The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [85]
Green world.
We had no time. We had no energy. We had no money. What we had was making art in the woods. So when Andy turned to me one night over scotches and said “We should invent a Northwest press that isn’t about fucking old growth and salmon,” and I laughed my ass off, and then said, “Yeah, we should,” we just … did. Which is how the zenith of our depletion changed into the zenith of our creative production. Andy and me, we had another child. An unruly literary press, which we named “Chiasmus.” Turned out, there were lots of writers in the Northwest who were tired of old growth and salmon. Our first publication was an anthology called Northwest Edge: The End of Reality. Because, you know, it was. Everything we were before we were this, utterly transformed.
Shakespeare.
In our forest we gave art to life, and life to art made us.
Angina
I KNOW. I’M MAKING ANDY SOUND LIKE A MAGICAL MANSAVIOR. You’re going to have to forgive me. It’s an effect of meeting someone who is your equal. It’s an effect of an astonishment: that I love men.
And it’s not like we have some relationship from a movie. For instance, in the beginning, we fought. Boy howdy. I fought like a woman whose father had betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her. He fought like a man who never had a father and whose mother’s heart didn’t quite reach him. Working out our childhood wounds at each other. Because … because we could take it. Because there was something on the other side.
People - I guess I mean couples - don’t like to talk much about fighting. It’s not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look… sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.
When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere - out and away from a body - like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.
Though like anyone else, our arguments are sloppy and dumb and artless. We look like cartoon adults, just like everyone. Like the time he put all our living room furniture out on the lawn. Or the time I grabbed his computer mouse and bit the cord in half. Yeah. Subtle. But I gotta tell you. People who never get angry frighten me.
Andrew: man-warrior. From the Greek.
Lidia doesn’t mean jack-shit, by the way. Figures.
And then there are the little sufferings that make a bond as strong as love.
When I was 38 my Andy woke up to pee in the night. I heard him in that wife way, even as I was half asleep. Before we went to bed, we had heard some eulogizing about Ken Kesey’s death on NPR. I’d cried some. Him too. Then we went to bed. When he got up to pee, he turned the bathroom light on and shut the door.
Then I heard him fall, like a tree landing on the roof. I ran into the bathroom and he had passed out. He was on the white tiled floor, on his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, white as death, seizuring.
I yelled his name at him. I put his feet up on the edge of the tub and held his head in my lap trying to give him a mini blood transfusion. He came to, dazedly. I called 911. I put a comforter around him. A firetruck full of paramedics came. I dressed my son while they hooked my husband up to wires and electrical machines. They put my husband in an ambulance and my son and I drove in our car - the ambulance took the freeway. I took the back roads. I was there 12 minutes ahead of them. At the hospital he lived. We discovered a triglyceride problem that scared the shit out of us.