen to put more emphasis on the physical body. A myriad of criteria could be used to sub-classify this list: rank of pay, class association, level of dignity or humiliation involved, society‘s perception of that level, degree of potential harm to the body, and so on. When I began to model for artists for a living, not as a side job for extra cash, the criterion on which I fixated was how much discomfort I had to endure, especially on days like the one when I was sick.

That day I felt particularly wretched, but even with a fever, the physical distress was fairly minimal; I would never equate modeling with factory work or waiting tables. I actually enjoyed having the time to think; my overactive mind filled the empty hours with a stream of never-ending thoughts, though many of them were about my aching parts. For 84 instance I would compose haiku to entertain myself, but they invariably ended up like this:

muscles tingle--numb

contraction without release:

groin and lumbar scream

Each cool air pocket

finds me, draws ice across me.

I am nipping out.

Besides cold and pinched nerves, the job had a moderate level of psychic discomfort, because the social climate of this workplace could be strange and unpredictable (as one might expect when there is only one naked person in a group of people). Setting the tone of the room, the professors could make the experience easy or uncomfortable. The first one I worked for at this particular university used to model herself, and she took pains to make sure I was at ease, finding a pillow for my feet and giving me an uncomplicated position to hold. The second instructor looked nonplussed when I asked for direction— what sort of pose she wanted—so I felt awkward and inadequate in even the most effortless positions. The third professor brought his sometime girlfriend as an assistant, with whom he would argue in front of the class. When he asked me to improvise a series of quick poses, he complimented me on how well chosen and well held they were. This made me uneasy, as it did when students said I was a ―good model.‖ Although I‘m sure they meant well, I felt like a child when they said it, like I was the quiet daughter who 85 didn‘t speak until spoken to. And anyways, short of refusing to stay still or falling asleep

(not always a disadvantage), how can one be a bad model?

This same instructor asked me to model for him in his private studio at home, where he paid me a decent rate. Here, I was often implicitly expected to chat with him, especially if his artist buddies (all men) hadn‘t shown up. I offered tidbits that either obviously agreed with his taste (saying I liked the music he played) or that he could patently discount (my appreciation of Georgia O‘Keeffe). Perhaps my opinions were already negated by my naked body.

I‘m guessing he‘d be chagrined to hear this; he probably thought I was a confident woman, secure enough in herself to sit without clothes in front of strangers; surely I could speak my mind. But the dynamic was similar to most employment situations; you don‘t want to piss off the boss, whether you‘re naked or not. So I kept my mouth shut when he played Joe Cocker (I can endure him only one song at a time), and I acquiesced my taste in O‘Keeffe by saying I didn‘t really know much about painting—somewhat true.

Which is not to say I never stood up for myself. I did get used to asking for breaks when I needed them, though it was always difficult to break the artists‘ silent concentration (and to force the professor to admit he or she had forgotten about me—so motionless I became a camouflaged still-life). Also, once, when I was modeling for a student group on campus during my undergraduate days, one artist kept referring to me as

―the model.‖ It wasn‘t the label that bothered me so much as the way he talked about it— the model—as if it didn‘t have ears.

―It‘s Kelley,‖ I told him, ―My name is Kelley.‖ 86

He was apologetic, but only in a way he knew he had to be.

It‘s hard to complain about objectification when your job is to be the living object of someone‘s gaze. But there are distinctions between, say, being told you look nice today and someone saying you should wear mini-skirts more often. Every woman knows these differences; we feel them in our spines and in our stomachs. The level of discomfort we have to endure.

*

You listen along with the rest of the class as the professor describes the process of the sculpture assignment. Begin with the torso, then do the legs, then the arms and head.

Circling around you, she points out features—how the shadows fall on the legs, the length of the thigh compared to the calf, how the back curves. You feel peculiar as she moves her hands to frame parts of you, gestures towards you. You don‘t know whether to look at her or to look straight ahead, pretending to be inanimate.

Although your position seemed easy enough at first—you‘re sitting on the stage with your hands clasped around your knees—you can soon tell it‘s going to be a bad one.

Before the students start to sculpt in earnest, you adjust your back, trying to ascertain if a curved posture will be easier to hold than a straight one. Both strain your lower back in different ways. You decide on straight but start collapsing to curved fifteen minutes later.

To distract yourself, you focus on the light reflecting off the stairwell, your breath, the strange music they‘re playing today. But your back groans louder than the music could ever hope to cover. Concentrating on the growing pinch, you will just have to wait it out.

* 87

There is nothing that separates the functions of the brain from the being in which it resides; even when one or the other is not fully functional, they still exist in contingency. Yet we still think of mind and body as two different entities. We see battles, struggles between heart (desires of the flesh) and head (the superego). We strive to control the vicissitudes of the physical (eating) with the ―rational‖ (diet). When the body succumbs to disease or debilitation, the mind searches for explanations. Did I eat a bad egg? Did I sleep in a bad position? Is God angry at me? Loss of control keeps us guessing which is mind and which is body—keeps the distinction between them alive. When I model for artists, I contemplate my brain and the flesh beneath it. At no other time am I so conscious of my physicality and my ability to conceptualize that corporeal being abstractly. I think about my body.

Our natural state, even in sleep, is to be in motion. Parents don‘t know what they ask of their children when they say sit still; even the least fidgety among us will shift weight, tilt the head, adjust an arm. When I hold a model‘s pose, I suppress this stirring, silencing the natural melody of movement. My mind imposes my will on my muscles.

Bodily sensations are heightened, simply because I can do little about them—relieve the strain in my bicep or my foot falling asleep—without jeopardizing the pose. I‘m making it sound too severe; I take breaks every 20 to 40 minutes, and the artists don‘t begrudge me scratching an itch now and then. But the majority of the time is spent motionless, save breathing. I observe what my body usually possesses—fluidity, flexibility—through its absence. 88

While I sit, stand, or lie, I am aware of the data my body gives my brain. Since my only task is to be still, stillness becomes an opportunity for tabulation, contemplation, and scrutiny. I note the disparity in temperature from limb to limb; I pray for the electric heater to cycle on again. I sense the numbness in my left buttock, and I am aware that my toenails need cutting. The veins in my feet swell, and I swear I can see my pulse in them.

Even as I freeze my movement, I realize how much I don‘t or can‘t control. Sometimes

I‘ll find that my posture has slipped, and I have to readjust. Thank God I‘ve never had a noisy fart or belch while I‘m on the podium, but I have gone to great lengths to conceal both in silence. Coughing and sneezing are the most disruptive; you don‘t realize how much your entire body is involved in a sneeze until you try to prevent the convulsion, the natural explosion and recoil.

The absolute worst, though, is to discover that my mind is on display as well as my body. I intend for my body to be exposed, but I guard my thoughts jealously, the only thing I can withhold when naked, or so I thought. I attempt to make my face a placid, emotionless surface, but I often discover that my body betrays me, that my brow is low and tense because I‘ve stewed over a dark memory, such as the time I thought of a past love who looked like one of the students. Or, the ruse of stoicism is destroyed when I come across an idea amusing enough that I crack a smile—what would happen if I decided to get up and dance around naked to the music they played? People have told me that I wear my thoughts on my face, and the occasional question I get from an artist (―Are you OK?‖) seems to confirm the theory. They can‘t know the exact content of my head, 89 of course; I don‘t have to tell them anything. But they have more than I want them to— the view of me viewing my thoughts, like watching someone watch a movie.

*

You‘re in a sitting pose today, so you can see yourself being assembled all around. Your body is multiple. Your body is twenty-five bodies spread across the room.

Slabs of pinkish-brown Plasticine on workbenches and on the floor—they are pieces being molded into you: torso, thighs, calves, feet, arms, head. Artists form the stool you sit on out of the same clay.

The students rotate around you to see from different angles, so your view changes often. An artist with a long, dark ponytail and retro cat‘s-eye glasses pinches the crease of your waist into your middle, while your thighs remain sprawled on the table, disconnected. A tall woman with an exquisite nose smoothes the surface of your knees and then moves on to the space between your breast and your armpit. A red-haired guy with a hemp necklace has given you unnaturally large feet. You‘re also sure that your stomach does not pooch out that much, but your indignation turns to distressed doubt when you see two others who agree on the proportion of your belly flesh. Thankfully, they do not corroborate red-hair‘s opinion of your feet.

You focus on the movements they make, the strain of pulling a wire through

Plasticine to slice off slabs, the patient strokes, kneading, pushing, pulling, flattening and building up. They are creating a tactile memory of you. You can almost feel them pressing on you, massaging you one finger at a time. Are they pulling you out of the clay or infusing you into it? 90

*

When I write essays, it‘s easy for me to distinguish my self from its representation on the page. Here I am only a small fraction of myself—what I choose to and can reveal in these several pages. However, it‘s hard for me not to identify with my visual image.

Perhaps this is because vision holds more immediacy for me, or because the images I see in the art classes are made by someone other than myself. I search for information about myself interpreted through their eyes. How do my breasts cast shadows on my stomach?

How does the angle of my jaw meet my neck?

It‘s a bad habit, this looking. It‘s as if I don‘t trust the many times I‘ve seen myself in the mirror, always wanting confirmation, refutation of . . . well, beauty. As much as I abhor myself for doing it, I evaluate myself by standards, real and imagined, portrayed in magazines and movies. Am I thin enough? Do my arms flab? These questions are never fully answered, as I suspect is the case for most women in this society. Of course, not many look for the answers in nude paintings of themselves, but given the opportunity, they would look too.

I admit to narcissism as well; I have been known to stare at my reflection for reasons other than flossing and fixing my hair. During my first year in high school, one day while I stood lost in thought in front of a bathroom mirror, a girl said to me, ―You‘re in here every day. What do you think, that it‘s going to change or something?‖ I hadn‘t really thought of my behavior as noticeable, and her mean tone shocked me. Shamed, I relegated my solipsistic staring to when I knew I was alone. But she was right in a way. I wanted my jaw to narrow, I wanted my stomach to be flatter. Looking was a sort of 91 wishing, as if I might someday morph into something beautiful, or as if, by sheer will, I could rearrange myself.

I still wish on mirrors sometimes, but not with such force. I maintain a more playful relationship with them, try to get them to tell me what I want to hear—wink and turn to my good side. I could give you the list of things I still don‘t like about my body, but these days, I‘m fairly satisfied with my looks. I suppose I wouldn‘t model if I didn‘t like my appearance on some level, on most levels. In a culture where we are trained to see large pores where there are natural ones and fat where there is a well-proportioned body, this is a difficult thing to admit. Say ―I like my body‖ and we are immediately suspicious; she must be conceited, or delusional, or lying. And I suppose I am lying; I still look in the mirror, ask it to tell me once and for all that I am pretty.

*

You are ready for your body to be exposed; you have prepared yourself. Your first time modeling, you assumed that you would take off your clothes in the sculpture room, that it would be no big deal. But you didn‘t realize how different the act of undressing is from being naked. It also turns out that your idea of ―taking off your clothes‖ is much different from removing your shoes, socks, jeans, sweater, t-shirt, bra, and underwear. When the instructor says you may undress, you take one look at the students and head for an adjoining room. It‘s the clean-up area with sinks and a thick layer of plaster dust everywhere, which soon coats all your clothes despite your best efforts. Wary of pottery shards on the floor, your fit your feet half in your running shoes 92 and clomp out of the room, a bundle of clothes held in front of you like fig leaves. You make a mental note to get yourself a robe, one easily put on and divested. And flip flops.

You find a robe for just five dollars at a thrift store, although it pains you to think that the purchase price requires you to sit naked for approximately 45 minutes. It is the perfect artist‘s model robe, a cotton pseudo-kimono with white bamboo printed on blue, thin cloth. It was hard to find among the plethora of short, flowy satin robes (too sexy), the vintage over-the-head terry-cloth ones that button at the top (tempting but impractical) and the heavy flannel ones with large cuffs (too sleepy-time tea).

Next modeling session, you undress in the bathroom and walk down the hall in your robe and flip-flops. This feels odd but strangely liberating. Although you are the only one walking the halls in post-shower garb, it seems perfectly reasonable to do so in an art department. Inside the classroom, the students immediately compliment you on your robe, which pleases you. Then you wonder if that‘s why we wear clothes, so we will have something nice to say to each other.

The robe is easier to take off than your street clothes. It gets easier and easier with each session as well. You feel more relaxed being naked, not just on the model‘s stage, but in the room. Sometimes on your break, you‘ll wait to don the robe until you‘ve done some stretches. You‘ll saunter over and get your coffee cup, or you‘ll adjust the heater, making sure it will hit cold limbs when you return. Then you‘ll find your robe and thread your arms through the billowy sleeves as casually as if you were in your bedroom. When you return to the stage after your break, you shed your robe as if you were too warm for clothes. 93

*

I also wouldn‘t model if I didn‘t like to be naked, another difficult thing to admit.

The latest fashions may barely cover the buttocks, but admit that you like baring them— removing the strips of cloth—and you are kinky, perverted, loose. I prefer ―comfortable.‖

I‘m no proselytizer for the nudist cause, but I am an advocate of bodily freedom, and generally take a more Continental stance on what‘s acceptable for viewing, on the tube and on the beach. I don‘t take my clothes off when I get in the door, don‘t even sleep in the nude most of the time. But in those periods of transition, where one set of clothes comes off and before another goes on, I walk about the apartment. With the blinds drawn.

It wasn‘t always that way. In grade school, horribly shy about nakedness, I never dared to shower at a public pool without my suit on. At school I wore shorts under my dresses so boys couldn‘t see my underwear when I played on the jungle gym. I remember a summer when I was 7 or 8 when my family visited friends who had a wading pool.

Since I didn‘t have my suit, my parents encouraged me to go in my underwear; we were in a backyard after all. Instead I took off my t-shirt and buttoned my skirt under my armpits, forming a small, strapless muumuu.

The seeds of comfortable nudity were planted probably on a trip to Europe when I was 12. Playing in a Danish park one day, my brother and sister and I climbed to the top of a hill, where we spied topless bathers. Ever protective of my younger siblings, I ordered them to retreat immediately. But the memory of glistening breasts stuck in my memory like a risqué joke you‘re afraid to repeat. 94

Closer to home, I might have been emboldened by observing the students at the liberal college in town. It was known for its nude Olympics, and I passed a couple of games of ultimate-Frisbee au natural while walking through the college‘s arboretum, some fields sheltered by surrounding woods. When I was 14 or so, passing the campus green on my bike one day, I saw a group of women with their shirts off: purple, white, pink, and red bras, some cotton, some satiny fabrics slightly iridescent in the sunlight.

Women of all sizes and shapes stood laughing, their arms around each other, posing for a camera. I was shocked, as a good Midwestern daughter must be, but envious of their celebration, their camaraderie.

Mostly, though, I think getting comfortable with nudity had to do with my body.

Somewhere in high school, after the most acute stages of development had passed—I had my height and most of my hips—my shyness grew into confidence, even defiance. I was on the track and cross country teams, and I won some races. My body, I discovered, my skinny limbs, could do something other than be awkward. The success translated to better body-image, and my body became not only something I was proud of, but something to show off, at least in small ways. I became one of the pioneers of training in just a running bra and shorts on hot days. My teammates—just the girls—and I would run to that same arboretum, and under the cover of trees, with giggles and whoops, we‘d take off our shirts and hang them on branches (to be collected on the return trip). But I would run shirtless alone too, through town and out in the country.

While it may not sound scandalous, girls (or women) running shirtless was frowned upon in my small Minnesotan town in the early 90s, which made the practice 95 excitingly indiscreet. It would be hard to argue that running in a bra didn‘t have anything to do with sexuality, but since I was not fully aware of myself as a sexual being, running shirtless could only have been obliquely about that sort of power. If asked, I probably would have said something about fairness; boys got to take their shirts off to practice, so why couldn‘t we?

I‘m not a very rebellious person, although I wish I were. I‘d like to think that running without a shirt, or standing unclothed in front of art students, makes me a renegade, but being naked is such an easy way to feel as if you are transgressing, a cop- out really. It‘s the domain of the masked streaker. What‘s shed is just as easily put back on. It‘s doing something your parents wouldn‘t approve of, but not so horrible that you would never go out again in public if they knew. Taking off clothes is a way I play non- conformist, but it‘s only skin-deep. I‘m a show-off without much to back it up.

I‘m not willing to believe, though, that I ran in a running bra just for show, because I was happiest on the deserted roads. I enjoyed feeling my strong legs propel me forward, I reveled in my self-contained rhythm, and most of all, I loved the wind on my arms and stomach. The feeling of freedom and empowerment continued well beyond the reaction of the townspeople, whose sideward glances I stored as fuel for my next race.

Like running shirtless through a prudish town, modeling gives me a little thrill, and the thrill comes from being naked. When I model, I have license to be unclothed when others do not. To have a mundane conversation—―So are you an art major or just taking the class?‖—while only one participant is dressed is surreal and even entertaining.

But more than that, I like modeling for the way it makes me appreciate my body. I can‘t 96 say that maintaining a pose for artists makes me feel as accomplished as when I ran, but it grounds me in a pleasurable way. Sitting naked in a room makes me more aware of my body—its physicality, the fleshiness of it. Like running, this awareness comes about sometimes through pain, but the end result is that I feel more clearly what my body is and what it can do. And though my awareness is created somewhat by others‘ eyes on me, the pleasure I take in my body is mine alone.

*

Your last day modeling, you can hardly sit still. Though you‘ve procured a new job, one that requires you to dress rather than undress, you said you would finish the series of three sessions so the class could complete their paintings. As you sit on a rickety bench, you think of the comfortable office chair that will be yours that afternoon. You do not anticipate that your body will become just as stiff from hours in front of a computer, clicking a mouse over and over again to remove dust specks from scanned slides.

For now, you grow antsy and remind the professor of your breaks more forcefully than you have in the past. During them, you savor your coffee and walk around, admiring the portraits. In one of your favorites, you have been rendered in unnatural pinkish purples on a green background. You body is simple here, flattened shapes with darker outlines of your more prominent curves. You don‘t know why you like it; you are unrecognizable in it. Perhaps that‘s why you like the painting, because you seem incidental to it. The artist has not captured you. That is for you to do later with pen and paper, to recreate yourself—body and mind—in your own image.

97

CHAOS/CONTROL

98

Say A Prayer

1. I was a nervous child. I counted things.

2. One rainy afternoon when I was in kindergarten, I counted the number of licks it

took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (without biting). It took 467 six-year-old

licks (though I lost my place a couple of times and had to guess where I‘d left

off).

3. I counted steps down the hall, the number of stairs in my house as I went from

floor to floor.

4. In my early teens, I used to count to 60 before rinsing conditioner out of my hair

because the bottle instructed waiting for a minute after lathering and before

rinsing.

5. Before that, when I was in middle school, I counted how long it took the dog to

pee. It was my job to walk the dog around on a leash to poo and pee one last time

before bed. Though I wouldn‘t have admitted it to anyone, I was still afraid of the

dark, even in our own yard, in our middle class neighborhood, in a small

Midwestern town, whose weekly police register was replete with car alarms and

college parties disrupting quiet, with the occasional vandalized Coke machine

offering variety. When I sensed that Ernie (our mini-schnauzer) was nearing the

end of his last stream, I would begin counting. As soon as he finished I‘d say,

―Come on!‖ and run with him back to the house. If I made it back to the house by

the time I got to twenty, I would be safe. From what? I was more afraid of

monsters than any tangible man-in-the-dark threats, avoiding the blacker spots 99

around the yard more out of a fantastical sense of evil lurking there than a

pragmatic urge to avoid hidden criminals. If it looked like I might not make it by

―20,‖ I would stretch out my numbers so I could make it in time. It was a way of

protecting myself, a force field created by the numbers, an imaginary talisman.

6. Aside from the magical, protective quality of counting, it was a way for me to

fabricate control of my surroundings. It provided concrete data about my life—

units of measurement and quantification, like colored blocks I could see in a

mental stack.

7. Maybe I just got into the habit of counting by watching Sesame Street. I recently

watched several early episodes of the show on DVD; I was struck with how they

slipped counting (and the alphabet) into every segment of the show like insidious

product placement. And this is how the show‘s producers conceived of it, using

the tropes of television to teach, right down to the show‘s sponsors listed at the

end of the program—―Brought to you by the number two and the letter M.‖ There

is, of course, The Count, the character who does nothing but. Bob has two ears

and two eyes, Ernie counts sheep, fire engines and balloons to get to sleep, and

children are always singing about some number or another. They tally dots,

turtles, picnicking ladybugs, alligator princes, dollhouses, strawberry cream pies.

Why wouldn‘t I count my steps on the way to school?

8. From an early age I found it difficult to fall asleep. My parents suggested many

ways of curing my insomnia, including ―thinking happy thoughts‖ (too

stimulating) and successively contracting and then releasing muscles from my 100

head to my feet (which helped to relax me, but didn‘t immediately put me to

sleep). The ways that were more successful involved counting. One method was

to count very slowly to 50 lying on my stomach, on my side, on the other side,

and then on my back. It worked until I got too bored and quit counting. I suppose

tedium is the point of such an exercise, but when I was too uninterested, I began

thinking of other things that kept me awake—scary things such as fires, forgetting

my book bag at school, or the alien muppets on Sesame Street who said ―Yep-

yep-yep-yep-yep-yep-yep!‖ I tried counting sheep, but found it lackluster, or too

easy—or maybe I wanted to emulate Ernie. Instead of sheep, I imagined a fence

made of French fries and little dancing puppets made of handkerchiefs (rubber

bands tied to the corners made the head, arms, and legs), and the weird creatures

danced, flipped, and leaped over the fence in time to a little ditty. It looked like

something out of Fantasia. (The movie itself, however, bored me.) This, too, did

not put me to sleep.

9. I still use modifications of these methods to go to sleep. I count until I lose count,

getting distracted by other thoughts, beginning again and again. If I don‘t count, I

dwell over what I have to do and what I have done—normal sorts of insomniac

thoughts. I rehash conversations (replaying them over verbatim in my mind),

trying to reinterpret a gesture or a word or a tone of voice. Usually I‘m afraid I‘ve

offended someone and am trying to assess the damage. She said, ―Of course.‖

Was she agreeing with me or pointing out that what I said was obvious, and how

dare I tire her with my trivial observations? My concerns are almost always moot, 101

ridiculous, or banal, but that does not stop me from inventing my own mental

torture with them. Occasionally, though, I relive something I‘ve said that made

someone laugh (―happy thoughts‖), which gives me a rush at the thought that

people might like me after all. None of it is conducive to sleep, hence the resort to

numbers.

10. Counting to sleep is most successful when I can make my whole body count. (The

different ways one can read ―body count‖ is derailing me in this train of thought:

as in, making my body count for something; as in a body count, the body dead in

sleep, my slumbering corpus as a count of one.) The numbers rise with each

complete inhalation and exhalation, and as I breathe out, I sometimes add a

relaxing exercise in time with my breath. Simply focusing on breathing doesn‘t

work; the numbers have to be there to provide something else for my brain to do.

Otherwise I end up mired in thought again.

11. Besides lulling myself to sleep, I still count all sorts of things.

12. My counting is usually attached to my body in some way, marking time as I

complete bodily functions. It‘s a way of thinking about the body as taking up

space in time. I embody the numbers.

13. I count the number of seconds it takes me to wash my hands.

14. When I stub a toe, I begin counting until the pain subsides, I suppose as a way to

avoid thinking about pain, numbering as a numbing agent. 102

15. I‘m very good at physical therapy. Give me a stretch and I will tick off thirty

seconds. Give me a set of repetitive muscle exercises, and I will make sure I do 15

on each side.

16. Ironically, I lose count easily, so I employ my fingers to help me.

17. I don‘t check to see if the stove is off tens of times before exiting the house or

wash my hands excessively. Enumerating is more of a diversion, or rather, a way

to keep my mind occupied. (What happens if my mind is idle? More of the same

nervous thinking that keeps me awake at night.) A way of organizing my

thoughts. A bit compulsively.

18. In my daily enumerations, I‘m often not conscious of my counting until I reach

about twelve or thirteen. I begin counting without realizing it, and then continue

cognizantly counting when I sense my lips moving, or when my mind settles on

the number thirteen. Something about that number rouses me. I think it has to do

with the pattern it begins: ―thirteen, fourteen, fifteen‖ . . . and so on.

19. At times I think I count for the rhythm more than the numbers. The pulse is

soothing, like a heartbeat.

20. When I was in the fifth grade I read A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L‘Engle. It

scared the bejeezus out of me. The three main characters go to the planet

Camazotz, which is controlled by IT, an evil force that commands that all its

inhabitants conform to a pulse. They observe all the children of a neighborhood

bouncing balls in time, except for this one boy who can‘t keep a beat, and who is

carted off the sidewalk and back into the house by his frantic mother. Later, when 103

the two heroes and heroine visit IT, they see the boy in a punishment room where

he is made to dribble the ball in time until he‘s got it right, his face grimacing

with every bounce. Curious about the plot, I recently picked up the book again,

because I remembered nothing except this last scene with the boy methodically,

metronomically bouncing the ball.

21. This is what terrified me as a child: the idea of having to maintain this sinister

rhythm, and the fear of the penalties if it was transgressed. My counting was (is)

self-directed, whereas the IT pulse was externally imposed. If counting is about

control, about directing my bodily tempo, then it‘s imperative that I be the one to

say the numbers, tap out the beats.

22. When there is a noisy clock in a room, I will begin to assume its tick and tock. If

I‘m trying to relax, I begin breathing with it. I can hear my kitchen clock all the

way in my bedroom, and to go to sleep I‘ll breathe in for four seconds and out for

three. That seems the most natural interval to me, the least forced, yet it troubles

me that it‘s not an even four/four. If I‘m filling the water pitcher, I count along

with the clock. But sometimes the clicks will simply fill my head, and I can‘t

separate myself from it. Like the proverbial drip from the faucet, it unnerves me

to the point where I can‘t think of anything else. I try singing to derail its

dominance, but have a hard time finding a song of a different speed.

23. My husband is also singularly attuned to rhythm. One dinnertime, as he sat with

me as I finished my meal (he eats faster), he began swaying to the rhythm of my

chewing, nodding his head back and forth, as if I were playing his favorite song 104

and he couldn‘t help but dance. Irked is too benign a word for my response, and to

say I loathed it doesn‘t convey how frantically I reacted inside. I hated it, and I

told him to stop. It‘s remarkable to me how violently I responded to this innocent

gesture on his part. Something about seeing my own rhythm externalized. My

chewing became the audible clock in the room I couldn‘t escape.

24. Speaking of being trapped, how am I going to end this essay? Where do you end a

numbered essay without some arbitrariness? There is no closure with numbers.

What is this amounting to anyways?

25. I want to know where it comes from, this addiction to numbers, rhythm,

repetition.

26. Addiction may not be the right word. Need, perhaps. Certainly it‘s human,

biological, to desire predictability, routine. The body has its circadian rhythms,

the mind its favorite paths to revisit again and again. (Witness the writer [and this

writer] who circles around certain subjects again and again.) But when are we

enabled by repetition, and at what point does repetition become an enslaver?

27. Counting both helps me to function and interferes with my daily life.

28. But does it ever inspire me or illuminate some area of my life?

29. Perhaps not counting itself. There have been, however, a couple of occasions on

which repetitive, rhythmical actions have freed me into transcendence, or as close

as I have gotten, anyhow. 105

30. One time was in a college class I took called ―Painting for Non-Art Majors.‖ Each

January at my college, we took only one class for four weeks—an entire term‘s

work crammed into one month—for a pass or fail grade.

31. Our first task was to complete a paint-by-numbers image in order to learn a basic

lesson in the shapes of colors in objects.

32. I enjoy doing paint-by-numbers. The end-products are not much to speak of

aesthetically, though they do have a certain kitsch value. What I appreciate is

being relieved of the trouble of thinking, the numbers instructing exactly what

goes where. (And why is thought so burdensome to me?) This, plus the

satisfaction of starting and completing a task, and indulging a held-over desire

from childhood to color within the lines.

33. This paint-by-number project assigned by the professor did not produce the

sublime moment I was referring to. I‘m getting to it.

34. Our professor had a hands-off, learn-by-doing teaching philosophy, so aside from

the occasional peer critique session, we painted during the six to eight hours of

class per day, mostly still life arrangements of odd objects—ladders and vases,

bowling pins and plastic dollhouse pieces. I remember particularly that he used

green and orange backgrounds (not together), and that I had disliked these colors

before, but grew to love them after staring at them for so many days, finding their

many shades with my paints.

35. I would lose myself in the click-click of my small, skinny spatula on the palate,

moving and mixing the pasty oils into delicious dollops that melded one into the 106

other. I moved my brush from the palate to my painting and back, feeling the

subtle resistance of the canvas as I pressed, feeling the slip of paint as it spread.

My gaze focused on still life, palate, painting, still life, palate, painting. As the

professor promised, I began to see in new ways. The dish I painted became six

triangles of different shades of blue. Then my breakfast cereal bowl became a

series of brown, white, and green polygons. Even words on a page turned into

lines and shapes—circles and squiggles grouped in unpredictable alliances. Rather

than disorienting or disturbing me, this fragmentation was fascinating and

enlivening; everything became new. This budding awareness, along with the

repeated physical motions and sensations, the careful attention to a limited visual

space, and the infusion of color contributed to a serenity I had not experienced

before. It wasn‘t a divine flash, but an extended period of tranquility.

36. Come to think of it, the feeling was not unlike swimming laps—the elevated state

of the body during physical exercise. It takes a while to establish a coordinated

rhythm and to get the heart up to speed, but once my arms stretch in time with the

beat of my paddling feet, my stresses dissipate through the water. My mind still

continues to churn, but my thinking under water is usually productive rather than

obsessive. The same was true while I painted.

37. I haven‘t mentioned the crucial component of the sublimity I experienced in my

painting class: the aural aspect. Our class, the professor claimed, was the quietest

he‘d ever had. We didn‘t carry on the usual chatter and banter of his painters.

(Perhaps in our novitiate status we needed more concentration.) To fill in the 107

silence, a paint-speckled, portable CD player hooked up to a small, radio

serenaded the class for all the long hours. We each brought CDs to play, but since

the professor‘s discs were always there, they were the ones we listened to most.

He had several by the band LUNA. I had never heard LUNA before, but I liked

their quirky lyrics. I remember lifting my head from my canvas to ask

rhetorically, ―Did he just say, ‗Don‘t waste your time learning Klingon‘?‖ The

lead singer‘s plaintive voice swooped casually over the notes, accompanied by

mellow guitar riffs, a subtle bass line, and elegantly subdued drums. Sort of Euro-

pop with a country twang, their laid back yet plucky style was as infectious as it

was inviting. The melodies were catchy and tuneful, if repetitive, as most pop

tunes are.

38. Quite repetitive. The more I listened to them, the more I honed in on the droning

bass beat. Four bar phrases over and over, the same notes ad infinitum. The lyrics

were often repetitive as well. In the 6 minute and 40 second song ―23 Minutes in

Brussels‖ the phrase ―say a prayer‖ is sung no less than 10 times. As we listened

to the CD Penthouse for the fifth time, I became annoyed. The chorus in the last

song features the words ―Bonnie and Clyde‖ sung over and over. To relieve the

monotony while poking fun at it, I invited the class to join me for another rousing

chorus after the song was done: ―Everybody! Bonnie and Clyyyyyde . . . ‖ No one

joined me, and I stopped singing very quickly.

39. Still, LUNA was better than quiet for any stretch longer than an hour. Maybe I

was the only one sick of the stuff. We played them again. And again. And, 108

excruciatingly, again. The tenth time I heard ―Tiger Lily Girl,‖ I wanted to scream

so that I wouldn‘t hear the nasal ―aahs‖ in the bridge. When ―23 Minutes in

Brussels‖ played for the fourteenth time, I rued the day they had ever ―left [their]

hotel in the city,‖ as the song began. But the twentieth time I listened to the lyrics

in ―Friendly Advice,‖—―How long can this go/How long can this go/How long

can this go on,‖—I found myself humming along and enjoying it, despite myself.

The bass line to the song, which previously had been merely tedious, sounded

more and more like an ingenious countermelody. Just as I had begun to see things

differently—colors and shapes and lines—I started to hear LUNA differently. I

felt like a child discovering hidden knobs and wheels on a toy; here was a new

guitar note behind the melody, here was a chord progression I hadn‘t noticed

before. And I felt a strange mixture of begrudging satisfaction that I knew the

entire second verse of ―China Town,‖ that I anticipated exactly when the guitar

solo would start. When ―23 Minutes‖ played again, I was enthralled by the

supplications in each chorus: ―Say a prayer/ For you and me/ Say a prayer/ Tell

me do you miss me.‖ Of course. The repetition was a kind of prayer.

40. The repetition of the music, which had been so repulsive to me, now became

something I searched for. Indeed, it changed my listening habits altogether.

Before, I doled out album listenings like fine chocolate to be savored on occasion;

too much would spoil the CD. Now I listen to each new album I acquire dozens of

times, until it seeps into my pores and I absorb its rhythms into my body. 109

41. At this moment, I am listening to ―Haunted When the Minutes Drag,‖ and eight

minute song from the Love and Rockets‘ 1985 release Seventh Dream of Teenage

Heaven. I have the song on repeat. It‘s been playing for 96 minutes.

42. The other time I experienced a transcendent moment through repetition and

rhythm was while saying the rosary. I hesitate to say it was true transcendence,

since I have no message from God or even information to impart about

connectedness, enlightenment, or being. I‘m also not Catholic.

43. I was studying linguistics at a summer program in Valley City, North Dakota

(bear with me, this will come together soon, though as I suggested in number 22,

I‘m not sure it will amount to anything) and taking a course in ethnography in

particular. For this class, my fellow students and I were loosed upon the town to

learn the particular lexicon of a subculture of our choosing—the local theater

group, the biker bar, the quilting bee. We were told to get inside their worlds by

learning their words and what they meant, as best we could. I approached the

Sisters of Mercy Hospital and asked where I could volunteer; they let me help

feed geriatric patients.

44. During my time there I met Sister Camille, who eventually became the focus of

my study. The last remaining Religious at the hospital (as she informed me was

the current term preferred by Sisters to ―nun‖), she headed the pastoral care

program, attending to the spiritual needs of patients—visitations, offering prayers,

counseling families, and taking people in wheelchairs to worship services. She

invited me to the mass held Tuesdays and Thursdays in a chapel about the size of 110

a living room on the ground floor. She also encouraged me to come a half hour

early to say the rosary with the six or eight elderly women who congregated for

that purpose.

45. Raised in Evangelical churches, I was a neophyte when it came to all the ritual,

and Sister Camille had to explain the rosary to me—a series of recited prayers,

each given a title and represented by a bead on a loop of string, which you

grasped as you went along to help you keep place. A lay leader began each

prayer, and the congregation responded with the rest.

46. For a while when I ―said the rosary‖ myself, I gripped the beads in one hand and

in the other a pamphlet explaining the complicated process.

47. Eventually I grew comfortable, resting in the leader‘s voice, responding with my

own. ―Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among

women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.‖

48. The prayer is said fifty-three times in all.

49. One day late in the summer, somewhere amidst the prayers and petitions, I

stumbled into a new space. I felt somnambulant but focused. I didn‘t, strictly

speaking, know anything at that moment, not even if I was there. The center of

my focus wasn‘t the prayers. Because of my linguistic study, I had paid special

attention to the words and their meaning during each recitation. Here, however,

the words had dropped out of my consciousness, even as I said them. 111

50. My lips moved, I breathed, but my voice was reduced to a vibration, or rather, my

voice melded with the others, all saying the same words. I was light—the best

way to describe it, in all of its meanings—no greyness, no heaviness, no doubt.

51. Was it a form of counting without numbers?

52. Perhaps it was simply that half-asleep, half-wakeful state rendered strange by the

fact that I was speaking. But on the other side of that moment, and for the rest of

the day, I felt joy. I felt that I had touched something beyond myself.

53. It‘s true that I was not the one in control. I was not counting. I had let go of my

pamphlet, and I inhabited the chant. I was surrounded by the prayers of the elderly

women, their creaky yet softened voices. It was their rhythm that sustained me.

112

On Birth Control

At my annual pelvic exam the nurse practitioner asked if there was anything she needed to know, any new developments. There were, sort of. ―I‘m thinking about having a baby. Not now, but I‘d get pregnant in 20 months or so—not this coming fall but the next.‖ This number, 20 months, was not in fact ―or so,‖ but the exact number I had calculated I needed in order to finish my doctoral course work, pass my exams, and wean off of medications not compatible with pregnancy.

In retrospect I wish I had told her I‘d ―start pregnancy‖ or ―conceive‖; ―get pregnant‖ sounds a bit crude, like I would get a head of lettuce from the grocery store. ―Is there anything I need to do to prepare?‖ I asked.

―Nothing really,‖ she replied, ―It‘s the most natural thing in the world.‖

Surely there must be something I needed to do, I thought—send for my transcripts, write a 1000 word essay on why I think I‘m ready for motherhood, at least sign up for some listservs. ―I heard something about taking some supplement for a year beforehand. Magnesium?‖

―Folic acid,‖ she corrected me, ―But if you eat a good diet you‘ll get plenty.‖2

―What about birth control? When should I stop that?‖ I had heard I should quit oral contraceptives, or ―the pill,‖ a year before trying to conceive so that my body would get used to menstruating on its own. The idea was that once you had reestablished your

2 This may be so, but the American Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends that women take a .4 milligram supplement one month before and during the first three months of pregnancy. Many medical professionals recommend that the supplement be taken throughout a woman‘s childbearing years, since the neural tube defects the mineral prevents occur in the first 28 days of pregnancy. Which makes me wonder, was the nurse practitioner picking up on my anxiety and trying to temper it by acting blasé, or did she tell all her patients not to worry about folic acid? 113 own rhythm, you could predict ovulation with more accuracy. Where had I heard this?

From another doctor, or somewhere on the Internet? My desire to have a child had been gestating for several years, beginning somewhere in my mid-20s. My husband Jamey and

I finally had ―the conversation‖ the previous month, speculating on when would be a good time, what we would need to do to prepare. My knee, which has been sluggish in recovering from a surgery I had six months prior, would need to be rehabilitated to carry the extra weight. Jamey, who was already interested in finding more meaningful work, would need to find a better paying job. It seemed like there were no shortage of needed preparations.

She didn‘t hesitate: ―I‘d stop a month before you want to get pregnant, so you have one normal period before trying.‖

Really. Was I thinking too far ahead? Befuddled, I refilled my birth control prescription for an entire year. It wouldn‘t hurt to have spare packs on hand, I rationalized. After what the nurse had said, I wasn‘t sure I‘d stop a full year before attempting to conceive, yet was also not committed to taking all the pills. The pharmacist gave me a white paper sack with twelve white foil packages, each containing 28 pills in 2 concentric circles: seven white, seven pale blue, seven sky blue, seven green. Up to twelve more times, I would snap the package into a white (why all the white?), plastic shell case, 336 small disks to push through the foil on the back. All those pills.

The pill. It‘s often capitalized: the Pill. Shortened from ―the contraceptive pill,‖ oral birth control‘s moniker makes it sound like it‘s some platonic pill form rather than the medicine it is. Of course, the pill has revolutionized society, called by some the most 114 important medical breakthrough of the twentieth century. My ability to ruminate on a post-adolescent child-free existence is due to Margaret Sanger‘s tireless efforts to spare me from her mother‘s fate: dying at age fifty after bearing eleven children. Instead, I agonize over my first step into parenthood, plan obsessively; this is the gift Sanger gave me, and it is a luxury. I live a different life because of reliable contraception.

Still, there are trade-offs, freedoms I give up in order to remain childless, however less burdensome they may be than parenthood. I give my body over to medicine. I think of the pills—all the pills waiting to be taken every other time the clock hits 12. Each day

I ingest norgestimate, a ―form of progesterone,‖ and ethinyl estradiol, a female sex hormone, to manufacture something that occurs naturally. It just doesn‘t seem right.

I remind myself why I got back on the pill to begin with—cramps so painful that one time I fainted. If I had a day off every month to nurse my uterus, perhaps I could do without birth control, I had justified at the time. And now I enjoy (but enjoy isn‘t the right word—it‘s more of an absence of ache, a relief) shorter periods with a lighter flow of blood and minimal cramps and back pain. But it comes with a price. The pack says

―ORTHO TRI-CYCLEN Lo® - 28 Day Regimen.‖ 336 pills. When I‘m on the pill, I feel regimented. I feel mechanized.

When I was seventeen and a junior in high school, my doctor prescribed me the pill to control severe mood swings and cramps during PMS.3 Sometimes I do feel ill, both

3 Premenstrual Syndrome. Did I need to include this explanation, or is PMS an understood term? Is it like US (which everybody knows), or like ACOG? Or is it like the term lipstick, which I realized in my early adult life was actually lip and stick put together? A stick for your lips—ingenious. But I had never contemplated the compound word until I‘d been using it for nine years. 115 mentally and physically, when I‘m experiencing PMS, but I believe it‘s unfortunate to call it a syndrome since PMS is almost as common as menstruation; I haven‘t met a single woman who doesn‘t have it. PMS made an already emotional and difficult adolescence nearly impossible. Like the Disney prince-on-a-white-horse in the movies of my childhood (there‘s the white again), the pill came to my rescue.

But the drug was not without side effects, the first of which showed up before I took the medication. I was old enough to drive myself to doctor‘s appointments, but I did not have enough independence to follow a doctor‘s advice without consulting my parents.

As my doctor spoke, I was already wondering if I could convince my parents to go along with it; would they think I was having sex? I wasn‘t planning on breaking the no intercourse rule I had adopted from my church (and didn‘t for many years after), but I wasn‘t averse to being prepared. So I approached my mom (could I have ever asked my dad?) with a guilty conscience. I remember immediately qualifying my request, reiterating the doctor‘s words; the pill is often used to control irregular periods or excessive flow, or to curtail PMS symptoms. I sensed my mother‘s hesitation, but she was accepting and supportive, and I began seven years on the pill.

Although the pill didn‘t give me the courage to have intercourse,4 it did provide some relief from the darkest moods of PMS and from cramps that had inspired me to improvise Lamaze-type breathing. Oral contraceptives gave me freedom from hours in bed with a heating pad pressed to my abdomen. The pill gave me a bit more social liberty

4 Not that the pill promises moxie. If there were a pill for fearlessness, I suspect wouldn‘t be an essayist, working out all my anxieties on the page.

116 in that I did not burst into tears quite as often. But these freedoms, if one can call them that, were bartered with tender breasts (a common side effect) and worry—that I would miss a pill, that I did miss a pill, that I‘d forget to take the pack with me on late nights out and overnight trips. I had to think about my period, not just for ten to twelve days a month (that‘s PMS plus the period), but every day.

And in my mid-twenties, it began to bother me that I was simulating menstruation when it comes naturally, or at least I thought it should. This is how I read it now: I was an adult living in a large city, controlling many things that had once been decided for me. I wanted to take on the responsibility of menstruating, not realizing that taking a pill every night is a responsibility, one I had shouldered from an early age. When I decided to quit, I don‘t remember thinking about why I had started Ortho Tri-Cyclen in the first place. If I did, I must have thought that the ―irregularities‖ of my teen body—what had been

―natural‖ for me then—had worked themselves out, that I‘d be ―normal‖ now. I do remember wanting to feel more in control, a curious wish since the pill provided all the regularity one could want.

My desire, however, was to be unmechanized. It had to do with doctors, with medicine given as a cure-all, the way doctors substituted little slips of paper for communication. I didn‘t want to take any pills at all, not just birth control. I didn‘t shun drugs completely, but when I could cut them out, I did. When I say drugs, I mean those prescribed or bought over the counter in a drug store; I added natural supplements like

Evening Primrose Oil to help with my menstrual cycle. One pill regimen was supplanted with another, one I perceived to be more natural. I don‘t think I was mistaken about this. 117

No, the hunter-gatherers weren‘t downing a Primrose Oil supplement, but at least it doesn‘t have the potential side effects of vaginal bleeding, fluid rentention, melasma

(darkening of the skin), nausea, vomiting, change in appetite, headache, nervousness, depression, dizziness, loss of scalp hair, rash, other vaginal infections, blood clots, heart attacks and strokes, gallbladder disease, liver tumors, and cancer of the reproductive organs and breasts.5 More than a sense of being closer to nature, I felt I was taking charge. I had done the research and made the decision, whereas my doctor, the one who first prescribed the pill, had offered only one choice. Still, it was a tenuous hold; I struggled to have dominion over nature, only with more natural aids, like tearing down an aluminum mesh fence and putting wooden posts in its place.

There is no tapering off period for birth control. You just finish a pack and don‘t start another. It took my body about a year and a half to recover after this abrupt stop, that is, to menstruate regularly and with predictable PMS and flow. My body went from calibrated to erratic, didn‘t care that I had made conscious choices for its benefit. My breasts became so swollen I had to buy new bras. The severity of my cramps was completely capricious, and the period could last up to twice as long as when I had been medicated. Knowing, however, that there would be another adjustment period of six months if I went back on the pill, and because I was still dedicated to my pursuit of natural control, I never considered going back on.

Part of the reason regulation is so important when it comes to menstruation is that

5 List condensed from the Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo product insert.

118 the process feels out of control, or at least it does to me. Sure, I can listen to my body, can divine when my period is coming and when my heavy day will be. Yes, it‘s regular in most people. But still, it comes unbidden, all of its own. Perhaps if menstruation were constant and not painful, I‘d think of it like breathing or a heartbeat. But almost every month, I sit on the toilet, glance at the toilet paper in my hand, and think, ―Oh my God,

I‘m bleeding!‖ It sounds impossible. You would think that I would lose my sense of the uncanny around my period after all these years, but it never fails to provoke a moment of fear, even if for just a second, until recognition and the impulse to control kick in.

In a way it‘s a brief reenactment of my first period. It was a Monday morning in the seventh grade (how do I remember the Monday part?), in the girls‘ bathroom stalls on the first floor of Northfield Middle School. It was a beautiful, two-story brick structure dating from the 30s, with an anomalous, ugly two-story addition (built in the 70s) attached by an angled skywalk. I was in the old section, where the partitions between bathroom stalls were wooden, and a friendly heat came off the visible plumbing, which was covered in some sort of fiberglass painted the same white as the walls. When I spied the brownish red spots on my white6 cotton underwear, a wave of terror washed over me.

I hadn‘t asked for this, hadn‘t wanted this. Didn‘t want to go to the nurse, who gave me a thick, generic pad that bunched and pulled between my legs. ―You really can‘t tell it‘s there?‖ I kept demanding of the two friends I dared to tell. If this was natural, why did I feel so abnormal?

When we think of what is natural, we often think of the beatific—predictable patterns of petals and sepals, bees creating hexagons of comb, of landscape and gorgeous

6 Yes, it was all white, I swear. 119 sun. We women like to make a lot of the connection between our cycle and nature‘s, comparing our 28 days of blood and its absence to the waxing and waning of the moon, the seasons, the soil‘s rejuvenation. The comparison is real and true, but faulty too; I see it as a compensation we manufacture for ourselves in lieu of having real power in society.

As in, we still have yet to achieve equality in government representation and in the highest echelons of corporations, but goddamnn it, we‘re connected to nature in a way men will never understand. This makes menstruation sound sacred and special. And I have to admit it is insofar as we have the capacity to create life, a holy and wondrous act.

But like the maxi-pads on commercials that soak up innocuous blue liquid, talk of cycles covers up how menstruation is also allied with a darker side of nature—with disease, with mudslides, with the daily, physical pains life brings. Again, I hate to draw this connection, because it‘s too easy spotting Eve in the grass with the snake, that is, the woman who takes the fall for mankind. Women have been maligned in their alliance with nature, the unstoppable, impetuous force (femme fatale) that allows a man to abdicate all responsibility for his desire, excusing crimes of passion.7

But make no mistake: menstruation is messy. It is bloody tampons and stained underwear and sheets. It is the hot ripe smell that accumulates in women‘s bathrooms.

Menstruation humiliates. First there is debasement in the failure to control the blood flow. What woman hasn‘t tied a jacket around her waist to cover a stain, or dashed home to change pants? Then there is shame in how we control blood flow. Trying not to pee on a tampon string. Pulling out pubic hair caught in the adhesive side of a pad. Getting your labia caught in a tampon applicator. How do we manage it all?

7 The stereotype of men is, of course, equally abhorrent. 120

Bearing a child, that other natural thing we women do, is even more chaotic and messy, or so I‘m gathering from an informal poll of my friends who have been pregnant.

I have a cousin who is four months along, and when I saw her over Christmas, I asked her about the first sign she noticed, how she knew she was pregnant. She said that she hadn‘t connected the two at the time, but in retrospect, it had been when her husband put a dollop of sour cream on top of their chili dinner; she almost threw up at the sight. She feels like she‘s continuously coming down with the flu—nauseated and fatigued. I babysat for five weeks for a woman pregnant with her third; she couldn‘t keep any food down and stayed in bed all day. There are changes in breast and hip shape, the urge to pee when the weight of the fetus pushes on the bladder. How do they manage it all?

It‘s hard for me to understand why I want this. Why would I want to subject myself to more female chaos? To be sure, I have plenty of reservations. To be superficial about it, I like my breasts in the shape they are, and I don‘t want to gain weight. But my desire to be pregnant is, among other things, physical, something I considered an impossibility until my body taught me otherwise; I disparaged the notion of the biological clock until I began hearing the pulse of my own. Perhaps I couldn‘t hear it until I was partnered in a stable relationship, or maybe it was being off the pill for a couple of years.8

The timing still confounds me, but at about age 27, I began to listen to gory descriptions of birth without wincing, with fascination, with desire. It doesn‘t make cognitive sense to me, and it scares me—just one more way that biology dictates disorder.9

Of course, it‘s not all biology. I have a loving partner who would make a great

8 What if a side effect of the pill is that your desire to have a child is diminished? 9 Speaking of disorder, do you realize that medical insurance companies classify pregnancy as an illness? 121 father. I find myself thinking about how I would explain things like catsup to a three- year-old. I want to see my daughter‘s linguistic development, marking when she starts to use complex sentences. I‘ve even envisioned what life might be like with a teenager. I even want a cuddly, pooping, crying, feed-me-every two hours baby. Just not in the next twelve months. For now, Ortho Tri-Cylen Lo doesn‘t sound so bad, mechanization tolerable. I just wish I had more options.

When I went off the pill, I kept condoms in a drawer close to my bed. With condoms I took the sexual freedom I could not take in high school—freedom from raising a child, and now the conscious choice to be free from diseases I did not want. Still, I wanted a backup method of birth control, which occasionally became a ―just in case‖ method when condoms weren‘t around, so I went for a diaphragm fitting. A diaphragm is a barrier contraceptive and doesn‘t protect you from creepy crawlies. Does this mean I was more afraid of children than illness? Maybe I wasn‘t as sexually free as I thought I was. But I didn‘t think in those terms then. I wanted to be responsible, and responsible was having more than one way you could prevent a pregnancy.10 I chose a diaphragm because I was familiar with it; my mom had used one all their marriage (because they hadn‘t had sex before it), until she had a tubal ligation.

You get a fitting for a diaphragm because they come in sizes, like women‘s clothing; a number indicates that one differs from another, but none of the numbers

10 I did not realize that employing two methods of birth control was strange until it came up in conversation with friends, where incredulously raised eyebrows told me otherwise. My theory was, the pill has a failure rate of 5% (again, according to my Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo product insert). It would just be my luck to be in that five percent. Why risk that? I still don‘t see why everyone isn‘t doubling up. 122 match the proportions of anyone‘s actual body.11 For diaphragms, the size refers to the diameter of the disk. I‘ll describe it for those of you not in the know, and I know there must be some out there, like the befuddled plumber who extracted one—not mine—out of my clogged toilet. ―That‘s a diaphragm,‖ my roommate pronounced matter-of-factly when he asked what the hell it was.12 It‘s a soft latex or silicone dome, about 2.5 inches in diameter (but, as I said, this varies). The outer ring is stiff but springy; think the ring on a mason jar, only rounded, not flat. You bend the ring in half to insert it, and then let it spring back when it‘s inside, filling the perimeter of the cervical cavity. The soft dome— like a very tough balloon—covers the cervix, or the entrance to the uterus. Voila—a barrier! The problem (and there‘s always a problem) is that you must put gooey spermicide in the center and around the ring, which makes it hard to grasp.

The spermicide is what got me into trouble. When I went to pick up my diaphragm, the GYN made me practice before I could walk out the door with it. She left me alone to experiment. Initially this was a relief, but then it was almost more humiliating to be alone in a paper gown, since the doctor is the ostensible reason one must put one on. I applied the spermicide—or maybe it was KY jelly, because why would they have spermicide in a doctor‘s office?—around the ring, and, um, practiced.

I could not get the damn thing in. Half prone on the examining table, my face began to break a mild sweat under the bright lights. Again and again the ring snapped back into shape on the wrong side of my vagina. After it fell on the floor (and I had

11 Why did I think getting and using a diaphragm would be easier than the pill? 12 I make light, but I know there are many women my age and younger who don‘t know their way around a diaphragm. I wouldn‘t have known how it worked if I hadn‘t gone through the process of getting one, since my mother only described its use in vague terms

123 washed and re-gooped it), I spied the nurse call button, a beige switch with a long string tied to it, so one could pull it from the floor if one were having a heart attack. It was a desperate move, one I instantly regretted, because when I threw the switch, a loud siren sounded from I don‘t know where, like a European ambulance: Nee Na Nee Na Nee Na.

Someone save her, she can‘t find her cervix! It only got worse when I tried explaining to the nurse. You get the picture. Out of control.

The diaphragm didn‘t work for me. I learned how to get it in by the third try, but I couldn‘t keep it in for the requisite eight hours after sex. The angle of my cervical cavity was such that if I applied moderate pressure—such as when I went to the bathroom—it would slip out, though I‘m happy to say mine never fell in the toilet. Perhaps if I‘d had one custom made to fit me it might have worked. As it is, the latex disk has sat in my drawer all these years, silently jealous of the condoms and all the fun they‘re having. And because I didn‘t have a backup plan, I once took the ―morning after pill‖ when my partner‘s condom broke.

The morning after pill inhibits or ends a pregnancy, either by preventing ovulation, throwing off the menstrual cycle, or making the uterus uninhabitable for an egg. You can actually take it up to 72 hours after intercourse, and it will still be effective.

The morning after pill is also known by the acronyms PCP—post coital pill—and the more euphemistic EC—emergency contraception. What a concept: a pill of regret. Pill of hangovers and second guesses. Pill of honest mistakes and horrid accidents, of assault. Is there a stigma to this drug, this pound of cure versus ounce of prevention, or is it just in my head? I felt embarrassed about needing the medication; I spoke in low tones at the 124 clinic, eyes down, face flushed. The staff was pleasant and understanding, but I couldn‘t shake my fear of judgment, that they would see me as a 20-something woman having too much fun in the city. The clinic I went to, the only one open late, was a free clinic intended for those with low or no incomes. I was making ends meet and I had health insurance; I felt guilty for taking up a space that could be used by an immigrant, an unemployed woman, someone who didn‘t have sex with Kimono condoms. Thank God

(not the one that prohibits sex before marriage) that I never had to go back there.

The staff were equally friendly at the university clinic where I went to get back on birth control, about a year ago, after the aforementioned fainting episode during some agonizing cramps and ersatz Lamaze breathing.13 I called to make an appointment for my annual exam, and the office told me that I had to attend a class first. I didn‘t understand.

Why did I need to take a class before getting my uterus scraped with a cotton swab? I was very good at it; I‘d been fitting my heels in the stirrups for years. The chirpy voice on the phone explained that it was Ohio law policy; before I could receive reproductive services at my state university, I had to take a two hour class on reproductive health. ―I‘m married,‖14 I told the woman, trying to control my anger, reminding myself that she was only the enforcer of policy, not its author. It‘s not that I had nothing to learn (though I didn‘t learn much), but I was annoyed at the principle of it. Did people have to go

13 I better figure the Lamaze stuff out if I ever want to give birth. I can just see myself passed out on the delivery table. 14 As if marriage were evidence that I was more sexually experienced than your average state school co-ed, and I mean that in a way that (jokingly) disparages the institution of marriage, not the sexual behavior of 20-year-olds. I only wish I‘d had their freedom and knowledge at my Christian college. But I‘m starting to dig myself a hole here . . . 125 through a class before grabbing a condom? If men had to have an exam equivalent to a pelvic from the time that they were teenagers, would health services require class attendance before their annual checkup? I thought of these things afterwards, as I stewed; on the phone I was simply irate. The voice happily signed me up for a class on a

Wednesday afternoon; they wouldn‘t even give me an exam appointment until I‘d been educated.

The day of the class I dressed in a knee-length black skirt, a fitted collared shirt and necklace, and knee-high leather boots—my most professional-looking outfit. I hoped to impress upon everyone there, educators and students alike, that I was not 18 and I was not happy. Our dauntless leader, who demonstrated how to put a condom on a model complete with testicles, was animated, over-nice. I‘m not squeamish about dildos, but I am about people who appear too friendly. As she explained how to do a monthly breast examination—the ―perky dingle dangle‖ method, she called it—I felt something close to revulsion (while still noting her technique). I was not revolted by breasts, but that I had to learn about them. Most infuriating was her jolly, slightly condescending tone. And the most I could do in retaliation was to be brusquely polite to her.15 Before leaving, as I icily asked the instructor about appointments, I fingered the strap of my bag with my left hand, making sure she saw my rings.

If I had gone through this class when I was younger, I might not have been quite as piqued, but I still would have been disgruntled.16 I‘m trying to locate the anger,

15 Because despite my bluster after the fact, I am a conflict-avoiding pansy. 16 And I would not have been nearly as generous and good-humored as the young women in the class with me. I felt sorry for the international students though. What kind of impression were we making by sending this instructor to introduce them to women‘s health in this country? 126 because it seems disproportionate to its source. After all, we need information about our bodies, it‘s not often talked about in the home, and why not use the university as a forum? Part of my frustration lies in how I perceived the class as an obstacle to birth control. It has to do with access, and the sense that men (probably some women too) in the Ohio capitol building thought they knew better than I did when I needed to be educated about reproductive health. But a good portion of my attitude stems, I think, from the sunny face the clinic radiated—how, right or wrong, it reminded me that women are expected to smile through the embarrassment and pain of female anatomy. Marketers reinforce this cheerfulness in pink and blue packages of panty-liners with curlicue letters promising assurance, security. Advertisements of slender, active women in tight clothing, so happy to be wearing an ultra-thin maxi.17 It‘s not that I don‘t understand marketing or appreciate the marginal security the products provide. But I‘m sick of the duplicity, the pretty scrim over the messy reality. I loathe the layering of betrayal; first the body declares itself to be in control, and then we‘re handed sterile language like ―flow‖ and

―sanitary napkin‖ to describe what‘s happening.

Consider the word flow. I‘ve used it five times in this essay, not counting the ones in the previous two sentences. It stands in for a gooey mess that can vary in consistency from liquid to snot-like, can be anything from a trickle to a run, can be watery brown or so red it makes me want to check to see if I still have a pulse. I use the word flow because the alternative is unwieldy and repellant in large quantities18. I am caught in my own

17 Women in soft focus walking on beaches. Women in birth control ads with smug looks on their faces. I always wonder, are they really on the pill? One ad I saw had small print that said something to the effect of, ―Model for illustration purposes only.‖ Like the blueberries on a package of cereal flakes? 18 Probably small ones as well. 127 attempts to free myself from confining language, not wanting to try your patience with further descriptions. How many mentions of labia can you stand? Once a month until menopause? Then come the hot flashes, and how can I know if ―hot‖ and ―flash‖ are accurate when I haven‘t experienced them yet? The further I get into language, the more

I‘m convinced there are no good alternatives.

For now I‘m sticking with the pill. I will continue to take it so that I don‘t get pregnant. But if I could, this is what I would call it: Medicine I take that makes life easier for me to be in a world that doesn‘t want to hear about women‘s bodies.

128

I Want to Drive a Bus

In Oxford, England, if you want a bus to stop, you must hail it like a cab. You extend your arm in a manner obvious enough for the driver to notice, but not so obvious as to appear emphatic or desperate; it needs a certain nonchalance. This was one of my many cultural observations upon learning Oxford‘s transport system, and as with all

English customs, it required a nuance that I seemed to lack. Bringing a double-decker bus to a halt with a stiff wave of my hand was decidedly thrilling, but I never became comfortable with the gesture. It felt unnatural to me, having to assert myself for this basic service; like having to pay for public toilets, it didn‘t make sense. Once, unable to read the number of the bus from far off, I hailed the bus very late. While I boarded, the driver spoke to me animatedly, and since I didn‘t immediately comprehend his thick

Oxfordshire accent, I smiled cordially. Slowly I realized he was he scolding me vociferously for forcing him to decelerate quickly. This incident made the practice of hailing, an already vexing process for me, enormously taxing; I felt like I was trying to hit a pinball with the flippers at just the right time, only the stakes were getting home or being stranded. I‘m not very good at pinball.

Growing up I had taken a train from suburban Chicago into real Chicago, and I was familiar with the school bus, but I didn‘t learn how to use public transportation until

I lived in England the year after I graduated from high school. The daily A to B (C, D, or

E) and back to A bus travel was new and frightening for me, an obstacle course of anxiety. The first couple of times I took a route were the worst. It began with wondering if I had the right schedule, the right number bus, and where exactly it would stop. What 129 was the fare? Did I need exact change? Did I have exact change (always preferable)?

Would the driver be pleasant, or would she be annoyed at my novice questions of how often, how long, and can you tell me when we get to Ashbury Street? Then I was sure the driver would forget about me. I would telegraph a nervous posture—glance between the driver in the rearview mirror and out the window, re-shoulder my backpack in a way that said, my stop is soon, isn‘t it? Then I worried that I annoyed the driver in my blatant inability to trust her. But I couldn‘t seem to help it. Anxiously searching addresses on buildings, my heartbeat sped faster than the bus.

I‘ve learned the public transport system in several cities now, including Denver and Washington, DC. I‘m older and more seasoned, but it still takes me several runs to get over the awkward stage of learning when to pull the wire or press the button that signals the driver to stop. Too soon and he might admonish you for making him brake too fast. (This has also happened to me.) Too far away and you either have to endure the embarrassment of saying, sorry, it’s the next stop, and the knowledge that everyone else on the bus knows you don‘t know where to get off. Or, you get off too soon and hope that traffic isn‘t so slow that you pass the bus walking. I usually take the latter option.

*

My granddaddy was a bus driver. He drove trolleys and then busses for over 40 years for Atlanta public transportation, first for Georgia Power Company, then the

Atlanta Transit Company (a British company, strangely enough), then MARTA

(Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority). My Dad rode routes with him occasionally for a couple of hours. Sometimes, after Granddaddy‘s shift, he would pick 130

Dad and Grandmommy up from Georgia State, where she finished her Bachelor‘s degree when Dad was in the 7th grade. The university was only a couple blocks out of his way, and he would swing by on his way back to the bus barn. Dad remembers feeling excited and privileged to have this special ride—a larger than life limousine. I imagine him watching for Granddaddy on the curb, telling Grandmommy ―there he is‖ when he came into view, feeling the massive machine slow and stop in front of him, the quick exhale of the brakes, the heat of the engine blowing air hotter than summer on his face. Then the doors would swing open, and Granddaddy would nod and say ―Hello, hello‖ in his slow quiet way, kind, with tiredness behind it. They would mount the steps and sit in the first couple of seats, my Dad sitting right behind Granddaddy, where he could see his wide back and shoulders, the sweat stains running down his sides. Granddaddy would swing his arm out in that practiced motion, working the mechanical arm that sealed the door behind them. Dad would look out into the Atlanta afternoon, feel himself joining the stream of traffic, feel his body anticipate the curves, mimick Granddaddy‘s lean into turns.

I realize it might be a bit odd to refer to them as Grandmommy and Granddaddy, but since she died when I was fifteen, and my father still refers to him that way though

Granddaddy has long since passed on, it feels natural to me. I have them fixed in my mind through child‘s eyes, I suppose wanting to avoid the pain of her death and his slow deterioration. It‘s almost as if I wish they had been my parents. I like to think that I wouldn‘t be so anxious around buses if I had grown up with them, if Granddaddy had been my bus driver. I picture myself on that high cab, calm, watching Granddaddy‘s 131 strong forearms turn the huge steering wheel. I see cars below and pedestrians slip by as we gain speed. But this is a fantasy. I suspect I would still have been terrified, because I take after my grandmother, who did not drive because it made her too nervous. After years of stomach churning practice, I have managed to learn driving, but my nerves take on a different form: I‘m intimidated by people like bus drivers. I get panicky on the phone with anonymous people—pizza order takers, representatives for the phone company, secretaries of all kinds. Before calling the DMV, I rehearse what I‘m going to ask in my head, and it won‘t matter. Invariably I become quiet and cautious, and

Anonymous asks me to repeat myself. I trip over a thought or elaborate it far beyond what‘s necessary. I also leave the most Byzantine, apologetic voice messages. I‘m the one who runs out of space and has to call back.

Like hailing the bus in England, my life is full of cultural customs that unnerve me because they are dependent on strangers and how accommodating they will be.

Nothing is too small for me to dread. As I brush my teeth, I worry that the dentist will tell me I am brushing my teeth too hard, and then I‘m sure he‘ll say I ‘m too soft on my molars. I lack the intrepidity to demand that my cold meal be returned to the restaurant kitchen. I fear, even though I plan out my time carefully each morning, that I will miss the bus, or rather, that I‘ll almost miss it and get a lecture from the bus driver once again.

*

When I first moved to Albuquerque, it took me six months to find a job. I had begun logically enough, applying for jobs in proofreading, editing and web design— positions for which I was qualified. As the months passed, I turned more to secretarial 132 ads and temp services. I pondered the help wanted signs in restaurant windows, knowing full well (from experience) that I‘m a lousy waitress. Not only am I uncoordinated (I‘ve dropped a tray of glasses and cut my finger on a meat slicer), but I‘m too thin-skinned.

I‘d wince for weeks recalling a mis-ordered meal, the nonplussed eye rolls of the patrons, the exasperated-yet-cheerful demeanor of the manager who rescued me by giving them their meal for free.

I don‘t know anyone who enjoys looking for work, so I suppose I am not unique in saying I hate it. Hate combing the classifieds, hate taking Microsoft Office tests at the temp agency, hate cover-letter-ese, hate not knowing if I‘m being too obsequious in interviews, hate lauding my virtues to prospective employers. It stems from the anxiety of having to ingratiate myself with strangers, anticipating what they want to hear, yet appearing confident and desirable. It made me dread leaving the mattress on my floor every morning.

Running out of options, cash long gone, I circled an ad for a school bus driver.

Not only highlighted it, but visited the depot, filled out an application, had an interview, and was hired, provided I pass the two week training course. I hasten to add that I did not take the job. A position as a technical writer at the university came through a week before

I was to start training, which was fortunate for a number of reasons. First of all, the bus job paid not quite enough; I can‘t remember the exact numbers, but they assured me I would be living in my stinky, tiny studio apartment that cost $200 a month, which I had hoped to outgrow once I got a job. Second, I am not a morning person, preferring to skip over that part of the day entirely and start with late brunch instead of breakfast. Third, I 133 don‘t like children. That‘s not true; it‘s just that they intimidate me. They don‘t talk unless you ask them questions. I end up repeating stock inquiries they‘re bored by like

―How old are you?‖ I sound like an adult trying to sound like an adult. Or I talk to them as if they were little grown-ups. ―So, what are you drinking? Milk? That a local microbrew?‖ As you might guess, this makes me a horrible disciplinarian, which is the fourth reason I would make an ineffectual bus driver. Fifth, I don‘t like to drive.

I learned to drive with the nicest drivers in the country, perhaps in the entire world: Minnesotans. It is my firm belief that anyone who learns to drive in Minnesota will never be completely comfortable driving anywhere else, though we do build up a passable amount of bravado if we are called upon to drive in, say, Chicago, or any place with more than two on-ramps. But the days of four-way stop signs, where we would sit in stalemate, each waving the other to go on ahead, are always wistfully in the back of our minds.

I perform well as a driver. I‘m actually not overly timid or cautious, but only because I manage to turn off a fearful mechanism in my brain. I convince myself that the world is not so dangerous: crossing the street will not get me run over, or there will not be hold-up at the Speedway where I get gas. But when I‘m not behind a wheel, and if truth be told occasionally when I am, the thought of driving fills me with trepidation.

I‘ve pondered why I thought I could do it—why a nervous driver with little ability to engage with children, especially early in the morning, would think she could drive a bus, financial desperation aside. Some of it, I think, has to do with wanting to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could work as hard as Granddaddy, that I could still do 134 blue collar work after having grown up in a family of academics. But it was more than that. I didn‘t want to be like Granddaddy. I wanted to be Granddaddy. Or at least the image of him that I‘ve created in my mind.

Granddaddy was a union man, the vice president of the MARTA union for eight years or so. Dad says he wasn‘t articulate enough to be the president—his quiet nature didn‘t naturally take on the role of instigator—but it strikes me as significant that he held the position through the 60s. He remained pro-union throughout his life, even after

Grandmommy had started voting Republican. He was reelected VP several times, but when he was voted out, it was by one vote, which Granddaddy himself cast; he thought it was prideful to vote for oneself, so he checked the box for the other guy. Grandmommy was incredulous, which I‘m sure didn‘t help the sting of defeat. He never ran for union office again.

There are other fragments I have of him that belie his perceived lack of elocution.

He led the hymns in the Baptist church in the old-fashioned way of shouting out a line of verse, then leading with his beautiful tenor. A small hiccup, but one worth pondering: although both Granddaddy and Grandmommy were teetotalers, Granddaddy would occasionally answer the phone, ―Tom‘s Bar and Grill,‖ which scandalized my grandmother. Was he trying to get a rise out of her, or did he just like to let loose once in a while?

My knowledge about Granddaddy is filtered through Dad since I was never confident enough to ask Granddaddy about himself when he was alive. A year after I was 135 born he had a stroke that left him with a limp and a lisp and without most of the use of his right arm, which dangled at his side, the elbow always bent at the same angle, his fingers curled into a weak fist. It‘s odd, the flashes of memory I retain around his disability, all of them tinged with shame—mine, not his necessarily; I‘ll never know how he felt about it.

Once Grandmommy told me to slow down as we walked through Rich‘s, a department store, because Granddaddy couldn‘t walk that fast. Fueling his car, he once got gasoline on new leather gloves; I wasn‘t there, but I remember my father telling the story with regret, and feeling my stomach sink, doubly shamed at the loss of physical control and, because of that loss, the marring of the new and valuable.

Difficult to understand, he spoke very softly and slowly, if at all. When

Granddaddy did speak, Grandmommy often finished his sentences. I had the sense that she was impatient with his long slurred words, always deciding what he wanted before he got the words out. He never reacted with bitterness or unkind words, but sometimes I sensed frustration under the placid surface. Or maybe I projected frustration more than I sensed it. He would saunter down to the garden and tend his tomato plants rather than converse in the living room. And he had a stubborn streak too that hinted at his former brief incarnation as Tom, telephone tavern proprietor. Once he scaled a ladder, precariously balancing on his good foot, to clean the gutters on the roof. I watched the scene from the back porch, paralyzed as the drama unfolded, Dad, my Aunt Dee, and

Grandmommy yelling: ―Charles, get down from there. What are you doing.‖

I draw these connections in retrospect; when he was alive he appeared to me simply as sickly, in need of care and kid gloves. Since he seemed frail, my parents 136 warned me that each of our visits to Atlanta might be the last time I saw him. This made goodbyes very difficult for me, listening to Granddaddy‘s softly slurred prayer as we held hands in a circle. He prayed for our safe return home, and the irony of this against his supposedly imminent death struck me at an early age. His speech unnerved me the most.

Once I asked my father how God heard Granddaddy when he said grace before dinner, since I could only make out ―Aaamen‖ at the end. I remember squirming in his lap as he read me a book. When he addressed me directly, which was rare, I was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat himself. It felt like an odd reversal; Granddaddy was supposed to ask me the questions. From a very young age I felt that misunderstanding him was a personal failure, that it was because I didn‘t try hard enough to hear him.

I‘ve always had this perverse narcissism; it‘s all my fault. This is common or even charming logic in a child, but in an adult it comes off as ridiculous at best and deranged at worst. I think back to the girl straining to listen to Granddaddy‘s prayers, and I want to tell her it‘s OK, but my grown-up self still doubts this is true. My ambivalence stems from the dual images I have of him: one of him navigating the tight turns of Atlanta city streets, and the other of him settled back into his deep, upholstered chair in the living room as my grandmother chatted with my mom and dad. He recedes into the background almost. He is the shadow of anxiety.

In order to mitigate my own unease in the world, or in order to find some way to navigate the fear I feel daily, I look for the Granddaddy I did not know. I envision the bus driver, quiet but confident, maneuvering a giant vehicle between the mini-worlds of neighborhoods. The one redeeming part of his job, Dad mentioned, was that Granddaddy 137 knew every street in Atlanta. He would descend and eat lunch anywhere; the whole city was home to him.

*

I realize that the few details I‘ve given you make Grandmommy out to be domineering. She could be manipulative, but it came out mostly in benign, everyday things. For instance, she‘d ask me what I wanted for breakfast: ―Kelley, honey, do you want some eggs, or some toast, some pancakes, cereal?‖ and after I ordered cereal, she‘d make everything anyway. She loved us through food, and she was just as generous with praise, telling my brother and sister and me we were smart and pretty and that she was so proud of us, that she loved us so much. She worked just as hard as Granddaddy did too, finishing a BA while she taught grade school and took care of my dad and his sister. And all that food she gave us was the paradigm of good Southern cooking. All my best recipes come from her: cornbread dressing, cream cheese pound cake. The way she worried all the time—telling me to be careful on the stairs every time I used them, admonishing

Granddaddy to watch his step in the garden—went hand and hand with the excess: all that food she made (and don‘t you want some more?). She had too much fear and too much love.

I used to think that the way she worried all the time was a product of having lived through the Depression. That is, until I realized that I am just like her. Or perhaps I‘m living out the legacy of the Depression—how she taught my dad who taught me how to be troubled. Did I inherit some fretful brain chemistry, a sinister adaptation? My shoulders bear the slight stoop hers did, I can hear her worried timber in my voice. Where 138 is Grandaddy? Don‘t I have his eyes, his nose? I want to drive a bus, goddammit. Instead

I inherited the stricken version of Granddaddy I saw, not the healthy one I wish I‘d seen.

Sometimes when I am eating I notice that my fist is inexplicably curled up in the same way Grandddaddy‘s did post-stroke, his lifeless fingers resting on the table beside his plate.

*

Contrary to our expectations, Grandmommy died first. After she died,

Granddaddy declined steadily. Confined to a wheelchair and then a bed, he lost his ability to speak and eat. Over this slow deterioration, I began to look for him on buses. It was easier to look for his features in the face of a bus driver than to remember his unfocused eyes in a sea of pajamas and sheets. I replaced his living ghost with a vision of someone whole, someone mobile.

In what I consider his final stubborn gesture, Granddaddy didn‘t die until I was

23. Though I can‘t know why he held on so long, I like to think that it was for my Aunt

Dee, who is like my grandmother, and who visited him every day in the nursing home.

Already retired, she threw herself into his care as Grandmommy had before. She constantly worried over him and often fought with doctors over his medications. Her anxiety kept him alive.

*

These days I take the bus to school in my little town of 21,000, and I have a favorite bus driver, who reminds me of Granddaddy of course. Every time I board the bus when Dave is driving, we have a friendly exchange—how are you, and how are you. If 139

I‘m lucky, I‘ll get a seat towards the front of the bus, and I can try to talk to him. But I‘m shy, and usually can‘t think of anything to say.

If we‘re not talking, I let my mind drift. I note the progress of the leaves growing on the trees, the height of the river we pass over, and the buttons on the backpacks of fellow student passengers. Riding the bus isn‘t all agitation and stress. There is a freedom that comes from public transport unlike that of riding in a car. The ability to think about nothing and anything. The exhilaration of being able to get yourself to your destination, of having mastered a system. When I ride the bus, I have the sense that I am doing something on my own. I glimpse a fraction of what Granddaddy felt; I can get myself anywhere in this city.

140

On Absence

I am a sun person, practically phototropic; I list towards it, and without it I‘m listless. Ironically, my skin also burns quite easily, so I‘m forever trying to position myself for maximum indirect light exposure—to find a bright spot of shade. Every morning I sit in front of a light box that projects 10,000 lux (whatever that is—enough like sun to fool my brain), for up to an hour or two in the winter, to stabilize my mood. I believe it balances some of my pregnant hormones as well, though I doubt there‘s scientific evidence for that.

Today my light box replaces the sun rather than supplements it. It is day-dark in a way only the Midwest can be under a heavy layer of clouds. We haven‘t had too many dim days during this summer of ―moderate drought,‖ as I heard it named on the radio.

Farmers not far from here have sold the cattle they can‘t water, have watched crops stall and wither. I chat about the weather with friends, most of whom are not agriculturally employed. We talk about the dryness as if we knew what dependence was like. We worry for the farmers; that‘s all. My allergies are intense this year, and my husband hasn‘t had to mow the lawn in weeks. That is the extent of the drought to us.

In Texas, where my parents live, they‘ve had too much rain. News—especially

CNN, which I catch peripherally while I exercise at the gym—is awash with replayed footage of people being rescued from trapped cars. Images play and replay of arms outstretched for the orange-clad rescuer, or water catching in white spray on the angles of the precariously swamped vehicles. There have been deaths. 141

Earlier in the week my husband traveled to Phoenix on business and was grounded in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for many hours as they waited for clearance to take off. Apparently if lightening strikes within five miles of the airport, all tarmac personnel must go inside until the area has been free of strikes for fifteen minutes. He told me this on his cell phone, already weary from a full day of traveling, but once again only the bystander to a calamity, removed from actual danger. At two in the morning, he got into his bed at the Phoenix hotel.

Weather in Dallas delayed him again coming home. At 3 a.m. I heard his step on the concrete stairs outside and instantly awoke. I got up and hugged him hard (as hard as

I can around my big belly), watched him as he read the note I‘d left for him about banana bread in the fridge. In bed we lay close and stroked each other like breathing again, easing the absence of four days.

He came home in rain. Afternoon thunderstorms have rattled the skies the past three days, terrible squalls that overflow city gutters and shock us with their contrast to the dryness. Last night was the first in weeks—months? I don‘t really keep track—that the rain continued all night. Now I sit in front of my light box, for once not minding the dark gray and the rain falling straight down—a purposeful rain. I write as my husband sleeps off hours of travel, comforted knowing that I could go in the bedroom and wake him with a kiss on his bare shoulder. I let him sleep a little bit more.

142

MOVEMENT

143

In Which I Move Again

I moved from city to city, traveled from person to person, and then I tried to define myself through writing, but that doesn’t work, no, not at all, it adds fiction to the fiction I became, and from that place where I had a sense of my absolute importance I reached a fogged Olympus from which the gods and goddesses had long departed; I’m in a disorienting wilderness. –Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country

Breech

I came into the world butt first, my head folded over my legs, backing out of the womb. The doctor might have cut my mother, but he realized my position too late; she was open and I was traveling, groping, looking for an exit I could fall into.

Accident

I have fallen off my bike four times. The first time, my shoe laces became tangled in the gears as I careened downhill. A pile of sticks broke my fall with puncture wounds.

The second time, I skidded out on gravel left over from a winter‘s worth of icy sidewalks.

The third time, I hit a hidden culvert on a grassy down-slope, and I flew forward off my bike, landing on my chest. The wind knocked out of me, I felt that painful forced hollow followed by a desperate gasp.

These were the falls of my youth.

When I was twenty-three, speeding without a helmet (which I usually wore) downhill on a sidewalk, a butterfly with a wing-span of six inches landed on my bare thigh. The stinging made me look down, but the iridescent blue flanked with sunrise yellow made me stare. I shook my leg to free it, but the force of the wind I made riding 144 fast pinned it to me, as if I‘d acquired my own bug collection, the wings stretched out on the roundness of my thigh. In my attempt to save the specimen, we both went down.

Though all four falls were injurious, it‘s the butterfly‘s sting that I can feel most in memory.

A Place I Live

Washington, DC has too many vibrations. Helicopters buzz overhead, chopping up the turbid atmosphere, cutting up your sleep into a rhythm your body can‘t contain.

The metro only takes you so far, can‘t bridge the divisions. Your body, young but aching with old joints, walks everywhere.

My Car

Faith was my first car, named so only partially because of the endless punning opportunities. She broke down frequently, and the name came to me shortly after learning about nihilism in college, though the exact logic of that connection escapes me now. A ten-year-old Honda Accord when I got her, she died just three years later in the middle of

Nebraska, during a cross country trip with my boyfriend to his home in Denver. I ran

Faith too hot, and she was prone to overheating. I pushed her too far across squelching summer plains.

Complete engine meltdown.

―It‘s toast,‖ the mechanic said. 145

We stayed in a motel that night as we waited for my boyfriend‘s mother to drive the eight hours from Denver to retrieve us. We fit my bike inside her mini-van, which I used, along with buses, to get to my temporary jobs all summer.

Mobility

What if travel is home?

Another Place I Live

The mountains are full of hunters, they say, but I don‘t care. I find a sunny spot in the woods—sun to keep the chill off—and I read without clothes. Not that I‘m far from civilization. My cabin-mate passes me in search of her own reading spot. ―You‘re naked!‖ she says. Skin is still so new to us, worthy of laughter. She nests in some grass, putting trees between us. Southwest Oregon is like that—warm inviting spaces not too close together.

My cabin-mate is an artist. She draws her menstrual cramps, and I am in awe of how she can see her body. When she tosses the abstract pastels in the trash, I fish them out.

One night we all decide to go skinny dipping by moonlight. I‘m the first one in, throwing my clothes off as quickly as I can. The last one in says, ―I‘m Eve!‖ We lie on our backs and look up at the stars, kicking in the water so we feel like we‘re flying further and further into the night above, unmoored.

146

Ticket

You don‘t need a ticket to walk out your front door, but you need one to get back.

And you are always away. Even with the advent of internet grocery shopping, you find yourself needing to go out, to accumulate more slips of paper—Metrocards, bus transfers, receipts for gas, passport photos. You can count them to see how much living you‘ve done. It‘s never enough.

Echo

I ride my bike (a two-wheeler with training wheels) up the sidewalk to the corner, but I don‘t cross the street. At every crossing sidewalk or driveway, I stop and watch the cars in the intersection. I pretend it‘s my intersection, and I wait for the car to go before I pedal on. I am practicing driving, and I tell my mom about it when I return home for ice water.

Mobility

Mobility is a trap. Is the way you get caught moving again, selling off most of what you own, putting the rest in your car named Joy. Her body will house your body for two and a half months, or at least will take you to the campsites and motels and friends‘ apartments that will harbor you temporarily. The only constant is Joy.

147

Breach

Your first apartment in Albuquerque is a studio you rent for $200 a month. It reeks of the cigarette smoke that leaks in the vents from the neighbors‘. When the cops come one night and ask if there‘s been a disturbance next door, you tell the truth. The neighbors visit soon after and tell you to mind your own business. You should have remembered how to keep quiet from all those nights in that other big city, how to be intimidated by the neighbors more than the police. The woman in the apartment across from yours screamed at her children, who wailed. But then, you never had police at your door, asking for a confession.

Another Place I Live

I spoke fluent Danish. I ate liverwurst on small pieces of rye bread—my PB&J at day care—and although I‘m a vegetarian now, I still get occasional cravings for it. For dessert, my taste buds curled around almond paste and custard, flaky dough, smooth licorice. Still, my mom fed me tomato soup from a can and packaged American cheese in slices. I didn‘t like either, but I ate it anyway. I‘d try to tear strips of the orange square into perfect, skinny rectangles, and this was entertaining enough. I was three.

Once while in daycare, I swallowed my gum. I felt I should tell Antje, but I didn‘t know how to say it in Danish. I don‘t remember how I finally told her; I have no language to complete the memory.

My mouth remembers another incident. Running down the sidewalk, from my mom‘s side to my Dad‘s outstretched arms, I tripped on a crack. The fall knocked my top 148 front teeth out, and for weeks I wore a crusty scab above my mouth like a mustache. I would stop in the hall mirror, my head barely visible above the side board, and I‘d finger the bumpy dark brown mass, lick it.

Echo

The road is the sound of the engine, the vibration of the sun visor loose in its clip.

The road is the sound of my stomach gurgling soda bubbles. The road is my elbow bumping the armrest a split second after the dip. The road is my mother‘s high-pitched hello when I arrive, her tight embrace around my shoulders. The road is the sound of her voice on my cell phone. The road is dots that don‘t make a straight line. The road is the taste of exhaust from the car that has traveled twenty feet more than I have. The road is my dry eyes tearing. The road is desire.

Mobility

I slipped through nine states and two other countries, moving every couple of years, sometimes away, sometimes moving back to where I came from. Ohio thinks it has caught me, but I know better.

Accident

Biking to a nanny job in Oxford, England, I was hit by a car. I was going up a hill, and the car was coming down one perpendicular to me, decelerating, though not fast enough to indicate that the driver noticed me crossing on the sidewalk before the corner. I 149 wasn‘t hurt, just extremely rattled. The bike was unridable, almost unpushable with its tire grating against the frame of the wheel, the front wheel angling in a different direction from the back one. When I met the mother that morning, I didn‘t tell her for several minutes, perhaps to effect a British stoicism, maybe to heighten the drama of finally telling her (an Americanism?). I was also worried; it was her husband‘s bike. She fussed over me as any mother would, though I was the one supposed to be expending energy. I was her day nanny, taking care of her two and four-year-old as she rested upstairs in bed, pregnant with her third. She had hyperemesis, or severe morning sickness, and could eat nothing but crackers and red soda.

Breach

As a second grader, I wait for a sixth-grader patrol guard with an orange sash to take me across the first street. Then I walk up a block to cross over to school at the busy intersection where Mr. Zenner, a sixth grade teacher in an orange jacket, ushers me across the second street.

One morning the patrol doesn‘t arrive, and as minutes drag on, my heartbeat increases and my eyes start to tear. The first bell rings. I can cross the street safely—I know how—but I‘m afraid to break the rules. Finally, more scared of a tardy, I cross.

When I reach Mr. Zenner, he asks if there was a patrol at my corner. How did he know?

You can‘t see one end of the block from the other since it‘s obscured by a hill and some trees. I tell him ―no,‖ and he takes me across the street. 150

The rest of the day I am tight with fear, sure he will come get me out of class, that

I am in huge trouble. But nothing ever becomes of my first moving violation.

Another Place I Live

There are hills and ivy, gymnastics classes and kindergarten. Peanuts and cheese for snacks, footprints on the carpet that I like to fit my feet into. But Kentucky also has tornadoes, tall, brusque principals, and angry kindergarten teachers.

My parents drive me to school. A rainy day, as my dad drives me and a friend up a steep hill on the way to school, a biker runs a red light (wet brakes) and our car hits him. My friend and I sit in the back seat, watching the scene unfold through gray streaked windows, seatbelts still taut. An ambulance comes. The biker claims that he‘s fine even though he has bloody scrapes from skidding on the asphalt. I wait forever. I worry about being late for school.

When we arrive we walk through the empty gym, where we would have lined up with our classes in the inclement weather. The principal is still there for some reason, or maybe he finds us in the hall after we exit the gym. His inquiries terrify me, and I explain the situation, almost more unnerved by this encounter with authority than by the crash.

When I get to my classroom, Mrs. Hayes is discussing bicycle safety, and I can hardly contain myself, blurting. She asks that I wait for my comments until she‘s done speaking, and I sit on my voice like I have to go pee really bad. Too young for irony, instead I believe that the world is ordered through astounding coincidence, and that I must tell others about my discovery. 151

Mobility

I hesitate; language makes me stumble. The words from one place do not transfer to the next. Words dislocate in the space between. Travel uproots my sentences.

Another Place I Live

Wheaton isn‘t Chicago, but Mom sometimes calls it Chicago when asked where we‘re from. Chicago is wind and water, buildings that look like they‘ll fall on me but don‘t. Chicago is easier when I‘m inside—looking at Christmas tree lights from the car, or seeing stars on the planetarium dome on field trips. Wheaton is made up of houses: mine, Nana‘s, Aunt Susie‘s, the Wood‘s, and the Jones‘. We drive to church and the grocery store, where I like to sit under the grocery cart basket as Dad pushes me and my little sister in the seat above. We eat animal crackers from a small red box with a string handle. Dad pays for them later when we check out.

Mostly, Wheaton is two blocks kiddy corner from each other. I can see my school from my front steps. When my parents first point out the house we will move into, I think they‘re indicating the school gymnasium, and I spend several weeks trying to reconcile living in a huge, brick rectangle before I realize my mistake.

Next to the gym, in the large blacktop where I cower in games of dodge ball in physical education, my dad teaches me to ride without training wheels. There is a slight slope to the tar, and we start at the top and move diagonally across it. I pick up speed and feel something between excitement and terror, my long hair streaming behind me, my 152 feet struggling to keep up with the pedals. I can hear my dad‘s running shoes keeping pace with me, his hand on the back of the bike. At the bottom of the lot we stop, both breathless. Dad tells me, no, he wasn‘t holding the bike up; it was you. And I feel betrayal, gratitude, and pride all at once.

Echo

Between my third and fourth grade years we moved from Illinois to Minnesota.

My sister sat in the U-haul with Dad, our collie at her feet. My mom followed in a brown

Honda with me in the back seat with my infant brother; my job was to take care of him.

At the beginning of our journey we crossed the railroad tracks that bisected the town, and

Mom and I saw the U-haul tip precariously in front of us. Mom and I gasped, but Dad and my sister were surprised when we told them the story later.

When my brother got fussy, I took him out of the car seat and put him in my lap, my hands around his torso, bouncing my knees in a rhythm more consistent than the car‘s. However, I didn‘t have a good enough hold of him, and when we hit a bump, he toppled over, his head softly bumping the arm rest. He wailed even louder, and I gripped him tightly in panic, sure that I had done something irreversible. But we arrived intact, plus a slight forehead bruise.

It was his first of many. Our new house had wood floors, and as my brother learned to sit and stand and walk, he hit his head repeatedly. His head was often adorned with a knot or two, a veritable halo of purplish brown. As he grew into a more accomplished walker, he began to demonstrate the family talent for falling not only down 153 stairs, but up them as well. I remember sitting on the sofa upstairs once and hearing it as it happened: ―AAAh!‖ thump thump th-thump thump. ―Oooof.‖ I hooted with laughter.

My family could only chuckle with me since, except for my dad, we were all clumsy. It was just his turn to fall.

My Car

Joy had air in her brake lines, leftover from a botched brake job. I‘d slam the pedal to the floor and nothing would happen. After pumping furiously, the pressure would magically return, and Joy would halt. I felt both terror (nightmare fear—no brakes, no brakes!) and then almost a shame after they began working again. My brakes made me question my sanity. It took three mechanics to believe me and bleed the air from the lines.

Another Place I Live

I don‘t notice the faint light, only the brightly colored beads on the necklace I made, strung together on twine. They are the same colors as Legos, the same as train cars

I run on a wooden track.

I live in a rectangle, and I ride my tricycle around the square formed by my house touching the three other rectangles. Once, I crawl out my ground-story window to see if I can. The stucco on the side of the house scrapes—something I didn‘t anticipate, and I regret my choice. The front door is locked, so I have to ring the doorbell to get back inside. My mother is not happy.

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Ticket

Guard it. Don‘t lose it, whatever you do. You fear that it won‘t have the correct bar code or numbers when the screener passes it through the red laser, when the ticket taker scrutinizes it. Pack it somewhere easily accessible—a pocket in your coat, an outside flap of your bag—and then forget where you put it when you need to show it to security. Finger the flimsy paper. You accidentally tear some of the perforation and then futilely press the edges together to make it appear that the seam is intact.

After the trip, hold on to the ticket for years. Find it in an old coat, under piles of papers, in back folders. Put it back where you found it. Keep it as a record of your passage.

155

On Rest Areas

1.

I‘m somewhere between Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago. Somewhere between Seattle and Minneapolis. Somewhere between Columbus, Ohio and Atlanta.

From the driver‘s seat of my car (my ‘88 Honda Accord, my ‘92 Honda Accord, my ‘96

Nissan Altima), I spot a sign that points one direction for semi trucks and buses and another for cars. Taking the arrow to the right, I pass the huge semis parked parallel to each other, and I imagine seeing them from a plane on its descent, the regular blocks diagonally aligned over the black asphalt, highway art deco. I pull up to the curb into a similar pattern of cars. I‘ve been sitting too long, and as I finally spot the tinted, glass doors of the rest area, I feel an impatient itch to stretch my legs. I note the small roofs hovering over picnic tables, each spaced apart like suburban houses, together but not touching. Past the lawn‘s tight edges, between the bushes that are surrounded by neat squares of wood shavings, a couple of paths have been worn by travelers wanting a quicker route to the restroom.

I open my door and feel a welcome blast of heat; my air conditioning was set extra cold to keep me awake. Or, I feel a rush of cold run up the coat I haven‘t bothered to zip since I‘ll be walking only a hundred feet to the door. Or, I feel a balmy breeze, making me regret that I‘m spending such a gorgeous spring day in 156 the car. Those first steps are almost painful as my body remembers how to stand, feeling my weight on my feet rather than my hips. But there is no time to dwell on this sensation.

I have to pee.

Entering the concrete block structure, I search for her. Ah, there she is, the faceless one without arms and feet, that woman in black with a triangle for a dress, facing off her masculine partner on the door opposite. Passing this sentinel, I enter a model of uniformity, faucets lifting their heads in unison, doors to the stalls all ajar at the same 30 degree angle. The bathroom is chrome, polished steel, faux marble, tile—easily cleaned surfaces. It occurs to me that all the rooms, down the partitioned toilet spaces, have locks, and that a third of the building can only be accessed by maintenance staff. A door without signage at the other end of the bathroom makes me curious. What kind of mops do they have? How many ―Wet Floor‖ signs with that careless action figure demonstrating its perils? Is it tidy, or does the door conceal a mess?

Now that I‘ve availed myself of what are

euphemistically called ―the facilities‖ (what, you

didn‘t think I was going to take you into the stall with

me, did you?), I am at leisure to dwell on the lobby,

the parking lot—the spaces where I encounter people.

Their amused faces adorn the pamphlets stacked

neatly in the lobby racks, glossy brochures in primary

colors advertising local restaurants and caves, bumper

cars and hotels. A volunteer in jeans and an oxford 157 shirt is staffing the counter at this state line rest area. She gladly will assist with my tourism and travel arrangements, but to receive her help I must ply her with the details of froms and where tos, the frequency of the route, hours driven and miles to go, chat about weather here and there. I glance over the literature and give a half smile to the lady while slipping out the door.

Or, this rest area sits in the middle of a state, and the only other people there are pictures of the governor and the head of the department of transportation, their signatures adorning the corner of the flag-festooned portraits. I wonder how quickly they swap out the pictures after elections. Or, there are several others here at this isolated oasis, the only stop for miles on either side, but the solitary nature of using a restroom checks my vision just short of these fellow travelers. I pass by them as if I were still in my car.

Or, if I‘ve been bored with the road, I am inclined to people-watch. I observe their comfortable car clothes—sweatshirts with college logos, rainbow trout, or flowers, matching velour sweat-suits, sandals half fastened, sunglasses. Or the knit caps and boots, puffy down coats, heavy flannel shirts. They shuffle out of minivans, stiff, gingerly stepping on solid ground. They avoid each other‘s eyes. They stay in their worlds, take the protective hum of their engines in with them to the toilet. Unless they have a dog.

Then all attention is on the animal, coaxing it to go pee and poop, plastic bag in hand, or running with it down the short sidewalk again and again. The dog, 158 enthusiastic about other dogs and people, forces the car‘s vibrations to break. The owners‘ eyes follow the taut nylon leash to the bundle of spastic energy to me bending down, saying, ―Can I pet your dog?‖

Children, freed from their car imprisonment, turn cartwheels to feel the blood rush to their heads, or scream and chase each other in a quick game of tag. ―Get it out of your system,‖ Mom says not quite under her breath. Adults, wishing they had the flexibility of youth, stiffly reach for their toes, letting the steering wheels fall out of their shoulders.

They stretch quadriceps and calves because it will be hours before they stop again. Some indulge in the vending machine selection of preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup.

Others look desirously but deny themselves these pleasures of the road; they have filled their Nalgene water bottles at the too-cold water fountain and have pretzels in the car.

About seven minutes after I exited my car, I reenter, wishing I had more time to be vertical, wishing I didn‘t have so much farther to go. I wind my way through the cars to the on-ramp, turn the radio to NPR, push play on my CD player, and soon I forget the rest area. There was nothing remarkable about it, really.

2.

I‘ve always been fascinated by restroom appliances.

Perhaps I should explain. All my growing up, my family traveled from

North to South (and back again) once or 159 twice a year. When I was younger we drove from Chicago to Atlanta, about a thirteen hour drive, and then later from Minnesota to Atlanta, which added a nine hour driving day to the trek. Conditioned to endure long hours by finding my own entertainment in small spaces, I looked for any difference, any similarity in my surroundings. I catalogued and compiled.

My favorites are the hand dryers. The simplest of machines, they always include instructions, and what else is one supposed to do for the minute or two the air blows on one‘s wet hands but read? Perhaps deface the machine with one hand while the other dried. Not that I ever did, but I notice it often. The directions initially read:

1. Push button

2. Rub hands under warm air

3. Stops automatically

But they have been modified (by strategic scratched out and scratched in letters):

1. Push butt

2. Rub hands under arm hair

3. Stops automically

I never could figure out that last non-word, but I‘m guessing that its creator(s) thought it had to do with anatomy. Or she couldn‘t bear to leave that last instruction unblemished.

(It was a she, right?) These days, many of the (apparently too verbal) instructions have been replaced with pictorial ones. The simple diagram consists of hands pushing a button and cartoon wavy red lines for air coming out of the vents. Whatever the intent behind making the directions iconographical, they are not immune to the bathroom humorist; in 160 many places verbal directions have been added: ―Push button, receive bacon.‖ While I concede the advantage for the illiterate or for those whose first language isn‘t English, I have a nostalgia for the old set of instructions, and whenever I spy them, I get a warm feeling. Which is probably just dryer heat.

While waiting for my hands to dry, I like to think about how much work has gone into allowing us to perform this necessary bodily function while we‘re away from home, the science of mass hygiene. A small motor was developed, and the optimal temperature pinpointed. The product was marketed (someone does this for a living!) to chain stores and public institutions. (Where is the catalog of hand dryers?) Someone, somewhere, decided the syntax for the directions. We could just let our hands dry in the air, but no, this is not fast enough, not sanitary enough for us. We need to return quickly to our cars feeling like our hands haven‘t touched surfaces thousands of other travelers have touched. And we need to pretend that our movement from place to place doesn‘t do damage—spew emissions out of cars, put soda bottles in landfills, ride on pavement that disrupts deer migrations. The directions on a dryer are often accompanied by environmental justifications lauding the sanitary and green benefits of using a dryer.

Like the partitions and locked doors, we want to press all bodily functions into tidy boxes, bowels, and basins, or distract from their messiness with chrome and porcelain. 161

As much as I observe the uniformity and cleanliness, I see where the dirt peeks through. While I relieve myself (irony noted), I notice the grime around the base of the partition supports, where the mop doesn‘t reach. The hand soap forms a gelatinous stalactite off the end of the dispenser. Graffiti adorns any and all surfaces—not even the mirror is safe. And there is the occasional pit stop—usually off the interstate system— that takes its moniker literally, with pit toilets and only the stall door between you and

nature. Honestly, I‘d rather dig my own

shallow hole in the ground and squat than

sit over one of these fly-infested filth

farms. When I come upon the rest area that

is grimy, I don‘t stop to ponder them at all,

and as soon as I‘m back in the car, I grab the hand sanitizer. It‘s amazing how a rest area‘s cleanliness can affect my mood.

Perhaps because I‘ve had to depend on them so much, I expect a lot from a rest area. Like the dependability of the taste and texture of chain restaurant fast food, rest areas are little spots of comfort, grounding me as I navigate the stresses of travel.

3.

Rest stops fade into memory like the miles of anonymous highway between them.

I recall fleeting moments—vets giving out free coffee on I 80 going east between

Albuquerque and Los Angeles, or stopping somewhere along the Oregon coast trying to find shade to park my overheated Honda. A vague sensory memory remains, the cold— 162 the Styrofoam cup in my hands providing contrast—or the heat radiating off the body of my car. Mostly, the rest stop erases people; get in, do your business (yes, like an over- trained dog), and get out.

I do, however, remember a couple of rest stops, or more accurately, I remember encounters with people that made the stops memorable; the buildings and locations themselves are muddled. One was a fluke reunion. It happened at an interstate stop in lower Georgia or upper Florida, as my family headed back to Michigan from a beach vacation. As my mother and I were washing our hands, and my attention was focused blankly on the sink, I heard my mom say hello and a familiar voice respond. I looked up to see a conversation happening in the mirror, my mother and a coworker exchanging pleasantries and surprise at having run into each other. The coworker‘s daughter was also there, as if she were my doppelganger in the mirror. The confusion of seeing these folk so far out of context was made more awkward by the fact that Mom and Coworker did not get along; I had been privy to several nights of strained complaint about the latest meeting or project that the woman had skewed or turned sour, the political backstabbing she had set in motion. Startled, I followed Mom‘s lead and cloaked myself with a polite face, one of those smiles made by stretching out the corners of one‘s mouth, plus a nod.

Though we recovered with decorum quickly, we had had our guard down. Who expects to be confronted with one‘s own history at a rest stop? Back in the car, it was all we could talk about for a while, the mundanity of the road pierced by the mundanity of back home.

How could they?

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4.

When considering the smallest rest areas—those tiny closets-cum- bathrooms on planes—I feel equal parts fascination and anxiety. Their charm is one of miniature, though the scale isn‘t strictly minute. Like looking at a dollhouse and noting the tiny cabinet doors that actually open, the lid on the toilet that actually goes up, one marvels that all facilities on a plane really work. Then there is the impressive space-saving economy of the tissue holder and toilet paper embedded in the walls, and the mystery of where the blue water goes when you push that button. (I always imagine the urban legend of bluish ice landing in someone‘s back yard.) There is usually a sign that gives hints at how to be a polite, mile-high pee-er: ―As a courtesy to the next passenger, may we suggest that you use your towel to wipe off the wash basin.‖ (At one workplace with a particularly forceful faucet, I contemplated putting a similar sign on the mirror.) And the mirror: why is it there? So that you can check how matted your hair has become and will be until your brush is reunited with you at baggage terminal number six?

Why don‘t they just dispense with these tormentors? Then again, the mirror provides some relief from claustrophobia.

The flight crew holds the bathrooms hostage on planes. When the seatbelt sign is off the flight attendants stand in the aisles, barring the way with beverage cans and snack mix. To use the rest room on a plane, you must brave the admonitions to return to your 164 seat, ignore the insistent ―fasten seatbelt‖ sign. Should you be interrogated, it can be helpful to use the energy of the pressure on your sphincters to add conviction to your voice; be prepared to give a full argument why you are the exception to their rule. Not that I‘ve ever actually had that argument. In fact, I can only remember once when I asked an attendant if I had time to go to the bathroom before landing. ―Well, go quickly,‖ she said in a slightly harried tone. It‘s this sense that I have to have permission to go, like being in a kindergarten classroom, that unnerves me.

What I am most aware of in an airplane restroom is the illuminated sign with a picture of a chair and an arrow pointing at it. That and the ominous domm of the tone that prefaces the pilot‘s instruction to return to your seat, the description of potential turbulence given in a soothing, bed-time voice. When this happens I flash on a scene from a 1985 cold-war release called White Nights, in which the famous ballet star (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov) survives a plane crash in such a bathroom. If memory serves, he has defected to the US in years past, and his plane is forced to land in the

USSR in an attempt to capture and him and make him perform once more in the

Bolshoi. Though it‘s been over ten years since I saw the flick (and I usually don‘t remember these sorts of things much or well), I replay vivid images of Baryshnikov tearing up his American passport and flushing it down the toilet (the Reds manage to retrieve it and push it in his face later) and then 165 being thrashed from side to side in the bathroom as the plane plummets. He‘s knocked unconscious as the lights flicker and that damn domm keeps dinging. Or maybe that‘s my fear projecting onto the movie memory.

The anxiety of timing (―We‘re about a half hour from landing; should I go now even though the seat-belt sign is on?‖) is compounded by the fact that at least six other people are having the same dilemma, they all have to use the same two economy-class toilets, and in the post 9/11 era, one is not supposed to loiter in the aisles. I hate to knock and hurry people along, having been the frazzled recipient of such knocks myself, but I have resorted to it, especially when I was pregnant. It was a small plane, too, one where I knew I‘d have to see whoever was in there again upon deplaning. (I still managed to avoid him.) After about seven minutes, I finally got up the nerve. A man with dark hair and a poker face came out directly. What was he doing in there? I decided to believe that he was feeling ill and waiting to see if he would vomit. As I spread out toilet paper in an impromptu toilet seat cover and lowered my enlarged tummy over the pot, I cursed my small bladder, and I hoped the flight attendant would not knock to summon me back before it was empty.

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5.

By now you‘re probably wondering why I haven‘t included gas stations,

McDonald‘s bathrooms, and other places to take a leak while on the road. I use such places probably more than rest areas, simply because they‘re more numerous and expedient when one has to fill up the car and stomach as well. But for using the toilet, for taking a driving break, the rest area is far superior.

In 1956 Congress passed and President Eisenhower signed legislation that provided for the building and maintenance of the interstate system. Congress also barred all commercial enterprises from rest areas, fearing state monopolies on these services.

There were a couple of exceptions. Some previously existing toll roads or turnpikes that were incorporated into the interstate system had commercial service areas, and those that existed prior to 1960 were allowed to remain. The Oases on Chicago toll roads—those buildings suspended over the highway, accessible from either side—are an example.

Also, in the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982, Congress allowed for vending machines. 167

Aside from the small conveniences of soda and candy bars, rest areas are a refreshing respite from the onslaught of highway commercialism—the billboards for the

Days Inn (―Kids Eat Free!‖), the Love‘s truck stop spreading fluorescent light for a mile around, the signs that try to lure you from your path to see the World‘s Largest Cow (Salem Sue, who resides outside of New

Salem, North Dakota). These stops have their own appeal, but the rest area is more focused in purpose, more pure, if you will. The space exists solely to help the traveler get to where she‘s going, to provide him with a few basic comforts.

The rest area is a democratizing

space (if you can afford a car or bus fare

to put you on the road).You need not pay a

fare. Everyone may rest here. Everyone

may take care of the body—walk about,

have a picnic, use the toilet, splash water

on the face to brace for the hours to come; you can even take a sponge bath if you don‘t mind being a little public about bathing.

Everyone may drink from the fountain. Everyone may take a nap in their respective vehicles.

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6.

My most memorable rest stop began with a bit of bad judgment. One June, on the way back from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, I decided that it would be cheaper to sleep in my car at the rest area than pay for a hotel. Truckers do it all the time; why not me? As if I had anything in common with truckers but the road. I was anxious about my plan since I knew that many rest areas have ―no parking overnight‖ signs. But in the middle of

Arizona, somewhere along I-40, I landed at a truck-filled rest area late at night.

Uncomfortable trying to sleep in the driver‘s seat, I shifted to the passenger side. I climbed over the emergency brake rather than getting out and walking around; I don‘t know why, but it seemed easier at the time. Perhaps I didn‘t want to break the bubble of solitude that was my car. I put the windows down and left the key partially turned so the fans would blow some of the summer night heat away from me, and I fell into an uncomfortable sleep, my neck turned at a wrong angle, my cheek feeling the prickly-yet- soft velour of the seat upholstery.

When I got up to pee about 4 a.m., I was groggy and disoriented by my position on the wrong side of the car. I put the windows up and locked the car for safety, taking only my wallet with me—and left my keys and cell phone inside. At first I wasn‘t even alarmed, thinking, ―Shoot, that‘s not good.‖ In the restroom the reality hit me, and my

―shoot‖ turned to ―shit.‖ I thought about asking someone to help, but there were only a couple of men around (who‘s a trucker now?), and I was too intimidated to approach anyone at that time of night. My one stroke of luck was that my calling card was inside 169 my wallet. I called information, who called a locksmith for me. And then there was nothing to do but wait.

It‘s hard not to feel conspicuous as a 26-year- old woman sitting on a bench at a rest area for longer than five minutes, never mind the hour of night. I was, of course, in comfortable travel garb, which in some contexts might be considered sloppy; how would my loose-fitting tank-top, shorts, and sandals be read in the middle of the night? I wasn‘t exactly frightened—there was enough activity that I wasn‘t alone. But this usually benign space had been rendered uncanny by my stasis, its function

(get in and get out) disrupted by my inability to leave. Surrounded by desert blackness, the lights illuminating the parking lot felt like a reverse black hole, all reality sucked into its halo. Out there was motion, but here were only the silhouettes of trailers next to the boxy curves of cabs, the odd car windshield reflecting the light above, sidewalks that led nowhere.

It began to grow light. ―At least I get to see the sun rise,‖ I thought as I watched gorgeous pinks, oranges, and reds swell with the heat. The light eased away any lingering sense of endangerment, and it also emboldened other travelers to approach me, all middle aged men. Were they all wearing T-shirts smudged with workmen‘s credibility, or is this just an overcast of memory? Two offered to try the lock—to rescue me. I declined saying help was on the way. And it did come. For the price of a hotel room, a locksmith got me 170 back into my car. I went to go pee again, even though I‘d drunk nothing since the last time—good to get on the road with an empty bladder. It was a relief, literally and figuratively, to use the rest stop as a rest stop again.

But when I returned to my car, I found the battery dead. I had left the fans on when I got out at 4 a.m. Now, at about 6:30, I searched the faces of the men and women who walked by my perch on the bench. Once again I found myself at odds with rest area norms; who tries to talk to someone at a rest area? No one returned my gaze, many looked away pointedly. So I began to pace, pretend I was slowly exercising my legs after a long night‘s ride, but with the intention of scoping out cars that seemed likely to have jumper cables. I spied some tools in the back of a Jeep Cherokee and, with a gentle smile on my face, approached the two Hispanic men who got out of it. One had a baseball cap and button-down denim shirt, the other a sports jersey of some sort. I could see a bit of apprehension when I said, ―Hi . . . my battery is dead, and I was wondering . . .‖ But they stopped and met my eyes. Were they more willing to talk to me because they were a minority in this particular rest stop? We weren‘t conspicuous, but a bit on the edge of the social dynamic, I because of my predicament, they because of their race in this

Caucasian-filled spot. Perhaps they were just being polite. I began speaking in English, but switched to a broken Spanish when I wasn‘t getting very far. Despite my not remembering the Spanish for battery or jumper cables, they understood what I needed and graciously offered to help. As the daylight turned from yellow to white, I relaxed knowing the road was finally ahead of me. 171

But the story doesn‘t end there. Later that day, at not one but two rest stops, I saw them again. The first time it felt reassuring, if a bit awkward. The background was still

Arizona desert, as if we hadn‘t gone anywhere or had traveled in a circle. I spotted them as I pulled in and intentionally parked one space over from them—close enough to indicate familiarity, but far enough to create a respectful distance. I got out of my car and we nodded and smiled like neighbors meeting at the property line while mowing the lawn. Now we had to make conversation outside of pragmatic problem solving. Where were they going? Somewhere beyond my final destination of Albuquerque, I don‘t remember where. So many holes in this memory, as if the dotted lines on the highway

were a sieve that strained out bits that

might make this a more coherent narrative.

Further handicapped by my inability to

remember Spanish vocabulary, we quickly

ran out of chit chat and returned to

nodding and smiling.

Later that day, at the second rest area, they were getting out of their car when I got back to mine. They couldn‘t have been following me, right? In fact, I was more worried that they would think I was following them. The idea was ridiculous since we were heading in the same direction. At the same time, seeing them again violated the anonymity of the road and made me uneasy. I had assumed that we would lose each other, that they would disappear with the rest stop. I laughed a bit nervously as I greeted them again, raising my eyebrows in a ―who‘d have thought it?‖ sort of way. Rest areas 172 had become the home where we had outstayed our welcome. We didn‘t speak much this time, just asked, ―Cómo estás,‖ and told each other, ―Buen viaje.‖ We returned to our cars. It was my last stop before home, and I knew now that they would recede in memory instead of advance on the highway. Now they are just another story I tell about the road, faceless as a rest area on the interstate.

173

In Transit

My sleep is interrupted. By what? A stiff neck? A shoulder pinched? No baby cries for my milk. Yet my nights are fragmented: 1:30, 3:30, 6:30. Or: 12:30, 1:30, 2, 3,

4:30, 5:30, and so on. I always check the clock. After ―nesting,‖ as my husband calls it— adjusting the many pillows that now separate us—I usually fall asleep again, but the lack of continuous sleep makes me lethargic. I am fragmented, looking for lost sleep in the day. I yawn, ask my interlocutor to repeat herself. One more time.

They say the sleep deprivation experienced in pregnancy prepares you for what‘s to come, but I don‘t buy it. Why wouldn‘t my baby want and need a well rested care- taker?

My friend Traci, due in six days, says she dreads the night, sleeps sitting up. Jana said her legs would twitch and cramp in the night, and her husband would have to massage them back into sleep. I have not yet been to this part of the country. There is much still to be explored, seventeen weeks left. But all in good time.

Dishes need doing, files need purging (I have this insatiable need—close to a craving—to clean my office), clothes need organizing (I‘ve already outgrown some of my maternity clothes), but I put it all off and wander instead; one can only do so much cleaning in a day. I walk on the country roads close to my house, ostensibly for exercise and sun (another task to be done), but really more to let myself be. My mind needs space for the business of waiting. 174

This reflective posture is undermining many of my good intentions. All actions have a muted urgency: an end is in sight (!), but not for a while yet. I literally navel gaze, watching the skin stretch in a wide O around my belly button. The fences along the road curb my thoughts, and I find myself contemplating the mix of gravel and asphalt beneath me, or rather, letting it be the background for my internal chatter: I can’t believe my belly will get even bigger; my hip hurts; I hope the baby doesn’t have my joint problems. A bird breaks my solipsism, and I look up. The animals in the farm across the street are studying me as I plod along, and I stare back, envying them their ability to stand still.

The snake was still alive in the hawk‘s talons, the familiar dark green curves still taut as it floated through the air. Just like the Mexican flag! I‘ve seen many hawks on my commute, usually soaring over deep valleys, but this hawk was closer to the roof of my car, preparing, I guessed, for landing and breakfast. I whooped with amazement (and threw in a couple of awe-struck profanities), my head craning to follow its flight path while still keeping my car between white lines.

My instinct was to call my husband at that moment and tell him about it, but I suppressed the urge, reasoning that it was an imprudent use of a cell while driving.

Safety, right? There‘s a fetus in the car too. Then I wondered if I should have found the image so thrilling. A parent wouldn‘t enjoy gore, however beautiful. Or swear. No?

My thoughts on pregnancy, birth, and parenthood swing from the beatific to the sacrilegious, often one with the other mixed in. Last Christmas, four weeks pregnant and sitting in a church pew with my parents, I thought, I should be having a Mary moment, 175 but all I felt was nausea. I do have moments of awe, but they are quickly lost in the mundane, or in absurdity. Perhaps if I were younger I wouldn‘t be so suspicious or wary of the sentimental, and I would touch the sacred more often. I‘m older and I think too much. Who am I kidding? When I was younger, I was so cynical I didn‘t even want children, sure they‘d turn out as miserable as I was.

On one hand—

I was a bad baby-sitter—just ask my two younger siblings. I ignored my charges if I wanted to watch TV. I‘d let them manipulate me into giving them brownies before bed.

It wasn‘t so long ago that I told my friends I didn‘t want to get married, that I never wanted to have kids.

I can‘t stand how people coo at babies and puppies in the same way.

I never know what to say to children.

I thought I was carrying twins. The early ultrasound told me otherwise. Now whenever I think that the baby is a girl, I‘m sure I‘m wrong.

On the other hand—

I was a diapering pro by the age of ten, thanks to a brother nine years younger.

When I was twenty-four I pulled over when I saw a second grader get hit by the car in front of me. I rode with her in the ambulance, waited at the hospital for her mother to arrive. 176

When I was twenty-nine I caught myself thinking about how I‘d get a toddler to eat peas.

I stroke my belly like any other pregnant woman you‘ve seen.

So what is instinct then? Do I have enough? Is mothering an innate or acquired taste?

There was a time when I prided myself on my androgynous qualities, relishing the handful of times a stranger mistakenly called me ―sir.‖ I wear more makeup these days, but I still prefer clompy, chunky shoes to heels. I want a girl, a tom-boy, who‘s not afraid to speak. If I have a boy, I‘ll teach him to cook, or my husband will. Nevertheless, I still can‘t fathom having a boy. I can‘t see something with a penis coming out of me. Perhaps this thought indicates that I was never as androgynous as I thought I was. But, conversely, maybe my ability to birth a boy, however strange the possibility, is evidence that I‘m more of both sexes than I ever imagined.

I have breasts now. I had them before too, 34 or 36A, sizes difficult to find. Now I fill out my A cups, and, in fact, they runneth over a bit, though not enough yet to warrant new bras.

My breasts were always my favorite bodily feature—just enough there to be feminine, perky without getting in the way, with nipples the color of clouds heavy with rain at sunset. I almost didn‘t want to get pregnant, I liked them so much. 177

Now they‘re ridiculous. Under my pale skin, veins of bluish lightning streak outwards from the darkened areolas, evidence of milk ducts enlarging, fat accumulating. I don‘t stare at them in the mirror as I used to. If I look at them, I look down as I massage them with olive oil every night, hoping to retain some elasticity in the skin. They grow like two annoying big sisters, and I‘m trying to keep my dignity under their taunts.

I ask my mom for hints, clues, signposts. Did you feel . . . ? Did you have . . . ?

Most often she says, ―Honey, that was 32 years ago.‖ I‘m frustrated. I want the guidebook, the Baedekker. What I haven‘t found in the tens of books I‘ve read. So I‘m laying out breadcrumbs for the next person, for myself, if there is a next time. As a souvenir. A travel log.

I loved poring over my baby book as a child, still do. There is a picture of my mom—her profile as she‘s in labor, just before leaving for the hospital. She has on a hideous, colorful tent of a dress, and she looks to be in mid-laugh. Next to that photo is one of my parents‘ collie, Annie, who is spread out on the bed; the story is that, jealous and sensing that she was not the center of attention, Annie buried herself in their sheets for the first and only time. These details, just as much as my first words or steps, are important to me—the world beyond myself that I entered, the narrative I stepped into.

My mother recorded a birth story for me, written on lined yellow notebook paper, with approximate times and details noted. ―2:00 [am] We decided to eat something—I my jello and he a bowl of cereal.‖ Mom explained, when I asked about it, that she‘d been 178 advised in Lamaze classes to prepare easily digested food for labor. She was excited finally to eat the cubes she‘d stored in the fridge all week, as if it were a fancy treat she‘d been saving for an indulgence. This sort of story thrills me, the accoutrement to my birth.

We‘ve begun accumulating things. Baby things. Onesies, a wind-up swing, a bouncer, all found on the cheap at garage sales. I find myself looking at people‘s strollers like they were new cars. I have competing desires for simplicity, a not-so-much approach, and the deluxe luxury models, the gadgets. We found toddler-size Nike running shoes for a dollar. Is this OK? I ask myself. Am I going to grow an eight-year-old who looks for brand-names, or a fifteen-year-old budding anarchist who will refuse to wear Nikes, even bought second hand? Women tell me it‘s not up to me, that the kid will have its own personality. Tell that to the Pottery Barn Kids people.

I took a walk yesterday and passed my neighbors‘ old barn, its graying and weathered wood, the chickens in their side yard. Next I passed (in this order) dogs, cats, donkeys, horses, and some cow-like things with shaggy fur and long horns—no idea what they are or what they are for. Who, these days, gets to teach animal sounds to her toddler by listening to the chorus across the street? (And what does the shaggy cow-thing say?) It beats the See-‗n-Say I had when I was little. I noted feeling vaguely superior to city people. I imagined long nature walks, pointing out the tiny fish in the creek, picking a wild flower. 179

But we might have to move. I‘ll have to find a job within a year of giving birth.

Even if the job is close, we‘ll outgrow our house very soon; the crib can‘t stay in our bedroom forever.

I have always dreamed of the perfect job, the perfect schedule, the perfect space, but this practice seems riskier when it involves a dependent. Is it wrong to fantasize about the idyllic? Will reality only disappoint? Or does my imagining perfection make it more, if not absolutely, possible?

I know this is ridiculous sounding. I can hear the parents groan. Isn‘t it difficult to read the words of someone who doesn‘t know what she‘s in for?

What is the value in writing about something when you‘re in the middle of it?

Shouldn‘t I wait until birth, when I have distance, perspective? Do my observations take on the tedium of diary entries? Or is there value in the immediate? I want to argue for the process, the transitional, the provisional. Perhaps I could describe my pregnant state as a perpetual essay, the body testing new limits. No, my body isn‘t testing; it seems to know what it‘s doing, but my mind is always catching up, guessing its whys and hows.

Women tell me (and who are the women? new friends with babies and toddlers, grandmothers at the grocery store, well meaning colleagues—they have suddenly materialized everywhere) that the waiting of the last trimester is interminable, especially those last weeks, especially in summer, when I‘m due. I suppose that I can‘t argue with it since I haven‘t experienced it, and it makes sense insofar as you‘re waiting for the 180 physical stresses and discomforts to be relieved. There has to be a coming conclusion in mind to get through it. But it seems to me that the last weeks of pregnancy would be not about waiting so much as adapting to constant change.

My adult life has been a process of becoming more and more comfortable with stability, desiring it, whereas I used to want the ability to instantly detach and move on. I will never again travel around the southwest for six weeks without a home besides my car—and this is fine. Children are, culturally, a stability benchmark; you‘re not supposed to have them unless you‘re economically sound and in a position to care for them emotionally. Nonetheless, many couples are foisted into parenthood before they are ready, and they evolve into their roles gracefully.

Since we planned this pregnancy, I feel as though I should have arrived at some ascertainable state of maturity, that I should have a badge on a sash attesting to my readiness to change diapers at 3 a.m. I will never feel as though I am completely ready.

My feeling of parental vertigo is not going to vanish when my baby arrives. I suspect my wobbliness will only increase; my child will pass through one phase of rapid transition after another all the way through college, and if my own experience is representative, through his or her mid-twenties. I‘ve just invited chaos to come live with me, only two years after I acquired a mortgage.

What the hell was I thinking?

I have this thought a lot.

So am I a bona fide parent now?

181

My friend Dewi‘s children often call her and her husband Jon by their first names.

Other mothers express shock to her when they hear the parents‘ given names come out of her kids‘ mouths. But it doesn‘t bother her. I think it sounds cute.

When I told my mother this she said, ―There‘s only a couple of people in the world who can call you Mom.‖

When I told my husband what my mom said, he said, ―I like the sound of Dad.‖

When I read birth books and they mention the mother, I forget that it is I, instead picturing my own mother beside me. When my husband commented that this year I‘ll have my first Mother‘s Day (the fetus 25 weeks in utero), it took me a minute to accede.

I‘m not sure if I‘m ready for the label. Perhaps I‘ll feel differently on my birthing day, but so far, I can‘t imagine having any other names.

Anxiety is a seller‘s market. All marketing is based on inculcating fear (aaah! yellow teeth!), but advertising directed at parents needs only to cultivate what‘s already there, whether it‘s feeding the baby nutritious and gas-reducing formula or making sure the child can read by age three.

Pregnancy and the birthing process have been co-opted by this same mentality.

When my mother had her children, she was required to take a gamut of blood and urine tests her first visit, and that was about it. Nowadays they check your urine at each visit, a good way to screen for items such as protein, the presence of which can indicate problems with the urinary tract or kidneys. I find it difficult to tell, however, the line between medical necessity and excess. At my second visit to my OB-GYN, she gave me 182 literature on a chromosomal screening test, originally recommended for women over 35, but now increasingly pushed for all women, whether they have reason to believe their child might have abnormalities or not. The AFP blood screening (alpha-fetoprotein—I have no idea what it means) is much more accurate and noninvasive than procedures such as amniocentesis, where a sampling of the amniotic fluid is taken. Still, the blood screen has an accuracy rate of 90%, meaning that I have a one in 10 chance of getting a false positive—or negative. Furthermore, the test only indicates a likelihood of abnormalities; amniocentesis testing is required to unearth actual problems. And what would I do if there were problems? The literature and doctors summed it up this way: I would want to be alerted to potential physical defects that accompany some chromosomal abnormalities, and I would want to be prepared emotionally. No one mentioned to me the possibility that women might terminate their pregnancies, nor did they mention the anxiety I would have to bear if something were to come up on the test.

The $900 AFP screen was not covered by my insurance, and I declined it, but not without a struggle—many conversations with my husband and our more sympathetic nurse midwife. When the medical establishment brandishes the baby‘s health and the label of ―good parent,‖ you feel held captive in a way that TV ads for deodorant will never effect.

I am fighting for a peaceful emotional space to birth my child. I fear I will pass on my fear to my baby, that it will absorb my trepidation through the placenta. I don‘t want to parent out of fear, don‘t want to instill unnecessary anxiety in my child, and this begins with its birth. I‘ve chosen to birth at home because I believe that childbirth is a normal, 183 natural process. And for someone as healthy as I am, the risks of medical emergency are miniscule and can be anticipated with vigilant prenatal care, which my midwife provides.

The responsibility weighs on me, and yes, ironically, frightens me. Nevertheless, I fear more what will happen if I passively accept the anxiety doctors and merchants visit on me.

Pregnancy has its pitfalls, and the concept of Being a Mother is still vague and scary, but right now I‘ve got it easy. I can take the baby with me anywhere: to class, to the opera, to Quaker meeting on Sundays, where I sit in silence for an hour. At the back of the concentric circles we sit in, my friend Molly stands with her six-month-old wrapped around her in a sling, gently bouncing and swaying to keep her asleep. Her daughter‘s cry breaks the silence after half an hour, and people look up from their meditations and smile. Molly retreats to the nursery as she becomes more vocal. My baby‘s very quiet. Sometimes a particularly violent kick or turn will make me emote

(―Ooof‖), but that‘s about the extent of its sound. When I sit still for a while (in Quaker meeting, before I go to bed), it moves more. I play with the baby, rubbing where I felt the quick pressure. Often it shoves back. Poke poke, press. Poke, press. Our silent conversation carries on while I teach my students, while I chat in the halls. Sometimes it distracts me. I ask my interlocutor to repeat herself. One more time.

So far the kicks aren‘t painful or too distracting, though I did have to ask the baby to settle down once while I was eating. It kicks my bladder quite often these days. Such an odd sensation, to feel the urge to pee for a split second, followed by relief. If my 184 bladder feels like it‘s getting a beating, I ask the baby to kick a bit higher up my belly, or

I rub just under my bellybutton, trying to redirect its aim.

I‘ve felt the movement for a good eight weeks now, and I‘ve been able to elicit kicks back for about half of that, but only once have we actually met, the baby‘s limb pushing out directly where I‘m pressing in. Unlike the first movements, which were faint and fleeting (think someone blowing bubbles in your abdomen), this touch was ecstatic. I felt a charge run from my fingers to my spine and through the rest of me. And then I went back to listening to the poetry reading, the conversation of bodies fading into the background again.

When do our bodies ever become more, better, than they are? My body grows another human being and a disposable organ (the placenta) in just nine months—without even trying. My body morphs itself, already softening bones and ligaments. My uterus will practice labor with Braxton Hicks contractions for weeks before birth. Then, from its tightly closed position, my cervix will open so that I can pass a head roughly 10 centimeters in diameter. My vagina, a space that‘s previously fit not more than a penis, will accommodate an entire person. I keep rehearsing this in my mind because it‘s still so difficult to believe. My body‘s intention was latent all this time. My body was made to do this.

185

INWARD/OUTWARD

186

Feet

When I was in middle school, I attended a modern dance concert at the local college. The show featured a visiting artist, who performed one dance while reciting text a capella. An Asian woman, she spoke about her unbound feet, how her elder family members would tease her about her particularly large ones. Mid-puberty, I had lost a sense of being at home in my body, and I was awed as she threw hers forcefully into movement. She used the entire stage, running in a zig-zag, flinging her slender arms back and out in wide arcs. I can almost hear her grunting in exertion in my memory, but that,

I‘m sure, is a fabrication. But I do remember her feet slapping intentionally on the stage, a high kick into the air so all the audience could see the offending part. I forget what she said except that it ended (rhyming with a previous mention of feet): ―and sweat in heat.‖ I liked this finale, resolved in the funkiness of sweat—the assertion of the beauty in this banality, though I wouldn‘t have articulated it that way then.

I only know where my baby‘s feet are by their movement in my uterus. According to my midwife‘s palpations, the fetus is generally in the same position: its head down and approaching my pelvis, its back on my right side with its rear tucked under my right ribs, and its legs looped under my left ribs. The kicks come on the left side, especially when

I‘m lying on it, as if it feels the resistance of the bed and pushes against it. When I sit, I feel a strong pulse outward and see my belly jump. Occasionally I press against the foot, massage it, and imagine I can feel toes.

[line space] 187

My husband and I both have pretty feet—fine arches, well spaced toes, shapely and smooth toenails. We brag in advance how beautiful our baby‘s feet will be. As she wiggles inside me, I think: we will have to give her some reason other than her feet to dance defiantly. Perhaps she won‘t need a reason. She is already strong, already keeps me awake at night, kicking, kicking.

188 Side Effects I was in my right mind; I was pretty sure. But the light was all wrong—too bright reflecting off the cars as they passed. The setting sun, perpetually in front of our westbound car, spun into diamond patterns, rays warped in the windshield with every bump and curve. I dug out my barely-used prescription sunglasses from the bottom of my purse. Instead of working on some writing as I had planned to do on our eight hour drive from Ohio to Chicago, I gripped the handle on my right and my husband’s leg on my left, as if physical rigid- ity could settle the see-saw of my brain. My ears rang continuously with a faint, high pitch, and every so often it felt like my brain abruptly moved without me, as if it were sloshing freely around in the confines of my skull. My head pulsed mildly along with the waves of queasi- ness, my body’s protestation for depriving it of the drug I had taken for the past year. I had weaned myself from it slowly over two months with manageable symptoms, but now that I had finally quit, my body felt alien and What happens when I stop ill. using EFFEXOR XR? After several stops for fresh air and solid ground, we made it to the west Chicago suburbs, but Symptoms are known to the wooziness continued through most of Thanksgiving. occur when people stop The day of the celebration, I tried to concentrate on the  “Frequently Asked Questions about Effexor XR,” Effexor, conversation, laughter ringing on all sides of me, but Wyeth, 11 March 2007 . 189 the dizziness had unmoored me from people as well as using EFFEXOR XR, from the floor. No one else could feel the walls move, especially when they

I was certain, and this made me despondent. Since the suddenly stop therapy. drug leaving my body had stabilized my mood, the feeling of disconnectedness was enhanced by emotional When people suddenly effects of withdrawal. I retreated to the guest bedroom, stop using EFFEXOR XR, lay down in my good clothes, and put a T-shirt over my they can get symptoms head, which also served as a tissue for my wet face. from stopping the medicine

I was feeling similar to how I had felt before too fast. Some of these starting to take Effexor (Venlafaxine Hydrochloride). symptoms include: The familiar pattern of daily crying, a sense of futil- ity, and a fog of anxiety led me to reach for the wobbly • Agitation handle of medicine to steady myself. My apprehen- • Anxiety sion was heightened when I first began taking the drug, • Confusion because I knew from experience with other anti-depres- • Diarrhea sants that the first months would be a tour of bodily • Dizziness or vertigo missteps and tectonic shifts. I would become a visitor in • Dry mouth my own body, waiting for the inevitable yet erratic side • Fasciculation (muscle effects the drug would bring. In an effort to provide a twitching) record of the new normal, I made this list after my first • Headaches medicated twenty-four hours: • Hypomania

• mild nausea • Impaired coordination

• brief headache • Insomnia (trouble

• sensitivity to touch sleeping)

• dry mouth • Loss of appetite

• depressed appetite • Nausea 190

• crave salt/sweet, but not food: cease eating • Nervousness

quickly • Nightmares

• rapid heartbeat • Seizures

• the sense that things are perfect/lack of second • Sensory disturbances

guessing: I look great, I took that curve perfectly (including electric shock

• chatty sensations)

• lack of feeling of futility • Somnolence (sleepiness)

• lack of feeling of forboding/doom/imminent • Sweating

death/imminent catastrophe • Tinnitus

• fear doesn’t sink into my stomach, that is, I will • Tiredness

respond to stress with a rush of adrenaline, but • Tremor

then it will sink back to my shoulders, dissipate, • Unpleasant mood

not turn into feelings of dread (acid stomach, • Vomiting tight muscles), and linger • did not cry today

• heightened muscular performance in workout, --- feeling strong, muscles less tired • thought I was not feeling as much pain, but knees sore this evening • trouble focusing (vision) I did not know which were the side effects and which were the intended effects, which would stay and which would abate, so I wrote them all down. Two days later, I reported: • insomnia • dry mouth 191 • constipation • blurred vision without glasses (more than nor- mal) • dizziness • fast heartbeat occasionally, but not too far from normal • fear that this isn’t going to last, that I’m going to crash even harder

• fear that I will kill myself even though I don’t want to • fear that I’m killing myself with the drug itself • slight lower back pain, thought it might be kid- neys It’s interesting to me that I included specific thoughts in my list. They were, of course, direct results of the drug, but they could not have been anticipated by the drug’s makers. While my overall mood was supposed to improve (direct effect), specific thoughts seem at first Pregnancy Category X: more appropriately categorized as side effects—how Studies or reports in my particular brain chemistry made sense of the chang- humans or animals show

es I inflicted on my body with the drug. But on further that mothers using the

reflection, that distinction doesn’t make sense, because medicine during pregnancy

all the changes are made particular in my body. All ef- may have babies with

fects, side or not, are personal.  “Pregnancy and Medicines,” womenshealth.gov, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, April 2007, 6 Feb. 2008 . 192

it has adversely affected the fetuses of animals. Preg- problems related to the

nant women should take the drug only if the potential medicine. There are no

benefits outweigh the risks, which are largely unknown situations where the

since no trials have been performed on pregnant wom- medicine can help the

en. I might have considered remaining on Effexor while mother or baby enough to

pregnant, but one of the side effects it caused was se- make the risk of problems

vere insomnia, and in order to sleep I took another drug, worth it. These medicines

lorazepam, that was pregnancy category D. This group should never be used by

of drugs has demonstrated risks to fetuses of humans, pregnant women. but the drugs’ classifiers cite benefits that might still

outweigh the negative consequences of taking them. --- My doctors advised against taking my sleeping aide

while pregnant. So it was lorazepam I had to quit before Lorazepam Oral Uses

conceiving, and that meant stopping the cause of the This medication is used to

insomnia, Effexor. treat anxiety. Lorazepam

How cruel, I thought, that I should have to suf- belongs to a class of drugs

fer nausea before I began my pregnancy. Fortunately, known as benzodiazepines the worst of the withdrawal symptoms lessened within which act on the brain and a week, unlike the morning sickness, which lasted for nerves (central nervous almost three months. The many physical reactions to system) to produce a pregnancy are called “symptoms”—the nausea, gas, calming effect. This drug constipation, indigestion, varicose veins, stretch marks, works by enhancing the insomnia, forgetfulness, sore breasts, etc.—but I think effects of a certain natural they might more properly be termed side effects. Like chemical in the body drugs, pregnancy produces unpredictable responses  Drugs and Treatments - Lorazepam Oral, Web MD, in the body, even from pregnancy to pregnancy in the Web MD, LLC,11 March 2007 . 193

same woman. (GABA). What is a side effect? The unintended conse-

quence of an intended action? Can it be positive as well OTHER USES: If directed

as negative? The connotations of the phrase are usually by your doctor, this drug

negative, conjuring up fast-talking announcers speeding may also be used to reduce

through alarming lists of symptoms at the end of drug the symptoms of alcohol

commercials. What to call my increased second trimes- withdrawal, to prevent

ter libido then? Fringe benefit? nausea and vomiting due

The side effects of pregnancy, unlike those of to chemotherapy, and for

drugs such as Effexor, are experienced by a wide por- sleeping trouble (insomnia). tion of the population. Commiserating with others who

have had pregnancies helped me to bear effects such --- as the fog of forgetfulness. I locked my keys in my of- fice three times this week, I would say, and they would respond, I didn’t brush my teeth this morning, and, I found my soggy dinner in the microwave an hour later.

At my particular workplace, however, those with whom What You May Be Feeling

I could commiserate were few and far between. I was [The Second Month]

usually the only pregnant person in any given room, set [. . .]

apart by the physical condition of carrying an additional Physically

life, and it left me feeling strangely alone in the compa- • Fatigue and sleepiness

ny of others. When people politely inquired how I was • A need to urinate

feeling, I responded honestly; I’m exhausted. I’m really frequently

tired myself, was often the response; you don’t need to • Nausea, with our without be pregnant to feel that, they laughed. I knew their re-  Murkoff, Heidi, et al. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, sponses were sympathetic, not intended to belittle, but I New York: Workman, 2002, 134–135. 194 felt more isolated by their remarks, mostly because they vomiting and/or excessive indicated my inability to articulate my condition. This salivation was especially true during my first trimester, when I • Constipation was too tired to explain. I could not convey in the space • Heartburn, indigestion, of chit chat the profoundness of my fatigue—the im- flatulence, bloating perative of the nap, the refusal of my body to go, to do, • Food aversions and without 10 to 12 hours of sleep, the frustration at having cravings only 10 really functional hours in a day to accomplish • Breast change: fullness, what usually takes me 16. When I woke, I felt as if I heaviness, tenderness, had just finished 30 minutes on a treadmill, my muscles tingling; darkening of the achy. Mornings at 6:30, I would calculate how much areola (the pigmented longer I could lie in bed and still have time to suppress area around the the nausea before teaching at 9 a.m. Weeknights settling nipple); sweat glands into bed I would tell my husband, “I don’t know how in the areola become

I’m going to do tomorrow.” At times I felt real panic at prominent, like large the prospect of not having a bed in proximity, my eyes goose bumps; a network and body losing the fight against gravity. The urge to of bluish lines appear sleep was a heaviness that began in my head, starting under the skin and blood in the back of my nose—a yawn before a yawn—and supply to the breasts creeping through my eye sockets to rest in my brain, increases blurring my consciousness. Even here on the page I • Increased or slight sense I’m not doing the sensations justice, how it all whitish vaginal discharge made me irritable (side effect of a side effect?), and (leukorrhea) how my peevishness perpetuated a cycle of separation. • Occasional headaches

(similar to the headaches

Near the beginning of my third trimester, on a in women taking birth 195

trip from Columbus, Ohio back to the hamlet where control pills)

I live, my husband and I stopped at a gas station so I • Occasional faintness or

could use the restroom. As I entered, I saw a man enter dizziness

the only bathroom with his young daughter; I guessed • Tightness of clothing

she was about three years old. I began thinking about around waist and breasts;

how I would have to travel with a child in tow, the abdomen may appear

many new variables of feeding, caring for a little one enlarged, probably due

while in the car and on the plane, diapering and potty- to bowel distention rather ing. (Yes, I just used potty as a gerund—can I blame than uterine growth language slippage on child-bearing?) Father and daugh-

ter were in there for five, then six, seven, eight minutes. Emotionally

Shifting from one foot to the other, trying to ignore the • Instability comparable to

noise from the slushy machine, I tried to sympathize premenstrual syndrome

with the man and to give him and his wee one the ben- (but probably more

efit of the doubt, but the fetus sitting on my bladder was pronounced), which may

making it increasingly difficult. include irritability, mood

Pregnancy turns the question, “Do I need to go swings, irrationality,

to the bathroom?” into a statement, because the answer weepiness

is always, “Yes.” There is no negotiation. The bathroom • Misgivings, fear, joy,

must always be no more than ten minutes away, and I elation—any or all of

had used up my ten on the road. The ache in my lower these abdomen had turned into pinching pressure, and all my

perineal muscles were engaged in an effort to forestall --- the flood.

A middle aged man in a T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes got behind me in line. After a couple of 196 minutes he said, “Guess you’re doing this a lot, huh.” Referring to, I guessed, going to the bathroom. Or did he mean standing in line? I was floored by his com- ment. When else would a man, when would anyone address me about my peeing (or waiting to pee) habits while queueing for a toilet? Or hold any kind of conver- sation for that matter? Not knowing what else to say, I laughed it off: “Yep, it’s getting to be about that time,” though I’d been urinating more frequently since about week six. In pregnancy books, authors tell you with cha- grin that there’s not much you can do about strangers touching your belly—how a pregnant body somehow destroys all sense of appropriate personal space, and that you just have to endure it. Call it a social side ef- fect to a physical state. But they don’t say much about the conversation that a pregnant body invites. I didn’t have too many belly gropers—I must give off a “don’t touch” vibe—but comments such as this one in the restroom line confounded me. My protruding abdomen became an open invitation. While I felt invisible and isolated during the first half of my pregnancy, the sec- ond half I felt obvious and public in a way with which I was not altogether comfortable.

The attention wasn’t simply weird; the things people said to me were at turns benign, annoying, 197 ghastly, and enlightening. I received a lot if information about the ages of strangers’ grandchildren and the due dates of their nieces. An elderly man swimming in the lane next to me cautioned me not to exercise too hard, and that he hoped I would have a boy. What do you say to such comments? Thank you? Lots of folks demanded to know, “This your first?” The lack of a toddler on my person might have tipped them off, but I thought that,

with my prematurely graying hair, they might have thought otherwise. I wondered, did I just look naive?

My coworker told me about her sister’s epi- dural gone awry, how spinal fluid was now leaking Doulas. “Doula” is a Greek and causing persistent headaches, and it seemed like work that means “woman’s everyone had a frightening birth story they had to tell helper.” Doulas are women me. This despite a button I wore on my purse that said, who are trained to provide

“Only happy birth stories, please; my baby is listen- continuous support of ing!” created by a wise woman who had experienced women in labor. Some this onslaught of tales—the breech births, forceps, and doulas also help out after third degree perineal tears. Well, only so wise, because the baby is born. During folks would comment on the button and exclaim, “Oh, I labor and delivery the know! I had an emergency cesarean myself . . .” doula guides the mother in

Occasionally I would get a tidbit of precious positioning, movements, knowledge. An elderly woman told me that when she and other activities that was nursing she lived near railroad tracks, and when- can reduce discomfort and ever she hears a train whistle, she still has the sensation  Spock, Benjamin and Robert Needman, Dr Spock’s of letting down, though her milk is fifty years gone. Baby and Child Care, 8th Ed, 2004, 24–25. 198

Another woman told me her sister could spray her milk provides back rubs and across the room. (Come to think of it, most of these other comforting physical factoids revolved around breastfeeding.) While these contact. Perhaps most comments weren’t predictive of my experience, they importantly, a doula who communicated something more essential: everything— has been through many absolutely everything—is unpredictable when it comes deliveries is often able to to gestation, birth, and motherhood. reassure a laboring woman

when things are really okay,

About 5 the morning I went into labor, I lost even though the woman what is clinically (and unceremoniously) called my may be feeling panicky or mucous plug, a seal that covers the cervix until the baby overwhelmed. is ready to be born. I had gotten out of bed to get a glass of water. Being in the heat of summer, I had taken to --- sleeping in a roomy shift sans underwear. As I crossed the Pergo floor in our kitchen, I felt a warm trickle run quickly down the inside of my thigh, to my foot, leav- ing a cold trail in its wake, and I heard a soft splat on the floor. (I wish I could say that a side effect of preg- nancy is that I feel more comfortable talking about the banalities of the body, similar to how travelers in de- veloping countries converse freely about the gamut of intestinal diseases they’ve acquired. But the truth is that I’ve always been one to go for the cringe; pregnancy just gave me that much more to talk about.) The snot- like ball, a little smaller than a half-dollar, was tinged with blood, another sign of labor’s imminence. Loss of 199 the mucous plug means the cervix is ripening (thinning in preparation for birth) but not necessarily ripened; my midwife had told me when I called her later that morning that it could still be weeks before I gave birth. It was nine days before my due date, but I suspected it would be sooner rather than later. A couple of hours later, I took my car into the shop to have the brakes done, and as my husband drove me back to our house in his car, we passed two cyclists whom we knew. The women belonged to the Quaker meeting we had begun attending towards the end of my first trimester. We had started going to meeting not en- tirely out of a sense of needing to bring our child up in When you find a religious community, but because of my longing to be yourself feeling alone, take around women who would talk to me about their preg- heart—there are kindred nancies, births, breastfeeding experiences, and children. spirits out there. Don’t even

When I did find these women, the mothers, I also found think about staying home

I could hardly get a word in edgewise. And I wondered, with the curtains drawn, or is it a simple camaraderie between women that made you will soon find yourself them open up to me, or did they, like me, feel that they going completely insane, or couldn’t articulate what their bodies were going through worse, inviting those nice at the time? Do they only now have words for the isola- Jehovah’s Witnesses in for tion they once felt? tea.

The two bikers were mothers. Pat, in middle So get out already. age and near retirement, told me about breastfeeding Go to the park, go to your  Gore, Ariel, The Hip a baby in an era when it was not encouraged. A nurse Mama Survival Guide, New York: Hyperion, 1998, 124. 200 literally yelled in horror as she put her newborn to her local cafe, find a La Leche breast. Pat was going to live in Africa with her husband League meeting in your and new baby six weeks later, and was determined not area, go to your local to bother with formula and sterilized water while she senior center and adopt a was there, and she didn’t. Meg, the other biker, was in grandparent if you don’t her late sixties and still long-distance trekking across have enough cool family country on her bike with her daughter. Meg’s delivery members around, sign nurse tried to prevent her from breastfeeding as well. up for a class, check the

“You can’t because of the drugs in your system,” the “Bulletin Board” section in nurse explained. Meg told her she hadn’t had any drugs your community newspaper during labor, and could she have her baby please. They for support groups, call hadn’t even known my intention to breastfeed when one of the national support they told me their tales (though they had probably made group referral centers listed an educated guess about my choice). These were just a in the back of this book, couple of the anecdotes I gleaned. I ate up these stories advertise about starting a more hungrily than the eggs I had for breakfast every new group, subscribe to on- day. line and print zines that are

We live about twelve miles from the nearest still small enough to feel like town on an old highway, so seeing bikers we know is a a family: Welfare Mother’s rare occurrence. We stopped along the road to say hello Voice, Biracial Child, and found they were traveling another fifteen miles to SingleMOTHER, Hip Mama, the town on the other side of our house, so I invited Sage Woman, HUES, Bust . them over for a coffee pit stop. My husband left for . . whatever! work, and there were just we ladies and our coffee. I talked a little about what it was like to be so close to --- birth, though I didn’t mention the early morning’s de- 201 velopments. “It blows my mind that it could be tomor- row or in three weeks,” I told them, though I had a feel- ing I was lying about the latter estimate. They did most of the talking, however—about trips they were taking soon, about keeping weight off, about coffee vesus tea. All the while, I noted that the “practice” contractions I’d been having for weeks were feeling stronger.

I suppose I didn’t tell them because, like many 261 If we take seriously women, I didn’t want to alert them to labor prematurely. the nurture of our children

This invites questions and phone calls about how far in the worshiping group, we along you are, which can be aggravating if the baby must start by re-appraising decides to sit on the matter while you feel all the dis- the whole life of the group. comforts of the end of pregnancy. I was fairly certain What kind of communication they were familiar with a mucous plug, but didn’t know exists between us all? Do if information about mine would be too intimate. (See we know one another as how a piece of paper makes me braver? Or rather, how people sharing joys and

I’m a coward in real life? It’s one thing to imagine sorrows? your reader cringing and another to see it in person.) Do we have enough

But mostly, I didn’t feel the need to tell them about my confidence in each other labor pangs. I had passed feeling isolated by my preg- to know that our problems nancy and all its physical effects and effects of effects. as well as our convictions

At the cusp of my rite of passage, I felt I had a thrilling and uncertainties can be secret, one I knew would not remain so for long. shared with understanding?

 Extracts from writings on Concerns, Leadings, My friend Molly, who attends Quaker meeting Testimonies, Faith and Practice, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious and who is also a new mother, shared the above anec- Society of Friends, Adopted 1952, Revised 2002. 202

dote, along with the joyful particulars of sex, weight How is the child and the

and height, and ecstasy of the parents, with the Quakers stranger received among

at the next meeting. Even though I couldn’t tell them us? [. . .] Are we across

myself, I was pleased for them to know that this com- all the ages a community

munity we were becoming a part of had touched us learning together? Do

so close to the birth in the form of my biking visitors. we consciously look for

But now that you, the reader, have read the same story, experiences which can

where does that leave us? Why am I telling you? be shared by the whole

I write foremost for the pleasure of writing and community?

to make sense of myself. I cannot live without writ- -Peggy McGeoghegan, ing because I think through writing; If I didn’t write, 1976 I’d be more of a muddle than I already am, or, at least,

I’m more aware of my disarray this way. The reader’s --- reaction, unpredictable and removed from the time of writing, could be thought of as a side effect. Certainly I desire for my writing to elicit some reaction. I write with the hope of connection in mind. But it’s not as simple as that. I push the reader away too. Sometimes I am the stranger who must tell you about my emergency

C-section. (Metaphorically speaking, I mean. I birthed To write is to set the traditional way.) Perhaps I’ll end up in your essay out, rejecting the language some day, as that woman did in mine, as an example of of the tribe, enrooting unwelcome transgression, the unwanted confession. I, oneself elsewhere. Hence the writer, am the secret bearer, and you my priest. Or, it is necessary for the writer

I’m the one on the couch and you play Freud. Or, I am to consent to become a the willing object of the voyeur, dressing in the window stranger, to forget what he 203 for the reader. But these metaphors bore me, and this knows, or thinks he knows, essay is more than dressing up or down. to run the risk of losing his

Perhaps I risk pushing the reader away in order friends, to not be afraid to to pull her in, hope that he will hold on to the thin lose his audience just when shred of recognition until it becomes connective tis- he begins to have one. sue, the ligament that holds writer and reader together.

And where are you? Are you in the space between the --- columns, in a thought between footnotes? Or can you place yourself in the text itself? If I allow the page to splinter, will the amalgamation of fragments add up to more than myself, something that includes you as well?

Think of all the side effects. I write in order to breathe,

to enlarge my space, to

meet brothers and sisters,

to practice a new kind of

freedom.

 Sulivan, Jean, Morning Light: The Spiritual Journal of Jean Sulivan, Trans. Joseph Cunneen and Patrick Gormally, New York: Paulist Press, 1988, 8.  Ibid, 27. 204

Betrayal, Betrothal

I didn‘t believe the newscasters when they said Atlanta was in a drought, because for about a month and a half after I moved there from Minnesota, summer thunderstorms piled up in dark clouds almost every afternoon. After the rain and thunder let loose, everything was drenched, still hot, with the sweet damp smell of boxwood and ozone. I spent the weeks before beginning the eighth grade watching the weather and getting to know a neighbor girl down the street. Maryann was my age but seemed years older, perhaps because she had an older brother whose wit she could draw upon (I was the oldest child), maybe due to surviving a bout of cancer a couple of years before. But I‘m getting ahead of myself. She was a bit taller than I was (and I was already my full 5 feet 8 inches), had beautiful long chestnut hair, clear, tanned skin, and she carried herself well, as if she didn‘t give a second thought to posture. I admired her, quickly idolized her, really. We were of the same opinion on crucial matters such as boys and makeup. A boyfriend would be nice, but not necessary; we weren‘t preoccupied about them (though enough so that we discussed them). Makeup, we agreed, looked ―stupid‖ and ―fake.‖ To wear our faces au natural was inherently superior, because we needed no

―improvement.‖ The stance was inherently subversive, almost rebellious considering that most girls our age were already caking on foundation and darkening their eyes with globby mascara. I did not know, however, how countercultural our position was until I started school in Atlanta and met the rest of my Southern peers.

For this brief summer period we hung out. Her family invited me to their cabin on a lake not far away. The older son drove, and whether he was inattentive or sleepy or 205 erratic I‘ll never know, but he had a habit of drifting slowly out of the center of the lane and jerking the old Volvo back just before it strayed over the lines. This made my perch in the back (leather) seat between two tall family members difficult to maintain; I put a hand on the back of each front seat and braced as I was tossed back and forth. (Why does this stick out so much in my memory? I remember not wanting to touch the others in the car since I didn‘t know them that well. That, and the feeling that we might crash made the journey memorable I guess.) We arrived late in the evening, and Maryann and I put on our suits to swim right away. The moon reflected off the slick, Georgia clay, and even in the dim light I could see that the waterline was down from the lake‘s normal level. The water was bath-warm, and we floated in it while drowning in the stars above, all the while chatting and splashing as teenagers do. I‘m normally squeamish about lakes and ponds, but something about the warm temperature and Maryann‘s presence made me not mind the mud between my toes.

A week or so later I was over at their house during a stronger-than-usual squall, trying to talk over the thunder, when we heard Maryann‘s mother yell from the kitchen.

We ran down there to see her staring into the backyard. One of their towering old pine trees had fallen, its root system weakened and the soil above it brittle from the drought, toppled by the severe winds. After the storm abated, we stepped into the weird, wet sunlight and walked around the crash site. I‘m not a very good judge of distance, especially when it comes to memory, but I remember feeling dwarfed. The roots, now exposing fresh red dirt in clumps and hairy twists, extended in an oval above my head.

How could this mammoth structure be unmoored and horizontal? It didn‘t seem possible. 206

Maryann‘s mom and brother discussed what to do with the tree (firewood?), the damage to the fence, and what would have happened if the tree had fallen towards the house. I felt a sense of giddy uneasiness at the newness of it. Late that night and over the next few days, this sense mingled with my anxiety of starting a new school and solidified into constant dread. Whole trees could be displaced. What was I?

I‘d been given a choice of high schools, eighth grade being included in that block.

The public school, several blocks from Emory University, was a good one, but huge, with a couple of thousand students. Or my grandparents would pay my tuition at a private school, Dekalb Christian Academy, where I would be in a class of fewer than 60. Coming from a mid-size school in Minnesota, overwhelmed by the enormity of the public school,

I chose the Academy. Maryann went to the public school, but my decision had been made before I met her.

Before moving from Minnesota to Atlanta, I had lived several years in suburban

Chicago, a year in Denmark, and a year in Kentucky. I had learned how to acculturate to new places quickly; speedy assimilation was the key to survival. At the same time, at the outset of middle school, in the splintering and stratifying of social cliques, I had developed a quirky, bookish, outsider status. My insistence on answering questions in class, my excelling at the clarinet, and my absolute ineptitude at any game that involved a ball made me a favorite target for taunts and jabs. So I had worn my nerd badge proudly, not only accepting my role, but championing everything that was not popular. Hence my no-makeup policy. 207

My new, small school, however, made it difficult to maintain a marginal identity.

Scratch that—it would have been very easy, but undesirable. The conservative,

Evangelical Christian school incorporated religious ideology into all of its classes

(including a science textbook that disproved evolution), and it maintained order with copious rules. You didn‘t have to go far to break them. The dress code, for instance, required shirts that had a collar (though girls could often get away with wearing no collars on their sequined T-shirts, the boys pointed out with a religious sense of justice). I myself was called into the headmaster‘s office once and made to kneel so he could see, much to my embarrassment, if my skirt touched the floor. (It did.) Then there were other not-so-subtle codes, those not expressly written in school policy, but generally held by students and teachers alike, and these morés amounted to a Puritanical list of goods and evils. Rack up too many in the bad column, and others began to suspect that you weren‘t

―saved.‖ Rock music was considered to be Satanic (that‘s what the Bible teacher taught), and the boys in my class who listened to Rush (Rush!) were thought to be dangerously close to giving themselves over to the Devil. It sounds so backward—almost funny to me now—but I am not exaggerating. We good Christian kids prayed over the Rush boys‘ souls. And I do mean we; if the cost for not being in the in-crowd was damnation, I was certainly not going to be uncool.

The effect of all this, as with many changes in adolescence, was manifested in my body. My speech took on a light Southern drawl fairly soon, almost without my trying; it just came out of my mouth. To dress to the letter of the new dress code, I wore inflexible button-down shirts instead of the comfortable t-shirts I‘d worn the year before, and I 208 donned dresses with shoulder pads. I decided that my straight hair pinned back wasn‘t trendy enough, so I wore it in front of my face. Because I couldn‘t see, I fell down the stairs at school and sprained my ankle. I had bangs cut and each day sprayed them with more hairspray than I‘d used in my entire short life before moving to the South. Within six weeks, I was wearing a thick foundation too light for my skin, shimmery brown eye shadow, and lipstick, though I resisted the very bright shades, picking one as close to my natural lip color as possible. In fact, one day I complimented my 22-year-old English teacher on hers, and it turned out she wasn‘t wearing any. The girls in the class made fun of me for this, which baffled me; how could (inadvertently) complimenting someone‘s natural beauty be worthy of derision?

It‘s hard for me to convey how much of a loss it was to me to wear makeup. To wear it meant that I had lost what I considered to be an important principle, and in an environment where principles were everything, I felt the loss doubly. I also lost any remaining sense I had of being at home in my body. To wear makeup meant I acceded— first with reluctance and then eventually with conviction—that my appearance needed correction and enhancement. Within a month or two I would not leave the house without it, not even to go to the video store. I think I knew that on some level I was betraying my own body, but I didn‘t feel like I could help it, so anxious was I to fit in.

To this day I have an ambivalent relationship with makeup. I wear it, even take pleasure in it—the sensation of painting on the face. But most of the time, the amount of makeup on my face is in direct proportion of the amount of social anxiety I feel.

* * * 209

I‘m trying to figure out where the separation of body and mind comes from, where I first conceived of body as adversary rather than partner.

In the first through third grades I was in a Christian brand of Girl-Scouts called

Pioneer Girls. Each of us was matched with a mentor, another woman in the church—Pal

Gals, they were called. We received special charm bracelets from them with the letters

PALGAL hanging from a chain. I don‘t remember anything about my Pal, not even her name, except this: At an ice cream social in the basement of Bethel Presbyterian, in a lull in conversation, she propped her leg up on the folding chair next to her. ―Feel my leg,‖ she suggested. Not knowing how to approach this command, I hesitated. ―Go like this,‖ she said, gesturing a knock on her leg. Her knock produced a hard sound like rapping on the folding card table at which we were eating. I reached out as if I were about to grasp a dead frog and touched her leg weakly. She explained that she had a plastic leg from the knee down, due to a motorcycle accident. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and hid there as long as I thought I could, but then returned, fearing I wouldn‘t be able to answer her if she were to look for me. When I came back, I hardly said a word to her, mumbling into my Neapolitan with whip cream and Hershey syrup.

I suppose I couldn‘t be blamed entirely for my reaction considering my age, but my rejection of this new information, and consequently of her, pains me now. Though I don‘t remember anything about her, I have the sense that she had been gracious, lively, entertaining, and warm, and that I had felt guilty about my reaction at the time as well. I still feel horrid to have treated her so. But I can also still feel the cringe, the sense of revulsion at having to touch the dead leg. I‘m not sure what scared me more: the 210 prosthetic limb and its un-life-like hollow sound, the thought that flesh I thought was there was in fact partially absent; the idea that part of my body could vanish in the same way; or the visceral fear of the accident she had, my vivid imagination creating a violent, nightmarish movie. To this day I won‘t ride motorcycles.

It couldn‘t have been that single event, of course. Does our sense of separation from the body develop with our consciousness of it? Maybe it really is, to paraphrase

Freud, in the toilet training. I remember having an ―accident‖ when I was two and a half or three. Well, not the actual accident, but I remember my mom taking off my poopy underwear in a bathroom stall, her frustrated tone of voice, my frantic shame and bewilderment. ―I thought it was going to be a bubble,‖ I told her, meaning it had felt like a fart but proved to be otherwise. I hadn‘t been able to predict or control my body, and I was aware of that failing.

Or perhaps it‘s only in illness that we come to view the body as other. My first memory of getting sick is a time I caught the ―awful urpy flu,‖ as Mom called it, in the first grade. I felt a weird hollow hunger, and I grew progressively cranky. When I was sitting at the reading table, crying for no apparent reason, Mrs. Hannaman decided to have my father called. It‘s strange to think of a time before I knew what getting sick was; today if I feel the slightest bit of queasiness I know it, and a tickle in the back of my throat alerts me that I‘ll come down with a cold in the next 24 hours. But back then I only knew I was unhappy. Since I lived only two blocks from school, my dad walked me home, and the chill of a sunny but cold winter day relived some of the heat my fever generated (though I didn‘t think ―fever‖ then, only ―so hot‖). At the last intersection, I 211 threw up on the grass next to the sidewalk. The quickness and intensity of vomiting was just as frightening as the sensation of gagging and the eye-watering bite of stomach acid in my mouth. What was my body doing to me?

Another time, I developed a cold over the course of a Saturday morning as I watched cartoons. I had situated myself over some cushions on the floor, lying on my stomach, my chin in my hands as I looked up at the screen. After a couple of hours, my eyes felt like they were pulling away from my cheekbones, heavy and strained. For a long time after this, I attributed my falling ill to looking up at the TV, and I thought I could prevent further colds by avoiding that position. Getting sick was a superstitious algebra I had to learn, equations that never seemed to work more than once, the variables always replaced with new ones.

As an adult, chronic knee and back injuries solidified my sense that my body was a liability rather than an asset, something to watch carefully and curb into submission rather than mine to learn from, to watch over, to nurture. If I didn‘t feel betrayed by my body, I believed that I could be, and I kept a wary eye on my physical person. This took the form of mild hypochondria and hyper-vigilance: that pain in my wrist might mean carpal tunnel syndrome, the indigestion an indication of a brewing ulcer. But I wonder how much I would have come to be this way if I hadn‘t also turned on my body as I did that year in Atlanta.

I lost touch with Maryann as school began. The ostensible reason was that we were in separate schools and thus separate worlds now. But I was embarrassed to see her 212 again with my mask on, the makeup I had only weeks ago railed against. Oddly enough, the thought of simply going to visit her with no makeup on did not occur to me, or maybe

I knew it would be too duplicitous. I wouldn‘t be able to hold up the façade of natural beauty when I knew I had forsaken it in the rest of my life. I wouldn‘t be able to keep up my phony self. ―Forsaken‖ sounds perhaps a bit melodramatic, but that‘s certainly how I thought of it then, feeling the pathos of adolescence, and appropriating the biblical language that surrounded me from day to day. But there was also a very real betrayal there, an erosion of the self that only now in my thirties I feel I am regaining.

Then there was her cancer. My mom mentioned it. This knowledge—and the fact that Maryann had said nothing of it—perplexed me, unsettled me in a way I couldn‘t articulate at the time. I immediately saw her in a different light; her astuteness now seemed to have been wrought from her experience of severe illness. Her natural grace and beauty I newly saw as forged from her recovery, and her contentment with her body seemed all the more perfect. I felt unequal to her. I didn‘t feel alarmed by the knowledge of the cancer, as I had with my Pal Gal‘s plastic leg, but my reaction was similar in effect. I withdrew. We did not see each other again.

* * *

I looked out the window since I was embarrassed to look at my instructor, a master‘s student in vocal performance at the university where I also studied and taught.

Her studio, a closet-like space (as those corners apportioned to graduate students invariably are) was so crammed with sheet music, bottled water, and fluorescent light I didn‘t feel I could breathe. It‘s unfair of me to externalize it; the lung capacity I had when 213

I sang as a girl was gone, and I felt like I was wheezing the notes. Tanya took me through an exercise sung on ah, lowering gradually with each repetition. A natural soprano and sorely out of practice, I sounded like a feeble accordion. Even with my inner cringing at my voice, by the end of the lesson I felt better. It‘s hard to sing and be unhappy. The deep breathing wakes all the cells in your body, and the straight posture required to produce sound forces a physical balance, which in turn affects the mind positively—or at least that was my experience.

Voice lessons, I had decided, would help prepare me for being pregnant. I viewed both pregnancy and voice lessons as a chance to come to terms with my body, broker a peace agreement, if you will. If I was to be an incubator for another life, I thought I had better learn how to be an advocate for my body, an ally rather than a guarded opponent.

For me, pregnancy was an enormous undertaking—about the scariest thing I could think of doing with my body, more frightening than sky diving. Part of my fear stemmed from the awful responsibility of creating life, the various foods and beverages I needed to eat or avoid, the exercises for labor, the sleep—all while trying mentally to prepare for parenthood. Then there was the physical endeavor of it; would my knees and back hold up? How would I endure birth? Add to that the knowledge that, even in the modern age, many things can and do go wrong with birth. Have I mentioned that I‘m a worrier? My anxiety was at peak.

So I threw myself into preparation like a new convert, skimping on my graduate coursework to read books such as Spiritual Midwifery, Gentle Birth Choices, and Taking

Charge of Your Fertility, and, boy, did I ever: I woke at 6 a.m. every morning to take my 214 temperature, charted the consistency of cervical mucous and the position of my cervix.

To take more conscientious care of myself, I ate more kale, swam laps, napped—and sang. My theory was that singing would make me feel more connected to my body, both in the immediate, physical sense, and also, more abstractly, more confident through speaking and singing in front of people. I had read in my pregnancy literature that vocalizing through contractions was very helpful, and I didn‘t want to feel shy about it.

The truth was that I had never liked the sound of my singing voice—too airy and nasal at the same time. If I felt better about my voice, I would feel better about my body, I reasoned.

In a fortunate coincidence, my voice teacher, Tanya, turned out to be a mother of two small boys aged three and eighteen months, and she was enthusiastic about my project, especially when ―preparing for pregnancy‖ became ―managing a pregnancy‖ only three months after I began lessons. She was one of the first people I told when I found out I was pregnant, and she eagerly noted my vocal progress and my belly growth.

Much of our time together was devoted to chatting about my last prenatal, her little ones, and her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Though scatterbrained and flighty at times, she was an inspiration and encouragement to me as a woman completing a graduate degree with small children. (And as my pregnancy progressed, I became more and more empathetic to her forgetfulness.) Perhaps I could complete my dissertation and birth a child as well.

Tanya is on the short side, with shoulder length dark blond hair and bangs, which she dyed a reddish color half-way through the school year. She‘s buxom, with a broad, 215 inviting smile and dimples. Perhaps I should mention here that she has a disability, the exact nature of which we have never discussed. I‘m not sure why. Maybe, like getting the name of a new acquaintance, the window for such a conversation opens and passes in the first meetings, and beyond that it doesn‘t seem proper. Since she had sat at the piano for the entire first lesson, I didn‘t even notice until our second. She uses a cane, and her legs appear to be small, weaker, and at slightly odd angles; she walks bent over and without much knee bending. She is so natural in her body—as one may expect from someone who sings opera—that I felt comfortable around her as well, and I didn‘t think much about it. A soprano trained at Juliard, Tanya‘s voice soared, mellifluous, and warm, as if she could make sound glow. As she demonstrated the first song I was to sing, my eyes watered, and this was well before pregnancy hormones had taken over my tear ducts.

She assured me that the deep breathing one performs in singing does help during labor, and she took me through the particulars of her own births. In her second pregnancy, she had a condition called a placenta previa, where the placenta has covered part or all of the cervix, which can lead to serious complications. After weeks of bed rest, the problem resolved, and she birthed vaginally, in the hospital with the assistance of an epidural. When I expressed my desire to have a natural childbirth without medical pain relief, she said, ―I know that‘s what you want, and that‘s great, but . . . it really hurts,‖ her eyes emphasizing that point with concern. I graciously accepted her—what was it, a warning? Caution? A tacit permission to change my mind? Perhaps she was simply commenting. 216

At any rate, I reasoned her comment away, beginning with the medical knowledge

I had gleaned from reading books on midwifery and critiques of modern, medicalized birth in the United States. To begin with, Tanya had birthed in a hospital and experienced many of the interventions common to those establishments, interventions which can sometimes cause more harm than good, sometimes causing a cascade of further interventions. Fetal monitors are strapped to you as you lie prone, a very painful and unproductive position for labor. Laboring women are not allowed to eat or drink in the event of needing general anesthesia for a cesarean section, but this complication is extremely unlikely (since most cesareans are performed with a local anesthetic). The lack of nourishment fatigues women. Labor slows and is pronounced a ―failure to progress,‖ increasing the likelihood of a c-section. If I were to use more ―traditional‖ methods of birth, such as walking around and changing positions often, I would circumvent these complications—and some of the pain. I was planning a home birth with a certified nurse midwife, and would thus avoid the entrapment of medical technology.

Then there was my attitude towards pain. I had experienced a decent share, from chronic aches in my knees and shoulders, to the acute pain of spraining my lower back (I felt sharp stabs when I so much as opened a door), to falling off my bike. I cut my finger on an industrial meat slicer once, and while that throbbing was limited to my finger, it was pretty damn uncomfortable. My menstrual cramps had been, at times, agonizing; I had spent many an hour writhing in bed, teary-eyed and clenching my fists. My reading had informed me that, during birth, endorphins flood the body in exertion, as they do in a 217 runner‘s high. I used to run races and enjoyed pushing my pain threshold for a faster time. I could handle it.

I might pause here to answer the reader‘s growing doubt, especially those women who are experienced in birth. Yes, in retrospect, my rationalizations on how I could manage pain seem laughably naïve. But I also believed, perhaps even more obtusely, largely due to the Hypnobirthing classes I took with my husband, that childbirth was not necessarily painful. Hypnobirthing was not my first choice for prenatal instruction, but it was the only natural childbirth class offered in my small town. I doubted that it would benefit me since I‘m naturally suspicious of anything involving hypnosis. The cliché of the duped volunteer from the audience, squawking and flapping like a chicken, entered my mind. Add a pregnant belly to that image—ridiculous. However, acquaintances who had taken the class vouched for the techniques, saying they were about relaxation and not staring into spirals, and that, while a bit odd, they were overall helpful. Finally, faced with the choice of driving an hour each way for twelve Bradley classes or attending six

Hypnobirthing classes in my town, I chose the latter.

Hypnobirthing methodology is built on the premise pain in childbirth is the result of fear. Fear causes the body‘s fight or flight response—a chemical reaction producing catacolomines, hormones which constrict blood flow. The lack of blood to the uterus during this time of exertion causes pain. A fearless, relaxed laborer would open and open, and pain would be minimal, or at least manageable. Marie Mongan, author and creator of

Hypnobirthing, also claims that pain in childbirth is largely a cultural construction, and while I won‘t go into detail about her claim, I will say it made sense in a general way. 218

The only images of birth in literature and movies I remembered were the martyr in agony: Catherine Barkley in Hemingway‘s A Farewell to Arms screaming for her husband to administer the nitrous oxide gas: ―Give it to me! Give it to me!‖; the hysterical woman in stirrups from any sitcom whose ratings were dipping that season (oh, the comedic potential); even Katherine Heigl in ―Knocked Up,‖ which I saw in the theatre during my final trimester, was wailing away on the delivery table (though her male partner was refreshingly able in the end, and the film included brave shots of the baby‘s head crowning). The Hypnobirthing philosophy was that we could counter these cultural constructs with our own quiet, confident, images of what birth could be.

The techniques included listening to a relaxation CD, practicing visualizations and reciting affirmations. I had my reservations, but I also had nothing else to go on. I resolved to ―drink the Kool-Aid,‖ as one of my friends who took the classes described the indoctrination. Imagine approaching a physical event that women have died from in ages past, one built up to be the ultimate act of suffering. Add to that an anxious, fearful personality, and a sense of having lost communion with one‘s body, and an overactive imagination for catastrophe. My fear was so entire and pervasive that that this no-pain philosophy seemed the best approach at the time. With part fervent wishing and part denial, I dedicated myself to the rigors of the program.

When my pregnancy had reached about twenty weeks, the elevator broke in the five story music building. While it was cumbersome for me with twenty extra pounds and bad knees, it was an absolute impossibility for Tanya, who took ten minutes per flight of 219 stairs. As we talked on cell phones trying to find a place to meet, I received an education in the difficulty of navigating our university with a handicap. At the last minute, a professor unlocked for us an empty classroom on the main floor.

It was strange being in this large, empty room, dim with half the lights on, the grey Ohio winter not supplementing much sunlight. Tanya sat at the piano bench, and I pulled up a chair next to the piano. As she rubbed her eyes and tried to shake the stresses of the day out of her shoulders, she mentioned that she had almost cancelled my lesson.

―I need a moment,‖ she said with huge sigh, and we sat in silence for a couple minutes. I thought she was going to cry, and I was about to cry with her. I‘m one of those people who cries when other people cry, and a lack of sleep makes me even more weepy.

Accommodating my differently shaped body and especially a hip problem made most sleeping positions uncomfortable, adding to the general fatigue of pregnancy, when much of the body‘s energy goes towards creating the life within. I wondered why I hadn‘t called to cancel the lesson myself. I decided to remain sitting for my lesson instead of the usual standing.

To begin, Tanya described a new stretch to help me warm up, one that involved bending over and hanging the head between the knees. It constricted my belly too much, and I couldn‘t do it. Finally we began with a usual exercise, the descending pattern we had done at my first lesson, but begun on successively higher notes. Since my lung capacity was increasingly diminished due to the growing babe, I ran out of air quickly, and I grew tense as my breath escaped mid-exercise. 220

Tanya asked me to think about opening the resonance in my head. ―Think about feeling a fullness in your forehead and under your cheekbones.‖

I had felt full in many different ways since becoming pregnant—my smaller stomach easily satiated, my bladder, of course, and my ever expanding middle. This fullness was different. I felt a warmth spread upwards in my face. The vibration in the back of my skull, just behind my ears, calmed me.

―Yes!‖ Tanya said. I hadn‘t even been listening to myself, just concentrating on the sensation. ―But now open the back of your throat as if you were yawning.‖ Tanya became more and more animated as I sang higher, reinforcing with praise after each repetition. I exhaled slowly into my skull, focusing behind my nose, opening, opening.

* * *

To move the labor along, my husband Jamey and I had gone on our second walk down the gravel country road near our house. I wonder what the neighbors and occasional passerby in his car thought of us, my tall husband sheltering me with an umbrella in the 95 degree heat and 80% humidity, me in a straw hat and olive green sun dress and salmon flip flops (the ones a size larger than normal I‘d bought for the pregnancy). Did they think about the pain I was in, how glad they were that it was I and not they? Did the women grimace with empathy, or had they forgotten the pain, thinking only of joy at the baby‘s arrival? Perhaps they didn‘t even know, seeing only a pregnant woman and her partner on a walk, the pain invisible to all but Jamey and the assistant midwife and doula watching from our front porch. We kept a slow pace, and when a contraction started, I stopped walking, embraced Jamey around the neck and swayed 221 from side to side. It‘s been called the slow dance of labor, but it shared none of the tenderness the phrase slow dance might imply. An intimacy, yes, but not one of emotion—one of necessity. The dance is a pragmatic one, moving the baby gently down the birth canal, alleviating some of the pain of the contractions.

After we returned, I lay down on the couch to rest in front of the air conditioner, but a prone position was no longer comfortable. I asked the assistant midwife, RuthAnn, if I could get into the tub—an inflatable one we had acquired for the birth and set up in our kitchen.

―We should wait until you‘re a little farther along,‖ she said. ―Do you want Angy to come?‖ I had been in contact with our main midwife from the beginning, but we had waited to summon her until I was well on my way since the early part of my labor had been protracted. Even in that foggy state, where I could not tell how long I was in pain and out of pain (since that time is spent preparing for the pain to come), where sentences were hard to form, I still did not want Angy to be there until it was necessary, knowing that my birth team needed to be rested. I demurred on both issues, but not for long.

―I‘m going in the tub,‖ I announced forcefully about three contractions later.

Angy was called (by RuthAnn I‘m guessing), the tub was filled, and I stripped off what few clothes I wore and entered the water. It was in the tub that I began vocalizing through contractions, after I had been in labor for about 24 hours, though the first 10 were mild.

To put it another way, it was fourteen hours after I had ceased being able to talk while having contractions. I suppose I could have spoken if I had to, and I did later on when a need pressed. But I instinctively went quiet when the pain settled in. And yes, it hurt. At 222 the time of birth, the uterus is over 30 centimeters tall, so the sensation of the contraction spreads from below the breasts, across the huge expanse of belly (ever think about how there is more of the body to experience pain in labor?), and also to the back and groin, so the pain lives in the very core of you. But my silence was not all because of the pain.

Contractions are all-absorbing and hard work. It takes concentration, but not a mental sort. The ultimate physical act, labor is more animal than rational, and the body creates its own space on the outside as it prepares space for the inner passage of the baby.

When I got in the tub, however, I began calling out with each surge of my uterus.

The vocalizations were also a form of concentration (unlike speech, which was a distraction), and I did it instinctually when the pain hit a certain threshold, when my body knew it was time to open, or rather, for the opening to accelerate; I‘m guessing the water relaxed me enough to usher me into this next phase. I moaned, low and long and primal, somewhere between an aw and an oh, and I consciously did so because I had read that low sounds and a loose jaw helped the cervix to open (it‘s strange the thoughts one remembers in labor—what conscious thoughts burble to the surface of an otherwise blank mind). Jamey says that I even broke my silence to ask him to remind me to stay low if my voice rose. Each moan lasted as long as my breath, loud and gravelly, as if I were trying to reach the ground with my vibrations. Though I‘m sure my voice lessons helped in a general sense, I think I would have moaned even if I hadn‘t had any. I only cared about the pain and how to get through it to the baby on the other side. Labor has a way of forcing inhibitions from you out of need. 223

I hardly noticed Angy‘s arrival; she stayed in the background, letting Jamey comfort me as I lay in the pool. Soon, though, she asked to examine me, and they all helped me to move to the bed. This is something I didn‘t understand in birth stories I‘d read before, how it‘s hard to walk or even change positions in labor. The best I can describe it is that when you sit, stand, or walk, your torso is crucially involved, and when that section of your body is otherwise occupied in contracting so hard it pushes a seven pound baby out, when your pelvis is realigning itself to allow for the baby‘s head to emerge, any extraneous movement hurts. When I was finally on the bed, she waited between contractions to examine me, and then announced I was at nine centimeters dilated. Later (I have no idea how long because one‘s perception of time during labor is distorted), I asked Jamey, who had been sitting beside the tub, to call RuthAnn over.

After my contraction had released me and I could use words I asked her, ―This is the worst, part, right?‖ I don‘t remember what she answered, only that it was diplomatic and noncommittal. I knew she had to answer that way, but I also had to ask. Up until I had asked to be in the tub, the pain had been manageable, but now I seemed in the grip of something stronger than myself, unbearable except that I was bearing it, insofar as I was alive. In the language of birth, it‘s called transition, when the cervix opens the last couple of centimeters to full dilation (usually 10 centimeters, but everyone is different), and it usually means that birth is imminent. My abdomen felt like it was ripping itself apart.

Exhausted, I began falling asleep between some contractions; if I did, I knew when I woke up that the next one would be even harder. 224

The Hypnobirthing book gave several hallmarks of this period: temperature change (feeling extreme hot or cold), nausea or vomiting, and the thought, vocalized or not, that one can‘t go on. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn‘t question the no-pain philosophy of Hypnobirthing when it included this very accurate feeling in the list. I felt like I would die, felt like I wanted to die, asked whatever deity would listen to smite me so I wouldn‘t have to feel my body any longer. ―This hallmark is the most exciting,‖ the book reads, ―It means that the birth of your baby is right around the corner.‖ But it wasn‘t. An hour passed by, and then another (according to Jamey—again, I only knew it was long). Finally Angy got me out of the tub again for another examination, which was worse because all movement exacerbated the pain, and I had to go onto my back again.

She found my cervix still at nine centimeters. No wonder.

Now Angy took a more active role in the birth. I was not to go back into the tub; we had to get the baby moving. With my knees on the bed, I bent over a large exercise ball and rocked through the next contraction. Then I stood up and rocked with Jamey through the next. Then I squatted while Jamey supported my weight. Then I walked, arms around Angy‘s neck, with Jamey moving my hips in the way she had showed him. Even as I was going through all of the motions, I was in disbelief at the pain, in disbelief that each subsequent motion could be more painful than the last. I kept thinking ―O‘Bleness.

Epidural,‖ O‘Bleness being the closest hospital. That and variations of ―I can‘t do this.‖

I have friends who have described their births as existential, ecstatic, holy. That was what I was hoping for, though I wasn‘t counting on it. Why wouldn‘t giving birth be magical, seeing a life enter the world? And I can say that the other side of it, those first 225 few moments of the new babe‘s life, feeling the weight of her in your hands, are incredible. And there are periods in the process where I experienced the altered state of time shortening, of a new, deep focus. But this was so grounded in the body, so necessitated by the pain, that my experience did not cross over to the transcendental. At the time, it only felt like torture, and I do not use that word lightly.

On the other hand, I don‘t think I‘ve ever been so connected to my body. I live, as many people do, writers or not, apart from myself, narrating my life as I go along— providing the voice-over of my actions, even my thoughts. In birth I had no mediation. I had no language to act as a buffer. I had pain and a sense that I would do what my body willed. I am not the first to observe that a part of you dies in labor, and that you must be reborn, in a way, as the child is born. I hesitate to use the word ―reborn‖ because of its use in the Evangelical world, that one in which I was enmeshed that year in Atlanta, to describe what happens when you ―give your life over to Christ‖ and ―accept his salvation.‖ (Whatever that meant.) What I experienced in childbirth is as far from the spirit as possible, and if I was reborn, it was in a purely physical way. And if I was changed, if that self was new, it was only in that I knew now that I could endure real pain, that my consciousness could be so immediately present in my body. Perhaps this is why many birth stories skip over the final throes of labor to the arrival of the baby; you can‘t come back from that place. The words to describe such an experience don‘t exist, because in that space, there is no language, only a silence akin to death.

That won‘t stop me, however, from making an attempt. Since beginning to moan,

I had mostly given one word directions like, ―Hot,‖ (Jamey told me afterwards they 226 weren‘t sure if this meant I was hot and needed to be colder or vice versa.) But now I finally addressed Angy, telling her my thoughts as if she were a priest and I confessor, admitting that I didn‘t think I could do this, that I wanted pain relief. ―The only way out is through,‖ Angy said, which sounds like a cliché now as I write it, but it was absolutely true. (I also knew, at some level, that it would be more painful to get into the car and drive 15 minutes to the hospital.) I had also read, particularly in Ina Mae Gaskin‘s Guide to Childbirth, that the body responds to language, that simply saying ―I am opening‖ can cause the cervix to open. So I began repeating Angy‘s truism to myself like a mantra, over and over again. At some point, I forgot the words, as if this language led me back into my body, enabling a wordless space to exist again.

Angy decided I needed to go to the bathroom again to make sure that a full bladder wasn‘t impeding the baby‘s descent. I had been pushing on and off for about two hours, but now that I was sitting on the toilet, I began to bear down with all of my contractions. I leaned forward and put my arms around Jamey‘s neck, and I remember a particularly forceful contraction where I grasped the back collar of his ratted old t-shirt, and thought I would rip it apart. My voice through that one reached a crescendo, and

Jamey called out to the midwives and doula, who were conferring in the next room. I heard the rustling of packages opening, steps back and forth, and I thought, is it possible?

Is it possible that I will soon be released from this agony? Is it possible that the baby will be here soon? I didn‘t get my hopes up.

Around 11 p.m., they moved me one last excruciating time from the toilet to the birth stool we had in the bathroom, basically a sturdy wooden bench with a toilet-shaped 227 hole cut out of its seat, with handles on the sides. The midwives and Jamey coached my pushing, and my low moans rose in pitch, became strained, pinched sounds. I didn‘t want to hold my breath and push because the strain was so great that I thought something

(what would that have been?) might burst, so I kept grunting long and loud. (As it was, my chest was spotted with little bruises afterwards, capillaries that had broken with my heaving.) Angy later said that I never really got the hang of it; I pushed hardest at the beginning of my contraction, whereas most women push hardest at the end. I attribute this to my exhaustion at nearly 40 hours after labor had started, and not having eaten since the morning. (I hadn‘t thought about food since breakfast.) But my ineffectual pushing was enough, and about 40 minutes later, Angy told me to reach down so I could catch the baby.

We had written in our birth plan that, if at all possible, I wanted to catch the baby with Jamey‘s help. But I had been gripping the handles of the birth stool so tightly that I could hardly feel my hands. Angy was taking pictures through this phase of the birth, and there is one of the baby‘s head showing through my vagina, and my hands hanging limply down by my side, waiting. My hands look exactly how they felt—swollen with veins bulging, red from heat and exertion, but almost lifeless in their slack position. I didn‘t feel like they were a part of my body, and I wasn‘t sure I could grasp the baby. I also didn‘t know if I had the strength to explain this to Angy. I don‘t remember what I said, but this was also enough. Jamey supported my back more so that I could let go of the handles, and RuthAnn readied her hands to help me if the baby slipped, which is what

I feared. I pushed again. Again. Again. 228

Some women say that the ―ring of fire,‖ or the baby‘s head crowning, is the most painful part of the labor, but this was not the case with me; it was only harrowing in a different way. I can‘t say I didn‘t mind, but I could not have cared less. With RuthAnn‘s help, I grasped my daughter (though I didn‘t yet know she was a girl) and brought her to my chest, cradling her in my right arm—my gorgeous, bloody, slippery, purpley-red, warm, perfect baby finally, finally on the outside of me. I marveled at her thin but longish black hair, her swollen lips, her closed eyes, her almost weightless limbs. Almost as astonishing as her presence was how words flooded back to me all at once. I had noted this phenomenon in the videos of labor and birth I had seen, how women went from groaning to coos and welcomes in an instant; it didn‘t seem possible. In the races I ran as a teenager, it would take minutes to recover from the exertion, bent over and panting. But after 40 of hours of mind-bending pain and the hardest work I‘ve ever done, I instantly fell into the role of mother. ―Hi!‖ I told her, and ―Oh, my baby!‖ and ―I love you!‖ I remember saying the latter because she still looked a little blue, and I hadn‘t heard a noise from her yet, and I thought if she knew the strength of my love, she would breathe.

Was there ever a more elemental thought? If I love her, she will live: the logic of motherhood. How could she not know how much I loved her from the months I spent carrying her, feeding her, rubbing the belly that housed her? And still, I knew she needed to hear the words, to be a receiver of the language she had given me—the new me, or at least, the wiser me, the one who had given birth.

Angy gave my baby a little oxygen, and her color completed its turn to a rosy pink. She cried, and I put her to my breast. Angy asked if it was a boy or a girl. It hadn‘t 229 occurred to me to check—I was fine with a healthy baby—but I didn‘t want anyone to find out before I did, so I lifted the umbilical cord from between her thighs and said, ―It is a girl,‖ confirming the faint intuition I had had, one I hadn‘t trusted until she arrived. I gave her to my husband to hold and admire.

Most birth stories end at this point, tacking on some fun trivia such as height and weight, and who the baby looks like. But the birth continues through the delivery of the placenta. And then begins a long, slow recovery process, which no one tells you about. I had two first degree (minor) tears, one of which required stitches; I received an injection of local anesthetic. It was no comparison to labor, but now that I was not in that state of extreme focus, now that I could reflect with some distance on what I was feeling, it was incredibly annoying, especially since all I wanted to do was dote on my baby. The next day, as the euphoria began to wear off, I felt the effects of the birth linger in every cell of my body. My arms, shoulders, and back ached from holding myself up on the birth stool and from holding my daughter to nurse. My voice was gravelly. I couldn‘t really sit properly due to the stitches and the bruises in my perineum and vagina, and this was the most frustrating of all, since it‘s difficult to nurse any other way at the beginning. Many women wear adult diapers after the birth to catch post-partum bleeding, and because I wore them in very hot weather, I got diaper rash. I remember telling Jamey, ―If I experience one more trauma to that region of my body I‘m going to kill someone.‖ It‘s difficult to poop, partially because, due to hormones, constipation is a common ailment in pregnancy and post-partum, but also because any pressure applied to the perineum makes it feel as though you are going to tear again. There are uterine afterbirth pains— 230 moderately painful contractions that are triggered by nursing. Breastfeeding has its own discomforts, such as cracked nipples, and a sore neck from looking down for the 8 to 12 feedings per day, part in awe of the baby, part trying to figure out the business of latching and staying latched. All this you do on very little sleep. I‘m still not quite sure how I managed through it.

Aside from the physical recovery, I needed to recover from birth psychically as well. The birth was, and still is (to a much lesser extent), a traumatic event for me. The fact that it was an unmedicated, natural birth, in my own house, on my own terms did not, at least in the weeks immediately following, erase the brutalizing shock of the pain. I know I might be viewed as unappreciative here, especially since I know many women who wanted a natural birth and ended up with an epidural and an operation. On the surface, my birth appears ideal. But for a long time afterwards, I could not assimilate the pain I had experienced, still in disbelief at the agony—that I could feel that much pain and still be alive, as if my body had punished me for some wrong done to it in the past. A perfectionist with a tendency to blame myself for more than I could possibly by liable for,

I assumed that I had fucked up, that there had been some preparation I had not attended to carefully enough. My body had worked perfectly, birthing the way women are built to do.

My birth was not even unusually long for a first baby. And I still felt betrayed. Now that I am months past it, I can see how absurd this self-judgment was. (I even berated myself for wanting pain relief; you can‘t get much more masochistic than that.) But I have also forgotten the pain now, at least, how it felt physically, and for the month after, every time 231

I nursed I relived a small part of it. As long as I could feel birth still in my body, I could only feel the injustice of it.

Part of my disbelief came from my training at the Hypnobirthing course. I see now that, in essence, Hypnobirthing provided another set of rules to which I could cling, rules that, if followed, promised a favorable outcome. They were certainly more positive and affirming than the standards set at Dekalb Christian Academy, but they were still measures by which to succeed or fail. I saw Hypnobirthing as a set of achievable standards, but this perspective was due to my own religious upbringing more than with the Hypnobirthing program, which in itself is not judgmental of women‘s choices. And the truth is that, physically, Hypnobirthing provided an excellent set of tools to manage aspects of pain. Angy and RuthAnn both commented afterwards how calm I was through the entire process, how relaxed. Still, I believe that some preparation for how to deal with pain emotionally would have helped me. At the least, I think my labor would have been shorter if I had had the idea that I needed to go towards the pain, to harness it, make it productive. That said, nothing could have actually prepared me for the pain itself. And it was also naïve of me to expect my body/mind rift could be healed by the experience of pregnancy and birth.

There is a tendency, at the end of the birth story, to sum up positively. When my friends who are moms, who mostly have small babies like mine, tell theirs, I often hear,

―But we had a healthy baby, and that‘s all that really matters.‖ No, the rest of the birth

(the part before the healthy baby) does matter, and this negation of what went before by what comes after infuriates me. The birth story functions under the rubric of women‘s 232 rites of passage, like the perfect wedding (with the perfect dress, ceremony, bride‘s maids, flowers, cake, etc.). The pressure of getting it right—the notion that there is a

―right‖ way—is too great and completely unnecessary. I understand the need to convey that the new life created and ushered into the world, the privilege of taking care of it, does eclipse this one event. How could it not? So let birth be just an event. Let birth be what it is, even if it is, as Hypnobirthing claims, unnecessarily painful.

And let me also acknowledge what birth gave me, because there were positives to the experience, ones we don‘t talk about enough. I have done the hardest thing a human body can do. Despite my self-doubt, despite my wish for escape, to be relieved of the burden of birth, I did it. I know now that I can do anything, even care for a small baby and finish a dissertation.