A Word of Our Own: Ch 5 Diving Into the Wreck
"Is that where it begins—your hate—at the desire of like for like?—My homo-ness? Or is the problem further back...The drowned face staring at the sun. The masculine, no, male, absence..."
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A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life. And why it’s so hard to use that word lesbian.
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5. Diving Into the Wreck
…Is that where it begins—your hate—at the desire of like for like?—My homo-ness? Or is the problem further back, further down into the wreck? Not at the presence of a second woman, but the deeper thing it implies. The drowned face staring at the sun. The masculine, no, male, absence. How every unsupervised female body provokes its rage. The ghost of a lesbian is there already in the apocalypse of blood and screams when I was in, then out, rejected in the most intimate way imaginable from between my mother’s milky, blue-veined thighs, at which point they pulled apart mine to check, observed a cunt and declared: “Yes, a girl. Get that down in the chart. And count the fingers and toes. Clean them both up.”
The baby looks like it’s smeared with cream cheese and jelly.
Shooting the movie, the director yells at the actress, "Don't be such a pussy. Squeal like you mean it." So the woman does, and the baby howls and howls as it's washed and dried and wrapped in a dry pink blanket, and stuck in one of those plastic nursery bins. “Now, beam!” he instructs, and she does for all she’s worth, until the director finally says, "Cut. Let's take five. And someone get me a fucking bagel.”
The actress has lines on her face. Was surprised to be given this role at thirty-five. The director insisted on it. She has a sip of water while she tries to remember the backstory. The character is the daughter of a daughter of a daughter. Like that. Each risking her life to give birth. Yes, all the way back in time, the next emerging from previous thighs like a snake eating its tail. Which is a symbol for something. She’s still trying to remember of what when the director calls for her again, and some girl spritzes her face. It gets in her eyes. She rubs them and tries not to cry. “Perfect,” the director shouts. “Tears of joy. Now you…” He gestured to a moon-faced man lurking in a corner.
He comes over, pats his wife’s hand encouragingly. “Next time, we’ll get a boy.”
“What are we going to call it?” she asks. “We were so sure.” He looks around the room. There is a plaque on the wall. A donor or something. Kelly. That will do. They have some friends that are The Kelly's. So Kelly it is.
He pats her hand again. “Next time.”
She doesn’t meet his eyes, stares down at that red-faced, squirmy thing. Can’t imagine that hungry mouth anywhere near her tender tits. Thank god for formula.
“C’mon beam!”
It’s not hard to imagine the scene when she told him. Fifty years later, he’s still performing rage. “They cooked it up between them, her and her mother. Got her doctor to tie her tubes.” He grimaces at the deceit, pounds the steering wheel, shouts, “I should have been asked!” His hair is grey. He’s nearly thin after a lifetime of bulk. He has Alzheimers, diabetes, keeps crashing the car. I shouldn’t be in one with him. He looks at me, expecting sympathy, for him, not his former wife who was thirty-five and alone all week with two girls already, disappointed at a third, while he worked out of town and never did a lick of work around the house.
At thirty, I was living in New York, met Ana getting arrested and eating fire. At 35 we had an online magazine together and that was that. It was as draining and expensive as a baby. Just as loud, back-talking, but not helping with the rent at all. Seven years later we killed it and walked away free. No one brought charges, though maybe they should. I was forty and going just a little bit crazy. I am fifty now, fifty-five, and the damage is done.
Woolf wrote about fiction, but was really asking why women were poor. Me, I want to know why you hate my dyke guts. It’s the same question. Same answer. One that I refused to see for years. Refused to go back far enough—to my body, hers—though it shaped my life. Shaped yours. Without it, the word “lesbian” is nothing, a soap bubble floating in air. Has no history. No power. Rooted in the flesh, it troubles, echoes with desire, with love, the hate women are prey to every time we step in the street. It speaks, says, “Yes,” to women. Says, No, and no, and no to men. Portends the end of the world.
I fled the knowledge for years. Thought I was above it. Screamed, I’m not a real woman, I’m a dyke. That philosopher Monique Wittig says so. How free I felt, when I read that. Light as a feather for the first time since I chewed off my own arm to escape, abandoned my mother to her hate. Kept my lesbian life far from hers because even when we were back in touch, she’d ask, after 10 years with Ana, when I was going to stop that nonsense and find me a man. “You first,” I’d reply. “How many decades has it been since your divorce?”
“I’ll pray for you,” she’d say. It creeped me out.
God, please don’t make me straight like her, I’d pray myself. Don’t make me like her at all.
She has Alzheimers, now, too. I ride the bus 14 hours to Kentucky from New York and visit her in the assisted living place. It’s new and clean. They’ve hung a few of her canvases on the wall. They are Cezanne type things with blue trees. She chats in a disjointed, mumbly kind of way, pauses now and then, strokes my hand with pleasure, and says, “You’re so pretty. You look just like my boyfriend. God is good. Isn’t God good?” She tells me that lots of girlfriends visit her, then takes pains to reassure me they aren’t that kind of girlfriend, she isn’t “queer.” Not her. Then she asks how much I weigh. And is satisfied when I tell her, responds, “People are so fat these days.” Not her, she’s almost starved herself with fear in her old age.
I can’t believe that this is what persisted. This terrible fear. Of her body. Of mine. (Though am I better?) It is a tape playing in her head. “Praise Jesus,” she says and smiles. She’s a little nicer to strangers. We get along great now that she has no idea I am that little pink Houdini shoved in her arms.
She died a couple of months ago. I haven’t had time to grieve. We had to give up our apartment and move. We’re in France now. I’ve grieved for years. I’ll pour it out here. Say what I want. Open my mouth right here in public and howl.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 6. My Mother’s Garden
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K