The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [59]
Until my very skin made screamsong.
Short Story
SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book Her Other Mouths. In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.
I did finish my dissertation though. It felt like walking through fire. A crucible. I called it Allegories of Violence. By some bizzaro twist of fate it got published too. I still think it happened to someone else. But something weirdly good came from it. The two mes? We began to get to know each other. Intellectual me and blood bodied me began to hang out. Brush each other’s hair. Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other’s backs and clink glasses late into the night.
But there was a cost.
I was in my eleventh year of marriage with the Devin. I was a teacher of things, having achieved a doctorate and publications. But that woman I’d let into the house ravaged who I had been. Her zany brain force would not go. I didn’t want to fuck. I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go numb every night. I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head. I didn’t want to drink until I dropped. I wanted to write. A whole other book. My husband became like a willful unruly child to me. A submerged one. And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places.
Devin’s life moved bedward, fueled by alcohol and woman need. On one of his travels to another country for the first time without me, he found a foreign bed. While he was in Vietnam I waited for the word “husband” to come back. Days and nights. Then weeks. Then one morning I didn’t get out of bed. Days and nights. When I had to pee, I did. When I was hungry, I cried. When I was awake, a white nothing. At night I ate small white sleeping pills. Something I learned well from my mother. More and more of them. When I slept, I hoped to die.
Finally a gentle friend broke into my house because he was worried about me. He and a bull dyke named Laurel broke down the front door of my house when I stopped showing up at work. He put me in the shower. Then he wrapped me in blankets. Then he fed me. Literally. Then we watched old movies for three days until I looked at him and said, OK.
I thought of Brody and his clarinet and beautiful black kid hands. I thought of my best friend in Florida, the one my mother had outed out of my life. Of my arch angel, Michael and how we both left the Lubbock and made up lives. There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you.
Devin did come back, but we were never again together.
He drank himself ever womanward. I entered my female family lineage - a suffering that once I again claimed it, felt as familiar as a mother. Daughter. Sister. Home. Her name, depression.
In that long thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman. Not a wife. Not a mother. No one’s lover. No job or book gave me value to myself. I felt like a pointless woman sack. I lost pounds of flesh having no one to share a body with. My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else. Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I’d smile, but I felt like an insect. In the morning I’d lose interest in washing my hair or brushing my teeth partway through, and find myself standing naked dripping in the bathroom staring at the floor or holding my toothbrush in the air, foam dripping from my mouth.
When I wasn’t teaching or driving to and from teaching, I was at home. No, not home. An empty woman in a house. I’d sit in my