The Chronology of Water (24 page)

FOR A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE I WAS FIRED AS THE Visiting Writer at SDSU, my belly grew.

Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me.

My belly grew in the halls of the English Department while colleagues tried not to look at or smell my ever enormous tits and belly bulge when they spoke to me about Cultural Studies or Gender Studies or Women’s Studies. Then they stopped speaking to me at all, and simply nodded or half smiled as they passed me, like you might a mooing cow.

My belly grew when The Chair signed a paper saying I could never work there again, and I had to sign it too, and while I signed it, instead of looking at the paper, I looked straight into her motherfucking eyes. Old bag I thought. She coughed.

My belly grew every single class I taught, the undergraduates smirking and nudging each other’s elbows, then turning strangely loyal like beautiful little revolutionaries against the man. My belly grew each week I taught the graduate fiction writing seminar, me staring them all down one at a time until they smiled, me helping them sew the colors of their words into magnificent tapestries no matter what the judgment, them not able to sustain their disdain in the face of my unapologetic radiance.

My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.

And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound
of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.

At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I’d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don’t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a sexuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali - had anyone crossed me I’d have a head necklace. I’d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I’d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don’t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I’d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I’d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man balls and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives.

My belly grew.

My belly carried me.

My belly carried our love, bulging between our shit faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.

When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a
carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers.

My thirst to go numb began to leave my body.

At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It’s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.

That night after the knot tying business? We went home and staged a photo shoot. Me with a black satin ribbon tied around my neck and black satin panties in front of a deep red velvet curtain licking milk from a bowl. I don’t know why. We just did.

God the sex we had from that photo. Big bellied sex.

Now that, ladies, is a keeper.

Because when love comes to someone like me? After all my black holes? You can bet your ass I’m going to grab it. I may be damaged goods, but I’m not an idiot.

And baby, lemme tell you. I’m no Hester Prynne.

LIGHT.

Life.

Beautiful alive boy.

The night my son Miles chose to come there was a thunderstorm. In San Diego in April a thunderstorm is a gift - as if your soul might be wetted for a moment between days of endless sun.

When my water broke I walked barefoot in a nightgown down the street a block to the ocean. Andy was asleep in bed. My sister Brigid was asleep in the house. I cried and the ocean within me made way for this boy and the ocean before me opened up. When I got to the water I said “Lily. He’s here.” Then I walked back to the house. In bed next to my sleeping love I counted minutes. It was 5:00 a.m. The contractions felt like sentences before they are born. It is the only time in my life I have experienced a purity of happiness. Because my head was empty of anything about me. Nothing else about my life in the room. Lightning lighting up the darkness. Water everywhere.

I’ve met many mothers whose children didn’t come right or never came at all. We are like a secret tribe of women carrying something not quite of this world.

A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - “mizugo” - which translates loosely
to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it.

In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.

There are no Western rituals for the water children. I am an American woman who does not believe in god. But I do believe in waters.

The day Miles was born, Andy cradled my body through its crucible. My sister Brigid stitched love in beautiful thread around the room of us - nothing wrong could have entered her fiercely sewn world. When he came I wailed as women do for the child they have carried and brought into the world. But my wail carried another soul in its song. My Miles’ long body was brought up to my chest, the umbilical cord curling its milky grey spiral still connecting us.

He moved.

I felt the heat of his body.

His little mouth made for the mound of my breast and nipple.

So this is life.

The first thing Miles saw when he opened his eyes was a father who let out a sound I’ve never heard before. A male sob as big as space. A father with open arms ready for his child, ready to protect him his entire life, ready to love him above anything, ready to be the path of a man before him and hold his hand until the boy goes to man. A father who had no father himself rewriting the story.

My sister came to us and embraced the three-bodied organism. I do not know what she felt but her face is the word for it.

In my belly, before he was born, Miles swam. Back and forth and around and flip turns and kicks and such movement - so alive - watching the taught skin of my belly was a little
alarming. The force of him took my breath away. And yet we felt inseparable. His body was my body was his was mine. When I went swimming with Miles in my belly, which I did often, people in the lap lanes would marvel at how I could be so fast. So big, so round, so breasted - but fast. But I knew a secret that they did not. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.

THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father. My father fractured the hearts of all the women in our home with his rage. And so when I go back through and think about the men I have loved, or thought I loved, it is with a split apart heart. If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry.

Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don’t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can’t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life.

The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them … something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a flask and walked up to the glass window and lifted my shirt up and pressed my bare tits up against the glass and knocked. Phillip turned and laughed, pointed. Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked.

Michael. My father’s name.

Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in
his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas?

I didn’t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael.

There is so much I didn’t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women.

I didn’t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean’s house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child - warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice - with no father to smash it apart.

I didn’t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew.

I didn’t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be … pretty.

Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record album recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.

Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the
morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in.

It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us.

After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.”

I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that.

When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish of a child.

I called Mike in Seattle from San Diego to tell him about my man situation. I didn’t call my mother, or my sister, or my father, or any woman friend. I called Michael. I called to tell him that I thought I had fallen in love with a man who was not yet
untangled from a marriage gone bad. That the man was younger than me. A lot. That the man was big and beautiful and played the cello and could beat the crap out of pretty much anything. That the man had lived in Spain and witnessed some ETA stuff and that the man had interviewed people from Earth Liberation Front and that the man kissed me so hard in Tijuana I thought I’d swallowed my teeth. That the man was my student. All things that ought to have made another kind of friend go, Lidia, you are making a mess. But you know what Mike said? He said, “Jesus. Thank god you finally got with someone whose story can keep up with yours!” Then he said, “We’re going out of town for a week. You should come house-sit and bring this guy up.”