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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 Boys & Girls & God: Essays Alaina Janelle Symanovich Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BOYS & GIRLS & GOD: ESSAYS By ALAINA JANELLE SYMANOVICH A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts 2018 Alaina Janelle Symanovich defended this thesis on March 19, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Elizabeth Stuckey-French Professor Directing Thesis John Ribó Committee Member Bob Shacochis Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For Chloe iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Versions of “The Girls We Love” appeared in Fogged Clarity and Ginosko Literary Review 17 “Faulty Hearts” appeared in Hawai’i Review 83 “The Dark Space” appeared as “Ready, Set, Go” in Entropy in September 2016 “Birds of Venus” appeared as “Venus Retrograde” in Little Patuxent Review 19 “Blood, Water, Sin” won the Winter 2017 Nonfiction Prize from Santa Ana River Review “The M Word” appeared in Fourth River 0.2 and won Best of the Net in 2016 “Ethereal Girls” appeared in Santa Ana River Review 2.1 “Holy Ground” appeared in storySouth 43 “In Transit” appeared in Quarter After Eight 23 “Me, Myself & Matthew Gray Gubler” appeared in Queen Mob’s Tea House in March 2017 “Shame, A Legacy” appeared as “Shame, A History” in Rubbertop Review 9 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER ONE – THE GIRLS WE LOVE ...................................................................................1 CHAPTER TWO – FAULTY HEARTS .......................................................................................17 CHAPTER THREE – THE DARK SPACE ..................................................................................30 CHAPTER FOUR – BLOOD, WATER, SIN ...............................................................................42 CHAPTER FIVE – BIRDS OF VENUS .......................................................................................54 CHAPTER SIX – LUCAS & LEO ................................................................................................65 CHAPTER SEVEN – THE M WORD ..........................................................................................74 CHAPTER EIGHT – ETHEREAL GIRLS ...................................................................................95 CHAPTER NINE – HOLY GROUND ........................................................................................102 CHAPTER TEN – IN TRANSIT ................................................................................................127 CHAPTER ELEVEN – ME, MYSELF & MATTHEW GRAY GUBLER ................................138 CHAPTER TWELVE – SHAME, A LEGACY ..........................................................................148 CHAPTER THIRTEEN – PARALLEL (INTERSECTING) LIVES ..........................................165 CHAPTER FOURTEEN – HEROIC SELF-PRESERVATION .................................................172 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................189 v ABSTRACT Boys & Girls & God: Essays concerns itself with the intense and needless loneliness of the human experience. As David Shields writes (or, given the project of his book, likely (mis)quotes) in his genre-bending treatise Reality Hunger: “I’m interested in knowing all the secrets that connect human beings. At the deepest level, all our secrets are the same” (27). I believe that secrets—my secrets, your secrets, your enemy’s secrets—are unnecessary, banal, and not nearly as earth-shattering or as well-hidden as you or I or your enemy like to think. Therefore, my thesis aims to flout secrecy. Whether I’m writing against my or other people’s impulses to hide, I seek to create art that discomfits. I like to risk something when I write; in fact, risky writing is the only kind I elect to read. Practically speaking, my anti-secrets thesis takes the form of personal essays that run the gamut of social taboos; I tackle everything from masturbation to religion (sometimes in the same essay), and I strive to let each essay’s content dictate its form. Some essays, for example, abide by the conventional narrative style; I look to works such as Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and Mary Karr’s Cherry for inspiration on those works. Other essays, though, demand more dynamic forms: collage, quotations from outside sources, lists, text messages, and more. I love to juxtapose dissimilar genres and topics—for example, to examine sexual fetishes through an academic lens, as I do in my essay “Me, Myself & Matthew Gray Gubler,” or to muse upon abducted children alongside moving to Las Vegas in “Parallel (Intersecting) Lives.” For these quirky works, I look to contemporary writers such as Elissa Washuta, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules; Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist; and Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty; the eclectic work of these writers reflects the same fearless anti- secrecy that undergirds this project. vi CHAPTER ONE THE GIRLS WE LOVE The first time I watch Titanic I am fourteen, long haired and small breasted. I’ve never kissed a boy, never known a touch more risqué than my dad’s arm on my shoulders during movie nights. He and I watch endless films plash across our television, oblivious to a world wider than Wege pretzels and Blockbuster rentals. Weekends flicker by in a strobe of blue light and laugh tracks, one that blips me from pre-K all the way to high school. As the Titanic sinks, our basement throbs with darkness; cold prickles my skin and sidles under my cocoon of quilts. Tears roll down my cheeks as the credits roll over the screen, and when I look at Dad, his eyes are glistering like sea glass. We have the same barreling forehead, the same craggy Russian nose and chin. People never find my mother when they search my face. An outsider might question why Dad and I bunker in our underground hideout, sheathed in ratty blankets on the threadbare couch, while Mom reclines on leather upstairs. Said outsider might find it strange that she lords alone over the high-ceilinged den with walls painted marigold. But I tiptoe past her lounger like a prisoner skirting the sheriff, and she keeps up with the Kardashians well enough to lose track of me. Replaying Titanic in my mind, I see Rose and Jack making love in the backseat of a car; I see her telling him where to put his hands. Her palm smacks the fogged window again and again. Jack disappears into the cerulean sea, frozen and drowned for love. It’s as surreal a sight as my friends kissing their boyfriends, their hands nipping at belt loops and shirt buttons. I’m not lying when I tell those friends I think I’m asexual. At sleepovers, I straddle them for back massages during marathon rounds of Truth or Dare. They interrogate each other—who do you 1 like? Whom would you rather kiss?—as I trek over trapezii and deltoids, my fingers finding every sore spot. These massages exempt me from the game. “Is love really like that?” I ask Dad, nodding at the screen where Rose and Jack were. I flex my palm, and in the television light it looks anemic, pale as a halved apple. I try to imagine it thrust against a window in a heave of passion, and I fail. I bury it back under the blanket. Dad watches the screen fade as he considers my question. I repeat myself—is that really how love feels? Like you’d die for the other person?—and give up expecting an answer by the time he says, “Yes. In the beginning, at least.” Only when I slide into bed that night, my legs goosebumping at the chilly sheets, do I wonder about the end. *** Dad retires over Christmas of my senior year. He wants to savor my last few months at home, he says—to enjoy those seasons. Snowstorms pummel the state all winter, so we establish a new tradition: every morning that I wake to a two-hour delay, we brew coffee, stash our pockets with Kleenex, and set out for the nearby woods. In Timberland boots we lumber across miles of forest: five if the snow isn’t wet, if our matching Reynaud’s fingers don’t throb purple, if Mom won’t be too annoyed by our absence. When Dad married Mom, neither of them knew what her Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease truly entailed. Only my grandmother had the disease—she, and a smattering of distant cousins Mom never managed to track down. Mom only heard rumors of them: their trouble walking, their hands that deadened with age. Neuropathy isn’t uncommon in Appalachia, but CMT in a woman, and in only one child of five, is. As we hike through the woods, Dad tells me stories of venturing into the stacks of Penn State’s library with Mom. Like most university couples, they 2 went on regular dates. Unlike most couples, those dates included researching the incurable and degenerative disease that was crippling one of them. “But why did you—” I cower from the question on my lips. My boots kick clots of snow into the air. I watch them bloom white, sparkle, then disappear. “When you read those things, why did you—?” “Stick around?” I nod, though Dad is too busy

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