Heart Berries: A Memoir(22)
7
little mountain woman
I feel like a squaw. The type white people imagine: a feral thing with greasy hair and nimble fingers wanting. My earliest memories, and you, and the baby, have turned earth in my body. I don’t know what I am anymore.
You have made me feel sick of myself.
I killed a ladybug when we were walking, and you looked at me like I was wild. I am the mother of your son. I don’t think you know how poor I used to be—that my house was infested with ladybugs for so long. My brother and I went mad when they wouldn’t stop biting. We tried to swat them with brooms and towels. We tried to corner them. Their death smelled like a puddle and wouldn’t leave our home. My mother didn’t come home when the bugs overtook the living room. She was working three days on and three days off, and, between that, she was with Larry: my sister’s father, who resurfaced in her life, twenty years too late. Just in time for my mother’s midlife crisis.
I don’t think you know how poor that made me feel, a squaw child.
I kill ladybugs whenever I see them. I know that the women you’ve loved wouldn’t do that. They consider the things lucky. So much of the world shames me.
I never get to say the full thing with you. Like the ladybugs. I don’t think you know how I feel. That having the baby didn’t make things better.
Before I went to the hospital, I drove to your home—at night. It was December in Mesilla. My moist hand stuck to your door.
You pulled me in, and we stumbled to your couch. We sat for minutes in silence, beyond polite conversation, in the dark.
I felt like a voyeur, staring at everything you owned. I wanted things to be mine too. You wouldn’t keep someone like me. I think you wanted the other women you were seeing—whole beings.
My thighs were sweaty, and your heater was buzzing. The skin on my neck parted away from itself like arid soil.
Your hands were holding themselves in your lap. You wore old clothes that stayed too long in the corners of your floor. You were dusty, and I liked that.
You’ve said before that I’m mercurial. I don’t know.
Pain feels faster than light. I react to pain, and there’s too much of it.
In my first marriage, I was a teenager. I got married to leave my mother’s house because foster care didn’t work. I had aged out. I left to prove I could leave, and then I had Vito’s baby. And then my mother died. I flew home to be in the room when they pulled the plug. He came with me, and we brought our son Isadore.
After her funeral, we stayed in my mother’s duplex and packed her boxes. She had left the house I grew up in because it was infested with mold. During renovations, reckless kids broke in and, in some drunken dialogue, burned the house down.
My ex-husband and I pushed each other—yelled at each other. And Isadore just rattled the gate at the stairway and sat in corners waiting for me. He was born gifted and moved silently throughout my world—unsure if he could trust me. He was a little ghost like I was to my mother. Little ghosts don’t carry little wounds. I think our pain expands the longer we’re neglected.
I got pregnant again by Vito. People have a right to think things will change. I allowed myself that much.
The tips of your fingers felt like wet grapes. I wanted to bite every one. I told you that I needed help, and you asked me to leave. A friend of yours had just taken his own life. It seemed unforgivable that I would be suicidal or wild when you needed me. I know at my worst I appear disposable, or that I make myself that way.
My first husband kept me awake at night, knowing I had to work the next day. I argued until I fell asleep in bed, and he appeared above me with a knife. My blinds were open, and, in the dark, I saw the moonlight catch his blade. He didn’t speak to me. When I started to move he left the room.
The next day I told him to leave, and then I begged him, and then I hit him hard enough to compel him to run.
I committed myself after you asked me to leave. The nurses gave me a composition book and a ballpoint pen: the least I was ever given to write with, and I produced so much work. Every letter was to you. I don’t think you know what your word meant to me. I found hundreds of ways to ask you if I was wrong. I tried to ask you, without your pride, was our problem your fault at all? Were you really cold, or do I just imagine people don’t care about me?
When I got out, I could read the dark. I turned the lights off in my kitchen and walked across the tiles. I had cleaned the room several times, and it became lonelier, as each speck was wiped clean. I felt absent without you or the dirt. Even my ghosts left me.
I wondered if your hands were still cold. You reminded me of a broken spring–rocking horse, and I was all weight.
Vito called the police after I hit him. I called my sister. When the cops came, they asked what I did to my husband. I wasn’t sure. Isadore sat in my sister’s lap. The officers asked me to show them my wrists.
They reassured me that Vito had no marks where I had hit him—and that he would be fine.
I pulled back my sleeves and there were small, thin, red lines across my wrists. My sister cried and held her mouth. She had seen worse, and I expected more from her. I knew that cutting myself was wrong. I was pregnant and a mother.
I reappeared in your life, and you were still seeing other women. I feel sick of myself when I consider my agency with you.
A woman you liked played the banjo, the one with the gluten-free dog.