Heart Berries: A Memoir(26)

“I’m trying not to be an asshole,” you say.

“Sometimes trying to be the absence of something makes you that very thing.”

I understand I am talking about myself and leaving. We can sit together for hours with the deficit, and it’s not unusual anymore—it’s ritual. Us both, trying to be the absence of something and forgiving each other for the children we have become. I think about my mother, knee deep in the beach with a rake, smiling at Larry. I think about myself, in the back of the truck, needing her. And after all of this there are still rocks in the old home I grew up in, the home that burned down. There are still lava sweat lodge rocks sitting underneath grass that overgrew a fire pit.

There is some stillness, even in my history—a good secret in so much bad. It almost feels like a betrayal to have good thoughts. Sometimes I know part of me is still a ghost, walking next to my mother, looking for something to make an offering to, holding her hand. Either this feeling means that part of me is dead, or that she’s alive, somewhere inside of me.





9


thunder being


honey bear


I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers.

Thunder is contrary. Thunder can intuit, and her action is the music caused by lightning. She comes because we ask, and that’s why falling apart is holy.

People said I came from thunder. I thought the quick chaos was my master. My dreams were about a spinning wheel—symbols of an unstoppable force that would ruin me. I was a child when I told my mother there was a large wheel in my dreams. She asked me what I did when I saw it.

“I watched it,” I said.

She looked at me carefully that day. She took out her paints and drew a thunderbird on a white poster board. Before the paint dried, I put my finger on its blue chest.

When I got my period, she gave me a Waterford crystal heart. I wore it like my brother wore his medicine bundle—around the neck and under the shirt. It felt like a new organ.

In a coffee shop, I couldn’t catch my breath and doubled over with pain. I remembered a man in the shower. I went outside. Closing my eyes only disoriented me further from the world, and holding on to things made me feel too connected—receptive to every fiber or bench or tree. I called Casey.

I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing—I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.

What do I do with my hands, I thought. What do I do with my eyes, which felt obscene in the light.

Thunder can awaken one’s soul, even the atheist without. We have clowns in my culture, who carry a subversive nature. When women wail, or when they won’t speak, a clown will throw its snot, or contort its body to point to how absurd our pain is—or how pointless it is to try to contain it. That contrary nature can awaken the dead.

I thought about my mother’s body, weak. My father’s body, jaundice. His pubic mound was black, and beneath the steam and soap, I can smell him—years away, I can smell him. I covered my nostrils. I remembered showering with my father, more than once, and I remembered my fear of breathing.

I had a new knowledge, or memory, and knew to be ashamed. The truth sometimes doesn’t appear exact but approximate. I knew my own fingers and my father’s were shameful. I remembered, in the coffee shop, something so brief and kinetic that I didn’t want to be in my body. My father, in the bathroom, had asked me to shower with him when I was five or six.

Things connect with the right conduit: one right memory had been absent.

As a child, I had drawn in my journal a male figure, naked. My mother was shocked, so I told her a friend had drawn it. I was forbidden from going to the girl’s house again, and my mother explained to me that men hurt children. They’re capable.

“What Michelle drew,” she said, “is not right.”

She called Michelle’s parents, and I remember thinking how right the drawing was. How I scaled each limb and part well enough that the girl next to the man appeared small, and her smile was not a real smile, but a sign. My mother, she believed my lie easily, without question. Not one.

Thunder Being made me feel like I had forgotten ten thousand irons plugged in. I couldn’t go home. I could only let things burn while I looked at my hands.

My husband held my shoulders.

“I don’t know what to do with my hands,” I said.

A graduate student approached us and ignored my eyes. I felt more present than I ever had, and invisible. It was Thunder Being’s game, or a gift of memory. This was more than simple traumatic stress, or me, open and gawking at my true misery. I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.

Casey and I went to the car.

“Do you want a margarita?” he asked.

My husband. Six-four, large head, large blue eyes, hapless and already acclimated to the chaos of me. My calls and my anxiety and the idea that I might never be okay were acceptable by now—usual.

“It’s okay to not be okay,” a mentor had said to me once.

I held the armrests of the car, looking outside like a child, waiting for my body to feel organic again, like when I’m teaching: bouncing around the room with an agenda. At thirty-two I was a child, a victim of something. I saw his pubic mound in my mind. I was afraid of what that meant. Afraid that I might remember clearly what happened. I made a life out of naming things, and I couldn’t speak this.