The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [48]
There was a prompt that required the story to include an important relationship between an adult and a child.
We talked for hours about what I could write about. I would say ideas and my mother would sit on the couch with her tumbler and southern drawl and say, “Yes. That’s a fine one.” Or, “And then what happens? Make it good, Belle.”
I won a prize. Like she had as a young woman-a story she’d tucked into a shoebox with old photographs and a drawing of a redbird my father made when they first met. My photo was in the paper. The day they took the picture my mother took me to get a haircut. My mother and I went to the 7-Eleven to get the newspaper the day the story was supposed to come out. We sat in the car and stared at the picture of me and read the small story about the “writers” who had won prizes. My mother said I looked like a woman. When I looked at the image of myself I looked … like a woman I’d never met.
The story I wrote was about a child who had witnessed a crime in a city park-a pedophile has been stealing and molesting children. The only other witness is a blind man on a bench. The blind man has no children. No wife. Just a gentle man. The child and the blind man have to piece the story together to help catch the pedophile. When called upon by authorities to speak, because she is afraid, the child loses her voice. But she is able to talk to the blind man when they are alone together. Each without a sense, they make a story that saves children. The police find out that before the pedophile defiles the child, he whips them on the bare bottom with a belt. The police are able to catch him when they hear the thwack.
In the newspaper the judge of the writing contest remarked on how mature my story content was.
My mother and father took me out to dinner at the Brown Derby.
We didn’t talk. We ate.
It was the first story I ever wrote.
About Hair and Skin
THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT HAIR AND SKIN.
In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love.
I have my sister’s. My own when I was a kid. My son’s. My dead infant’s almost hair. The hair of my best friend in high school. In college. I have Kathy Acker’s hair. Ken Kesey’s hair. My first husband’s hair. The hair of a longtime woman lover - several different colors of it. My second husband’s hair. My third husband’s hair. The hair of two of the dogs I owned. The hair of cats. The hair of- and this one is kind of random - my high school English teacher - who was over the top Christian - so I have Christian hair. I have Buddhist hair. I have atheist hair. Gay hair, straight hair, the hair of a post-op tranny who used to be a Scientologist. The hair of a white wolf. Seriously.
I have my mother’s hair.
What?
I can’t help it. When I get the chance to own the hair of someone important to me, I leap forward a little too zealously.
Ken Kesey’s hair between your fingers feels like lamb’s wool. If you hold it up to the light you can imagine shapes in clouds - like the touch of dreams kids have when they look up into the sky.
In anthropology the word fetiches was popularized by C. de Brosses’ Le Culte de Dieux Fetiches, which influenced the current spelling in English, and introduced the obsessive desire part.
A nicey way to say it would be to say “something irrationally revered.”
Fetishism in its psycho-sexual sense first cropped up in that swank sex writer’s work, Havelock Ellis, around 1897. Have you read Havelock Ellis? Was that guy high or what?
Kathy Acker’s hair is like blades of bleached grass - sharp and stiff - and smells like swimming pools.
It’s not just hair.
There’s the hair, and it’s true to this day if I meet someone with beautiful hair I want to put my face in it and lose myself, and one other thing.
Scars.
I like to run my tongue along them like mouth Braille.
Buddhist hair smells like smooth stones taken from a river. Whereas Christian hair has a cross between new car smell, dollar bills, and after shave.