I don’t.
When we got back to our ordinary lives, Claire told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized.
A Body in a Kayak
WITH HANNAH, IT TOOK ME WEEKS TO FIGURE OUT IF she was attracted to me or just really pissed off - her jokes always seemed a little mean, always left me feeling like a female headed slow-poke. Sometimes she’d charley horse me good ones in the arm or thigh hard enough to leave a lump. It didn’t weird me out. Unlike everything else, I could feel it.
Once she bit my cheek so hard I sat in my classes the next week looking like I’d been mauled by a chimp. When she bit my cheek? I laughed so hard I cried.
I never thought Hannah was hurting me when she’d do things like shove me up against a wall for fun hard enough to ache my shoulderblades. I felt like I had pain in me that needed to come out. More and more I wished for the force of her. She’d drink my vodka from the bottle and we’d go for long walks at night in the graveyard next to the college and fuck on the stones of dead folks. After she’d flip silver dollars in the air and we’d lay on our backs and watch bats dive at them. I’d talk about dead things. She’d let me.
A few months in to our whatever it was she walked up to me and whispered, I signed us up for kayaking.
?
The U of O pool is where I first made Jr. Nationals as a teen. The pool had not changed - a slimy chlorine hell with Disney ducks painted on the walls. We were two of three women in the class. The third, big red, was 6’ 2” with a mane of red hair all the way to her ass. I had a hard time not touching her hair. In our giant fiberglass kayaks we learned kayaky things from our instructor, Jeff. In our cockpits. Things like the life-saving Eskimo roll. Hoping to master an ender. A pry stroke. A put in. A wet exit. Hannah learned fast because she was a tomboy woman, and I learned fast because anything in the water felt like home.
Our last class in the pool our instructor put each of us one at a time on the end of the diving board, kayak noses pointing forward, and then he grabbed the back end and heaved so we went in nose first and hard. The idea being that you’d immediately be upside down underwater and have to practice your Eskimo roll. I loved it. Not the life saving part. I loved being pitched over the edge and being upside down underwater. I asked Jeff to do it again and again. Harder, I’d say, and Jeff would shove me off the board. I’d stay under for as long as I could - sometimes until I heard Hannah or Jeff yelling my name.
At the end of the five weeks our instructor took us all to the McKenzie River for our “final.” Little bit of speed in the alley, little bit of white water for excitement. I decided that day it would be a really good idea to get incredibly high just before I met up with Hannah at the river’s edge.
On the forest trail to the put in I remember Hannah being annoyed with me, because it took me too long to put my life jacket on and too long to secure my paddle into my kayak and too long to pick my kayak up and trudge down the forest trail to the put in as I stopped and turned to look at things and got the kayak tip caught in bushes and wow look at my own magnificent red converse sneakers a step at a time in front of me making a rhythm and cottonwood blowing around like summer snow and look at the intriguing hats in the branches no wait those are BIRDS and stopping and laughing until she came back for me going WHAT ARE YOU DOING, EXACTLY? My kayak in the dirt.
Eye to eye, she saw it. Christ Lidia, you are high. What the fuck? You have to go in the water. To my huhuhuhuhuhuh.
So she slapped me hot and hard right on the cheek.
Time stopped. I’m pretty sure my pupils pinned. I saw stars. I liked it. For a split second I felt alive. I wanted her to do it again. Harder. But I didn’t say anything.
Hannah turned and picked up her kayak and left the trail in the trees, making for the rocks near the river’s edge. We could see the rest of our class up ahead - some on the rocks, some in the water. Still stunned into focus, at the point where the rocks met the water I saw a dead steelhead, half in water, half out. Even dead, she was something. The silver and black and blue sheen of her body, the white of her underbelly. She smelled like ocean. “She” because of her split open belly, and the dried up jelly of sunburned eggs on the rocks. I had a hard time not looking.
LIDIA. Hannah calling.
No one seemed to notice we were a little late, they just dipped in and paddled around like spinning ducks in a big pool of slow water, their shiny bright colored helmets looking like Easter eggs to me. Big red’s hair briefly mesmerized me, as usual, and I reached my hand out to touch it, but Hannah pinched my arm where fat grows and I got clear again. In we went, Hannah ahead of me, me getting a little too interested in the black lines on the ends of my paddle. Huhuhuhuhuhuh. I had my bright blue tard helmet on backwards but no one noticed.
My feet and legs stretching out the front of the kayak seemed easy to forget existed. The slow water curled long left then slow right, around giant boulders that I knew had steelhead in the eddies. The tree leaves hanging over the water quivered. It smelled like river - dirt and fish and wet and algae. I put my instructional paddle across the skirt over my lap and let my hands trail in the cold dark wet. I closed my eyes. I leaned my head back, up toward the sun, the skin on my face hot, my hands in the water cold. I thought I might be touching bliss. A surface I’d not felt in years. Then I heard my name too loudly and looked up to see Hannah looking back at me: LIDIA. PAY ATTENTION. Too late, Hannah. Too late.
When we hit the whitewater, instead of the lane we were supposed to navigate, I went down the one that was out of our league. Look at all the pretty white. Like lace. I smiled. I didn’t make one paddle stroke how I’d been taught. Instead, I lifted my paddle into the air and laughed, and I heard Jeff’s voice going LIDIA and Hannah’s voice going LIDIA but I was laughing, so the power current took me into a spin and I traveled backwards for a bit and then down and sideways and then right over, my shiny blue helmeted head going down and down. I didn’t have to think about taking an enormous gulp of air first. It’s in my DNA.
Upside down underneath the water holding my breath things became oddly calm. You’d think you wouldn’t be able to see shit, but the water is icy and green colored clear up where we were on the McKenzie. And the underwater blur isn’t as pronounced as you might think. But it does make your eyes feel like ice cubes.
The boulders bigger than bodies rose up dark black jade and shimmered with the sun moving through layers of deep water. I could see the bottom of the river. Rocks, sand and plant life moving and moving by. More than one steelhead shaped itself, their dark shadow selves doing that thing where they water - hover in the current moving only their tails. The cold water made my temples pound. My heart beat me up in my chest and eardrums the way it does when you are running out of air. My lungs burned. My hands went numb. I closed my eyes.
Something-I think a rock - scraped my paddle. Oh. Yeah. My paddle.
I didn’t think get yourself upright, dumbass. My arms simply lifted to position until I could see the lines of my instructional paddle - exactly as they should be. I definitely had the right grip to flip myself upright - I definitely had the right angle with my arms - up until I slowly and simply … let the paddle go.
Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity. The rushing water and strength of current pulled my arms, rocked my head. The upsidedowness of blood in my skull made my head ache. I closed my eyes. Still smiling. The cold wet of my life. My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void.
It’s possible it would be impossible for me to drown.
After I shot through the rough and tumble of the whitewater tunnel I pulled the skirt and made a wet exit not even bothering to hold on to my kayak. I somersaulted twice in the current and banged my knees and shoulder and something else on rocks and saw my own air bubbles furiously leaving my nose. But I popped up
anyway, taking in the biggest breath of my life. Coughing. Snot all over. Something warm on my cheekbone. Blood. The cold finally making me shiver.
I saw the entire posse on the shore, some of them yelling and waving or pointing. Then my exasperated instructor paddled up alongside me and grabbed me by my life jacket. “Let’s get you in - you gave us a scare - you gave us a goddamn scare, girl!” His voice controlled anger.
“Let go, Jeff,” I said, “I can swim it. Let go.”
It was true. I cut through the minor current easily. I swam upstream even though most of my strength had left my body.
Big red ended up swimming down my kayak and bringing it back to the exit edge. Magnificently. Hannah didn’t say much. She sat near me and ate an orange. She looked pale. She fed me orange slices. She looked extremely serious and soooooooo not high. I’d lost my high underwater. Jeff acted cranky - both because I nearly lost the kayak and paddle but also because he watched me enter the whitewater and surrender. It must be hard to know one of your students might drown. I wonder how often it happens. If at all. When we put our gear back onto the truck he pulled me aside. Were you trying to kill yourself? Jokingly, laughing the tight pitched nervous laugh of a man old enough to be one of our fathers.
Was I trying to kill myself. Letting go the paddle in deep water. Letting go the handlebars of the bike as a kid. Letting go the steering wheel. These are not questions I know the answers to.
Later at home Hannah put her arm around my waist at her front door. She kissed my cheek lightly as whisper. She tried to be womanish and caring, but it wasn’t what I wanted. My eyes stung. My chest hurt. I wanted to see stars.
She put her hands on my shoulders to gently usher me inside. I stopped and turned my head back to look at her - no, I said, harder. I put my hand on the door. She put her hand on my hand. She pressed my hand against the wood. Harder. Let lips do what hands do. Let hips.
I wanted to be pushed through her door and shoved to the floor knees first, my elbows pinned behind my back, my hurt cheek against the hardwood floor, my ass skyward, my good cheek exposed to whatever was coming next. Her face close to my ear: you could have died.
The truth is I was a woman who thought of dead things. All the time. I couldn’t help it. Dead daughters. Dead fathers. Dead steelhead. I wanted her to somehow knock it out of me body to body, even if it killed me, which it never did.
Maybe this is how the steelhead feels when it’s caught - thrashing itself against water, then land-a lifedeath fight. How some get released and others get eaten and others just float away, too weak to survive. All those body blows and wounds. Or when they swim upstream to spawn then die. Are they killing themselves? Or making life?
Inside her house, Hannah made me a cup of green tea.
But tenderness couldn’t touch me then.
I went swimming in the river alone every night that week. At a spot where hoodlums and teens got drunk and jumped in to shoot the rapids. Nobody cared that I was there. Or that I was older than them. Or alone. In nightwater, I didn’t have to feel what people are supposed to feel. There is a glooming peace there. At the end of the rapids, there is a still.
In water, like in books-you can leave your life.
Writing
AFTER MY MOTHER TRIED TO KILL HERSELF WITH THE sleeping pills, we shared a strange dream-time together. Every day after school and before swim practice I sat with her in the living room while she watched television soaps and drank. She looked exactly like a zombie. But one day, she put down the giant vodka tonic she was drinking. She dug into her purse. She said “Lidia.” She handed me a newspaper advertisement for a writing contest. Out of the fucking blue.
There was a prompt that required the story to include an important relationship between an adult and a child.
We talked for hours about what I could write about. I would say ideas and my mother would sit on the couch with her tumbler and southern drawl and say, “Yes. That’s a fine one.” Or, “And then what happens? Make it good, Belle.”
I won a prize. Like she had as a young woman-a story she’d tucked into a shoebox with old photographs and a drawing of a redbird my father made when they first met. My photo was in the paper. The day they took the picture my mother took me to get a haircut. My mother and I went to the 7-Eleven to get the newspaper the day the story was supposed to come out. We sat in the car and stared at the picture of me and read the small story about the “writers” who had won prizes. My mother said I looked like a woman. When I looked at the image of myself I looked … like a woman I’d never met.
The story I wrote was about a child who had witnessed a crime in a city park-a pedophile has been stealing and molesting children. The only other witness is a blind man on a bench. The blind man has no children. No wife. Just a gentle man. The child and the blind man have to piece the story together to help catch the pedophile. When called upon by authorities to speak, because she is afraid, the child loses her voice. But she is able to talk to the blind man when they are alone together. Each without a sense, they make a story that saves children. The police find out that before the pedophile defiles the child, he whips them on the bare bottom with a belt. The police are able to catch him when they hear the thwack.
In the newspaper the judge of the writing contest remarked on how mature my story content was.
My mother and father took me out to dinner at the Brown Derby.
We didn’t talk. We ate.
It was the first story I ever wrote.
About Hair and Skin
THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT HAIR AND SKIN.
In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love.
I have my sister’s. My own when I was a kid. My son’s. My dead infant’s almost hair. The hair of my best friend in high school. In college. I have Kathy Acker’s hair. Ken Kesey’s hair. My first husband’s hair. The hair of a longtime woman lover - several different colors of it. My second husband’s hair. My third husband’s hair. The hair of two of the dogs I owned. The hair of cats. The hair of- and this one is kind of random - my high school English teacher - who was over the top Christian - so I have Christian hair. I have Buddhist hair. I have atheist hair. Gay hair, straight hair, the hair of a post-op tranny who used to be a Scientologist. The hair of a white wolf. Seriously.
I have my mother’s hair.
What?
I can’t help it. When I get the chance to own the hair of someone important to me, I leap forward a little too zealously.
Ken Kesey’s hair between your fingers feels like lamb’s wool. If you hold it up to the light you can imagine shapes in clouds - like the touch of dreams kids have when they look up into the sky.
In anthropology the word fetiches was popularized by C. de Brosses’ Le Culte de Dieux Fetiches, which influenced the current spelling in English, and introduced the obsessive desire part.
A nicey way to say it would be to say “something irrationally revered.”
Fetishism in its psycho-sexual sense first cropped up in that swank sex writer’s work, Havelock Ellis, around 1897. Have you read Havelock Ellis? Was that guy high or what?
Kathy Acker’s hair is like blades of bleached grass - sharp and stiff - and smells like swimming pools.
It’s not just hair.
There’s the hair, and it’s true to this day if I meet someone with beautiful hair I want to put my face in it and lose myself, and one other thing.
Scars.
I like to run my tongue along them like mouth Braille.
Buddhist hair smells like smooth stones taken from a river. Whereas Christian hair has a cross between new car smell, dollar bills, and after shave. Alternately like chocolate chip cookies.
There is a woman I want to tell you about.
Right after I tell you about my mother. Which is where everything gets born.
My mother was born with one leg six inches shorter than the other. In my life it meant something completely different than it did in hers.
In my life as a
child it meant that the pearled gleam of her scar appeared exactly at eye level. So white. So beautiful. I wanted to touch it. Mouth it. When she got out of the bath I hugged her leg and closed my eyes and saw it and saw it and saw it. I saw the crossed white tracks, the too-white non-skin on her misshapen leg, the dark wire of her pubic hair. It made me dizzy enough to see stars.
And that’s not all. My mother wore her hair wound in a never-ending spiral at the back of her head. When she let it down, it reached her calves. It smelled like fir trees.
Every desire that flickered alive in me as a child came from those two images.
My mother said that as a girl, she let her hair grow long enough to cover her body, her deformed leg, her scars. So that there would be something about her that was beautiful to cover a crippled girl.
When I was 13 my mother became an award-winning real estate agent. More and more she left the house. More and more alcohol entered. The bathroom closet full of vodka jugs. She cut her hair off in that 1970s real estate agent on the go way. The long trail of her hair sat curled in a box like a cat in her bedroom closet. Sometimes I would sit in the dark of her closet and smell it and cry.
Harder
“NOW ASK ME FOR WHAT YOU WANT.”
Maybe it was because I only saw her three times a year. She lived in New York City, I lived in Eugene, Oregon. Maybe it was her stature - so high up in the academic echelons that it was like being awarded a very important prize to be with her. It could be it was that she liked my brutal and unruly stories. Or that I had no place in her daily life. Maybe it was her scar, her hair, my pathologies. But mostly I think it was what she taught me about pain.
When I was 26 a big time academic came to give a talk at the University of Oregon. I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was being all grad student faux smarty butt. I was all Sontag and Benjamin and Deleuze and Foucault. I was talking the talk of Barbara Kruger and Roland Barthes and … who the fuck gives a shit. Point being: I was not prepared to psychosexually regress fast enough and hard enough to make me leave a puddle in my seat.