The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [24]
If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don’t know.
But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or shells or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers.
In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away.
She’d let me get in bed with her, and we’d move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. “ Watercolor covers,” she’d say, and I’d nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repetitive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high.
Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she’d escort me, and I’d be back in the upperworld of things.
What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live down there that year. How much I didn’t understand where the danger lived.
When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her art teacher Baudette very calmly but with complete certainty that she was not going home.
Ever.
My parents had to go see the officials at the school, and the art teacher, Baudette, who my sister had made into her better family, explained to my ding headed mother that my sister couldn’t be around my father. That mandatory counseling sessions would happen. I thought her teacher’s names were magical. Mr. Foubert. Mr. Saari. Baudette. I sat in the corner of the school office eating a little piece of paper trying not to cry.
I still remember the counselor’s name. Dr. Akudagawa. I remember how I had to stay with friends of my parents when the three of them abandoned me for sessions. How my father never went into the basement. How she rarely came up.
How my sister got closer and closer to the final act of leaving for college: exeunt daughter, stage left.
How my father’s rage came to live in the house for good.
How I would be what was left of her, when she gave me a piece of her hair as a keepsake.
How my father’s eyes would turn.
This is Not About my Sister
THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT MY SISTER. BUT IF IT WERE, I’d tell you again that for two years before she could leave our Oedipal household she carried razor blades in her purse.
I’d tell you how her colon was irrevocably messed up - how as a child I sat in the bathroom with her and held her hand every time she tried to poo. How she squeezed my little girl hand so tight I thought it might be crushed. Because it hurt that bad to shit.
I’d tell you how she was born with a wandering eye, and what the Dr. who later delivered me wrote about what that might mean for infants like her - how to watch for it as a sign of danger in a child. How fathers or uncles or grandfathers might have had a hand in this particular kind of eye disorder - in certain sexual abuse cases - a penis coming too close to the still developing eyes of a child.
I’d tell you how, in the end, my sister replaced my mother and father in my mind and heart, how we created a union of survival that means we are both still alive.
If this book were about my sister, I’d tell you how she lived past daughter.
And I’d show you a picture.
A Simca station wagon. Maybe white. Maybe wood paneling.
My father loved the Northwest. He loved to explore the mountains and rivers