To Punctuate

By Magin LaSov Gregg

My body is being weird today. Hands tingling, forearms squishing. I stop typing for a moment and arc my arms in the air, a quick sun-salutation. The movement takes me back to a time I can barely remember, when I could squeeze in one yoga class per week between days of weight lifting and four-mile runs. That person I used to be glimmers like a ghost in my memory. Even when I squint hard, I can barely see her.

I haven’t run or practiced yoga consistently for years because my joints ache. Or the room spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl. Or everything in the distance looks like it’s melting. Today, thank goodness, there’s none of that. Just pins and needles in my hands and weakness in my arms. I can finish grading. I can teach my classes. I can get through the day. A few fingers on my left hand have started shaking. Stress, maybe?

When a friend walks by my office, I call for her to come inside. We’re work sisters, bonded by more synchronicities than I can count, including losing people we loved to the same illness when we were younger.

“Do your hands ever twitch while you’re grading?” I ask. I massage my right forearm. There’s a stabbing pain that started up two weeks after my flu shot. Now it feels like a needle straight to the bicep.

Work Sister slumps in a chair across from me. Every day we discuss my mysterious medical symptoms. Early waking. Anxiety. Insomnia. Vertigo. Nailed-to-the-bed exhaustion. What diseases do I have? Or is it all in my imagination? Symptoms, unattached to firm diagnoses, float like giant question marks over our heads.

“Maybe carpal tunnel?” she says, and I nod. I hope so. Something relatively simple. Something else to ask my new GP about when I see her next week.

Like me, Work Sister is tired this morning. She didn’t sleep well last night and might have a cold. As always, our fatigue comes at the worst time, at the tail end of our semester, when our grading load quadruples. She slinks toward her office and closes the door. If I need her, I can call. I don’t think I’ll need her today, but it’s nice to know she’s there, on the other side of the wall, like my own sister once was.

I go back to grading. My students are trying to make sense of Hillbilly Elegy, a book I find mildly irritating, but assigned because this year I’m trying to stop tuning out people I’ve written off. Like my father, who I was estranged from for eleven years. My father is from rust-belt Ohio, like the book’s author. And he voted for Trump, and I didn’t think I could ever understand this choice. But I’m trying. We’re talking more now. The last time, he did most of the speaking. He told me a story about his cat and then told me I worked too much.

Perhaps he is right. Is my arm-hand-shoulder malfunctioning the equivalent of tennis elbow for writing professors?

( )

My father and I have plans to talk tonight. I take his phone call in bed, even though it’s eight p.m. on a Friday. I worked a twelve-hour day, advising a student publication that almost didn’t make it to press. Now I cannot sit up. Also, my husband left this morning for a weeklong meditation retreat, and I am not feeling very Zen about his absence at the busiest time in my semester. Yet our ten-year marriage works because we hold space for each other and we make space for the other’s individuality. I’m more envious than resentful of his absence. I wish I could check out of real life, too.

Tonight it’s just me and a dog in the bed, and my father on the phone, talking about neutron bombs. He asks me about the basement bomb shelter we inherited from the previous owners. Have I gotten it repaired? How much canned food do I have down there? What about water? What is my plan?

“It will be every man for himself,” he tells me. This sentence comes after he has suggested I install a wooden wishing well over the manhole cover in my backyard, to hide my bomb shelter’s exit from marauding gangs. He will not be coming to save me. What else is new?

For a moment, I think of asking his opinion on Trump’s latest baiting of North Korea on Twitter. But I’m too tired to argue. I focus instead on the fallout in my body. I tell him a doctor has recently diagnosed me with shingles, but the rash and pain have since migrated, so it’s not that.

“I’m going to see a new doctor on Tuesday,” I say, leaving out that she’s a woman recommended by a friend who lives with chronic pain. My father still uses words like “hysterical” to describe my mother, dead now sixteen years from juvenile diabetes. I suspect he distrusts women in authority. I don’t tell him about what happened at the last appointment with my former GP, either.

(I left the former GP because he told me my shingles-ridden body was a threat to pregnant women. He went on and on about this until I stopped him. I didn’t tell him how his comment hurt me because I miscarried my first pregnancy and fell apart afterward. I didn’t tell him how I feared he believed my non-pregnant body was less valuable than a pregnant body. But I called the office the next day.)

“I won’t be needing a follow up appointment,” I told my GP’s receptionist. “I’m leaving this practice.”

Silence. And then, “We’re sorry to hear that.” Then, click. Why didn’t I speak up in the appointment or demand an apology from the doctor? Why was I satisfied with silence, a simple click?

The day I told my father about my miscarriage, he said, “Well, I have to go.”

I shook when I hung up the phone, and then walked fast out my front door, as if I could shake off his inexplicable apathy. But I called back the next day, too.

“I told you I had a miscarriage,” I said. “Why didn’t you respond?”

He claimed he hadn’t heard me, and I wondered if that was true. I wondered if me being real with him was too threatening, or if I was afraid he’d reject me each time I asserted my version of the truth.

Last year, when my husband and I joined the Women’s March on Washington, I told my father I’d be “out of pocket” that day. He never asked what I’d be doing, just like I never asked him if he actually voted for Trump. I simply assumed so because of the giant Trump sticker on the rear window of his car.

Out of pocket. My choice of words does not surprise me.

A thousand pockets line mine and my father’s conversations. Countless unvoiced words cram inside those pockets. They form sentences I’d stuff inside parentheses if I were writing everything out.

Parent, a root of parenthesis, means “to bring forth.”

Ironically, a parenthesis holds back. A parenthesis suggests sub-vocalization or even silence. At best, a parenthesis is the grammatical equivalent of muttering under one’s breath.

From the Greek para “beside” and tithenai “to put, to place,” parenthesis reminds me of another conversation my father and I had, when he was working the ninth step in AA.

He talked then about how he and my mother had separate roles in their marriage. He was the worker, the earner. She was the unpaid domestic. They “wrestled” because they did not agree on those roles. He used his fists, his buck knife, to put her into place. She almost died leaving him. But he still said they “wrestled.” His language made her a complicit partner in the violence he inflicted against her, as if they stood in a ring and shook hands after a coin flip. He towered over her, but he still insisted they had wrestled.

When my mother was dying, she begged me never to tell my father that she was sick. Her hands trembled when she said his name, although they hadn’t lived under the same roof for twenty years. Did she teach me how to hide a secret in the middle of a sentence? Did she write my first parenthesis?

Now, whenever I see the word “parenthesis,” I see the word “parent.” I see myself standing between them, like I did on the night of the buck knife, when as a toddler I pushed against him and said, “Stop.”

“ ”

A rash has erupted on my neck. It looks fungal, like ring worm. But also like acne. It wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. I notice red splotches spreading to my clavicle when I use the Ladies Room before class. I adjust a scarf Work Sister lent me when I texted her about the rash. I fix my lipstick, as if that matters.

The person looking back at me in the mirror is me and not me. Illness distances me from my body. I, or the person I used to think of as “I,” is no longer in charge. And I don’t know who has taken over.

Because I wear bright lipstick and dangly earrings and stylish clothes, I appear “healthy.” No one can see that my legs wobble as I walk. My calves have been tingling since Thanksgiving and are starting to numb. For the first time in my life, I’ve wondered if I might lose my ability to walk, but I tell no one of these suspicions. If I say them out loud, I’ll have to face them. Right now I prefer mystery, a sensibility I inherited from my mother.

When she and I were living into her last days, she liked to say, “It’s in God’s hands.” And she believed that. She believed in a mysterious force pulling the strings, choosing whether she’d live or die. She did not believe her suffering was a result of random chance or bad luck or biological determinism. Her God concept, I think, gave her hope and a sense of purpose. God relieved her of self-blame. I am glad she died hopeful.

A few years ago, when I went to Al-Anon once a week, we used to say, “Let go and let God.” Even though I didn’t believe in God anymore, I’d say these words with everyone else because I liked their rhythm, the way the right quote can ease anxiety, can feel like a prayer.

Back then, I was trying to understand the toll of my father’s addictions and abandonment. I wanted to believe in the possibility of okayness when everything was not okay at the moment. The closest I could come to believing in God was believing in hope, which lit a path toward okayness.

At the end of the Al Anon meeting, when we held hands and said The Lord’s Prayer, I choked on the first few words of the prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” Sometimes a quote can hit like a punch.

The quote that gets me through my days comes from the New York City street artist, James de la Vega: “You are more powerful than you think.”

I have taped these words to my office computer. I say them quietly before class, as if I am trying to make myself remember something important. I try not to think about my father, who I’m fairly certain has never needed a mantra to remind himself of his physical power.

The “you” I am talking to is not the daughter who interrupted his fists years ago.

The “you” of my mantra is the “me” I used to be, the one who could trust her legs, the ghost glimmer of a self I hope to meet again. I wish I could welcome in my new self, this emerging sicker self. I want my words to make room for her in my body. I want to speak her into being, make her worthy, visible.

…

It’s a Sunday night, and I’ve spent the day grading. All I want to do is binge watch Christmas movies. But an unknown number flashes on my iPhone screen. A twitch in my gut tells me to answer the phone.

On the other end of the line, my new GP greets me. I saw her earlier in the week and agreed to more bloodwork. Now the tests have come back, she says.

Oh shit. My belly cramps hard. Doctors do not call on weekends with good news. Beside me, the dog shifts. I rub his belly, soothing him when I cannot soothe myself. My husband’s still away, meditating in the mountains.

“Your autoimmune tests are normal,” the doctor says. “You have Lyme disease.”

A pop releases from my jaw. I never saw a tick on me, never had the bull’s eye rash. Lyme disease? Is she sure?

The doctor assures me that my tests are conclusive and tells me I might be on antibiotics for a long while. I need to get over my fear of them, my assumption that they’re a modern scourge.

When my symptoms started a few years ago, my former GP tested me for Lyme. The tests showed some abnormalities, yet he dismissed them without suggesting follow-ups. I didn’t contest him. I wanted to be healthy, and he told me what I wanted to hear. My doctor was bigger than me, like my father. And a part of me suspects I didn’t challenge him because I still freeze up around large men with loud voices. I still wonder what menace lurks behind bravado. I shrink into silence. I defer.

Now the power of silence, of what is omitted, overwhelms me. Until it received a name, my illness was a silence whose form I could not trace, a deadly omission, an absence intent on destroying me.

My diagnosis punctuates that silence.

To punctuate means “to interrupt,” or “to mark,” or “to divide.” There was a healthy me, now there is a sick me. A before. An after. A self that is marked, not only on medical charts or insurance claims, but psychologically, emotionally. And yet, I am less sick now than before my diagnosis, which put me on the path toward recovery. Another mystery.

For my mother, diagnoses were question marks and exclamation points and, finally, periods, when she learned her transplanted kidney was rejecting seven years after the initial surgery and she would likely not have another organ transplant in time to save her.

My illness was an ellipsis for years, a disease hiding in plain sight, a disease with no words attached to it, no name, an ever-present absence.

For days after my diagnosis, I walk around imagining bacteria swimming through my blood stream. I picture sea monkeys dying, one by one, inside of me. Still on retreat, my husband texts me a photo of the metta prayer.

May I be happy. May I be well. I cannot complete the subsequent verses, the ones addressed to “you” and “sentient beings.” Borrellia bacteria colonized my body for at least two years, possibly longer. I will not bless a stealth infection that hides in my heart, my eyes, my nervous system.

I want my diagnosis to be a different form of punctuation –– a dash that forms a channel between the former and present me, allows me passage back to a healthier self who’s become a shadow, a ghost.

How many selves live inside of me? How many more will come? I used to live more than a thousand miles from my father. I once plotted a PhD in Renaissance literature and read Shakespeare for hours each day. When every doctoral program I applied to rejected me, my father sent me a box full of smaller boxes containing inspirational messages and trinkets. (I did not see the metaphor at the time.)

On one box, he taped an envelope with a poem inside. I’d spent months obsessing over variants of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the questions that form entry points in the play, all the dashes belying paralytic ambivalence. So the silly ABAB rhyme scheme poem by Linda Ellis, made me chuckle. Eight years later, I can’t remember more than the first five lines of Hamlet’s most quoted speech, but I can remember couplets from “The Dash.”

“For it matters not, how much we own, the cars … the house … the cash. / What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.”

The academic in me wants to deride the poem’s platitudes, but I can’t. All those years ago, my father reached out to me. He tried to impart guidance, tried to teach me how love matters. I read this poem as evidence of his potential to be a father, and his longing to connect.

Maybe that’s why it’s so much harder when I stand in his kitchen one night and try to talk about my treatment, my fears of relapse.

He busies himself by spooning leftover Chinese food into Tupperware containers. His back stays turned, like a jammed door. He says nothing to comfort me. Again, it’s as if he hasn’t heard. In this moment, I am reminded of the dash’s double meaning, how a dash can connect –– and separate. On either side of his kitchen, my father and I form two ends of a dash.

He can only connect at a distance, and I cannot mediate all that divides us.

•••

MAGIN LASOV GREGG’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, Literary Mama, Bellingham Review, Under The Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Thread, and elsewhere. Proximity Magazine named her as a finalist in its inaugural 2016 Personal Essay Prize. She stopped making New Year’s resolutions in 2018, but swears she will soon finish her first memoir about marrying a Baptist minister while staying committed to her Jewish faith. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, in Frederick, Maryland, where he now serves a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Train Wreck

Photo by Mehmet Pinarci/Flickr

By Tanisha Wallace Porath

“You are a train wreck!”

“I’m a train wreck?”

“Yes, a total train wreck.”

“Why? Why am I a train wreck?”

“Because you can’t let go of Peter.”

I’m the fucking train wreck, I’m the train wreck? You… your ex-wife is a macadamia, a certified borderline personality and you picked her, and you always talk about her—she left you six months ago and I can’t let Peter go?

The last sentence only travelled as far as my head. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or bring up the memory of his ex-wife. I sit quietly on the passenger side of his oversized truck, wondering if what he had said was true. Am I still a train wreck? Will I ever be normal? Will anyone ever see me as normal or am I destined to be “the young widow” for the rest of my days? He grabs my hand and kisses it twice in quick succession. He thinks I’m upset with him but really I’m just lost in thought. We’re headed to a faraway destination, a cabin on a lake and I have two more hours in the car with him, so my decision is clear. Create a box and put his statement into it, open later. My plan falls apart about nine seconds after I create it. I want to talk to him if we are going to be in a relationship. I want to be open and honest but am I too honest? I fear my mouth will betray me and hurting him isn’t an option. When I was married, I could crush Peter’s soul with one or two well crafted, cruel, and just timely enough sentences. I no longer want to be that person. I stay quiet. Oh here we go, I’m talking about Peter again.

He starts asking me question after question, sensing that I’m anywhere but here in his truck. He’s right—the last thirty minutes of this ride have been me obsessing about if people are ever the same after trauma. Do we show our scars forever or do we get an amazing concealer from MAC and cover them? At what point does my inability to let Peter go put a damper on my ability to move forward with another man? This man.

I start to drift off into a spiral of “What ifs”—all pointless but all very relevant to this particular spiral. The worst part of the shame spiral is that I am miles away from a cell tower, headed to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, so I can’t even reach my best friend and her calming, logical words. But since I am in the middle of nowhere, deep in the valley of Idaho, her calming words are out of my reach.

We stop at a lookout point because he wants to show me all of the things he loves about where he lives. We get out of the truck and he comes over to my side. I jump out of the truck and before my feet barely touch the gravel path, he grabs me by my waist and kisses me square on my lips. My mind panics, but when our lips are together I can no longer remember what I was panicked about. I am now panicking because I can’t remember the first panic. Dear God, I am a train wreck. He grabs my hand and walks me over to a steep cliff. My hand start to sweat and he tells me it’s okay, he’s got me. I realize he does have me but more importantly, I have myself. I’m no longer a scared fifteen-year-old that needs to be protected. I am also no longer the scared thirty-eight-year old that needs my husband to stand up for me. My scars are showing but so is my strength. In my head I start to sing that Alanis Morissette song about how she is sick but she’s pretty. Perhaps I am all of the things not just one. As we stand above the vastness of where he lives, among the trees and cliffs, I turn and face him.

“I am a train wreck.”

“So am I,” he says.

He squeezes my hand as we stand together, silent. My last decision before I decide to stop making decisions is to accept my scars, show them to the world, and try my best to avoid fancy concealer.

•••

TANISHA WALLACE PORATH was born a poor black girl in…well actually she had a pretty middle class existence in Anchorage, Alaska, where she was born and raised. She studied photography at an art college in Seattle. Soon after she graduated, she moved to Portland, Oregon, with her husband and started a career as an editorial photographer. Some of her clients have included: Willamette Week, The Oregonian, and several other periodicals. She began writing professionally the spring after her husband died in 2013. Her work has appeared in several online periodicals, including Full Grown People. She has two roommates—her daughter Bronny and her son Duke. Currently, she’s writing her first memoir and pitching agents.

Hooked Up

Photo by Gina Easley

By Leanna James Blackwell

Nine p.m., the appointed hour. The person who opens the door is a surprise. I’d pictured someone in her sixties, calm and professional, with a tidy bun and a crisp white uniform, a clipboard in her hand and a name tag that says “Marion” or “Florence.” Someone who knows what she’s doing. Someone with steady hands and a soft voice. But it isn’t Marion who greets me, or anyone remotely like her. I consider backing out, but it’s too late for that.

The fact is, I need comfort. I need answers. I haven’t slept through the night in more than a year. Not since, to be exact, November 8, 2016. I’ve become a tightly packed box of stress, shaken and furious after every White House tweet and new revelation about sexual abusers in Hollywood, in government, in the media. My phone notifications are a constant trigger; my long-ago post-traumatic stress diagnosis, the legacy of a past laced with violence and sexual abuse, is suddenly relevant again after years of relative peace. Before the election, I had a pretty good routine. Morning meditation and writing before work, gym several times a week, anti-depressants and Vitamin D, regular therapy and a wholesome “eating plan”—my life so damn virtuous it would have bored the habit off a cloistered nun.

After the election, my routine wasn’t cutting it. Night after night, sleep evaded me. I laid awake, churning. I could run screaming into the streets—and did, with thousands of others—but you can’t march every day. I’d have to step up my daily plan.

Melatonin. (It works, but only for a few hours. By three a.m., I’m up.)
Chamomile tea. (I have to drink pots of the stuff to get sleepy. Then I’m up all night peeing.)
Warm milk. (One word: revolting.)
No electronics for two hours before bed. (No difference.)
Books about English gardening. (I remain awake but in a state of clawing boredom).
Soothing audio recordings. (“Rain” sounds like a dripping faucet; “waves” induces mild nausea.)

My efforts only resulted in a series of hollow-eyed mornings and a fatigue so deep I spent my days feeling like a sluggish fish, lurking depressed at the bottom of a slow-moving river. Finally, my doctor ordered an overnight test at a “sleep medicine clinic,” which has led me to a nondescript building on a side street next to a real-estate office.

Is this really a clinic? Am I the only patient here? The guy waving me inside is twenty-five if he’s a day, tall and gangly, with unconvincing facial hair, baggy blue scrubs, and a super-casual vibe. I half expect to find a bunch of his friends sitting inside on a saggy couch, passing a bong. His name tag says “Brad.” Where’s the sleep clinician? Maybe Brad is the greeter, like in Walmart, and then the clinician comes in?

“How ya doin’? Everything good?” Brad lopes ahead of me down the hall. We pass a brightly lit room with a bank of computer screens at which another guy in a bulky hoodie appears to be dozing.

“Fine, thank you. And you?” When I’m anxious, my mother’s manners kick in big time. I’d remember to say “please” and “you’re welcome” in a fire.

“You can change in there,” Brad informs me, gesturing toward the open door of a bathroom—sink, toilet, wastebasket, harsh overhead light. “Once you get in the sleep room there’s a camera on you, so you wanna get your pajamas on before.”

A camera? No one told me about a camera! Will it be on all night? On me? Who watches it? Will it be live-streamed? Brad laughs—you’re one funny lady—and explains that he will watch it, along with the other dude. It’s just procedure. Making sure I’m not sleepwalking, tearing out my wires, falling off the bed…trying to escape. He doesn’t actually say “trying to escape” but I suspect that’s the real point. Or something worse. But I can’t think about it. If I think about it, I’ll never go through with this.

In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and change quickly into my sleep clinic outfit: an oversized tee-shirt, pair of old yoga pants, and woolen socks. Brad waits for me down the hall. My hands are damp. My heart is jumping. Summoning my courage, I exit the bathroom and creep boldly into the testing room, which is tricked out Holiday Inn–style. Carpet, curtains, dresser with lamp, framed print on the wall (boats), and queen-sized bed with coverlet in a queasy pattern of peach and blue swirls. The only difference is the absence of a window—I check the instant I walk in—and the infrared camera mounted on the wall in the corner. I turn my back on it, a brief moment of middle-aged rebellion.

“Everything good?” This must be Brad’s signature phrase.

“Okay.”

“Great, great. Just sit here on the bed and we’ll get you hooked up.”

“Hooked up” means just that. An electronic box, about the size of a loaf of banana bread, sits on the bed waiting for a thicket of wires to be attached to it. But first, the wires need to be attached to me. All over my body. My skin seems to tighten in resistance, as though trying to harden, like a protective hide. I would like to be a rhinoceros during this procedure. No one fucks with a lady rhinoceros. The last hope for Marion, the matronly clinician, flickers and dies. Eyes closed, I stiffen as wires are snaked down my pants leg—both sides—and attached with sticky pads to my chest, to my lower and upper back, my neck, my wrists, and all over my head, 72 different-colored wires in all. Are there 72 colors? What are the wires doing? To calm myself, I make conversation during the ordeal, the kind of chat you might have with a fellow guest at your cousin and his wife’s anniversary party. Except there’s no punch bowl or cheese platter.

“So, how do you become a sleep medicine clinician? Is it a branch of nursing or physical therapy or something…?” I hear myself emphasizing medicine, as though by saying it I can make this place feel more like a clinic and less like the weirdest motel in America.

“Nursing! Nah.” Brad chuckles at the idea. “You just do this two-week training and figure out which wires go where. It’s pretty hard at first”—he’s concentrating on the purple wire now, which is snaking around my arm—“but then you kinda get the hang of it.”

Kinda is not reassuring. “What were you doing before?” Brad’s professional history has become extremely important to me.

“Working at Antonio’s. You know it?”

As a matter of fact, I do know Antonio’s. The place is a mile from my house. Many a Friday night we’ve had their pizzas delivered. A month ago, Brad easily could have stood on my front porch, handing over a large sausage and mushroom pie and pocketing my husband’s tip before jogging back to his white delivery truck. “Thanks for the fiver, dude. Have a good one.”

And this is the trained professional who will be watching my movements on camera. This is the clinician who supposedly knows what all these wires do and how to read the information that will be fed to the computer screens as I sleep.

Sleep! Who can sleep like this? I’m now fully encased in a tangle of wires, including a clip-on thing on my index finger and two little clips pinched inside my nose. The camera watches me clamber awkwardly under the covers. Then I’m lying on my back, staring up at Brad. He stares down at me, looking for all the world like a bumbling young dad ready to tuck in his kid. I almost expect a bedtime story. Or a prayer. A prayer might not be a bad idea.

“Brad?” My voice squeaks.

“Yeah?”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Just call me.”

“How? Is there a button?”

“Nah, just yell my name. I’ll hear ya. I’ll be in the other room looking at the computer.”

Just yell his name? I imagine lying immobile, held down by wires, bladder full, shouting “Brad! Brad!” into the darkness.

“Well, g’night!” Brad ambles from the room, shutting the door behind him. I catch a glimpse of the person in the hoodie, still slumped, motionless, in front of the computer screens. Is he even real? Maybe he’s some kind of sleep clinic mannequin. Or robot. A sweatshirted robot that used to toss pizza dough at Antonio’s. Anything is possible. The screens will display my brain activity and my movements—do I thrash around, kick, sleepwalk, try to ride a bicycle in my sleep? Do I lie there like a mummy? Do I fall immediately into REM sleep (as if), do I wake up fifty times a night, do I stop breathing? If the test shows that I stop breathing, I’ll be prescribed an apnea mask to wear over my face at night. It’s called a CPAP and looks like something an astronaut would wear on a discovery mission to Pluto. I resolve to breathe.

Now Brad’s voice comes crackling out of the speakers in the room. “Just a little test before you go to sleep. Okay? Move your eyes to the left.” My eyes obey. “To the right. Up. Down. Around.” Then it’s time to test my voice. The reason for this is not explained. “Say the word milk five times.”

“Milk?”

“Yep, milk.”

“Uh. Okay.” By the end of five “milks,” I’ve dissolved in semi-hysterical laughter. The weirdness keeps increasing. Why “milk”? Why not “leaf” or “stick” or “dog”? Are we supposed to think of being babies? Will I be given a bottle next? I might accept it. Especially if it has brandy in it.

Then I hear another voice, coming from the other side of the hall. Someone else is being instructed to move their eyes and repeat the word “milk” like an imbecile. Someone else, in an identical room across the hall, is wrapped in wires and unable to get up. A mystery sleeper! I wonder who it is. A stressed, pissed-off writer/academic/mom with PTSD like me? Any or none of those things? It doesn’t matter. A sleepless plumber, an anxious accountant, whoever it is, we are united. I imagine communicating telepathically with mystery sleeper. We could talk until we fell asleep, two strangers in pajamas at the oddest sleepover in the world.

“Are you asleep yet?”

“No, are you?”

“No. Wide awake.”

“Do you believe cats have souls?”

We’d talk for hours until one or both of us managed to drop off.

But no answer comes when I signal hello with my mind. Mystery sleeper has his or her or their own thoughts and problems. I’m on my own. And I’ve got to sleep. The test won’t work if I don’t sleep. My body lies rigid, alert to the knob on the sleep room door. What if it turns in the middle of the night and Brad creeps in? Or the other one? How am I supposed to relax? How could any woman relax, alone and tied down in a faux motel room with male strangers right across the hall who have total access to her room?

I lie in the bed, remembering things I don’t want to remember. Times I was touched, grabbed, patted, squeezed, felt up, held down, much more and much worse, by male relatives and boys in the schoolyard and guys on dates and bosses at work and men on the street. Men who believed, for the simple reason of biology, that having unfettered access to my female body was their divine right. Men like my grandfather, who installed a swing in the barn and invented a game for just the two of us when I was four. We had to play the game each time my parents left me there for a visit. Men like the boyfriend of the woman whose son I babysat on Friday nights when I was thirteen. He always drove me home but didn’t like to let me out of the car once we got there. Men like the guy in a business suit who picked me up hitchhiking one day (I know, I know) when I missed the bus. He accelerated past the high school, unzipping his pants. I jumped out of the moving car and landed on the curb, my backpack saving my skull.

And now, men like the ones running, unimaginably, our godforsaken country. Who have dug up the past from the dark soil of history—what I thought was the past—and flung it back into the present.

It’s chilly in the room but I’m sweating bullets. What doctor could possibly think this is a good idea? I’m going to sue him when I get out of here.

It’s not long before the door knob turns. My breath stops. A dark shape is standing over me. My heart thumps out of my chest and vaults through the roof.

“Sorry,” Brad whispers. “Your nose wire fell out. I saw it on the screen. I just need to fix it.” He leans over me, delicately adjusts the wire, and tiptoes out of the room. “Sleep well,” he murmurs as he shuts the door. And he doesn’t come back. He’s in the computer room, watching the screens all night, making sure my test goes well. Hours go by, but the door remains shut. Brad, it seems, is not going to hurt me. He’s just a guy. A guy doing his job.

Gradually, my heart slows. Gradually, the sweat on my body dries. Gradually, I start to feel tired. And then, somehow, miracle of freaking miracles, I fall asleep. And I stay asleep until four in the morning, when the army of garbage trucks come, roaring behind the building as though announcing the apocalypse and sending me rocketing from the bed, pulling out several wires. Now I am yelling Brad’s name. I hear his hurried footsteps immediately. When he opens the door, he is grinning.

“Ready to go?”

“Hell, yes!”

At this, Brad actually giggles. “Hey, no problem. You slept for a few hours. I got the data. And you didn’t stop breathing. That’s good news!” He seems genuinely happy for me. I’m happy, too. It’s over. I’ll never have to do this again.

Brad hums as he helps me remove the wires. A couple of them get stuck in my hair and we laugh. But my sleep medicine clinician—by now, he’s earned the title—is patient and calm, untangling me wire by wire until I’m free. Free! I stand up, feeling as liberated as the moment just after confession, when my childhood sins had been pardoned and I could step out of the dark booth, cleansed and holy, and burst out of church into the forgiving sunshine. I throw on my clothes in the bathroom, slip on my coat, grab my bag, and head down the hall. I feel like skipping. There is no sign of my companion in the other room. I hope mystery sleeper had a good night, too.

“Have a good one!” Brad calls as I open the door.

“You, too, Brad.” I mean it. I drive down the silent streets toward home. A few fading stars are left in the sky. There are patches of paste in my hair, and an itchy sensation on my back where a cluster of wires was attached. But hot coffee waits for me, and my husband and daughter. And cat.

I’m intact. I’m all right. I did it.

A week later, I get the results. They are unremarkable. I don’t sleepwalk or talk. I don’t thrash around. I don’t have sleep apnea, so I won’t have to wear the dreaded mask. My sleep problem is something else. “Maybe it’s stress,” the voice on the phone suggests. “Have you tried melatonin?”

Two days after the phone call from the clinic, a far-right candidate for a Senate seat in Alabama—and accused sexual predator of adolescent girls—rides his horse to the voting station on election day, supremely confident of a win. His confidence is misplaced. The candidate’s opponent is declared the winner, the first time a pro-choice liberal has won in that state in a quarter-century.

That night, millions of women sleep through the night.

That night, I am one of them.

•••

LEANNA JAMES BLACKWELL is a professor of creative writing and director of the Bay Path University MFA in Creative Nonfiction. An essayist, theatre director, and playwright, she is a member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, former artistic director and playwright-in-residence of TKO Theatre and the Inner Stage in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the co-founder and director of The Place for Writers at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her most recent play, Grimm Women—a radical re-imagining of three fairy tales told from the witches’ point of view—was included in 2016 Play by Play Festival in Northampton, Massachusetts, and funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is currently at work on a collection of essays and a play about race and adoption, New Soul, which will receive a staged reading in September 2018.

The Purge

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jody Mace

I started hating things in the first week of December, 2012. I mean “things” literally. Objects. It might have been the tiny plastic cocktail forks that did me in.

Before that week, I had an archaeologist-like fascination with things. I was especially interested in things that other people had discarded. I’d walk down the aisles of thrift shops and consider the objects on the shelves. I rarely bought anything. There was the brass table lamp with the straw lampshade, crystals hanging, like coconuts, from the palm leaves, above the monkey family. But for the most part, I left things behind.

I took pictures of some of the more interesting finds and even put them on a website for a while. I liked to think about the people who owned the objects and why they let them go. The flotsam and jetsam of our lives. The clock picture frame with a picture of a boy next to each number, year by year. Each hour, his face lengthens, and his hair grows darker as he grows from a baby to a pre-teen. How could anybody throw that away?

I especially enjoyed the notebooks, a voyeur’s paradise. There was one in particular from a girl, maybe in middle school or high school. She was not a go-getter.

Page 1:

To Do

Page 2:

Storie: A girl walked down the road.

Page 3:

Dear Journal,

I need a break from school. I don’t even want to go.

Page 4:

My mom said

Page 5:

(A tic-tac-toe game that ended in a tie.)

The notebook was a monument to her inability to get it done. She was rudderless. But the new year brought a burst of energy and determination.

Page 6:

January 1, 2001

Take shower

Make bed

Get $ 4 yearbook and field trip

Eat baggle

Get dressed

Do hair

Pack purse

Get dirrections 4 math project

I thought about the girl and wondered about all that happened to her after she wrote in those pages of the notebook. Was her January first to-do list a sign that she was getting herself together? Or did she drift through her adolescence? What was she doing now? Would she remember her young self if she saw that notebook now?

Then there were the objects—so many objects—that made me wonder why they were created at all. The leering Santa knick-knacks. The figurine of a clown riding an elephant, carrying a clock, balanced on a ball. The little ceramic shoe, filled with little ceramic mice.

In late 2012 my father moved from Florida up to North Carolina. He had early stage Alzheimer’s, although he hadn’t been diagnosed yet and was years from admitting it. I had somehow convinced him to move up here so we could keep an eye on him. When he moved, he brought everything.

Everything.

There wasn’t room for everything in his new apartment but he was overwhelmed with the task of downsizing, so the job fell to me and my husband Stan. We had to decide what to keep, what to donate, what to dump, what to store, what to beg my siblings to take.

A small sampling of the things my dad shipped from Florida:

One and a half bottles of vodka
A zip-loc bag of coins, mostly pennies
Approximately twelve phones
A box of ShamWow super absorbent towels
26 yarmulkes, so he’d be prepared, I guess, to lead all the area Jews in morning services
8 hard drives
A cherub corkscrew. The screw part was actually the cherub’s penis. (When I commented that it was an interesting corkscrew, he explained the operation of a corkscrew, as if my comment was about its functionality: “You just screw it in and then pull it out.”)
Multiple funnels
The contents of his kitchen junk drawer. The shipping box was actually labeled “Misc Junk Drawer,” which is one of the most terrifying things to read on a box you’re about to open up.
Part of an old garbage disposal
An almost empty plastic bag of napkins
A package of approximately one hundred chopsticks
Really, really long tweezers
A glass bowl filled with plastic cocktail forks

It was during this process that I developed a distaste for all of his things, and things in general. I stopped enjoying thrift stores. I rarely shopped at all. The things we already owned started to seem oppressive to me.

I had always been able to turn a blind eye to chaos in my home. But after digging through the piles of my dad’s junk, my own junk started to make me tense. It was harder to ignore all of our own stuff.

Plus, I had a new understanding that our possessions would someday be a burden to our children, who were, at that time, in high school and college.

I can be pretty fatalistic. It would not surprise me at any point if I were to die in a car wreck or from a sudden, catastrophic illness, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think it’s possible, maybe probable, that I will trip over one of my dogs on the stairs.

If that happens to both me and Stan, then our kids would have to sift through the wreckage and decide what to keep and what to dump.

I had started reading about the Swedish tradition of döstädning, which is translated as “Death Cleaning” or, more satisfyingly, “Death Purge.” The idea is to simplify your life by getting rid of a lot of clutter so that you minimize the labor, both physical and emotional, of your children when they need to figure out what to do with your possessions after you die.

So we rented a dumpster.

We got the biggest one we could, twelve cubic yards, from a local junk removal company. They parked the dumpster in our driveway, and then, after five days, would haul it away and sort through everything, separating the contents to recycle, donate, or reuse.

It’s strange to think that all your possessions are just material. Wood, metal, plastic, paper. A wooden carving of an owl is really no different from a table. The Bible is pretty much the same thing as that girl’s notebook at Goodwill.

Speaking of paper, I worried about my own papers of any kind ending up at a thrift store for someone like me to gawk at. So I shredded them. The sheer quantity of papers broke my shredder, so I threw the shredder in the dumpster too, and bought a new shredder.

I fantasized about an almost empty house, with minimal items on shelves, all with a specific purpose.

We had a lot of junk in the house, so the Death Purge started out easy. There was plenty of low-hanging fruit. Worn-out shoes, a broken printer, old WiFi routers, four navigation systems, mismatched table wear, the unfavored coffee cups. The exercise bike which had never worked, that Stan had brought home triumphantly six months earlier from a dumpster.

But at some point the decisions get harder. For us it was after approximately six cubic yards of crap.

There are three categories of things that were hard to get rid of: aspirational items, items that “might be useful someday,” and items that reminded me of a specific person.

Aspirational items had a shelf life. I had no problem getting rid of the huge block of wax and the package of wicks from the time when my son was around twelve and I thought we would, obviously, make candles. Also, I threw away cheesecloth, from when I mistook myself for someone who might make cheese. But last summer I bought some little vials of essential oils from which I was going to concoct natural bug-repellant, according to a recipe I found on the internet. Since that aspiration was less than a year old, I kept those. Because you never know.

Letting go of aspirational items was an admission that I hadn’t achieved a goal, even a goal I didn’t remember having. It was admitting failure. Coming to terms with some of these little failures and throwing away the evidence was freeing.

In the category of “might be useful” were a lot of surprisingly specialized kitchen implements. A French fry slicer (a grid made of wire that you presumably pull down on the potato), an apple corer-peeler, a melon baller, a straw spoon. These all went in the dumpster. Although I had always sliced cheese with a plain old knife, I actually owned a cheese slicer that promised to produce thin, uniform slices of cheese. I decided to keep it and also decided to stop decluttering at that very moment and slice some cheese. At the first attempt, the wire popped off. It had been junk all those years but I had never known it.

One thing that I did keep was the vegetable spiralizer, which I had just bought. I made a point of spiralizing three zucchinis that day. Because this was different.

Stan and I didn’t always agree on the future usefulness of items, but we deferred to the person who wanted to keep them. Which is why, after the Purge, we still had a rewired vintage x-ray machine and a coffin in the garage. They were part of the Halloween haunts that he had created for several years, and, that, he said, he might again.

Souvenirs were really easy for me to dump. The shelf life of my attachment to wooden shoes from Amsterdam or German beer stein mugs was short. Looking at them didn’t help me remember the time I spent in those places. They were just stuff to buy.

We say “flotsam and jetsam” when we talk about the objects we unload. But in the nautical world, flotsam and jetsam are two different kinds of debris. Flotsam is the stuff that goes overboard as a result of a shipwreck or accident. It’s lost, through no choice of the owner. Jetsam is stuff the owner throws overboard on purpose, maybe to lighten the load.

I had looked at the stuff at thrift stores at flotsam. What tragedy could have caused sentimental objects to end up at a thrift store? A sudden death, a mismarked box during a move? But I was starting to think that this stuff had actually been jetsam, thrown overboard to keep from sinking.

I found a cassette tape with a label written in my mother’s hand. It had the name of a relative who I had never known. I learned from a cousin that he was the brother of my maternal grandfather. My grandfather had died when my mother was a child. This was just the kind of thing that shouldn’t be thrown away.

I put the tape into a cassette player (that miraculously hadn’t ended up in the dumpster) to listen to this oral history. I never knew my grandfather, and my mother died twenty-two years ago. I’ve always wanted some kind of connection to the world I didn’t know, a little window into my mother’s childhood.

The tape began.

“We did well with mutual funds until the crash of 1962…then I went into the real estate field but that wasn’t for me…Alan said ‘then just take a second mortgage on it’…we had a carport on one side of the house…I spent some time at the country club, but Mother never really went…”

It was the most boring thing I’ve ever heard.

Just like aspirational items, sentimental items have a shelf life too, and a small circle of interest. My great uncle’s children might do anything to hear his voice again, but to me, it was a stranger talking about things I didn’t care about. The only thing that mattered to me about that tape was his name, written in my mother’s distinctive, elegant handwriting, so tall and precise.

I could not let go of anything with a connection to my mother, although I was starting to feel like I was missing the point of the Swedish Death Purge.

I put her collection of cookbooks into a box to carry to the dumpster, but then took them out and lined them up on a bookshelf. It wasn’t even nostalgia about childhood meals that made me hold onto the cookbooks. I didn’t remember her cooking anything from them. Cooking wasn’t her strength. Our meals were mostly meat, with a side of canned vegetables. The cookbooks were aspirational for her.

For some families, food traditions connect one generation to the next. For my family, food aspirations connect us. It was a parade through the decades of unmade recipes.

The Halibut Soufflé from Casseroles, including Breads (1952.) The Eggs à la bordelaise from Larousse Gastronomique (1961.) The Vichyssoise from Cooking with Wine (1962.) The breaded veal steak and sweet and sour tongue from The Kosher Gourmet (1974.) In 1994 I grabbed the baton and didn’t cook the Soba Noodle salad in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home.

I was caught short by the remnants of my kids’ childhoods. We found a bunch of sticks in my son’s old backpack. The sticks were carved into sharp points. The shanks of suburban boys. They were from when he was around eleven, during the time he spent entire afternoons in the woods with other boys, creating elaborate civilizations. They used bark as currency and built shelters out of branches. They formed alliances and waged war. Really, I had no clear idea of what they did in the woods, because it was none of my business.

But when I looked at those sticks I could see him at eleven, thinking of nothing but whittling, his focus as sharp as the points. I kept the sticks.

I also kept the tomes that his sister wrote. The travel journals, the business plans, the letters of complaints about her brother.

I admired my friends who matter-of-factly dumped the bulk of vestiges of their kids’ childhoods, but I didn’t understand them. “Each kid got one Rubbermaid tub to hold their stuff!” they declared.

It all made sense, but, on the other hand, it would be hard to fit six full-size LEGO ships, the collection of ceramic horses, and the six-foot-long stuffed tiger into a bin.

There’s no logic to keeping any of this, I know. And it’s embarrassingly sentimental. But I’m not ready to let it go. Also, I can’t stand to think of it in the dumpster, mixed in with the stuff I don’t care about, being sorted through.

To the recycler, fabric is fabric, whether it’s a shirt from Target or my mother’s last pocketbook. Paper is paper, whether it’s an old newspaper or my daughter’s notes about her secret club. And wood is wood, whether it’s those souvenir shoes from Amsterdam or my son’s carved sticks. It’s all flotsam and jetsam.

But when those materials are what connects me to the past, it’s not so simple. Throwing them overboard doesn’t make my load lighter. It just makes me lost. Maybe that fabric is the sail. Maybe the paper is the map. And that wood? What if it’s the boat?

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Read more FGP essays by Jody Mace.