Heart Berries: A Memoir(18)

I remembered when I thought I could go through with it. I remember being caught slumped against my bathroom door. My friend stuck his finger inside my throat until I purged. I remember waking up with blood and bile in my mouth. My friend said that he just knew I wasn’t okay. It was strange because I didn’t know. I had called him several times crying before that, and I can’t remember how I had such conviction that day.

I was not right to want to die. I didn’t want to leave my family. I liked my mind and its potential. I knew the type of burden I was. I was like my mother.

I have tried not to call her my mother. I started to believe that a person cannot own land or a family member.

“Where is your mother?” A woman asked me at a church thrift store. I was very small.

The woman took me to look for her, and, when Mom was found, she got angry at the white woman for chiding her.

In another store, I was accidentally locked in a bathroom stall in pitch black. I had gone to the bathroom, and a cashier came into the restroom and cleaned it. I sat silently in my stall, and my feet dangled from the toilet seat. I was too small to be seen. She turned the light off and closed the door. I heard a lock. Mom used to shop until stores closed. Eventually, someone let my mother in to look for me. They turned on the light, and I don’t think I spoke. Nobody asked why I didn’t speak. Nobody asked me what I did while I was in the dark. My mother didn’t feel like mine as much as I wanted to belong to her—to be inseparable from her.

She taught me that I didn’t own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don’t own our mothers. We don’t own our bodies or our land—maybe I’m unsure. We become the land when we are buried in it. Our grandmothers have been uprooted and shelved in boxes, placed on slabs of plastic, or packed neatly in rooms, or turned into artifact—all after proper burials. Indians aren’t always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I’d like to belong to that.

“If we can’t die right, how are we gonna live right?” my mother would have asked.

Isaiah needs me more than ever. I tell him that you only want white women. I frighten him and you. There is a reason to live better now, I think, but I can’t. The things I say to you both feel awful. I hear Mom in my own voice.

She is not all wrong. I’m carrying a child by a man who abandoned me for being too emotional and then got me pregnant. My emotions are unreasonable, you say.

You talk to me like you’re teaching rhetoric.

“You’re making leaps,” you say. “There are more pleasant ways of asking what you need from me.”

You carefully explain the semantics of your letter to Lillis. You decide for both of us that, given my transgressions, yours pale in comparison.

My language strengthened through all this discourse.

I asked myself if you chose me, or chose the woman I was when I was medicated. We fought until you had to leave me alone, pregnant, with Isaiah. I somehow panic when I’m alone with him. I turn into the woman I was when Isadore was taken away.

I had always risen to the occasion of Isaiah, eventually, but in your home I couldn’t stop crying. I have every trauma to pull from, to justify my fear that you don’t really love me.

You come back to the door to explain how you choose me every day. I only respond with questions.

“Then why did you leave me in the hospital? What has changed since then, besides my pregnancy?”

I really want to know, and you can’t explain. So, I can’t feel safe. I can hear my aunt’s voice, telling me that if my security depends on a man’s words or action, I’ve lost sight of my power. I feel like I become worse, the more I know you love me. We are both worse for loving each other, it seems. It can get better. Descending to ascend—they call it. Everything feels ugly, and we are only at three months’ gestation.

I plan for a trip to my low residency program in Santa Fe. We sent Isaiah, alone, on a flight to stay with Vito and Isadore for the weeks I’ll be at IAIA.

I searched your computer and saw that you told Lillis that the world was better with her in it, while I was in a hospital with brochures about my potential disorders. You had never told me before that the world was better with me in it, and I wouldn’t have believed it either.

I found a conversation between you and Lily, where she asked what happened between you and me. You said I was a “cool girl,” but it was just over. You were still fucking me, though.

You asked her if she wanted to hang out, not in a lecherous way. You are a great friend to women.

She told you that she had a problem with a man.

You told her you were a good listener.

Then, every Sunday, even after you and I made the commitment to a new fidelity, Lily goes to your house at night to smoke weed and watch TV. I learned, through the transcripts of your conversation, that moments after my son and I left your house, she was with you. I could not stop obsessing.

I explained to my friends that I don’t think you slept with her. The strange thing is they believed me. I guess I was convincing.

The knowledge proposes I either start each day as new and take you for your word, or I tear the walls down to illustrate my pain. I feel pregnant with burden, and I chose it. I want to take it back.

I broke every glass. I broke windows. I threw out your possessions. You didn’t apologize. You explained what a friendship is. You explained that, while she asked to cuddle you, you didn’t proposition her.