The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [93]
We laughed so hard walking back to the car we couldn’t breathe.
We laughed so hard our sides ached.
We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.
A Small Ocean
MORNING. I’M SITTING IN MY CAR WAITING FOR THEM to unlock the doors of the swimming pool nearest to my home. I can feel the years of training like a DNA river running through me. All those years of 5:30 a.m. Then I see my mother, sitting in a car just like I am, her long gray winter coat with the faux raccoon fur collar, smelling a little like last night’s vodka and dayold Estée Lauder. How she waited for me every morning when I was too young to drive a car. How she sat there quietly, the engine purring alongside her middle-aged misery of a life. What did she think about sitting there in the dark? Who was she besides the mother of a swimmer and the wife of a jerk?
In Port Arthur, Texas, where my mother is from, the trees rise only a little off of the ground. The sky is the main thing, resting heavy and blue and hot on miles and miles of dirt. Heat singing like a fever in you. Making you forget water and that breathable blue past. Making you think the southern song was meant for you, the twang thick like syrup up your spine, cradling you like lemon drops in that hot dry always. The front porch. The cool of tile in the basement. Panties in the freezer. A breeze at night like prayer. And the land is filled with the up and down black steel heads of oil rigs hemming their way across dirt.
Where I was born the trees bear fruit and the ocean hugs the shore, making you believe in things like sea serpents and mermaids and Disneyland. When I was five, California had a smell. Orange trees, their waxen leaves like crowns studded by fruit. Marin County. Stinson beach. Warmth whispered around my skin, I could breath it into me, I was tanned like children get. My hair white against the whole sky. My eyes blue as lapis. In our front yard, orange trees, plum trees, and apple trees. The front of the house keeping its secrets, the hands of a child rubbing bark, or grass, or dirt; child’s games. But the back of the house gave way to ocean and the edge of things - a girl’s thoughts rose and fell as tides, drifted like the smell of orange blossoms through the windows and doors, out, across, beyond vision, beyond daughter. The house is of a man’s hands, and I was not a swimmer yet.
Maybe there’s another reason I went to Texas beside escaping to college. Maybe I was looking for something - something of her. Where in that dirt is she from? Is it from a damp place miles down, a place where dead things have composted? The wet at the back of the neck, a woman’s hand wiping sweat away, her eyes closed? Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away … a woman’s imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful?
My mother was an alcoholic manic depressant borderline suicide case with a limp. All of that.
In 2001 my mother went to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. I was in my ninth month of pregnancy in San Diego. She’d been taking care of my memoryless father for over 15 years by then. I know what kind of toll that caretaking takes. It must have drained every drop of her. My mother didn’t visit doctors