The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [78]
In addition to loaning me his car, he began driving me to and from my communist re-education drunk driver courses every night for eight weeks. Bringing me a bottle of wine or vodka on the floor of the car when he picked me up. You know, kind of like a best friend would do. A kind, sly one.
He also drove me to and from my exhausting road crew days for eight weeks. Cooking me pasta when I couldn’t lift my arms. He went to my mandatory AA meetings with me and sat through the 12 steps and nodded and smiled in his black leather jacket all the way up until we’d get home and I’d rage rage rage at god and fathers and male authority and he’d dismantle my rage with funny jokes about jesus and monkeys.
He treated this thing I’d done - this DUI - the dead baby- the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone - myvodka - my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.
But there’s even a story deeper than that. After he moved out of his wifehouse and into my little one bedroom seahouse a block from the sunset cliffs in Ocean Beach, after he finished his MFA and I filed divorce papers and he filed divorce papers, after I had to go into the English Department Chair’s office and lie like a rug because his wife went in and spilled the shit, after we both bit the bullet and said the “L” word out loud, something better than sexual and emotional zenith happened. I didn’t know that was possible.
Night. Ocean sound. In my tiny seahouse. On the sofa. Both of us scotch handed. Mazzy Star playing all night all night all night. We’d been admiring his Karma Sutra book and he’d been explaining the Tibetan Book of the Dead to me. Sexuality and death. Home run.
He put his hand on my heart. I could feel the heat of his skin diving down into the well of me. He stared so deeply into me my breath jackknifed. I began shaking. Just from that. Then he said, knowing everything I’d told him about myself, he said, out of the blue, “I want to have a child with you.”
.
?
.
Well you can imagine how many ways I tried to say “No.” I wanted to pick up a phone. “Um, hello, human race? Can you connect me to the dreaded relationship department? I need to say something. I’ve got this man thing over here, and well, bless his heart, this man is confused. He’s clearly mistaken me for someone else, and he needs rerouting. Different area code. Different address. Different woman. Is there a special number to call? I know. It’s crazy. He thinks he wants to have a family. Yeah. With me. Nuts, huh? So can you just, you know, give me the number to relocate him? He may need prescription medication. I can stall him for awhile, but you may want to send someone out.”
His argument against all my fluttering resistance? One sentence. One sentence up against the mass of my crappy life mess.
“I can see the mother in you. There is more to your story than you think.”
The Scarlett Letter
FOR A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE I WAS FIRED AS THE Visiting Writer at SDSU, my belly grew.
Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me.
My belly grew in the halls of the English Department while colleagues tried not to look at or smell my ever enormous tits and belly bulge when they spoke to me about Cultural Studies or Gender Studies or Women’s Studies. Then they stopped speaking to me at all, and simply nodded or half smiled as they passed me, like you might a mooing cow.
My belly grew when The Chair signed a paper saying I could never work there again, and I had to sign it too, and while I signed it, instead of looking at the paper, I looked straight into her motherfucking eyes. Old bag I thought. She coughed.
My belly grew every single class I taught, the undergraduates smirking and nudging each other’s elbows, then turning strangely loyal like beautiful little revolutionaries against the man. My belly grew each week I taught the graduate fiction writing seminar, me staring them all down one at a time until they smiled, me helping them sew the colors of their words into