THREE STORIES
A Project
Presented to the faculty of the Department of Liberal Arts
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
Liberal Arts
by
Nicole Reese
SPRING
2014
© 2014
Nicole Reese
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
THREE STORIES
A Project
by
Nicole Reese
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Victoria Shinbrot, PhD.
__________________________________, Second Reader
Doug Rice, PhD.
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Nicole Reese
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to
be awarded for the project.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator___________________
Victoria Shinbrot, PhD.
Date
Department of Liberal Arts
iv
Abstract
of
THREE STORIES
by
Nicole Reese
Autobiographical writing and close reading are vehicles for self-discovery and the
creation of meaning. This project incorporates and blends those vehicles through the
inclusion of three pieces of creative nonfiction (autobiography/memoir) and my analyses
of them. I open with a philosophical exploration of hermeneutics, and attempt to
determine whether I, as the author, can find meaning in my own texts.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Victoria Shinbrot, PhD.
_______________________
Date
v
DEDICATION
For Ari, the reason I’m doing any of it
For Danny, who told me to
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Dr. Doug Rice for teaching me how to write
Thank you to Dr. Victoria Shinbrot for teaching me how to read
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ................................................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... vii
Chapter
1. RATIONALE FOR THE PROJECT…………………………………………….. 1
2. THE FALLING SICKNESS ................................................................................. 26
3. INFINITE FEAR AND SADNESS ...................................................................... 73
4. EVERYTHING I STOLE (DISAPPEARED DOWN A HOLE) ....................... 102
Part 1. The Hole in Me ..................................................................................... 102
Part 2.
2002: Living Together .......................................................................... 129
Part 3. 2003: Marie and Noah .......................................................................... 145
5. ANALYSIS OF THE FALLING SICKNESS ..................................................... 169
6. ANALYSIS OF INFINITE FEAR AND SADNESS .......................................... 178
7. ANALYSIS OF EVERYTHING I STOLE
(DISAPPEARED DOWN A HOLE) ...................................................................184
Works Cited ..............................................................................................................194
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1
RATIONALE FOR THE PROJECT
Michelangelo said he sculpted a marble block into the statue David by simply
removing everything that wasn’t David. Reading and writing are the tools I use to chip
away at myself, a slow and often painstaking process of removing everything I am not. I
turn to books to make sense of my life. Each meaningful text I read brings me closer to
finding and understanding my authentic self. Writing further stimulates this discovery
process for me. When I wrote the essays included here—all of which are
autobiographical—I discovered things about myself I otherwise couldn’t—or wouldn’t—
articulate. Reading and writing is where I turn to find meaning for my life.
I had begun my search for meaning when I started the Humanities and Religious
Studies bachelor program at CSUS. As graduation got closer, I wanted to continue along
the same path via the Liberal Arts graduate program. Throughout my project work I
mulled over this question: what value did my education have? I repeatedly came up with
the same answer, an answer that indicates what I got out of the program went beyond
academics and was worth far more than the tuition I paid. What I gained was priceless:
in the Liberal Arts graduate program I learned how to read.
When I say “I learned to read” I mean that through the program—readings,
lectures and the influence of a few specific professors—I learned how to do close
readings. Perhaps most crucially, I learned to recognize patterns within texts. I learned
to look for connections and to deconstruct texts. I learned how to think, to make choices.
As a result, over the course of attaining my graduate degree I became confident in my
ability to determine what each text I read—or watched, or listened to, or looked at—
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meant to me. It enriched my appreciation of all art, sometimes even that which is
considered “low” art.
I learned that, whether we know it or not, we are constantly making choices about
how we interpret information. If we are not conscious of our choices, we take in
information via our default setting; we are passive, spectators. This way of being is so
automatic it doesn’t even seem like a choice, but it is. Learning to deconstruct a text is
making the choice to go against that default setting, to actively engage in the production
of meaning. It’s another form of being present. This is an extreme example, but once I
made the choice to be an active reader, I could watch a show like MTV’s The Jersey
Shore, a show The New Yorker called “an embarrassing reality-show cliché” and by most
accounts regarded as “vapid, empty, and [appealing] to some primitive need to watch a
train wreck” (The Washington Post), and still find something meaningful about it. The
Jersey Shore was not exactly a prime candidate for encouraging intellectual stimulation
or fueling reflection. It wasn’t created to do that; I don’t think I’m going out on a limb
when I say it wasn’t the creator’s intention. Yet with my newfound ability to deconstruct
a text I found myself closely watching the show and noticing things of significance: in
those brief moments of silence between fighting and clubbing and partying, I saw the
representation of a nation of bored and empty people lacking direction. The constant
partying and fighting—the meat of the show—suddenly seemed like a symptom of a
larger problem. I harkened back to something I read about utilitarianism, and the results
of formulating an entire teleology based on pleasure as a value, maybe the only value. I
reflected on that insipid show, and wondered if I was seeing something significant and
3
tragic and revealing in their hungover faces. What happens when your whole life is about
eliminating pain and increasing pleasure? Does this lead to a life devoid of meaning?
Was that what The Jersey Shore was communicating during those silent moments?
Probably not, but I saw it that way. My new way of looking at things didn’t make
me much fun to watch television with, but it stimulated a lot of thought for me, and
caused me to ask myself how I was avoiding pain and focusing on my own pleasure to
the detriment of my own life having value. In that way I learned to make something out
of nothing.
After I learned to read I was constantly rewarded with moments of illumination
like this. There were no limits on what I could use as fuel for reflection. My life
changed as I began incorporating those moments of illumination into how I lived. I then
applied those revelations to my relationships, my understanding of other living things, to
my conversations with others. Even the way I interact with other people has changed
since I learned to read. I listen more carefully. I am more present. Things matter more
to me now.
Before I started studying at CSUS I lacked the tools I needed to analyze texts and
habitually incorporate that understanding into my life in a meaningful way. I was homeschooled all throughout junior high and high school, and literary theory was never part of
my curriculum. I lacked a basic understanding of how to do a close reading. I thought
there was one correct way to analyze a text, but the correct way eluded me; it seemed
beyond my grasp. I thought finding the text’s meaning was someone else’s job. My
4
misguided beliefs affected my academic confidence. I was more likely to take another
person’s interpretation of any given text as a fact. I wrote term papers with insecurity
because I thought each text I was writing about already had an established meaning. I
thought the person who wrote the text (the author) had already infused the text with his or
her intended meaning, and my research consisted of following clues to find out what the
author was trying to tell me. I was never confident that I was correct, so I turned to
journal articles and Internet research to locate other formal and established sources who
had written about the text from a theoretical framework that I had no real understanding
of (feminist, historical, ethnic studies, etc.). Instead of using those articles to enrich my
present understanding of the text, I leaned on them.
Because I hadn’t yet studied literary theory, I didn’t realize the analyses I read
were textual interpretations reached through the utilization of literary theories. I didn’t
know that literary theories were, simply put, just different ways to think about and
understand art. I was so ignorant to literary theory that I often read more than one
interpretation of the same text and found myself wondering who was right. I was
frustrated. I felt I was left reaching out in the dark to pick one, and I was too
embarrassed to ask for clarification. I thought I was supposed to choose an established
interpretation of the text I agreed with most and formulate my arguments from there. I
thought there was little room for my own interpretations. After all, what did I know?
Who was I to say what a text meant? I had little respect for my own ideas, and perhaps I
shouldn’t have: I had not yet learned to think critically when I read. All of this reduced
the potential personal impact of my written analyses, because while I value intellectual
5
thought, understanding a text in a personal and meaningful way is a whole new level of
reading, of living. Once I understood texts in a personal way I cared enough to
incorporate what I read into my own life. Those things I read became a part of me and
move through me even now. I am different, better, because of them.
If I could pinpoint when I learned to read, I’d say it was when I took a graduate
class called Culture and Expression in the Modern Period. We studied literary theory and
hermeneutics. This was a revelation to me. By gaining an understanding of literary
theory I was, for the first time, aware of my options. I became able to contextualize the
analyses I read by scholars. Literary theory stimulated something inside of me, and I
think this is because I began to contextualize literary theories as theories of meaning.
The task of hermeneutics is to discover meaning. “Meaning,” throughout this paper,
refers to the meaning of or in life. And meaning is what I’d been looking for all along.
For critics in the early twentieth century, textual interpretation was more authorcentric. Both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault identify Romanticism as the period in
which our current model of authorship reached its climax. Romantics—set against the
backdrop of neoclassical predecessors who emphasized pragmatic notions of creation like
imitation, craftsmanship, and formal tradition—emphasized the individual and elevated
self-expression, originality, and uniqueness along with sociohistorical context. For the
Romantics, a text expressed the author’s thoughts and feelings while also transcending
them. Wordsworth regarded a text as “the creative instantiation of the writer’s very self”
(Wallace 139), a “direct representation of the creative experience” (Bennett 62).
6
I.A. Richards, one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature “saw
criticism as all and only an effort to nail down the ‘relevant mental condition’ of a text’s
creator” (139). It was widely accepted that reading was the act of recreating in one’s
imagination the author’s mental state at the time of writing; an act of telepathy from the
writer to the reader. A common metaphor is a poem or a story as a window into the
author’s psychological processes. Therefore, understanding a text relied firmly on
authorial intent. If there was anything to be deciphered within a text it was what the
author meant at the time of writing.
But as we drew closer to the middle of the twentieth century, New Criticism
began to dominate literary theoretical thought. In his 1932 essay “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot proposed that “textual meaning is independent of the
author’s control” and that “it leads an afterlife of its own, totally cut off from the life of
its author” (Hirsch 1). Axiomatic for New Critics was Monroe Beardsley and W.K.
Wimsatt’s essay “The Intentional Fallacy.” Published in 1946, it asserted that the
intended meaning of the author is not the only meaning, nor is it the most important
meaning. Sometimes the meaning even changes even for the writer. Many scholars
believed this exegesis in literary theory was a positive one because it shifted the
discussion from the author to the author’s work.
Even though these new ideas about authorship had been introduced, in the mid1960s theories based on the primacy of authorial intent were still prevalent and widely
accepted in the world of literary criticism. In his 1967 book Validity in Interpretation,
intentionalist and literary critic E.D. Hirsch defended authorial intent while criticizing the
7
“post-romantic fascination with the habits, feelings, and experiences surrounding the act
of composition” (3). He called the foundations of old criticism “weak and inadequate”
(3), yet he thought it common sense that a text means what the author intends.
As an intentionalist, Hirsch was after precision in interpretation. He assumed it
was “always preferable to have a single standard” and his argument was that “the
author’s intention gives us a single, stable standard for correctness in interpretation and
that without it we are at sea in a multitude of meanings” (Weberman 54). He argues that
even when meaning changes for the author, it is actually the significance of the text that
has changed; the meaning of the text cannot change. For Hirsch, there is only one
meaning, and the meaning can never change, only our relationship to that meaning. A
single, stable standard is vital because without it, the reader is unable to distinguish a
correct interpretation from an incorrect one.
There are a number of problems with this view. The reader is still capable of
using context to figure out the meaning of the text. More important, in my view, is that
even if we were able to fully understand the author’s intention behind the text—which I
propose is, if not impossible, close to it—we still miss out on what is vital and nourishing
to reading: it stimulates self-reflection, helps us discover truths about our life and the
lives of others, and assists us in drawing significance from those discoveries.
Just a year after Hirsch published Validity in Interpretation, French philosopher
Roland Barthes declared the author was dead in his work “The Death of the Author,” an
essay found in his book Image Music Text. Barthes was one of the three French
postmodernists in the late 1960s rebelling against what they considered the tyranny of the
8
author’s absolute authority over a text’s meaning. Along with Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida were French postmodernist philosophers and
poststructuralists/deconstructionists (from here on out referred to as “DOAs” for the sake
of simplicity). The DOAs helped usher in the shift from structuralism and New Criticism
to deconstruction or post structuralism. They were motivated by a shared interest in
critiquing power structures and neutralizing privilege.
To understand the motives behind Barthes’s killing of the author, it is crucial to
understand the context from which the DOAs came. They belonged to the Tel Quel
Group (who self-identified as a movement of the avant-garde). Inspired by Marx and
Freud, and later, Maoism, and “for whom the larger notion of textuality had become a
central theoretical and critical concern” (Herman 483), the Tel Quel Group aimed to
achieve social revolution through thought and ecriture (simply put, writing). The DOAs
viewed all claims to absolute truth as power plays. Their particular brand of literary
theory is based on critiquing the tyranny and authoritarianism they see as inherent in
viewing the reader as “outside” the text while the author remains fixed “inside” the text.
From inside, the author holds the key to the one true meaning. This is problematic
because whoever determines the meaning of something has the power. From inside the
text the author has an unfair advantage.
Throughout “The Death of the Author,” the language Barthes uses to signify the
author is representative of the Tel Quel Group’s critique of power structures. Barthes
refers to the author’s “prestige” and calls the image of literature in culture “tyrannically
centred on the author” (143). He distrusts the authority given to the author and states
9
“the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if
it were always in the end […] the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us”
(143). He derides New Criticism for often doing no more than consolidating the author’s
power; he praises Mallarme, who “never stopped calling into question and deriding the
Author” (144). For Barthes, to defer authority to the author is to “impose a limit on that
text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). He refers to the
author as the “Author-God” (146), so for Barthes, refusing to defer to the author’s fixed
meaning is “in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (147).
The stakes are high; seizing the power of interpretation from the author represents the
ultimate liberation of the reader.
“Author” in the context I am using it is a somewhat modern development, one
that Barthes and Foucault trace back to Hobbes in his book Leviathan. In Leviathan
Hobbes establishes a distinction between what he calls a Naturall Person, and (a lesser)
Artificiall Person. For Hobbes this distinction has to do with property and ownership
rights. A Naturall Person owns his or her actions while an Artificiall Person represents
the words of actions of another. In other words, “an actor [Artificiall Person] is one who
is empowered to make a covenant for which the author [Naturall Person] who he
represents will assume responsibility”, while “an actor is empowered to do only what his
author wishes or commands” (Hix 5). The author, or the Naturall Person, has the power;
the Artificiall Person does not. It is just this issue of property rights (ownership) within
authorship that Barthes and his fellow DOAs aimed to systematically tackle and then take
down.
10
In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argues that “writing is the destruction of
every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space
where our object slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing” (142): that is, the author. A year later in 1969, fellow DOA
philosopher Michel Foucault followed suit with “What is an Author?” Like Barthes,
Foucault speaks of the author’s “privilege” (10) and “empiricity”(11), and how “we are
accustomed to presenting the author as a genius” (22). He relates the author with ideas
about individualism and private property, an association Foucault disdains.
Like Barthes, in “What is an Author?” Foucault speaks about the author utilizing
religious terms. He argues that elevated status given to authors is undue, and he is
disgusted that their writing seems to represent “in transcendental terms, the religious
principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation)” (12). He complains that
readers are “used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so
transcendent” but “the truth is quite the contrary” (21). Foucault is interested in flipping
the power dynamic, which is perhaps put forth most clearly in his proposal that “we make
him [the author] function in exactly the opposite fashion” (22). The language Foucault
uses is a way of taking the authority from the author and putting it in the reader’s hands.
To further reduce the author’s relevance, Foucault argues that “the writing of our
day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’” and that writing is “an interplay of
signs regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier”
(10). The signifier (the text alone) has the power. Foucault sees writing as a game that
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doesn’t follow its own rules, that cannot be contained, a game that “invariably goes
beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits” (10). He aims for a future where it no
longer matters who is speaking or what the author intended while writing.
Jacques Derrida, too, argued for the death of the author in ways strikingly similar
to Barthes. While Barthes says the author is dead, Derrida argues the text is “orphaned,
and separated at birth from the assistance of its father” (MP 316). In his essay “That
Dangerous Supplement,” Derrida refers to writing as “literary suicide” and “death by
writing”; he refers to the author as the “obliterated origin” (OG 188). In his essay
“Signature, Event, Context,” Derrida reiterates the same arguments made by Barthes and
Foucault: a text’s meaning is not determined by the author or the reader, or the situation
in which the text is read. Meaning is, instead, fluid. This is because the meaning of a
word or text is different each and every time it is uttered or heard. This indeterminate
meaning creates a breakdown between the author’s intentions and the text’s meaning as
the reader interprets it. Derrida finds language systems inadequate for relaying meaning,
thus the author is redundant.
For Derrida the problem is one of binary opposition, whereby everything in
Western thought is structured in terms of hierarchical pairs in opposition to one another
and always part of a systematic chain, with one term of each pair always the lesser or
corrupted version of the other: “error is the corruption of truth, woman is a diminished
version of man, culture is a prostitution of nature” (Hix 197). Within the realm of
authorship, the problem is one of inside versus outside. That is, does meaning lie inside
of the text with the author or outside the text with the reader? Derrida believed that
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“wherever the dichotomy appears, the inside is the privileged member of the pair, the
outside its diminished derivative” (198). The inside—the place of privilege—is where
literary critics traditionally placed the author. For Derrida and his fellow DOAs, the
inside is where the power resides, and that power must be neutralized.
By neutralizing the author’s privilege, the DOAs hoped to place the reader on the
inside, to, as Barthes says it, “restore the place of the reader” (143). Once the author is
dead, or decentralized, there is room for what Derrida terms “freeplay,” which he
describes as “a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble” (WD
360). In other words, by killing the author, the reader becomes freed up to interpret the
text and garner his or her own meaning from it. The structure of the text may never
change, but the meaning of it can and does. The meaning of a text escapes its origins and
rests in the hands of its destination. This created the potential for finding meaning in
anything.
My sympathies lie, in part, with the DOA philosophers. I agree that the author
does not, and should not, have absolute authority over interpretation of their texts.
However, I conceptualize the extremes of their arguments as a backlash that was
necessary to decentralize the author; I cannot wholeheartedly agree with their assertions.
I find it somewhat incoherent and severe to argue that the author’s intentions mean
nothing. The author’s intention means something, even if it doesn’t mean everything.
Giving the reader power doesn’t mean the reader should disregard the author’s intentions
entirely; I think a balance can, and should, be made.
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Reading a satirical essay as if it were literal is an example of what I consider an
“incorrect” reading. Another example is this: if my daughter (the author) tells me (the
reader) she wants an ice cream cone, I may hand her a sugar cone when she wants a cake
cone. It may not be exactly what she had imagined, but it is close, and I still understood
her meaning. If my daughter tells me she wants an ice cream cone and I hand her a dog
collar, I have fundamentally misunderstood what she attempted to communicate with me,
and the fault is mine. I have done an “incorrect” reading; even though the reader has
some authority, he or she can still make blatant errors in interpretation.
Do the author’s intentions have no part in determining the meaning of the text?
While it is true that each reader brings his or her own identity, prejudices, prejudgments,
associations, experiences, etc. to a reading, it still stands that the author has given us
something to work with. In his book Truth and Method, philosopher Hans Georg
Gadamer brought a more balanced view to authorship and hermeneutics. While Gadamer
agrees with the DOAs that “not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes
beyond its author” and that is the reason “understanding is not merely a reproductive but
always a productive activity as well” (296), he also understands the reader and author as
co-creators of meaning. He calls this experience of co-creation a “fusion of horizons,”
meaning the limits of knowledge and experience brought to the text by the author merge
with the limits of knowledge and experience brought in by the reader. The reader
receives a text only according to her own capacities, and because the reader’s capacities
are always in flux, the reader can interpret a text one way and while reading that same
text years later can come away with an entirely different meaning.
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For Gadamer “our understanding or interpretation of objects or events is always
conditioned or shaped by our historical situation in a way not fully transparent to us and
this circumstance does not so much impede as enable knowledge and experience”
(Weberman 45). So when we garner meaning from a text we will always understand it
differently than others, (and after repeated readings sometimes differently than ourselves)
but our different understanding does not mean we are incorrect. To understand and
interpret a text is to engage in a mediation between the reader and the author. It is a
middle ground where the reader and author meet.
Unlike the DOAs, Gadamer does not have negative associations with attempts to
understand the context and intentions behind the author. In Truth and Method, he argues
that although the author is not present and cannot claim absolute authority over the text’s
meaning, we can establish context “by careful study of the text, the author’s situation,
and the surrounding world from which it came” (Weberman 47). Rather than seeing the
author’s intent as oppressive, Gadamer believes that this always enhances our
understanding of what we are reading. And rather than allow our knowledge about the
author and his or her intentions to dictate the meaning of the text, we are free to allow
this information to enrich our reading of it. Reflecting on the intent of the author, for
Gadamer, is a “fruitful starting point and tool for the discovery of possible meanings and
their coherence” (56). But we must tread lightly. Information about intention can help to
guard against misunderstanding, but, Gadamer argues, does not add anything to the
words of the text: “its function seems to be wholly negative; it rules out but does not
provide any positive content of its own” (56). Reading is an active process, where true
15
meaning is not simply absorbed. The text needs to be turned over; clues need to be
deciphered. The reader needs to put in work and make deliberate choices.
I learned to put in work when I read. Through deciphering and learning to
deconstruct a text I sought significant clues within. Sometimes these were metaphors or
symbols. I call this act “finding a thread.” The word text itself comes from the Latin
word textus, meaning woven cloth or web. A thread represents a continuity I find
through closely reading a text. In my estimation there are almost infinite threads within
every text, but the one I see when I read closely is decidedly “me” in the moment I
choose it. For example, if I am feeling alone and without friends, I am more apt to spot
symbols, metaphors, and sections of the text that seem to me to be about alienation and
loneliness. So in doing a close and personal reading of a text I am able to find meaning
tailored to who I am at that precise moment.
In his book Time and Narrative, philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued that narrative is
the only way we have to make sense of our experience in time, and it is inherent to
understanding our lives. Ricoeur states that “time becomes human to the extent that it is
articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it
becomes a condition of temporal existence” (TN 52). Ricoeur calls this the “narrative
unity of life” and states “narrative identity is the poetic resolution of the hermeneutical
circle” (248). Narrative formulates a system by which we can stand apart from our own
lives and reflect on them, leading to self-understanding; reflection is how we use that
self-understanding to give our lives meaning.
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Reflexivity teaches you accountability, a process Ricoeur calls “attestation” (TN
21): the fusion of analysis with reflection, “when the certainty of being the author of
one’s own discourse and of one’s own acts becomes the conviction of judging well and
acting well in a momentary and provisional approximation of living well” (180).
Through attestation the self is validated of who it is and what its values are, and the self
becomes confident that it is embracing its own values. This can only be achieved through
the process of formulating a narrative of the self. By formulating these narratives we are
able to bundle together seemingly random occurrences and experiences, to line them up
in a way which makes sense to us, to create order out of chaos. Ricoeur calls this a
“grasping together” which “carries with it the capacity for distancing itself from its own
production and in this way dividing itself in two” (61). Through attestation we get to
know ourselves. Every time we discover another truth about who we are, we remove
those extraneous layers that weigh us down, that are not who we are, just as
Michelangelo chipped away at his amorphous block of marble until he found David
within.
Ricoeur poetically calls literature the “apprenticeship of dying” (TN 162). I think
what he means is that we can use it to teach us to cope with our impending deaths and to
learn to live well in spite of it. Narrative helps us because through the “process of
emplotment we make sense of the past, and through a similar process of emplotment
which we might call poetics we imagine a future we might inhabit or in which we might
act. We are pulled forward in the hope of living well” (Ford 12). But this cannot be done
when we sit back and let the text wash over us; this only happens when the reader
17
engages with the text. Finding meaning, this chipping away, is an ongoing project; it
takes work. When the reader is active, he or she “plays with the narrative constraints,
brings about gaps, takes part in the combat between the novel and the antinovel, and
enjoys the pleasure Roland Barthes calls the pleasure of the text” (76-7). Through close
and active reading we inhabit the text; we give to it as much as it gives to us. There is a
sense of reciprocity to this type of reading.
Finding meaning, in any satisfying way, always involves some form of active
engagement. Ricoeur notes that we do not have absolute control over our lives (those
constraints and gaps we encounter) and are thus not the authors of it. However “by
narrating a life of which I am not the author as to existence, I [can at least] make myself
the coauthor as to its meaning” (Ricoeur 162). So although our lives often take turns
over which we have zero control (the condition of lacking authorship), we can still
choose to produce our own meaning. As readers, we have the ability to discern which
threads of meaning are significant to us. By doing so we emancipate meaning from the
text. By doing so we learn how to live.
Through the reader’s engagement with the text Ricoeur offers an analogy in
which the text is neither a Romantic window into the author’s mind nor a mirror that
reflects the reader back to herself: Ricoeur likens the text to “a projection, like an image
thrown onto a wall which already has a shape and a structure into which the reader can
interpose him or herself” (Ford 79). His ideas are similar to Gadamer’s fusion of
horizons, except for Ricoeur the text is a phenomenological object that takes us out of our
small worlds and place us into a larger context, and “any fusion of horizons must at the
18
same time consist in a self’s intentional projection of meaning” (Wall 40). As readers we
need to not only be active in our interpretations of what the texts says. We must be
willing to inhabit the text, to offer and bring ourselves into it, because the point of close
readings and deconstructing texts is “not to rediscover some pristine immediacy [the
mind of the author] but to mediate again and again in a new and more creative fashion”
(Kearney 106); to blend into the text. By doing so we seize back some power,
compensating for our lack of control (authorship) over our own lives. Narrative makes
our lives meaningful, and “it is precisely in creating one’s own story in the world that
understanding and interpretation through language reach their poetic destination” (Wall
35). This isn’t only a reading phenomenon; I’ve found it also works with writing.
Autobiography seems, to me, to be the most straightforward and indelible way to
construct one’s own story.
Philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey considers autobiography to be “the stem from which
all the other human studies have all branched out” (Hodges 29). For Dilthey our lives are
articulate in that they express their own meaning, a meaning we can understand if we
devote time and attention to it. He acknowledges “with most people this happens
occasionally and spasmodically, but with some it becomes a chief concern, they enquire
systematically into the meaning of their own lives” (29): those people are often
autobiographers. Autobiography is that system whereby one finds fulfillment of that
expression of meaning one gleans from observing the self, and is “essential to selfknowledge, since it is only through overt expression that our views of ourselves acquire
clarity, stability, or depth” (Wright 32). I can attest to this: I’m never clearer about my
19
own opinions and feelings than when I write them on the page. There is something about
taking the chaos of the mind and organizing it into language, and then putting that
language down in an ordered way that gives me clarity. Dilthey calls autobiography “the
greatest form of self-expression” and considers it to be “the most profound and deliberate
path toward self-knowledge” (32).
Indeed writing autobiographical texts has been a huge learning process for me.
I’ve learned to trust the writing process to reveal to me what it is I have to say. I’ve
found when I set out to write an essay with my ideas already formulated I staunch the
flow of discovery. When I intend to write an essay on a particular subject, I will end up
with an essay on that subject (and it typically isn’t very good; certainly never
transcendent), but when I allow writing to be a process of exploration, I always learn
something that surprises me, something that almost seems to come from outside of me.
When I write like this, my final text becomes “the record of an idea developing. [It] is a
process whereby an initial idea gets extended and refined” (Shaughnessy 234).
Writing is a recursive exercise; when I write I harken back in order to move
forward. Because of this particular phenomenon, writing is the other place I go (aside
from reading) for new insights. Writing is where I articulate my thoughts, those that
swarm around in my head, amorphous until I find myself writing them on a page, until I
look down at what I’ve written and reach a point of revelation. When I am successful at
the writing process I end up with a text that teaches me something or clarifies something I
already know. I have never learned more about who I am, what I ought to value, and
where I missed the mark than I did each time I wrote an autobiographical text. Writing
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about my life is a process of discovery for me, and I concur with Dilthey’s opinion of
autobiography when he calls it “the highest and most instructive form in which the
understanding of life confronts us” (32). And it can indeed feel like a confrontation at
times: harsh and unexpected, a slap in the face.
In a text I did not include in this collection I wrote about my childhood. My
mother and I are not close, and I harbored feelings of resentment toward her that
ultimately (and partially) manifested in my being unable to see her as a fully formed
person: I saw her as a mother who did not give me what I needed: warmth, approval, etc.
When I write about myself and other people, I attempt to be as fair and unbiased as I can,
so in writing about people I don’t get along with I am always cautious and conscious not
to write with a vendetta or from a place of anger. I do not write therapy for others to
read, so I have to practice standing outside of myself in order to do this, to place my
emotions to the side. This process of distancing myself alone stimulates emotional
growth in me since I do not practice this openness and detachment in my daily life. I
found myself writing about the night my mom, eighteen years old for less than a month,
snuck out her window at night to elope with my father. I wrote about the oppressive
home she was escaping, and about the pink convertible she drove to the Lake Tahoe
chapel in. Because I am stranded in my own mind I had to give myself imaginative
access to what it would be like to be my mother. As I was writing about her I attempted
to feel what it was like to be in her body that night: the fear, the nervous excitement, the
potential, the hope. And I found myself writing about the wind whipping through her
hair as she and my dad drove up the mountains toward the chapel, the hope she felt for
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the future, the freedom she felt as she drove away from her strict dad’s house. And as I
closed the scene I wrote, “She would be married by midnight.”
All of a sudden, looking at that one line, I was indescribably sad for her, knowing
(as the author and her daughter) things that would happen in her future, and how many of
her hopes and dreams would be unrealized. She became fully human to me in that
moment, and I haven’t looked at her with detachment since then. Writing taught me a
deeper empathy.
And that is just one example from one moment of my writing experience. I have
been repeatedly rewarded with moments of illumination like this. Because the Liberal
Arts graduate program enhanced my ability to interpret texts and my own life through the
process of reading and writing, I chose to do a project that was a culmination of those
skills. Here I have included three pieces of creative nonfiction, all autobiographical. I
wanted to know if I, as the author of the text, could read each piece I’d written and
analyze them. I wondered if it was even possible to read my own texts and glean any
more meaning or new understandings from them than I got when I wrote them.
When the idea first occurred to me it seemed impossible, and even worse,
solipsistic. What could be more solipsistic than writing about myself and then writing
about my own thoughts about reading about myself? It seemed so circular and difficult
to articulate that I wondered if it was even a coherent endeavor. I searched and searched
for books or articles featuring writers analyzing their own work, but I didn’t turn up
much. This only made me feel more doubtful about the idea. Additionally, I was
ashamed by what my project might reveal about my level of self-absorption. By
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ruminating on myself for so long and so deeply and in so many different ways, did I risk
the same fate as Narcissus, drowning as I attempt to embrace my own image?
There also seemed to be a terrible conflict between the benefits of attempting to
better understand myself versus the negative results (for the reader) of claiming authority.
Interpreting my own work, in light of the DOA philosophy, seemed a tremendously taboo
thing to do. It seems distasteful to publicly state what I think my texts mean. Crude.
Many writers I respect refuse to speak about their work, and with good reason: it can
potentially take personal meaning away from the reader. It can heighten my horizon at
the cost of limiting the reader’s, potentially cheating the reader out of his or her own
personal interpretation. Doing so would degrade and devalue my text in my eyes. My
intention in writing is always to give the reader a gift, whether that gift is simply honest
communication from one human to another, or at its highest level to make the reader feel
less lonely in the world.
In spite of all of these doubts, the more I read about DOAs and the more I
researched, the more firmly I became convinced that it was not only a coherent idea, but a
beneficial philosophical exercise. I had to push aside thoughts that it is vacuous and silly
to attempt to understand myself in a deeper way, publicly.
I was further encouraged when I came to understand I was not alone in my
endeavor. As it turns out, autobiographical self-understanding has much grounding in
history. Speech act theorists J.L. Austin and H.P. Grice did extensive research on firstperson utterances and discovered something which may seem obvious: as humans we
seek to know ourselves and to be known by others; we invoke the word “I” to
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“circumscribe knowledge: to individuate experiences, to acknowledge a particular social
and political placement in the world, and to ‘become who we are,’ as Nietzsche exhorts”
(19). It is what Susan Sontag calls a “response to the breakdown of the philosophical
system-making of the nineteenth century, […] a new kind of philosophizing: personal
(even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systemic” (Wright 19-20). Sontag
claims autobiography as a mode of philosophical reflection was foremost demonstrated
by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
I also found the exercise to be coherent and worthwhile because “the act of
autobiographical self-narration initiates a hermeneutic event between the reader and a
text” (Wright 30). This is true even if I am both the author and the reader. There is a
certain distance born out of the writing process—by invocating “an authorial voice, a
distinctive literary form, and a specific narrative structure” I can “engage in a form of
self-reflection otherwise closed off” (20) to me. It was crucial to me that my project is a
cumulative reflection of everything vital I gained from the program. Reflecting on my
own texts seemed a way to take those hermeneutic skills I learned in the graduate
program and to turn my attention inward, using my newfound analytical skills on myself
and demonstrating how priceless the program has been in my growth as a human being.
Aside from my doubts there were other stumbling blocks. We tend to look
outside of ourselves to learn new things and gain understanding, which makes it seem
unlikely that a person could learn anything from her own writing. However, I became
optimistic about gaining a new understanding in my texts when I came to understand
postmodern identity as fragmented, bifurcated. The process of bifurcation is inherent in
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the act of writing autobiographical texts. Bifurcation refers to a split in the self that
results in two identities: (in this case) the writer-self and the author subject. The writerself is “the individual who writes, arranges, edits, interprets, and perhaps reads the text in
which he or she appears as the main or sole character” (Wright 53). The author-subject is
the “rhetorical persona” (53) created by the writer-self. This process of bifurcation is
“both necessary and good, necessary for the sake of self-examination and self-narration,
and good because it initiates the Socratic process of self-transformation and invites a
higher form of self-unification to emerge” (Wright 28). Once bifurcated the self can
reflect on itself as another, opening up the possibility for greater self-understanding.
Self-narration is key to constructing self-identity because identity construction
“arises from a process of selecting, highlighting, and deleting (or repressing) remembered
experiences through a set of precognitive or subconscious concepts of ideas” (Wright 50),
in short: through editing. I use the same processes of selecting, highlighting and deleting
experiences when I write autobiographical texts or when I formulate an argument. I have
come to see writing/editing as a microcosm of identity construction. Similarly, the
process of textual interpretation is a microcosm of garnering meaning from all of life.
We choose the things we notice and those we ignore; we choose that which we elevate
and that which we find useless; we do this whether we realize it or not, but my growth in
the program means I am now consciously participating in my own editing process; this
has, thus far, led to a more fulfilling existence.
Just as the possible selections we make in editing our identities are infinite, so too
are the possible readings, even if you are both the author and the reader. Just as “an
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autobiography is as much the expression of a present self as it is the representation of a
past one” (Lloyd 170), new horizons (and thus new interpretations) through reading
emerge that are contingent upon where the reader is at the precise moment of reading.
The reader’s “horizon is not privileged and singular but is instead a fluid and relative
moment in the life of effective history, a moment that is indeed productive and disclosive,
but one that like all others before it, will be overcome and fused with future horizons”
(Wright 140). Given that time has passed since I wrote each text and I have had new
experiences, thoughts, and thus, a “new horizon,” I have new interpretations and
understandings of each piece. Because of this new horizon and my interpretation through
this lens, my texts are as much an expression of who I am now as they are an expression
of who I used to be. I am a different reader each time I read.
What follows are three pieces of my creative nonfiction, followed by my
interpretations or understandings of each one. My intention is for the reader to read each
text first, then read my evaluations afterward so that they do not color the text and
prejudice the reader.
The choice, however, is yours. The text belongs to you now.
I hand it over to you.
26
THE FALLING SICKNESS
My parents told us my dad was going to die when I was in my teens. The four of
us—Mom, Papa, Michael and me—all sat near the Christmas tree in our living room
feeling the warmth of the fireplace with gifts on our laps. My mom’s angel collection
covered the surface of the sideboard. The television was on, as always. Both my parents
held hot mugs of coffee. My mom was still in her tatty skunk nightgown and robe, and
she leaned forward to speak. I had just opened a Christmas present, and my new gray
angora scarf and hat set were heavy on my lap.
Hours later something dreamlike occurred: I watched my Christmas presents get
run over by a Mack truck. I’d put my boxes of gifts and stocking stuffers on the roof of
my car before I got inside. I pulled the door closed. I’d driven halfway down the street
before I realized I’d left them up there. I never even heard them fall off. In my rearview
mirror I saw my presents scattered across the road. I made a quick U-turn to collect them
when the truck had appeared out of nowhere, crushing the box, smashing everything flat,
scattering them all over the road. I ran into the street. I picked up my scarf and tried to
scrub off the greasy, black tire print. It wouldn’t come off, but I wrapped it around my
neck anyway. I was freezing. More than ten years later it still smells like gas and metal.
Your father is going to die. It’s been over a decade since they first told us, but I
won’t ever forget it. Maybe because my mom cried. She never cries; when we saw this
my brother and I sank.
Sometimes my mom likes to be the bearer of bad news. A group of children run
toward a public pool in the sweltering heat and it is my mom who stands at the door to
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tell them it’s closed for repairs. Ask her for an update on a friend’s pregnancy and listen
to her say, “Oh, you didn’t know? She had a miscarriage.” Ask her how she’s doing and
she glows as she informs you of a calcified deposit on her shoulder, her twisted ankle, her
impending hysterectomy. But that day there was no gleam to her words. Her dark brown
eyes, which had been hardened from her annual Christmas morning argument with Papa,
had an unfamiliar cast.
Reese Family tradition says Christmas lurches to a start only after my parents
wake up and fight from their bed and my mom storms out to the kitchen to slam things
around as she makes the coffee. I can hear Papa whine her name after her. The terse
drone of argument in the background is as characteristic of Christmas as the tree that
flickers with ornaments and strings of popcorn, the gifts stacked beneath it, my mom’s
cloth advent calendar with the little mouse, the television blaring, and Papa opening up
his bible and trying to read over the noise, trying to infuse the holiday with meaning. I
had left home that year in the most tumultuous way a born again Christian teenage girl
can leave home: my parents found my boyfriend crouched naked in my closet as he tried
to tug his pajama pants up over his knees. That week I packed my things and left to stay
with my best friend’s parents.
My relationship with my parents was strained, but I came home on Christmas Eve
to sleep in the same bed as my little brother, to listen to mix tapes and talk, our Christmas
tradition. He was 13 and I was 17 and we stayed up late, chattering away with childish
Christmas excitement. We still felt like children that year. I think that was the last year
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we slept together in the same bed. It was the last year we had a real Christmas tree, the
year before my mom brought home a scentless, artificial one. A dead one in a box.
That might not even be true, but that’s how I remember it.
“Your father is going to die,” my mom said, and she looked back and forth
between my face and my brother’s for a reaction. “He has two years. That’s two more
Christmases ... hopefully.”
Papa looked past the jumble of red and green and gold paper on the ground, the
tape that used to hold it all together. His eyes bore into the TV. I put my scarf down and
looked to the TV, too. I didn’t know what to say. None of us moved to embrace each
other. We sat there silent except for the sounds of the TV until Papa ripped the paper
from another gift. It was tools or a wallet or a flannel or whatever.
Papa is a dominant male with traditional ideas of what makes a man. I like a lot
of them: a man takes responsibility, protects his family, is heroic, and doesn’t complain.
He’s a hero: he has saved lives multiple times. He pulled a toddler out of a fire at the
moment she fell into it, his reflexes so quick he created a pocket of air that saved her
from permanent burns. He and my Uncle Charlie saved two hysterical women from
drowning at the river; they carried the women on their backs and swam them back to
shore. Another time my dad and Uncle Charlie saw a truck in flames on the side of the
freeway. People stood by their cars watching, transfixed by the blaze. When Papa and
Uncle Charlie pulled over to see what was happening, Papa saw a hand reach out of the
passenger side window, this single hand just waving, so they ran over and pulled two
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men out. One of the men had blood spurting from his neck, a stream shot out with every
heartbeat. Papa shouted for a white towel, and when no one stepped forward he tore off
his own white shirt and wrapped it around the man’s neck to stop the bleeding. He
pressed it there until an ambulance arrived.
Papa has other ideas about what makes a man though, and those I can’t get
behind: not being a fag, primarily. Papa has a laundry list of things that are faggy: gay
men, the color pink, caring about clothing/fashion, dyeing one’s hair, my little brother
Michael crying, me dressing Michael up in a bonnet and girl clothes and calling him
Michelle, Michael playing with G.I. Joe action figures. (Papa calls GI Joes “dolls.”) I’ve
always gotten the impression that Papa thinks talking about his feelings is gay. And the
only thing he wanted less than Michael turning out to be a “girly man” is appearing to be
one himself. It was more acceptable back then, I think, but Papa used to hit us with his
belt or slap us across the face to punish us when we were bad. He made us bend over the
bed, and I’d turn my head and look at myself in the closet mirror. We weren’t permitted
to squirm or tighten up. When he slapped me across the face the worst part was the
moment before he did it, where he told me to hold my face still, to stop flinching; the
wordlessness anticipation of it. I learned to be still then, to not react. My mom—like
most moms maybe—threatened us with what my father would do to us when he got
home, and that was usually enough to straighten us out. Sometimes we were afraid of
him. Still, things between us were easier when I was little. Our language had nothing to
do with words. We laughed or grunted when he danced with us. He swung me around or
threw me into the air, or he lay on his back and lifted me up with his feet while I soared
30
over him. We played air instruments in the car, backing him up while he sang. We ran
around in the yard and he hoisted me up into our tree. We swam together. When I was
four I sat in a parking lot with my mom and confessed I wanted to marry Papa.
When I got older the physical part of our relationship faded away, so what lies
between us now can only manifest itself in language, communication. This is
unfortunate, for me at least, because our communication consists of Papa talking and me
listening, or trying to. My opinions don’t interest him. Since we don’t talk a lot, I don’t
think Papa knows much about me, and what I know about him fits in this paragraph: his
favorite color is blue, he watches Westerns, he used to body build. He was a drug addict
then he became a born again Christian, he’s a family man, he’s stoic, Conservative, hates
peas, talks too much, and wears a mustache. He loves dogs, he likes guns, he’s a great
singer, he drives my mother crazy but is faithful to her, he is not a good listener, he is
territorial, he can be insensitive to the feelings of others, he adores his grandchildren and
he loves television. He watches TV a lot lately, and it’s usually on so loud that when I
visit I can hear explosions and gunshots from the front porch.
His hearing began to deteriorate in his twenties. By his thirties he’d already
coined his famous catchphrase, “Your what hurts?” as a response to not hearing what was
just said. When we watch television together he looks over at my mom and she repeats
the dialogue, rolling her eyes. There are certain sounds he can’t hear anymore: high
pitched beeping noises like alarms for coffee pots, clocks, and the oven. He sets the
timer on the oven and the rest of the family hears it beeping for a full minute while he
walks around oblivious. Last year he was fitted with a hearing aid, though I only saw
31
him wear it the day he brought it home. I hid in different corners of the house, expanding
outward with each hiding place, whispering words and asking if he could hear me.
Papa is an obsessive person, so when he becomes interested in something he
immerses himself in it. It is all he reads about, talks about, and spends time on.
Sometimes he remains interested in the same thing for years, so that knowing Papa at any
point in time means to know drugs, or the bible, or nutrition, or juicing, or gardening, or
dog training. When he started doing drugs he went all out: marijuana, alcohol, cocaine,
meth, heroin. He sold my mom’s engagement ring to buy more drugs. He was caught
selling hard ones in Japan when he was in the Navy.
Papa’s interests are transformative for him: he is a vessel for the thing he loves.
His preoccupations don’t leave space for things like listening or interest in the lives of the
people he cares about. This aberration in his personality can make him exhausting to talk
to because in those brief spaces he allows you to speak you can tell he is just waiting for
his turn again, identifying a crack in what you’re saying in which to crowbar in what he
wants to say.
No matter how hard you try, a conversation with Papa always gets derailed. Even
as you consciously work to stay focused he expertly manipulates the conversation back to
his interests. He’s a salesman hawking only his own passions. He tried to engage my
husband, Danny, in a conversation about Christianity once by asking him—out of
nowhere it seemed—if he believed in Absolute Truth. Then he pulled out a piece of
paper and drew a diagram meant to bring Danny around, bludgeoning him with words
and pictures and as he saw it, logic. On holidays the family makes eye contact with each
32
other and chuckles with affection or exhaustion toward Papa and whomever he has
cornered. Papa can be a real bore.
But he’s also funny without trying to be. Because he is so preoccupied with his
own interests, he is the king of non-sequiturs. When he decided to practice training his
dogs for search and rescue, he called and, with no explanation, asked me if he could have
a pair of my daughter’s dirty panties. He seemed surprised that he had to explain his
plans to put the underwear in a PVC pipe and hide it to teach his dogs to find my
daughter. He was equally annoyed when he called up a Citrus Heights funeral home and
was refused when he asked if he could have “just a small piece of flesh” from a corpse. It
was all part of teaching a dog search and rescue, and Papa didn’t see anything weird
about the request. When I told him it could have been construed as creepy he just looked
confused. These types of Papa stories abound. At my wedding, the best man, Chris, asked
him how he was doing. Those of us in Papa’s inner circle knew—boy, did we know—
that Papa was embroiled in the personal drama of mating his female dog, Maya, but Chris
had no idea. So when my dad sighed and said, “I’m having trouble finding a male,”
Chris was taken a little off-guard.
Another time Danny was standing on my parent’s front porch watching the sunset
when Papa sidled up to him to gloat about how swollen Maya’s vulva was.
He recently sent an email to my sister-in-law saying he’d just gotten Maya’s OFA
rating back and it was the second highest rating possible. (“I feel like I did when Michael
and Nicole were born, and she’s not even pregnant.”) When he finally found the right
male he spent almost $2,000 of his very tight budget to breed her. Last time I went to his
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house he prompted me to run my fingers up and down Maya’s torso, and gleamed with
pride when I remarked on how large her nipples felt all of a sudden, how running my
hand along her torso was like running a stick along a picket fence.
A few months ago at my mom’s surprise birthday party my dad sat me down on
the couch to tell me he has cancer: renal cell carcinoma. He made his way around the
party, sitting us down one at a time, telling us the news. I sort of froze up, my brother
acted like he’d heard nothing, and my sister-in-law went barreling around the corner
sobbing. Though his mom died of kidney failure, Papa himself didn’t seem that
concerned. It’s hard to tell with dads, though: part of the job description is being stoic,
but all of the information he had sounded hopeful too.
Though kidney cancer is notoriously resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, his
was caught early enough that it hadn’t spread. The surgery he was about to have to
freeze the tumor has a 95% success rate. Still, the word cancer is like a bullet. I asked
him if he was scared. He shrugged it off. I pressed him and he answered me with an
anecdote:
He and my mom went out to dinner the evening he found out he has cancer. He
was quiet, so my mom asked him if he was okay. He said he was, but my mom knew
better, so she asked what he was thinking about. Staring out the window of the
restaurant, he sighed. He told her he wasn’t thinking about anything, but she still pressed
him, “Is it about the cancer?”
He shook his head. “Actually, no,” he said, “All I can really think about is if
Maya’s eggs were fertilized or not.”
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Papa grew up in a family of six children. Four were boys, and he was the oldest
and by far the most handsome man in his family, the only handsome man, with black hair
and light green eyes to his siblings’ brown on brown. He was also the most athletic.
Papa set the record for the most sit-ups in a minute at Mira Loma High School, wrestled,
played baseball, basketball, water polo, swam on the school’s swim team. He’s a brilliant
swimmer. He’s the guy people go to when they want their children to learn to swim. He
taught my daughter Daisy to swim by the time she was two. Once I dreamt that he could
lift the top half of his body out of the water and move himself across the surface of the
pool like a dolphin performing at Sea World. For a year afterward I couldn’t determine if
it was a memory or a dream. It seemed possible. He used to go out back to swim in his
faded purple Speedo and get angry with my brother and me when we’d laugh.
If being handsome and athletic were his blessings, defective genes are his curse.
Both of his parents died in their fifties and all of his younger brothers died in their forties.
Uncle Matt got lung cancer and continued to smoke, even with a trach installed in his
neck. Uncle Charlie died suddenly of a heart attack on a friend’s back patio. In the early
2000s, Uncle Mark was beaten nearly to death by a group of teenagers with baseball bats
and when he woke up he thought it was the 1980s. Within years he died of liver failure.
Papa used to visit the gym every day before work. He read bodybuilder
magazines and wore a lot of muscle shirts. He loved to dance. When he was in his
thirties he was playing basketball at the park when he rolled his ankle and crouched onto
the asphalt in pain. He tore cartilage and needed surgery. The surgeon propped his ankle
back up with pins and screws. The night he came home from surgery it was raining, and
35
the pain was so bad I could hear him crying in his bed down the hall. He has a permanent
limp now, a stagger that gets better with each step and worsens every time he starts over
again. In his thirties, he felt pain in his hands and wrists: arthritis. By the time he was in
his forties he was diagnosed with Hepatitis B and C, possibly from sharing heroin needles
in his early twenties.
He was told he only had two years left to live when his liver was biopsied and
sent to the Mayo Clinic to be examined. They diagnosed him with hemochromatosis, a
disease that causes the body to absorb and store dangerous levels of iron. Because the
body has no way to process extra iron, it is stored in the liver, heart and pancreas, causing
them to fail. Hemochromatosis may be the cause of his arthritis and his liver disease and
the cirrhosis of the liver and his diabetes and his heart disease: he has hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy, a disease affecting the heart’s muscle, causing the walls of the heart to
become thicker and thicker.
For years he was on the liver transplant list. He drove down to the Liver
Transplant Center in San Francisco frequently until they turned him away, saying he’d
only re-infect the new liver. Papa doesn’t complain, but his weeks overflow with
doctor’s appointments, biopsies, check-ups, driving back and forth to different offices,
meeting new specialists, surgeries, pills, baskets full of orange and white bottles in
various sizes, Dilantin, Methadone, Depakote, insulin shots, ointments, creams, surgeries,
Bowen therapy, MRIs, CT scans, x-rays, phlebotomies, different sized needles digging
under his already tender and graying skin.
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Papa can’t play sports anymore. Even though he has a swimming pool in his
backyard, he rarely swims. He says it’s too cold. He doesn’t dance anymore. Walking
any distance hurts him too much. He has a handicapped placard on his truck. He uses
knives with special handles to cut his tri-tip. He rubs creams on his wrists and hands,
experiments with his diet, but he still hurts. When the doctors said he had two years to
live, he and my mom withdrew all the money they’d saved for my brother and I to attend
college and spent it flying from California to Utah to visit a holistic doctor, maybe a
miracle worker: this was over fifteen years ago and he’s still alive.
When I was eight, Papa had his first nocturnal grand mal seizure and my mom, in
her late twenties at the time, younger than I am now, didn’t know what it was or how to
deal with it. In a panic, she called an ambulance and then called his parents. My
grandparents got there before the ambulance arrived in time to see Papa’s nude figure
streaking down the hallway as he sobbed, my mom trailed after him. He didn’t recognize
his parents. My brother and I stayed asleep. We didn’t hear the ambulance pull up our
driveway, or my dad’s cries, my mom’s begging and sobbing, or the stretcher squeaking
as it was pushed through the doorway.
The second time he had a seizure I was nine. I saw it happen and I panicked. Like
a robot short-circuiting I circled the coffee table, round and round, hyperventilating and
repeating, “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die,” until my mother
looked up from where she knelt over him, her eyes pink and blurry with fright, and
threatened to slap me. A year later I recorded Papa's howls from down our shallow
hallway with a little cassette player I’d gotten for Christmas. His cries were the most
37
animalistic sounds I'd ever heard from a human being. They were distressing to me, so I
can’t explain why I wanted to record them, but I did. I played the cassette for my best
friend Kim the next day, and she was so disturbed by it that she told her parents. By
evening Papa knew. He could not understand why I did it, and I couldn’t offer a
satisfactory answer. I was shocked that he was hurt by it. It was the first time I
recognized I had the power to hurt him, and the vulnerability implicit in that disturbed
me.
38
A year before Papa found out he was terminal, he took a mid-day nap in his
bedroom. All the way across the house I heard a crashing sound, recognizable to me
somewhere deep inside, and I ran to Papa’s bedroom. I found him in on his back on the
carpet in the midst of a series of seizures. I screamed for my mom. These seizures were
different than any before them, so strong he stopped breathing, and lay there gasping and
then not moving. My mom called an ambulance while I put pillows between him and the
dresser he had fallen next to. Waiting for help to arrive, we watched as his eyes rolled
back in his head over and over again. This was the first time I saw blood pour out of his
mouth, and I was horrified by the color of it. It was not a crimson, but a thick, dark red,
brown or black. It was the blood of something dead or rotten or evil.
Epilepsy used to be called “the sacred disease” because the ancients believed that
a person having seizures was possessed by a demon. They thought it was contagious,
that whoever touched him was vulnerable to possession too. Akkadian texts from as far
back as 2300 BC speak of a person like Papa: a person who foams at the mouth, whose
hands and feet tense up, and whose neck stretches and turns to the left. In Prehistoric
times, people may have tried to drill holes in the skull of the epileptic. The Romans
called epilepsy the morbus comitialis, which loosely translated means that the person
who has a seizure is a complete buzz kill: they ruin the day for everyone else.
The stigma surrounding it made it shameful to have a seizure. Anyone who felt
one coming on fled to a private place to be alone. The epileptic was a figure of horror
and disgust, treated with contempt. Romans spit on their bodies as they writhed around.
They called the spitting “throwing back the contagion.” At one time it was believed that
39
drinking the blood of a gladiator would cure it. Some thought it was better to eat a piece
of a gladiator’s liver. Another cure was thought to be rubbing menstrual blood on the
epileptic’s feet. In the 5th century the epileptic’s mouth was smeared with blood as they
seized. One cure was a concoction of crocodile feces, the heart and genitals of a rabbit,
the blood of a tortoise, and the testicles of another animal. Some epileptics drank a
potion made up of burned human bones. Some allowed themselves to be castrated in
hopes of being cured.
Nothing we did made his seizures stop, so my mom and I hovered over Papa and
cried. We tried to tip him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on the blood. When the
paramedics arrived they lifted him up and strapped Papa to a stretcher. He slammed
around so violently that as they carried him out the front door he almost flipped the
stretcher upside down. I couldn’t do anything to help, so I watched the paramedics’ faces
tighten, and I watched them struggle to regain their balance. I kept stepping forward and
then stopping myself. I’d wanted to ride with him in the ambulance but amidst the chaos
I couldn’t get in before they closed both doors on me. My mom stayed by my side, and
so we watched it pull away down our shaded street. We paused only for a moment to
catch our breath before we ran to the car and followed them to the hospital.
Papa’s first and only job was at Sierra Printing, a family business owned by his
father. My brother and I used grew up visiting to Sierra Printing, three separate buildings
filled with big machines and stacks of paper in all different sizes. We pushed each other
around on the dollies and examined the massive machinery. In each building there were
dumpsters filled to the top with shredded paper, and Papa let us climb to the top and then
40
jump inside and wade through it. He brought home notepads in different sizes and shapes
and pastel colors, but the biggest treat for my brother and me were the huge poster-sized
sheets of glossy white paper he brought home for us to draw on.
When my grandpa died he surprised Papa by changing his will and passing the
business down to one of his younger brothers, my Uncle Matt. As the oldest brother, my
dad grew up being told (and believing) he would inherit the family business. I am not
privy to the reasons for the change, but there are always rumors in the family, and one is
that my grandfather was turned off by my father’s conversion to fundamentalist
Christianity. He hated how my dad proselytized, no doubt making his coworkers
uncomfortable. My grandpa didn’t like how fundamentalist Christianity had taken over
my dad’s life. He didn’t approve of my parents pulling us out of public school to
homeschool us. He warned Papa that my brother and I would rebel because of all the
restrictions, but Papa had to do what he thought was right. The other rumor is that Uncle
Matt worked up in the main office with my grandpa, and as my grandpa’s brain tumor
began to close in on him, my Uncle Matt was in his ear, creating, or at least widening, the
division between my dad and his father.
I loved my Uncle Matt, but we didn’t visit Papa at work as much once he took
over. Uncle Matt sat in my grandpa’s old office at my grandpa’s old desk in my
grandpa’s old chair, chain-smoking cartons of cigarettes and chain-drinking Diet Pepsis.
Whereas my grandpa had lived modestly in the same home for decades, Uncle Matt
upgraded homes constantly. It seemed like every few months he got a new flashy car.
Within years the company went bankrupt and had to be shut down.
41
After the seizures the day Papa stopped breathing, his doctor gave him a note that
forbade him from returning to work for a few months. Throughout those months Papa
loafed around the house, resting, waiting to return to work. When he called Uncle Matt
to return to work, his brother told him the position had been filled.
Papa and I never talked about it, but for a while after he was fired I saw him dress
up and leave the house with a resume in his hand. His only job experience was at Sierra
Printing, so he visited competing printing companies. I didn’t like picturing my dad
starting a new job. Maybe it was the thought of my dad vulnerable to others, cowed
almost, that bothered me. No one ever hired him, though.
His health continued to deteriorate and he’s been unemployed and on disability
ever since. Now he sits in front of the television all day, the volume booming, but most
of the time he isn’t even watching it. He sleeps. His job at Sierra must have been
supervisory, because as soon as he stopped working there he began to oversee every
minor detail around the house. He looked for anything, crumbs on the counter, a grain of
rice on the floor. He made orders from his recliner in the middle of the living room. He
was angry.
My parents attend church multiple times a week, speak in tongues, lift their hands
to worship, pray before meals, pray to get good parking spots, and pray before making
both major and minor decisions. When I was a teenager and asked to go out with friends
Papa often told me he had to pray about it, and sometimes while I waited for God to
answer him, I waved goodbye to a car full of my friends as they drove off our street.
Papa studies the Bible. He has computer programs that translate Greek words and
42
programs that allow him to spend hours dissecting tiny sections of the Bible, verse by
verse, word by word. One night when I was making midnight nachos I found a note with
the words “four horsemen” and “apocalypse” written on it in Papa’s handwriting. When
he was told he was dying, he prayed for God to tell him what he needed to do with the
rest of his life. God told him to pursue his childhood dream of being a dog trainer.
The Reese family has always had a dog, but Rocky, a Rottweiler, was the first dog
Papa was serious about training. Before we had Rocky the Rottweiler we had Cocoa the
Dachshund, nicknamed “Cocoa Loco” because he was out of control. Cocoa was too
hyperactive to listen to commands, and when he escaped into the front yard he went
straight into the road. He was eventually run over by our neighbor as she backed out of
her driveway.
Papa only spoke German to Rocky, so we had to learn German commands to get
Rocky to sit or lay down or stay. This was so typical of my dad, to make communication
complicated, to make something fun like a new puppy an undertaking, something only he
could control. Rocky was not a family pet, this was made clear to us. He was Papa’s dog
and probably that was the reason my mom loathed him. She didn’t allow Rocky inside of
the house, and he was banished to a chain-link pen in the backyard. My mom flared her
nostrils when she was near him, exaggerating his odor, just stopping short of pretending
to gag. Her hatred seemed to solidify Papa’s relationship with Rocky, and they’d sit on
the tailgate of Dad’s white Chevrolet truck parked in the middle of our long driveway,
facing an orange and pink sunset. Papa had his arm draped around Rocky’s small and
rounded shoulders; the back of Rocky’s head was like that of a content teenage girl with
43
her first love. Seeing Papa at peace like this was nice, but I could hear a grunt as my
mom bore down on the scene at the window. “Do you see that?” Her breath was hot
behind my ear. “His arm around the dog like that? He hasn’t sat with me like that in
years.”
Rocky died shortly after. Papa didn’t tell any of us the day he took Rocky to be
euthanized. I never got to say goodbye. One day I came home and the pen was empty.
He was just gone.
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I told Papa I hated him once. I’d never said it before, not to anyone. I’ve always
been a believer in the power of words, cautious about the things that I say. I might be
overly optimistic in my ability to explain things, but I’ve always known there are some
words you can’t take back. That day Papa and I were alone in the house. I was fourteen
then, and obsessed with the idea of being in love. No, loved.
My boyfriend had the ugliest face I’d ever held in my hands. Scarlet and
yellowish pustules throbbed across his cheeks. The first time I saw him I pitied him—I
thought he was a homely girl—but he sat next to me in a dark movie theater and took my
hand in his. We’d never even met before then, just passed by each other in church aisles.
It was shocking, and the excitement encapsulated in this gesture spread first through my
hand, then up my arm to my chest, and for months it reverberated throughout my every
gesture and thought and interaction. I walked around with an internal smile. He told me
he loved me. He told me I was beautiful. He sent me letters in the mail and called me on
the phone. He talked to me. He had an abundance of words for me, so it didn’t bother
me that he’d recently been released from juvenile hall for assault with a deadly weapon.
I had no qualms about his current residence in a group home, or the big gang tattoo across
his chest. Papa didn’t trust him, especially after he found us making out against the side
of our church, and he told me I was forbidden to speak with him any longer. I wasn’t to
do so much as look him in the eye on Sunday. We’d be broken up before the year was
over. I’d eventually find out he was a serial cheater, but I didn’t know that yet.
Papa pulled the entertainment center out and told me to squeeze behind it to
vacuum the dust that had collected there. I hated the taste of soap and the feel of his hand
45
slapping my cheek, but instead of helping, I took the vacuum’s hose in my hand and told
Papa I didn’t think he was being fair, that he was taking his punishment too far. When
that didn’t work, I begged and argued, my voice got louder and more disrespectful. But
his mind was made up, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to budge.
I couldn’t see why he was trying to take this from me, and in my fervor my words
took on a life of their own. I hadn’t even realized I was going to say it. We looked at
each other, stunned, and I ran to my room. When I got there I sat down on the bed across
from the mirror and watched my resolve slip down. Someone once told me that you
know you truly hate someone if you don’t care if they die. I sat without moving, trying to
think of what to say to him. There were no words. I couldn’t think of a single
meaningful thing to say after I hate you. I wanted him to know I didn’t, but as I sat on
the edge of that bed I couldn’t formulate a single word.
So I went to him the only way I knew how. I got on my knees and crawled to my
bedroom door, my head and shoulders slouched down as I pulled myself across the tiles.
I moved on all fours over to the hardwood where Papa was still vacuuming. His face was
stiff and he wouldn’t look at me. My body shook and my hair lay like a mop over my
face, and I peeked at him from behind it. I can’t explain how in those early years a thing
like that seemed to me to be unforgivable. I dragged myself closer until I pushed my face
into his shoes and howled.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I repeated myself over and over until I could barely
breathe, “I don’t hate you.” I wept. Papa was stoic. We didn’t make eye contact. He
didn’t lean over and pick me up off the ground, or smooth my hair from my face, or pull
46
me close. He didn’t reject me, or turn me away or send me back to my room. What he
did do was stare past me, through yards and yards of space and say, Okay.
Okay.
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After that day I became very depressed and even more withdrawn than usual. I
took it really hard: feeling something like love and then having it torn from me. I could
barely eat. I was angry with my parents, and I spent almost all my time in my room,
listening to Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette. I tore pages from magazines and taped
them all over my walls. My parents took me to see our new youth pastor and his wife,
and arranged for me to attend youth group services with them several times a week; they
hoped the youth group could help guide me, I think.
This occurred near the beginning of the Brownsville Revival/Pensacola
Outpouring, an intense religious revival happening in Pensacola, Florida at an Assembly
of God church. The Holy Spirit was said to have swept through the place, filling the
people in their pews with religious ecstasy, even healing people of disease and illness.
Our church was hit with revival too after our pastor’s wife returned from a women’s
retreat in Pensacola. She stood in front of the church and as she was playing the piano
she collapsed backwards onto the stage as if she had fainted. She lay there on her back
with her arms lifted up, praying and crying, worshiping God, speaking in tongues,
completely enraptured. And the spirit seemed to roll through the church then. People
around me started to hit the carpet and lay there slain in the spirit. Some of them rolled
around in the aisles laughing hysterically, saying they were drunk in the spirit, or they
cried or screamed or spoke in tongues. I didn’t know what to make of it so I stayed in my
chair. I just sat there, scanning the congregation, trying in vain to make eye contact with
my boyfriend.
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The youth pastor and his wife took our youth group all over northern California to
visit other revival churches. At one of the churches we visited the speaker called forward
anyone who needed prayer: anyone who felt alone, anyone who needed help of any kind.
I wasn’t the type to go forward for those types of things because I hated to be looked at or
draw attention to myself, and the one time I had been called forward by a guest speaker at
our home church he had humiliated me by telling the entire congregation (and my
parents) that God was telling him I was a chameleon, that I was desperate to fit in. But
this time I was compelled to walk forward and stand before the altar. I was nervous, but I
closed my eyes and lifted my hands toward the ceiling as strangers from the front rows
formed a tight circle around me and started to pray for me. No one asked what I needed
prayer for, and I couldn’t articulate a thing like that anyway. They laid hands on me,
millions of hands all over my body, warm, murmuring, speaking in tongues, all of it for
me. And I lost it. I surrendered. I began to cry. Not a normal cry, but a deep, primitive
cry that shook my whole body, and I collapsed.
I fell, and my body hit the carpet. I had my eyes closed the entire time, and I
could feel their hands on me still, and their voices grew louder, so my cries escalated too.
I gave myself completely over to it. I screamed like an injured animal. I growled and I
shook. I didn’t care how I looked; I didn’t even think about it. I forgot about my friends
sitting in the rows of chairs behind me. I forgot about all of it and in that moment I
became this thing that existed outside of myself.
But then I heard someone say I had a demon in me and it needed to be exorcised,
and I seized on that, the idea that all of the tensions of my life, all the things I wanted, all
49
the things I lost, all of my inner pain, could be resolved in one single public drama. I did
have a demon, the source of everything dark within me. And so I snarled and rolled
around on the carpet, and more people came and put their hands on me and shouted to
God to cast this demon out of me. They spoke in a frenzy, in soft English, in barbarian
tongues, in whispers and shouts. Some of the women were crying and moaning over me.
I could feel them rocking back and forth. Everything was love; every type of love was
presented to me all at once. Some of the hands on me were gentle and soothing, patting
me or rubbing my back, and some of them were rough and pressing, stiff palms almost
striking me as they shouted for the demon to leave. “In Jesus’ name!” I heard them cry,
“In Jesus’ name I rebuke you!” The women continued their chorus of moans, their song
of sympathy. And it was beautiful.
But the demon wouldn’t leave, and I gagged, almost vomiting, and drool hung
from my lips. I shrieked and bellowed. I writhed in pain on the carpet. I choked out the
word “no” in my demon voice, my face tensed up and ugly. I convulsed violently, I
seized. I kicked my legs and tensed my feet up in my shoes. My mouth foamed and my
neck twisted and turned to the left. I wanted this demon out of me, whatever demon it
was. The demon of loneliness. The demon of isolation. I pushed through my lungs as if
giving birth to it, as if the demon’s only exit was a tunnel through my throat and mouth.
Gagging, sweating, shivering, my grief and pain reached a climax, and I finally
went limp and cried very softly. I was carried outside. Someone placed me on a bench
and draped a blanket over my shoulders. Someone else brought me a paper cone filled
50
with lukewarm water. Someone rubbed my back. Even outside on that bench I was
hesitant to open my eyes, to come back.
I never told my parents. To me the experience was private.
51
At about two o’clock in the morning on my 24th birthday Papa pulled a gun on
me. I had spent the evening out with some friends and they had just dropped me off at
home where I was living with my parents and my daughter. I had forgotten my house
keys, so after trying to get in through the front door next to my parents’ bedroom, I went
around the back of the house and past the swimming pool to enter through the patio door.
I had chosen not to knock because it seemed too late to wake my parents. The sliding
glass door in the back was unlocked, and as I entered the den it was so dark I had to feel
my way through the room. When I got to the doorway of the den I was grabbed and felt a
gun touch the side of my head. It has always seemed to me that my dad knew it was me
the entire time: he’d known I was out that evening because he was babysitting Daisy so I
could go out for my birthday. No sooner had he pressed the gun to my head than he had
already put it down and told me I was “lucky.” Then he went off to bed and so did I. We
never talked about it after that.
That’s what I mean when I say that Papa is territorial. He’s territorial even when
he’s on public property. He was walking Rocky at the park one evening when he saw a
group on teenage boys hitting each other with sticks. He couldn’t tell if they were
roughhousing or seriously fighting, so he stepped out of the shadows like Chuck Norris
and said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” until the boys dropped their branches and left
confused. At home he’s humiliated my brother by lecturing his friends for neglecting to
knock when they walk in a few feet behind my brother. He’s told these same teenage
boys, “This dog here could tear you apart.” He’s lectured my friends similarly.
52
When I was eighteen I made the mistake of leaving the front door unlocked with a
note to my friend to just walk in, in case I was still in the shower. Papa came home from
his doctor’s appointment before they got there. He tore the note from the door and
dangled it before me like something pungent, as if he were holding a used condom in his
hand. This time he got close to my face to tell me how stupid I was. I’d never been
courageous or dumb enough to argue with him before, but it was all too much. Shaking, I
said I was sick of his shit. Papa stood up straighter as if a war had been waged. “Don’t
you use that kind of language in my house.”
"Pussy fuck cock!" I shouted. He leaned his head back as if my breath was rancid,
but I kept going, "Mother fucking cock-sucking Jesus fucking Christ!" I went on,
knowing what was coming, not caring, saying every single curse word I could think of, a
daisy chain of profanity. I hadn’t realized until then that I had been stopped up with it.
“Come here,” he said when I finally stopped cursing, beckoning me with his
index finger and then pointing to the ground directly in front of his feet. Punishment. He
expected me to shuffle toward him and present my face to him, not moving or flinching
once my head was in place. As soon as my face was still he would slap me. I’d always
complied before. Two decades of this gesture and his control over me seemed to come
back to me all in this one moment, and I ran at him with my head down, flailing,
throwing punches, physically fighting with my own father. My eye was jabbed as he
pushed me away. I slid across the kitchen floor on my back. I curled back into a corner
next to the trashcan, and Papa walked away toward his bedroom. There was nothing left
to say.
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I knew I couldn’t stay there, but first I ran down the hall to the bathroom and
checked my reflection for any swelling in my eye. It was slightly red, maybe a little
swollen, and I wanted to call someone. A witness. I needed someone to see this; I
needed to prove to someone else that my father had never given me the love I deserved.
Afraid the swelling would go down, I watched myself as I punched my own face
as hard as I could, over and over. I hurried to the phone and called my friend, asking her
to hurry. I went to my room to and filled my red suitcase with clothing and lotion and
books and my glass pipe, and then I walked past my dad to the front door. I turned my
face so that he could see the swelling, but he stared past me.
I sat out on the front porch next to my overstuffed red suitcase while I waited for
my friend to arrive. As a final “fuck you” to my dad, I stuffed some pot into my pipe and
smoked it right there on the porch. Out of the corner of my swollen eye, I saw Papa
sitting on the other side of the window watching television. I thought about how typical
it was of him to cap off an event like that with TV. Only in the past year did it occur to
me how upset he must have been, and how alike our activities were. Mirror images, we
were. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.
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My parents live on a quiet street in the city of Citrus Heights, California. A
canopy of trees form a tunnel as you drive through to their house. I thought our house
was big when I was a teenager. It was a single story, but with two bedrooms added on: a
five-bedroom house. That was exactly how I described it to people growing up. The
house had belonged to Papa’s parents before they died, and when we moved in three of
Papa’s siblings had been squatting there. They’d turned it into a flophouse for their
friends. When we moved in my parents remodeled the home, painting all the rooms
white and installing hardwood floors. They tore up the kitchen and rebuilt a new one.
The pool in the backyard that my cousins and I had grown up swimming in had gone
green and swampy, so my parents got a pool service to come in and clean it up. They
chose blue tiles to replace the old brown ones. The floor of the pool was resurfaced in a
brilliant, fresh white. They replaced the pull chain toilet in the hallway bathroom though
I begged them not to. They had a landscaper come in and tear out some trees, reshape the
lawn, plant flowers. They built a new wood deck over the old concrete porch and tore
out the iron posts by the door. We still thought Papa was healthy then.
Today the house is a monument to inertia. I notice it every time I pull my car into
the driveway. Everything is dilapidated. There are piles of giant garbage bags filled with
aluminum cans and plastic bottles spilling out and crowded into a corner of the cracked
driveway behind the truck shell on the ground. The flowers died long ago, and there is
constant tension between my parents because Papa doesn’t clean the dog mess off the
lawn consistently. We warn the grandchildren not to walk on the grass. The wood deck
is cluttered as if everything that has ever been put down on it has been forgotten about.
55
The pool is back to a swampy green, though almost without fail each summer it is
renovated for the grandchildren to come and swim. Sometimes, even though I moved out
of there many years ago, I find myself straightening things up or fixing things when I’m
there. Last year I paid for a housekeeper to come in and clean their house. Before my
mom had to return to work she was a clean freak, always vacuuming around my body
where I sat or literally running an index finger along a surface to check for dust, even
polishing the light switches. I don’t know why I’m so concerned about the house being
unkempt, but it unsettles me.
Now that I’m older, my relationship with Papa is no longer contentious. We’ve
settled into each other, but there is still a space between us, a gap I can’t figure out how
to close. Sometimes I try to stage moments for us; I burn soul music onto CDs before we
drive somewhere; I plan for us to sing together again like we used to, but he talks over
the music without even bothering to turn it down; he quotes Fox News, he rants about
socialism, he talks about dog breeding, he warns me about government drones and the
impending apocalypse until I get so frustrated and feel so hopeless I start to scream inside
of my own head, until I surrender and reach toward the volume knob to turn it down.
How do you mourn a life that is still living? When I visit him, the slackness of his
face shocks me. The skin beneath his pink-rimmed green eyes has started to droop and
his skin is yellow-gray from liver disease. Although our every interaction is strained,
barely tolerable sometimes, I live with a nagging voice that warns: soon there will be a
breathtaking amount of loss, regret. It’s an eerie way to live. I say I love you with a rib
cage protecting my heart, and I hate myself for it. I ache. I’m prematurely haunted. My
56
mind is a haunted house. When I walk down that driveway toward my car defeated, I
remind myself that when he dies I will long for his tics, just to hear him go on and on
about any stupid old subject, just to have him back. I try to whittle future regrets down to
a minimum, but I’m my own worst enemy. He doesn’t call me often, but when he does I
put off calling him back. I tell myself I will call him later, then I wait for the bad news,
for the sound of my phone ringing in the middle of the night. I make myself hug him and
kiss his stubbly cheek, but we act like acquaintances that had an awkward run-in years
ago.
I have good intentions. I make plans to roll up my sleeves and force a
conversation on him. Maybe it’s naïve, but I believe there is something we could say
together, a final dialogue, closure. A magic incantation that vanishes the space between
us. I just don’t know what it is, and like so many of my ideas this one suffers an abortion
every time. I’m too weak and afraid and distracted; too content with my life, my own
family, too busy. I think about it almost every day, I want it so badly, but then I can’t.
Or worse, I don’t.
Papa used to quote Romans 7:15 to me, something Paul said when describing the
war within himself, how he wanted to serve God, to do with right thing, but his body was
slow to respond. I find myself thinking of it more and more: “I do not understand what I
do. For what I want to do I do not do, but instead I do what I hate.”
What do you do when one of the greatest loves of your life is made greater and
greater by its impending doom? I have become a living testament to cognitive
dissonance. People given this much warning shouldn’t fuck up this badly.
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A few years ago I was downtown and ran into an ex-boyfriend, Neil, in front of
Tower Theater. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but we had been a couple for
almost five years, and there was a lot to catch up on. When he asked me how my dad
was doing I told him that Papa was obsessed with dog training now. Back when Neil
knew my dad, Papa was focused on God. Neil seemed unusually astute when it came to
understanding people other than himself, so when I told him about the dog training he lit
up and nodded as if he weren’t surprised. He said, “Makes sense. With you and your
brother out of the house he needs something to control.”
We chuckled. I remember being struck at the time with how true that sounded.
Maybe the dog training was a way for him to exercise control over something in his life.
It’s so clean and simple: you say one word to a dog and it obeys. Perhaps control was
what made my dad tick. But it was too late for me to be more like one of his dogs. The
first time I moved out I had chosen another way to be.
After Rocky, but before Maya, Papa began to train German Shepherds. He got a
male and a female: Max and Madchen. He’d adopted Max down in Southern California
from a man who neglected him so much it had warped his personality. Until Papa
rescued him, Max had spent his entire life in a tiny kennel with no love. If you made eye
contact with Max, even through a sliding glass door, he cowered and peed all over his
own legs. The only person he trusted was Papa. He stood tall around Papa. The only
dog Max allowed near him was Madchen. Max fathered Madchen’s puppies.
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I drove with Papa down to Livermore, California, to pick Madchen out. She was
his first German Shepherd, and he’d been researching and reading books about dog
training and how to choose the most trainable puppy. On the drive down there, Papa told
me that it all came down to temperament. He would be looking for the puppy with the
strongest prey drive. A puppy with a strong prey drive demonstrates a lot of momentum,
and will chase—with gusto—after any object you throw. He’d brought a rag with him to
see which puppies engaged with it, tugging at it, and which puppies were indifferent. He
chose Madchen because she was the most eager. She ran around lightly biting her
siblings, and went after Papa’s rag with the most vigor. I held her in my lap the whole
way home.
Madchen was allowed in the house more than any other dog we’ve ever had.
Papa took her out for hours a day to work with her in a field by his church. They took off
in his truck in the morning and came back in the afternoon. She and Daisy played hide
and seek, and Madchen always tracked her down. She was the most lovable dog we’d
ever had.
The problem with Madchen started when she escaped through the front door one
day. She zeroed in on our next-door neighbor’s Chihuahua and darted over to where the
dog was standing, snapped her up into her mouth and tried to break the little dog’s back
by shaking her back and forth like a chew toy. The dog’s face was torn open, but after a
long stay at the animal hospital she survived. Papa didn’t say much to us, but it was
obvious he felt terrible about it. Madchen had to be watched much more closely, and she
began to be confined to the dog run Papa built in the backyard. We had to be careful with
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her, and as a result Madchen lost a lot of her freedom. A few years after that she broke
free from Papa in the front yard while he was talking to a neighbor. She’d spotted a
different neighbor’s small dog on the grass of their front yard, and Madchen chased the
dog into the backyard to kill it. Papa saw it all unfold in an instant, and with horror he
ran as fast as his injuries would let him. He could see Madchen standing over the small
dog in the backyard through the neighbor’s fence but he couldn’t get past it. He
commanded Madchen to stop, and she did. She froze for a second over the other dog,
staring into Papa’s eyes, calculating. As Papa moved closer to climb the fence to get her,
she broke eye contact with him and took the smaller dog into her jaws, shaking the dog
and trying to break her back while Papa stretched his hands toward her but could not
reach, no matter how far he stretched. He shouted, but Madchen didn’t listen.
One extra hot summer day Danny and I were dipping our feet in the pool at my
parent’s house when my dad burst into the backyard with Max in his arms. Max was
limp, his eyes were rolled back in his head, and every breath he and Papa took seemed to
be a heave. Papa looked like a child in a panic, and told us that he had fallen asleep in his
recliner and forgotten Max in the back of his truck in the hot sun, like one of those dads
who kills his baby by leaving it locked in a hot car. When he realized what he had done
he jumped off the couch and staggered out to the truck, but it was like an oven, and Max
had already collapsed from the heat and was crumpled up on the hot plastic bed.
Papa came down the steps into the water with Max and plunged him beneath the
tepid water, hoping to revive him, but Max remained unresponsive. I knew he was going
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to die then and so did my dad, but we didn’t give up. Danny ran to the bathroom and
filled our hallway bathtub with the coldest water he could, and Papa followed him in, his
clothes soaking wet and clinging to his body. He lowered Max into the tub and we all ran
back and forth from the freezer to the tub, dropping ice cubes all over Max, doing
everything we could to cool him down. Danny and I kept bumping into each other in the
hall as we ran past each other. We barely had time to make eye contact, to acknowledge
the situation. Max would live through this in the end, and die a couple years later from
eating the buds off a magnolia tree. When my parents took him up to their property to
bury his body, Madchen tried to throw herself into his grave like a grieving widow, and
my mom told me my dad cried as he shoveled the dirt to dig the grave, and later on in
bed.
But as I raced toward the bathtub with my cup of ice cubes I remember in the
midst of my worry feeling also a little angry at Papa for his carelessness, and embarrassed
in front of my husband that my dad could make a mistake this egregious.
But then I saw it: the look on my dad’s face.
The look on my dad’s face.
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Fathers fall like chopped trees all around me. Kim’s dad ran his weekly mile, sat
on the curb hacking up phlegm like he always did, went inside, and was found dead on
the couch; he had harbored a secret heart defect. Suzanne’s dad was found curled up
with a pillow on the kitchen floor after a battle with cancer; she stepped over his body to
steal his morphine and syringes. Andrea’s dad had just gotten married, and on his
honeymoon he got to the bottom of a trail in Mexico, was seized with a heart attack, and
died in the dirt. Sarah’s dad died in a parking lot chasing a shoplifter out of Kmart:
another heart attack. Papa was supposed to die long ago, before everyone else, but he’s
still here, holding on, a memento mori in the corner of every picture, on the periphery of
every occasion; but one we’ve all gotten used to. A memento mori made powerless by its
continuous presence, like the print of Munch’s Madonna I have hung next to my mirror.
In the lithograph there is a woman who looks to me as if she too is looking into a mirror,
but in the bottom corner of the frame there is a small skeleton: death. I placed it there to
remind me of my own mortality and the mortality of the people I love, to remind me of
what is infinite and what isn’t. I thought that it would help me live the way I aspire to
live. I look into the mirror every day. I see imperfections in my skin and eyebrows that
need to be groomed, but it’s been years since I noticed Madonna.
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Sometimes I tease Danny because his family dynamic during childhood sounds so
Catholic and repressed. I like to bring up the fact that when he and his siblings were
children and the family watched TV together, if a family member farted, the entire family
pretended it hadn’t happened. I think the image is both funny and significant: three little
towheads sitting cross-legged on the floor with their parents, staring straight forward at
the TV, marinating silently in the smell of farts. But my family is no different, really. To
discuss Papa’s mortality is to acknowledge our family’s decay, so we don’t talk about it.
The last time I visited Papa in the hospital he was shoved into a curtained room, his
moans mixed with the moans of everyone else. He passed gas beneath the sheets.
Normally we would have laughed about the farting and teased him and called him a pig,
but none of us said a word. As I bent down to hug him the smell of gas mixed with the
smell of his mouth, and I inhaled it on accident. Pungent and metallic, like copper and
blood, gas and metal, it entered me. I blew out hard. I leaned away as far as I could.
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I got the phone call on an afternoon at the end of September. It was my sister-inlaw. Maya had gone into labor a little over a day previous, but still no puppies had
emerged. Papa was worried when he saw that Maya was spotting, so he loaded her up
into his truck, and drove her to the vet.
When they arrived at the hospital, the vet examined Maya, and gave Papa the
news: Maya had only been pregnant with one puppy the whole time, a stillborn.
A little later Papa led Maya back out to the parking lot. She was hurting still, so
he helped lift her into the back of the truck. The drive home was heavy with silence.
Both Papa and Maya were sore and weary, both more hollow than they’d ever been.
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In a mauve bedroom decorated with wooden rabbits and a painting I made of a
woman beneath an oak tree in a garden, my dad stands completely nude, gnashing his
teeth and stomping like a bull, looking back and forth across the room with wild eyes. I
block the door while he tries to charge toward me, trying to escape the room. He’s like a
little boy or a man having war flashbacks. He staggers toward the bedroom door, each
step heavy and unbalanced. He looks with horror at something invisible over his
shoulder, like the napalm girl in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo as she runs nude
through the streets.
I lead him back toward the bed. I place my hands gently on his shoulders and make
soothing sounds. No words. He pushes back against me trying to get to the door, and in
frustration he cries and hits the sides of his thighs with balled up fists. I guide him to the
bed and he finally surrenders. He sits hunched over on the edge of the denim bedspread,
his clothes scattered in a crescent around him on the floor: his cargo shorts, his teal tank
top. His eyes scan the floor but take in nothing. I stand over him and rub his shoulder
with my hand and make sounds that mean it will be okay.
People who haven’t witnessed a seizure think the scariest part is watching the
body convulse. It is scary: Papa falls to the floor, his body on its side; he bobs and
weaves like a boxer or like a fish out of water. He shakes rhythmically, his body rolls
like waves or like dancing, but it isn’t dancing. It’s terrifying, but compared to what
comes afterward this part is nothing but an alarm, a warning, a prophecy. Get under your
desk, stand in a doorway, prepare to stop, drop and roll. That’s all the shaking is. It’s the
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part where his body is swallowing up his soul, taking it somewhere secret and refusing to
spit it back out for an hour.
There’s always a great deal of scuttling around during the shaking. We – my
mother and I, sometimes my brother – know that we have less than five minutes to
prepare everything: a plastic cup of water, a handful of Dilantin tablets to bring him back
to us, something to block the doors, pillows around his head and padding around hard or
pointy objects in the room, a phone in case things get too out of hand, too scary, or in
case he stops breathing and blood trickles from his mouth again. As my mother scurries
about I’ve always carried out these duties with a proud efficiency. I pat myself on the
back for my apparent sense of calm. My voice even becomes a little clipped, because I
want my mom to think I’m capable. I’d always prefer to call for help, but Papa says
we’re not allowed.
The scariest thing about a seizure is the postictal state afterward. Postictal,
meaning “after the seizure” is when Papa wakes up from the seizure and interacts with us,
but it an altered state. Postictal states involve confusion and a lack of responsiveness,
and for some people like my dad, they involve the tendency to wander and to become
violent. In this state Papa wants to do what the doctors call “peregrinate,” which really
just means he wants to wander around, trying to leave the room and sometimes the house.
We have to keep him sitting or lying down because he is dizzy from the head trauma a
seizure induces, and we don’t want him to hit his head. He also tends to remove all of his
clothing. When I was a teenager I tried to restrain him after a seizure in the living room
and he tried to get away by biting my upper arm, his eyes blazing like a wild thing.
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He looks up at me now and his eyes are bloodshot and I remember I am stoned. I
remember that only ten minutes ago I was sitting out on the patio by the pool with my
friends, laughing, swatting at mosquitos and secretly smoking a joint in the warm
summer night air, when I heard my mom’s voice, a whisper from the bottom corner of the
screen, saying, “Help me.”
Now, in this condition, Papa’s face is like a portrait by Robert Crumb: the black and
silver afro squiggling out in all directions, his eyes bulging, the tiny red lines in his eyes
zigzagging like lightning bolts, the lines around his eyes, the cords of his neck bulge. He
tells me he wants his mom and looks up at me but I don’t think he sees me. In the
postictal state he often begs for his mom. I used to take it literally: I used to kneel down
and tell him his mother was dead, and each time he received the news as if he were in
denial, as if it were the first time he heard it: he blinks and shakes his head in disbelief,
like he might be dreaming. Then he asks for her again.
I know now that calling for his mom is just another way of asking for comfort, for
love, for warmth. It was stupid of me to tell him his mom was dead before, so instead
now I touch his hair while my eyes well up. I massage his scalp with my fingers. I
continue to rub his back, the cold skin on his shoulder that I only touch at times like
these. I hold my dad as if I am his mom.
He keeps asking for his real mom, begging, crying, looking up at me. The light is
too bright for this. A part of me wants to flee the room, to leave him to someone else.
But his face crumples and he rubs it into my chest like a baby. He moves his face back
and forth on my breasts, and I don’t jump away. He doesn’t mean anything by it, and I
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put my arms around him, pulling him closer. I ask him if he knows who I am, and he
looks up at me and shakes his head. No. He seems sad to not remember. His eyes sag
from the weight of his entire life: his disappointments, the people he lost, the things he
will lose, his dreams like mounds of dirt left pebble-sized in the distance behind him.
“Can’t you help me?”
And his voice is unrecognizably small. He looks into my eyes, his daughter he
doesn’t recognize: his caretaker, his mother. He whimpers and pleads with me, this
stranger who stands before him.
“What can I do?”
“I just want someone to love me.”
And this time he shouts as he lifts his arms up into the air, then lets them fall to
his sides in defeat. “I just want someone to love me,” he says louder, and he sighs and
then he shouts it again, “I just want someone to love me!”
And when he screams this at me I’m startled. We look into each other’s eyes for
just a second and it’s like seeing myself or a smaller version of myself trapped inside.
I know what it’s like to want to shout this, and in this postictal state I can finally
mourn him. In this postictal state I can finally eulogize us. In this postictal state, when
he is seized, we are never more present together. When he is seized like this we are both
no longer afraid. So I hold him close and kiss him on his cheek. I rub his back and he
rests his head on my shoulder. He is my baby. I run my fingers through his hair.
Silence. For those few moments, together we are still.
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My mom rushes back into the room panting, the medication enclosed in her tight
palm, and she tries to poke a pill through his lips, but he purses them together. He
doesn’t want to take it. For a second I think, Maybe he doesn’t want to leave this place.
But it’s a stupid thing to think.
Finally, Papa relaxes his jaw with a sigh. I hold him while he swallows, but I
know the medicine is already starting to work. The air between us grows thicker as the
medication spins its magic, restoring Papa, bringing him back one fried neuron at a time.
I look at the pile of clothing on the floor and take a step back.
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Over the summer I was writing this, and I finally worked up the nerve to drive to
his house to have a conversation. For research, I told him. While Daisy swam in the
pool, Papa and I sat down at a table in the backyard and I asked him about the seizures. I
asked if he’s aware of anything going on at the time, or just blacked out.
“It’s like I’m in a cave. My body is all the way back against the cave wall, and
you and your mom are standing at the entrance, but you can’t come in. You’re shouting
at me, but as the words travel slowly toward me they get smaller and smaller and quieter
and quieter, so that by the time they reach me the words are just a vapor. They don’t
mean anything anymore. But I can feel you there,” he said. “And I can feel when you’re
comforting, or when your mom is anxious, and that feeling matters more.”
I was still trying to think of a way to respond to that when he changed the subject:
something about church, how the pastor forbid him from doing private bible studies, how
the bible says this or that. I tried to steer us back to his seizures, but he had moved on. I
sat back and tried very hard to listen for a minute until I gave up and let my eyes wander
around the backyard.
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Papa returns to his body like a sheepish dog returning to his master. He and I
move further apart as his eyes regain their old life. You can see it, this focus that
becomes clearer as it drips from the top down. I walk out to the living room to preserve
his dignity while my mom helps him dress. A few minutes later she leads him out to the
living room and over to the sofa. While I run back to the bedroom to grab a pillow for
him, she begins a rundown of everything that just happened.
“You should’ve heard yourself. You should’ve heard the things you were saying.
‘I just want someone to love me.’ So stupid.” She shakes her head and does an
impression of him. He looks at her with a blank expression, his jaw still kind of slack.
I wish she wouldn’t do this to him, so I gesture to get his attention, to share an eye
roll with him, to save him somehow, to catch my reflection again, but our time is up.
Think of my eyes, the color of antique wood, searching for contact with my dad’s. Think
of his pale green ones like glass, fixed, a two thousand yard stare that goes straight past
me toward the TV.
I keep standing there.
“Nicole?” He says, and I rush over to him. “Turn the TV up louder, will ya?”
I walk over to the stereo and turn the knob. I look to him to see if I did it right.
“Louder,” he tells me, so I keep turning the dial until the only thing we can hear is
the TV, until everything else in the room is crowded out with noise.
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Once when I was in my twenties I came home from a vacation and found that
Papa had made a card out of a sheet of white paper folded into quadrants. He hadn’t
mentioned it; it was just sitting there on my nightstand. He’d drawn a picture of me
sleeping in a bed, and a stick figure of him standing in the doorway looking in on me.
Crudely drawn, I looked like an alien. The head was hydrocephalic, but the message was
simple.
It is to that father that I offer this parting gift, these clumsy lines, stumbling forth
pigeon-toed from my klutzy heart. I offer them up to him to despise or misunderstand or
resist or forget to read, a ring of coffee gathering upon an abandoned stack of papers
stapled together.
But I won’t ever hand them over. I’m going to clutch them to my chest like
armor, and wait too long until he’s gone, then release them into the wind like a prayer
that no one hears. This is a manuscript that will dampen and rot, superfluous now, a pulp
on his gravestone. It was never words between us anyway.
Still, Papa, I lift these words up to you in spirit because they’re all I have. I am
your only daughter and you are my only dad. You raised me and cared for me, you
worked for me, you stayed up late trying to figure out ways to keep me good, in
desperation you hit me when I was bad.
We aren’t so different, you and I. In a world of bipeds we lag behind, soaked in
the primordial sludge. Mirror images, we face each other: two fools just learning to
crawl. Our dumb mouths gape open, our gills are still tender from sprouting legs, our
flesh is still damp from the icy water of the sea, our backs are still cool from where we
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leaned away from each other against the stone walls of our opposing caves. I don’t think
there will ever be enough time to get where we’re going. There isn’t enough time in the
universe for the two of us to finally come together, to drag ourselves across all the dust
and debris of things forever left unsaid.
Every once in a while our eyes meet.
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INFINITE FEAR AND SADNESS
On a cool April morning when the fog left a haze over the foothills of Auburn,
California, a mother of two got out of her car to run along the Western States Trail. She
wore purple shorts, Nikes, a hooded purple sweatshirt, a white visor to protect her from
the sun. She had been on this trail many times, was accustomed to the give of soft pink
clay beneath her feet, to the smell of the American River’s middle fork below her. She
jogged past the burgundy branches of the manzanita trees with silver-gray leaves in
bloom. Bright red berries dotted the branches. She flew past the trail’s flowering oak
trees. She kicked up pinkish dust that faded as it rose. She moved too fast to notice the
leaves arranged in spirals and the catkins that bloomed there.
The Western States Trail was blazed by the Washoe and Paiute Indians and
originally extended from Sacramento to Utah. It is now the location of the Western
States 100-mile endurance run of the Tevis Cup, and a popular trail for runners and
horseback riding. The trail’s towering trees and cascades of green moss surrounded the
mom as she ran. The year was 1994, there were no iPods, and the forest was silent,
except for the sounds of twigs snapping and leaves crackling beneath her feet. As she
ran, she felt as if she had broken free of something. She inhaled the wet river air. Her
nails were painted pink, and as she jogged downhill she spread her fingers and then her
arms wide as if she had sprouted wings. She skipped her son’s little league game to train
that day.
She jogged around the trail’s curve and came to the part where it straightened into
heavier brush. There was a steep bank on her left. The hillside dropped on her right side.
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She took cold breaths, felt air swirl in her chest. With pride she realized how much
further she could go without stopping, how malleable were her soft pink lungs, how they
expanded like balloons.
It came as a surprise when the mountain lion jumped on her from behind,
knocking her to the ground as it wrapped its muscular arms around her chest, digging in
with its claws. The mom and the lion rolled down the hill, entangled, struggling. They
rolled until they hit a fallen fir tree. They struggled in near silence, except for snarling
and grunting and the sound of the creek below.
The next day it was gray, raining. The mother’s body was found facedown,
buried beneath dirt and twigs and brush. There was a deep gash to her shoulder blade
where her organs—lung, stomach, kidney, esophagus, liver, pancreas, and spleen—had
been dragged out of her and consumed. Her face had been torn off. Up the hill her
blood-streaked visor and water bottle lay abandoned.
Before the Europeans settled in North America, mountain lions roamed the entire
continent from coast to coast, from northern British Columbia to southernmost Argentina,
from deserts to forests to swamps. Mountain lions follow deer, so if you live in North
America and you spot deer, mountain lions are likely nearby. I live in California, where
more than sixty percent of the state is mountain lion territory. In North America there
has been a big increase in cougar attacks on humans in the past two decades. You’d
never know it, since most mountain lion activity is shrouded in secrecy. I’ve lived here
my whole life, and the first time I saw a mountain lion I was 28 years old. They are stalk
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and ambush predators, lurking in the shadows where they follow their prey in silence.
They have webbed skin and fur between their toes that muffle noise as they walk, and
while they stalk they place their hind feet in the tracks left by their forefeet with the
precision of a tightrope walker.
Witch hunters in the middle ages believed that their eyes were windows to the
fires of hell. To the Apache and Walapai, the cougar’s scream was a harbinger of death.
President Roosevelt called mountain lions “the Lords of stealthy murder.” They go by
many names; they hold the Guinness record for the animal with the highest amount of
names: Puma concolor, cougar, panther, puma, catamount, mountain screamer, painter,
etc. They are agile, able to jump 20 to 40 feet horizontally and 15 feet vertically. They
have small lungs and lack the stamina of wolves; they depend on their cunning and
strength. They tend to kill prey from the side or the rear, biting the back of the neck and
forcing vertebrae apart, severing the spinal cord and paralyzing their prey. Or they use
the excessive strength in their jaws to clamp down on the trachea, strangling the victim.
Other times they go for the skull, biting it open to puncture the brain.
Once their victim is dead or incapacitated, mountain lions use their four large
canines to separate the skeletal joints of their prey. They use their front teeth to remove
hair and feathers and strip flesh from bone. Their premolars and molars are ridged to
assist in shearing dense muscle tissue. They have inch long, retractable curved claws that
arc together when flexed and allow for a deeper grip into skin. These claws slash like
knives and pinch together to rip flesh from bone. They use them to tear open the
abdominal cavity and feed on the internal organs. After they are done feeding, they cover
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what remains of the body with dirt and leaves. Their primary source of food is deer, but
will also consume pets and livestock. They don’t like the way we smell, but in some
cases they eat humans.
The first time I saw one I was only 20 miles from home visiting the Folsom
Animal Sanctuary. I stopped, backed away, and watched them for almost an hour,
refusing to turn away as if staring at a TV screen or an iPhone. I brushed my husband
and child away with a wave of my fingers, afraid to make a sound, to look away.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t always known there were mountain lions around; I just
thought they were much smaller. Once I visited my cousin up in the hills of Placerville,
and we wanted to spend the night outside on their giant trampoline, but my uncle
wouldn’t let us. There were mountain lions in the area. I remember being perplexed
because I didn’t see the danger. I thought mountain lions and bobcats were
interchangeable.
My grandfather hunts, and his living room is like a large display case featuring all
the animals he has killed. They are taxidermied and hanging from walls next to framed
cockfighting pictures, or propped on tables and shelves, most pieces of furniture
transformed into podiums for presenting deer, wild boar, bear skins, ducks: a vast
menagerie of animal corpses, all stiffly positioned in various ways. There is a bobcat on
a wooden placard near his television, her mouth frozen in a scream or a snarl, and
somewhere in the back of my mind she was filed under Animals I Can Beat in a Fight.
I don’t know how I managed to live 28 years in California without seeing a
mountain lion. I never saw a picture of one, never saw one in a zoo, but that day I finally
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saw a mountain lion for what it was: a lion. Lions live in California: they tread the same
paths I did, made homes in the state parks I hiked in with my family. Only a mile away
from where I sat at the sanctuary, a man and his daughter were fishing and spotted a
mountain lion near the water. It didn’t make sense.
“It’s like we’re living in Africa!” I told anyone who would listen. “They shouldn’t
be here. This isn’t Africa.”
I began my mountain lion research on my iPhone on the way home from the
sanctuary, shutting out Daisy’s voice as she asked the same question she always asks
when we leave the zoo, the start of a sort of game we all play, one I usually join in with
enthusiasm as we talk about the highs and the lows of any experience: “What was your
favorite part?”
“The mountain lions,” I mumbled as I dragged my finger along the touch screen.
Danny and Daisy chattered around me, an animated buzz. I was too engrossed to make
out the actual words.
By the time we pulled into the driveway I was obsessed. I thought I heard Danny
and Daisy talking to me, but at a delay. A little later I thought I heard the car doors slam,
but when I looked up from the front seat they were already out of the car and entering our
home through the garage. I saw Daisy standing on the step in front of the door, watching
me with a look—of disappointment, maybe?—before vanishing inside.
I stayed there in the front seat and logged on to Amazon to buy two books about
mountain lion attacks. That week I went to the library and checked out two more. I
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bookmarked websites that documented attacks with details with details like dates and
locations.
I read them so much I memorized statistics on mountain lion attacks and fatalities
on humans in North America. I memorized them like they were phone numbers. I can
tell you which states are the riskiest, as far as attacks on people go, and I can tell you
which state parks to avoid. I know who is most at risk of being attacked (a small male
child). I know what to do when I encounter a cougar in the wild: make myself look
bigger, maintain eye contact because as soon as you look down they attack. Never run
away. Never turn your back. I’d keep Daisy close. I’d fight back. I would clamp down
on its bottom teeth with my hand and pry the jaw open. I’d even try to gouge out the
eyes, even though it would probably be futile1.
I watched myself—and my family and friends watched me—turn into a mountain
lion Rain Man, ticking off dates, locations and ages of the victims of obscure mountain
lion attacks and fatalities in North America who snatched children off of staircases (Male,
7, British Columbia, 19942) and schoolyards (Male, 7, British Columbia, 19923) and
1
A woman tried to stab a mountain lion in the eye with a ballpoint pen from her husband’s pocket as he
was being attacked. She couldn’t quite plunge the pen in, and resorted to beating the lion with a log she
found on the trial nearby.
2
Kyle Musselman was attacked just 50 yards from his home on his way to school with friends. He was on
a 3 story staircase with alder shrub thicket on either side, and as he and his friends started to race, the
mountain lion shot out of the thicket, scalped him, tore his face off so that his nose was only hanging by the
skin of his nostrils, and left his eye socket almost empty. There was a bubble of blood where his mouth had
been. He survived, but needed a glass eye. The mountain lion was found and shot on site. It showed signs
of having been recently hit by a car.
3
Jeremy Williams was mauled to death as his schoolmates stood by screaming.
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sidewalks (Male, 6, Texas, 20124) and trails (Female, 11, Male, 8, British Columbia,
19165) (Male, 13, Washington, 19246) (Male, 14, Colorado, 19767) (Male, 9, Alberta,
19828) (Male, 8, Texas, 19849) (Male, 12, Idaho, 198510) (Female, 10, British Columbia,
198511) (Male, 6, California, 198612) (Male, 9, California, 199213) (Male, 6, British
Columbia, 199614) (Male, 4, Colorado, 199715) (Male, 10, Colorado, 199716) (Male, 3,
Colorado, 199917) (Male, 5, Alberta, 200418) (Female, 4, British Columbia, 200519)
4
On their walk back to their hotel room from a restaurant, Rivers Hobbs was holding hands with his
mother when he was pulled away and dragged by his face into nearby brush. His father stabbed the
mountain lion with a pocketknife until the lion released the boy and ran away. The boy survived.
5
Doreen Ashburnham and Tony Farrer fought back and survived. They received a congratulatory letter
from President Roosevelt and were awarded the Albert Medal from the King of England.
6
Fatality
7
Reports differ over whether he needed hundreds or thousands of stitches to repair his face, scalp and hand
wounds.
8 Adam Bisby was attacked as he walked ahead of his parents on a hike.
9 David Vaught was attacked and scalped on a trial at Big Bend National Park. The mountain lion was
later treed and killed. David’s hair was found in the lion’s intestinal tract. The lion had eaten a deer before
attacking David.
10 Johnny Wilson was playing with his toy soldiers when a mountain lion jumped on him from behind. He
was bit in the throat, but survived.
11 Alyson Parker was attacked on a trail at her summer camp and rescued by female camp counselor who
beat the lion with a tree branch. Alyson received 15 puncture wounds to her neck, but survived. The
mountain lion was killed 3 days later and the attack did not appear to be motivated by starvation.
12 Justin Mellon was snatched from a trail while hiking.
13 Darron Arroyo was attacked and mauled while hiking on a trail. His parents have since filed a suit
against the State of California.
14 Steven Parolin survived a near scalping. For more information see Cindy Parolin attack story.
15 Rafael DeGrave, visiting from France, was snatched off a trail as a Park Ranger escorted him and his
family to the parking lot. Rafael was dragged into bushes and his ear was torn off, but he survived.
16 Mark Miedema was on a hike with his family when he was attacked by an adult female mountain lion.
Though his mother was a trained nurse and began CPR, after an hour of attempting to resuscitate him he
died choking on his own vomit. The animal was later treed and killed.
17 While hiking with his church group, Jaryd John Atadero disappeared from a trail and not a trace of him
was found until 3 years and 8 months later when two hikers found his clothing with puncture holes in it.
18 Chance Stepanick was jumped by a mountain lion, but his father and another man kicked the mountain
lion repeatedly until it ran off. Chance had only minor injuries.
19 A mountain lion flayed Hayley Bazille’s scalp and raked her skull with its teeth. She went into shock,
her scalp had to be put back together like a puzzle, but she survived.
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(Male, 7, Colorado, 200620) (Male, 5, New Mexico, 200821) (Female, 3, British
Columbia, 200922) (Male, 7, British Columbia, 200923) (Male, 5, Washington, 200924)
(Female, 6, Alberta, 201125) or crashed through glass windows (British Columbia,
195126) and ran up driveways (California, 199527) and entered living rooms (British
Columbia, 201228) and posted up in two-car garages (California, 201129) or lingered near
20
Shir Feldman was attacked as he walked hand in hand with his father.
Jose Salazar Jr. was scalped on a hike with his family.
22 Maya Espinosa was attacked while picking berries on a walk with her mother.
23 David Metzler Jr. was attacked while sledding in front of his church. His mom popped the mountain
lion with a rolled up towel and the lion ran off.
24 Simon Impey was crouched down eating huckleberries when he was attacked.
25 The little girl was pounced on from behind at a boat launch and attacked.
26
This, to me, is one of the top 3 scariest mountain lion attack stories, probably because of the home
invasion aspect. Ed McClean, a telephone lineman, was at his cabin on Vancouver Island. It was snowing,
and he was cutting wood and preparing dinner when he noticed a mountain lion prowling around his
property. He’d seen mountain lions around before, so he wasn’t too alarmed, but he brought his spaniel
inside the cabin with him that night. Ed stripped down to his long underwear and when he glanced outside
through the cabin door’s window he saw the lion staring back at him. He extinguished his gas lantern,
thinking the light from inside the cabin was attracting the lion’s attention or that the movement of his hands
was taunting it. The second he turned the light out the lion crashed through his window and was on him,
taking Ed’s elbow into its jaws. The spaniel whimpered and scurried away to hide under the bed, leaving
Ed to wrestle the lion alone. Ed managed to pull his body on top of the lion’s, then tried to scoot across the
floor with the lion pinned beneath him. There was a butcher knife on the table. When he reached for the
knife, the lion nearly bit his thumb off. Still, Ed was able to grasp the knife and plunge it into the lion’s
throat. He could feel the knife hitting bone. Ed was able to drag himself out of the cabin, slamming the
door on the lion as it whipped around to watch him leave. He pulled himself out to the water and climbed
into a dinghy. As the snow fell, Ed, clothed only in long underwear, paddled his bloody body across the
lake to another cabin. The next day, two men rescued Ed, took him to the hospital, then returned to the
cabin and peeked in through the window to find the lion, blood-stained and half dead, curled up on Ed’s
bed like a house cat. The two men remained outside of the cabin and shot the cougar where it lay.
26
17-year-old Michelle Rossmiller was charged by a mountain lion in her driveway as she bent over to get
her books out of her car. She jumped in and slammed the door shut before the lion could reach her.
27
Angie Prime was attacked when an elderly, emaciated mountain lion entered her home through an open
screen door and pounced on Angie while she sat on the couch. Her Border Collie chased the lion off.
28 A family in Hesperia, California (approximately 80 miles from Los Angeles) found a mountain lion
hiding in the garage of their home. There were no injuries associated with the incident.
29 At University of Utah
30 Hours before President Barack Obama was expected to arrive in downtown El Paso, Texas to give a
speech, animal control officers attempted to tranquilize a mountain lion in a parking garage. The lion
escaped and ran through the streets until it was eventually shot and killed.
21
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parking garages (Utah, 201030) (Texas, 201131), or about the mountain lion who—just
last summer—circled and almost entered a Harrah’s casino in Reno, Nevada through a
revolving door—the very casino hotel I had just been staying at a month previous
(Nevada, 201232).
I watched people’s eyes go from intrigued to concerned or amused or bored as I
droned on with my mountain lion stories and stats. I pause just long enough to sip from
my lion glass before I lift an index finger in the air and continue. Like any connoisseur I
have my “favorite” attack stories (though they bring me no joy), like the one about the
Canadian mother, Cindy Parolin, who went horseback riding with three of her children
and found they were being stalked by a mountain lion. The lion sprung out from the
undergrowth and spooked the horse her son Steven was riding. The lion landed on top of
the horse, right above the saddle. The lion jumped up once more for Steven, but only
managed to remove a sock and a shoe. The horse bucked and threw Steven off, then ran
into the woods like a coward, leaving the boy on the ground. The lion bit down on
Steve’s head. Cindy jumped from her horse and began beating the mountain lion with a
branch she tore off a tree. She screamed for her children to go get help and the remaining
horses fled in the opposite direction.
31
The two-year-old male mountain lion had probably been chased out of his territory by adult mountain
lions, and had been holed up under an outdoor stage near the casino. He was tranquilized and released back
into the wild. Authorities say he will be euthanized if he enters the city again.
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As she continued to fight, the children traveled on foot, dragging Steven far
through the woods until they found a camper, Jim Manion, with a gun, and led him to
Cindy. When they arrived more than an hour had passed, and—although much of her
upper torso had been consumed—Cindy was still fighting the mountain lion. When the
Jim assured her that her children were okay she reportedly said, “I’m dying now” and
then collapsed.
Jim fired his gun toward the mountain lion to scare it off, and at the sound of the
shot, the lion turned its attention on him. As it whipped around and raced toward him,
Jim tried to fire his gun at the lion, but the gun jammed. He was able to clear his gun and
shoot the lion just before it got him. The lion slinked off and was found dead 150 yards
from where it was shot. Cindy died from the attack. The boy needed 70 stitches in his
head, but survived. No one knew what motivated the attack: there was plenty of prey in
the area.
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My friends email me links about mountain lion sightings in California. In July of
2012, a female mountain lion with two cubs was seen multiple times near the Greek
Theatre by UC Berkeley’s campus. In September of 2010, in Berkeley, California, a
mountain lion leapt over a fence into a playground. It made its way into a backyard, and
police killed it with a shotgun in someone’s driveway. Throughout the summer there
were rumors circulating about a mountain lion that ran past a nightclub in West
Sacramento, mere miles from my neighborhood. In November there was a more formal
report of a mountain lion sighting in West Sacramento. There were at least four sightings
in Folsom along the American River in the month of January in 2012 alone. That year a
man was attacked by a mountain lion as he slept under the stars in his sleeping bag near
Nevada City. In March of 2014, I watched a surveillance video of a parking lot in the
Hollywood Hills where a mountain lion crept past parked cars at night.
In February of 2014, I was a volunteer chaperone on my daughter’s weeklong
field trip to Sly Park. One night our hiking group’s activity went on a night hike through
the woods. We had to extinguish all flashlights and cell phone lights, and walk in a line
through the forest, holding onto each other’s shoulders and allowing our eyes to adjust to
the darkness. I pictured lions watching us, and I had to catch my breath, and to practice
courage around the children. Fear is contagious, so even though I had my shoulders
hunched up to my ears, I kept telling myself to act brave. I was safe, I told myself.
They’ve been doing night hikes since the 1970s and there hasn’t been one attack.
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The next morning our hike leader—who, it turns out, had been a friend of Barbara
Schoener’s—told me that only hours before, a mountain lion was struck and killed by a
car near the entrance to Sly Park. All around the United States the animals are closing in
on our cities, just as we closed in on theirs. We’re leaking over into each other’s
territories, becoming more and more intertwined, and I, for one, won’t stand for it.
Like any fanatic I was pretty indiscriminate about the mountain lion material I
imbibed, and it often led me in unexpected directions. I saw a picture of President
Roosevelt standing over the body of a dead mountain lion. He once killed a mountain
lion with a knife, running up behind it and stabbing it in the shoulder with a hunting knife
he’d borrowed from one of his children. I discovered the writer Jean Stafford when I
checked out her book The Mountain Lion from the library mistakenly assuming it was
more mountain lion attack porn. Turns out it was actually a rather good novel, but not
about mountain lions: a mountain lion only has a little cameo toward the end.
I read all about Proposition 117, The Mountain Lion Initiative that passed in
1990, an initiative that changed the status of mountain lions in California from game
animals to “Specially Protected Mammals.” I know and agree with both sides of the preProp 117 debate: why lions should be killed (the amount of lions have outgrown their
food supply, they are being pushed further into residential areas which puts pets and
children in danger) and why they should be protected (because all life is precious,
because this has protected well over 2 million acres for wildlife in California, because
mountain lion attacks are statistically very uncommon). In 1996, Proposition 197 was
introduced. Meant to repeal Proposition 117, it did not pass. According to the
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Department of Fish and Game, the incidence of encounters between humans and
mountain lions has skyrocketed since. However, it is legal to hunt mountain lions in
British Columbia, and the majority of mountain lion attacks I read about take place there.
It’s all very complicated, and I can’t pretend to understand it all, so at night when I walk
alone through my College Greens neighborhood I put my hood up over my head to
protect my neck. I picture mountain lions perched up in neighbors’ birch trees watching
me, their black-tipped tails swaying back and forth beneath the branches.
The last time I hiked to a waterfall with my husband I heard a rustling in the
bushes and I started to cry from anxiety, stopping in my tracks and begging to turn back.
I declined an invitation to my father-in-law’s home up in the mountains near Auburn to
lay under the stars and watch the Perseids meteor shower: a magical, icy explosion of
light shooting through a dusty sky. I know that even when my eyes are turned upward I
am rooted in the dirt—someone has to keep watch—waiting for my daughter to be seized
from her sleeping bag by her head, torn from me and dragged away before I have time to
react. They are everywhere, the lions, and exactly what they want from me I can’t pin
down, but wherever I go I can feel it: they stalk me, crouching lower and lower: when
they pounce it will come out of nowhere.
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At the height of mountain lion fever I took frequent trips to the Folsom Sanctuary
to watch the mountain lions pace back and forth in their cage. I did it all the time, and I
can’t explain why. I didn’t enjoy myself there, exactly. I know the dread I feel handing
money over to the woman in the booth, the feeling of fear that swirls under my sweater. I
know when I see the little arrow next to the rickety wood sign that says “Cougars” my
heart rate quickens. The sanctuary is the only place I know of where I can safely stand a
few feet from mountain lions, where I can stare directly into their eyes, and where, if I’m
feeling brazen enough, I can practice staring one down or watch their shoulder blades
pump up and down as they pace. I can examine their feet, their claws, the curve of their
chins, the markings on their tails. Who was it that said, “Know your enemy?”
I got to know each lion’s name: Alder, Willow, Rio, Ventura. They all look alike
to me, except for Alder, who is the largest of the lions and has a patch of white fur on his
shoulder. One of the others, a male, likes to watch my little girl Daisy run around on an
oversized planter in front of the cage. Daisy thinks we go to the sanctuary for her,
because all zoo trips are supposed to be for children, but I only really notice her to snap at
her to slow down. I don’t like the way he looks at her. Sometimes he crouches down as
he watches her, zeroing in on her. Even though there are bars between them and us, I
picture him leaping to the top of the cage and slipping out through a weak link. I don’t
trust the height of the cage or the strength of the metal or the vigilance of the sanctuary
workers to contain something so wild. It’s a test of my bravery, I think, to stand there.
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I sat up against the headboard of my bed with two pillows stuffed behind my
back. I was in my nightgown, hair in a bun, wearing my reading glasses, engrossed in
my book. When I read I can’t hear a thing. It’s like everything around me ceases to exist.
I turned the page. I was particularly absorbed in the chapter I was reading (“California
Attacks”), and I was on the section about the death of Barbara Schoener, the mother on
the Auburn trail. Then I read this part about the lion that killed her:
When it was discovered that the cougar was a lactating female, an all-out
search was organized to find her kittens. That search was successful when
rescuers found a shivering, malnourished and dehydrated six-week-old
male kitten in its den. A contest was held to select a name for the orphan.
Named Willow, it is now the resident mountain lion at the Folsom Zoo.
The resident mountain lion at the Folsom Zoo. I felt like people in myths and
fables feel when they realize this seemingly unimportant person they’ve been dealing
with, this beggar, this common criminal, was actually someone of great fame and
importance, and that he had disguised himself to walk among the general populace
unnoticed. It seemed meaningful, though I wasn’t sure why. I read the paragraph aloud
to my husband twice before he rested his book in his lap, sighed, and told me to stop
talking about it. He asked that we put a moratorium on me speaking of mountain lions in
front of our daughter. It was enough already.
I’ve always been this way, the type of person who feeds fear rather than avoids it.
Even at four I cultivated the things that frightened me. I had a copy of Little Red Riding
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Hood, and I begged my mom to read it to me every night before bed. There was this one
picture of the wolf with Grandma’s bonnet on his head, hiding behind a door in her
house, one finger held to his lips. That picture in particular scared me, and I used to hide
the book at the bottom of my toy chest each night after my mom was done reading it to
me. The next evening I retrieved it from my toy box and began the cycle all over again.
I notice this same tendency in my daughter. When Daisy was six, she held a
Rosemary’s Baby DVD in her hands. She turned it over and stared at the picture of the
silhouette of the dark pram on the hill. She is fascinated by it: the title, the picture, the
jacket design. For over three years she approached me with it, asking me questions. I
didn’t want to feed her fear, so I wouldn’t tell her what Rosemary’s Baby is about. So
she built an entire plot in her imagination. She became convinced it was about an evil
baby or a monster that kills babies. She asked, “Does the baby kill people? Does the
baby have red eyes? Does the baby get shot?”
She looks down at the case and gulps. I kept finding the DVD stashed in her
room.
But about the mountain lions: by the time Daisy started to mimic me, to avoid
things she’d normally do—she would ask if there were cougars in the area when she went
on bike rides and tried to turn down a camping trip at the beach with her grandparents;
she’d also taken to jumping off the bar in our living room, pretending she was a cougar
pouncing on top of a victim—I knew it was a huge problem, that I was damaging her in
some way. I just couldn’t seem to stop myself.
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A little after midnight I wake up to the sound of Daisy’s bedroom door punching
open, and the sound of her bare feet slapping the hallway tiles. She screams. My
husband and I groan. I squint and stagger toward my bedroom door. When I open it
she’s standing there, looking up at me in shock. She yelps and jerks back. She no longer
expects me to comfort her in the middle of the night. She expects to be ignored.
“What in god’s name are you screaming about?” I ask her. My voice is ugly. She’s
unlucky to have a mom like me in the middle of the night: night terrors, bouts of fear,
nausea, coughing: I don’t have patience when I am tired. In those moments all I care
about is getting back to sleep. In the morning I am filled with regret about the way I’ve
spoken to her, but it’s always too late then.
My mom was irritable about being awakened at night, too. Around the ages of
eight to ten I went through a period where I woke up nauseated in the middle of the night,
and spent hours on the cold tile, crying and vomiting into the toilet. I called for my mom
to help me. Sometimes she brought me 7-Up and rubbed my back in a circular motion,
but most of the time she got mad. She shouted from her bedroom that I was making
myself puke, that it was my fault for gorging myself at meals. It was one of the loneliest
feelings I’ve ever had. I swore to myself I’d never do that to my kids. My mom stopped
being affectionate with me at around that same time. She says the reason she stopped
hugging and kissing me is that one night as she came in to kiss me goodnight I told her I
was too old for it. I don’t remember that.
Daisy’s nightmares became more frequent when she turned seven: the same year I
discovered mountain lions. She started to sleep with her light on the day she saw a scary
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book cover in the school library and couldn’t get it out of her head. In the picture there
was a vampire coming out of a toy chest. Daisy fixated on this image, and began to
imagine the vampire was a scary doll. She began to imagine the scary doll was in her
own toy chest somewhere, buried beneath stuffed animals and dress up clothes waiting
for night to fall. I was unsympathetic about it; I laughed at her and told her it was
ridiculous.
Still, she stopped closing her bedroom door even during the day. When I asked
her to close it and she refused, I snapped at her. Too busy with my own neuroses to give
hers much attention, she later told me she’d found her own way to cope: at night alone in
her room she visualized the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz sucking every scary
thing into a tornado, and as she looked down on it she watched the book cover swirl its
way into oblivion.
My failure to be more patient with her makes me ashamed. Besides the fact that a
lot of her fears and neuroses were probably passed down from me in some way, I should
have been able to empathize; I’m scared of sharks, which is reasonable enough, but I’m
afraid of sharks lurking in the pool in my backyard at night. I don’t do night swimming,
but the rare times I’m talked into it I avoid the deep end. I picture them squeezing out
through the filter or entering the pool via the loose light we have under the diving board.
Sometimes I jump off the diving board, but swim to the nearest step like my life depends
on it, kicking my legs desperately.
I have an irrational fear of robotics, especially underwater robotics. At Universal
Studios, I buried my face in my dad’s chest when Jaws popped out of the water, half
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expecting our entire shuttle to be pulled under. I was fifteen. I can’t look at a picture of a
Tyrannosaurus Rex without getting The Fear, and although I’m fascinated with
dinosaurs, I certainly won’t turn my back on fossils in a museum, or animatronic ones at
the fair. Not even for a picture. When I went on the Jurassic Park ride I kept my eyes
shut the entire time. Last month I tried to show my daughter a video of the ride on the
Internet, and was surprised that I had a physical reaction to it, even in my living room.
Without fail I close my eyes at Disneyland every time our bobsled shoots past the
Matterhorn monster.
I’m afraid of birds: parrots perched in pet shops, crows searching for scraps in
parking lots, cockatiels in cages, chickens on farms, peacocks wandering through the zoo.
I’m afraid of being pecked and of feeling a bird’s wings flap near my hair. When I was a
teenager I dreamt that a bird landed on my head and woke up to terrified that I bashed my
head against the metal rails of my bunk bed until I passed out. I woke up the next
morning with a goose egg on the back of my head.
This is embarrassing, but when I was almost 30 I was home alone and spent the
night afraid to move because I kept imagining a mountain lion eying me from the
window. I was too paralyzed with fear to even get up and close the curtains. I kept
thinking about the man who was attacked in his cabin when the mountain lion jumped
through his window and tried to eat him. I finally ran up the stairs, but when I got to the
top I remembered that lions can jump twenty feet, so then I just stood there breathing as
quietly as I could as if that would help. I was terrified to be alone that night. Like my
daughter, I wished for comfort.
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I am now 32 years old and as I was writing this I tried to understand what it was
about mountain lions that got me so obsessed and afraid. Since the fear isn’t rational I
suspected beneath it was another thing trying to express itself in a whisper. I’m a little
embarrassed to openly psychoanalyze myself because I know how trite it is. All my
psychoanalytic tools come from pop culture, but I never let that stop me.
I am afraid to die. It’s anti-climactic, a clichéd epiphany to be left with after
spending so much time trying to figure things out. But it’s not just death I’m afraid of, I
think. It’s sudden death, the inability to prepare, to tie up loose ends. It’s crucial to know
how much time you have left when you’re a procrastinator like me.
The majority of the things I’ve been obsessed with have to do with death and
horror and fear and terror and panic: mountain lion attacks, true crime, serial killers,
conspiracy theories, murder trials. Even the comedy I love is black. At one point I read a
lot about the afterlife. I was obsessed in particular with return-from-death stories. I read
them from people across cultures and spanning time, from The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and The Egyptian Book of the Dead, from Mesopotamian and Greek mythology to the
Middle Ages to now. I read Kenneth Ring and Raymond Moody and Elisabeth KublerRoss, and I made my own YouTube playlist of videos of people sharing their near death
experiences.
Something I noticed from all that research is how similar people’s experiences
are. It doesn’t matter if it is a woman in the middle ages or a man in modern America.
Many report a passage through a tunnel until they enter a light-filled realm. A luminous
being is sometimes there to meet them, and to lead them through their life review. The
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life review is the part of the story that always gets my attention, the part I seek out each
time. It’s a feature that crops up again and again in modern day near death experiences,
but it’s also described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
and in Plato’s account of what Er experienced during his journey into the hereafter. It is
featured in books from the Middle Ages, like the dialogues of Gregory the Great. The
life review is found in yogic writings, Hindu writings, 18th century writings, as well as
ancient texts throughout the world. It is described similarly in all western religions.
The experience of the life review has been described as a vivid three-dimensional
replay of the person’s entire life: their thoughts and the things they did. Some have
described it as climbing inside a movie of your life in complete sensory detail with a total
recall that isn’t possible in life. One woman saw hers in a series of bubbles floating
before her. A man saw his life displayed on stacks upon stacks of television sets.
Sometimes people see three-dimensional holograms or they see their entire lives
reenacted on a stage. Others find themselves absorbed into the scenes of their lives, once
again a part of the action. Regardless of how it manifests itself, the main point of the life
review is always consistent: you experience all the joys and sorrows that accompany the
scenes you are watching and feel all the emotions of all of the people you have ever
interacted with, down to the smallest, seemingly insignificant events. You feel the joy of
all the people you’ve been kind to. If you have hurt someone, you become painfully
aware of the sadness they felt as a result of your selfishness. One woman felt the loss and
powerlessness her sister had felt as a child when she stole a toy from her hands.
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On YouTube, I watched a man named Rene Jorgensen give a lecture about dying
and coming back to life, and his experience of Hell. In his life review he saw himself
bullying a girl in his class when he was in third grade, and as he watched himself making
her cry he was suddenly on the receiving end of it, and he felt how his treatment of her
turned her inward and made her shy. He felt the aching sadness and helplessness her
parents felt watching their daughter suffer and become introverted. This experience was
Hell to him because it was almost unbearably painful to see how much he had missed the
mark in his life.
Almost everyone leaves a life review knowing all that matters is love, and to
devote your life to anything else makes it a waste, a failure, a Hell. The definition of sin,
it turns out, is to miss the mark. So when people die and come back, they often learn that
things like fear are the result of judgments we make or labels we have put on things to
dismiss them, and those judgments only serve to separate us from each other, and from
the truth. From love, really. They learn that when you let go of fear, when you turn
away from it, you find yourself aligned with love and bathed in a warm light, a light that
feels like getting hugged by a room full of giggling babies, or like falling in love, ecstasy.
And you are free. And you can live truthfully because everything in you is directed
toward what is permanent and beautiful.
A life review is like the kabalistic aleph, the mythical point at which all moments
are contained, and they all come back to you in an instant: the look on your little
brother’s face when you popped him on the back of the head for chewing with his mouth
open, the day he was grown up and he cried and reached his arms out to you as you
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closed your apartment door in his face, how it was about money, your first day at college,
how you thought you couldn’t do it, how you wanted to go back to your car, the water
splashing against your bare feet when the firemen opened the neighborhood hydrant, your
dad in a hospital bed, his mouth stinking of blood and metal, raising your arms and
speaking in tongues at church camp, the goose flying toward your canoe, laying on a
blanket on the grass with the boy you fell in love with, your mom serving you cinnamon
toast, crawling into the sleeping bag with your cousin’s ex boyfriend, you and your
husband and daughter riding your bikes through puddles after an evening rain, your feet
lifted off the pedals, driving around looking at Christmas lights, the preacher touching
your forehead before you went down and woke up disoriented, surrounded by bodies that
fell to the floor laughing and crying or still as men in ties draped blankets over women’s
legs, the pride you felt when your autistic nephew started to talk, the birthday card from
your mom with nothing written inside of it, not even her signature, your pet bunny laying
in a laundry basket in the seat next to you, emaciated, as you tore through the freeway,
standing in the parking lot outside of the veterinary hospital with your daughter, sobbing
in each other’s arms, the laundry basket now empty except for the blanket, looking into
the eyes of your two-year-old niece, both of you smiling at each other in a way that
connotes a deep and unspoken connection, an ex-boyfriend throwing your purse out of
the window of a moving car, getting baptized in a baby pool on a flatbed truck, cutting
down your first Christmas tree as a family, your husband and daughter on stage singing
Tank Park Salute together, every boyfriend you’ve ever had proposing to you, none as
real as the time your husband got on his knees in a Santa costume and his eyes filled with
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tears, your cat burrowing his head into your neck, your little girl telling you another girl
said she was ugly, baking chocolate banana muffins to bring your dad after surgery, the
way the chemicals in your mom’s skin makes every perfume stink, you in bed turning
your back toward your husband, a picture of the two of you thrown against a wall and
shattered, him kneeling over, helping you pick up shards of glass, back-flipping off the
diving board, the look on your dad’s face as he jumped fully clothed into the pool,
cradling his over-heated dog in his arms, the dog’s eyes, how they rolled back, how you
thought he would die then, how you moved him into the bathtub in the hall as you and
your husband ran from the kitchen to the bathroom to dump buckets of ice cubes into the
tub, your husband’s eyes wide but resolute, how your father leaned over his dog, his
clothing soaked, his face pinched, his shoulders slouched forward, your Grandma
reaching up to the top shelf and then handing you Lambert, your favorite stuffed animal,
a lion, the feeling in your heart when your husband cries on the couch next to you during
Friday Night Lights, you and your daughter laughing until you can’t breathe, feeling such
agony you threw yourself in the mud, kissing your best friend’s boyfriend right on the
lips, putting the baby carriage ornament on the Christmas tree, the air bag exploding in
your face, the diamond from your engagement ring flying from the smashed prongs, the
smell of smoke, the empty car seat, your shrieks, how they filled up the car, the stranger’s
hands as they dragged you out toward the sidewalk, taking a bath in Dr. Pepper and
cherry tomatoes you grew in the backyard, a firework shooting into the bushes, watching
the bush go up in flames, your mom running with the hose, taking photos with the judge
after your husband adopted your daughter, the time you looked into the mirror and told
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yourself life couldn’t get any worse, your Grandpa’s halitosis, making nachos at midnight
with your best friend, your mom teaching you to shave your legs, the doctor entering the
waiting room to say he thinks all the cancer is gone, your family singing together in the
car, your dad assigning an air instrument for each of you to play, your husband
whispering in your ear that he wants a baby, comforting your dog as she cried softly in
the backseat of the car after being spayed, finding your car had been gutted and set on
fire, Late Night, Maudlin Street, your husband running out of the bedroom wearing one
of your dresses to make you laugh, your father’s body shaking violently as he seizes,
blood streaming from his mouth, you and your mom trying to feed him pills, your Nana
after her stroke, her left side hanging limply in her wheelchair, half of her face drooping,
her brain changed forever, writing jokes with your husband, watching him pace back and
forth on stage, hearing the audience laugh, your Papa with staples holding his scalp
together, snap judgments, wondering why your cousin was showing so much cleavage at
her own dad’s funeral, cutting all your hair off in front of the mirror, vomiting outside of
the courtroom, crying inside of your jail cell, slapping your first boyfriend across his
face, watching his hand cup his own cheek, his mouth dropped open, the safety you felt
when you looked at your father’s hands, your face in a book, your face in your laptop,
your face in your iPhone, your face in your TV, pulling weeds with your mother-in-law,
you and your daughter tap dancing together on the tiles the night before you went away,
tucked under the blankets and waiting perplexed for your mom to kiss you goodnight,
you pregnant, dancing behind the bedroom door alone, your hand on your stomach, the
doctor placing your baby girl on your chest, the promises you made to her then, long
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forgotten, covered up by other, newer things, like the way you sometimes tried hard to be
engaged, tried asking her about herself, but your eyes went out of focus in the middle of
her replies; fear when you gazed at something you did not understand.
The beings of light don’t judge you. By all accounts they are there to support you
through it, and you feel nothing but acceptance and warmth in their presence. The only
judgment that ever takes place is self-judgment, and it rises up only out of your own
feelings of repentance as you learn the true gravity of the things you have done.
I know it’s cooler not to care, and more intelligent to be cynical, to believe life
ends before they pitch dirt onto your coffin; when I told my friend Karlos, he laughed.
Not to be cruel; it just escaped from his mouth. I know it’s not modern or scientific or
academic, but I’d still like to believe these stories are true.
I believe they are, I think.
Moments that seemed meaningless resonate with newfound importance. One
woman watched herself as a little girl bending over a tiny violet growing through a crack
in the concrete. She was mesmerized. She bent over and cupped the flower in her hands.
During her life review she discovered that this was the most crucial moment of her life
because it was the moment she expressed her love in the purest way, and didn’t expect to
get anything back.
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When Willow was found he was a malnourished infant, shivering and dehydrated.
He was sick from worms. He was distraught. After being nursed back to health he was
brought to the Folsom Sanctuary. Sanctuary workers feared the other lions would attack
and kill him, so he was kept in an enclosure separate from them. Willow was terrified,
disoriented, and did not want to be touched. He had to be hand-reared and bottle-fed by
the workers, but he spat and growled at them. When they brought him an old stuffed
panda, he rolled around with it as if it were another kitten. Using the panda as a gobetween, sanctuary workers were eventually able to treat him. Willow began to chirp and
whistle.
The media covered Willow’s relocation and habituation to the sanctuary, and
when he made his debut at a news conference some people were furious with the
sanctuary’s acceptance of Willow. They were afraid of what his mother had done, and
the tiny puncture marks found on Barbara Schoener’s body seemed to indicate that
Willow had, at one point, tasted human flesh.
On his show, Rush Limbaugh falsely reported that two separate trust funds had
been set up for the children of Barbara Schoener and for Willow, and that Willow was
receiving tens of thousands of dollars more than Barbara Schoener’s children. In
actuality there was no trust fund set up for Willow, but some people were angry, and
sanctuary workers worried that someone would break in after closing and hurt Willow.
They took him to a sanctuary worker’s home each night, where he slept in the bathroom,
curling up on the counter.
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Who could harm a baby? What kind of animals made up this angry mob? And I
scan the crowd, I search it, and when I squint I catch a glimpse of a familiar face, but it’s
contorted: the mouth twisted and ugly as she shouts with all the rest. And coming out
from the shadows the mob swarms the cage and we lift our torches and bang on the bars,
and in unison we cry out for someone to get rid of this diabolical beast, to make it
disappear. Make it go away, I’ve been saying to myself for years now. Make it go away.
I found a picture of Willow in an old journal the other day. A photo taken from
when he spent his nights alone in the zookeeper’s bathroom, sleeping in drawers and
cuddling with his stuffed panda. He is curled up on the bathroom counter. His blue eyes
peek out of his furry, spotted face. The toilet paper on the roll next to him has been
playfully torn to shreds. He has this look on his face, like, “What did I do?”
The thing is, he’s just a kitten.
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If I can’t empathize with my own daughter, what hope do I have to
unconditionally love a flower peeking up through the sidewalk? What will my life look
like to me when I emerge from my tunnel of light? Maybe I’ll feel what it’s like to be
Daisy tugging at my sleeve, begging to tap dance for me on the tiles one more time while
I stare at my iPhone and brush her away with a wave of my fingers. Or I’ll see myself
with my arms crossed over my chest, sitting on the sanctuary bench, staring past the bars
with a hate-filled, fearful gaze fixed on Willow until I am subsumed, entangled with him
forever, feeling his shoulders pumping up and down as we pace the worn trail in his cage,
wondering where on earth our mothers have gone.
We’ll peer out through the bars of our cage and see my mom standing there,
straining to find something just beyond us. Daisy will be there too. I’ll catch her
watching me with her arms crossed while her own daughter plays behind her, like a series
of mirrors where you can go on searching forever. And when my eyes finally get tired
and surrender to rest I will step back and see the big picture, proof that I missed the mark:
my own reel ticking and whirring as it projects my daughter’s birthright, my legacy, a
wilderness of error: my empire of infinite fear and sadness.
Last week I went to visit Willow again and he was gone.
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EVERYTHING I STOLE (DISAPPEARED DOWN A HOLE)
“No, everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. We know this. But we must
first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered
and what we must take into account.” - Albert Camus
Part 1: The Hole in Me
I’m probably one of the nicest girls you could ever meet, but I wasn’t always so
nice. For most of my life I was asleep. I don’t know when I first got knocked out: maybe
I knocked myself out through a series of bad or thoughtless decisions. Maybe I never
decided to be conscious. Or maybe it was my mom and dad’s fault: maybe they never
taught me to be awake. Or it could be that over time the world knocked me over the head
again and again until I began sleepwalking through my own life.
It doesn’t matter how it happened. Or even if it happened. Maybe I was awake
the entire time but I wanted to forget, so I blocked everything out. Maybe it’s just my
way of separating myself from her: the girl I was then. Maybe forgetting is a way for me
to avoid responsibility. It wouldn’t surprise me. I’m like that sometimes.
What I do remember is this: I wanted to be perfect when I was younger. I
remember trying and never even getting close. I remember being fourteen and listening
to the song Perfect by Alanis Morissette on repeat. It’s a song where she complains
she’ll never be good enough to win someone’s love. It made me feel sorry for myself to
listen to it. I sang along in a whisper with tears on my face. It wasn’t long after that that
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I probably just gave up and decided to be bad. I gave up and decided to reward myself
for all my efforts by doing whatever I wanted, when I wanted. That’s probably what
happened. Either way, I don’t remember that day, the day I went to sleep.
There is a hole that cannot be filled. It started as a pit and became a sinkhole and
I collapsed into it. After a while I became one with it, a gaping wound, hollow and
hungry all the time. My dad told me that everybody feels this way, that the only way to
fill it was with Jesus. But that never worked for me so I was left to figure it out on my
own. It’s hard to figure things out when you’re asleep, because then you don’t even try.
I didn’t have an introspective thought until I was in my twenties. As a teenager I
didn’t realize the hole was a bottomless pit, a black hole. I was naïve. Somewhere along
the way I came to believe I could fill it with material things and fantasies. So I poured a
lot into it. I was essentially shoveling images and shooting stars into a bottomless pit in
the dark, but I didn’t know that then. Acquiring things—and tricking people, I realize
now— was the only thing that gave me the sense of being full or awake, so I stole
anything I could get my hands on. I snatched things, swiped things, and crammed things
beneath my coat or into my pockets or into my purse. It got so bad that after some time I
stopped wanting things that weren’t stolen. Paying for a lipstick or a pair of socks
became foreign to me. Boring. Frivolous even.
I don’t even remember the first thing I stole but my mom says it was a packet of
rainbow barrettes with the name Georgette on them. I was two. Were the jaws of the
hole already yawning open then? I snagged the barrettes from the store shelf as we
whizzed by and then hid them in my stroller. I didn’t start to steal again until I was in my
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late teens, maybe 17, my hair no longer in two pigtailed ringlets, and then I dedicated my
life to it. Stealing became my religion.
I was lost, so I took everything from other people. Not just their belongings, but
their ideas, interests, opinions, and decisions. I didn’t have my own opinions, or if I did
they mattered so little I considered them wrong, a nuisance to be ignored. I thought
everyone else’s opinion was the truth. I thought what everyone else wanted was more
valid and real than what I wanted. Everything else in my life, every main event, was set
into motion by someone else. I was like a raft moving through life in the wake of various
motorboats if the raft eagerly tethered itself to the motorboats each time. If the raft was
an idiot.
I started stealing with Jessa. Jessa was the kind of girl you couldn’t trust: flaky
and spoiled, always cheating on her boyfriends. But she could be funny and fun to be
around. She had this cute baby voice and a speech impediment that made her sound like
a baby Boston gangster played by a cartoon mouse, if you can wrap your head around
that. When she sang it sounded like babies puking. Jessa smoked and listened to The
Grateful Dead and cut her hair short. She was more daring than me. She had already
done acid by the time we met; I hadn’t even tried a cigarette. She was the first person I
smoked pot with. Her bedroom was no more than ten feet from her parents’ room, but
she rolled a towel up and placed it against the bottom of her door and we smoked pot
together in her twin bed when I stayed over. I thought that was pretty ballsy.
She was much cooler than me so sometimes Jessa was condescending, but I never
said anything. She liked to make fun of how sheltered I had been, how I had none of the
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cultural knowledge shared by our peers, how I wasn’t aware of certain bands or movies
or TV shows. She had me all figured out; she seemed to know me better than I knew
myself. Sometimes I liked to sit there and just listen to her tell me who I was. In private
and in the company of others she said I was socially awkward and afraid of confrontation
because I was home-schooled. She said I was shy and struggled socially so often and in
so many different ways that I could feel myself become molded by it. I began to see
myself as shy and socially awkward. I began to act shy and socially awkward. By
contrast Jessa was the confident one. I was technically prettier than her, but I still would
have rather looked like her than me.
She said I didn’t know how to dress. Sometimes she reminded me that when we
first met I dressed like a Russian. I still have no idea what that meant, but I knew it
wasn’t a compliment. When we became friends I began dressing like her. She didn’t
mind. She helped me find a skirt like hers, told me where to get it and everything. Some
years later she said I had pursued her relentlessly before we were friends, that I kept
calling her. I don’t remember that, but I believe it to be true. Jessa was my best friend.
Jessa and I stole each other’s clothes. We didn’t even try to hide them from each
other, not really. If I got to her house before she got there her mom let me in, and I
would go into Jessa’s bedroom and shop the shelves in her closet, packed tight with more
clothes than I had, which justified me taking what I wanted. I took a camisole or a shirt
and hid it at the bottom of my backpack before she got there. In particular was this white
Calvin Klein camisole she had that I stole constantly. It went back and forth between us
like a child of divorce. I still have it today. I don’t know how Jessa got my things, but
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sometimes we’d meet in the Borders parking lot and she’d walk up to me sipping an iced
tea from a bent straw and wearing one of my skirts. I didn’t say anything, just stole it
back the next time I was at her house.
Jessa taught me how to steal from department stores. We stole matching clothes
and accessories together from Gap. I think the first time we stole from Gap she took a
green leather purse and I took its red twin. I stole a wallet to carry inside of it. I took
things near the cash register like lip gloss and chapstick and little perfumes and key
chains. If I liked something I held it in my hand and then dropped it into my pocket or
purse. I stole a camel leather skirt with pleats worth well over $500. I took lots of
cashmere sweaters and lace underwear and bras. A crocheted camisole. Five camisoles
with lace trim in different colors. A silk blouse. An embroidered cardigan. Lots of
jeans. I stole a pink Calvin Klein bra, all lacy with a tiny rose at the center. I stole a
black bra by Betsey Johnson. I stole pants and shirts and skirts with cute gold buttons.
My hairbrush was stolen. My toothbrush was stolen. My toothpaste was stolen. My
shampoo and conditioner were stolen. My makeup bag was stolen. The things I ate,
everything I wore, everything I used: stolen, stolen, stolen, stolen.
I became brazen. I put on a big puffy jacket and walked out of the store wearing
it. I took a turquoise coat with gray lining and a hood. Some things were hard to steal
because some department stores attached sensor tags or tags filled with black ink, so
Jessa bought some industrial pliers and carried them in her bag when we went out.
It got to where almost everywhere I went I stole something. I took a clementine
or an apricot from the produce aisle or a tiny figurine from a garage sale or gum from the
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checkout line. I took batteries and pens from the grocery store. In one of my community
college classes the girl next to me, who I had been friendly with all semester, left her
purse on her seat while she went to use the bathroom. I leaned over and took six dollar
bills from her wallet. This was the first time I had ever stolen something personal and my
heart was pounding through the rest of class. I felt actual guilt. Up until that point my
stealing hadn’t violated anyone’s sense of security, and I was so disturbed by my own
behavior that I wrote a lengthy passage about it in my diary that night. I don’t know why
it escalated, then.
After that experience I preyed on the vulnerabilities of others. I stole a bud of
weed from a guy Jessa met on the Internet. They started making out on the patio right in
front of me, so I went back inside and after sitting on his couch for a while watching
skateboard videos I got bored and wandered in and out of rooms until I located his
bedroom. When I was rifling through his drawers I found a jar of weed beneath a black
light poster and a spider terrarium. I slipped a large bud into my pocket. He wouldn’t
notice. On the way home I stuffed it into Jessa’s pipe and generously smoked her out
with it, never mentioning where it came from. I’m not even sure she would have
disapproved. We were truly partners in crime. Together we celebrated Y2K on the
downtown Santa Cruz streets, and when we popped into a store bathroom, Jessa found
and stole the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape on VHS.
Everyone’s home became a store. In the autumn of 1999 my boyfriend Neil and I
walked to a house party a few blocks from where he lived. I hate parties and large groups
of people, and I hate meeting new people (it makes me feel shy and awkward) but I went
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because I hoped there’d be something in the house I wanted. It was dark and the party
was packed full of young drunk kids my age who were shouting over the music. I walked
down the dim hallway to use the bathroom. I locked the door behind me and peeled back
the shower curtain, careful to be quiet. I peeked inside the medicine cabinets, but there
was nothing in there I wanted. Inside the linen closet I found Benefit brand makeup,
Philosophy shower gels and lotions, shampoo, MAC makeup brushes, Laura Mercier
lipsticks, eyeshadows, and foundation that didn’t even match my skin tone. When I was
little, I used to watch these game shows on TV where kids ran through toy stores with
shopping carts and had a limited amount of time to throw whatever they wanted into the
cart. I was obsessed with those shows. This was almost like that; just as exhilarating,
anyway. I didn’t wear much makeup, just a naked face except for red or plum lipstick,
but I took it all. I stuffed it into my backpack and left Neil behind at the party without
even saying goodbye. I knew he might get pissed off at me when he realized I left, but I
was shaking with adrenalin, so I speed-walked to his house, galloping even. When I got
there I dumped everything on to his bed to sort through it and gingerly organized it all
into little piles. It gave me a Christmas feeling.
Jessa and I ran out of chain restaurants and ice cream shops without paying the
bill, giggling as we toppled over each other down the stairs to the car. When I was by
myself I prowled through my community college parking lot, scanning the rows of
vehicles for unlocked doors or unrolled windows with purses or backpacks that had been
left behind, or CDs or books, or anything else I wanted. Sometimes I skipped class to do
it.
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If I was at someone’s house and saw a book I wanted to read I just slipped it into
my purse. That’s how I got A Clockwork Orange. One evening at my cousin’s house I
saw that her friend had left her car unlocked so I stole a book of CDs from it. The police
tracked me down where I was staying and asked me questions, but I lied and somehow
got away with it. I used my friend’s Shell credit card to buy gas for my car even though
she let me stay at her house when I had nowhere else to go. I burned bridge after bridge.
Earlier that summer Chelsa—a girl I met at Neil’s church and desperately wanted
to be friends with—let me crash at her house while her family went on vacation. Like a
klepto Goldilocks I went through the bedrooms of each of her family members, sleeping
in every bed, and the last day I was there I stole a pair of her little sister’s new Nikes.
They were still in the box, very obviously a back-to-school purchase. I let Jessa borrow
them and when she wore them to church Chelsa asked her where she got them. Jessa
didn’t know they were stolen from Chelsa’s little sister, so she said she borrowed them
from me. After that none of the girls at church wanted anything to do with me.
The day I finally went to jail I was attempting to steal several expensive items of
clothing from a department store because I wanted to buy my new boyfriend Ethan a
DVD player for his birthday. Jessa and I had done this particular scam many times
before. We stole items, took them out to the car, and then one of us went back inside to
return the items in exchange for cash. Or we’d drive west on Interstate 80 from Roseville
to their Sacramento store with the windows down, listening to David Bowie or Erasure or
the Boogie Nights soundtrack, singing and smoking cloves, and we’d return the items
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there. We did this habitually and made thousands of dollars, actual cash right there in our
hands.
The day I was arrested I was the one stealing the clothing while Jessa waited for
me in the parking lot. I took the clothes into the dressing room with me and put an
expensive blouse on under my sweater, then tucked some more clothes under my coat.
The clothes I was stealing this time were ugly, one of the shirts had primary colored
graffiti all over it, but each item was worth over $200. I didn’t know it, but a detective
working for the store—a blond woman with a dark mustache as I remember it—
watched me through the slats of the changing room door.
Security had been watching Jessa and me for a long time, but I’d always left the
store too quickly for them to get me. That day I exited the store as usual, but this time I
stopped to hold the door for a woman in a wheelchair. Just as my foot touched down on
the concrete outside the detective slammed her badge into my chest and arrested me. I
remember that hard punch in the chest, a moment of absolute confusion, and then looking
up and seeing that badge inches from my face. It looked massive.
They put me in the back of the paddy wagon on the way to jail, where I watched
the road dissolve in front of me. I couldn’t get Jailhouse Rock out of my head. When I
got there they asked me if I was suicidal and I had to seriously think about it for a second
before saying no. They sent me to another room where a female officer was supposed to
watch me undress and put on a red jumpsuit and large pink cotton underwear. She had
mercy on me and turned away while I took my clothes off, neglecting to do a cavity
search.
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They tried to charge me with a felony: second-degree burglary. I was looking at
up to a year in jail. I tried to call Jessa from my holding cell, but her dad said she had
gone bowling with her boyfriend Evan. That really pissed me off. I thought the least she
could do was wait to see what happened to me. I knew I would have been camped out by
the phone waiting for her call, but that was classic Jessa. I called Ethan, who was
celebrating his birthday at his parents’ home, wondering where I was. When I told him
he was short with me. All of his answers were clipped, and I wondered why he seemed
mad. I expected sympathy. I hung up the phone and sat there, staring at it or past it, and
realized I was the fuck-up in the relationship, though I had never once seen myself in this
role before. After considering this for a minute I decided it was time to call my parents,
the scariest of the phone calls. I don’t know why I called them. I was legally an adult
and could have kept it a secret forever. At the time I didn’t feel like I had a choice. They
were sad and disappointed, too tired for outrage maybe, and my dad asked me how much
bail was. I wouldn’t tell him. I felt an overwhelming need to suffer the consequences of
what I had done, to be punished.
I was booked after waiting for hours into the night in a cold room with a metal
toilet at the edge of it. There was garbage all over the cement floor: empty juice boxes,
cellophane, toilet paper and string cheese wrappers: everything used and then tossed to
the ground. Another arrested woman kept crying and showing me a picture of Sergeant,
her German Shepherd. Around one in the morning I heard the door buzz and my last
name and when I came out the police officer who took my mug shot didn’t try to hide his
disgust with me. My mug was haggard and pale from crying, and in the moment before
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the camera clicked he sneered and said, “You’re no better than anyone else in here. You
know that, right?”
As the flash blinded me I thought about murderers and rapists and wondered if it
was true. I wondered if, philosophically at least, he had a point. At the cellblock I was
assigned to I shared a cell with a pregnant girl who was being charged with kidnapping.
She said it was all a huge misunderstanding. Big tattoo of her dead brother’s name on her
wrist. Ethan, it said.
Outside my cell I met a woman in her late forties who reminded me of one of my
aunts. I’d noticed her the past few days; there was something comforting about her being
there, the familiarity, maybe. She and several other women exercised daily, speed
walking in a circle around our cellblock’s common area. Most of the women didn’t
bother talking to me, but the woman who looked like my aunt stopped and asked what I
was in for. I told her and she nodded knowingly.
“I’m a klepto, too,” she said, and I could see some of her teeth were missing.
“They let me out of here and I’m just gonna keep on stealing. I’ll be back. That’s what
people like us do.” She gestured toward the two of us. “We can’t stop.”
I didn’t say anything. It reminded me of the time just a few months previous
when my Uncle Mark, almost completely toothless from meth use, told me I reminded
him so much of himself at my age.
Because this was my first offense I was released within a week and my charge
was dropped to a misdemeanor. I was to stay out of trouble and do community service.
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The woman from jail was both right and wrong about me. After I was released from jail I
was too frightened to steal from stores. Jessa continued to do it, but I begged her not to
when I was with her; I could be charged with Accessory.
One thing I couldn’t get arrested for, though, was stealing people’s boyfriends,
and I did that a lot before and after I was arrested. The year before I was arrested, a few
months after Neil dumped me and moved to Hawaii to get away from me, I slept with my
closest cousin’s ex-boyfriend in the back of his truck. I did it even though she was letting
me live with her, even though she was my closest friend at the time, even though I loved
her and couldn’t imagine my life without her, even though I knew she was hung up on
him, even though they were still intimate and I had everything to lose from doing it. I
kissed Jessa’s boyfriend David even though she was just outside on the patio smoking a
cigarette. We even lay down on his bed to kiss. I was so surprised and flattered that he
was attracted to me I didn’t try to stop it. A few months after that I slept in the same bed
as Jessa’s new boyfriend Evan and I put my arm around him in the morning just to see
what would happen. Nothing, it turns out.
After Neil and I broke up, every guy I dated had a girlfriend when we met. It was
hard for me to maintain interest in a guy with no girlfriend. It wasn’t much different
from stealing anything else: I liked the challenge. And because of my inferiority
complex there was the extra thrill of feeling like I one-upped another girl, that in the
moment her boyfriend had decided to dump her and go for me instead, I was tangibly
better than her. My looks, my personality: it had been decided.
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I got pregnant with my daughter just a few months after I was released from jail
and the genesis of my relationship with her father Ethan was the same old story: he had a
live-in girlfriend named Sarah. The second time we hung out we were in his truck and I
asked if he had a picture of her. At the stoplight he leaned over to open the glove box
and handed me a Polaroid of a very cute girl with long black hair and horn-rimmed
glasses, her head titled to the side as she smiled.
“She’s very cute,” I said, and I touched my hand to the side of my face, worried
she was cuter than me.
“Yes, she is cute,” he said, and he looked straight into my eyes. “But you- you are
gorgeous.”
He took me to see his apartment when Sarah wasn’t home. I’d been expecting a
bachelor pad, but I was impressed by how clean it was, and by the amount of books
lining the shelves in his bedroom. My last boyfriend Neil did not read for pleasure and it
bothered me. I wanted a boyfriend who liked to read as much as I did.
But in spite of the clean apartment and the reading, Ethan was still not my type.
His style was silly, for one. He looked like a vampire: he wore a black leather trench coat
down to his feet and two rings in his lower lip. He bought steel toe boots from Payless
and had a long, crunchy goatee. I believed in God; Ethan wore a shirt that said Satan is
my fucking co-pilot.
The first night we were making out he took his shirt off and when he got up to use
the shower in the morning, I saw that someone had written something on his back with a
Sharpie. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to embarrass him, but later Evan told
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me it wasn’t Sharpie. It was a tattoo one of his drunken friends gave him. It was
supposed to say Eat the Rich, the name of an Aerosmith song I’d never heard, but the
friend thought it would be much funnier to tattoo the words Eat Shit instead.
Still, Ethan was determined and persuasive. A few weeks after we had been
meeting in secret at the video store Jessa and Evan worked at, or driving around in his
truck at night and parking in cemeteries and elementary school parking lots, Ethan
dumped his girlfriend and kicked her out of their apartment. One February night he and
his leather trench coat ambled toward me in the Beverages and More parking lot to tell
me. He announced it like he was giving me a gift. He seemed to think that I had been
waiting for him to dump Sarah when in fact I appreciated the distance she gave us. It had
been exciting and romantic to send him coded messages on his pager, or to not know
when we would see each other next. To feel my heart beat when I pulled up to the video
store, and saw his truck parked in front of it.
It was nice to be pursued, but I was ambivalent about us as a couple and still not
over Neil, and here Ethan was forcing me to make a decision. I sighed and told him I
didn’t want a boyfriend. I realized he was drunk when he got on his knees in the parking
lot, looked up at me, and begged me to give him a chance. He was always getting on his
knees with me, probably because it worked. It embarrassed me to see him down there,
and I felt terrible that he had dumped Sarah assuming I was a sure thing. I had probably
led him on. I accepted just so he would stand up, and because I felt flattered and because
I felt sorry for him, and mostly because he had asked.
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It’s been more than a decade since that night, and now I associate the smell of
leather with all kinds of poverty: economic, emotional, social, romantic. Within a month
I would discover that several of Ethan’s teeth were rotting; a pungent smell like garbage
emanated from the back of his mouth. I could smell it when we were close, taste it when
we kissed, when he shoved his enormous tongue into my mouth, invading my face as I
moved my head back and away from him, but kept on kissing. Sometimes when he bit
into his food a piece of his tooth broke off. That February we went to a buffet together
and I wondered why he filled his plate with only hard-boiled eggs, red Jell-O and
pudding. He had hemorrhoids, and when Sarah moved out she took all her books with
her. When I went back to the newly vacated apartment there were only a few Stephen
King books left on the empty shelves. The apartment was trashed from partying. There
was a ripped pair of women’s track pants tacked onto the living room wall, Stove Top
Stuffing and macaroni shells all over the kitchen floor, blood and pink vomit on the
ceiling in the hallway bathroom, and empty beer bottles laying everywhere. I’d never
seen such a transformation.
I moved into Ethan’s apartment the day I got out of jail. Once I moved in he
confessed he’d never finished reading a book in his life.
I was single and living on Evan’s couch when I discovered I was pregnant. It was
October of the same year Ethan and I had met, and we’d already broken up by August.
Even though we hadn’t been friendly on September 11 we had both reached out to each
other for comfort. I remember walking across the acre of grass toward Ethan’s house,
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and seeing his dad, a veteran, sitting on a lawn chair as the sun was setting. The air was
warm. He had a few empty beer cans next to him, and he was staring off into the
distance.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, and everything about him was somber and battleweary. I couldn’t stop thinking about the things I had seen on the TV. New York was so
far away, and I didn’t know if I should be scared or not. I hadn’t heard of the World
Trade Center before that morning, and I didn’t know what to say. I nodded at him and
grunted in agreement. He kept staring ahead, and when he didn’t say anything more, I
bowed my head and walked up to the house to get Ethan.
I got pregnant that evening, about eight hours after the planes hit the towers, after
I saw people jump from broken window ledges and heard all the screaming and witnessed
gray smoke swelling and all those bodies flailing as they spun and fell through the air.
Getting pregnant was an indirect result of seeing all those things. Maybe that was why
many aspects of my pregnancy seemed different, doomed somehow. I told friends and
family members the news the same way people tell you they’re dying or seriously ill. If
you’d looked through the window as I was telling my parents you’d swear I just said, “I
am dying of cancer.”
My mom looked down and my dad moaned and said, “Oh, Nicole.” They were
too sad to even yell at me, and I can’t blame them. It was not good news. I was twenty
years old and a total loser: homeless, poor, an ex-con still doing community service, and
there was no father. Ethan wanted nothing to do with us. There wasn’t anything to
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celebrate, so I kept my head lowered when I told people. I said I was pregnant like an
apology.
Ethan and his parents had been much crueler than mine. The night before I found
out I was pregnant, Ethan and I had gotten into an argument because we were supposed
to go to Marine World together and his mom didn’t want him to go because she was
afraid Marine World would be attacked by terrorists. I thought it was a very illogical
fear: Marine World did not seem important enough to be chosen as a site for a terrorist
attack.
“Marine World is in Vallejo. Marine World,” I argued, “isn’t even as culturally
significant as Sea World. I don’t even think Sea World would be attacked by terrorists.”
I tried to imagine Marine World exploding. I tried to imagine Sea World
exploding.
“These amusement parks are not politically significant,” I said. “Disneyland,
maybe, but Marine World?”
I looked at him with disgust. Ethan was 25 years old and could have gone to
Marine World if he wanted to. Anyway, it shouldn’t have mattered, but I was hyperemotional from the pregnancy hormones and didn’t know it. I became upset and
somewhat irate when I realized he wasn’t going with me, that I couldn’t talk him into it.
His true reasons for not going had nothing to do with his mom or terrorist attacks, and we
both knew it. He wanted to go to a strip club in Davis with his friend that night. When
Ethan dropped me off at Evan’s so I could go to Marine World I cried, and kept my
seatbelt on, and refused to get out of his truck. He became cold in that way I recognized
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from being dumped by him many times before, and though we weren’t technically dating,
I knew he was about to drop the hammer: sure enough he said he never wanted to see me
again.
On the way to Marine World that night, my friends and I stopped at In-N-Out
Burger, which I usually loved. But I wasn’t hungry, and when I smelled the french fries
inside the car I felt nauseated. Later on a ride that spun I got dizzy for the first time. On
the way home I told Evan and Jessa I was scared I was pregnant. Evan seemed annoyed
and accused me of being dramatic. The next morning I vomited in Evan’s shower and
came out in my towel to tell him. He still thought I was being dramatic. After work I
took a pregnancy test and my suspicions were confirmed.
One of the first things I thought when I saw the plus-sign on my pregnancy test
was how shitty the timing was. I knew it was going to look like I was lying about being
pregnant just to get Ethan back. I knew it seemed like a desperate ploy, a cliché. I called
him at his parents’ house first, but his mom said he didn’t want to speak with me.
“It’s important though,” I said.
Of course it is, she probably thought. She said he couldn’t talk and then hung up.
I had to tell him, so Jessa drove me over and we climbed the rickety steps on their
back porch and knocked on the door. I brought the pregnancy test with me because the
situation demanded proof. I tried to be calm as I stood at the door, but his mom blocked
the doorway and said, “Ethan isn’t here,” even though I could see him behind her shaving
his head with a razor. White shaving cream was smeared all over his skull and I could
see patches of hair scattered across the linoleum.
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“He’s right there,” I said, pointing. He looked away from me. She shook her
head and shifted to block my view. It was almost comical in its stupidity, and as a last
resort I took the pregnancy test from my pocket and held it up between us.
“Here,” I said.
“What in the hell is that?” she asked, looking at the pregnancy test with what
appeared to be genuine confusion. I realized then that she was very, very old and had
never seen a home pregnancy test.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, putting the urine-stained stick back in my pocket. Saying
the words out loud made me cry, so I burst out crying.
“You need to have an abortion,” she said without taking a breath, looking me
right in the eye. When I stood there with my mouth open she shut the door in my face.
I was dumbstruck, and I waited for Ethan to come outside. I was sure he had
heard me. But when the door reopened it wasn’t Ethan, it was Ethan’s father. He
grabbed me by my arm and marched me off the property. I didn’t say anything, just kept
crying, my feet stumbling over each other. Jessa ran alongside us cussing at Ethan’s
father. Unlike me, she wasn’t too numb to react to the injustice of it.
Whatever our feelings about the pregnancy were, whether elation or despair, they
were feelings Ethan and I were supposed to share. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the
pregnancy, and I didn’t expect Ethan to be either, but I thought at least we were in it
together. I had a sense that this was the primary thing Ethan had taken from me. He had
stolen the comforts of communion from me, had thrown me out in the cold to fend for
myself. If I hadn’t been living in such a state of denial at the time I would’ve expected
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nothing different, but as it stood, I hated him for dodging me. I cried and cried in my
bedroom for days, but after that it became easy for me to stop talking to him.
I was working as a teacher’s aide, and a week later Ethan called me at work while
my students surrounded me. When I picked up the phone and said hello he hissed at me
to get an abortion. The way he treated me you’d think I planned the pregnancy, that I’d
done it all on my own. He pretended that I hadn’t told him all along I never wanted to
have an abortion, so we needed to be careful.
The other times he had broken up with me I’d felt desperate to get him back, sat
out in front of Borders writing a pros and cons list and forcing Jessa to listen as I
explored every angle of our relationship (“He has gross feet and bad breath and I don’t
really love him, but he does makes me laugh, you know?”), but this time I had no such
desire. My feelings for him had been obliterated. I told him if it was money he was
worried about, I didn’t want a thing from him. I told him to leave me alone. I told him I
was having the baby. It was maybe the first time in my life I was bull-headed.
Everyone had an opinion of what I should do, but not one person thought I should
keep the baby. Evan and Jessa thought I should have an abortion (“I mean, why wouldn’t
you?”) and Evan seemed annoyed that I didn’t want to. My parents suggested adoption
because they thought abortion was murder. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving the baby
up for adoption, because making a decision in someone else’s interest was foreign to me.
My baby represented a new start. A do-over. I may not have realized I was
sleepwalking, but I sensed I was missing out on something fundamental that other people
seemed to have. I wasn’t sure what it was, but a baby felt like a step toward finding out.
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I didn’t even consider that the baby could have a home with a couple that was ready for
him or her. A baby could fill this hole, so I moved back in with my parents determined to
raise her on my own.
After a few weeks of silence Ethan called to yell at me about his missing
Nintendo 64 controllers. He accused me of letting my cousin borrow them and never
returning them. I couldn’t believe he was calling me up about video game equipment,
and I was so outraged I said, “Fuck you. Are you insane,” and hung up on him.
He called back and before I could hang up on him again he asked (in an eerily
different tone) if I would meet him on a street corner near my parents’ house. I didn’t
know what to expect so I cried and my teeth chattered the whole walk there.
When he came toward me in his trench coat, I was crouched in a patch of dead
grass on the side of someone’s front yard, weeping into my hands. I had been puking all
day. The skin across my forehead had broken out into millions of tiny bumps. My
breasts were on fire, and my eyes were red with exhaustion. When I looked up he was
crouching down and reaching his arms out to hug me. I stood up, confused, but he stayed
on his knees.
“I’m ready,” he said, “I’m ready to be a father.” But it felt like improv, like he
had just decided right at that moment—and sort of in this gross way, like what he was
doing was heroic. Like he should have extended his arm to indicate majesty as he said it.
And it bothered me that he seemed to have no doubt that I would take him back. That
wasn’t even a question in his mind.
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“I don’t want to raise a baby with someone who drinks like you do,” I said, even
though that wasn’t even the half of it. But still I thought say you will quit oh please say
you will quit and don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave.
“I’m done with all that,” he said, unfazed. He pulled something from his pocket
and for a second I was worried and excited that it might be an engagement ring.
He placed a golf-ball sized red foam heart in my hand. I just stared at it.
“It’s always been special to me,” he said, “and I want to give to you.”
It was a blatant lie, like a lie you’d tell a child. I just knew he had found it on the
ground—probably on his way to meet me—or in one of his mother’s junk drawers on his
way out the door. This cast-off piece of heart-shaped foam—which upon closer
examination looked like it had broken off of a keychain—was being sold to me as the
defining symbol of our reunion and his commitment to me. I hated that I was expected to
be complicit in this charade, that I had to feign ignorance, that we had to pretend
together, or that he thought I was stupid enough to believe him. I stared at the heart and
waited for more. After what he had done? I may have been stupid, but I knew sincerity
when I saw it. He should have begged, atoned for tossing us away like garbage. I waited
for some groveling, but I could hear his leather coat creak as he shifted.
He kept looking in my eyes, waiting for a response, and I wanted to scream
“FUCK YOU” and then escape, running over his body until it was flat like a rug or a
pancake. I wanted to leave black track-marks along his legs and torso and face and a
smoke-trail behind me. And then I’d just shoot off like the Roadrunner until I ran into
one of the men from work that had offered to marry me or help me raise the baby.
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That particular male phenomenon had shocked me. Heroes came out of the
woodwork when I announced my pregnancy. Dennis, bald and doughy with glasses, had
offered to paint a mural on the baby’s nursery wall. He said to my face, “I would love to
help to raise this baby” even though we didn’t really know each other. I wasn’t attracted
to him at all, but it was touching, and I can’t say I didn’t consider it for a moment—the
two of us sitting together with his arm around me and the baby in my lap beneath a giant
mural in a home that he was paying for.
Or I could run past him into the arms of the more attractive one that responded to
the news of my pregnancy by asking me on a date—but did not offer to paint a mural for
the baby. Or maybe I could get something going with Doug, a friend I worked with who
was good with kids but became silent and withdrawn when I told him I was pregnant.
The next day at work he slipped me a folded up note that said he was sorry for not saying
anything, that he hadn’t known what to say, but he wanted to help in any way he could.
These were all different levels of viable options and they all seemed better, more kinder,
than Ethan.
As much as I wanted to scream in Ethan’s face until I forced all the air out of my
lungs and they turned inside out and shot up through my throat and out of my mouth and
then flew around our heads like a popped balloon, I couldn’t deny that it was his baby
that was inside of me; his baby that was only a bit bigger than the garbage-heart in my
hand. Somewhere deep down I was thinking about being a family and about being loved
by a man and a baby and about how sometimes everything does fall into place. I
tightened my fingers around the heart and squeezed it like a stress-ball.
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His coat squeaked when I hugged him, when I said I too wanted to make it work.
I felt cold leather against my cheek, and I told myself to stop being angry. Don’t try to
get an apology from him. It’ll only cause a fight. Let it go, I told myself, you can’t get
everything you want.
For years afterward I would tell myself that I chose to be with Ethan that day for
the baby’s sake, but I was lying to myself, covering up my desperation with the pretense
of nobility and sacrifice. I was scared to be alone so I cluttered my mind with fantasies,
pasted over what I knew was real with all the paper-thin things I knew were not. I told
myself things that couldn’t possibly be true: An extreme alcoholic who’d not shown an
ounce of self-control in his life could stop drinking without help from anyone. I could
grow to love him. Through willpower alone a person like Ethan could decide never to
drink and black out again.
I allowed myself to believe a man whose idea of a good time was to headbutt his
friends until their foreheads made cracking sounds and dribbled and spat out blood could
grow to be a good father just because he said so. A man who pulled a knife on an
acquaintance in the Flame Club parking lot could be a decent partner. A man who got so
drunk he dove head-first off a roof and broke his nose could be a good father if he wanted
to. A man who blacked out and wandered around the city all night until he was found in
a gutter and rushed to the hospital. A man who was told by doctors that his heavy
drinking had resulted in him having the heart of an eighty-year-old man could change. A
man who blacked out and woke up in a cemetery. A man who blacked out and played
with knives in open fields near children’s soccer games. A man who lived in bushes near
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a swamp for a whole summer. A man who once drank bleach because he was so out of
his mind he believed it would remove his black nail polish—a man who wore black nail
polish, for Christ sake—could quit cold-turkey without help, could raise a human being,
could love me, could love our child, could become a family man, could take care of us,
could support us. And he promised he would. And I hinged all my hope on a flimsy
person like that.
Two days later Ethan went to a Halloween party in Davis and got drunk. He
called me the next day to confess and I was very upset, but he explained—his words still
slurred—that it had just been a final hurrah. It was all out of his system, he said.
I’m not perfect either, I said to myself. I shouldn’t judge.
When we hung up I walked out to the living room to tell my parents I was moving
in with Ethan.
A few weeks later his rusty truck plowed down the freeway. I sat beside him with
our baby inside me. The torn vinyl seat scratched the back of my thigh. We were driving
away from my rich aunt’s ranch-house where she’d just spent over an hour lecturing us
about responsibility. She sat us down and—without offering us a thing to eat or drink—
got straight to the point, laying it out more clearly than anyone else had.
Her opinion mattered immensely to me because so did everyone’s. And her
words were still ringing in my head. Stigma. Bastard. Ethan and I were silent and not
touching each other as we headed back home. We’d only been in the truck for about ten
minutes, headed west on Highway 50 when something went wrong with the tire and
Ethan swerved off the side of the freeway. Before I could ask, he jumped from the
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driver’s seat, closed the heavy door, and went behind the truck to take a look. I waited. I
ran my index finger along a rough thread on the seat next to me.
He wasn’t returning so I pushed the door open and walked toward him alongside
the rusty bed of his truck, defeated. I was tired of car trouble. Recently he had changed
my tires and forgotten to tighten the lug nuts. As I headed down Sunrise Boulevard the
car wobbled, then veered off the side of the road, lopsided. I saw one of my own tires
roll past me and crash into a sign.
Around the back of the truck Ethan locked eyes with me and sunk down onto the
asphalt on to his knees again. His face was earnest again, so I looked anywhere else.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
I looked up and away from his face at a billboard planted in long dead grass.
Tortilla Flats, it said. Cars filled with other people passed us by in noisy bursts. I turned
and looked at the garbage alongside the freeway: a flattened Dixie cup, a shred of rubber,
an abandoned shoe. Then I looked down at Ethan—the father of my unborn child, my
lover, my enemy—wearing cargo pants, holding my hand in his, waiting for an answer. I
eyed his arms, blotchy, and with thick, raised scars like pink slugs lined across his wrists.
I looked at his hands—his cracked and bleeding knuckles, his eczema, the sharpness and
vampiric length of his nails I so hated—and there was no ring there.
I couldn’t think of the right thing to say, so I said yes.
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When I was five months pregnant we lay on a mattress held up by wood pallets.
We were just settling in to our new home on the front edge of his parent’s property, a
one-bedroom cabin with a fireplace. We’d turned the large laundry room into a nursery.
I painted the walls a periwinkle blue, the ceilings a lighter blue like the sky. We put the
crib together and I hung a mobile with tiny yellows ducks over it.
Lying there, Ethan and I looked into each other’s eyes, and what I saw in his was
that he might actually love me, and optimism that I loved him back. When he looked at
me this way, with this lopsided smile, there was something about his eyes that I found
revolting.
Maybe it was his fundamental inability to recognize who I actually was, how I
actually felt about him. Maybe it was the girl I saw reflected back, and how I could be
trapped as the person I was in his perception forever: a girl who could settle for a guy like
him. A girl who could settle for a life like this. A girl who accepted some third-rate,
mattress-on-a-crate, foam heart, dollar-store love.
It’s hard to describe, but in that second the possibility that our baby would
resemble him sickened me, so I did the only thing I knew how to do.
I closed my eyes tight and leaned in to give him a little kiss.
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Part 2: 2002
Living Together
Things crumbled by the time the baby was only a week old. Ethan had abstained
from drinking (as far as I know) for the last five months of my pregnancy. He’d treated
me well during those five months, running out of the house to buy me the burrito or the
bread with dill sauce I was craving, and massaging my back when I needed it. He was
supportive and present while I was in labor. He never left my side. He rubbed my back
and fed me ice chips. After Daisy was born, he beamed. He came around the side of my
hospital bed and kissed me with passion. It was the only kiss I ever got from him that I
truly loved. It contained an abundance of potential. I don’t remember tasting garbage or
leaning away from him. In our hospital room we held hands in my bed and looked down
at our daughter. In the hospital it felt like everything going to be okay. I didn’t want to
leave the hospital.
I turned 21 nine days after Daisy was born, and Ethan and I went with Jessa and
Evan to The Peppermill, a casino lounge-style bar in a restaurant a few miles from home.
We planned to be out for no more than two hours because I was breastfeeding. I wanted
to get one drink at Peppermill just to feel 21 and then go home. Ethan wasn’t supposed
to drink at all, but when I went to the bathroom with Jessa to attend to my postpartum
bleeding, he ordered and consumed an entire Long Island iced tea, and was already
guzzling down the second one by the time I came back. As I got closer to him, I saw he
was on the phone with his sister saying, “The lights… it’s like a video game in here” and
I interrupted him to ask if he was drunk. He looked up at me with glassy eyes and
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without a word ran out of the bar and into the parking lot where he was immediately hit
by a car. He rolled up the hood to the windshield and fell to the ground. The car drove
off and disappeared. Ethan’s face and elbows were torn up and bleeding and his pants
had holes in the knees when I arrived in the parking lot. His bloodshot eyes were glazed
over and he was sort of walking in large, loopy circles in an attempt to “find the car” that
hit him. He swung and punched the air. I turned away, disgusted, and went back up the
stairs and inside to call his sister to pick us up.
On the way home Ethan felt so sorry for himself that he tried to jump out of her
car as we sped down the highway. Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural
Woman played on the radio. Slumped down in his seat as I held my hand across his chest
and pressed down on the door lock, he slurred along with the song, but directed at me the
words, “You make me feel like a natural…jackass!”
That night I locked him out of the house because it was too dangerous to have him
around the baby. She was only a week old. He might pick her up and drop her. He
might lie on top of her. He might think it was funny to toss her into the air and forget to
catch her.
He banged on the doors so much that I was scared, so when he disappeared to
wander the streets I wrapped Daisy up in a blanket and held her to my chest, then fled
across the grass to his parents’ house. We spent the night on the pullout couch in their
living room. The next day he said he was sorry, and was quiet and withdrawn for the
entire day, silently daring me to lecture him or harp on him when he was obviously
already feeling guilty. I didn’t say anything.
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When the baby was two months old Ethan’s friend invited us to a strip club. I’ve
never been comfortable watching other naked women dancing on top of my boyfriends,
but in the past I could have seen myself going to pretend I was cooler and more confident
than I actually was. But as I sat there overweight and still more or less bleeding from
childbirth, the fact that was so insensitive to even consider it made my face radiate heat
and burn. I bit my tongue and asked if we could go in a few more months, though I had
no intention of doing so. He didn’t understand, or claimed not to. The conversation
became more and more heated, but the important things were the things we didn’t say.
On my end: stretch marks, leaky, lactating breasts, and that I didn’t want to witness his
lust for another woman, that to me it would feel like a rejection of my body, an admission
of his dissatisfaction with me, our life, all of it. During arguments, Ethan didn’t yell or scream or break things. He simply shut off.
He could go for a week without speaking to me, without acknowledging a word I said. If
he was angry with me, I didn’t exist. I could beg and plead, but I was a ghost. I had no
idea when it would end. It was torturous. He refused to make eye contact. He planted
himself on the couch and pretended to read I Am Legend, the only novel I’d ever seen
him read. He’d habitually read I Am Legend during arguments throughout our
relationship. I came to loathe the sight of that book cover: the black and white lines of
people with shaved heads just like Ethan’s, the skull at the front of it screaming, those
sharp teeth, the skeleton’s hand reaching out at me.
“I hate it here!” I finally screamed after three days of silence. It had been so long
since anyone said anything that it seemed to echo throughout the house and in my head. I
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hate it here I hate it here I hate it here I HATE IT HERE I HATE IT HERE. The words
were like concentric circles ever expanding, becoming greater and greater, ringing in my
head and—likely—his.
I regretted it as soon as it came out—not because it wasn’t true—but because I
knew Ethan had been waiting for me to make one wrong move. He’d dumped me under
lesser pretenses before. I ran outside, leaving the baby swaddled in blankets on the
couch, and then stood next to the front door in the dark while mosquitos swarmed the
porch light. When I came back inside I braced myself for it, but I was surprised when he
went back to the couch, opened his book to a random page and pretended I was
nothing—just a foul smell in the room. But the next day when he got home from work he
told me to move out and to take my daughter with me. I begged him to reconsider.
“But you hate it here,” he said.
“Please don’t be this way,” I said to his back as he headed out the door.
Eat Shit, said his back.
I begged as I stumbled barefoot after him out the car, whining the word please
over and over. I was scared to be alone and I didn’t want Daisy shuttled back and forth
between houses, never really having a home. But I could see his jaw set tight and his
eyes cold and focused on something invisible, something that had nothing to do with me.
And I watched him unbuckle the baby’s car seat, and I watched him toss it, and I watched
it land in the dirt at my feet. It bounced a couple of times and then fell over on its side.
There was something symbolic and devastating about seeing the car seat tipped over on
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the ground like that, discarded. My arms flapped and then collapsed at my sides as I
watched him reverse the car and speed down the street away from me.
I sobbed and cursed out loud as I stuffed clothes and diapers and my breast pump
into a few bags and took Daisy to stay with my parents. I thought I was calling his bluff,
that when he found the house empty he would realize what he’d lost and panic. But
Ethan didn’t contact me or return my phone calls all week. He didn’t call to check on
Daisy. Sometimes when I called he answered the phone, and when I said hello he hung
up on me. Other times he answered the phone and said nothing. I could hear him
breathing, or I could hear rap music playing in the background.
When a week went by without hearing from Ethan, I decided I hated him, and
asked my dad to drive me to the house to pick up more of my things so I could move out.
My parents said I could stay with them. Even though a week previous it had been one of
my greatest fears, it didn’t take long for me to get comfortable with the idea of being a
single mom. What kind of life was this anyway? And Jessa and Evan were calling,
coming around more.
That week a seed was planted. Evan introduced me to Marie. I’d never met her
before this, but she’d been on the periphery for a while now. When I was still pregnant
Jessa and Evan broke up but were still hanging out and sleeping together, which meant
they were “free” to see other people. Evan met Marie on Makeoutclub, the Internet’s
first hipster social network. Evan dated Marie while she was still with Noah, and while
he was still sort of dating Jessa, who was sort of dating David. Total clusterfuck.
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Initially, Evan wrote about Marie on his Livejournal and posted pictures of her.
He bragged about her to Jessa and me, and Jessa pretended she was too cool and
confident to be jealous. I didn’t see how that was possible though. Jessa was cool, but
Marie was unlike anyone we had ever met. Marie’s dad was wealthy and he gave her
what seemed to us to be endless amounts of cash, so she paid for everything when they
went out: drinks, parking, admission, everything. Jessa started hanging out with Marie
and Evan, then sometimes with just Marie, then Jessa told me one night she and Evan had
a threesome with Marie. She said earlier that night Marie had reached up inside of her to
help her remove a tampon that was stuck so high up that Jessa couldn’t reach with her
own fingers.
Before I even saw her picture one thing that piqued my interest in Marie was that
she was also a mom. I couldn’t understand how a mother could remain so autonomous
and so free. She was the only other person I’d heard of among my dwindling circle of
young friends who had a child, yet she never seemed to miss out on anything. She
popped up in every online photo. She went on road trips with Evan and Jessa, met them
for spontaneous lunch dates, and went out to bars almost every night while I sat at home
watching television or playing rummy with Ethan and nursing Daisy. Marie split custody
of her son with the father, and every night she had her baby her own father babysat.
She’d tuck her son in and leave as soon as he fell asleep.
My friendship with Evan had cooled considerably from the moment I discovered I
was pregnant, in part because he was so annoyed with me for not having an abortion, so it
shocked me when he told me Marie brought her son over to his studio apartment. He
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pulled knobs and buttons off his stove and books off his shelves and scattered them on
the floor. Marie draped herself over the sofa and called across the room for the child to
stop as he ransacked Evan’s apartment, ignoring her pleas.
Evan’s infatuation with Marie only lasted for a few weeks before he started to talk
about her with a tone of amused outrage, then simple anger and disappointment. I was
surprised—and somewhat delighted—to learn that Marie was a pathological liar, the type
of liar who spins elaborate daydreams and presents them as reality, the type of liar who
lies even when the truth would better serve her. Evan began using words like
compulsive, impulsive, and pathological to describe her. I don’t even believe her when
she says hello, he told me.
He dismissed her as crazy: (“She’s like Kirsten Dunst’s character in
Crazy/Beautiful—a total nut job.”) she overdosed on cocaine and another guy she was
dating had dragged her from the car to her front porch where her dad had found her
shaking on the ground and scratching at the door like a rat. Blood dribbled out of her
nose and stained her lips. Marie was seeing multiple guys at once, and wasn’t making
more than a token effort to cover it up. How interesting, I thought. How exciting. How
can she have the time? When I told Evan I wanted to meet her, he shook his head.
“Don’t bother with her,” he said. “She’s not worth it.”
The worse Evan said about her the more attracted I became to her, or to my idea
of her. Marie became a character whose adventures I increasingly depended on hearing
about. Marie stories were my escape. Once I became pregnant and had Daisy I rarely
left my house, and most of my friends, especially Jessa, had just started going to bars
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most nights, then sleeping in until the afternoon. Coming over to sit in my house to
watch TV or walking around the mall not stealing things was the last thing they wanted to
do. It was typical. For most of my life I’d been on the outside looking in, and now I felt
trapped. I looked out past the bars of my cage, transfixed by the figures I saw, resentful
as they passed me.
From my temporary bedroom at my parents’ house I reached out to Evan and he
invited me to coffee. Ethan left me carless, so Evan came to pick me up from my
parents’ house. On the way to coffee he said Marie might stop by. I tried to be casual
about it as we drove toward the Borders shopping center, but I pulled the sun visor down
and looked at my reflection. I smoothed my hair and touched up my foundation as we
pulled into the parking lot. I looked down at my floppy stomach and felt my heart sink.
Evan and I sat out in front of Starbucks waiting to meet her, and I ran my fingers
along my stomach multiple times. My heart was beating fast like I’d been set up on a
blind date. When Marie pulled her car into the parking lot she was driving way too fast,
and as she skid into her parking spot her car scraped against the curb. When she got out
her gestures were wild, frantic, and she had already been talking to us way before we
could hear her. Her voice was deeper than I expected it to be. We sat around a table and
smoked vanilla and cherry flavored cigarettes, though none of us were smokers. Marie
spoke fast, leaving little to no breaks between sentences or thoughts, but she was
charming and funny, and I was happy to lean back and take her in. Being with Marie,
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just sitting outside and cracking jokes me made me feel good for the first time in a week,
and I was sorry when I had to go back home to nurse Daisy.
I was riding this Marie high when Evan dropped me back off, but when we pulled
up to the house I saw the car I shared with Ethan parked in the driveway.
“Oh, God,” I said to Evan, and I rolled my eyes even though I was relieved and
satisfied to see that Ethan was pursuing me now. Evan wished me luck and I headed in.
Ethan and my parents were in the living room, and he was holding Daisy on his
lap. My parents’ faces were expressionless. Ethan asked to talk to me out in the car.
I sat in the passenger seat and waited for his apology. Instead, Ethan told me I
could come back home now as if I had been holding my breath all week. Fuck you, I
thought. The day before I had created an AOL profile for myself with the screen name
“enemy_of_the_father.” Now here he was saying I could come back to the house as if it
were a gift. Worst of all he wasn’t acknowledging what he had done to Daisy and me.
He wasn’t going to apologize.
I was still grinding my teeth when he began to lay out the conditions of my return.
Things needed to change, he said. I needed to take better care of the house, for one; I
needed to clean it more. He wanted me to pack a lunch for him every day. He wanted
dinner on the table when he came home from work. I tried to explain that the baby was
only two months old, that I was too exhausted from being up at nights pumping and
nursing to be consistent, but he wouldn’t hear excuses. I felt like I was sinking further
and further into the cushions of the seat I was on, like I was being swallowed up by the
car, by Ethan, by this life I had chosen. This time even I knew I had sold my soul to the
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devil. Even I heard the sound of the death march when I agreed to go back with him this
time, when we walked back inside to tell my parents.
Girls say this all the time, but I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten pregnant.
Ethan and I always used condoms. I’d been fastidious about it, even on 9/11.
When Daisy was about six months old my question was answered. I was
eavesdropping on Ethan and his friend; they were laughing and talking about sexual
techniques, one in which they took condoms off during sex without the girl realizing it
because it “felt better.” Sometimes, they said, they got carried away and forgot to pull
out. I was only half-serious when I asked, “Is that how I got pregnant?”
Ethan looked over at me like he was surprised I was even there. They laughed
and Ethan shrugged.
“You can’t be mad at me now,” he said, “Look at what came out of it.” And he
gestured toward our daughter on a blanket on the floor, kicking her little feet around,
gurgling as she tried to touch the toys hanging from an arch just out of her reach.
He used that often enough. When I was angry with him, he reminded me of what
he had given me: “Without me, you wouldn’t have Daisy” or “That’s a pretty big
engagement ring I got you. I’m still making payments.”
“You can’t argue with that,” he said. And he was right. I couldn’t. It was a
dickish thing for him to say, but if I was mad at him for tricking me, for getting me
pregnant without my consent, it implied I hadn’t wanted our child. And what kind of a
mother would say something like that? I didn’t say anything.
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I walked down the hall toward the sound of paper shredding, wondering which of
my keepsakes Ethan was destroying. We were fighting. We were fighting a lot lately. I
broke the same single-pane picture window of our new duplex twice in the same month,
first by pounding on it and the second time by throwing my keys at it. The second
time—as punishment—Ethan refused to help me replace the window. I didn’t know
how, so the picture window remained shattered for months. Looking in or out,
everything you saw was fractured.
Ethan had slashed a picture of Neil from my keepsake box earlier that month and
then placed it back where he had found it, so after I went out on the lawn and set every
female photo in his album on fire, I started hiding things with sentimental value. I
squirreled them away in hollowed-out books and in pages of magazines stashed in the
corner of my closet. I climbed up into the attic and hid other things in a box.
The noise was coming from the kitchen, and when I walked in he was crouched
over the trashcan. He wanted me to think he was destroying my pictures, tearing them
systematically, but when I looked closer I saw he was destroying an Ikea catalogue that I
recognized as having arrived in the mail that week. He had been ripping each page out,
slowly and deliberately, then throwing them into the garbage. When I asked him what he
was doing he froze, holding what remained of the catalog. I don’t think he had fully
thought out what he was going to say when I realized he was trying to fool me. After
thinking for a second he said, “I didn’t want you getting any pipe dreams.”
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I stood there for a while, not saying anything. I looked up at the ceiling and tried to
make sense of what he’d just said. I didn’t know if it was funny to me or not. Pipe
dreams. He didn’t want me getting any pipe dreams.
“Pipe dreams?” I finally asked, “Like…pipe dreams about … buying stuff from
Ikea?”
I’d decided to confront him and make him feel like an idiot for his failure at a
blatant manipulation, to really dig into him until he was thoroughly humiliated, but my
voice echoed in the empty kitchen. The front door slammed and I could hear our car
engine start. I didn’t even go out after him this time. It just didn’t seem worth it. I knew
he wouldn’t answer my calls. I knew he wouldn’t come back until the middle of the
night—maybe morning. I knew he’d never tell me where he’d been.
After a year of living together, I didn’t dream of much other than an intact family
for Daisy. Growing up I’d wanted to be a doctor. I’d graduated from high school and
started college at fifteen, but I couldn’t remember the person I used to be. All the things I
had accomplished, the small amount of progress I’d made on my pre-med degree, my
attempts at a novel; all of those things seemed like things someone else had done. I felt
dumber than ever. Ethan had been fired, so I had to get an office job to pay the rent. But
I was concerned about how much attention the baby was getting while I was away. One
of Ethan’s friends had just been caught leaving his infant daughter strapped in a car
seat—propped in front of a TV—all day while her mom was at work and he did God
knows what.
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When I returned from work Ethan was almost always playing video games while
our daughter lay at his feet on a blanket. Once I came home from work to find Ethan
gone and our daughter next door with the toothless, meth-addicted neighbor who hated
me. She had been so ravaged by drugs that she looked like the kind of skeleton you’d
find at the bottom of a sunken ship. Yet as she handed me my baby she shook her head
at me in disapproval. It made me want to kill Ethan.
I know I make it sound that way, but life with Ethan wasn’t totally bad. There were
moments. When we got the keys to our new duplex we painted the walls together, and it
felt like we were building something permanent for ourselves. The morning we finished
painting he turned the radio on. Magnet and Steel was playing. It’s a beautiful song, nice
and slow, and I knew it from the Boogie Nights soundtrack. Ethan wrapped an arm
around my waist in the empty bedroom still reeking of paint fumes. He pulled me against
his body. As we slow-danced he sang the words he knew into my ear in a whisper, real
close. I shut my eyes and rested my head on his shoulder. This is what it’s supposed to
be like, I thought. And maybe it would be that way in our new place.
But most days after work I gathered up all the plastic toys that littered the house.
I made dinner, I played with the baby, I picked up Ethan’s socks, his pants, his shirts, the
trail of clothing he left throughout the house. I collected the dishes from each room. He
had fought to decorate our new living room with skulls and other things that looked like
Halloween decorations, and like usual I gave in. When he wasn’t playing Grand Theft
Auto he liked to draw. He scrawled pictures of skeletons and demons in his notebook
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with a Sharpie. That summer he drained our bank account to buy hundreds of dollars of
illegal fireworks.
He was leaving and coming back blacked out drunk more and more often. It got
to the point that I didn’t say anything anymore. One afternoon he came home from
drinking with Evan at the river, swaying in the doorway and holding onto it for balance.
When I told him he wasn’t allowed around Daisy in that condition he tore our hanging
plants from the ceiling.
“This wouldn’t happen if you weren’t such a fucking bitch!” he screamed. Daisy
was sleeping in the other room, so I pushed Ethan out the door. He banged and kicked
and slammed his body against the door when I locked him out, and I had to run to the
back door to lock it before he got there.
Over the summer during another argument Ethan dumped me again for the last
time. He told me he had never loved me and was only with me because of Daisy. When
he said it my legs went weak and I fell to my knees. I was surprised by my own reaction.
I screamed and I saw him watch me fall, but then walk right out the door and leave. I
picked myself up and ran outside, and in a moment of desperation I jumped savagely onto
the hood of the car so he couldn’t drive away. He looked up at me through the
windshield and I stared right back. He opened the car door, got out, and came toward
me. He picked me up from under my arms, dragged me across the hood, and tossed me
off onto the driveway.
I lay there for a second, then sat up. My ankle was bleeding and my knee was
burned raw from getting pulled across the hot metal of the car’s hood. I was crying. I
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still had the feeling I could manipulate this situation; when he saw the blood he’d have to
stay and work things out. I looked up at Ethan, but he was already backing out of the
driveway, his head turned away from me. I looked again at my bloody ankle, the burn on
my knee, and I thought about what I must have looked like slumped over in the driveway.
How my hair was hanging over my face, messy. How my skin was broken out and
probably red. How swollen my eyes were. I felt like Adam and Eve did when they
realized they were naked, except I was realizing I was ugly and my life was shabby and
smudged. I was ashamed and ran into the house and locked the door behind me, wanting
to hide my life, my abject existence.
Ethan came back the next morning and pretended nothing had happened. I kept
positioning myself wherever I sat in ways that best displayed my injuries, hoping he’d
notice. But he pretended not to, and he knew I’d never bring it up.
As my injuries faded we continued to live together and began to interact in a more
polite way. I was afraid to bring up the argument and what he had said about not loving
me, but it was all I could think of. Later that week when I dropped him off at his friend’s
house I asked him if he really meant it. I expected him to back down, but he said yes. He
said he was only with me because of Daisy. I didn’t say anything, but I cried the whole
way home for the last time.
We continued to live together as half-couple/half not. We slept in the same bed
and we still had sex, we raised Daisy together, and it was obvious neither of us could
openly see other people. From the outside things looked as they always had. The main
difference was internal, an emotional disconnect between us, at least on my part. I still
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wore my engagement ring, but things were suspended. It seemed like they could stay like
this forever. There was no wedding planning, no talk of it. Sometimes we cuddled on
the couch at night while we watched TV, but other times I rolled over in the middle of the
night to find an empty spot in the bunched up blankets next to me, and an oil stain in the
driveway where our car used to be.
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Part 3: 2003
Marie and Noah
I compulsively opened my email and read Marie’s boyfriend’s message to me
again and again. You’re sexy as fuck. Typing clicked from every side of the office, but
while I read Noah’s message nothing else existed. I planned to print out the message and
read it again during lunch, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept going over it in my
mind. During cold calls I trailed off mid-sentence. I looked at the photo of Daisy on the
desk, Ethan’s rough hands holding her up just out of the frame, but I thought about Noah:
his voice, his words.
I’d resorted to staring at the clock, and a few minutes before lunch I hovered over
the office printer, shifting in my pencil skirt. When the hot paper emerged I glanced at it
before I folded it in three and slid it into my purse. (You’re a hot Puerto Rican. I can’t
stop thinking about you and what I want to do to you.) I looked behind me to make sure
no one was watching. With my heavy electric breast pump under my arm I tottered,
unsteady on my new black stilettos, to re-read the message and touch myself in a
bathroom stall.
Noah was just a conduit to Marie, a zip line I intended to ride until I slammed
right into her. She was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. She was pastel:
green-eyed, apricot-skinned, pink cheeks and lips, bobbed golden hair. She was all mint
bows and chocolate satin ribbons, lavender leather and diamond brooches, stilettos and
sling backs. Her skin smelled like honey and rose water.
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It began when I was pregnant, then most of 2002 and 2003 I had my eye on her. I
watched her online, on Makeoutclub, on Livejournal, on her Friendster profile. I tried to
look up her name again and again on MetaCrawler, turning up nothing new. I watched
her when I went out to bars with Jessa. I started to leave Daisy at home with Ethan or my
parents or his parents more and more just to go out to bars at night with Jessa to catch a
glimpse of Marie.
When Daisy was five months old I watched Marie in the downtown streets of
Sacramento, watched her leaning against Old Ironsides’ brick wall beneath a mural of a
wind-blown ship. I watched her alongside people standing around smoking cigarettes
and adjusting their clothing. I watched her while autumn leaves fluttered down around
our feet in clusters. When I looked up it was only to watch Marie, to evaluate every
aspect of her, to drink her in. Her outfit was flawless. A dainty Kate Spade purse
dangled from her wrist. All my purses were big and functional, doubling as diaper bags.
I didn’t have the money to buy cute and useless things.
Marie looked into her compact, snapped it shut, and then turned to her friend, a
girl in horn-rimmed glasses. Marie whispered something that made her friend shake her
head and laugh. I was wondering what she said when Marie reached her hand up her
skirt, pulled her underwear to the side, wriggled her arm, tugged, and then threw her
tampon on the ground.
I lifted my eyebrows while Marie shrugged with bravado. Her friend laughed. I
know it’s disgusting and weird and doesn’t even sound true, and I can’t explain why I
was impressed by it: I just was. And I was still mulling it over when the doors opened
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and everyone filtered into the bar, passing the tampon or trampling it beneath high heels
and boots and scuffed men’s dress shoes. I followed everyone inside, trying to think of a
way to approach her, but knowing I’d remain at the periphery, sipping a mojito and
looking over Jessa’s shoulder as we danced, or excusing myself to use the bathroom and
lurking in the shadows like a hunch-backed Humbert Humbert to her Lolita.
Hours later I stopped dancing and crossed the threshold alone, stepping out into the
cool air. It was late; it was raining. Daisy was being put to bed again without me there,
nursing from a bottle we kept in the freezer. I could feel my milk letting down, my
breasts getting harder, but I wanted to see it. I walked over to it and looked down,
transfixed. The tampon lay abandoned on the asphalt, a wad of cotton in the rain,
cushioned by dun-colored leaves. I leaned down, just slightly and squinted. It was like a
relic or a sign. Her secret. Whatever it was it was a privilege to look at it. I brushed my
sweat-soaked hair back from my face and stared at it as I panted with beer breath, riveted.
The real trouble with Marie and Noah started when Daisy wasn’t even a year old
and I had to find work in an office. Ethan got fired from his job at the auto yard for being
lackadaisical, a word I’d had to look up in the dictionary upon hearing. Without interest,
vigor, or determination. Lazy or idle. Unambitious. Lacking purpose.
I, myself, had been similarly criticized at my new job. I worked at a Scientology
company, and my supervisors had labeled me very low on the Scientology tone scale:
Apathetic, a Condition of Non-Existence. Located on the tone scale, it was just one level
above Death.
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The night before I started the job I had been inconsolable. I was still nursing
Daisy, and it made me sick to leave her at home for a full day. It was a Sunday night, and
I spent it holding her to my chest and sobbing at intervals. I panicked at one point when
she was napping and ran outside. My head was spinning. I was like a trapped animal,
and as I ran across the grass I tried in absolute desperation to think of any other option
besides going to work in the morning. When I reached the wood fence at the end of our
property I just stood there facing it.
Working changed everything. I was no longer cloistered inside my home, I was
no longer primarily a mom, and now I had Internet access. I had only met her once, but
on workdays I distracted myself by reading Marie’s Livejournal or looking at her
Friendster profile. There was never anything deep there; nothing revealing, just funny
anecdotes about her life and pictures, but my access to these things fueled my obsession.
My full breasts drooled milk inside my maternity bra as I ogled her pictures from
my cubicle. The only pictures of me online were quick shots taken on other people’s
computers, mainly pictures of me wearing a plum-colored camisole and sitting in a chair
in a dark room trying to look pensive. They were posted on my comparatively dull and
pathetic Friendster profile. My Interests field was filled with sarcastic remarks and
interests I’d seen on other people’s profiles. My Favorite Music was copied from other
people, bands whose songs I’d never heard. My favorite TV shows were the same TV
shows Jessa and Evan listed on their profiles or things I’d heard them mention in passing.
Before, I’d been too absorbed with Daisy to care much about these things. I
didn’t even recognize most of the bands Marie listed as her favorites: My Bloody
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Valentine, The Paper Chase, Cocteau Twins. But all the things she listed: her favorite
bands, her favorite books and films and TV shows became portals of discovery. I set out
to make them my favorites, to have the same interests as her.
Every picture I saw of her made me compare myself and come up short. In every
picture she looked airbrushed. A photograph of her in the morning, blurry eyed, mascara
smeared, brushing her teeth over the sink. Another photo of her with her head cocked to
one side, sucking a lemon over a plate of pink sushi. A picture of her son’s big blue eyes
staring up at the camera. There she was in Minnie Mouse ears at Disneyland standing in
front of the teacup ride. There was a picture of her sitting on a chair with her legs
crossed, wearing a party hat, her eyes caught in mid-blink but still managing to capture
the precise shape of desire.
Evan complained that when they went out she sat in front of the mirrored wall at
the back of the bar and gazed past the bartender, fluffing her hair or studying the angles
of her face, pouting like Paris Hilton as she watched herself. She’d actually met Paris
Hilton once, she said, at a music festival, and her skin was like a leather handbag. In the
midst of a group, Marie took her compact from her purse, opened it with a snap, and
powdered her nose, her cheeks, her forehead, looking at herself and ignoring everyone
around her.
I had just turned 21, and I was still carrying my baby weight. The thing about me
is I’ve always worried I was too fat, even when I wasn’t. I thought if I was fat no one
would like me. Pregnancy had magnified this problem; for the first time in my life I was
a little overweight. Too many burritos and loaves of bread with dill sauce.
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At the time I began to fixate on Marie I had just gotten out of my stretchy cotton
maternity clothes; her clothes were meticulous and tailored. I couldn’t help but to
compare myself. She was delicate in a way I knew I’d never be. I kept my prepregnancy clothes folded on a shelf high up at the top of my closet, but nearly a year after
I gave birth my favorite jeans looked so tiny they may as well have been doll clothes.
Marie’s stilettos were condemnations of my worn-in flip-flops. I studied her photographs
like they were puzzles to be solved. I tried to figure out the brands of her clothing:
Banana Republic, J. Crew, Marc Jacobs, Isaac Mizrahi, Built by Wendy, Diane von
Furstenberg. I thought if I could have the same things as Marie people would like me.
I spent half my paycheck on a pair of black heels that reminded me of the ones I
saw her wearing in a photo. They were still a cheaper imitation of the real thing, but I
wore them out of Macy’s like a child, looking down at my feet while I toddled out of the
mall. As I hobbled to my car I was mesmerized by what I imagined to be my own
transformation. I thought that I too had become glamorous, slender, elongated.
As I obsessively looked at her online photos, my feelings for Marie morphed and
grew until I wanted to consume her. It wasn’t just that I wanted to dress like her. I
wanted her to fill me; I couldn’t be satisfied until I ingested and ultimately became her. I
began to imagine what it would be like to be friends with her, to look like her, and then to
kiss her, to pull her brittle bird bones to my soft body and squeeze. To pull the car over
and feel her climb on top of me, straddling my thighs. We’d push the sides of our faces
together, touching cheeks, my hands crushing her hair like a dried orchid. I would inhale
the sweet chemicals in her hairspray, brown sugar and lemon, the molecules and minerals
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from the powder on her face. Our lips would touch, would press against each other,
connecting us by thin threads of lip gloss and running along those sticky lines a shock of
electricity would shoot back and forth between us. We’d rub and pull at each other’s
black stockings. Our matching stilettos kicked off and laying at our feet, identical.
I thought about these things, and what started as a fantasy contorted into a gnarled
plan, something deformed and imminent, until I was wandering around half-dead, a girl
alive after a bludgeon to my skull. I could feel myself turn away from my role as a
mother as I zombie-walked toward Marie. I didn’t know how I would get there, but like
a rat I knew I could find a hole, and when I did I would do everything in my power to
chew my way inside.
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Noah lived in Oakland, a couple of hours away from where Marie and I lived in
suburbs just outside of Sacramento. They cheated on each other so carelessly that even I,
an acquaintance, knew about it. I was doing my patrol of Marie’s Friendster profile one
day in June when I checked out Noah’s. One click on his picture took me straight to his
profile. I could see a list of his favorite bands and movies. I flipped through his pictures
to see if there were any with Marie. There was an entire album of Disneyland photos of
the two of them. After a few days of stalking his profile, I emailed Noah and introduced
myself. I don’t remember what I told him, except that I was a friend of a friend, and that
I had a crush on his girlfriend. I knew it was a provocative message before I sent it but
once I clicked the Send button I knew I’d gone too far with this. I had just done
something insane. I panicked and started to write a new message claiming it was a joke,
which sounded even crazier, but as I was writing it I had already received a message back
from Noah.
As a male in his twenties I should not have been surprised that Noah found my
message hot, but a part of me was surprised. I was so used to thinking of myself as the
girl who needed to lose the baby weight; but he began the message by telling me he’d
looked at the pictures on my Friendster profile and thought I was a “hot Latina” and
wanted to know more. I responded with more specific fantasies about kissing Marie in
my car, and he wrote back to say he’d love it if Marie and I hooked up. He proposed
suggesting to her flat out that she hook up with me, but then immediately changed his
mind. I don’t want her to think it’s because I like you. We decided it would be best if I
took some initiative to ask her to hang out as friends first, then move on from there.
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In retrospect it was inevitable, but as we discussed ways I could seduce Marie, as
we played together, moving Marie around in our minds and positioning her like a doll,
my conversations with Noah got increasingly personal and erotic and time-consuming.
Soon we were reminding each other to delete our messages, to cover our tracks. By the
end of June I spent most of my workdays emailing back and forth or instant messaging
with him. He told me story after story about Marie: private stories she wouldn’t want me
to know. He sent me explicit information about their sex life and his own sexual
awakening, the things you tell a new lover. He told me about his fights with Marie, how
she was jealous, how she’d once gotten so enraged she’d slammed on her brakes on the
freeway, whipping the car around in a half-circle and nearly driving them into oncoming
traffic.
Everything Noah told me fed me and went straight down the hole. But I felt it fill
me up. More than anything it was Marie’s secrets that filled me. Her secrets gave me
something to think about while I changed the baby and made dinner. They occupied my
thoughts on the drive home from work, when I was in the shower, when I was nursing,
when Ethan and I were in bed. Her secrets and private experiences became my own. I
absorbed them like a tampon in the rain, so that even now they are almost inseparable
from my own memories.
I remember the first night they met. Noah drove hours to get to her house. They’d
met online, on Makeoutclub, and like Noah and I they had exchanged erotic emails and
instant messages. I remember Marie pulling her curtain back to watch through the
window as he got out of his van, how she watched his boot step up on the curb. He was
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6’5. She looked at his hair, dyed black, hanging in dreadlocks around his eyes and ears,
then his shoulders, which were large and hunched. As she watched he lumbered toward
her house like Frankenstein’s monster. Marie answered the door dressed in underwear
and a Britney Spears t-shirt, braless. I remember when the door opened, how Noah lifted
his eyebrows in approval but said nothing just as they had arranged. I remember their
hearts, how they both fluttered in that moment, how they both felt weak. I remember the
force Noah used when he grabbed Marie and dragged her across the hardwood floor. I
remember that she hit her head on the wall on the way to her bedroom. He tossed her on
the bed and without closing the door they had anal sex. I remember how they both
pretended he was raping her.
Hearing stories like this made me feel like I was out of my element, yet they
excited me. Part of it was the excitement of having a secret. I love having a secret, and I
walked around with it bundled up in my core, radiating through my body, a little flame
warming me up. When my cousin Andrea invited Ethan and me to her 4th of July
barbeque on Friday, Noah and I decided to make a move. I’d invite Evan and Jessa, and
then suggest they invite Marie to come along. Marie would bring Noah, and Noah and I
would pretend we didn’t know each other at all. I’d get closer with Marie, and Noah and
I would finally meet. We decided not to talk to each other the entire day, but to wear
navy blue bandannas on our heads, pretending it was a coincidence. We’d let everything
else go unspoken.
When Marie introduced Noah and me, we shook hands and smiled as we eyed
each other’s bandannas. Noah and I didn’t really talk, just shared eye contact throughout
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the day. We swam together in the pool, and I saw him eye my chest when I emerged
from the water. Everyone ate barbecue, and then we headed back to my duplex for
fireworks. Marie and Jessa rode back to my house together in Jessa’s car, and they
stopped off somewhere before getting to my house. As I sat on my couch nursing Daisy
and stroking her head while all the guys lit fireworks in the driveway, I felt left out. I
remember feeling like Marie and I would never be friends.
I had thought meeting me and seeing my baby weight would shatter Noah’s
illusions, but Monday when I returned to work I began receiving a compulsive string of
messages from Noah. I had a hard time keeping up with his messages and I felt things
spinning out of control. I didn’t have Internet access at home, so the only time I could
read them was at work.
I can see what you mean about the baby weight, he said, but you’re still a really
hot Puerto Rican with a nice rack. My face felt pinched when I read the first part, but he
had softened the blow with the last.
He admitted he had started thinking about me alone, not even with Marie. He
asked me to send him more pictures of me. I didn’t have a way to take pictures and
upload them, so I told him he’d have to be satisfied with the ones on my Friendster
profile. He complimented me over and over, compliments I hadn’t heard in a long time.
I was flattered, blushing.
You’re so hot. I want you. I love your tan skin. Your ass is heavenly. Big
upside-down heart. So when he asked for my work phone number I gave it to him.
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Within minutes my phone rang and it was him. Before I even heard him speak I
knew he was masturbating. He breathed hard into the phone and said things nobody had
ever said to me before. I tried to look business-like as my co-workers moved around me,
but I shifted in my chair. I was horrified and flattered and turned-on and grossed out.
But when I hung up I looked around and then rushed off to the bathroom. I closed the
door behind me, pulled my skirt up and straddled the toilet, touching myself and thinking
about Noah’s voice.
I shuddered at myself when I was through. I was disgusted with Noah. Hadn’t his
voice sounded like the voice of a teenage boy? Hadn’t he seemed desperate? Hadn’t that
turned me off? I had that familiar feeling of not understanding how I’d gotten here, of
watching as I was tugged around my own life. Even though I wasn’t sure I wanted this
thing with Noah to go on, I wasn’t doing anything to stop it. As I sat on the toilet with
my stockings around my knees I realized I probably wouldn’t.
I instant messaged my cell phone number to Noah that week, and he called me
while I drove home from work. I pulled over while we had phone sex. Once I lifted my
leg while I drove in a state of frenzy, surrounded by other cars. A bearded man in a truck
peered down at me, saw what I was doing and nodded. He winked at me and I dropped
my leg down, humiliated and annoyed.
I started to arrive home later and later. I patted Daisy on the back and looked over
her shoulder at my cell phone. I felt myself float further and further away from her while
we played. I made excuses to leave the house to sneak a quick call to Noah. Perhaps he
wasn’t all that different from me. Raised in a Mormon house with parents who wore
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garments beneath their clothing, Noah probably felt as I did: that his life would forever
contain this hole that could not be filled. We would be forever pitching shit into it. I felt
sorry for him and I felt sorry for me.
But there was something else. I felt… happy.
It sounds odd in light of everything that we were engaged in, but I couldn’t
understand what Marie saw in him. Noah wasn’t ugly, but like Ethan he wasn’t my type.
Marie could do better. He had progressed to begging me to let him visit me at work, to
hang out in his van during my lunch break, but I turned him down. I didn’t feel guilty
about “cheating” on Ethan over the phone, but I knew if I entered Noah’s van we would
have sex, and that was a different story. I wasn’t ready to cross that line. I knew what
Noah wanted, but knowing what I wanted had always been complicated.
Whatever I wanted, I knew it had something to do with capturing something that
belonged to Marie and making it mine. Because I no longer believed we would be
friends, because I was too shy and insecure to invite her over, one-upping her was the
next best thing. Not only was I involved with her boyfriend, I was rejecting him when
she hadn’t. Noah was mine if I wanted him. There was some power in that. I knew
things about Marie’s life and her relationships that she didn’t know. Didn’t that make me
superior? A hollow victory, but not totally. My relationship with Noah had blurred the
indelible line that had separated me from Marie. She just didn’t know it. In that way, I
had achieved something. In that way I had become Marie, or at least intertwined with
her.
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In September Evan invited Ethan and me to watch a band play at the Capitol
Garage. Jessa and Marie would be there. Ethan and I arranged to drop Daisy off at my
parents’ house, and before we got there I received a message from Noah: I’ll see you
tonight.
I deleted it and tucked the phone back into my purse.
Ethan and I had trouble finding parking downtown, so he dropped me off near the
side of the bar while he went to find somewhere to park. As soon as the car was out of
sight I saw Noah walking toward me.
The air was warm and I was wearing my heels and a short skirt. Noah and I hugged
in a way that felt clumsy to me, and without a pause he slipped his hand up my skirt; a
callous scraped the skin of my thigh on the way up. I remembered I wasn’t wearing
underwear at the exact moment Noah discovered it. I could tell by his grin that he
thought I did it for him. I didn’t.
“Wha-?” I made a sound and took a half step back. I shook my head while I
scanned the street for our car and the sidewalk for Ethan or Marie. Why wasn’t this idiot
being more discreet? I looked over my shoulder and spun around, imagining Marie
concealed somewhere on the street retouching her makeup in her car or out of view
behind a parking meter. My hands shook as I ushered Noah inside.
“I’ll come in later. I don’t want anyone to see us together,” I said, smoothing my
skirt. He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow at me.
“You’re a strange bird,” he said, and then the door closed behind him.
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When I went inside Noah was with Marie near where the band played. Ethan
lingered near the bar, and I kept checking that he wasn’t drinking. I watched Marie with
Noah. He told me Marie was insecure about him and other women, and I noticed her
checking to see if he was looking at girls. She kept her arms wrapped around his waist.
She leaned into him. I caught him looking at me many times, though his arm was around
Marie’s shoulders. He peeked over her head as he kissed her hair. The eye contact alone
had me brimming with tension by the time Ethan and I left.
That night on the drive home, Ethan didn’t question me when I asked him to pull
over to the side of the road and anally rape me. He found a lane between some pine trees
just off a road I passed all the time. We walked toward the trunk of the car, and he threw
me to the ground and pressed my body into the gravel. Car lights traveled across the
trees as he tore my cheap wrap skirt off me. One of the big plastic buttons that held it
together popped off and rolled away. Ethan grabbed a fistful of my hair near the roots
and pulled, then shoved my face into the rocks, pushing down. I got dirt in my mouth, on
my teeth. I pretended to struggle while he cursed in my ear. Cars drove back and forth
past us until I stopped hearing them. I writhed and kicked. When we were finished he
picked me up off the ground. I brushed myself off near the trunk and we got back in the
car in silence. We drove to my parent’s house to get the baby.
After breastfeeding Daisy that night, I wrapped her up in blankets and put her in
our bed next to Ethan. In the bathroom I examined my wounds in the mirror. I turned
my face side to side. My right cheek was spotted with red. I hoped that it would bruise.
I wanted to carry those marks around with me as an artifact, proof that I was alive.
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Every day while my coworkers sat at their desks, I was in the janitor’s closet in
the bathroom seated next to a giant stack of toilet paper and a mop bucket, with a breast
pump attached to my chest. I could hear toilets flushing and women’s heels clicking
across the tile outside. I removed my shirt, unsnapped my maternity bra from between
my breasts and then attached two clear funnels connected to tubes. I stared at the wall or
looked down in disgust to watch my milk shoot out in tiny streams, like water spit
between a gap in the teeth. Walking past my co-workers to go in and out of the janitor’s
closet I didn’t feel like a girl in her early twenties. I reminded myself of a big old cow
and I worried that was how everyone saw me. But now I had a secret life full of secret
things, and I had someone to talk to, and I had my fantasies, and I sometimes caught
myself grinning inside the janitor’s closet, grinning at nothing in particular.
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In October, Marie invited Jessa and me to Disneyland for her birthday. It was
shocking to know that she thought of me at all, especially enough to invite me on a road
trip. The night before we were supposed to leave my phone rang. Marie wailed and
shrieked into the phone. My first thought was that she had found out about Noah and me,
but she was talking so fast I couldn’t understand her. Then she hung up.
I looked down at the phone for a second, watched it shaking in my hand, and then
I hung it up. My body rattled, and I felt like I was going to vomit. It rang again and
when I answered it she was talking fast again.
“Calm down. I’m sorry. I can’t understand you.”
She slowed down just enough so that I realized she was on coke. Jessa had just
called her to flake on our road trip. I’d never been around anyone on coke, nor had I seen
an adult have a tantrum like this, but I was so relieved it wasn’t about Noah and me that I
was able to speak calmly with her until we hung up.
“Do you still want to go with me?” she asked when we were about to hang up.
“Of course I do,” I said.
Marie picked me up the next morning, and we pretended nothing had happened.
By the time we were on the freeway toward Los Angeles I was glad I had come, though I
wasn’t sure I was attracted to her anymore. Everything was different in real life. The
inside of her car smelled like perfume and crushed cigarettes mixed with the faint smell
of kitty litter and my cousin Suzanne’s morning breath, the smell of sweet shit. Up close,
her makeup was thick, her foundation too light for her face and covering up acne I hadn’t
noticed before, making her skin look shiny and mottled and lumpy and porous. Her teeth
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were crooked and overlapping. Some shifted to one side. Her hair was thin and her head
was small. She was jittery and she drove way too fast.
When we were halfway there, a highway patrolman signaled for her to pull over,
and when he approached the car, she caused a scene so hysterical that I couldn’t decide
whether I admired her audacity or was humiliated by it. She gasped and sobbed and
slammed her fists on the steering wheel. She craned her head up toward the officer and
begged him to let her go. He was so uncomfortable he let her off with a warning. Her
face was red from her fit, but the minute she pulled back onto the freeway she cackled,
then turned the music up to full volume. She sped off again and I clutched the handle
over the door.
When she stopped for gas she opened the car’s middle console and it was stuffed
with cash. When she went inside to pay I stole twenty dollars from it, tucked it into my
wallet, and realized Marie and I were going to be best friends. It was just one of those
things I was suddenly sure of. During our drive I stopped being so attracted to her,
stopped being intimidated by her. I just wanted her friendship, and I knew I had to put
Noah behind me now. When I got back from LA I would stop the phone calls, the
emails, everything. I would tell him we were finished.
Marie stood in front of the gas station talking on her cell phone for a few minutes
before getting back in the car. By the time she tossed a bag of Skittles on to my lap I was
relieved to realize I didn’t need Noah anymore.
When we pulled out of the gas station she turned to me.
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“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “But Noah is on tour with his band. He’s
sleeping in our room tonight. You don’t mind.”
I didn’t say anything.
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Noah didn’t arrive at the hotel until around two in the morning. Marie had fallen
asleep waiting for him to arrive, but I was too anxious to sleep. I trembled waiting beside
Marie. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I heard a light tap on the door and when
Marie didn’t wake up I walked toward it. When I opened it, he smiled at me.
Marie had begged her dad to get us a room in Beverly Hills. He technically had,
but the room was tiny and held just one bed, no couch. Without a word, Noah and I lay
on either side of Marie. I had felt his expectations and my fuzzy motives vibrate and
press against each other through the door before I even opened it. My head hummed.
Laying there, Noah slid his foot toward the middle of the bed, rustling the sheets until our
bare toes touched beneath them. The touch was as light as a flower petal at first, and then
we pushed them toward each other. In that moment the skin of our feet pressed together
was more intimate than all the orgasms we’d shared over the phone; more real. Pleasure
buzzed up my thigh. Marie slept between us, oblivious as Noah and I masturbated in
silence. Our feet crashed against each other like waves breaking while we came. I must
have passed out right away because I don’t remember falling asleep that night.
In the morning I woke with a lurch, my memory like touching an exposed wire. I
lifted my head and looked over at Noah as he spooned Marie. I sat up as slow as I could
without waking them. Marie was in the pajama pants I’d bought her for her birthday. I
was in my matching pair.
Noah’s enormous foot popped out from under the sheets. A couple of the toenails
on his right foot—the foot that had touched mine—were discolored and yellow and flaky
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and thick: a row of cornhusks. It was in that exact moment, as I fixated on Noah’s crusty
toenails, that I finally felt something.
I had this idea of myself, there on that bed, as having finally succumbed to the
hole. And now I was alone and it was dark and I might be there forever. Worse still, I
didn’t know how to climb out of it, or how to find my way back because I didn’t know
where “back” even was. No one I knew could pull me out. I didn’t know how to cope
with it so I just sat there staring at the foot and trying not to cry or panic.
When Marie got up she took a shower and left Noah and me alone for the first
time. I looked in every direction but his, and tried to think of something to say to him.
We were both sitting on the rumpled bed when Noah turned and shook his enormous
finger at me.
“You sure are shy for somebody with such naughty bedtime behavior,” he said.
I laughed and looked down.
Then he came toward me and threw me down onto the bed on my back and
climbed on top of me. My eyes darted over to the closed bathroom door, then back at
him. What had I been thinking? His eyes were dilated with a kind of madness. His
dreadlocks touched the side of my face and scratched like steel wool. I lay there like an
object, just another pillow. He dipped down and then over my body. I could hear the
shower running as he pulled his pants down around his thighs and masturbated over my
face. It was a very familiar thing to do to someone you’d only just met. It was the first
time I had seen his penis, and it was small for his size, I remembered noticing. I flinched
and moved my head to the side, but he pushed himself closer to my face, wordless, yet
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seeming to insist I repay a debt I’d incurred. I was overcome with misery and dread, yet
vaguely excited, and so I bowed to the point that went unspoken: I owed him. I’d made
certain promises; I don’t think I have ever led anyone on so fully. I needed time to think,
but there was no time. I cordially flicked my tongue out for one grim second and the skin
on his penis was cold.
The shower was still running when I heard a sound and the bathroom door jerked
open and Marie popped out in her towel, claiming she had forgotten the conditioner in
her suitcase. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know if he heard her coming out before
I did, but Noah had jumped off of me with the rapidity of someone who sneaks around a
lot. Whatever suspicions Marie may have had about us were left unconfirmed.
After that I wanted nothing to do with Noah. My ambivalence had solidified into
revulsion, and I used our shared fear of being caught by Marie to ward him off the rest of
the trip. Each time he made eye contact with me with that look on his face I shook my
head and looked toward Marie.
On the long drive home I lay down in the backseat curled up with gossip magazines
and my sweater balled up under my head. I pretended to be asleep. Noah, baffled by my
sudden change of heart, tried to exchange meaningful looks with me all weekend, but I
looked at him like he was a stranger. At Disneyland as the three of us went through a
dark tunnel on Pirates of The Caribbean, he reached around my shoulder and squeezed
my breast. Rather than jump away or slap his hand, I leaned back and let him, staring
straight ahead, forcing myself to confront my own disgust; to atone.
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Those touches I thought about every night, that had sustained me while I lay in bed
next to Ethan, now made me want to cry. But as I said, I wanted to suffer.
As we drove through a town called Gilroy, the car stunk of garlic and Noah
quietly begged Marie for a blowjob in the front seat. I peeked through closed eyelids and
saw her shake her head and whisper something about me being in the car. He clamped
his hand around the back of her neck and tried to ease her head down. She tensed up and
leaned harder into the headrest. He persisted until her head sank down into his lap. I shut
my eyes and tried to sleep.
I opened my eyes again, just to get my bearings and I saw Noah staring at me in the
rearview mirror with Marie’s head moving up and down in his lap. His eyes appeared at
once sinister and gleeful, and I saw myself through his eyes: a hot Latina with big tits and
a fat ass, a body, a shell, a blank canvas, an ear to breath into. A hole.
I entered that hole and when I came out on the other side I finally saw it: myself
through the only eyes that mattered. I saw myself leaning over the bathroom sink, staring
into a mirror, straightening my hair, curling my lashes, applying mascara, plucking my
eyebrows, my eyes stinging from the fumes while I bleached my mustache. I saw myself
slide my foot into a high heel shoe. Saw myself out dancing with strangers in a bar,
taking shots of tequila, trying to ingratiate myself while swaying on unsteady feet. Saw
myself looking back and forth between the baby and the mirror, and the Internet and the
baby. Saw the baby smiling; saw the only two teeth in her mouth and the pleasure on her
face when she heard my voice. Saw her taking her first steps; toward me. Saw myself in
a new dress dropping her off. Saw my hands reaching through different doorways,
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passing the baby to a series of different people. Saw myself standing near the front door,
hair sprayed to perfection, my makeup finally immaculate, most of my baby weight
finally gone, a dainty purse dangling from my wrist, looking at Daisy, waving goodbye.
I was a hundred and fifty miles from home when I began to dry heave in the
backseat. I made a sound like barking and Noah pulled the car over to the side of the
road. Marie’s head flew up and she turned to look at me, bewildered. She wiped her lips
off with the sleeve of her shirt. And as these two strangers watched me gasp and put my
hand to my throat, I realized I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me either, so I
turned away from them, from their eyes, and I thought only of my baby girl, waiting,
often waiting, patient on her tiny back in a giant crib, pudgy legs pulled up to her chest,
patient and smiling in confusion, her diaper wet, her tummy growling, a darkness inside
of her the size of a pinhole just starting to expand, her eyes scanning the room, her face
searching, her arms remaining empty as they reached out for me.
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ANALYSIS OF THE FALLING SICKNESS
When I sat down to write “The Falling Sickness,” I did not know what the story
was going to be about. I started with one isolated image: my father and me in his dark
bedroom after one of his seizures. There was something about the image that wouldn’t
go away. I knew it was significant but I did not know why, so I knew I needed to write
about it. While I was writing the story I still didn’t know what it was about. I could tell I
wanted to explore my relationship with my dad—a relationship that was fraught but
improving—but I wasn’t clear on how I felt about him or us.
Through editing I began to see the story as a multilayered one. On the surface it
seemed to be a story about death. On a deeper level I saw that it was about language and
communication. In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker calls the human
tendency to ignore death as a fact of life our inherent “narcissism” (2). Attempting to
understand this inherent narcissism is largely what “The Falling Sickness” is about:
ignoring death even when it is staring you right in the face. In one of the first scenes of
the story the protagonist watches as her Christmas gifts are run over by a truck. This
happens right after she learns that her father has been diagnosed with a terminal disease,
and apart from demonstrating the chaos of her mind that day, it seems to foreshadow the
loss she will eventually experience when her father dies. The destruction of the gifts as
they lay scattered across the road reflects the ultimate destruction of her father’s life, and
the protagonist’s inability to piece everything together again, further exemplifying her
impotence.
One thing I hadn’t realized until I analyzed this story was how the smell of gas and
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metal was a symbol for death in the text. It was not my intention to put this into the
story. When the protagonist picks up her scarf from the road after it has been run over it
“smells like gas and metal” (26). The smell of gas and metal on the scarf becomes
inextricably linked with the protagonist’s anxiety about her father’s death. Later in the
story when the protagonist visits her dad in the hospital she smells his breath and it smells
“pungent and metallic, like copper and blood, gas and metal, it entered me” (62). In this
scene the smell also refers to death, and the protagonist “leaned away as far as I could”
(62). The smell reminds her of death, which is why she wants to get away from it. She
does not want death near her. I was completely shocked to find these symbols in the
story.
Upon re-reading the text, I found many symbols of death and decay. The artificial
tree is described as a “dead one in a box” (28), which brings to mind a person in a coffin.
The words “your father is going to die” (28) are repeated directly after this image. “The
tape that used to hold it all together” (28) also reads like a symbol that foreshadows the
loss of Papa: the centerpiece of the family. It reads like a premonition of things falling
apart when Papa dies.
Many things in the text seem to deteriorate: Papa’s dog training business, his dog
Maya’s pregnancy resulting in one stillborn puppy, his other dog Max overheats and
nearly dies. Papa’s hearing is deteriorating. The home Papa and his wife live in seems to
be deteriorating also, with “piles of giant garbage bags” and “the cracked driveway” (54).
Though when they first purchased the house they “reshape[d] the lawn, plant[ed]
flowers,” at the time of writing the protagonist reports that “the flowers died long ago”
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(54). Decay surrounds the protagonist’s family.
Papa’s body is dramatically deteriorating. When the protagonist sees her dad “the
slackness of his face shocks me” (55). His hearing is deteriorating and he limps after
tearing cartilage. There are paragraphs listing his various maladies, and they are so
extensive they seem ludicrous, exaggerated. Decay is pervasive in this story; the
protagonist watches helplessly as “I saw blood pour out of his mouth” that was “not a
crimson, but a thick, dark red, brown or black. It was “the blood of something dead or
rotten or evil” (38) a color which signifies decay to me.
The threat of death is all over the text. Near the beginning of the story the
protagonist talks about all the times her father saved people’s lives. A toddler is pulled
out of a fire, two women nearly drown, a man is pulled from a vehicle before it explodes.
These things serve as a reminder that death is all around us, how at any second a freak
occurrence can happen, ending our lives or the lives of those around us. When I wrote
those anecdotes my intention was to flesh out the character of Papa. Those stories are a
big part of who he is. The threat of death is prominent in Papa’s relationships with his
dogs. Each of them: Rocky, Max, Madchen, and Maya have scenes in which death takes
them or lingers near them. Max almost dies from overheating, a close call, but then dies
of a freak poisoning. Rocky dies. Madchen almost kills two other animals. Maya carries
a dead puppy inside of her body for an undisclosed period of time before Papa finds out.
Cocoa is run over by a car and dies. All of Papa’s brothers are dead. His parents are
dead. He seems surrounded by death, and as an extension, so does the protagonist. The
protagonist notes “fathers fall like chopped trees all around me” (61). When the
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protagonist finds “a note with the words ‘four horsemen’ and ‘apocalypse’ written on it in
Papa’s handwriting” (42) it seems like Papa has his mortality on his mind too.
The theme of impotence is another thread throughout the text. When Papa’s dog
Madchen attacks the neighbor’s dog, nearly killing it, Papa is trapped behind a fence and
unable to stop the attack, and he “stretched his hands toward her but could not reach, no
matter how far he stretched” (59). The protagonist and her mother watch Papa convulse
and bleed out of his mouth but can do nothing to help. When Papa, in his postictal state
asks, “Can’t you help me?” (67) the protagonist can only respond with the rhetorical
question, “What can I do?” (67). Near the end of the text the protagonist noticed her
mother making fun of Papa after his seizure, and she “gesture[s] to get his attention, to
share an eye roll with him, to save him somehow” but “our time is up” (70). Again the
protagonist feels a sense of helplessness and a lack of control.
Even the text itself is an impotent one. The narrator imagines giving the text to her
father in the hopes that she can communicate something to him, but ultimately decides
she “won’t ever hand them over” (71). She imagines that even if she did, Papa would
“despise or misunderstand or resist or forget to read” (71) or he would use the stack of
papers as a coaster for his coffee. She refers to the text as “superfluous” (71). The
protagonist feels helpless to communicate with her father because “a conversation with
Papa will always get derailed” (31) signifying a runaway train. She lacks control.
Over and over again we see characters lacking initiative or simply unable to deal
with the gravity of a situation. When Papa and the mother tell their children Papa is
going to die, the protagonist’s “hands froze” and she “didn’t know what to say” (26).
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The family sits together but “none of us moved to embrace each other” (27). They seem
incapacitated by the news. The silence is only broken when Papa begins opening another
gift, which seems to imply that the family chooses to avoid the discomfort of Papa’s
terminality, to play-act, to pretend nothing has just happened. The protagonist herself
realizes this later in the text when she talks about teasing her husband for being in such a
repressed family, only to discover her family acts in much the same way.
As the protagonist describes punishment growing up she describes how she would
“turn my head” (29) to avoid seeing what was coming. It’s as if her way of coping with
something that is imminent is to look away and pretend it isn’t coming. She reacts the
same way with respect to her dad’s diagnoses. It seems like when Papa tells his daughter
he has been diagnosed with yet another terminal disease, this time cancer, she “sort of
froze up” (33) again impotent and action-less in the face of bad news. Her brother “acted
like he’d heard nothing” (33) another way of avoiding the truth. It is interesting to note
that the only person who allows herself an open, authentic response is the sister-in-law,
someone from outside of the family who “went barreling around the corner sobbing”
(33). When Papa has his first seizure the children are literally asleep throughout the
ordeal. Later when he has another seizure we see the protagonist watching the
paramedics carry her father out on a stretcher, and she “kept stepping forward and then
stopping myself” (39). Most actions or attempts at acting throughout the narrative are
stopped short. When the protagonist tries to enter the ambulance “they closed both doors
on me” (39).
When characters do take action, the actions seem inappropriate and exaggerated, as
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if the characters, after having been paralyzed for so long, can only react with
overcompensation. There seems to be little balance. When the protagonist sees her dad
have a seizure she “circled around the coffee table, round and round, hyperventilating and
repeating, ‘He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die’” and her mother
immediately shuts it down when she “threatened to slap me” (36). The family seems to
want to keep things secret or downplay them. The protagonist breaks this pact when she
records her father crying and plays the sounds for someone outside of the family.
Because of this type of secrecy, most displays of emotion are, sometimes literally, behind
closed doors. When Papa has surgery on his ankle, Nicole can only hear him crying from
“in his bed down the hall” (35). After Papa is fired from his job, the protagonist remarks,
“Papa and I never talked about it” (41). When the protagonist collapses during a church
service she “never told my parents” (50). She says that “to me that experience was
private” (50). Later in the text she talks about the night her dad held a gun to her head
and again remarks, “We never talked about it after that” (51).
It was interesting for me to re-read this text critically and to note particular patterns.
I was surprised by how many of the anecdotes ended with the notion of silence or a lack
of open acknowledgement, especially when the situations involved were very serious.
This wasn’t something I had thought much about before. Once I noticed that pattern, I
began to notice that there was a lot in the text about communication, language, speaking,
etc., and I noticed that Papa seems to come by it honestly. I noted that when my
grandfather died “he surprised Papa by changing his will and passing the business down
to one of his younger brothers, my Uncle Matt” (40). It made me think about how our
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habits can be generational, and helped me to understand those moments when my father
is non-communicative a little more. It’s the only way he knows to be.
Throughout the text we see that Papa’s hearing is deteriorating, literally taking
away some of his ability to be communicated with. In a scene where Papa gets a hearing
aid, we detect some eagerness on Nicole’s part to be heard by him when she “hid in
different corners of the house, expanding outward with each hiding place, whispering
words and asking if he could hear me” (31). Papa’s hearing isn’t the only thing that is a
barrier to communication. Throughout the text the television always appears to be on.
When the parents tell their children that Papa is terminal, “his eyes bore into the TV. I
put my scarf down and looked to the TV, too” (28). The TV becomes an easy focal point
for avoidance of difficult subjects or intimacy. Papa “watches TV a lot lately, and it’s
usually on so loud that when I visit I can hear the sounds of explosions and gunshots
from the front porch” (30). Not only is the TV a visual distraction, detracting from eye
contact, it also blocks verbal communication by being turned up so loud. The protagonist
views Papa’s interests as a barrier to intimacy. She believes they don’t leave “space for
things like listening or interest in the lives of the people he cares about” (31).
The protagonist bemoans the loss of a simpler time between her and her father, a
time when “our language had nothing to do with words” (29). The protagonist seems
hung up on language as a means of expression, sometimes to the exclusion of all other
kinds of intimacy. She seems critical of Papa because he does not communicate much
verbally. Rather than understanding that verbal language is not his primary mode of
communication she often tries to force it on him. She is too blind to note that a man who
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can barely hear may desire communication in ways that don’t always involve him
listening. The protagonist notes that her dad seems most peaceful when he is with his
dogs, sitting “on the tailgate of Papa’s white Chevrolet truck parked in the middle of our
long driveway, facing an orange and pink sunset. Papa had his arm draped around
Rocky’s small and rounded shoulders; the back of Rocky’s head was like that of a
content teenage girl with her first love” (42). Yet, she doesn’t seem to get that this kind
of scene is transferable. She sees it as something between him and his dogs, something
she will never have access to. And her thoughts are verbalized by her mother, who
comes up behind her and scoffs at the scene, complaining. She says, “He hasn’t sat with
me like that in years” (43). When Nicole runs into her ex-boyfriend Neil he hypothesizes
that the dogs are important to Papa because “he needs something to control” (57).
Nicole thinks he is right, that “perhaps control is what made my dad tick” and that things
would be better if she was “more like one of his dogs,” (57), but Nicole misses the mark.
Perhaps Papa does enjoy some of the control he has over the dogs, but what he really
seems to love is the peace he gets from being relinquished of the responsibility of talking
so much.
And this is the primary discovery I made when writing and then analyzing my own
text: that the thing between Papa and the protagonist, my father and me, has nothing to do
with language. I think this is why my inspiration came from that one image: my father
and me in a dark room after one of his seizures. It is because this is one of the only times
we have together where we can don’t feel the pressure to try to talk. Language is no
longer of primary importance. In this postictal state, Papa has his guard down and so do
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I. In our parallel scenes where we fall to the floor, it appears that total collapse is the
only way we know how to ask for love.
It seemed to me, in the end, to be a story about loving a difficult person (and
sometimes being that difficult person) and accepting and embracing moments of
illumination or intimacy as they come. I recognized through this story that the moments I
felt closest to my dad where those moments that had nothing to do with language:
looking at the drawing he made for me, or sitting with him in the dark rubbing his back. I
learned to appreciate those things, and to stop trying to make things happen on my terms,
in line with my own fantasies. I also learned that my father and I are more alike than I
thought before I wrote the text. I noted that his postictal experiences and my experience
at the church service were quite similar, and that at the end of the day we both just want
to be loved. And this is why the text ends as it does, with image of the two of us still
relatively un-evolved, yet crawling toward each other. I’m trying to learn to embrace that
journey, even though “I don’t think there will ever be enough time to get where we’re
going” (72). When I write “every once in a while our eyes meet,” what I am trying to
indicate is that what matters to me now those brief moments of connection.
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ANALYSIS OF INFINITE FEAR AND SADNESS
More than anything else I have ever written, I had no idea what I was doing when I
sat down to write this essay. It started when I was assigned to write an essay in a creative
nonfiction class. I had never written a lyrical essay before, and for a couple of days I
struggled to come up with an idea. I had been obsessed with mountain lion attacks for a
while at that point, so I decided to write about that. I thought, as a bonus, I might
discover something about myself in the process, as long as I stayed open to it.
As I wrote, I began to wonder if by writing about mountain lion attacks, I was
really writing about fear. After re-reading my first draft I began to see it as an essay
about fear and love, and about how fear often separates us from each other, and is often
in direct opposition to love. When fear crops up in the essay, it only serves to separate
the protagonist from others. Her obsession with mountain lion attacks begins to separate
her from her child and her husband, and from her friends as she gets deeper into her own
world. She mentions that she “watched people’s eyes go from intrigued to concerned or
amused or bored as I droned on” (81). The fear stops her from watching the Perseids
meteor shower (sharing an experience) with her family. Even in bed, a place of intimacy,
she sits up “against the headboard of my bed with two pillows stuffed behind my back
[…] engrossed in my book. When I read I can’t hear a thing” (87). Though she is there
with her husband she has shut him out, she has isolated herself to be absorbed in her fear.
Near the end of the essay the protagonist learns that fear separated her from
acknowledging Willow’s vulnerability and “personhood.” Throughout the essay, Nicole
looks at Willow (and all mountain lions) with fear, detachment and disdain. This
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prevents her from seeing the truth of Willow. Her fear makes her label Willow as scary
or “a danger,” and this label blocks her from being about to see the full picture. Her
final revelation about Willow is hinted at when she discovers Willow’s history. She says
she “felt like people in myths and fables feel when they realize this seemingly
unimportant person they’ve been dealing with, this beggar, this common criminal, was
actually someone of great fame and importance, and that he had disguised himself to
walk among the general populace unnoticed” and that she “wasn’t sure why” (87). I had
this peculiar sensation the night I read about Willow’s history and his relation to the
Barbara Schoener attack, like I had met an important celebrity, but one who had meaning
only to me. I had no idea what the meaning was, though. Learning about a specific
mountain lion’s history marked the first step in the protagonist’s ability to look upon him
as an individual, past the label of “deadly mountain lion.”
As she studies near death experiences, Nicole learns “all that matters is love, and
to devote your life to anything else makes it a waste, a failure, a Hell” (94). She learns
that fear is in direct opposition to love. Everything about near death experiences came in
the final draft, after I had an experience that changed the course of the essay. One thing I
didn’t include in the essay was a conversation I had with a sanctuary worker. As I was
writing, I called the sanctuary to ask some questions about Willow’s history, and to see if
she had any details about Willow’s early life at the sanctuary. I couldn’t believe my ears
when she digressed into describing the differences in the personalities of the lions at the
sanctuary. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was shocked. I had never looked at them
as having individual personalities. The sanctuary worker told me about how playful
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Willow was once he became comfortable with the sanctuary. She told me about his
stuffed panda bear, and how he rolled around with it. It completely derailed the questions
I had lined up, because when I called I was more focused on what it was like when
Willow first came to the sanctuary; I had wanted to ask about the drama surrounding his
arrival.
There was something unsettling about our conversation. When I hung up the
phone after speaking to her, I opened up my research folder. There was a journal article I
had scanned with a picture of Willow as a baby. I had breezed right past the picture
before, but this time I really looked at it. While I was doing so, my cat Moses (whom I
absolutely treasure) came to sit on my lap and to nestle into me. He was staring into my
eyes, with this look of total trust and vulnerability. At that moment everything fell into
place. I began to think of Willow in a more human way, and that came with some regret
about how I had framed him in my mind. Instead of this bloodthirsty demon, I began to
think of him as a lost orphan.
A while later I went to visit Willow with my newfound compassion, but his name
was no longer up on the cage. I was confused, so I walked to the front of the sanctuary to
ask about him. The person working at the counter told me Willow had recently died. I
was surprised by how sad I was to hear it. I kicked myself for taking so long to have my
realization. That experience strongly influenced my last draft of the story.
Reading my final product, I noticed how I framed Willow in relation to being
abandoned by his mother. Then I noticed how often mother/child relationships were
littered throughout the essay. This was not intentional. Even the scenes I wrote about my
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daughter were put in because they “felt right,” not because I felt they were supporting a
theme. Analyzing the essay, I noticed how I consistently referred to attack victim
Barbara Schoener as the “mother.” In the opening scene “a mother of two” (73) begins to
run on a trail. It seemed significant to me, at the time I wrote it, to mention that “she
skipped her son’s little league game to train that day” (73), though I wasn’t sure why. So
much of what I include in these pieces relies heavily on what I think might be intuition.
At the time I included it because, as a mother myself, it struck me as a sad detail. My
assumption is that she wouldn’t have skipped her son’s game if she knew it was her last
day to live. This is not meant as a criticism of her choice to run that day, by any means.
It just points to what I believe the whole piece is doing, which is reminding us of our own
mortality, that our relationships are precious, and to be careful not to take them for
granted.
Mother/child relationships are further explored through the allusions to generational
traits being passed down from one mother to her daughter. Nicole complains about how
her own mother was grumpy about being woken up at night, while also noting that she
herself is irritable about her own daughter waking her up at night. This shows how easy
it is to be on autopilot, even with good intentions. The protagonist alludes to feeling
alienated and lonely as a child when she says her mom “stopped hugging and kissing me”
(89) as a child. Here the hugging and kissing symbolize the comfort the protagonist felt
she lacked, so it is significant that when Daisy needs comfort, Nicole laughs it off and tell
her she is being “ridiculous” (90), leaving her alone in her room to fend for herself.
While the protagonist is shown performing her own mom’s behaviors, she is also
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shown passing negativity to her own daughter: her obsessions with her fears. When
Daisy is terrified of the cover of Rosemary’s Baby, Nicole “kept finding the DVD stashed
in her [Daisy’s] room” (88). This resonated when we learn that as a young girl Nicole
also hid and then retrieved something she was afraid of in her own room. Daisy
additionally mimics her mom when she tries to “turn down a camping trip at the beach
with her grandparents” (88). This mirrors the Perseids meteor shower incident where the
protagonist turns down family time because she worries about a mountain lion attack.
Fear is just one way distraction expresses itself through the essay. As the essay
opens we see that as the mother ran along the trail she “moved too fast to notice the
leaves” (73), the first reference in the essay to being focused on one thing to the
detriment of noticing the other. When I re-read the essay I noticed how often the
protagonist becomes absorbed or distracted from her relationships. The first time she
sees the mountain lions, Nicole becomes transfixed, and she “brushed my husband and
child away with a wave of my fingers” and was afraid “to look away” (76). On the way
home from the sanctuary, she continues to shut her family out as she does “mountain lion
research […] shutting out Daisy’s voice” (77). She becomes so engrossed in what she is
reading that she doesn’t even realize her family has gone into the house. Through her
imagined life review, she pictures seeing herself with her ”face in a book, [her] face in
[her] laptop, [her] face in [her] iPhone, [her] face in [her] TV” (98), another allusion to
being distracted.
As I went through the twofold process of writing and reading this essay, I learned a
lot about myself. It helped me to pinpoint places in my life where I was missing the
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mark, and places where I could do better. It reminded me that life is made up of little
moments, and if I’m focused to much on other things, those moments will pass me right
by. I can’t say I am always present now, but often when my daughter wants my attention
and I’m absorbed in something else, what I’ve written and read has (and hopefully will
continue to) served as a reminder of where I should put my attention.
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ANALYSIS OF EVERYTHING I STOLE (DISAPPEARED DOWN A HOLE)
The first few drafts of “Everything I Stole (Disappeared Down a Hole)” focused on
something completely different than what you see here. I thought I was writing a story
about my friendship with a girl I’ve called Marie. Marie and I had a tumultuous
friendship, in part because of the complexities of the genesis of our relationship. It was a
friendship formed on a foundation of dishonesty. Marie was a compulsive liar, and I was
untrustworthy and competitive, and even though I ended the friendship I couldn’t figure
out why I still missed her. Shouldn’t I have been happy to be rid of her? My early drafts
started with me trying to work out why I wasn’t completely at peace with my decision.
In my first drafts the story began with the protagonist remembering the time she
watched Marie standing outside of a bar. Earlier drafts were about me exploring our
friendship, and trying to understand why I did the things I did with Noah. There was a lot
of writing about my friendship with Marie. But like everything else I’ve written, by the
time the story came to a close I was in a completely different place than I expected. In
that first draft I ended on the image of the baby in her crib, waiting for her mom to come
home. Going back and re-reading the draft I realized the beginning and end of the story
did not match. I had built up the expectation that my friendship with Marie would be
explored and possibly resolved, and the end of the story delivered none of that.
Re-reading these earlier drafts, I found the core of the work. It was surprising to
find that Marie was peripheral, and that the story’s core is about Nicole’s pervasive
emptiness, an existential void.
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In the beginning of the story, Nicole mentions her loss of religious faith, leaving
her with “a hole that cannot be filled” (103). She says, “My dad told me that everybody
has one, that the only way to fill it was with Jesus” (103). Here she acknowledges that
this hole, this emptiness, is a part of the human condition, and that religion is one way to
help fill it. Without religious faith as a stabilizing force for Nicole, she finds that she has
nothing to believe in.
Jean-Paul Sartre noted that without any good a priori, there is no longer an infinite
or perfect consciousness to think it, no real reason to be good— no reason for anything,
really. Sartre argued that since it is “nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must
be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men”
(Sartre), Nicole finds herself without direction— her life has no meaning and she has no
values. When she loses religion as her life’s center, she embraces a life where anything
goes, where “everything is indeed permitted […] and man is in consequence forlorn, for
he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself” (Sartre). The
character of Nicole is certainly forlorn. Much of the story follows her as she wanders
from person to person, and object to object, trying to find something to hold on to.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explains this particular phenomenon in which “the
certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to
behave badly with impunity” (44). While Nicole finds herself in an existence in which
everything is permitted, she hungers for parameters. Even though she is legally an adult
and wants nothing from them, she calls her parents to tell them she has been arrested
because she “felt an overwhelming need to suffer the consequences of what I had done, to
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be punished” (112). Near the end of the story she gives herself another self-imposed
punishment when she forces herself “to confront my own disgust; to atone” (168). There
is something inside of her that needs a sense of values or parameters, as if somewhere
deep down Nicole knows that without those things she is left grappling with an immense
sense of emptiness, joylessness, and meaninglessness— the Void.
Throughout the story, this emptiness (the Void) is symbolized by holes. Nicole
seems to acknowledge the Void, but doesn’t understand exactly what it is or how to deal
with it. It is painful; she calls it “a gaping wound that made me feel hollow and hungry
all the time” (103). Initially she believes she can fill it— and she naively attempts to do
so with material objects. That is why there is such a frenzied, savage quality to her
stealing— an indiscriminate desperation. She steals because is gives her “a sense of
being full or awake” (103). Left with no stabilizing belief system or values, Nicole tries
to revert back to the inadequate (to her) comforts of religion, but in a new way: “Stealing
became my religion” (103).
With stealing as her new religion, Nicole elevates it above love/human connection.
When she goes to a party with her boyfriend (a symbol of love) she walks past all of the
partygoers (human connection) and makes a beeline straight for the bathroom to find
something she can steal. It is significant, then, that when she steals toiletries from the
bathroom she “left Neil behind without even saying goodbye” (108). She has become so
devoted to stealing that she doesn’t even care if he is with her. She goes to his house
alone, empties out her backpack, and spends her evening organizing everything into piles.
After she is put in jail for stealing, Nicole tries to fill the Void with other things that
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are just as absurd. She tries to fill the Void with fantasies, all of them shallow and
materialistic. Her obsession with Marie is misguided in that way: Marie is beautiful and
has all the “right” material things, and therefore Marie must be fulfilled. Nicole becomes
convinced that if she can absorb Marie, mimic her, or take ownership of her in some way,
she too will be fulfilled.
Through the text, Nicole comes face to face with various absurd truths. With no
fixed meaning in her life, she makes meaning from unusual events. The seeds of her final
revelation are planted when her long-awaited fantasies come true. She had envisioned
entering Marie’s car and inhaling the “sweet chemicals in her hairspray, brown sugar and
lemon” (151-2), but when she enters Marie’s car she is faced with an altogether different
experience, the real one:
The inside of her car smelled like perfume and crushed cigarettes mixed
with the faint smell of kitty litter and my cousin Suzanne’s morning
breath, the smell of sweet shit. Up close, her makeup was thick, her
foundation too light for her face and covering up acne I hadn’t noticed
before, making her skin look shiny and mottled and lumpy and porous.
Her teeth were crooked and overlapping. Some shifted to one side. Her
hair was thin and her head was small (162-3).
Her fantasies about Noah come to fruition and are similarly disenchanting. On the
bed of her Beverly Hills hotel room, Nicole sees that some of his toenails were
“discolored and yellow and flaky and thick” (165). As she looks at his feet she finds a
kind of truth about her condition. She realizes that Noah and Marie also live an existence
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that is flawed and abject. She sees the Void in them too and realizes it is inescapable.
She becomes completely hopeless in that moment as she realizes these people she has
been counting on in her fantasies cannot in reality give her life the meaning she’s looking
for either.
The story reaches its climax when Nicole looks into the rearview mirror and Noah’s
eyes are looking back at her. In that moment she sees herself through his eyes: “a hot
Latina with big tits and a fat ass, a body, a shell, a blank canvas, an ear to breath into. A
hole” (168). Whereas these same descriptors flattered her before, at this moment she has
a different reaction. When she thinks of the word “hole” she associates it with the Void,
and has a revelation. In her mind’s eye, she sees her baby watching her get ready to go
out at night. She watches her trying to get the approval of strangers, and she watches her
mom being distracted from her. Through her daughter’s eyes she sees the emptiness of
those efforts. That emptiness is then juxtaposed with “the pleasure on [Daisy’s] face
when she heard my voice” (168). In that moment of reflection, Nicole sees she has a
chance to be seen and valued by her daughter for something immaterial, perhaps
something more permanent and fulfilling. She experiences empathy finally,
understanding what it is like for her daughter to see her mom leaving all the time, and
suddenly all of the things she obsessed over seem grotesque and absurd, meaningless.
This repulsion is further antagonized by the crudity of what Noah and Marie are doing in
the front seat of the car.
Throughout the text, the idea of being asleep represents the time before Nicole
attempts an earnest search for meaning in her life. She says that “for most of my life I
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was asleep” and that she had the sense that she was “sleepwalking through my own life”
(102). Nicole harkens back to a time in her life where she thought her purpose was to be
perfect, but when she realized it was impossible she “gave up and decided to reward
myself for all my efforts with a long nap” (102). In one of the rare moments Nicole feels
happy and content with Ethan she “shut my eyes” (142), blocking out reality.
In the moments before her revelation, her eyes are closed as she pretends to sleep,
but she cannot convince herself to sleep this time. Her eyes have been opened. When
she thinks of her baby at home, the baby signifies both potential for emptiness and
potential for meaning. Nicole imagines her baby as having “a darkness inside of her the
size of a pinhole just starting to expand” (169) and imagines the baby’s “arms remaining
empty as they reached out for me” (169). That darkness and emptiness depicted in this
scene is key. Nicole realizes her daughter will one day face the Void herself, and knows
that even if she cannot fill it for her daughter, she can at least be there to offer her
comfort, love, and guidance, to at least fill the empty space in her arms. This marks
Nicole’s first step toward a meaningful existence, toward establishing some set of
parameters/values in her life.
In the last episode of the 2009 season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), Larry
David introduces the notion of the “having just said that” escape clause, which gives one
the ability to make a statement and then immediately contradict it while still maintaining
those opposing viewpoints simultaneously. My rationale, in part, argues that the DOA
philosophy enabled me to find my own meaning in a text. I believe the DOA movement
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was tremendously helpful in encouraging me to develop a stronger sense of individualism
and confidence when deciphering a text. Having just said that, I believe the author—in
my stories— is more relevant than the DOA philosophy gives credit for.
In my rationale I spoke of establishing a middle ground between traditionalist
ideas of authorial intent and the presumption of a lack of authorial control presumed by
DOAs. After re-reading all of my stories and writing my analyses, I see a tension within
my own texts that forms a parallel to finding this middle ground: while much of my
rationale involves a discussion of the author being dead, throughout my stories the
author—or the narrator—is what is most alive about them.
In his book The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth introduced the concept of
the “implied author,” a term he uses to depict the text “as the product of a choosing,
evaluating person rather than a self-existing thing” (74). Booth’s implied author is not
dead and cannot be killed: the text cannot exist without him/her. The implied author
“chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary,
created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices” (75). The implied
author is “present in every speech given by any character” (19) and the “author’s
judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it”
(20). In part this is a result of the author’s editing choices. The author chooses which
details to include with respect to each character, chooses what she thinks are the most
significant details about each person, setting, and event in the story. It is the author who
is responsible for what the reader sees in each story, a culmination of all of the author’s
choices (whether the author is conscious of it at the time or not).
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Booth names three terms that are “sometimes used to name the core of norms and
choices” (74) an implied author makes. The first is “style”, which refers to “whatever it
is that gives us a sense, from word to word and line to line, that the author sees more
deeply and judges more profoundly than his presented characters” and is “one of our
main sources of insight into the author’s norms” (74). This insight into the author’s
norms is prevalent throughout each of my three texts, many times as the narrator
comments on the main character’s actions, in spite of the fact that one could argue they
are both the same person. In my stories, the author often speculates on why the
protagonist made a specific choice, sometimes expressing a sense of disappointment or
disapproval. In “Everything I Stole,” the author/narrator—who are often conflated
throughout my stories—comments, “I didn’t even consider that the baby could have a
home with a couple that was ready for him or her” (122). This gives the reader insight
into the author’s current values/point of view without the author outright saying it; one
gets the impression that the author, reflecting on past choices, now believes the
character’s choice was a self-centered and perhaps thoughtless one.
The second norm is “tone.” Tone is “similarly used to refer to the implicit
evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit presentation” (74).
Even though “some aspects of the implied author may be inferred through tonal
variations” (74), his “major qualities will depend also on the hard facts of action and
character in the tale that is told” (74). Lastly, “technique” is used to “cover all
discernable signs of the author’s artistry” and the “entire range of choices made by the
author” (74). Within the text “every recognizably personal touch, every distinctive
192
literary allusion, or colorful metaphor, every pattern of myth or symbol”—“any
discerning reader can recognize that they are imposed by the author” (18-9).
Summarizing and consolidating a week’s activities into a paragraph are “signs of the
author’s manipulating presence” (19). Although the author has control of all of these
things, she is not there to dominate the text. She is there to help, to shape the text and aid
the reader’s perception of the story she is attempting to tell.
In my stories, particularly in “Everything I Stole,” the narrator and the author
often overlap and converge. There is a strong apathy to the main character, a cold,
emotionless tone referred to by one of my readers as “pathologically banal.” My role as
the author was— in part—to bring a provisional order to the story, to guide the reader
through the often tough textual experience. It was my job as an author to create some
type of order and urgency amongst the backdrop of chaos and banality. The main
character’s—along with many of the other characters’—apathy, fragmentation, and selfnegation demanded a strong author/narrator to drive the narrative forward. This is also
because “Everything I Stole” is not about my past experiences so much as it is about my
current connections, interpretations, and associations with those events of my past.
Therefore, the text is my—the author’s—attempt to give coherence and order to that
fragmented mess through the act of composition.
In my stories, the author functions to shape the narrative like a potter at a wheel.
Without my—the author’s— hands to shape these events, they are nothing but an
amorphous mass of clay— they lack inherent meaning. The author/narrator’s voice
constructs a bridge between the self-destruction of the protagonist and my own self-
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creation. In this way the author is absolutely vital to creating meaning out of the Void, as
well as the lived experiences and vignettes depicted in the stories. Without the author’s
provisional order, we aren’t left with much; there is no value, no reflection, very little
point to the endeavor.
The main character in “Everything I Stole” parallels that unshaped mass. She is
the chaos inherent to a life encompassed by the Void. It is only through the author’s
choice of words and the narrator’s tone that the chaos is provisionally shaped. The author
oversees everything. The actions of the main character have such a corrosive emptiness
to them that darkness threatens to encompass the entire text. The author cannot make the
darkness go away—it is not her job— just as the main character cannot make the Void go
away. But they can both build a parameter around the Void to keep themselves and
others from falling in, from getting lost.
194
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