The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [84]
We were 25 minutes from the city I would work in. From people. We were 45 minutes from Portland. Culture and the socius. Virginia walked off a ways to have a cigarette. Then it was just me, Andy, and Miles. I said, “Andy, I can’t believe how beautiful it is here. It takes my breath away.” I turned away from him. I felt small. Maybe like a kid. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” he said, coming up behind me with Miles on his shoulder like a little second man. “It’s what’s next.” Andy has a weird way of making the impossible sound ordinary.
Our first days that ran into nights than ran back into days in that house in the forest were like what I understand Shakespeare to mean by the green world. Seriously. You know, where the action of a play starts out in normal world and then goes into green world where a magical metamorphosis takes place. Think A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I always wanted to wear that donkey head thing or run around naked in the woods. Actually, Northrup Frye came up with the phrase. Sorry. It’s the goddamn academic in me.
But my life with Andy and Miles in the green world really did magically change everything for me. For example. Christmas? At Christmastime we didn’t trudge up any godforsaken mountain hill in the shoulder high snow to get a goddamn tree. No one yelled their head off. No one cried their eyes out. We simply went to a tree lot and bought the biggest fucking Christmas tree they had, like a 12-footer, strapped it to the car, drove it to our sanctuary, and peed our pants with joy - the open space of the octagons filling with the smell of Douglas fir and glee.
And there was no architect’s office with smoke and anger pouring out late into the night while children hid in their bedrooms scared to sleep or dream. Miles slept in a bed 10 feet away from two giant writing desks Andy and I pushed together. So while the parents were writing, the child was sleeping, and art kept us well and space kept us well and trees watched over us so dreams could get born.
There was no mother you couldn’t find in the house because she was out selling real estate, or locked in the bathroom with a bottle.
I used to watch Miles fall asleep from drinking boob milk late into the night. I’m guessing all mothers do this. But I bet not all mothers were thinking of Shakespearean sentence structures when they watched their babies drunkenly drift into sleep. I know, watching your boy suck tit doesn’t seem very Shakespearian on the face of it. But when I watched Miles go from mother’s milk to burp to deep and frothy dream, his body heavy in my lap, the blue-black of night resting on us, I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is “love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.”
As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.
I didn’t sleep much the first two years in the forest house. Miles, bless his hungry little head, wanted more milk than any man alive. All night. I thought of my mother - and my own unquenchable, milkless mouth. If this boy wanted milk, I would give it to him. Maybe all our lives were being reborn in the forest.
My exhaustion was of course epic, but only in that way it is for everyone else, too. I taught full-time shooting for tenure so we’d have a shot at a life. Andy too exhausted himself. We taught in alternate waves day and night and parented by passing Miles off like a football between us. Thank god for breast pumps and bouncy chairs.
The exhaustion of new parents is absurd. Beyond absurd. But I’m not about to get all righteous about that. In fact, it’s something else altogether I want to tell you. I think our exhaustion in the green world brought us to our best selves. Listen to this: the first two years