Heart Berries: A Memoir(17)

I tried to watch TV, and, behind the couch, the dog shat plainly on the wood floor. I told you to get rid of it. You began to clean, and then I resigned.

I was not going to be Laura or Lillis or Lily. I stood in the kitchen while Isaiah played in the furthest room away. You came to me.

“I read a letter where you said you wanted Lillis.”

“I didn’t say I wanted her,” you said.

“You said you wanted to kiss her.”

“We’ve been friends for years, and it was momentary. I’m not attracted to her.”

It went back and forth, and you were never really sorry. You compared your transgressions to mine. I am erratic and cruel sometimes. The medication helped, I argued. I would have argued that the woman I was, outside of the hospital, deserved better.

We found solace in getting drunk together. At your bar, I told you that I wanted to be chosen. You explained that you were sorry. You told me that you chose me.

After last call, you told the doorman that we were going to make a baby in a pecan field.

We both stumbled on dirt roads to pick the most lush and soft field. We couldn’t stop laughing. I believed, on this occasion, I was two inches taller than I had ever been. My body was rushing with newness and safety. You laid your coat down, and it was too dark for us to be soft and prepared. I saw your eyes and smiled before you kissed mine closed. We knew there would be a baby, as sure as we knew our love felt impossible and necessary.

The truth of this story is a detailed thing, when I’d prefer it be a symbol or a poem—fewer words, and more striking images to imbue all our things. I can’t turn it into Salish art. I had to fill these pages with the story of our new family, because the merging was so complicated, even I was confounded. I had to write full sentences, and the exposition lent itself to the dialogue, and there can’t be ambiguity in the details of this story.

For you, and our child, and my sons, I said what happened up and down on the page. Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.





5


your black eye


and my birth


Pregnancy didn’t stabilize our relationship. The baby was a Thunder Being inside of me. His growing cells and tissue heightened my awareness and physically incapacitated me.

He took the best parts of my blood. I became anemic.

I told you that I could not take my medication anymore. The risk to the baby was too much. You told me that you were prepared for it to be hard. We want the baby. We decided that Isaiah and I would move in with you.

The night at the pecan field amused us at doctor visits and ultra sounds. We always found a quiet moment to look at each other and laugh. There were good omens of our new family. We walked through a greenhouse with Isaiah. The smallest pots with little sprouts made us feel sentimental. You almost cried when you gave Isaiah a stuffed animal from your childhood: Charlie Chips, a puppy dog. He carried it with him everywhere. Your mother gave us things to decorate the baby’s room.

It only took four weeks for the symptoms to appear. I yelled at my son in a way I never had, for no reason. I had the sense to apologize.

“Hormones,” I said.

“Yeah. Dad Casey told me,” he said, forgiving.

“You know that nobody, not even me, has the right to speak to you that way, no matter what you do?” I started to cry.

“I know, Mom,” he said. He got himself a soda and sat with me on the couch in silence.

The work for my graduate program required me to generate prose and read more than I ever had. I also taught composition, and I didn’t miss a day. When I was in the hospital, feeling crazy, I learned how to manage my symptoms in the external world. The techniques for coping worked outside. In the house, I was unsure how to cope. I wanted to cry, and hurt people, and I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know if what I felt was authenticity, or a disease that would overtake me.

I wasn’t sure I could control my behaviors. My disease was not an excuse to harm you, I knew.

My eating disorder became a full order of every food I had starved myself of. My weak, and easily bruised, deficient body became thicker, like cedar bark or a trunk.

I started to ask you what you meant after you said anything. I started to scratch the back of my scalp, nervously, until I broke the skin. I refused to heal over, and pulled the scales from my open wound. I chewed the top and bottom of my lip so much that I chewed part of my Cupid’s bow off permanently—the most protruding part on my heart-shaped mouth never grew back.

I began to tell you, often, that we were only a family because you chose me on a drunken night—because it seemed like a solution to a fight neither of us could ever win: Do you love me enough? Can I be good to you? I won’t ever put a toilet seat up. You told me to stop.

My aunt said that being in the desert, away from my land, made me sick.

“Go to the river,” she said.

“I will,” I said, knowing I couldn’t.

I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from my heart. It was polarizing to be told there was a diagnosis for the behaviors I felt justified in having. And then, I knew some part of my disease was spiritual or inherited.

I had not stopped wanting to die. It was not romantic because it felt passionless—like a job I hated and needed. Romanticism requires bravery and risk. The obsessive thoughts ruined things. Good news was met with a numb feeling. The voice I heard was practical. It noted every opportunity to die and then noted how I refused to jump out of a moving car. I refused to take all the pills I could find. I refused to drink myself to death. I refused to cut my pregnant body. I refused to buy a gun. I refused to crash my car. And I refused to jump from a spaghetti interchange. I was aware of every opportunity I missed.