Permanent Record

By Jessica Handler

Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100. I explained to him that the quiz was one of four, which together totaled twenty percent of the semester’s overall course grade. In other words, a five-point difference on a single quiz was meaningless.

He was having none of it. He was clearly worried about his permanent record. No matter what I might have told him, I know that he wouldn’t accept that the grade on this quiz, or any quiz, has no bearing on who he is as a person. That no school administrator is going to come roaring into the room with his grades from middle school. That for the rest of his life, no one is going to judge him on his GPA.

But who teaches him, or me, about how to judge ourselves as people? Parents, to start with. Teachers, perceived as proxy parents, even if we don’t want to be. I’m thinking here of my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Moye, who left us to our own devices while she stepped out for what I realize now was a smoke break. For however long she was gone—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the noise level in the room rose to a solid wall of released energy. I was the kid who hunkered down to read ahead in my textbook, wishing I were as audacious as the over-excitable boy who managed to climb out of the classroom via the transom over the door. When Miss (I have no idea of her actual honorific—in Atlanta in 1971, all adult women were addressed as Miss) Moye was on her way back to the classroom, the PA speaker over our heads would click on. From the principal’s office, she’d whisper, “teacher’s comin’.” No matter what we’d been doing, judgement came from above the coat closet. Act right even when you’re on your own, because someone’s watching you.

Now that I’m a teacher, I love her for this. She must have cracked herself up.

I wonder when I stopped believing in the power of the Permanent Record that loomed over school like a wagging finger. Earn a bad grade and see my “permanent record” forever scarred. Get caught passing notes or miss my turn feeding the classroom hamster, and be told by someone (A teacher? A principal? A game of telephone on the playground?) that these temporary oversights will haunt me throughout adulthood and possibly into the afterlife. The permanent record that no one ever actually saw? It would follow me to the grave.

My elementary school grades, on their flimsy pink paper, have vanished into the ether. My high school adhered to the trend in “alternative education” by disdaining traditional letter grades. Instead, our teachers, with whom we were all on a first-name, Frisbee-tossing basis, wrote paragraphs-long assessments of our personal growth and individual strengths. I have no idea what happened to these dispatches from the barefoot and bell-bottom jeans front, but I appreciate the attempt to broaden the interpretation of how a person becomes whole. My college transcripts were useful only as items in my graduate school applications. My graduate school studies resulted in my first book, which was written as a kind of permanent record of a place, a time, and a family in crisis.

What is my permanent record, if it’s not decades-old grades and well-meaning teacher commentary? On every elementary school report card, I was given a checkmark beside the “uses time wisely” criteria, verifying that I had done just that: used my time wisely. That checkmark made me proud. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is what it means to use time wisely as an adult, if it’s not reading ahead while the teacher’s out on a smoke break. Who teaches us a viable template for a “wise” use of time? When do we learn to do that for ourselves?

•••

When my father was dying, he asked me to forgive him. As I sat by the crank-up hospital bed in his living room, my impulse was to list every act of his for which I could not forgive him. “What about this?” I wanted to say. “Or that?”

Instead, I lied. I said that I forgave him. Nothing good would have come of telling him otherwise.

My father had turned sixty-seven that month. After a lifetime of four-pack-a-day smoking and decades of drug abuse, he had been diagnosed with cancer a year or so earlier. At that moment, he had less than a week to live.

When I was a child, my father intoned over the Passover Seder plate, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” All the adults at the table laughed, and I did, too, believing this was the actual prayer. Of course it was, spoken by the irreverent, fun, charismatic version of my dad, acting like the kid who climbed out of the transom while the teacher was out of the room.

But this not why my father asked my blessing.

A few months ago, I awoke unsettled, because I felt that my father was in my bedroom. I could smell him. Pall Mall cigarettes and anxious flatulence. He had been dead nineteen years, but he was somehow present.

“Why are you here?” I asked the air near my husband’s nightstand.

“Forgive me?” my father asked. He was wheedling, like a child.

I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “Go away. Maybe later, but I’m not ready yet.”

Proud of having told even a ghostly version of my father to leave me alone, I went back to sleep.

•••

My real permanent record is written, in part, in my father’s hand. That same hand that held an electric carving knife to my throat at a family dinner. I was about ten years old, and my laughing made sounds that grated on my father, especially when he was very, very high.

I wondered for years if I’d created a false memory from a roast, a carving knife, and my father’s instability. When I reconnected with a childhood friend last year, I got proof that it had happened. My friend described my mother frozen in fear at the table, unable to pull my father away from me. I remember my father’s face so close to mine that I could see his pores, his pupils spinning like pinwheels. I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s on acid.” I remember believing that was a reasonable excuse.

This is the same man who brought me, at eight years old, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. As we made our way through the solemn, slow moving crowd outside, and then inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, my father, gentle and grieving, lifted me to eye-level with the adults and turned me toward the first open casket I had ever seen. He wanted me to see Dr. King’s face up close, not on television as I had so often. What he wanted was for me to absorb the need for justice in the world.

Within a year, my father tried to shove me out of a moving car. When I tell this story, I laugh and say, “It was only in second gear,” but the irrationality of his act, his absence of judgement—or the presence of his cruel judgement of me—is what strikes my listener. My attempt to make this into a funny anecdote doesn’t land well.

I am trying, here, to reconcile a permanent record that can’t be graded. My father tucked me in at night when I was small and sat at my side reading poetry in the same elegant baritone he surely used defending his clients in court. The ballad meter of Countee Cullen’s “Incident,” telling of a child stunned and hurt by racial violence, and the mystical images of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lulled me to sleep.

The last time I saw my sister Susie alive, my father was cradling her in his arms as he rushed her out of our shared bedroom to the hospital. She had been ill with leukemia for a year, and died a few days later. Through my lashes, I watched him run with her. He was terrified, my mother was terrified, Susie was terrified, and so was I.

After my father died, my husband and I helped his second wife sort his possessions. My husband found my father’s Twelve Step workbook. He will not let me see it. “He blames you,” my husband says, “because you’re too much like him.” Throughout the workbook’s pages, my husband says, my father blames other people in his life, but he never accepted his own role in his permanent record.

It’s become clear to me since my father died that he lived with a mental illness that may never have been diagnosed. Within its rapid cycles, he treated himself with amphetamines and Scotch. That the amphetamines were (sometimes) legally obtained and that the Scotch was eighteen-year-old single malt is immaterial. His emotional and psychological turmoil escalated as my two sisters died of illnesses, as he brutalized my mother for failings only he imagined, as whatever had transpired in his own childhood ensnared his mind. Abuse is real, no matter the ZIP code, no matter if the clothing hurled to the floor is a Brooks Brothers’ suit or coveralls.

My aunt, my father’s sister, told me the other day that her mother once refused to let a woman wearing green nail polish into her house. I can’t corroborate this, but I believe it. My father’s mother, was, as the phrase of the time went, uptight.

What I’m saying is that my father must have been harshly judged, and then judging himself harshly, turned that blade to me. I am the first daughter, the oldest, the one in whom he saw himself.

•••

A few years after my father died, my husband and I vacationed in Memphis. We visited Graceland and Stax Records, and we toured the National Civil Rights Museum. It was there, in a display of photographs by documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, that I came face to face with an image of an unsmiling young man in a suit and tie, sitting on a curb beside another similarly attired and equally serious young man. The Black man held a placard reading “Union Justice Now!” The White man held one reading “Honor King: End Racism.”

The White man was my father.

I knew the placard. It’s framed in my house. My father had given it to me the night he came home from the vigil in Memphis in 1968. I had never seen the photograph before, never known of its existence, and there in the museum, I screamed. A group of middle-schoolers, touring the exhibit, stopped and gaped at me.

“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at the image on the wall. I began to cry.

One of the students approached me. She peered at the photograph, then at me, then at the photograph again.

“You do favor him,” she said.

•••

My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.

I don’t know if I can forgive him, entirely. I can’t grade an abusive father’s relationship to a daughter. If he gets an A for some things and an F for others, does that really average to a C? On the days when my own fist splits my lip to silence his taunting voice in my mind, I’d say no. On the days when I turn to a poem and physically, truly, feel his longing for words, I’d say yes. If I wrote an assessment, as my high school teachers did for me, would I implore him to get the help he needed, or would I suggest something benign like learning to meditate or taking up a musical instrument?

Perhaps I should be grading myself, since I’m the one living with this permanent record.

I am trying to understand how to create a permanent record for him and for me. For us together. I want to teach myself to judge him fairly. I don’t know if I can forgive him, as he asked, or if doing so is a requirement for his, or my, final grade. But in trying to learn this, to read ahead in the book that he’s put down, I want to believe that I am using time wisely.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick.” Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Full Grown People, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing. www.jessicahandler.com.

Other People’s Clothes

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Amanda J. Crawford

The dress was stiff and boxy, made from that awful faux-suede fabric my mother wore in the 1970s, rubbery on the inside and velveteen on the outside. It was far too large for me. The pressure of my office chair pushed the collar up toward my chin so that the shoulder pads seemed cantilevered from my neck, and the belt, otherwise too low for my waist, found a niche in my short torso to rest. And while the deep merlot color of the dress would have been acceptable on another day, today I was certain it brought out the shadows under my sleepless eyes and the bruises darkening on my upper arms.

I sat at my desk in the sunny ninth-floor newsroom of Phoenix’s daily newspaper with my legs crisscrossed underneath me and my shoulders hunched, folded into myself as if trying to construct a purple faux-suede wall around my heart. I had spent my entire adult life in newsrooms, where there is no escape behind office doors or cubicle walls, and I usually relished the collective energy—the perpetual chatter, collegial banter, ringing phones and occasional shouting—that sucks you into your role as a cog in the daily grind.

The distraction of a busy newsroom, where I could never wallow in my own thoughts for too long, had kept me going for years as my personal life fell into shambles. On this day, though, I struggled to concentrate as I put together simple items for Sunday’s political column. I wanted to disappear. I practiced not looking up, not catching eyes, staring at the flashing cursor on the white screen of my computer. When that didn’t work, I fled one floor down to the brown tweed couch in the small, austere parlor off the women’s bathroom that was set up for nursing moms, locked the door, and cried.

That morning, my friend Sarah, four inches taller and three sizes bigger, had produced this dress from the back of a closet filled with the work clothes she had worn in a former life as a payday-lending executive. Now expecting her second child, she was planning her exit from the business world for good. Sarah offered me the dress and a ride downtown.

The night before, her husband had reluctantly paid the cab that delivered me to their home in the suburbs. I was hysterical and had run into oncoming traffic on the six-lane road by my house. Sarah made me herbal tea in a large, brightly painted mug and listened as I tried to explain what had happened through tears. She dismissed questions from her husband, who was friends with mine, and set me up to sleep for a few fitful hours on their couch.

With no place else to go, I headed into the newsroom early the next morning, wondering if anyone could tell I was wearing someone else’s clothes.

•••

I’d never been good with clothes. I learned to shop cheap and fast from the blue-light special sales at K-Mart. I’d sip a red Icee until my lips, teeth, and tongue were tinted its unnaturally red cherry color, waiting for the cart with the blue light to illuminate the kids’ section and put everything in our price range.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother made most of my clothes, in cotton prints that matched my mother’s. In middle school, I remember standing at the bus stop with my friends as they bragged about their tee-shirts with prices inflated by the word “Esprit.” My mother was too practical to spend money on brands, so I began supplementing my discount store clothes with items dug out of the back of her closet: a patchwork skirt, a tweed jacket, and a cowl-neck sweater from the 1970s. In high school, as I embraced grunge music and its associated style, I wore my dad’s oversized yellow and gray flannel, smothered under his large Army jacket.

By my young adult years, though, that creative fashion spark was gone, extinguished under the weight of responsibility carried too soon. I married my high school sweetheart at nineteen and began working full-time during college to support us. My clothing, like my life, became almost entirely utilitarian—bland “work clothes” purchased in haste from the clearance racks of department stores or casual items picked up on sale at the outdoor stores he frequented. My wardrobe was as joyless as our marriage, and I spent my twenties trying not to think about either situation too much.

It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I started to pay attention to my clothes again. I made a good salary at the newspaper and could afford to move beyond the clearance racks. I had a cache of stylish professional women friends who counseled me in my shopping. And I was propelled by an internal stirring, the nature and ramifications of which I was not yet fully aware. I started wearing high heels, tight pencil skirts, and clingy blouses. I was never the type of woman to turn heads, but I felt sexy for the first time in my life. People noticed. One day in the newspaper’s breakroom, the photo editor asked why I was dressed so conservatively. I looked down at my outfit, a short-sleeved red sweater and black dress pants, unsure what he meant.

“Most days you look like someone about to get divorced,” he informed me.

•••

The first time I left my husband I had time to pack a duffel bag. I tossed it in the trunk of my friend Emily’s white Honda Civic coupe and put my miniature schnauzer in the backseat. A few hours later, my husband tried to set our house on fire. I stayed with Emily in her small condo for two weeks, living out of that duffel bag, taking my dog on long walks along the nearby desert canal, and seeking solace in the arms of a married coworker.

The second time I left my husband, I left with nothing but my purse. It was sitting in a room on the other side of the house with my cell phone and keys inside when he held me in a room and told me, “You will never leave this house on your own two legs again.” When he wasn’t paying attention, I sprinted across the house, grabbed my purse, and ran into the street to flag the cab that took me to Sarah’s house. I borrowed clothes from Sarah and another friend, Yvonne, before sneaking back into my house for some of my own clothing a few days later. I lived in a friend’s vacant rental house for six weeks.

The third and final time I left my husband, I had just changed out of my pajamas. As I poured our morning coffee, I sensed it: a tingling in the air foreshadowing violence. I put on a coral tank top, jeans, and a simple necklace I had made out of a circle of marble and hemp twine. If you had told me to pick just one ensemble from my wardrobe that I would get to keep, that would not have been it. But that night, as I sat in that same vacant house I had stayed in a few months before, staring at my disheveled reflection in the mirrored closet doors and trying to decide what to do with my life, my husband packed up almost everything I owned—clothes, shoes, jewelry, photos, keepsakes, and even my writing. Stolen, dumped, sold, set on fire—I don’t know. By the next day, nearly all of it was gone.

•••

I didn’t know how to start putting my life back together again, but I knew I needed things to wear. I remember walking listlessly through Target with Yvonne just before the store closed, dejectedly checking the price tags of items on the clearance racks. Yvonne lingered a few feet behind me, alternating between perky chatter and croons of empathy. I bought underwear, sweat pants, capris, a tee-shirt and a short-sleeved green knit blouse I found on sale. It was all I could afford.

It was the summer before I turned thirty-one. I was homeless, single for the first time since I was fifteen, and broke. A few months earlier, partially in a bid to save my marriage, I had put in notice at the newspaper to teach at the state university and complete my graduate degree. The move would mean less hours at the office but also less than half the pay. I was sure now that my marriage was over, and I made the move anyway with virtually nothing to my name.

After our shopping trip to Target, Yvonne and I returned to the house she shared with her boyfriend in a neighborhood along one of Phoenix’s desert mountain preserves. She had moved in with him a few months earlier, despite being uncertain about their future. She took me upstairs to a spare bedroom, taken over by the things that she had still never put away. There was a metal rack overflowing with clothing, and she began going through it, pulling out things she thought would fit me and throwing them in a pile on the bed.

I was petite, but Yvonne was even smaller, not even five-feet-tall, and her style was flamboyant in comparison to mine. Yvonne was born in Mexico but adopted and raised by Anglos in Idaho. In the Southwest now, she had been reconnecting with her Latin American roots and attending a lot of cocktail parties with her boyfriend, who was in politics. Her clothing reflected both. The rack was filled with brightly colored silk and bejeweled dresses. I sifted through the pile, holding clothing up before me in the mirror and trying on things that didn’t seem too small or ostentatious. I took a plain red blouse and a sleeveless brown dress. Yvonne insisted I also take a strapless silk cocktail dress with ruffles and a bright tropical flower print that she thought was perfect for newly single me.

As the word spread that I needed clothes, other friends culled their closets for things that might work for me, too. For some reason, it seemed we were all going through major transformations in our lives around that time—an epoch in our collective history—and my friends empathized with my predicament. (In the years since, I’ve wondered what it was about that time. Maybe it was hormonal, since we were all, more or less, around the age of thirty—a biological pull to reinvent, rejuvenate, redo or reproduce. Or maybe there was, for some reason at that point in our world, a collective metamorphosis, radiating from one of Arizona’s desert vortexes and sucking all of us in.)

My friend Emily, a cutesy blonde who I stayed with the first time I left my husband a year earlier, had recently left the newspaper to work in politics. Despite all of our grave concerns, she was marrying a religious conservative from far across the aisle. She cleaned out her closet so he could move in and gave me a black A-line skirt.

My friend Megan, a brash cocktail writer raised in a family of park rangers, was trading in her hiking boots for sequins and a personal brand. She gave me a green terrycloth hoodie and a couple of tee-shirts.

And Sarah, the former payday lending executive adept at reinvention, was taking massage classes, seeking out a more natural lifestyle, and trying to figure out what was missing in her comfortable family life. She gave me a black linen wrap-around blouse and pink pajama pants.

As I wore each of the items from my friends, I felt like I was trying on pieces of their current or former lives. My existence was so pliable at that moment, with no structure, definition, mementos, or even a set address, that I wondered if a blouse or a skirt could set a new course, one that might turn out better than the one I was on before. I allowed each piece to shape a part of the new me: The new professor wore Emily’s A-line skirt, and the newly single party girl wore Yvonne’s ruffled silk cocktail dress. I tried to get in shape in Megan’s green hoodie, and I tried to prove I was strong and independent in Sarah’s black linen blouse. But more than anything else, what my new wardrobe changed in me was my thinking about clothes.

•••

I can’t remember how long it was—if it could be counted in months or merely weeks —before I returned home for the first time. There, I found a pile of shoes in the corner of my closet. I sat on the floor hopefully sorting through them only to discover that not a single one had a match.

I had been stuck in agonizing paralysis about my future, but had finally settled on a new place to live when my estranged husband called and told me he couldn’t make the mortgage. He moved out, and I returned home that day and immediately changed the locks.

It was 2008, in the throes of the Great Recession, and every indicator of Phoenix’s bursting housing bubble told me I should run away from the house, too. Still, here was something I could own at a moment when so much else familiar in my life was gone. I threw away all the matchless shoes and any other reminders of what had been, cleansed every square inch with disinfectant and burning sage, and posted an ad for a roommate. A nineteen-year-old college student moved in and, almost immediately, so did Yvonne.

Yvonne had met someone new at a conference. She told her boyfriend she was moving out, packed her car with clothes still on the hangers and stuffed it all into the small closet in the back bedroom of my house. I learned to be single living with these two women – one of them new to adulthood, the other my own age but newly in love. I also learned the secret to Yvonne’s expansive wardrobe: a local chain of name-brand consignment shops. We shopped there together, sorting through the designer racks, experimenting with our fashion and inexpensively figuring out what the new “us” would wear.

Yvonne didn’t live with me long. In a few months she got pregnant and moved out to begin a new life as a wife and mother. Megan introduced me to her ex-boyfriend, Marcus, who moved in. Marcus was a buyer for a trendy recycled fashion boutique. He picked out clothes for me at his store and patiently helped me figure out my style in front of a heavy full-length mirror in the hallway. He also began taking me on thrift-store hunts throughout the city.

Before I lost everything, I had done very little second-hand shopping. Raised on the blue-collar edge of middle class, I realized that new clothes—even from K-mart—were a mark of something I had always been reluctant to concede. Now, headed into my thirties, I rebuilt my wardrobe almost entirely with second-hand clothes, from friends or consignment and thrift stores. The process made me conscious of the waste of fast-fashion and clearance-rack junk—cheap clothing that I had, for so many years, bought and thrown away without ever really looking or feeling good in it anyway. At the same time, I began to marvel at how people (including me for a while) could spend so much money on a few items at a boutique or an upscale department store.

Learning to shop second-hand allowed me to live out my ethics, recycling and repurposing more fully in my life. I began shopping for other things second hand: furniture, dishes, silverware, curtains, a bicycle. It became my nature to think first about Goodwill or Craigslist. I continued to exchange things with my friends, too.

Soon after my divorce, Sarah left her husband and became a single mom as she finished massage school. I was searching for myself, but Sarah’s quest was more specific. “I want to experience passion—real passion—before it’s too late,” she told me. As I cycled through my new wardrobe, deciding who I would be, what I wanted and what that new person would wear, I passed on dresses to Sarah.

•••

After my grandfather died a few years ago, I followed my mother down the creaky wooden steps into the musty basement of my grandparents’ house where decades’ worth of flannel shirts hung on a metal rack.

“We’re just going to get rid of them all,” my mother told me.

She remembered my penchant for my dad’s old flannels when I was a teenager.

“I thought Toby and Beck might want some, too,” she offered.

My second husband and stepson are Goodwill pros. Toby is a musician and had been a single dad on a budget, with a punk aesthetic crafted by thrift-store finds. All three of us took flannel shirts that belonged to my grandfather.

When we got back to my parents’ house, my dad saw the Army shirt Beck brought home and went to the basement for a special hand-me-down of his own. He brought up his Army jacket that I had worn throughout my teenage years and gave it to his new step-grandson.

I was back at my grandparents’ house last year after my grandmother died, helping my mom sort through things. My mom pulled out a thick beige sweater of my grandmother’s that she said suited me perfectly, and I picked out some costume jewelry. When we got back to her house, my mom brought out the trench coat that she had worn throughout my childhood from a wardrobe in the basement where it had been covered in plastic for decades and had me try it on.

“I think the eighties are back in style,” she told me, approvingly.

In the winter in Kentucky, where I moved with my husband and stepson a few years ago, you can find us all in layers of other people’s clothes. My whole family is donned in the flannels of a gentle Maryland man, who wore them as he went fishing or watched Westerns, and my stepson is wrapped in my father’s Army jacket, which had been a staple of my own teenage years. When I’m feeling lonely, I put on the taupe trench coat that I remember my mother wearing to church on the rainy Sundays of my youth and swear I can still smell her perfume after several washings.

As I write this essay, I fondle the large wooden triangle on a necklace that had been my grandmother’s and think of Betty Jane, the stylish woman who pulled herself out of poverty and gave me my middle name. I ponder how my world has changed in the years since I began wearing other people’s clothes, and I find beauty in the cycle, the threads of which are intrinsically mine.

•••

AMANDA J. CRAWFORD is a recovering political reporter whose literary work has previously appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Hippocampus. She is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University and performs with the Americana gothic band Former Friends of Young Americans. www.amandajcrawford.com

These Five Hours

By Amy E. Robillard

Steve and I head to bed at the same time in the same room with our two dogs. We kiss each other goodnight, assure each other of our love, and close our eyes to attend to our thoughts and memories, our worries and eventually our dreams. Steve has worn a CPAP since I’ve known him because he suffers from sleep apnea, and if he didn’t wear the hose and nose pillow that pushes forced air into his system as he sleeps, he might stop breathing and die.

We haven’t always slept in the same room. Only in the last three years, since we moved into the new house, have we been able to manage it. In the old house, the sound of the CPAP combined with the white noise machine Steve required to sleep was too much for me. I slept in a different room, in what I thought of as my own bed. I tried not to notice that these arrangements were exactly like the arrangements my mother had with my stepfather. As an adult, I recalled the times my mother would go into Warren’s room at night for a spell and then come back out to the couch-turned-bed she slept in every night. It embarrasses me to remember those times, even now, thirty years later. What did they do with Warren’s wooden leg?

When Steve and I moved into the new house, we got rid of the clunky old white noise machine, which wasn’t actually a white noise machine but an air purifier, and replaced it with a small, more reasonable white noise machine. We got a bigger bed. We put a white noise machine next to my side of the bed. And somehow we made it work. We all four slept in the same room. And it felt right.

But in the last year or so, it has stopped working. Ever since Steve came home from the hospital after his gallbladder surgery, something about the CPAP machine has been off. The hissing sound it makes is unbearable. We’ll fall asleep at the same time, but inevitably, I’ll wake up around twelve-thirty or one to use the bathroom and when I return, the hissing sound makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. I say his name to wake him, scaring the shit out of him in the process. He tells me I’m going to give him a heart attack. I tell him he’s going to kill me with that goddamn hissing. “Just adjust the nose piece, please.” He adjusts it. I roll over in bed. Ten seconds later it’s hissing again.

I tell my friend Hillary that if I ever do end up murdering my husband, my entire defense will consist of me imitating the CPAP hissing sound in court while others are trying to speak. I will drive everybody so crazy that they’ll find me not guilty. Psssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Take a breath. Psssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Repeat until they set me free.

•••

More than once Steve has told me this story: when he was a teenager on vacation at Myrtle Beach with his family, his mom vetoed his choice in a tee-shirt shop on the boardwalk. He wanted one that said, “The Ayatollah is a Assaholla.” (This was in June, 1980, at the height of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, so Steve had good reason to believe in the Ayatollah’s Assaholla-ness.) Interestingly enough, his mom didn’t have a problem with his getting one that said, “Football players do it in the end zone.”

For years, until so recently that I’m embarrassed to tell you, I thought that tee-shirt was ridiculous because, really, what a stupid pun. Oooh, a play on the words do it. So immature. And then a week or so ago, we got back on the subject of that story and I said something along the lines of how silly this shirt was. “Remember, I was barely sixteen,” Steve reminds me.

“I know, but still. You mom thinks it’s perfectly okay to get you a t-shirt with a really juvenile reference to sex but not one about the Ayatollah, who really was an assaholla. And besides, what does it even mean: football players do it in the end zone? Do they run into the end zone and suddenly celebrate by doing it right then and there?”

“I think it’s more about doing it in the end zone, you know, like anal sex?”

Pause.

“Oh my god. You mean that end zone?” And the uncontrollable laughter begins. I’m dying. I fall over on the couch. I can barely catch my breath, but when I am finally able to, I manage to spit out, “Your mother let you get a tee-shirt about anal sex but not about the Ayatollah?”

“I don’t think she realized it was about anal sex.”

“Did you?”

“Not until a few years ago.”

My stomach hurts from laughing so hard, so I cannot reply. Minutes pass.

I never met Steve’s mother. She died years before I met Steve, but what I do know about her is that she was unhappy. She did not delight in being a mother, she did not delight in Steve, and she rarely demonstrated affection toward him. I do not think I would have enjoyed meeting her. His father, though, was one of my favorite people on this earth. Kind-hearted, warm, funny, empathetic, and unashamed to eat blueberry pie with each meal because otherwise I or Steve might get to it first.

Finally, I find my voice. “What made you realize it was about anal sex?”

“I don’t know. I think I was telling someone the story and it just dawned on me.”

I don’t know how to write laughter. I don’t know how to tell you that my stomach hurt so badly from my laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all. Maybe it wasn’t that the story was all that funny. Maybe it had been too long since I’d had that kind of full-body laugh. Maybe my body needed that kind of embodied emotional experience.

“You do realize, of course, that that tee-shirt could very well be interpreted as being about gay sex, right?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t the Ayatollah.”

•••

When I crawl into the bed in the guest room, the one with the memory foam mattress, I always squint at the clock to check the time. It’s usually between one and two a.m., which means I have about five hours before I need to get up. These five hours, I think. These five hours have to get me through.

Lately I’ve been noticing when I adjust myself in this bed, rolling over onto my stomach, that my left hip hurts. When I get out of bed in the morning, I have to take an extra second or two because of the pain.

•••

The few times I can remember an adult asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I can remember responding that I wanted to be either a fireman (masculine pronoun) or Little Red Riding Hood. I clearly had a thing for running into, not away from, danger.

•••

I teach undergraduate courses in rhetorical theory and the personal essay regularly, and one of the things I find myself telling students outright again and again, even though I know on some level that it is something they must learn for themselves from experience, is that the louder a person declares their strength or their smarts, the weaker or the less intelligent they actually are. A person who is strong or intelligent doesn’t need to announce her strength or her intelligence, I tell them. Pay attention to the quiet ones. They’re the strong ones.

I do this because I want to give students the benefit of knowing what, for years, I did not understand. I believed that the people in my life who shouted the loudest, “I’m strong, I’m strong, I’m strong!” actually were strong, and that I, who could never declare such a thing about myself, was weak.

When I tell students this, I characterize it as one of Dr. Robillard’s life rules.

•••

At first I attributed the hip pain to all the walking I do with our dogs, Wrigley and Essay. I’ve always walked a lot, even before I adopted my first dog in grad school, and the daily routine with the dogs now is two walks a day. A shorter one in the morning and a longer one in the late afternoon. I probably mentioned the pain to Steve once or twice, but even I will acknowledge that I’m a bit of the girl-who-cried-wolf when it comes to pointing out problems with my body. Having grown up in an abusive home, I have low expectations for this life and I’ve long been on the lookout for the thing that will kill me young. A particularly tenacious pimple becomes, in my telling, terminal cancer, and an upset stomach that lasts more than a couple hours is surely the first sign of stomach cancer. It is not, I am always reassuring Steve, that I want to die, but that I expect to die. It is hard for me to imagine a future for myself that stretches out very far. I understand now that people who have been abused know exactly what I’m talking about, and people who have not do not. People who have grown up in secure homes believe that I am a simply a pessimist or a hypochondriac because that is the easiest way of categorizing my beliefs.

But then one Saturday, the pain got significantly worse. It hurt to stand, it hurt to walk, it hurt to simply exist. I could feel my left lower abdominal area throbbing when I lay my hand on it. Eventually I began to limp. Steve walked the dogs on Sunday. I told him that if the pain persisted, I would see if I could get in to see the doctor on Monday. I began researching ovarian cancer symptoms.

When I was twenty-one, I had a very large ovarian cyst removed. We had discovered it in April, but my doctor had told me it would be okay to wait until I had graduated from college in late May and moved back home to do the surgery. By that time, though, the cyst I had named Henrietta had become impossible to remove by laser surgery, so they had to cut me open once she ruptured. I was in the hospital, miserable, for three days.

Now, at the age of forty-four, I had all the symptoms of ovarian cancer. Abdominal bloating or swelling. Check. Quickly feeling full when eating. Kind of. Discomfort in the pelvis area. Check. Changes in bowel habits, such as constipation. Not really. A frequent need to urinate. Always.

On Monday, the pain was worse. My primary care doctor listened as I told her that the pain had been there for at least a month, but I thought it was my hip. I could hear myself, could feel the narrative forming around my words as I spoke. You waited more than a month to see a doctor?

I pointed out where the pain was and she smiled. “That’s not your hip.”

“Yeah, I’ve figured that out by now.”

She ordered a pelvic ultrasound and told me that it could be another cyst. But she wanted to get this ultrasound done quickly, this week if possible.

“And then,” I’m telling Hillary on the phone, “she starts talking very quickly about how it could also be an abdominal muscle strain, but we both know she’s just talking to talk so that she doesn’t have to say the truth that we both know. This is ovarian cancer.”

•••

There is a feeling I get that I’m not sure I can do justice to in words, when I or those close to me are on the cusp of something dreaded. Where others might wish to run away, I want to run in, for I am most comfortable, I think, in the midst of suffering and pain. I want to hear others’ stories of suffering and pain. I want to see how they deal with it, how they cope. I am eager to live through the drama, if only to emerge on the other side with more strength, even if it’s only vicarious strength. Surviving dreaded situations is the only way I know how to develop strength.

•••

The results of the pelvic ultrasound were delayed. My doctor was supposed to get the results that same afternoon, a Tuesday. I didn’t hear back from her office until Wednesday morning. During that time, from about noon on Tuesday, after the ultrasound—when the head of ultrasound took what seemed like hundreds of pictures of my innards, sighed deeply, and wouldn’t look into my eyes—until Wednesday morning, I considered how I might react to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

And I surprised myself. I was actually afraid. I could tell that Hillary, the friend who has known me the longest, the friend who understands best my attitude toward life and death, the friend who also expected to be dead by now—she, too, was afraid.

I was afraid but I was resolved. I would do what I had to do. Steve offered to take time off from work to come to the doctor with me if she called and said she needed to see me (she had told me that she would only call me in only if it were bad news). I told Steve that he should save his time off for later, when things got real.

When things got real.

I think it’s time to get real. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers, says that “liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

It feels dangerous to admit that I enjoy my life and I want to continue living. It feels like I am being unfaithful to my story to acknowledge that I can imagine a future for myself. I want so badly, I have for so long wanted so badly, to look straight at reality rather than squeezing my life into the narratives our culture offers us. Narratives of overcoming or narratives of triumph. Bullshit narratives. I cherish the personal essay because it insists that I run right in. Jonathan Franzen writes that the essayist “has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them.” I can do that! I can look at the ugly, the shameful, the painful. I know I can!

But can I change the story? Can I acknowledge that I want to continue to live?

•••

Steve’s mother didn’t want to buy him a t-shirt that simplified a complicated political situation, so she let him get one with a juvenile sex joke instead. Who knows what her intentions were? It’s easy enough to change that story.

I’m forty-four years old and I’m just now realizing that maybe I want to continue to live. I’ve been afraid of admitting this because I’m afraid it will be taken from me. So much safer to say that I’m not afraid of dying, that I’ve got nothing to lose.

I’m coming to see that all this time I’ve been saying that it’s okay if I die young, that I don’t want or expect to live a long time, that I am not afraid to die, I was voicing my actual fears of dying in ways that could be heard and responded to by others. Maybe what I’ve been saying all along about the people who proclaim the loudest that they are strong actually being weak has been true of me all along, too: my proclaiming for years that I am not afraid to die and that I don’t expect to live a long time is evidence, in fact, that I am afraid.

Somewhere along the way I began to expect things from this life. And I allowed myself to accept that I expect things.

That is risky.

•••

Steve is easy to buy for. Lately I’ve taken to buying him tee-shirts with funny sayings on them. If it were up to him, he would wear shorts year-round, so I bought him a tee-shirt that says, “If I have to put on pants, then NO.” For Christmas one year, I bought him a tee-shirt that says, “Please don’t make me do stuff,” but he is dismayed that when he wears it, I still ask him to do things. And one of my recent favorites is the one that says, “I was told there would be cake.” I tell him he can wear that one whenever I make him go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. He can just point to his shirt and look around the room expectantly.

There’s a part of me, a part that is steadily atrophying, that believes that I deserve pain. Or rather, a part that believes that I don’t deserve good things. I’m beginning to understand that these beliefs are vestiges of an old story, one that began so very long ago in other people’s pain, but one that I now have control over. That control is not simple authorial control, the kind that allows me to open a file on a computer and delete a few words here, a couple paragraphs there and, voila, a new story emerges. Rather, the control comes in the willingness to reinterpret the stories that have been fossilized, the ones we think we know.

The pelvic ultrasound found uterine fibroids, but they aren’t causing the pain. They’re relatively small, but I didn’t know that right away. From Wednesday, when I learned about the fibroids, through Friday morning, when I learned that they weren’t the cause of the pain, I imagined a huge red slimy fibroid about to rupture on my left side. I could feel it throbbing. I was afraid to bend over to pick anything up for fear it would rupture. Once I learned that the biggest fibroid is only three centimeters and that the pain is probably coming from a pulled muscle, I could no longer feel the throbbing. I walked the dogs more carefully, holding both leashes with my right hand instead of my left.

The last time I ordered Steve a tee-shirt for his birthday, I ordered one for myself, too. “I just want to pet dogs and throw the sexists into the sun. Is that so much to ask,” it reads. It’s really not so much to ask.

I think I expect more.

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD teaches writing at Illinois State University and essays regularly for Full Grown People. She and her husband are the guardians of two special mutts, one named Wrigley Field and one named Essay.

Rent

By María Joaquina Villaseñor

2006

Relief as I arrive at the rental office with moments to spare before it closes to pick up keys for my new home: an eleven-hundred square foot townhouse with a small backyard, a garage, and more space in the closets than I have stuff to fill closets with. I wonder if the large downstairs closet by the front door could be used as a study; I contemplate it seriously.

I furnish the town home with two tables, a small stone-colored couch, a rustic Mexican wooden television stand with shelving—all furniture that my mother and stepfather have given to me from their own home. My queen-sized bed is a hand-me-down I got from my sister; I’m pretty sure my niece was conceived on it.

About a year later, a friend from Berkeley, a former roommate, visits me there. After staying with me, she gossips to another friend that I still have all my furniture from grad school. I’m hurt since it is obviously not meant to be a compliment; but she’s not entirely wrong either. The décor of the townhome is more than a little patched together, the furniture worn and perhaps more starkly so against large, bright white freshly painted walls and new carpets. I want to paint the walls, but it’s a rental and I don’t want to lose my security deposit. Grad student poverty is still my day-to-day reality. But the new place is to me, palatial and above all, spacious with possibility.

I am 189 miles away from Sacramento where I was born, the furthest I have ever lived from that city except for the year I lived in Mexico as a girl. I am a new Assistant Professor at a public university on California’s central coast with a freshly completed a doctorate from UC Berkeley. I traveled from the Sacramento area in a caravan with my mother and stepfather in a small U-Haul truck, me driving the 1987 Volvo that my stepfather purchased for me for $750. I am twenty-nine years old, the Volvo is my first car, and I am a newly licensed driver. My mother and stepfather are doing all they can to help me. So many things are new.

2005

I’m embarking on a nationwide job search, and I interview at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, after actually complimenting the coffee at a restaurant in which we have dined, a graduate student accuses me of being a “Berkeley food snob.” She says: “People who come here from Berkeley are always like, ‘Oh, well, in Berkeley we have blah blah blah, and in Berkeley we have wah wah wah.’” Seriously—that’s exactly what she says.

If the apartment in which I live can be taken as any indication of the kind of status that enables one to become an anything snob, then this graduate student’s accusation is a verifiable impossibility. I live in a basement studio apartment of an old white Victorian home on Hearst Avenue, in Berkeley not far from campus. I select it solely on the basis of its location and the fact that it is “affordable.” It is not really affordable, since I have to take out roughly ten thousand dollars in student loans to afford it, but I’ve reached the point that many graduate students reach: I simply can not deal with the idea of having yet another roommate and have no idea how I will be able to write anything while having to negotiate others’ schedules and habits. I’ve been a student having student money problems and roommates for eleven years; I’m desperate to be done.

I should have known there is something up with the basement apartment when the landlord asks me to give him twelve postdated rent checks for eleven hundred dollars each when I sign the one-year lease. I have never signed a lease on my own before, and I understand Berkeley to have an odd and difficult rental market, so I agree to his request. After all, he says this is the only way to secure the apartment and make sure he doesn’t rent it to someone else. I give him over thirteen thousand dollars in postdated checks.

I’m sick almost immediately and this lasts pretty much the entire year. The damp, musty basement apartment grows molds and mildews in places I didn’t know mildew grew. As a child, I lived in some poorly ventilated homes and apartments; I’m used to the green black creep of mold on bathroom ceilings, to the mold that grows around window sills. But this apartment has that and more. I discover that mold is even growing in the one small closet in the apartment. My clothes begin smelling like mildew. A girlfriend tells me about a product called Damp Rid, a container of crystals that gets put in places where moisture leads to mold in order to absorb the dampness. I have no idea such a thing existed, and after complaining to the landlord who does nothing, I think I should give it a try. I have three containers of Damp Rid in different parts of the four-hundred square foot studio including in the musty closet. I write my doctoral dissertation next to containers of Damp Rid with a constant runny nose, itchy eyes, and allergy-induced headaches.

Some young men live in the flat above. I can’t tell if they’re students or if they do something else for work. I hear them exclaim, “Oooooh! Oooooohhh!” in loud unison about once a week. I imagine they are involved in some kind of weekly circle jerk and don’t really know what to think about that. I guess I’m curious about it but I mostly stay away from them. Eventually, I figure out that they’re vociferously playing video games. A disappointment. I have a very regular writing routine and remember every day that I moved to the Hearst Avenue basement apartment because I didn’t want the noise or the distraction of roommates. One day, I begin to hear hammering right outside my window. I try to tune it out and don’t worry about it much until the hammering goes on day after day. I am distracted and irritated. I see that my neighbors are building something brown and hairy on the back of a truck. Over the next few days, it begins to take shape…some kind of an animal. A…Snuffleupagus? On a truck? One day, I ask them about it. And that is how I learn about Burning Man.

I think I will be happy and in better health once I move out of the Hearst Avenue basement apartment, but the move takes place abruptly. I file my dissertation on a Friday afternoon in May, and my grandmother dies the day after on Saturday morning. My deceased grandmother is in Mexico, and though it’s time for me to move out of my Berkeley basement apartment, I leave suddenly and take a flight to Guadalajara to accompany my mother to my grandmother’s wake. After the wake and after my grandmother is cremated, we transport her ashes to Ciudad del Carmen, my grandmother’s hometown and the place where my mother was born and raised.

Back in Berkeley, at move-out time, my stepfather and my sister pack the contents of my apartment into a small U-Haul truck. I tell my twin sister where the cigarettes I hide are, and all the things I do not want my stepfather to see; as always in my life, I entrust her with my secrets. I leave the apartment with a little clothes, a certificate attesting to the completion of the requirements for my doctoral degree, and some uncertainty about the future though I am certain I will not return to that mold-infested place. I’m grief stricken, exhausted, worried about my mother, missing my grandmother already, and overall considerably less happy and healthy than I thought I would be at this moment.

1999

I’ve walked by the 1970s era building thousands of time since I moved to Berkeley in 1995. There’s a storefront on the bottom floor and the store sells Turkish rugs, beaded jewelry, baskets, and other imports. The building is pretentiously called “The Glen Building” and it has a top floor studio apartment that I rent with he who is my first serious long term romantic partner. I’m twenty-one and just learning about what that means. The studio apartment interior is very basic and has fresh paint and a new carpet, the way I hope and expect a rental will have. The carpet has very little padding and matches the 1970s industrial storefront feel of the building. It has a full but very tiny kitchen with a sliding door onto a balcony with a view of the Bay Bridge far in the distance. We move in a queen bed that’s just a mattress and a bed frame with no headboard and an old red easy chair and a table from my parents’ house. While we live in that place together, my partner Ryan and I travel to Mexico, the first time I have ever taken a love there. After returning from Mexico, I make a complete travel scrapbook including ticket stubs, stickers, and countless photographs of us with cousins, aunts, and uncles, on the Zocalo, at la Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, in Xochimilco, in so many magical Mexican places.

I want our studio apartment in the Glen Building to be more like Mexico. We paint the bathroom Frida Kahlo blue and the kitchen a Mexican avocado green. The painting of the kitchen and the bathroom is an investment and a grownup undertaking both because of the effort and because of the cost involved between the painting supplies and the forfeiting of the deposit money. There is a basketball hoop over the sole closet door in the apartment. The closet is not like a regular bedroom closet. It’s very small—more like a hall closet or linen closet. I share it—happily—with Ryan, and we jam our clothes in there and do not complain. I have a bad habit of leaving my wet towel on the bed when I get out of the shower. It is one of only two things that Ryan ever seems unhappy with me about. The other is that I sometimes go on and on talking, and I don’t listen to him very well. I stop leaving my wet towel on the bed and learn to be a better listener.

I learn to fry tofu, I learn to make soups, I learn to use a rice cooker. We host friends sometimes overnight, even though we have no separate guest room or even a futon. One of our friends, a fellow undergraduate, and also poet, gambler, and sports fan, stays with us several times, sleeping on our floor next to us in the queen bed with no headboard in which I learn about what it means to have an adult sexuality. Another friend comes out to me in the stairwell outside of the apartment, confesses that the protagonist of the sex and romance stories he has told me is a man, not a woman as he had made me believe. I’m unfazed; we’re figuring things out and finding our way. We host parties in our cramped studio apartment and create traditions. One of these new traditions is hosting Christmas dinners the week before we leave for our respective families’ holiday gatherings. It’s a way that I can make sure I have a good Christmas. I make roasted legs of lamb and experiment with cooking other things that are brand new to me and like nothing we ate in the homes in which I grew up. With Ryan, I learn what it means to create a chosen family; we flirt with being a family of two ourselves. For the first time in my remembered life, I share a home with a man with whom love and safety are feelings I have all the time and in abundance. I am free.

1992?

We live in a rented house in a suburb of Sacramento on Ash Street, having returned from a year of living in Ciudad del Carmen just the year before. The house is a boxy, light brown two-bedroom house where I live with my stepfather, mother, twin sister, and my two younger brothers—sweet, rascally, fun, little boys. My twin sister and I miss living in Mexico and long for the embrace of my mother’s family, the literal and figurative shelter they give us.

Between, say 1984 and 1995, I live in at least six different rental homes and apartments excluding the year we live at my grandparents’ house in Mexico. In one of the apartment complexes where we live, my mother and stepfather are the resident managers, living rent free in exchange for being the on site go-to people for our neighbors in the apartment complex. A Korean family who own a donut shop are our upstairs neighbors there. The woman of the household teaches my mother to make kimchi and they sometimes bring us fresh donuts from their shop. Some of our homes have unfinished floors. Some of our homes have roaches. All of our homes have holes that my stepfather has punched into doors and walls.

The holes in walls sometimes get covered and repaired, but they sometimes stay—or multiply—while we live in those places. The holes in the wall remind me of the imminence of the “cocos”—what my stepfather calls the knuckle punches on the head he gives us—that is his most frequent physical punishment of us kids. For a while, we are hit with the hard, grey plastic handle of a paddle for a raft I only vaguely remember us owning. But I do remember the raft paddle … its sting, its heft, the fear it inspires even after the welts were gone. There are slaps, too. Hair pulling. I believe, hope, pray that my mother will make it stop.

But she is being hit, too. The sounds of my mother and stepfather’s yelling and arguments are often preludes to sounds of thuds and later to the sight of my mother’s eyes—red and bleary and puffy from crying—or to the mark of welts or bruises on her. Occasionally I see a ripped blouse from her being pulled, yanked on, or dragged. My sister and I learn to drown out the sounds by turning up the volume on the TV. Against reason, we hope our little brothers do not hear what we’re hearing, do not see what we’re seeing.

Once my mother has us pack a few things as we flee to a battered women’s shelter—a “safe house.” I do feel safe in that house though I’m also scared that my mother will go back to my stepfather. Which she does. In the safe house, I desperately want my brothers to somehow feel like things are okay and normal. Though the hand-me-down towels, sheets, and other kids’ hand-me-down stuffed animals point to the anything-but-normal nature of our situation. One of the rules of the safe house is that no one is permitted to give out its phone number and address to preserve the secrecy, anonymity, and so the thinking goes, the safety of the women and their children. We can’t tell anyone where we are or how to reach us. It does not feel normal.

2017

Today, almost thirty years later, I long to remember the faces or names or stories of others who were in that safe house with us, experiencing something similar. But I don’t. We were there just a few days and I was preoccupied with our own situation, where we would go after. It turned out to be that where we went after was the same house we had left. After that, there were promises of no more beatings, which was a promise he mostly kept. After eight years or so of much torment, he (for the most part) stopped hitting us all, instead sticking to yelling, punishing, general volubility, and the maintaining of a home environment where walking on eggshells was the norm.

Of course, we kids did sometimes have fun and experienced joy in our childhood family homes, but these feelings were rented, and we were always aware that we could be evicted from joy at any minute. My siblings and I continued to be kids together until my sister and I moved away to college; we loved and still love each other with the passion of people who know that sticking together is survival.

I’m now a tenured professor, a wife, and a mother of twin daughters. I married my husband just over two years ago, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon on a beach in Maui aptly named Baby Beach since we spoke our vows with our two babies by our side with no other family present. In the midst of our wedding planning, and after thirty years of marriage, my mother and stepfather were in the middle of a bitter divorce the dregs of which I could not bear to have at my wedding.

Beside a shimmering Pacific Ocean, my groom read poems I saw him write on the plane ride without knowing what he was writing. We had one friend in attendance, a dear mutual friend and colleague we learned would coincidentally be in Maui at the time of our wedding. Our friend valiantly did quintuple duty—as our sole guest, videographer, on-site child safety specialist, best man, and maid of honor. I marveled at our luck. Actually, I marvel at my luck every day, as the man with whom I share my home and life shelters me with love, harmony, and understanding, opening my eyes daily to all that is possible for me, for us, for our life together. What is this happiness that I dare to call my own, beyond all my younger self could have imagined?

For the first time in my life, I live in a home that is not a rental home though it is in the same campus housing complex where I moved as an Assistant Professor just over ten years ago. The home I bought with my husband is only slightly bigger than the home I rented just over ten years ago on my own. Not long after we moved in, my husband and I went to the furniture store and bought a brand new couch and coffee table, another first for me. We didn’t buy an expensive couch because we have two small children who spill and stain things the way small children do, but it’s probably still the nicest couch I have ever had.

Last month, my youngest brother hand delivered a letter from my stepfather. The letter was sort of a group letter—asking for reconciliation with my mother, with my siblings, and with me. My name was written on the envelope in handwriting I will always recognize, but there was no address on the envelope under my name. My stepfather has never seen the first and only home I have owned, and does not know where I live. Sometimes the dull ache of the past tugs, but peace reigns in the home I have made, and I relish it.

•••

MARÍA JOAQUINA VILLASEÑOR is a professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is a co-author of The Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature, and an essayist whose writing has been published in Remezcla and The Acentos Review.

Unlovable

By Kimberly Dark

If you’ve ever felt certain you’re not lovable, come on over. Sit by me.

I was walking up the steps toward the bank. The sun was hitting the glass door so that I couldn’t see inside. I guess the woman coming out didn’t see me either and—bam—the big glass and wood door clocked me in the face. I stumbled back a bit, head throbbing. We both said, oh shit, and she apologized and I shook it off, got on with the day. My nose wasn’t broken, but I had a black eye for a week.

When I saw my sweetie the following day, she assessed the damage gently in public and then later in bed, she cozied up next to me. “Goddamn, you’re even hotter when you’ve been roughed up a bit.” She kissed me and pushed her head against mine, making me wince in pain. “Mmm,” she grunted.

“You’re one sick fucker.” We both laughed.

“Yeah, at least I’m not the one who hit you. Count your blessings I’m mostly over that shit.” We shook our heads and laughed again.

Look, no part of me wants pain. I understand how pain can be cathartic, and it’s not my thing. I always talked myself out of a beating, smelled the metal of my own blood through the skin before it broke, and got myself out of there. I don’t attract the ones who hit, but I sure attract the ones who could. And I learn how not to push. Being careful not to get hit, apparently that’s my gig. And I’m good at it.

In my youth, I had a flair for the flamboyant outburst. I mean, I was never one of those jealous glass throwers; I never upset a table in a restaurant. I’m not violent at all, just a little loud. Even still today, I’ll yell and put on the Medusa face but I do it in the privacy of my home.

This was my last big scene and how it finally clicked that I was done with that nonsense.

We’d been upstairs at my place, having sex and then arguing about some damn thing. I couldn’t begin to say what. She was visiting for the weekend and decided, no, fuck it, she was leaving. I was wearing a pale green and cream lace silky negligee with a little pearly business along the bodice. That I remember clearly. She threw all of her stuff in the duffle bag and heaved it onto her shoulder and down the stairs. I followed, giving her a piece of my mind every step of the way. Fire was shooting from my eyeballs as I watched her step off the porch and head down my steep front yard into the dark night. I shouted one last thing, loud enough for her to hear as she got into her truck: “YOU ARE ONE FUCKED UP INDIVIDUAL!”

And suddenly, that thing happened. A zoom out. An awareness. Suddenly a small, but terribly clear, voice inside my head said, “Actually, you are standing on your front porch at two a.m., yelling for your neighbors to hear, wearing nothing but a skimpy negligee. You have just become the dictionary-illustration for ‘one fucked up individual.’ Why don’t you close your mouth and go in the house?”

And I went in the house.

She sat in the car for ten minutes and then I heard her mumbling angrily, hauling her bag up the stairs, bump by bump, then telling me, as she took off her clothes and got in bed, “Goddammit, if I leave now, I can’t fuck you again in the morning.”

At which I rose up briefly like a cobra to say, “Oh, so you think we’re having sex in the morning!?”

And she said, “Shut up. Just shut up. Go to sleep.” There wasn’t much fight left in me, so I did.

Yeah, we had sex in the morning.

She never hit me, but after a few disturbing episodes of almost, she went back to anger management classes and I joined a domestic violence abuse survivors support group. Things weren’t always good between us but that relationship lasted a decade because we both had fix-it tenacity. We tried to better ourselves this way and that. And now years later, as friends, we love each other still.

Maybe that’s all I will ever have in the relationship department. Love.

Not comfort. But love. What a strange consolation prize.

I sure know how to pick ’em. And they pick me just as surely. Okay, sometimes the others try to pick me but I just don’t get the hots for too many people and I send them straight to the friend-zone. With some, there’s a fast hard click, like a metal lock. That kind of connection rarely slips out of place until we’ve moved through some serious business together. How do we know even before we know? Is it scent or aura or the hand of God that shoves us together on the sofa?

I was talking to a recent unsuitable suitor on the front porch. We were drinking wine and smoking cigars, and I said, “Hey, look, don’t you even get it going for me! I mean, you don’t want the likes of me. I am damaged and downright difficult. I mean, fuck sake, you were raised by nice people in middle class suburbia and you’ve worked at the same job for thirty years. What the fuck? Stay away from me.”

As I told a friend (okay, she’s an ex) about the unsuitable suitor, I assured her I’d given her a good talking to. I’d really laid it out. And my friend said, eyes fluttering back in her head, “Oh, I’ll bet she loved that. You don’t know how bad people want a talking to from someone like you. You’re tough and pretty and almost always right.”

I stared, with the edges of my mouth curling up, eyes bulging. I thought I’d been super-clear. She added, “You’re a Bon Jovi song waiting to happen!” And then she finished our conversation singing, “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame! You give love a bad name…”

I specifically try not to be a heart breaker. I say “no” more often than I say “yes.” The body has to choose; my head can’t be in charge. It’s a little fucked up in there where mating’s involved. The circuits didn’t get laid quite right in the beginning maybe. Though I give advice to others like a champ, keep my head cool in most situations, I rarely know what to tell myself.

Though it’s not like I’m pre-interviewing lovers—the fact is, I rarely get a lady-boner for people who haven’t had the crap beat out of them a few times when they were kids. It was probably someone who loved them doing the beating.

One could say, well, that’s just common. And it’d be true. But there are similarities among most of my lovers that are downright eerie. Probably it’s comfortable for me.

Probably it’s familiar to me. Probably it fits somehow with something I learned when I was a kid. Isn’t what the therapists would say?

I pick people who are too damaged to trust anyone fully by the time they get to me. Maybe the part of me that thinks I’m not lovable says that seems right. But it makes me mad. And they’re so certain they can’t be loved that my anger seems deserved. But it also justifies the lack of trust.

That’s it. Those are the ones I’m hot for.

Or maybe it looks like this: I’m so calm and accepting, I seem like a miracle at first. Truly, I am calm and accepting and a motherfuckingmiracle as well, but you’ve got to know that some anxious lovelessness caused me to pursue all that calm, and as soon as you upturn the table, you’re gonna see how it was made. I can’t get to the sex without showing someone how I’m made. Well, at least not more than once or twice, and I’m a more than once or twice kind of gal.

My lovers usually can’t let down their guard. They can’t be honest with themselves about how they keep creating their own misery despite trying really hard to get clear, meditate, breathe, get back to nature, journal, join a tantra group, talk to a shrink, and get freaky, at least for a while, with me. I have some kind of mojo going on that keeps them wanting it, that’s for sure.

It’s a shame one can’t put a nozzle on ones own mojo, point it in the right direction, build it up, and let it fight the fire of a painful past. My lovers are fighters with mojo to spare, but it’s not clear whether we’re ever fighting in the right direction. I like ’em either super-scrappy or super-smart; both is best. What if we could point ourselves toward those painful pasts together, rather than looking right at each other when we’re mad?

After years of on again and off again, my lover with the anger issues and I went to couples counseling. After some time talking about our problems with sex—that is, talking about how she loves fucking me but doesn’t totally let me do her, she said this to the therapist: “I just know that if I really soften up with her, it’ll be the best thing ever. Then I’ll need it. Then she can hurt me.”

I wept quietly because, yeah, I knew that. I also knew she was already in pain without me doing the hurting. A pain I couldn’t touch. I guess she figured it was easier not to heal, to keep the low-grade fever of anger and hunger. Better to blame me for not trying hard enough. Better to choose a pain that already fit into her schedule rather than a yawning, aching need that brings terror. Who could relax then?

Pain is easier to carry than fear. Both will shorten your life. Whatever. We’re resilient as fuck, my lovers and I. That much is clear.

I have to hope for something better. It could be worse and it’s not. I pick someone with a few skills. I don’t pick the ones who are strung out on drugs. I don’t pick the ones who hit. I just pick the ones who need love and won’t accept it from me. Maybe a little they do. Small morsels. But I don’t do a good job pretending it’s enough. There’s a lot of fighting to be loved here on my side of the table. A lot of trying and failing. A lot of tear-it-down-and-try-again hope. A lot of joy despite the pain. Real eye-of-the-storm peace. A lot of tenacity and tenderness because there doesn’t seem to be another way.

If you’ve ever felt certain you’re not lovable, come on over. Sit by me.

There are a lot of you out there. Just like how I learned to stop making a screaming-scene on my own front porch, maybe I can learn to draw someone with a softer jaw, an unclenched fist. That’s possible. And here’s what’s likely: No matter who sits by me, I’ll keep pouring up love by the cupful. Sweet love. No matter what else happens, that’s not nothing. Love is never going to be nothing.

•••

KIMBERLY DARK is a writer, teacher, and storyteller who wants you to remember that we are creating the world even as it creates us. She’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People. Read and gawk and learn at www.kimberlydark.com.

RePair

tinyhouse — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Gina Cooke

My dishwasher broke. So I’m standing at my sink, hand-washing all of the dirty dishes I’d rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher the day before, plus the rest of what had accumulated since. Doing the dishes always means looking out the kitchen window. In the warm weather, with the window open, I can hear the bullfrogs and waterbirds from down in the creek. Today I’m washing and watching, my rubber-gloved hands warm in the soapy water, Joe’s work-gloved hands lifting broken cinder blocks and chunks of concrete off of the back lawn and onto the trailer, which is hitched to the back of the John Deere.

His arms still bear bruises from the beating he took changing the John Deere’s blades the week before. His shins are scratched from mushroom hunting in shorts deep in the woods, and his right knee is scabbed over from where the guardrail on the bridge gouged him impressively as he tried to climb over it. Last week, he took a weedy thorn to the front of his nose, and it bled and bled and bled, but he said he wasn’t hurt. Now he’s outside my kitchen window, in the fenced-in part of the back yard, bending over and righting himself, lifting and moving one jagged hunk at a time. His black gloves say CAT in big yellow letters. After he has removed the blocks, he mows inside the fence. I go upstairs to get some work done on my laptop, the push mower sputtering in the background. After a while it’s quiet, and he comes in to ask for a burger. I’ve learned to keep ground beef, Swiss cheese, and buns on hand at all times.

I head back to the kitchen and open the fridge, hunting and gathering, tomato, lettuce, ketchup, provolone, that brown mustard that he likes, butter for the cast iron skillet and to toast the buns. I look out the window to see the shorn lawn out back, and Joe in reverse motion now, heaving new cinderblocks off the trailer into a tidy little octagon in the grass, his yellow-lettered CAT hands swinging with each heavy hoist. I quickly pat the beef into concave disks and set them on a smear of butter in the pan. For nearly two decades I was a vegan, but today the sound and smell of sizzling fat and flesh make my mouth water without compunction. Outside, Joe stands back to admire his work: We have a sweet new fire pit in the back yard now. He comes in, washes up, and sits down to his burger and a Gatorade. Purple, low-calorie. His favorite.

There are always a million repair projects around my property. Or maintenance. Sometimes I lose track of the difference. And there are upgrades too. Things that work perfectly well but are ugly or old or otherwise undesirable. I don’t expect Joe to take on everything all on his own. I make calls, set appointments, take care of the household business. I need to have the heating vents cleaned. And several stumps ground out of the front yard to make it easier for Joe to get the mowing done. It’s a part time job, the mowing. A few hours a day, a few days a week, in season, to keep everything sensible around here.

And I had a painter come out the other day to give me a quote on several smallish jobs: My kitchen ceiling has that horrible popcorn texture on it and it’s impossible to clean, so it has this greasy little beard on it right over the stove. Twenty-three years of the detritus of cooking here, ten of them mine. My son’s bedroom needs painting too, and then there’s the trim on the inside.

•••

It used to be that I would come home from work in the late evening to find the house a wreck, my husband and son still in their pajamas, homework incomplete, no dinner or bath or bedtime stories in progress. Upstairs in the master bedroom, my husband would proudly show me the fruits of his day of labor: tiny, elaborate, repeating patterns of flowers and leaves and berries that he had painstakingly painted on the wooden trim around the windows and doors and the crown molding framing the room. He would spend the hours I was at work on a stepladder in the bedroom, choosing and mixing paints and delicate brushes, dabbing dots of gold and silver highlights on his acrylic flora, all the while neglecting the real plants on our small farm and the real boy pinging off the walls downstairs wondering what would ever be for dinner.

•••

The kitchen ceiling and the boy’s room are easy enough problems to solve. The trim is another story. “You could sand it and prime it and paint it,” explained the man through his fuzzy gray beard, “but you’d still be able to see it.” I nodded. “Some days the light will hit it just right, and even with a few coats of paint, those patterns will make themselves known to you again.”

I could imagine exactly what he meant, and there was no way I was going to pay someone to do all that work only to still see those flowers in relief just refusing to die in the afternoon light.

“Call Kevin,” he suggested. “He’ll come in and redo that trim for you, and it’ll be much nicer than what you have now. Get those corners right with a miter saw.”

I think to myself, Joe’s such a real man to be able to lie with me in my big marital bed with that shitty trim and the painted ramblings of an unbalanced mind insistently outlining the bedroom.

•••

My first divorce hearing was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, 2014. We were still living together, but my husband had moved himself to the guest room in the basement. The night before the hearing, the tension in the house was horrific. There was screaming and wailing and it was so, so dark. It finally simmered down to a wretched and tearful talk in the kitchen, just outside my son’s bedroom door. I was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, wanted to be out of my son’s earshot, for crying out loud. I excused myself from further conversation. My husband responded sorely, “I hope you sleep well in the bedroom I made beautiful for you.”

•••

Like my divorce, all these repair projects always cost more than I think they will, and at this point it’s all money I don’t have. In the nineteen months since the sheriff removed my husband from the house, I’ve had to put in a new water treatment system and a new barn door. I bought a new used car on credit—appropriately enough, a Ford Escape. Bought a new doghouse and a new compost bin too.

I put in a security system after my husband broke in. I guess that’s an upgrade, though, not really a repair. I’ve had to replace siding and remove birds’ nests and repair both garage door openers after a bad windstorm. Fixed the refrigerator once and the dishwasher twice; now it’s not working again. I should’ve just replaced it the last time. Sometimes things aren’t worth repairing; it’s cheaper to get a newer, more efficient model than it is to keep sinking money into something that just doesn’t work. I know, I know, that’s how our landfills get full: planned obsolescence. Things don’t always last like they should.

Once Joe moves in, money will be a lot less tight. It’ll be different having a second income in the house after all these years of family breadwinning by myself. He’s not afraid of work. He brings in good money and he’s handy. Strong, incisive, good at figuring out how everything works: people, machines, plants, animals, electronics, toys.

I’ve never once heard him holler at things that get in his way, not even the stump that took out the blades on the John Deere. “There’s no point,” he says. “You can’t reason with inanimate objects.” This property has long felt to me like just a lot of work, but Joe says he’s always wanted to take care of a place like this. I can see that it satisfies him. I hope it stays that way. I’m trying everything I know to make sure that he feels like it’s his home too, even though it’s technically my house. I call it Our House, in the Middle of Our Street. I ask him to help me pick out area rugs and bedding. I’ve made space literally and figuratively: cleaning out closets and dressers, and learning to stop hosting him when he’s here because then he feels like a guest. But nothing that I do or don’t do is really key, because the thing that makes him feel most at home here is working on the place. He likes that John Deere. He was proud of those bruises.

•••

I’ve been known to tell people that owning a home is a lot like being in love: At the outset, it’s all spacious and bright and airy. It looks and feels perfect and seems worth all the sacrifices you had to make to get it. But then you move in and you start to fill it with your crap and you notice its flaws. Spaces fill up. Cracks start to show. New things get old. The dust settles, and one day you look around your place and realize that it’s not only not perfect, it’s a hell of a lot of work. Everything needs repair or maintenance or replacement. So you sand and you prime and you paint, and one day the light hits things just right and those old patterns just make themselves known all over again. An adult lifetime of monthly payments starts to seem a lot longer than it once did.

I also tell people that this home is a dream home, but it was someone else’s dream. I’m a city girl, a third-generation Angeleno. I lived in Paris and Chicago before I married, and I thrived. I never really even imagined myself paying a mortgage, let alone paying for a stump grinder or a John Deere or a barn door. I never dreamed of this place: a big pine-log home with a pitched metal roof and skylights, perched atop hilly green acreage in the rural Midwest. This winding road runs between two small central Illinois towns, and all my neighboring farmers—real farmers—have gone organic.

This place is beautiful, no question, when I take a longer view, when I can see past the claustrophobia of repairs and projects and dust. Out front, I have a porch swing and a healthy ecosystem and a pretty good sunset almost every night. There is no time of year that the view out my bedroom window is not breathtaking, if I look beyond the framework of florid trim. When it’s winter and the air is frozen clean, the early twilight colors the snow on the ground periwinkle blue. It happens every year. I’ve spent a decade in this house all told, long enough to see the patterns emerge.

•••

My husband had two favorite lies, and he told them louder and more frequently the closer I got to divorcing him: One was “you’ll never be able to take care of this place without me,” and the other was “no one else will ever love you.” I’m in my seventh season on my own here now; soon Joe will move in and that will change. It’s a good change, I think. The light is hitting everything just right, and from my perspective, it all seems to be in good repair.

•••

GINA COOKE is a linguist working toward her second graduate degree, a pursuit that has spanned half of her adult life. She lives and works on a small farm in the rural Midwest with her son and her dog. She typically writes about spelling: word histories, word structure, and word relatives. This is her first foray into the personal.

Counseling

yarn — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Seema Reza

We go to see a counselor. Karim will not accept that he should see someone for his anger, but he agrees to couple’s therapy. I’ll take what I can get. Based on the bio on the office’s website, it appears that the primary focus of this therapist’s career has been on issues of gender identity and homosexuality. But she is available on the day we need, and I don’t want Karim’s compliance to dissipate. Lainey has short hair, thick wire-rimmed glasses, black socks, and orthopedic shoes.

Karim tells the story of spanking Sam with a shoe in our hotel room on our vacation. Of telling me, when I stood between them, I have another shoe for you. In his retelling, Sam pushed his brother and sent him flying headfirst into the wall. He could have seriously hurt him. It was unacceptable.

I see, Lainey says. So you wanted to make a strong statement.

Yes. And then Seema challenged my authority in front of the kids. I got mad. I shouldn’t have said that to her.

It seems so simple, so reasonable explained this way. I wonder if I’ve been overreacting all along. Maybe we’re not so badly off. Maybe we just have a few little issues.

She asks Karim, Why do you want to stay married?

Because of the kids. And she can’t afford to be on her own.

She turns to me. Seema, what do you think about that?

My teeth are white, my hair is thick. I know this man, know that he loves me. I laugh. That’s bullshit. I’m an excellent cook and the sex is fantastic.

•••

For the rest of the summer and into the fall, we see Lainey nearly every Monday evening. Lainey prods us to say kind things about one another and encourages us to implement date nights.

In October, after the push that changed my perspective, that shook me from my slumbering pretense, we go back to see Lainey. I’ve decided that I’ve outgrown the fight. Now, he begs me to visit the therapist one last time. I agree, taking along a ball of wool and knitting needles. We sit in the now familiar office, meeting at our regular time, but days are shorter and the room is darker than usual. He begins to talk, and I begin to knit. He catalogues my crimes: making him jealous at seventeen, rekindling a friendship with an old boyfriend at twenty, disliking his mother from the start, dancing with another man at a nightclub one night. He tells it chronologically, has clearly been rehearsing this narrative—collecting the evidence.

Several times anger rises up from my core, forces my mouth to fall open, but I knit more furiously, shut my mouth. I am determined to give him this opportunity. After thirty minutes, Lainey interrupts him. The clock is ticking; he needs to wrap up. He moves to my most recent crimes: not believing him when he said he didn’t make romantic advances toward my friend, forcing him to have to push her because he felt backed into a corner, because he thought we were ganging up against him. Forty of our fifty minutes are up.

Lainey looks at me. Seema?

I look up from my knitting. I let it fall to my lap, push my glasses up. I take a deep breath. I’m done. For a moment, I consider responding to the accusations he has made, defending myself, reminding him that he has left out his responsibility in all of it. But the feeling evaporates with my exhale. I don’t want to do this anymore.

Okay, she says. Let’s talk about divorce counseling.

•••

Afterward, Karim is livid. How could she have given up on us like that? What kind of counselor is she? It’s your fault. Why were we seeing a social worker anyway? He goes to see a therapist on his own, and he tells me that therapist said we shouldn’t get divorced. That therapist thinks that Lainey was wrong to have told us what to do.

She didn’t tell us what to do. I told her I was done.

You told her you were done after she told us to get divorce counseling.

The order of things is always uncertain with us. He remembers it one way; I remember it another.

•••

SEEMA REZA is a poet and essayist based outside of Washington, D.C., where she coordinates and facilitates a unique hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care, and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. Her work has appeared The Beltway Quarterly, HerKind, Duende, Pithead Chapel, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. When the World Breaks Open, her first collection of essays, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers

By Eaton Hamilton

She’d left so many bruises that I needed long sleeves in August, and I finally told her, quietly, firmly, that I couldn’t stand covering up through the heat wave any longer.

“But the windows open now,” she said, annoyed since I’d just hired people to reconstruct the living room sash and pulls.

I’d learned how to phrase things so that I wasn’t talking about what I was really talking about. “Which is really only helpful…” I said, pushing slick strands from my forehead in the thick-aired room, “if there’s a breeze. What I really need is to be able to wear summer clothes.”

•••

She never felt remorse after the intimidation, after the bruises.

Only once, after she scared me seriously with back-to-back rages, a raised fist, and trying to yank me out of my escape car, did she apologize, but even that regret vaporized in twelve hours.

•••

One time she screamed in the middle of a rage, “Tell me who I am!” and her voice went wobbly at the word “am” while she grabbed her hair and shook it.

I don’t know, I wanted to say. Nobody I’d like to meet in a dark alley.

•••

Within three weeks of our knowing each other, she had her first meltdown. That’s the name she already had for these things, her meltdowns.

Her meltdowns.

My wife as a nuclear power plant. My wife as reactor #1 with complete core deliquescence. My wife as a fuel rod with explosive concentration limits.

Red-faced rage is what it was.

I’d risen from bed an hour after she started snoring because I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stand my insomnia one minute longer. I watched TV in the living room until I nodded off.

I woke to her screaming inches away from my face, spittle rain. “Why are you out of bed you know I can’t sleep if you’re gone you know I need you in bed beside me you’re so fucking selfish you know I can’t be alone!”

I was—I don’t remember what I was. Shocked. Dazed with sleep. Confused. Certainly scared.

“I have to get up unlike some of us I have an important job do you want me to kill someone when I’m overtired because you kept me up?”

If I didn’t sleep beside her, properly, someone could die.

•••

When she was good

She was very very good

And when she was bad

She was horrid

•••

Rinse and repeat. Add suicide threat and shake well.

•••

There at the beginning, she was regularly grumpy and snarky and mean like a child decompensating after a school day.

Eggshells. Crunch, crunch, under mine and the kids’ bare feet, sharp shards of white across our lives like carpet.

But then she got diagnosed and put on a “mood regulator.” It worked like flipping a switch—now we got the other side of her, the woman I had fallen so madly in love with. Her good side was a drug to me; I did anything I could think of to court it.

She was funny and quick, and she thought I was hilarious. I lived for her peals of ready laughter. She was dependable, sweet, and attentive. We read fiction together. We could discuss politics, social justice, feminism. She was plot doctor for my novels. I counted on her intelligence. We made a family together. We bought a house. We adopted a cause, and together with other folks, we sued the government and changed our country’s constitution. We grew a garden. We went to Africa, to Greece, to Paris, to Fiji, to Thailand, to Cuba. To art museums, to dinners, to dance and symphony. We slid down sand dunes in Oregon and Fiji and Namibia; renewed vows on elephant back, at the top of the Empire state building, in a hot air balloon, in a Thai tuk-tuk. When she was happy to see me—which was always until she met someone who’d had a vituperative divorce and she became, herself, imitatively scurrilous—she’d turn around and wave her butt as if it was a thumping tail.

•••

But this was how we still talked about her violence after nearly two decades: politely, with obfuscation. We did not need to refer to where I got the bruises, since both of us knew that, or what she had done to cause them—the two or three times a week, she held me by force and I would repeat, my voice half dead from weariness and repetition, Stop. Let me go. You’re hurting me. Trying to wrench away, I knew, would make things worse. As the bruises bloomed like black roses, five to each stem, she pretended that I had a blood disorder, and once, once, when there were so many, she directed me to have the test to prove this. I did that, and it came back negative.

“You were trying to drag me out of the car that day,” I said.

“That was just one occasion.”

“We fought again and you grabbed me,” I said.

“The things you do. The things you do provoke me. I’m not putting the blame on you. I’m just saying be careful of what you do, be careful of what you do and how you do it.”

•••

I didn’t blame her, so forgiveness wasn’t needed. She was an important woman saddled with employment burdens, and for her, different rules, I thought, applied. She thought so, too; whatever rule applied to the rest of us was not applicable to her because she was smarter, more educated, held aloft by the reverence her job provided her.

I gave her every benefit of doubt: She didn’t mean to hurt me. It wasn’t the real her who did those things. The real her was the good her.

•••

This is what I did with her violence when I was alone: I added it up—made charts—to see how much of it there was, relative to homework and cooking and sleeping and doing laundry and watching TV and celebrating occasions and ferrying kids and gardening and dancing—and stuff, you know—and it was less than one percent. 90% of the time, we were glowing: engaged, productive, tickled with each other; 9% of the time, we were like any long-term couple, a little inert, unexcited with each other; and only one percent of the time did things go topsy.

I shredded the charts afterwards so she wouldn’t find them.

After she made me leave her, my therapist said, “Would you tell me a car with bad brakes was basically a good car?”

I looked at her.

“If you were on the top of a hill, those bad brakes would be a pretty important flaw, wouldn’t they?”

“We could have moved to Kansas,” I said. “It’s flat in Kansas.”

She cocked her head. “I hate to let you in on this, Dorothy, but nobody lives in your Kansas. Toto doesn’t live in your Kansas. Your Kansas doesn’t even exist.”

•••

Her father went after me, after us, about six months after his wife died, after I started calling him Dad, even though all the other wives called him Dad.

There was no welcoming nomenclature for me, the lesbian. When I tried out my wavery “Dad,” he soon said I (and by extension, his daughter) had killed his wife with my “gay stuff.” I had disrespected his wife. I exploited his daughter. My house stunk and I smelled, too. “Gaijins know they stink,” he said.

This is the problem with never learning even rudimentary communication skills. Things percolate to the surface in destructive tsunamis. After his blow-up, the man refused to see us, his daughter and daughter-in-law, his two granddaughters, his great-granddaughter, for seven years, unless I would stay home.

From father to daughter, the inheritance of bullying.

•••

My relationship was continually under threat from my wife’s disrespectful peregrinations towards break-up, and since she never talked about these, I just sensed them, or wrangled with each lie on its own terms, and did whatever I could, anything I could, to protect us as a couple—silly things like putting white light around her, and her car, around our whole house of cards.

•••

Define domestic violence. Big dudes spring to mind, furious and fisted, their abuse flagrant, flamboyant, fervid. But butch though my wife was, she was not hefty, nor quintessentially angry of spirit, and if I asked you to pick out the likelier batterer in our relationship, ten out of ten people who didn’t know better, I’m guessing, would pick me, because I am raunchy of mouth, untactful, and larger, and just, you know, not “nicey,” whereas she is small, polite, warm, and obsequious.

They’re quite lovely, most batterers.

Lovely at home, too.

Until they’re not.

Size, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with being battered. And neither does gender.

All that you really need for battering is one person willing to batter.

The thing about batterers is that you can see what they’re not doing to you just as much as what’s transpiring. Yes, they are pinning you, but you can also see their gaze sliding sideways and fixing on the knife rack, considering. Yes, they are pulverizing the sofa, but you know by what they’re saying that they wish it was your face. Or they throw a bunch of stuff and then come rushing at you, fist raised, even though at the very last minute, they drop it.

I never hit you is technically correct.

But they have their ways of letting you know where their violence could go—if they want it to.

And this is always clear: You don’t get to decide.

They get to decide.

•••

At first we had a potted garden, but when we moved into our house, she went at the hard clay with a pickaxe, double digging, and we dumped bales of moss and vermiculite and compost into the soil four feet down. Together, over years, we made a perennial garden with different rooms and arbors and sunken pits and water features and pergolas.

Wisteria, roses, clematis, poppies, lilies, hydrangeas, palm trees.

•••

It didn’t fit with her self-image to be an enraged beast—it shamed her, so she “disappeared” it. After flagrant episodes, she’d threaten to kill herself.

Or else threatening to kill herself just ended the fight without dealing with the matters at hand.

•••

After I left her, she admitted that she had no sense of self, and said she had a personality disorder (she declined to say which). She said that she had never—ever, not once—told the truth to anyone. “I just tell them what I think they want to hear,” she said, “and nobody has a clue.”

“What?” I said, “what?” I had lived with her for almost two decades. Wouldn’t I have known this?

“Even you,” she said. “I lied to you from the day I met you. Every word out of my mouth? Lies. Every word.”

•••

I was disabled, and she became my legs; over the years, as I grew sicker, I became more and more dependent on her care-giving and support.

She always ran ahead of our lives to see whether I could handle the terrain—and I believed that she didn’t mind. I thought she was in it for me, and I was in it for her, and we were in it for our family.

But after she broke us, she told me that living with a cripple had been like living a quarter life.

“Not even a half life?” I said, blubbering.

“A quarter life,” she repeated.

•••

We made up new words or we mangled the pronunciation of extant words. Our convos looped and spiraled until we were linguistically charmed.

•••

In 1997, she adopted the kids when our laws changed to allow it. They needed independent counsel to understand what rights they were waiving and what rights they were gaining; someone to make certain we weren’t coercing them. In those early years together, we couldn’t, as a lesbian couple, get married, but the adoption made us family and confirmed that we would always be linked, and confirmed who would inherit if she died.

•••

She had breast cancer, in situ; lumpectomy and radiation recommended. She opted for chemo, and the less-generous-me wondered if it was so other people would see her suffer.

After she healed, she held her illness over me like a sword.

“I’m having trouble swallowing,” she said when wouldn’t eat her dinner and didn’t want me to know that she’d already had dinner with her lover.

•••

She twisted my wrist when she held my hand—not once, not a dozen times, but hundreds of times. I talked to her about it often, saying how much it upset me, and also how it wrecked my hands, wrist, and elbow, gave me carpal tunnel and tendonitis etc., and for a few minutes after I said something, she’d stop squeezing, stop twisting, and we’d be just sweethearts, walking, like all the other queer sweethearts strolling around Trout Lake, madly in love, until she started again, bearing down hard, wrenching it left.

My interior monologue ran like this:

She’s happy she loves me she wouldn’t hurt me not on purpose it can’t be voluntary it must be because she’s learning to lead in dance and she’s working on developing a “frame.”

As if sense enters into battering. As if logic has the slightest role to play.

•••

In our long-time house, we had a hot tub, my wife and I. We had it installed right outside our back door, half roof-covered, half exposed, so that it was possible to be protected from the elements or not. We used it every day, pretty well, and that was where we decompressed from the stresses of our days—where we met in chit chat and bubbles.

Where I first saw her naked with the other woman.

•••

There was something hinky in how I loved her after her cancer, how besottedly I cared. I took the car in, dealt with laundry, made dental appointments, hemmed her pants, cleaned the windows, bought the paint, changed the sheets, scrubbed the fridge, ferried the kids, ground the coffee, bought the birthday gifts, sent the thank you notes, booked the ferries, hotels and air, picked up the bulbs, arranged delivery of the compost, paid the bills, renewed the mortgage, and she pretty much worked, came home, and did the heavy lifting I was too ill to manage. She looked at me often, sometimes with derision, and said, “Oh my god, you are just so kind.”

But I was absolutely terrified to lose her. My favorite thing was being with her. Doing anything.

•••

Every year, or every two years, she’d decide she didn’t need her meds anymore, giving us a two-day slide into the bad old behavior.

And I’d ask myself: Which of her is real? Happy or harridan? I wanted to believe in the former, because she glowed with health and satisfaction, but a niggling part of me believed that, actually, it was the latter.

If both were, she was deeply bifurcated.

When off her pills, she’d pick fights. She’d pick pick pick pick at my Achilles’ heels. Bland, I’d remind myself, be bland bland bland, but about day four or five, I’d say something a teeny bit snarky back.

Then I became the reason she was mad. Me being a fuckhead became her explanation for everything.

•••

When she told me that she was leaving, she said that she’d wanted to go since thirteen years before, when she’d had cancer. But that wasn’t what she’d acted like at the time: during that hell, she’d stood on the rocks on a Pacific Ocean beach and asked me to marry her, then we’d become litigants in the same-sex marriage case and fought hard, against the government’s fifty lawyers, for three years—to marry each other. When we’d wed, she was as transported as I was. I’d swear it.

•••

We never stopped having sex, not all through the good times or the bad times, not even through the break-up.

•••

“I’m sorry that I scream,” she said. “Mine just comes out as rage and meltdowns. Yours comes out as hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt. Hurt, hurt. It’s not just me. I will take—I know I’m being fucking insane right now. Please. Please.”

•••

It wasn’t until after I left her and was blemish free that I understood that I wouldn’t have bruised at all—with ease or difficulty—if her fingers hadn’t been pressed into my flesh. It wasn’t until after I left her and I no longer had carpal tunnel, tendonitis, ulnar nerve trouble, and bursitis in my arms that I realized that it hadn’t been computer work causing the pain as she’d said.

•••

That last year, I had a bad reaction to my October flu shot, so the top of my arm was three times swollen, red, and griddle hot. No sleeve was large enough, so I was half-shirtless, my top jerry-rigged, part of the neck under my armpit. My wife pulled back her arm as if winding up to throw a baseball, then slammed her palm onto my wound, shaking her hand vigorously.

While smiling. Not a serial-killer-smile like on TV, but a loving smile.

A smile that ultimately told me whatever was going on inside her was in a code that I was never going to break.

•••

When I got more direct, challenging her on the uptick in violence as our marriage had gone to hell, she told me I had abused her, too. I asked how and she said by rolling my eyes, by smirking. And then she said, “By making me dance.”

In the years when I was well enough: jive, night club two-step, west coast swing, waltz, cha-cha, mambo, samba, meringue, rumba, salsa.

•••

That mid-August week in 2011, we negotiated ways to beat the summer heat so she could go on hurting me in her preferred manner. She set up a fan in front of one of the new windows to push the air around, and even though I lived there, in that room, largely, all day long, because I ran my photography studio from it, and I knew that it wouldn’t work, I appreciated it.

I appreciated it.

I was glad I had a considerate wife.

This is true.

By the next Wednesday, the bruises on my forearms had faded into yellow smears, and my new bouquets bloomed only my upper arms.

She looked at my arms and said, “Well, never say I didn’t bring you flowers.”

I laughed and snorted. Then I sobered. “Hon? Short sleeves I want to wear are, um, a lot shorter. Um. You know. Not, you know, down as far as my elbows.”

Blank stare.

I pulled my shirt back on. “I mean…” I lightly karate chopped my mid-upper left arm. “They end about here, right?”

The next week a new set of marks, dark, circular, insistent, appeared, but just on my shoulders.

•••

Her wedding vows:

“I feel so lucky. We have had ten wonderful years together. I already know that you will love, honor, and cherish, that you will comfort me in illness. I know that we can laugh so hard we end up crying. I now that you will wipe away my tears. I know that we can be angry without hate, that we can confront without fear, that we can resolve without resentment. There are no doubts, no questions. There is only this love. The synergistic miracle that turns one plus one into a billion shining stars. You and I together can do anything. I feel so lucky.”

2003, when she’d already wanted to leave me for five years.

•••

We spent years play-wrestling, giggling our way across our bed. But then I started getting injured, a whack to the head, an elbow pushed into my back, a neck pin. “Can we just go back to how we wrestled when you didn’t hurt me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

•••

She leaned forward to confide in our couples’ counselor. Exasperated, long-suffering, she said, “I’ve been waiting—and waiting—and waiting for Jane to die.”

The counselor didn’t know what to do. Long, stilted, uncomfortable silence while I waited, sobbing, holding my hands over my face, and then the counselor changed the subject.

My wife hung two voodoo dolls, one white, one brown on her work bulletin board. She shoved pins, lots of pins, through the white doll’s chest. Brown doll, white doll. Asian wife, white wife.

•••

I remember all the energy I expended to keep her alive—all my care and concern and sacrifice and worry, how hard I worked to pick up income so we wouldn’t be saddled with financial worries—and when it hits me how she met that hope and drive and protectiveness doing exactly the opposite, wanting me dead, I have to breathe very deeply and slowly not to weep even now, even after four years.

•••

She started going all-the-time hooey when she turned fifty—broody and paranoid in slow increments. It was creepy and weird; she’d curve herself above me in my office chair so that I couldn’t get up, intimidating me, her voice thin and threatening. She’d lay waste to anniversaries and holidays. I took to counting her pills to see if she was medicated because I couldn’t always tell.

And then she didn’t want to garden. She didn’t want to work around the house. She wouldn’t clean the hot tub. She became a vegetarian. She lost sixty pounds. She became a gym fanatic and had to practice multiple musical instruments every evening, plus find time to meditate. During this mania, I knitted and watched TV, waiting for her to snap out of it. She seemed breakably happy. It never occurred to me that the woman she hung out with was her lover, not then, because I thought nothing could threaten us. But my wife no longer really slept. She showed signs of major anxiety—trichotillomania, twitchiness, flicking her thumb hard across her chin. She started referring to our kids as my kids instead of our kids. She started referring to her extended family as her family not our family. She stopped calling me by my nickname.

Her lies grew florid and silly.

She sat me down and told me gravely that she was sure her cancer had come back. Her cancer had been gone for thirteen years, yet everyone—not just me, but all her friends—treated her like it was active, as if she deserved special attention. Okay, I thought, cancer. Cancer again. We can do this. Even if, as I imagined likely, the metastasis was in her brain.

This particular lie, meant to throw me off the scent of her love affair, led me to push her hard towards a series of wholly unnecessary medical tests as serious as endoscopy and colonoscopy.

•••

Love and violence,

love and violence,

go together like

secrets and silence.

•••

Stockholm Syndrome.

•••

She blurted out that she was not a lesbian anymore and was going back to men. When I tried to sit her down to discuss it, and what it would mean to us, she refused to admit she’d said it.

She said I was nuts. You’re crazy. This is what you do. You make up stories.

Did she know she’d said it? Or not? I just could not tell.

In therapy, I brought it up again. I need to talk about some of these things she’s been telling me, I said. She repeated that she had not said it.

You only think that’s what she said, said the therapist. That’s what you heard.

No, I said, what she said was, I’m not a lesbian anymore. What I heard was that my marriage is in grave trouble.

A week later, at check-in, my wife said, Remember what Jane said I told her? Well, I did say that. Beat. Long beat while the therapist and I sat baffled. But I only meant that I had a hard time coming out eighteen years ago.

I said, How does ‘I’m not a lesbian anymore’ equate to ‘I had trouble coming out?’

Jane, said the therapist. If that’s what she says she meant, I’m sure that’s what she meant.

A later therapist said that my ex had just denied the things she’d said to mess with my head, a bully’s tactical maneuver.

To mess with my head.

The whole idea that anyone did anything just to mess with someone’s head was foreign to me, like a humanity-abruption, something shearing off, alien and grotesque, from the human womb.

•••

She believed my tears were exactly equivalent to her rages.

•••

I told her I was leaving with two weeks notice. I paid our common bills and took my half of our line of credit to live on until we could settle matters. It was finally clear to me after six months of trying, after therapy and one more chance after one more chance, after her telling me she was moving out and then not moving, after couples’ counseling that made everything worse, after her endless gaslighting and mendacity and threatening and pernicious lacks of basic good, after being scared out of my mind that she was actually going to kill me, finally, during those last months when I came to believe she wanted me dead in order not to split assets or pay support, that I had to get safe. But still I was, as I always had been, out of my mind with love for her. Unconditional love. I’d never imagined being apart. I was committed to her. We’d said forever. We’d challenged a government to prove it.

So I shaped leaving as a temporary separation just until she could get through anger management classes.

How do you leave someone you’re still smitten with?

But how do you not?

I was disabled and getting sicker faster and fifty-seven. I would have no income since I was too ill to work and, also, was leaving my studio behind in the house; I was leaping into a very deep well.

I did not believe that I could survive separation, and indeed, according to a cardiologist, I was only ten minutes from the truth. Losing my marriage pushed my disease into months of unstable angina and finally a massive heart attack, leading to more permanent cardiac damage, open heart surgery, and a chancy recovery beset with heart failure.

•••

The kids were packing boxes in the basement when my wife hip-checked me from the dishwasher. She emptied the dishes that I had stacked while I leaned on the kitchen counter behind her. She was more verbally pleasant to me than she’d been for weeks, because the kids were home. She restacked the dishes.

She sent me over a sweet, small smile.

I smiled back, tilted my head in puzzlement. She hadn’t smiled at me in months. Many times, I had asked for hugs. Many times, I had stood in front of her and nakedly said that I admired her, appreciated her, loved her while she stood with dead eyes just staring at me.

Now she came waltzing across the black and white tile and wrapped me in a bear hug. I didn’t know how to react. I started to cry right away from my sheer dumb human need for a little kindness, and from this woman who had been treating me like dog poop for months, and I wrapped my arms around her, too. She was being nice to me? Loving? So sweet, so long overdue.

But then I felt her thumb drilling into my left shoulder. At first it was like deep tissue massage that pinpointed pressure, until I registered pain. Pain? I thought of the children downstairs, embarrassed, and then I just succumbed to it the way I had to a heart attack. My arms fell.

Anyway, I knew our rules: This was (as always) a game of chicken.

I was (as always) half angry and half annihilated. Both together.

The annihilated one said, I am hurt. I believed in you. I trusted you. I gave my whole future to you. How could you do this to us, to me? To yourself?

The angry one said, Go ahead, take it further, you pig, I dare you. Do it. Do it, asshole. Do it harder. Want me to flinch? Well, fuck you fuck you fuck you. I will not flinch.

Who would stop first? Her, hurting me, or me, getting hurt? It wasn’t going to be me, goddammit. It was some point of obscene honor. I wasn’t going to give her my capitulation. I wasn’t going to hand her shrieks of weakness. I was leaving her to get safe when all I wanted was to stay—wasn’t that enough, losing my wife, my best friend, my business, my animals, my home, my garden, my income? Yes, that was all she could take. She didn’t get to see me on my knees, too.

If the kids had come upstairs, all they’d have seen was a hug.

Sure, she had rages. Sure, she threw things. Sure, she came at me with her fist raised. Sure, she screamed. Sure, she threatened suicide. But a lot of her violence was this kind of violence, stealth violence that was hard to put into words (I think she counted on that).

It wasn’t spontaneous, this attack; it couldn’t have been. She’d had to conjure it up the way she conjured up sticking pins in a voodoo doll’s chest, the way she had to pre-think wrist twists. She probably had to research anatomy, unless it was something she’d learned in training. What I knew when she finished, I knew clear as a bell—she’d been planning this assault, strategically biding her time, studying up for its precision (even choosing my non-dominant arm). I knew that much, and maybe it was the first time in hundreds of incidents that I saw her for what she really was.

With everything else stripped away: a batterer.

At last she lifted her thumb. She broke the hug and fled.

I stared down at my arm, fascinated. It didn’t hurt. Instead it was—gone. My hand and arm were paralyzed. I hadn’t been expecting that; I’d assumed she was just hurting me like normal.

I went slowly upstairs. I didn’t know how to loop a sling without help, and it was clumsy, but I got fabric and used my right arm, my mouth, to rig it, my teeth to help tie the knot. I went back downstairs. She sat in the living room with a packing box and looked up, black-eyed.

“I have to go to Emerg,” I said. “I’m paralyzed.”

“What’s Emerg going to do?” she said. “Think that through. They’ll put you in a sling. You’re already in a sling.”

I thought, Yeah, she’s right, I guess. She’s the medical expert.

“Let me fix the sling,” she said.

So she did.

The kids came up from the basement. “What happened to your arm?” my daughter asked.

“I hurt my shoulder,” I said. Not, your mother paralyzed me. Not, I just got attacked.

The paralysis lasted three days in my arm, and five days in my hand, and damaged my hand permanently.

•••

After the house was sold, the roses were ripped out or died, Dortmund, New Dawn, Compassion, Charles Aznavour. The water feature was unplugged, the birdbath emptied, the mason bee house shaken until the bee-plugs fell. The chairs and table and heater were taken away. The delphiniums bent double on their stalks. New owners trashed the Chinese wisteria with the white raecemes two feet long. Someone threw renovation debris atop the garden beds that we’d carved out of clay, earth, and rocks, junked the sunken garden that my ex had built from glass beads during chemotherapy.

•••

Once, she and I had danced in the Milky Way under the Perseid meteor shower while bats skimmed our heads, out on the yard, me in bare feet, the grass cool and damp and impossibly green in strong moonlight, slugs munching the hostas, snails in their soft, translucent protoconchs slithering out for calcium.

Now I dreamed I walked through Allium giganteums alone, and they were high overhead, big balls, purple and bristling. I dreamed I walked under Magnolia grandiflora, and white blossoms floated down to cover me like tissues. There was a blue sky, but I couldn’t see it for the waxy leaves. Morning glory, tough, with white insistent roots, twined around my ankles and began to climb me, up over my calf and around my knee, binding me, a series of green hearts, then moved higher, higher, until it touched me where she had once put the tip of her tongue, and it stopped there, twitching.

And I stopped there, stopped.

When I woke again, it was moving day.

•••

EATON HAMILTON is the Canadian author of eight books, including the just-released poetry volume Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes (available only in Canada). This piece first appeared in shorter form at Letter of Apology. They are the two-time winner of the CBC Literary Awards (2003/2014). Their winning story “Smiley” can be found online at CBC. Their twitter: @eatonhamilton.

Friendship and a Bottle of Mirto

bikes — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Powell Berger

“I’ll take the big room in the back,” Marie announced after our host family waved good-bye, dust trailing their little red Fiat. “That way, you get the room by the front door,” she said to me, “so you can protect us.”

Marie and I hadn’t traveled together for years, and back when we did, it was usually in triple-sheeted luxury hotel rooms at resort destinations where booze and business mixed, and our corporate expense accounts picked up the tab. She’d been that go-to friend for over twenty-five years, even though time and distance and life meant that we sometimes went months—even years, a few times—without talking much. She was the anchor during my divorce over two decades ago, and I can still hear her laughing when I’d call, irate over my estranged husband’s latest transgression. “The only thing funny about it is that you’re so shocked and angry,” she’d say. “Let it go!” She was right, of course, and I’d been reminded of her sage counsel more than once in recent months. My second marriage was crumbling under the weight of deceit and abuse.

Here we were, together again, this time in Solanas, Sardinia—a tiny beach village along the island’s southern coast—in a home exchange arranged months earlier. It had been advertised as a “charming, rustic beachhouse”; it bore little resemblance to the luxury hotels of our traveling past, and, as far as we could tell, had no proximity to anything resembling a beach.

Marie had been my go-to source when Sardinia beckoned, not because she’d ever been there or had any special insight, but because her grandparents emigrated from Sicily over a hundred years ago and their Italian roots held firm, even if her passport proclaimed her an American. What is normally considered spaghetti bolognese, she calls macaroni with gravy, and her pasta lexicon is numeric, vaguely explaining those mysterious numbers on pasta boxes. She’s the diva of her Italian-loving Manhattan meet-up group, and I’m convinced that should someone cut off her hands, her tongue would fall out as well. For all things Italian, she’s my source.

And for that matter, maybe all things too hard to navigate alone.

•••

We’d met back in our DC days, me a young lobbyist for the plastic bag industry, and her, the savvy insider, keeping safe the distilled spirits industry of America. She peddled Boodles gin, Moet champagne, Absolut vodka, and single malt scotch while I tried to convince the nation of plastic’s benefits. She drew the crowd, and I rode her coattails.

It was her DC apartment—its tiny galley kitchen, ten-foot ceilings, and Victorian molding—that was my respite during the drama of my first divorce. My then two-year-old, Owen, knew her as “Aunt Marie,” our wacky friend with the elegant apartment where we had pajama and movie parties, mostly when Mom seemed sad and needed a friend. It was a regular enough occurrence that Aunt Marie’s apartment came to be stocked with Owen’s own melamine bowl and plate and cup, and a can of Chef Boyardee, to be opened only in the event of dire emergency. It should be noted that the can was never opened, Marie horrified by its mere presence in her cupboard. She finally tossed it, declaring that no kid she loved would ever eat that junk.

Sometime after my first marriage and two new kids into my second one, she was my pick to stay with my babies when my new husband and I secretly jetted off to Honolulu in search of schools, housing, and jobs, the next step in my plot to move my family from beltway politics to the beaches of Hawaii. She routinely questioned my logic, first on the new husband—whom she called Church Man because she never remembered his name and because we met at church—then on both my moving strategy and my common sense in choosing her to watch my kids. Unmarried, with no kids of her own and no tolerance for the suburbs, she looked bewildered as I handed her my house keys and a map to the preschool and waved goodbye.

She swears I never called to check on them, a point I contest, but maybe it’s true. But when I returned two weeks later, she’d become the Peter Pan in my children’s magical world. Five-year-old Austin introduced her to Thomas the Tank Engine, and she sat with him, transfixed, convinced that the show’s narrator, George Carlin, would surely revert to his stand-up calling of smut, that this children’s movie phase was purely hallucinogenic.

Like the actress glumly owning her box-office failures, she reported that two-year-old Emmi couldn’t be swayed by Coco Chanel’s timeless fashion wisdom about elegance and simplicity, insisting instead on prints plus stripes plus plaid—and the tiara—on a daily basis. “That’s okay, I guess,” Marie told me. “I did what I could. She’s young. There’s still time. And thank god the women at the preschool knew she wasn’t mine.”

•••

Teenagers now, Austin and Emmi had not spent much time with her in the years since—just short visits whenever we passed through New York City, her home since retiring from her high-flying lobbying days—but time and distance hadn’t dulled her mystique. To them, Aunt Marie was a living, breathing, designer bottle of pixie dust. Me? I believed that bottle to be filled with truth serum and honesty. Exactly the potions I needed about now.

For our Sardinian adventure, we rendezvoused at the airport in Calgieri and giggled like schoolkids as we engineered the inclusion of my family’s meager carry-ons and backpacks in the rental car after stuffing it full with Marie’s steamer trunk, designer carry-on, and expensive leather satchel. There was none of the usual whining as Austin and Emmi crammed in on top of their bags, their feet settling for the cracks between the suitcases on the floorboard. Marie drove, while I navigated the nonsensical maze of narrow, twisting, scare-you-breathless roads between the capital city and our Solanas summerhouse.

While our hosts—Italian grandparents straight out of central casting—escorted us through the history and rustic nuances of their family home, I exchanged nervous glances with Austin and Emmi. Their eyes registered our common thought: the queen of luxury—with her designer bags, Chanel sunglasses, and perfectly manicured nails—is actually going to stay here?

The small, dated kitchen with the lean-to roof jutted off the covered porch, separated from the rest of the house as though an after-thought, behind the bougainvillea vines threatening to overtake the eaves. A wobbly table and chairs—circa 1950 with the formica top and metal frames—anchored the room. Rickety cupboards flanked the fireplace where a picture of the Virgin Mary leaned against the mantle, food splatters suggesting she’d enjoyed more than a few meals here.

Across the small porch, past the simple square table and two wooden straight chairs, Grandma guided us through three sparse bedrooms flanking a space that might have once been the entryway, before TVs demanded a room. Grandma pointed to the mismatched, folded sheets on each bed, miming that we could make our own beds as we wanted. She showed us where she’d cleared the closets so we had room for our belongings and shook her head forcefully when pointing to the closed bureau in the small master bedroom. Off limits. We got the translation. Ignoring our nervous glances, Marie smiled and tested her rusty Italian, chatting and miming with Grandma, conveying our understanding and appreciation.

Outside, Grandpa scurried around the property, showing us the fresh herbs in the garden. The basil and rosemary we recognized immediately, but the thick green leaf vines brought us to a bi-lingual, miming quandary. Crowns, the couple mimed, weaving the vines together and placing them on their heads. Plucking the leaves individually, they held them to their nose then pretended to drop them into a pot, their eyes pleading that we figure it out.

“Bay leaves!” Marie suddenly declared much to our collective relief, our American city-dwelling ignorance in full bloom. Our meager herb gardens never included bay leaves, and we reveled in the just-discovered truth that they weren’t brought forth as those dry, sad leaves in the McCormick jar.

Pulling a small, distressed plank of wood from his pocket, two old fashioned keys bound to it with baling wire, Grandpa tugged me, leading us to the rusty double-wide chain-link entry gate—the one at the end of the dirt path, off the dirt road that intersected the main road that led back to the house—then handed me the key and motioned that I demonstrate my ability to successfully lock and unlock our fortress. I struggled at first, then again. He demonstrated a second time. Marie giggled quietly over my shoulder; I knew better than to catch her eye. With Grandpa’s calloused hand guiding mine, I eventually maneuvered the key into the intricate lock, forced it open, then locked us back in the safety of the compound. Grandpa nodded with satisfaction.

In the kitchen, he pulled the bottle of Mirto from the refrigerator and pointed to the small glasses reserved for the occasion. More miming—berry picking, grinding with a pestle, cooking, stirring, tasting. A Sardinian specialty made from honey and myrtle berries, Mirto liqueur warms from the inside out and sucks the breath away with the first sip. His bottle was hand-labeled “Rosalba Mirto 2012.” He’d made it himself, and named it in honor of his wife, Rosalba. We nodded appreciatively and walked them to their car.

As instructed, I took the room by the door to the porch, the door that didn’t quite close completely, the door for which the only lock was a padlock. On the outside.

No cell service, no Internet, and definitely no three-sheeted luxury beds. A rusty old gate with an antique key that I’d successfully mastered once in my four attempts. A crossroads village with one restaurant, a couple of markets, and one gas station. A winding, indecipherable maze of switch-back, harrowing roads leading in all directions but with no maps or GPS to explain them. And absolutely no idea what we’d do for the next two weeks. We reached for the Mirto.

•••

For the next fourteen days, over early morning coffee at the simple square table on that front porch, kids still sleeping, a catharsis unfolded. Always the first one up, I cut up some melon, made toast, brewed coffee, and retreated to my writing while the birds awoke and chattered in the surrounding trees. Marie joined me an hour or so later. In our faded pajamas, hair pulled back, no signs of make-up or any trappings of luxury, we sipped our coffee in silence until our brain waves fired with the first jolts of caffeine. Then the stories poured out. Each morning, a ceremonial ritual commenced, an exhalation, a release of the long-held weights that I’d not even acknowledged I’d been carrying.

“I never, ever expected to be twice divorced at fifty.”

She nodded and shrugged.

“I loved him, you know.”

She pursed her lips, shook her head ever so slightly, and locked her eyes onto mine. I knew the look all too well. It was the same one she gave me whenever I doubted my ability to get a job done. Or when I wore something she didn’t approve of, which happened so often that I took to planning my wardrobe around my plans to see her. A look of impatience, hoping I’ll eventually catch up and realize the error of my ways.

“I’ve supported myself and my kids all these years, but can I really do it again? Can I start over? Re-build a career?” Her eyebrows arched, the pshaw audible. “I’m a tired, fifty-year-old, overweight woman with rebuilt boobs cross-stitched by a freeway system of scars and no nipples because I never went back to have that done after the mastectomy. And I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m going to do next.”

Marie guffawed, the kind of belly laugh that she’d release whenever I complained about my first ex-husband.

“Really?” she said. “We’re here, facing all this, and we’re talking about your boobs?”

Once again, she was right. I laughed. “At least they’re all perky again. I don’t have to wear a bra, you know. They stand up all on their own.”

Over those mornings, on that porch in the wobbly chairs beneath the bougainvillea vines, along with the smell of fresh toast and a dwindling supply of coffee, I exhaled, letting go the months—years, maybe—of fear and destruction and failures that defined my marriage. That Marie never quite liked Church Man in the first place made it all the more poignant. She never reminded me she hadn’t liked him. She just listened.

I held back the lurid details: the slamming me against the walls, the forced sex after my chemo treatments—rape, I’d eventually come to understand—the monies stolen, hidden, and squandered. But in those mornings, those facts didn’t matter. I wasn’t quite ready to speak those truths out loud, preferring instead to write about them first.

With Marie, it wasn’t about the details of what had happened, but rather, what was happening with me. Now. Time and distance would sort out the past, I knew; my challenge now was the journey forward, what happens next, and she was my most trusted guide.

“How could I let my kids down like this? Will Emmi ever know what a healthy relationship looks like? Will Austin?”

“Yes,” she reassured me. “They will. Because you will teach them.”

“How could I have been so stupid? How did I rationalize it, ignore the obvious, let it keep happening? Am I really one of those women, the he-loves-me-no-matter-how-he-treats-me types?”

“You loved him,” she reminded me. “You believed what you wanted to believe.” Then she reminded me of her friend, the one whose husband was fired from his seven-figure post, and only after his failed suicide attempt did she know of his years of deceit and embezzlement—and that they were completely broke. “It happens,” she reminded me. “And we pick up the pieces and move on.”

I talked about my anger—the type that boils up from within and sticks to the tips of my fingers and the back of my tongue, tainting everything that passes through my hands or from my mouth. I talked, and she listened.

“Life never turns out like we think it will,” she said. “Who’d have thought I’d end up single, facing retirement in a 600-squarefoot mid-town apartment and loving it?” She told stories of her childhood, living in a walk-up apartment on East 5^th, between Second and Bowery, raised by doting parents whose factory on Canal Street in Chinatown made Christmas stockings and aprons and hats, and doll dresses in the off season. “I remember we were the only ones of all my friends to have a shower and a sink in our bathroom,” she recalled, smiling. The teenager who always wore her best dress to visit the neighbors, apparently a fashionista even in the ’hood. The young lady who got a secretarial job and climbed the corporate ladder to eventually be the legislative voice of a multi-million dollar company. She’d defied tradition, expectation. And none of it had come easy.

“Remember your treks out to Staten Island?” I reminded her, giggling. Every weekend—even into her fifties—she’d retrieve her car from the garage to visit her dozens of cousins and ailing aunts, all of whom sent her home with fresh tomatoes and basil and pastas, because “you just can’t get good food in the city.”

“You and the kids really have to come to New York at Christmas,” she insisted. “Come to my party. Matt and Jake put up the ten-foot tree and do all the cooking,” she explained, “and I only invite people I really, really like.” Her family—friends from a rich career and special people collected along the way—all gathered around for the holidays, and Marie holding court. I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the season.

I listened to her stories of dinner and theatre dates with girlfriends she’s known for decades, and stories of the men she dates occasionally—nothing serious, just company, she assured me. I admired her strength—the same strength and charisma that drew me to her so many, many years ago. “You’re a great mom,” she said, abruptly changing the subject. “You’re going to be fine.” Her sudden turn shocked me. In that moment, somewhat surprised, I realized that she admired me, too.

Without the clutter of technology, under the birds’ chirping and flapping, in the company of that old friend rediscovered again, I found the acceptance to own my past. And the realization, as she put it, to rebuild and move on.

Eventually our mornings turned to afternoons, and breakfast gave way to a drive into Villisimius, the resort town seven kilometers away, where the waiters at La Lanterna held our favorite table and knew our favorite dishes. We wandered in and out of every tourist shop, jewelry store, and occasional boutique and made a point to try every gelato joint in town.

We managed to conquer the switchback roads, and even went exploring beyond Villisimius a few times, always getting lost, and always managing to eventually wind back to the summer house, our only landmark the blooming cactus that hung so low over the dirt road that I ducked every time we drove under it. I handed off my gate duties to Austin, who turned out to be far more talented at ancient key mastery than me.

Sunset always brought us home again, to those wobbly chairs and creaky table, where re-matches of “Name that Tune” would commence. The kids had thought it lame when Marie suggested it that first night after dinner, in those hours when TV and the web might otherwise fill the void. But when she cranked up her iPhone to sounds from Flo Rida and Emeli Sande in her first few challenges, they were hooked. It became their obsession, and over the two weeks, and countless challenges, Marie never missed a beat.

I wandered through the summerhouse garden, hanging our laundry on the clothesline strung between the trees, just past the rope swing where Emmi and Austin wiled away the early evenings. I marveled at the bay leaves, their strong vines weaving a maze amidst their small plot. They aren’t dried and wrinkly at all. Sometimes discovery is gradual. Sometimes, it comes all at once. No, my marriage couldn’t be saved, I realized. And what’s more, it shouldn’t be.

Our two weeks coming to a close, we reluctantly packed our things and headed to bed on our last night there. I drafted an email to Marie, to be sent once we finally had internet again, attaching a copy of the essay I’d been writing—the long, rambling, lurid story of my marriage, its collapse, and the truths too painful to share on that porch. “Here’s the entire story, including the stuff I couldn’t say on that porch,” I wrote. “Thanks for listening.”

Just then, Austin whispered, “Holy shit!” loudly in my direction as he looked out the window into our courtyard, just beyond the table where we sat every morning. “Come look at this, Mom!”

Emmi and I rushed to his side, adjusting our eyes to the dark garden, lit only by a glimmer of moonlight through the olive trees. Slinking along the wall of the shed, silently gliding towards the porch, it was unmistakable. The moonlight cast an eerie reflection off its beady eyes—a rat, far bigger and fatter than any housecat we knew, and it was headed straight for the house.

“Don’t tell Aunt Marie!” Austin and Emmi whispered in unison.

“No shit,” I said in return.

I slammed shut the door next to my room—the front door, the one onto the porch, the one without a lock—and slid a chair in front of it for extra measure. She’d put me in that room for protection. It was the least I could do.

•••

POWELL BERGER is a freelance writer living in Honolulu with her two teenagers and two kittens, where she revels in their havoc and joy in equal measures. She is currently plotting to split her time between Honolulu and her other favorite city, Paris, where she spends every July as a Program Fellow at the Paris American Academy’s Creative Writing Workshop. Besides Full Grown People, for which this is her second essay, her work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Travelati, Hawaii Business, and Inside Out Hawaii. She hasn’t made it yet, but she still plans to eventually show up at Marie’s annual Christmas party. Her writing world is housed at www.powellberger.com.