The Other Side (22 page)

I am out walking the dog one morning and stop for a moment at an intersection to lean over the stroller, to tickle my son's fat belly, and twist a tangle of his reddish curls around my finger. The dog perks up and takes aim at something behind us. I turn, see a man's large frame standing right behind me, and scream. Not a yelp, but a bloodcurdling horror-movie scream. A long moment passes before I realize that this stranger, who lives in my neighborhood probably, is waiting patiently for a chance to pass. The dog foams and growls and tries to lunge for the man as he walks around us without speaking.

In the afternoon I take my children to the park for a play-date. Two of my friends have invited us to join them; they
each have a child the age of my son, and these children are happy to toddle around the jungle gym, climb up and down the ladders, and, only with tremendous encouragement, roll headfirst down the slide. I try to join the motherly conversation: the woes of finding day care, of keeping a part-time nanny, all the gear that must be schlepped to the doctor for a checkup only to return with a virus that causes diarrhea for days. My daughter follows her brother up the ladder a few dozen times before she declares that the babies are boring and bolts across the playground, where she asks a complete stranger to push her on the swings. He looks around, smiles at her benevolently, before giving her a little shove on the back.

She doesn't answer when I call her to come.

When she sees me finally pick up her brother and march toward the swings to retrieve her, she sprints to the sandpit, where she greets a scruffy-looking vagrant sleeping on the park bench. Just as I reach the sandpit, she bolts again, this time to the other side of the jungle gym where I can't see her, or anyone else she might be talking to. I apologize to my friends, put my son in the stroller, chase my daughter down, and leave.

Before we get to the car, before I've buckled the children into their seats and locked the doors, my voice has grown so loud and terrible that it frightens even me.

You don't understand
, I say, my voice hoarse and rattling in my chest.
The world is not the kind of safe place you think
it is
. Her hands squirm in my hands. She searches my face, trying to understand.
There are people who would do terrible things to you. People who would take you and kill you and I would never ever see you again
.

Before I'm finished saying this, she cries out:
Mommy, you're scaring me!

You should be scared
, I say, starting the car.

The worst dream goes like this: I am stuck in a single point, unable to move, while the world goes on at normal speed around me. I can't open my eyes fully because the light is too bright. I can't move my limbs, which are stuck in molasses, maybe, or made of molasses. Time, too, is sticky and slow. No particular danger threatens me, but I panic anyway. Nearby, a group of children squeal and giggle and run. A couple passes, holding hands, bread-and-buttering around me. They take no notice of me at all. A bus unloads its passengers. A tree drops acorns on the grass. The day is sunny and warm.

On my very best days, my children and I take turns cartwheeling through the yard. We finger-paint long rolls of paper on the floor under the dining room table before I chase them through the house with messy fingers; they squeal,
running, paint on their faces and bellies and armpits, and we are all laughing, laughing, laughing. We hold hands and jump through the sprinkler, each of us fully dressed, soaking wet. Or we pack a picnic and ride our bicycles to the playground, where we spread a blanket and eat cross-legged on the ground, or lying on our sides, or crawling like lions in circles. That afternoon we might fall asleep together in the bed, the grass blades still stuck in our hair. While I make dinner, we turn up the music and dance in the kitchen and I swing my daughter back and forth, back and forth singing,
I know one thing: that I love you
.

I love you I love you I love you
.

And it's true, so true, that suddenly I've got tears running down my face, so I put her down to find a towel, a tissue, any scrap will do. She pulls at my sweater.
I just need a minute
, I say, turning away. But then they're both pulling at my sweater, their hands on my skirt, my legs.
I just need a minute. Just a minute!
I say. But then I'm already checking the soup, or sweeping the floor, or putting the dishes away. My son lies down on the floor, deflated. My daughter storms toward her room. They know it's too late. A door has closed. I'm gone.

I wake in a cold sweat, crying out in pain. The father of my children wakes or does not wake. He rubs my back, rolls over, toward me, and invites me into the nook between his
arm and torso.
It's real pain I'm feeling
, I want to tell him, though I couldn't point to any one place it most hurts.

I climb from the bed and weave my way through the house checking all the locks on the doors, peering out the blinds of the windows, my skin prickling, my hair standing on end. I pour a glass of water in the kitchen, and think of taking the longest, sharpest knife out of the drawer before I crawl back into bed. I might watch the darkness through one open eye for hours before I close it and sleep.

I open the door and enter the room where my children are sleeping. I stand between them, listening to their bubbles and hiccups, their slow steady breathing. I rest my palm on my son's back, his cool cotton pajamas, and underneath, his dream-warm skin. I smooth back the damp line of my daughter's hair with the corner of my thumb. I lean down to kiss her cheek, and inhale the smell that belongs to her and no other. She looks so beautiful like this: her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open.

It all seems so fragile, this life that I have.

But no, I take it back.

This is the place I would point to.

This, right here, is the one place it most hurts.

[twelve]

ONCE, WHEN DAD
drank two beers at dinner, he insisted I've been writing poems since kindergarten. I have no memory of this. My first memory of writing is in fourth grade. While my classmates write expository sentences in cursive, I am writing a novel. Or that's what I call it, anyway. A thinly veiled excuse to imagine myself caught in a love triangle with two of my real-life friends. We travel to a cabin in the Colorado mountains. The other girl goes missing.
Finally, we're alone
. I have not yet been to the Colorado mountains, but imagine them steep, sloped, snowy, and thick with trees. I imagine they are dangerous. I show the novel to my teacher, my librarian, my friends, my parents. I offer all the handwritten pages, eager for their praise.

By my first year of high school, I start keeping a journal: a spiral notebook in which
I write everything I can't say out loud. I show it to no one; no one knows I write each night before I go to bed. The notebook stays secret for years, until Dad finds it left haphazardly in the basement. He hands the notebook over to my mother, who calls me into the bathroom. She grills me about the material,
this smut, this garbage
. I stay
silent and nod or shake my head. She wants to know if I am a virgin. I swear that I am. This is a bold-faced lie. A year earlier I was raped by a drunk boy in my friend's basement.

I don't write that in my notebook.

I write about sneaking out of the house to get drunk, smoke pot, and have sex with boys who have already graduated from high school. I write about fucking a grown man on the golf course in the middle of the night. How his cock is so large it nearly splits me in two. I write about the man who dances me into a corner at a party and fucks me in the front seat of his car. I write about the college student who fucks me on the bottom bunk at a frat party, my head spinning from the alcohol, my friend passed out in the next room. I write about going to apartments to give head. In my notebook, it's all I want, this fucking.

Mom stands in the bathroom, the notebook in one hand, her other hand on her hip. She's angry but her voice is a whisper.
What have you done?
Sitting on the edge of the sink, I say,
It's fiction, Mom. My way of dealing
. A lie, and she believes me. She gives me back the notebook and it never comes up again.

I'm cleaning my office when I stumble across a stack of my early poems stapled together, stuffed into a magazine file of my writing from college. I'm not even sure I want to read
them, afraid I'll find something new I've forgotten: a broken bone, a fist-sized bruise.

Instead, I find delicate, trite little verses about The Man I Live With: how his touch, his gaze, his whispers in my ear wake me from a dream I didn't know I was having. In these poems, my love transforms me: it's beautiful, transcendent, sublime. The poems are terrible, but I remember feeling so proud of them, folding copies into envelopes and submitting them to magazines, printing and stapling a whole packet and pushing it across a table toward a kind and generous teacher. I remember showing one poem to The Man I Live With, who grows so angry as he's reading that he tears the page into pieces that fall to the floor.
You don't get to write about me
, he insists.