Mind, Body and Soil

August 12, 2013

My husband drives, both hands steady and tense on the wheel with his eyes straight ahead. The winding Colorado two lane highway bends dramatically against the ridges of the canyon, with tall red-stained cliffs rise on our left side, turning the sunlight bronze, contrasting the white snow that gathers on the side of the road, falling off and catching on the brush resting below. I crack the window slightly, letting a gust of sharp, frozen air rush in, filling the car with the scent of cold and a slapping sound that bites my ears. “It wasn’t supposed to snow this week,” I mutter, slumping my head against the window, watching dark clouds gather overhead. Robert only hums in reply, adjusting his grip. The start of spring is always indecisive. It’s a lost in-between when ice cracks beneath the surface of lakes, roots lift, and trees slam themselves hard onto the ground.

I turn my face and breathe against the glass, but my fingers are too lazy to draw anything. The silence between us presses against my ears, and I feel my heart begin to spread and stretch, beating against my bones.

His eyes hardly move, staring straight in the direction of the car’s movement and nowhere else. I wonder if he feels the holes my eyes burn into his cheeks.

I feel it in my bones first. Like something inescapable shifting deep in the marrow. Not a dread, but an inheritance of something that feels a lot like death. Passed to me from blood to blood, womb to womb. It shivers like a wet bird in me up from my feet to the top of my spine. I clench my jaw and dig my nails into my palms.

I think of my mother. I remember how efficiently her body moved, something I never noticed back then, and envy now. A woman’s knowledge is passed down with no ceremony, I think. I wonder if she ever considered becoming something different?

We drive for another hour. Making conversation only out of politeness, or rather, a need to cut the stale awkwardness that stuffed the car. Hours later, after pulling off the road to drive up a steep and narrow path, the cabin emerges through the trees. Robert wanted to come here to fix things, but I wonder if we’ll watch them as they break. The endless conversations we had circled around one unspoken issue, one I avoided naming directly that he refused to shut up about. Within his talk of the future and my dissection of the past was an unacknowledged truth: will we have the child, or will I finally leave him?

Silence stretches like a balloon about to pop. I close my eyes for a moment, feeling the steady, rhythmic buzzing of the engine beneath me, the pull of my body backwards, then forwards, then stopping entirely.

It’s drizzling when I open the car door, and I sit for a while looking at the familiar shadow of the old cabin through the windshield as frigid air slaps against my skin. Roberts is unloading our things; I can hear the wet thud of them hitting the dirt from behind me. The air is thick and charged, like a storm is coming.

Soon enough, it starts to rain in earnest. I quickly leap from the car, shut the door and wordlessly grab the handle of the suitcase as Robert lifts our two heavier duffel bags into his arms and we run down the dirt path towards the door, which is now made up entirely of shadow.

I don’t look around before walking inside, though I wonder if the swing is still there. Another missed opportunity to find space between spaces. When the door shuts, the only light in the cabin comes from the moon, which shines bright and silvery through the large windows to my right. In front of me is a staircase made of dark wood, which lets it blend into other shadowy parts of the cabin. Although I might reconsider that word. The word “cabin” alludes to it being smaller than it actually is. Its two stories tall, with high ceilings and one large, curling chandelier. To my left, I know there are rooms that are now most likely uninviting and breathless. Something within me crawls from the base of my spine up the back of my head, and the stale air sticks thick to my throat.

Robert turns on the light, and yellow beams down from the chandelier, casting more shadows than light. Robert moves through the rest of the home like that, turning on lights and admiring the old-fashioned nature of the amenities, holding our duffle full of the groceries.

“This is nice,” He found the kitchen.

“Hm,” Too quietly for him to hear. I can’t stop looking at a shadow at the top of the stairs.

“Should I start dinner?” His voice is repulsively loud, “I’ll help bring the bags to our room after.”

“Yeah,” I reply. “I’m starving.”

October 25, 1989

The ceiling fan swirls through the blackness of the girls’ room, slicing it to pieces. She lay in bed staring up at the small red light as it blinked. One, two, three, four, five times, all the way up until twenty, when she stops and starts again. Onward, the numbers line themselves up in a row, ready to be collected until she’s too tired to stretch towards them anymore. The girl sighs and turns over onto her side in her bed, pulling her pink duvet over her shoulder and chin before tucking her head underneath and humming loudly to distract herself from the small stream of light that pools from beneath her doorframe. She imagines the click-clack-click-clack of her mother’s manicured, white tipped fingers drifting deftly across her keyboard from the other room. She imagines the pleat between her thin brows as the lights move across her skin. She imagines that somewhere on the bed next to her, there’s an outline where her mother’s body once was. Where her own tempering left side was once sucked into the edges of her.

She feels the explosion in her body before she hears it. Red licks against the backs of her eyelids where they hide away. Last week was the fourth of July, and the first time she saw fireworks. Suddenly, excitement tickles her skin from the inside out.

Crash, crash, crash, and the house trembles with excitement. She wishes she could cut a hole in the ceiling to watch the fireworks explode, so with cold feet and a hot heart she marches clumsily through the door and into the bright hallway, trying desperately to keep her footsteps quick and even; reminding her body to work efficiently before stretching up on her toes and letting her body weight fall down, down against the handle of her parents door.

“Mommy! Daddy! Fireworks!” She shouts out of breath. Squealing, but she reminds herself to be patient.

Crash, crash, and the light from their closet is on. Crash, and her mother shouts,

“What the fucks wrong with you? I knew you were fucking her!” Another crash, and carefully now, she inches towards the door handle, ornaments full of glowing skies hang around her head, quiet and blue.

Here’s when daddy breathes fire, she can feel its heat from behind the door brushing her face.

She was always good at creating things; she could conjure anything she wanted in her mind and make it hers. She created stories, memories, and friends who each belonged to her, no matter how far away they were. They were her planets and she was their sun, always at the centre of things.

She imagines her friend, the small girl with pink wings, the one who lives up, up in the sky and who sometimes sits inside the pocket on the left side of her shirt. She holds her there now, and with a newfound seriousness, she presses open the door with authority, stomping towards her parents, her eyes blinded by passion and nerves, her arms unfurling like the wings of a dragon.

“Stop fighting!”

Her chest puffs itself out. Taller, taller. Bigger, bigger. Until she feels a pair of hands, her mother’s, pressing against her shoulders, pulling the wings back inside her skin.

She opens her eyes, mother’s on her knees now, smiling at her, then at daddy, then back to her. The air fills with laughter, cutting at her skin.

“Ada,” Daddy laughs, “We’re not fighting.”

They share another knowing look.

She bleeds.

She shrinks into herself, smaller, smaller, more embarrassed than upset and she hopes she hides it well. Face glowing red, nostrils flaring, eyes burning through the back of her mother’s skull before she blows out a breath she hopes will set the house on fire. She stomps back to her room, ears sharpening to the sound of her parents’ shared laughter at a joke she does not understand. Her feet are cold. Her dreams smashed to the ground, leaking onto the brown floors, staining them.

“Night, Ada!” Daddy’s voice follows her down the hall, and she wants to wrap it around herself.

August 12, 2013

The cabin smells like abandoned dust and rotten wood. Robert is finishing the last of our unpacking. Fitting our things neatly into the unfamiliar space.

I watch him as he moves: somehow both intentional and mindless. He says something about dinner, but I hardly hear him. “Maybe pasta? Or fish?” he mumbles, uncoordinated.

I nod, only half-way listening and caring, my attention is caught on the way he reaches into the bag, the way his fingers curl around things like they belong to him, rough like he’s about to break them. Careless.

Rage unfurled hot and thick and familiar inside of me. It stretched up towards my throat and tried to force itself through my lips. I move suddenly, turning my back to him and pressing the heel of my hand against my lips, biting down hard. My breath comes out in short, staccato pants. I hope somewhere full of malice that he’ll notice, ask what’s wrong, so whatever anger that’s boiling inside of me can be released. But he won’t, so I wait until the feeling subsides, eyes rolling achingly against my skull.

I’d memorised his every movement, the way he wipes his mouth after eating, the way he chews every third or fourth bite with his mouth open, smacking his lips together before throwing a knowing, bashful smile in my direction and shutting up again. I know the way his head tilts when he listens to me speak, never understanding but desperate to. So, so desperate. I know the slight drag of his right foot across the floorboards when he’s tired. I know him like a book I’ve read too many times that the bindings come undone and the pages all fell out and I read them all from memory.

I imagine leaving him. The thought came to me as easily as an inward breath, as if it had always been there at the corners of my mind, waiting. I let myself imagine how it’d go, “Robert,” I’d toss near him carelessly, “What are we doing?” He’d know what I meant. I’d phrase it perfectly to cut him in half. He’d beg me to stay, but my life would already be dragging behind me towards the door. I’d tell him I never loved him, but that the time we spent together wasn’t wasted, but over. I’d say it with no fire, no malice, no heat, and no ice, so he’d know just how much I do not care. My body shakes as I think those last four words, and I want to throw them somewhere, release them from my body. I turn back towards Rob, who doesn’t notice me noticing him. He has a half smile on his lips that pulls his cheeks back slightly. His stubble has grown back in uneven patches, and there are two faint lines creasing the side of his right eye.

Standing here in the dim cabin, with his voice still echoing through the once stale, rotting space, I feel terror. Not of him, but of myself. Because I’ll probably never leave him. I’ll never be able to actually leave him. I am tied to him in a way I can’t unravel.

My body moves before my mind, and I go to him, rage still breathing, huffed and impatient, living tight but cool as stone in my stomach. He looks up at me, brows slightly raised as though surprised by my sudden nearness. He gestures at me with his arms and I hesitate, willing the fire in me to come back, and when it doesn’t, I let myself shrivel and die; I let him shield me from himself.

I think of my father, and the way his hands wrapped around things like he meant it. As if he felt the ridges and contours of all things and wanted to make them his own. Every footstep, every laugh, every look, and every touch had something to say. I think of him now: decrepit, old and stupid. I wonder what the old him would think if he could see me now. A part of him would understand me, I think. A part of him would find Robert insubstantial enough to resent, but a part of him would understand me. Why I chose him, I mean. I was never as fragile as my mother. I took after my father in sharpness and rigid intellect. There is a power that comes with knowing how to own the things around you. There is a power in being able to grasp words, people, and things and make them yours. From him, I learned to take up space invisibly. To know where others lines are not drawn and draw them yourself, and make sure your logic lines up perfectly that no one around you will find the right words to tear it apart. That was the power my father held over my mother and many others.

The fire from when I met Robert had turned to embers and ash and left a chalky residue on every surface of my life. Including the kitchen where he now stands, in the home we will be living in for the next week. He owns things without knowing it. He owns them because not caring means breaking things, taking them, and molding them, with little consideration or care for me. And I know, with more force than I know most things, that my father would hate me if he saw me now. More than he resented my mother and more than he’d resent Robert if he really knew him. He’d resent me because I have thought about leaving more times than I can count and have not yet stepped out the door. He’d resent me because, unlike my mother and maybe even himself, I have a wildness about me. A fire that seemed to be the only thing that ignited my father’s curiosity to allow him to fan the flames of someone else’s personhood as much as he fanned his own. He watched me scribble like a wild thing and stand on the shoreline when the sea was raging, my hair whipped across my face, and he never saw me smile. He saw me grab handfuls of rocks on the beach when the other children played and throw them hard. He watched me scream and rage and beat against things when I didn’t get my way. I know I buried myself with my mother. And now I’m a coward, sitting across the lap of a blind man I hate. I’m as bad as my mother once was: I’ve buried all of my valuable parts.

In the window, I see our reflection. I see the back of Robert’s balding scalp and my own drooping, unarresting face. My blonde hair contrasts the few black strands that dangle from his neck. I drop my hand along the back of the brown leather chair and let it swing. Behind us, the trees bend towards one another. Tangled, gnarly branches are wet and clinging to the earth as the rain pounds them hard and the wind makes them swing, and I watch as things rest against other things, carrying the weight of each other without protest.