The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [22]
The third thing that happened is I got pregnant. I’m still not sure why, I took my birth control pills regularly. And more and more JT and I were not making love - shocker. But a seed went up and against all odds, in. Breaking my fucking heart.
Look here it is straight no chaser. The me I was if I leave Phillip out of it? Abortion. But something about him and something even deeper down inside me - like a hidden blue smooth stone - it all made that impossible for me to choose. And yet, there was no way to keep pretending the life we had together was anything but a sad ass country song, so as my belly bump turned into a hill, I did the only thing I could do, given the life I’d frankensteined. I called my sister in Eugene where she worked as a Professor of English at the University of Oregon and asked her if I could live with her. Across her leaving me as a child, across the waters of our age difference, across her life as a successful academic and my life as a reckless fireball. The fact was, we were both adult women now. Living adult women lives. Meaning we had something very deeply in common: the tyranny of culture telling women who they should be.
It’s not possible to explain to you how quickly and profoundly she said yes. Maybe she was waiting for me to come back to her. Bringing my big as a house belly with me. To birth and raise a child together, to make a family outside the lines. Because it was the only story I could think of that might live. And though she’d left me to save her life, she somehow knew how to make a space for sister, child, self. But I know too that it was a sacrifice to bring a daughter in from the cold.
Phillip eventually followed me to Eugene. He lived on the other side of town. We barely saw each other. He worked at Smith Family Bookstore, I went to school in English. Sometimes we’d run into each other, and lock eyes, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d put my hand on my belly to feel what was there between us. It was all I had to give to him.
Here it is. What I didn’t want to say before. It’s me. I’m the reason we went busto. I could not take his gentle kindness. But neither could I kill it.
Family Drama
WHEN MY SISTER WAS 16 AND I WAS EIGHT, SHE’D MAKE me “do” things.
Like this: just hold this apple in your mouth by taking a partial bite out of it. Yeah, like that. Now hold it, hold it … her socking the apple out from between my teeth, sending it across the room, while my little blond head shot to the left with the momentum and my teeth clacked shut on my lower lip.
Or this: see this ashtray? Do this. Just blow in it. One, two, three.
Ashes going all up my nose and all over my face.
Or this: aren’t the icicles hanging from the house cool? C’mere. Put your tongue on this one. It’s pretty!
I would have done anything.
Lemme say from the get-go - I adored my sister to the point of going cross-eyed and fainting as a kid. I thought she was mythic. For one thing, she had the thickest, longest, most beautiful auburn hair I’d ever even heard of, better than the idiotic dolls my mother kept buying me with hair that you could pull out from the tops of their heads - Chrissy with the red-auburn hair and the shorter platinum blond Velvet. Whereas I had a kind of … Q-tip for a head. Chlorine bleached head fuzz. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any hair out of the top of my head.
For another thing, she could read and recite Shakespeare scenes by heart. She’d seen the R-rated “ Romeo and Juliet” - she had the album. She could paint real paintings that went on walls. She had a black portfolio almost as big as me (that I was secretly convinced could be used as a sled). She could write poems, speak French, she could play guitar, recorder, she could sing,