Heart Berries: A Memoir(12)

I’ve been released, but I am not better. I can’t work, and I won’t leave the house. Outpatient treatment: Because I am not crazy enough to be sedated in a madhouse. They think I’m better. I am a cat in heat—something my mother would say. I am unraveling in the dark kitchen. I am scattering my wet eyes looking for signs or something significant. I am incorrigible when I’m like this. I wish I could do anything but stand alone in a dark kitchen without you.

Every Christmas after Grandmother died, my mother locked herself in her room to cry. We always stood on the other side of her door, looking at each other as if she might never stop crying. Some years she didn’t come out until the morning. Some years she came out with red eyes, and she could barely speak. She’d motion to get the presents from under the tree. We passed them around, and I can’t remember a single present I ever received.

I lock myself away as she does. Some things seem too perfectly awful.

I only have crude things to say to you. I won’t fuck you anymore so it can mean less. I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress. There is permanence in physical craft. Laura isn’t absorbed in any beds. She barely perspires. She requires twenty-four-hour protection from her own scent. She keeps her bra on. She wears practical clothes. Her fleeces and cargo pants and that smell of non-scented goat’s milk lotion for dry skin—that must do something for you.

My body left resonance that can’t be dismantled or erased. I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends—convincing your mother that I could mother you like she does. It was laying warm towels across my legs before I shaved so that when you touched me, I was soft. It was withholding from you at the right times, and listening to you with my eyes and ears. I worked hard to assert intent on your bed and your body. I’ve soiled all beds for you with my wanting and preparation. I prepared myself for you as if I wasn’t working as a server, going to college, or raising Isaiah. The weight and the dust of me are in every thread of your mattress. Love is tactile learning, always, first and foremost.

When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, “I love you. I love you.” I go home and degenerate alone. The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you. My agency is degraded. For comfort, I remember my hospital bed and the neutrality of the room I had. I was safe from myself and from you. I’m stupid, waiting for the phone to ring, thinking you might call. I’d drive to you and be no better for it.

I want my grandmother’s eyes on me. I thought unseeing would be a cruel game to play with myself. But now I am reading the dark and knowing how my feet drag on every inch—feeling monstrous and tired. I’d like to have familiarity back, but all I see now is my father’s body over my mother, whose body is boneless like a rabbit’s. I’ve descended into my earliest memory. It is too horrible to know, and no work of unseeing will remove him from me, or turn the lights on in the kitchen. How could someone like you ever be on the other side of the door—on the other side of this?





4


in a pecan field



I wrote like I had something to prove to you. The stories were about the Indian condition alongside the mundane. Most of the work felt like a callback to traditional storytelling. Salish stories are a lot like its art: sparse and interested in blank space. The work must be striking.

It was spring, and I hadn’t stopped wanting you. I sent you letters. I bought a tripod to take pictures of my body and my loneliness.

I told my therapist that I felt no purpose without you.

“What about your children?” she asked.

“I believe purpose extends beyond family.”

“It’s been months, and he hasn’t reached out. Do you think we’re at an impasse?”

Leaving her office, I thought most people would have walked away with the realization that it was over. With the knowledge of what a normal person might do, I tried to enact it all. I went wherever I was invited and invested in my friendships. My son and I had long discussions about family and what he might want in the future.

“I think Casey would be a good dad,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Remember that guy who got me a PlayStation?” he asked.

“Chris.”

“Why isn’t he your friend anymore?”

“He was my boyfriend, Isaiah.” He looked shocked. We laughed. He has given me so much laughter. “I would not be able to live without you.”

“I know,” he said.

Isaiah has always known his brother. We made frequent visits. Because I was Canadian and a flight risk, I had supervised visitation only.

I remember one visit at the YWCA. Isadore was three, and he hadn’t yet learned how to sit properly or hold a conversation. I gave him a grin and tickled his tummy. He crawled underneath the desk and I followed. There was so much laughter, and then the supervisor asked us to be quiet. Isadore sat in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

“Do you need something?” I asked.

“Grandma,” he said.

I held him, and we cut our visit short an hour. The supervisor wrote a lot in her notebook. She shook her head at me. I asked her what was wrong.