Open Letter #8, to my step-father for the holidays

Do you remember our first Christmas together in Pennsylvania?  How the presents under the tree sparkled in the sunlight shining through the large wall of windows in the living room?  There were more presents under that tree than I'd seen under any tree this side of a movie screen.  I remember sitting in a great unfurling of wire-rimmed ribbons and red and green wrapping paper, how we fed the colors to the fire before I slipped into my new down jacket and winter gloves and ran out the door with Fred, both of us clutching the sleds Santa had brought us.  Mine was a sturdy plastic green dish, a shade lighter than my coat.  I remember how the snow twinkled, how I sailed down the driveway so fast, not even the wind could touch me.  I remember thinking that things had changed.  I remember feeling safe.

That Christmas came two years after the morning I woke up in my dad's bed and the cops came to take my statement and less than a year after we'd moved from Florida, where the pieces of my life lifted from their moorings and flew around me like hurricane debris.  You know what I'm talking about because you saw some of what went on, and we told you the rest to get back at our mother.  But what you don't know is that it wasn't the presents I noticed so much that Christmas in Pennsylvania; what I saw was the lights shimmering on the tree because the power hadn't been cut off, what I heard was Christmas music rather than the phone ringing with bill collectors, what I felt was a stomach full of hot chocolate and orange juice and sticky buns, and what I understood was that with you around, I would no longer have to worry about not having enough to eat or not being able to see to do my homework because Mom hadn't paid the electricity bill.  Furthermore, I knew I could count on you to ask me about my day, to take me in your arms and listen to me rattle on about my adventures in the woods behind our house and the books I was reading and what I was learning in school.  You had become, in a relatively short time, a more dependable and doting parent than the ones who'd raised me.  And this was difficult to believe because you were also a tyrant.  I knew you'd never look at me the way my molester father did, and I knew you'd never be as cold as my mother, but you ran hot, and I had plenty of reasons to hate you.  Still, you never knew, I don't think, how grateful I was and am for many of the things you did.

One of the first and most cherished things you ever did for me was teach me to fish.  I remember the slippery rubber of the squid you bought for bait, how when I grabbed it from the box you kept in the freezer, it froze my skin, and how when I dangled a thawed triangle of the flesh between my fingers, it wiggled insouciantly.  You taught me how to wrap the bait around the hook so as to hide the barb, how to cast the line off your dock, how to spin the reel and jerk the pole to tempt the fish, how to bring one in without losing it, how to free myself from a snag.

When I'd catch one, no matter whether it was a tiny sunfish, a gluttonous puffer, or something actually admirable like that barracuda we had to pull up with a net, you were always glad for me.  You showed me how to remove the hook gently so as not to tear off the fish's lip.  You urged me to put the fish back into the water quickly so it could go on taking its chances with this life, and that was part of the fun too, watching it shoot off like a backwards firework, a flash and then nothing but the brown bottom of the canal.

I remember the time Fred couldn't get hold of a particularly slippery fish, how it slapped wildly against the sea wall, how when he finally got a rag around it, he labored too long to remove the hook, and when you came outside to help, because you wanted to spare my brother, because you wanted to change things, you took the still-gilled fish gingerly in your bear-sized hand and pushed it back and forth just under the water's surface, like a kid playing with a toy truck, attempting to give it life.  I remember my brother's tight little forehead, the way he squatted on the sea wall watching your hand, watching the fish, watching the water turn red with its blood, watching it float onto its side when you let go of it, how his own mouth opened and closed and opened soundlessly as he stared at the rigid gills and the broken scales, how you said, mercifully, "He's still in shock," while moving quickly to retrieve the fish, your hand pumping that fish through the water like a doctor pumping a chest with his fists, how you wanted what we wanted, how in your better moments, you loved us.

Why I Don't Go Home for Thanksgiving

Tonight as I was leaving choir, my sister, who had just finished the drive from her apartment in a New York suburb to our childhood home in Southeastern Pennsylvania, sent me this text message: Sooo I get home and there were cops.  Bradley died :( had a seizure.  Mom found him. 

Bradley.  He was the son of a man my mother saw for a while when I was a senior in college, seven years ago.  He was odd, like his father, but his father exploited my mother, using her for housing and eventually "borrowing" her car when he moved four hours away from her to manage a hotel.  He had her car for six months.  She was too codependent to take it back.  Finally, she broke up with him and he returned her SUV with no thanks, no monetary compensation, and many miles on its engine.

Bradley's father was seven feet tall, wrote fantasy, and believed in fairies.  He had a deceased wife and, I believe, ex-wives as well as children scattered across the country.  He liked to talk about his kids, how many he had, and how he was a father, but in actuality, his kids never saw him.  To say he was around his son Bradley would be a backwards statement; Bradley was the one who stuck by his father's side.  At least, Bradley was loyal to his self-serving father until a few years ago when...I forget what happened.  Bill forgot his son's birthday (again?) or didn't give him a Christmas present or stopped calling him or in some other way (for a hundredth time?) made it very clear to his son that he did not care about him.  Bradley was a couple years older than I was, and though it took him a while to figure out that his father was a narcissist, when he figured it out, he got free of him and moved into my mom's house.

Why?  Why would he choose to live with my mother, of all people?

My mother is one of the least nurturing people I know.  I couldn't fathom why a guy who had been trying his whole life to get his father to acknowledge him would want to move in with a surrogate mother who would treat him the same way.

But you know what, my mother always favored boys.  I could tell by the way she treated my brother when we were growing up that she favored him, not because he was in some way better than me and my sister, but because he was her son.  She told me once that she felt a bit like a mother to Bradley, so I wager she told him at some point while he was living with his father that he could move into the house with her, that she'd charge him very low rent.  And she'd been kind to him in the past.  Had cooked him meals, had talked to him, had kept him company.  And that was important because Bradley was a loner.

Bradley had, to our knowledge, no friends.  But he had enemies.  He used to bike to Walmart, where he worked, in the snow.  I remember watching him suit up in these shiny black bike tights and goggles one winter when I was home for Christmas, how he sailed through the falling flakes and the snow on the long curve of our rural driveway, how he looked like a snorkeler out of water, his giant feet flopping over the bike's small pedals, his stick thin legs pumping the air.  He biked to work not necessarily because he enjoyed it, though he did, but because he wasn't legally allowed to drive.

When Bradley was in his young 20's, he was cornered by a couple of guys in the bathroom at work, and beaten.  The traumatic brain injuries he received turned him into an epileptic who suffered from frequent seizures.  I never saw him have one, but my mom has periodically told me about them over the phone.

As I was saying, Bradley didn't have any friends.  He may have had virtual acquaintances, however, because he spent much of his time in his room on the computer.  I suspect, from conversations I had with him, that he was on the autism spectrum.  He never really seemed bothered by the fact that his life was so solitary, and in fact, the conversations he had with the people at the house--my mother, my grandmother, and the occasional renter of my former bedroom, as well as me, my brother, or sister when we would visit--were probably enough.

I didn't know him well.  But I knew him well enough to exchange gifts with him at Christmas.  And I knew him well enough to know he was a good guy.  Benign.  I knew him well enough to feel sorry that he had to die at my mom's house, in the basement, the day before Thanksgiving, a holiday that would have seen him sitting in my mother's dining room with a bunch of people who didn't really know him and who were not his mother or father or any blood relation.

Today, his last day on earth, he helped my mom around the house.  She's been renovating the kitchen and building a kitchenette in the basement area just off Bradley's bedroom while simultaneously preparing for tomorrow's meal.  He was a gentle guy, and would do just about anything if asked.  I'm sure she bossed him around, like she does everyone else, and didn't thank him for his help.  So he spent his last day on earth with my ungrateful mother, hauling stuff around, maybe nailing things together, probably watching my 83-year-old grandma, possibly even cooking.  And then, sometime in the late afternoon or early evening, went to his room for a break.

When my mother knocked on his door to see if she could get in to work on some wiring, he didn't answer.  She decided to come back later.  When she returned, she knocked again, and again there was no answer.  She spoke through the door, told him she was going to come in, that she needed to do some work in there.

She noticed his glasses first.  Bradley couldn't see past his nose without his glasses.  They were on his nightstand, which is where he'd put them if he was sleeping, but he wasn't in his bed.  She peered over the edge and saw him on the floor.  By the time she found him this way, he was already growing stiff.

My sister came home shortly after my mother discovered Bradley.  She came home to cop cars and flashing lights, to the upstairs renter driving down the driveway where she gestured to him to roll down his window so she could ask him what was going on.

"Someone passed away," he said.

And she thought maybe it was our grandmother.  Maybe the cancer that had spread from her breasts to her bones had taken her home.  "Who?" she asked.

"The guy in the basement."

Bradley.  The guy in the basement.

And now my brother and his girlfriend, who also arrived tonight, to a house where a young man without a family was pronounced deceased by a coroner and carried away in a body bag, are trying to sleep on the living room couch while my sister texts me about how my mother and her asshole alcoholic boyfriend continue hammering into the wee hours of the night.  And my mother, who did not clean the den so my sister could sleep on the couch in there, tells her, "I'll move all this crap out of the way," and the "crap" is the stuff on the den floor, the stuff my mom cleared out of Bradley's room days ago so she could work in there.  The "crap" is what is left of a man who thought of my mother as a mother.

And this is Thanksgiving at my house.  And this is why I do not go home.  And I won't sleep tonight, wondering who will cry for Bradley, who will miss him if not his father, if not my narcissistic mother. Are my tears enough?

Daddy's Girl

"Do you want me to powder you?" he'd ask every time I stepped out of the bath or shower, a towel wrapped around me three and a half times, which was half as many times as the number of years I had been alive.  He'd look at me when he asked, but I always felt like it wasn't his eyes that were looking, but his lips peeking out from the dark curls of his beard, his teeth.

I didn't want him to touch me.  Yet denying him the ritual felt treasonous.  I was his daughter, and I loved him.  I was his daughter, and I owed him for that.  "Do you want me to powder you?" he asked, and the water droplets that had been running down my neck and back slowed as the seconds stretched between us like Silly Putty.  The longer I stood there, hesitating under his gaze, the more clearly he could see me for what I was.

I always said yes.  And when I did, his eyes would brighten to a bachelor's button blue and a container of baby powder would appear in his hand like a rabbit pulled from a magician's hat.  He'd pat the carpet and have me spread my towel and lie down.

Then I'd close my eyes and disappear into the same darkness where rabbits in hats quiver in wait for a hand.  

* * * * *

He'd call me baby.  But not the same way other parents would say it.  Not like how a mother caressing her daughter's cheek might whisper: my sweet girl, my precious, my angel, my baby.  I wasn't his baby like a daddy's girl is, like a daughter is--a downy duckling, a pretty princess.

Carol Babe-ah, he'd say, the first A as long as his favorite kind of legs, the second A as short as I was.  Babe-ah, because he thought I was a babe, because according to him my legs, which spread on a towel formed the letter A, were "hot," which was the temperature of his breath on my skin as the powder fell like fairy dust across my shoulder blades.  He called me by the name on my birth certificate, the name he and my mother had picked out, the name that complemented my twin sister's, the name I would respond to, and he gave me a second one that no one else got to take part in, babe-ah, he called me, Carol Babe-ah, because I was still the age he liked best, because I was still small enough to fit in his hand.

* * * * *

"Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Babe-ah Carol Rose," he sings--the refrain to the song he wrote for me when I was a kid--his voice spinning now around the wheels of one of the many cassette tapes he used to make me.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, you keep me on my toes!"  My godfather, Pat, plunks black and white keys on a piano, like everything is that simple.  "When they made your name the national flower," my dad's voice rises, "you knew you were the girl of the hour." The piano sings.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Baby Carol Rose."  He didn't make my sister a song.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah..." He didn't make my brother a song.  "Baby Carol Rose."  And nobody thought this strange.

"Oh babe-ah babe-ah," his voice never leaves my head.  "You water with a hose."  It wasn't like his tapes were private. "When your garden starts sprouting..." The photos he took of me in the bubble bath weren't private either.  "...you begin with your shouting!"  Everyone could see me, but they weren't looking through his lens.  Everyone could hear the song, but they couldn't hear the truth.  "Oh babe-ah babe-ah, Baby Carol Rose!" They never tired of telling me how much my father loved me.

* * * * *

Raspberry: a fruit, a color, a father's lips humming against his three-year-old's belly, his beard a Brillo pad polishing the places he'd wash and powder later when his lips had tired of trilling and his mouth had finished pulsing and the spot of spit he'd left around her center had been wiped away, though what remained--the memory of his hot breath drumming against her navel--could not be so easily erased.

* * * * *

The negatives exist in plastic containers full of glossy black and white scenes.  Held up to the light, they expose the poses he requested.  Little girls jumping.  Little girls laughing.  Little girls twirling their hair with the tips of their tiny fingers.  Little girls in short dresses, in bikinis, in camisoles slipping off their shoulders.  He called himself a photographer, an artist with a camera, and he mixed in some mountains and trees for good measure, and hardly anyone complained.  Certainly not his daughter, straddling a large piece of driftwood or spread across a sandy beach, her tight little body sure and strong as a long A, her eyes sparkling like the sea, his voice pushing her into position, his lens trained on her, always.

CoDA Files: Sherman Alexie, Excretion, & Secrets

I recently attended a reading by Native American author Sherman Alexie and not only enjoyed the three stories he read from his new collection, Blasphemy, but delighted in his hilarious self-revelations.  At one point, he asked us if we'd ever shit ourselves in public.  "Hold up your hands," he said, and everyone clenched in their seats.  "Liars!" he scolded, and we laughed, and he proceeded to relay his sordid shitting history, sharing with us how once he'd just left a hotel only to realize shortly afterwards that he had to relieve himself--but he couldn't return to the hotel because his OCD wouldn't allow him to go back into a building he'd just left--so he wound up pooping in his pants.  At some point, after sharing several such stories with the audience, he told us that if we want to write, we have to be able to stand in front of an audience and talk about this stuff.  He reiterated what all of my writing teachers have instructed.

Write what scares you.  Write what pains you.  Write your darkness, your demons, your ghosts.  Write your insides out.  Write blood, sweat, tears.  Write into the scars until they're festering wounds; write through the infection until the very words that tore you open turn to a salve.  Write what you have been told to keep silent; write what you have been told to keep out.

I am an apt pupil.  I dig.  I rush toward my shame with a knife and a warm glass of milk, ready to put it to bed.

But I'm constantly wary.

You must understand that the secrets we tell reveal more than just themselves.  Sherman Alexie has OCD.  Sherman Alexie occasionally accidentally shits his pants.  Those who think these are his most shameful secrets are fooling themselves.  And those who cannot admit that they too have a disorder or have on occasion experienced a loose sphincter are even worse off.

I have told you my father molested me.  Some of you have been molested too, but you do not share your secret because you believe it is a darkness you must hold inside of you, that it is yours to hide.  My father's hands on my body was not my secret to keep--it was his.  And I shared it.

Sharing someone else's secrets is not nearly as hard as sharing your own.

I have shared my own secrets with you, too.   I have told you how I paged through loved ones' diaries, how I betrayed my brother, how I hurt my sister, how I feel about my mother.  I have even told you the happy secrets, which ironically can be more difficult to share than the sad ones.

But you should know, because I have warned you in the past, and because it is a universal truth, that what I have told you, no matter how serious or shameful or vulnerable, is only a piece of what I own.

I am codependent.  You know this because I have told you, but you still don't really know what it is for me.  You think, perhaps, in general terms, it is low self esteem or fear or mistrust.  You estimate it has something to do with denial, with control, with insecurity.  Yes.  But it is better conveyed in detail.

Have you ever found yourself standing over a toilet bowl full of the yellow proof of your girlfriend's frequent middle-of-the-night trips to pee, with an eyedropper in one hand and a plastic cotinine test cassette you ordered behind her back in the other hand, and held your breath as you waited for a line to appear or not appear in the spot that would tell you whether she had lied to you yet again about smoking?   If when the results showed she'd been telling the truth--that she hadn't smoked or chewed nicotine gum in several days--and you felt ashamed for ordering the test, smuggling it into the bathroom, and testing your girlfriend's piss, you may understand what it is to be codependent.  But you'd understand it better if you also felt simultaneously or momentarily afterwards a discordant swell of confusion, frustration, and relief.  Confusion because your girlfriend was not lying to you, which meant she wasn't always a Liar, that she wasn't a demon or an angel but simply, complicatedly, human, a member of the gray space between good and evil.  She wasn't this or that; she was this and that.  And you found that fact frustrating and almost inconceivable because you were used to seeing people in one of two shades only.  She was forcing you to acknowledge a truth that made you uncomfortable.

Confusion, frustration, relief.  Your relief came from the very source of your discomfort--the truth.  She was telling you the truth, so you could breathe easy and stop trying to control the world, if only for a minute.

You might know codependency even better if weeks after you tested her urine and found she was telling the truth, you tested it again after she'd told you she'd been chewing nicotine gum, only to find, of course, that it tested positive.  You did the test not because you didn't believe she was using the gum, but because enough time had passed that the demon of doubt had crept in to tell you that the first test may have been a false negative.  After all, the instructions called for a clean sample, not stuff that had already hit the bowl.  This second test helped to restore your flailing faith in the first test, the one that you'd allowed to be your higher power that day--the test that you decided knew reality better than you did.

Months later, after your breakup, you stumble across the leftover tests in your closet and feel compelled to tell her what you did.  She forgives you--easily--and though you're glad, you worry because you have something else you have to share with her that makes you somehow even more ashamed.  The night before you shared with her about the tests, you invited her over for the first time in months, and you were nervous and excited, worried about your recovery but hopeful too, and while you were hugging, your hand brushed her front pocket, felt a hard rectangle beneath the denim.

It only took the tactile suggestion of a lighter for you to betray her.  Your mouth dried to a thick wool, your heart stuttered.  But you couldn't let her know.  You smiled.  You raised one eyebrow intentionally, like a skirt sliding up a thigh, dressed your voice in something a little more comfortable, and whispered a scantily-clad question of an accusation.  "Are you packing?"

She laughed.

You held your breath.

"My car keys," she responded, her eyes glowing fiercely with her love, everything about her soft and shining, oblivious to your puppetry.

You tell her twenty-four hours later, and it's almost impossible to type the words because to you this isn't a trifling misstep; it's evidence of how easily you can slide back into the past, how readily you will let your demon press your buttons so you can manipulate the people you love to assuage your fears.  To you, this is proof of how broken you are, and you tell her she deserves better, because you love her and she does deserve better, not because you want to manipulate her but because you're terrified she will leave your crazy ass and you think it might be better if she goes now rather than confesses to you months down the road that you are too much to handle.

So.

If you know how to work strings...

If you have good intentions but fall prey to dark deeds...

If letting someone love you feels like a pinwheeling tumble over the world's tallest waterfall...

You know that sharing about how you accidentally shit your pants is just a drop in the bucket.

Open Letter #7, to my fundamentalist Christian aunt

This is what I know about you: you are a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mother of two, a divorcée, a doctor, a teacher, a globe trotter, a breast cancer survivor.  You are also a self-proclaimed Christian.  You, of course, already know all that, but I'm making it clear because so much of what is known often goes unspoken, and when that happens, we tend to make assumptions.  Or at least, I make assumptions.  I made one recently, in fact, when I assumed you understood the nature of our relationship; I realized my mistake when I was surprised by your virtual friend-request.  I don't know why I've never been as straightforward with you as I'm going to be right now, though I've been forthright with you in conversations about other issues unrelated to our relationship as aunt and niece.  Perhaps I worried my words would fall on deaf ears and a heart so closed to understanding the truth that not even Moses could get through. 

We've certainly shared words before.  There was that time we had the heated debate about logging and owls, when you lamented the economic effects on families who depended on logging jobs that would be lost to preserve a forest full of endangered birds, and I said that the preservation of those owls' lives would mean the survival of our species because nature is our bedrock and we're all connected and that the loggers could log elsewhere or change vocations, and you wound up angry because you thought I cared more about animals than people and I wound up angry because I thought you had understood that God trusts us to care for the animals and the earth that sustains us.  

And there was that one time when something like ten family members were crammed into an 8-passenger SUV and someone (you?) said something about abortion, and I challenged your view of what it means to be human, and the car got so crowded with words and clenched muscles that I thought the doors would pop off.

Occasionally you and I exchange emails and text messages.  We even share a phone conversation every now and then.  And I guess I never knew what we were playing at with these interactions.  I suppose I was hoping we could be close because I know that despite what I'm about to share with you you're a good person.  And maybe you were hoping too that despite who I am we could be close.  But I'm tired of pretending for the family.  I'm tired of hiding from Grandma that her son molested her granddaughter, that he was not the father she thought he was.  I'm tired of not speaking up when someone in the family says something bigoted.  There are so many beam-filled eyes in the family, it's a wonder anyone can see anything at all. 

So I'll share with you now some fundamental truths about our relationship.

One: You and I are not close nor, without a miracle, will we ever be.

And two: This has everything to do with Jesus, God, and Love.  

To my understanding, you believe Jesus was the son of God and that he died for our sins; I believe he was the son of God too (in that I believe we are all God-incarnated), but I don't care if he came from Immaculate Conception or a one night stand or a rape or a fairytale, and I don't believe he died for our sins. I agree with you on this point: he was a prophet sent to teach the world about the true nature of love.  

Jesus preached the most sacred commandments--to love that which created us and to love each other (for we are all God's children).  He did not ask us to "tolerate" each other.  He did not say "force your beliefs on each other."  He did not decree "give some people rights and deny those same rights to others."

You presume that the Bible, which was neither written by Jesus nor by God, has all the answers in it.  You presume that the numerous interpretations of the language in which the book was originally written have been uncorrupted by what is lost in translation and by human beings and their own imperfections and biases.  You presume either to know that God did not create queer people or to assume that God did create queer people but damned their love in the same breath.  You presume to know what it means to be queer when God has made you a straight woman.  You presume to know God's design.

I'm gay and not even I have the audacity to pretend to know why I feel the way I feel about women.  I have ideas, but I don't state them as fact because I'm not God and I don't know.  What I do know is that it doesn't make sense for a god to create so much variation in sexual and romantic orientation and simultaneously demand that all people, no matter the way their hearts and bodies were designed, love and have sex exactly the same way.  And I don't see God stepping out of the heavens to correct the gay penguins or stop other homosexual animals from bonding.  Maybe they missed your memo about how God works.

I don't know why I'm gay, but I assume God made me this way for a reason--maybe to teach other people that love is boundless.  But the point is I don't need to know why, and I refuse to presume the Truth.  I know what's more important than knowing; I know what love feels like, what it is and what it is not.

For instance, I know it is not an act of love when you ask my straight sister about her romantic life but abstain from asking me.  I know it is not an act of love to tell another person, either overtly or covertly, that her love is a perversion.  I know it is dishonest, disrespectful, and unloving to misappropriate another person's love as "sin" just because you don't understand God's plan (or because you think you understand it).

I will not accept your friend request on Facebook because I anticipate reading posts about a god that has been whittled down to a force that gets squeamish at the notion of two people that have similar looking body folds loving each other; I can't stomach the presumption, hypocrisy, and judgment.  I will, however, continue to read your emails and email you back.  I will continue to talk to you on the phone.  I will even carry on playing board games with you and the rest of the family (some to whom this letter should be addressed as well) during our gatherings, and I will be as kind (but honest, yet) as I can in the moment.  I will continue doing these things because I know God is good and because I hold the hope that one day you will stop presuming you know how the Great Mystery works and start loving your fellow queer human beings the way Christ intended so that we can actually have a relationship based on something far more profound than tolerance.  Maybe God's waiting for you, too.

Open Letter #6, to the woman I love

I picture you walking through the rain, the bill of your cap pulled out far over your eyes, October's gold leaves carpeting the streets and sidewalks on which you tread, every step blurred by rain and royal colors and the fact that you left your glasses at home.

Last night I slept with the hat you used to wear to work every day, the one you let me keep when we broke up.  I snugged it into the space between my right arm and my body and would have turned to wrap the whole of me around it if not for a certain insistent cat curling into the curve where my left side tapers into my hip.  I wish I had kept your favorite sleep shirt too.

The other day, driving home, I suddenly needed you, and I thought I might do something crazy like find your car and fill it with millions of plastic googly eyes, the kind kids affix to puppet socks, the kind that make you laugh, small ones and big ones, with pupils of every color, all those plastic circles jiggling invisible grins, I'd pour them all in so when you opened your door, it'd be like one never-ending wink from me to you.  I thought I might go to the bank and ask for a hundred dollars in newly minted pennies, crack every roll on the lip of the driveway we sort of planned together before I moved out, spill the coins into a giant, shining heart, under which I'd place a note put together with notebook paper, glue, and cut out letters of the alphabet gleaned from advertisements from The Plum.  The note would say only this: Joey the Fish.  And you would remember our first weeks together and all our elaborate inside jokes and how easy it was.  I thought I might buy you a dozen sunflowers like the first flower I ever gave you, but multiplied, and leave them in odd places around the outskirts of your house so that you might not notice them at first but then you'd go to take out the recycling and meet a yellow-petaled head thrust between the can's blue lips like the happiest, strangest straw you ever saw, and later you'd find one glowing serenely in the washing machine like the promise of fresh socks and a new day.

It's the first time it's rained in months, with exception to one early morning a few weeks ago where it rained for a few minutes and nearly nobody noticed because it happened before most alarms had brought the day to anyone's attention.  The sky hasn't looked this forlorn since we were together, since the days of sad pizza and wet eyes and words heavy and tired as so many old pennies.  

You asked me if you were to ask me to marry you if I'd say yes.  But you'd been drinking.  And you'd been smoking.  You said it was always me, that I'd always been the one.  And I said no.  But I moved in with you because I loved you, because I knew you could get free of your garbage if you wanted to, because I believed you would.

But you weren't ready yet, and I got sick.  When you'd leave the house in the morning, I'd go through your laundry and sniff your clothes for the scent of smoke.  I'd thrust my hands into your pockets, my fingers seeking the plastic oblong shape of a lighter.  I'd go to the fridge and count your beers.  I'd check the recycling bin outside for empties.  When I didn't see any, I'd dig.  And when I'd find something, or even if I didn't--maybe especially if I didn't--I'd grab the key to the shed and look there, just in case.  Once I found a couple of cigarette butts beneath the shed.  Once I found some beneath the bush by the back porch, and there was that one time I found the old cottage cheese container hidden beneath the hood of the grill and filled with smoked cigarettes and the same gray sludge I imagined coated the delicate tissue of your lungs.

I'd wade through the bins in your closet, searching for secrets, searching for hidden cartridges for the electronic cigarette I hated so much.  In the kitchen, I'd grab your box of nicotine gum and spill the blister packs onto the counter by the sink and silently count, spending the rest of the day sick to my stomach because you were using more and more, because you were using, and I was still there, despite myself.  Sometimes the impulse was so strong, I'd poke through your backpack when you were in the bathroom or working in the yard.  I'd find cigarette stubs and lighters, an abundance of nicotine gum, lozenges, a whole pack of smokes.  What my hands found depended on what phase you were in.  

I couldn't sleep.  I was guilty.  I'd never been guiltier.  Because I was reading your text messages, too.  I was reading tiny snippets of truth that roiled in my stomach and made me feel wicked and foolish.  I burned like your cigarettes, like your cheeks after a few beers.  I hated myself for not having the strength to stop hoping all your lies would one day fall away from your lips like ash, all used up.  I wanted to stop resenting you.  I wanted you to stop resenting me for wishing you would drop your addictions.  I wanted you to keep your promise to me.  You'd said if cigarettes were my "hill to die on,"you'd quit, but all four seasons came and went, and I was still counting.

Gradually, the numbers took over my life.  I'd count how many times you'd go out and return with beer on your breath.  I'd count the seconds between when you'd locked the door in the morning and when you'd started up the car and when the gravel in the road had stopped crunching so I could get out of bed and tally gum pieces and bottles.  Eventually, the numbers got inside me.  I lost weight excavating your life.  Eight pounds total, and you'd comment on it, and I'd blame it on work stress, and almost everyone I knew half-believed I was anorexic, but I had a fever that was burning through me.  My heart ticked like a cabbie's meter so I could hardly keep up with my thoughts or my own breathing and was left to count the beats at night while you were sound asleep.  I called my sister and told her the number of chances you had left, which was one, and I asked her to promise to remind me of this figure if I ever called her in the future to tell her I was going to give you one more chance.

Finally, I counted the number of times you said we would go to couple's therapy, and I subtracted the number of times we'd gone from the number of times we'd promised to make an appointment and came up with a number that matched the number of notches I no longer needed in my belt.  And when, on our final night as a couple, we searched for a counselor together online and your conditions mounted and my patience waned, and somewhere in there the arguments about all the other things we couldn't reconcile came up, I gave up.  I didn't even have to call my sister because I knew we'd hit zero, and there was nothing left to count.

I moved out.  You wrote me to tell me you loved me, to apologize.  I didn't count the tears that fell as I read, and that was how I knew I was already getting better.  I started going back to Codependents Anonymous, and I promised myself I'd do the program right this time, for the first time in my five years as a self-avowed codependent.  I joined a step study group.  I told my friends and family I would not date for a whole year, that I would devote twelve months to myself and my recovery.

You and I tried to be friends.  Thirty days of separation, we'd agreed in an email, but when we met a month after the breakup, you gave me a list that left me sick with counting all over again:

number of alcoholic drinks and milligrams of nicotine in your life: zero

number of spiritual tattoos you'd acquired: one

number of times you'd jumped out of a plane since I'd last seen you: one

number of new, healthy people in your life: L, with L representing Lots

number of activities you'd tried that I'd always wanted to do with you: U, for Unknown but greater than zero

number of smiles on your face that I wished I had seen more often when we were together: I, for I can't remember because I was caught on the next two items in the list

number of times you said you missed me: zero

number of hugs you gave me: two, one at the start of our meeting, one at the end, both chaste

We planned to meet up again, but I had to cancel because I'd begun counting the days until I'd see you again, and all my hours were shadows next to the sun of getting to see you.  I wanted so badly to have you back in my life.  But I was angry, too.  I had been counting so long, and in the end, it had all amounted to nothing, and here you were, not even aware of the numbers, and your whole life was filling up.  Why had you waited until the space beside you in bed was empty?  I tried to count the number of times I'd told you your addiction bothered me, hurt me, was a deal breaker, but I lost track and the numbers prickled my skin.  I told you I couldn't talk to you anymore, that I needed space.

And after some fits and starts, you gave it to me.  Five weeks of silence between us.  The most we'd ever not talked in the approximate year and a half we'd known each other.  I focused on my own problems, and I went out with my friends, and I settled into a contentment I had not known when we were together.  I no longer had to worry about you or about us.  But I missed you, and soon the counting began again, but it was different this time. 

I began counting the number of times you'd watched a movie with me that I knew you hated but that I loved.  I counted the times you'd said something so beautiful to me that I'd ached at the words.  I counted your hands in my hair, your laughter in my ears.  I counted our quiet afternoons, our Sunday morning breakfasts and cups of coffee, our kisses, the way you looked at me whenever I wore a dress.  I counted the things we hadn't done together that you were now capable of doing.  I counted the days ahead of me, the weeks, months, and years.  I counted trips not yet taken, children not yet birthed, places not yet lived in.  I factored you into them.  

And then you wrote me an email, and I wrote you back, despite my concern, and our emails multiplied with our apologies and forgivenesses, and I felt X possibilities shooting up from the seeds of these new beginnings, and of course now I want to reach for you like a flower reaches for the sun, but I believe in promises, and I've had much practice counting, so I will live on meetings, and gold leaves, and emails while I endure the next few seasons without you, and I will sleep in a half-empty bed, one cat cinched to my left side, one hat snugged against my right, with countless thoughts of loving you warming me through the night.

Open Letter #5, to My Sixth Grade Teacher

You had short, curly hair that I remember as being a blondish gray, but the color never struck me so much as the overall effect, like you had bows for hair, and perhaps it was the subliminal notion that you were a gift that had me so taken with you.  It was your smile, too, because it was genuine and somehow classy, small but bright, like a 1940's Madge Evans smile.  And your steady blue eyes, delicately framed by your glasses, were a promise.  You were probably in your late 30's, and I didn't know how I felt about you, but I knew I liked you.

It's funny because even though I was eleven, old enough to actively make and retain memories, I don't remember much about that year, about what you taught us, I mean.  I can't even remember the easier things, like the way you held a pencil or a piece of chalk, or the way you greeted the class.  And I can hardly remember your voice, that fine auditory wave that guided me through so many lessons that year.  But I remember how you let me do a project on tadpoles, how proud I felt in front of the class as I encouraged everyone to come to the front of the room and take a look into the plastic container full of flickering, legless amphibians.  I spoke eagerly of the transformation they'd be going through, of the massive changes their tiny bodies would undergo in such a short time.  I stole glances at you the whole time, and there you were always, calmly smiling at me.

You thought I was gifted.  You told me I had a way with words, that I was special.  I loved you for thinking this, for telling me so matter-of-factly, for telling my mom and stepdad, neither of whom had ever told me I was special in any way.  You asked my parents for permission to have me tested, and I agreed, though when I asked what would happen if I passed, I was told I would be put with a group of students who were also advanced, and we would do more challenging work in another classroom, and that didn't sound good to me.  But I wanted to be special, so I took the test.  It was an IQ test, and I excelled with the language-related tasks but was stymied when it came to the left-brained problems presented.  In the end, I fell just a few points under the mark, and I was relieved.  We still had quite a good deal of the school year left to go.

You had a sort of honors club wherein high achievers in the class would get to take field trips with you.  I don't think they would allow this kind of thing today, but I absolutely loved it.  I remember how a small group of us went to your red brick townhouse in West Chester, the exclusive nature of it.  How you let me play with the antique phone on the wall, how the wooden floors squeaked and shone and reminded me of Christmas, how I realized you lived alone, how the feeling part of me that didn't yet have the knowledge or words for the feeling I felt for you wondered if you were like me.  You bought us pizza, and we all drank soda and ate and talked.  Sometimes you'd take us other places.  I remember the trip to the courthouse.  I don't think you knew what case was going to be happening that day because it was a rape case.  I remember the solemnity of that wooden-benched room, how still and quiet you were, how the rest of us sat close to you, quiet as mice, not saying how we felt, not knowing how to say it.

After sixth grade, I rarely saw you, but I made it a point to visit you when I graduated high school.  I found you in a hallway of the new middle school building, and you seemed tired out from all the newness, and I thought of your townhouse and the wood floors and I wondered if the florescent lights we were standing under had anything to do with the change, and I wanted something from you, too, but I didn't know what, and you wished me luck, and I left you, knowing finally, as I walked away, what it was I wanted.

I sent you a letter when I was a freshman in college, and to my surprise you wrote back.  I still have the letter, written on notebook paper, and am looking at it now.  Your handwriting is lacy, but not as fine and gauzy as a grandmother's.  It reminds me of the way you sat at your desk, your careful posture, the look you got on your face when you were grading at the front of the room while the class was hunched over their books, quietly reading.  You begin by saying what a nice surprise it is to hear from me, and you write about the snowy weather and "treacherous" driving and how teaching at the middle school compares to teaching at the elementary school.  There is whiteout beneath the whole of the word "elementary," and I wonder if you misspelled it the way I misspell cemetery because the second e sounds like an a.

You wrote the first half of the letter in red pen on March 4, 2003 and the rest of the letter in pencil on March 6th. Here, you tell me that college was one of the greatest times of your life, and in response to my having divulged my choice to major in creative writing, you proclaim, "Good for you!" And reading it now, I still feel your pride in me and in your job.  You go on to say that you read my letter to the class, I'm guessing to inspire them, and that "they were delighted that you bought a gecko."  I can't remember if I told you in my letter that I bought that gecko with my girlfriend, but I bet I kept that hidden from you; I can't imagine you would have read that part to a class of sixth graders.  You end your letter with this: "Take care and write soon, Love, Miss _____."

I don't think I ever wrote you back, and I have your letter but not your address because I lost the envelope.  You've retired, I know, because I've looked for you since graduating college and then graduate school, and I wonder if at some point I'll look beyond the dead-end results on Facebook so I can write you again, so I can give you this letter, so I can tell you that I loved you, too, and so I can freely admit that I don't know who you are but I know what you did for me and how you treated me; I want to tell you that you were one of the only sources of adult love in my life when I was eleven and that your smile and your belief in me were what kept me going when everything at home led me to believe I would never be enough. 

I guess I'm thinking about you a lot today because I'm an instructor now, and I teach reading and writing, as you did, but to college students, and today in the library a former student of mine caught me browsing through magazines in the stacks and told me how much I meant to him, how much my encouragement and disciplined manner helped him to become a better student.  And this came from a guy who did not pass my class.  But he'd worked hard, and I'd loved his spirit.  I'd pushed him because I'd wanted to see him go beyond himself; I'd wanted him to know he was capable, not just as a student or writer, but as a person.  So today, he told me he is taking the class again this term and doing well, and he looked proud, and I almost hugged him, but our eyes said enough, and he thanked me and told me he hoped to see me around.

And we probably will see each other around, at least until he graduates, and then who knows how long it'll be, or if I'll ever hear from him again, but I won't need to because I'll have today's conversation in the library, and I'll have your letter, and I'll know that I can be good to people because you were good to me, because you showed me what I was capable of, and you believed in me.  I'll never forget the love you gave me, Miss _____.  Keep smiling.

Gravity, God, and Skin: Parable and Interview

They say the only thing tethering us to the ground is the strength of Earth's gravitational pull.  They say we're all falling towards the sun, and if not for the Earth's incredible speed, we'd sink into that old star.  What would happen if God sneezed in the midst of this balancing act?  Maybe he does, and when he blinks we lose our footing and slip a fraction of an inch towards the sun.

God must have given us skin for friction, to keep the air from overtaking us, to keep gravity on our side.  If not for our skin, the g-force might come tearing through the marrow of our bones and cast us into a darkness so vast not even God could find us.  Yet there are times when not even skin is enough to keep out the forces that have no name.

* * * * *

When the girl was eight or nine years old and knew just enough about gravity and acceleration to swing an axe, she got it into her head to play Russian Roulette with a green lizard as it ran in dizzying circles up a palm tree in her backyard.  She swung at the trunk carelessly, wondering--the way one might wonder as she tosses a wad of paper in the general direction of a trash can--if she'd hit the lizard.

Hold on.

Yes?

What were you doing with an axe?

You mean why did I, a young child, have access to an axe?   Or do you mean where were my parents? Or why did I select an axe as opposed to a net or something more benign?

Yes.

Because of gravity.  I was falling away from my mother, and my life was hurtling towards me.  I grabbed what was nearby; I held on to whatever couldn't escape.

The blade bit into the soft wood, once at her hips, again at her elbows, and then a final time at her shoulders, where the silver edge sunk through cool green skin, the lizard's head easily bisected, the ripe red jelly of its blood inching up both sides of the blade as its pinprick black eyes bulged and its tail twitched like a hamster's pulse.  

Jesus!

Wasn't there.  But to his credit, neither was the devil.

Her mouth fell open first, her jaw muscles sacrificing their strength to gravity.  Her hands and arms followed, but the axe remained stuck in the tree, nearly parallel with the Earth's curve.  And for a few minutes, she swayed beside the dying, now dead, lizard and the seemingly oblivious palm tree and the innocent axe, and she tried to rewind time, but she was falling too fast, and there was nothing left to hold onto.

That's a bit dramatic.

Is it?

What did you do with the lizard?

I buried it.  I hope.

You don't remember?

Isn't that sad?  How memory, too, is victim to the forces that push and pull?  Perhaps feeling is the only force with enough constancy to matter.

CoDA Files: Good Girl

I wanted to be good.  So I never told lies, and I did, or tried to do, what I was asked.  I even tried to keep order for my parents, tattling on my twin sister whenever I heard her telling a story or I noticed she was omitting key pieces of information I knew my parents would need to bring a situation to justice.  Because of my own inability to lie or to let a known untruth live, my parents came to trust me.  It is perhaps for that reason my father never said, "Let's keep this between us," the morning he told me what he'd done during the night while I slept beside him in his bed.

Put together my abhorrence for untruths and my pride in being a good daughter, and my predicament should be immediately apparent: if I told on my father, I could uphold truth, but I would no longer be a good girl in his eyes; if I did not tell on him, his secret would have to live inside me, and my life would be tainted by this thing I could not share, but I could still be his favorite.

In many ways, this difficult decision--to tell or not to tell--bothered me more than what my father did in that bed.  When I look back now, I see the real travesty of my father's actions: he put me in a position in which I could not win, in which I would have to make a sacrifice because of him.  He had committed a great injustice against me, and we would both pay for it.  This was beyond unfair, but I was helpless to change it.

That morning, I told my sister, who put me on the phone with our mother who was staying with a boyfriend somewhere in town while my brother, sister, and I spent the Christmas holiday at Dad's.  For those of you who think the worst part of incest is the trespass, I will tell you that for me, this was not so.  Here is the real crime of incest: as I told my mother what had happened, I felt the weight of my father's betrayal in my heart, and I matched it with my own, word for word, tear for tear; I betrayed my own father.  I was sorry every second I was on that phone.

What happened after I told: my mother called the police and came to meet us at my father's apartment.  The cops talked to all of us in separate quadrants of the apartment complex's parking lot, and a woman with a yellow legal pad stood before me as red and blue lights swirled alarmingly quick beneath a patient California sky.  She asked me if I wanted to press charges.  I was eight years old.  I will repeat this: I was eight years old.  I didn't know what she meant.  She asked me if I wanted my father to go to jail for what he'd done.  I could see him wildly gesticulating in front of a couple of officers across the lot.  His brow was furrowed the way it got when things weren't going according to plan.  I cried.  I had told the truth, and now I would be punished no matter what I did.  If I said no, he might not learn his lesson.  If I said yes, I'd surely lose what little left I had of my father, whom my mother had divorced earlier that year.

I told the officer I did not want my father to go to jail.  So I got to have the truth, and he got to have his freedom, but despite all of it, I was no longer a good girl.

I didn't fully recognize my situation at the time, but now I see that my father not only put me in a position where I was set to lose, but he showed me an ugly truth most children wouldn't have to suffer for at least a few more years: adults broke the rules just like kids did.  This fact devastated my worldview.  What my father did put me in a situation where I had to relinquish my childhood, where I had to be my own parent.  You may have heard other incest survivors say this before, but it's true: that was the end of my innocence.  After that, I never trusted adults to take care of me.  I saw that they couldn't even take care of themselves.

This post isn't really supposed to be about what happened with my dad.  That's just a part of the picture.  The deal is it's been twenty years since I told on my dad, and I'm still not comfortable breaking the rules.  To this day, I try to be good--not because I believe it will earn me a ticket to Heaven or out of Hell or even because it will make life easier or more pleasant, but because I like to believe that rules give the world some sense and order, that they keep people from doing things they will regret or that will cause others pain--that they will keep me from being punished.

But no matter how good I am, I fall prey to the injustice of this world just as everyone else does.

One day when I was six or seven years old, I awoke with a high fever.  Our live-in sitter was still sleeping as it wasn't yet time for us kids to be up for school, my dad was either asleep or at work, and my mom was in a hurry to go to work, but she managed to move me to the couch in the living room, pulling a blanket over me and setting the oversized, pink-and-white dappled bowl reserved for vomit beside the couch before kissing my cheek and rushing out the door.  But she didn't leave a note for our sitter, who was a severe woman with a sturdy hand and a strong work ethic.

I was awakened by a gruff shouting that I sensed had been going on for a while.  With great effort, I lifted my heavy lids to see the fierce, red face hovering over me.  Through grainy eyes, I watched her lips open and close rapidly, like my goldfish's mouth when I'd pour flakes into its bowl.  She said something, but I didn't know what.  I was delirious with fever and fatigue and began to fall asleep again even as she raised her voice.  Suddenly, a cold rush of air hit my legs as she yanked the blankets off me.  "Get up!" she yelled, the words muffled by the cotton ball of my head.  I tried to tell her I was sick, but my throat hurt, and I could hardly get the words out, and she was not a patient woman.  The next thing I knew, my long, blond hair was in her fist, and my scalp was screaming as my body hit the floor.  Her thin, yellow teeth nearly poked me in the eyes as her smokey breath engulfed me.  I raised my hands up to protect myself as she began swatting my body and through the tears now spilling down my cheeks managed to croak, "I'm sick!" at which point she thrust a cool palm atop my forehead before drawing it back quickly with a sharp gasp.  She picked me up gingerly, then, setting me back on the couch and covering me with the blankets.  Exhausted, I quickly fell asleep.

When I was nine years old, I attended a public school in a poor neighborhood in Florida.  The administrators had their hands full just trying to keep us all under control, let alone teach us.  The classrooms were packed with hungry, love-starved kids and racial tension, and fights broke out so frequently that teachers didn't move to stop them but instead would put their hands out in front of the rest of us like a parent might do in a car during a sudden stop and say something like, "Kids, this is an example of what you should not do."  Lunch time was particularly painful because it often served as a school-wide detention period.  When it got too loud, for instance, or when a fight broke out, we were all instructed to put our hands and heads on the tables.  Anyone caught talking during this time would have to go stand on the stage in front of everyone else for the remainder of the period.

Often the young daughter of one of the administrators was asked to walk around the tables and patrol.  I was always dead quiet during this time, but as the minutes ticked by, I'd grow more and more agitated, as most of the kids did, because I'd been drinking chocolate milk and eating tater tots and was full of fuel.  To keep myself calm, I'd read my milk carton.  One day, I was silently mouthing the ingredients when the administrator's daughter pushed her pointy finger into my shoulder blade and said loudly, "You, get up!"

I remember how my heart jumped from my chest.  "But I wasn't doing anything!" I whispered, afraid even now to speak.  "You were talking!" she shouted in my face.  She was my size but maybe a year younger, and I could tell by the dark glare in her eyes she hated me.  At this point, the adult administrator on the stage, another woman who was not this girl's mother, shouted down that I'd "better get a move on."  Tearfully, I grabbed my tray and slowly walked across the large cafeteria to the stage, where I stood amongst the other kids who had actually earned their way to the stage of shame, and cried because I was outraged but also because I wanted to show my outrage, while simultaneously feeling like I shouldn't give that little bitch the satisfaction of my tears.  I hated her, and I hated that this had happened to me, one of the only students in the school who cared about her education (the way I saw it, anyway).  After five minutes or so, my teacher walked in and noticed me crying on the stage.  She demanded that the administrator let me down immediately, claiming I was a good student and did not deserve to be up there.  I was grateful, but the damage had been done.  I would never be good enough to escape punishment.

One day when I was in eighth or ninth grade and had just braved the bathroom after finishing my lunch, I was washing my hands at the sink when one of the popular girls in my class walked in, looked straight at me, and declared with a menacing snarl, "Bitch," like it was a fact.  We'd never even said two words to each other before that day, though we'd had classes together.  I was baffled, and I wish I could say I laughed, but I didn't.  I took her words and held them in my chest like smoke, crying myself to sleep later that night, knowing I had failed to be good enough.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the Thematic Apperception Test for a psychology class.  I had spent a lot of time and effort on the informative essay, and I knew it was good.  Which is why when my professor accused me of plagiarizing it, I fell apart in his office.  Here I was, nineteen or twenty years old, unable to escape that telephone call with my mom, that feverish struggle with my babysitter, that elementary school stage.  I swore to him I hadn't stolen a single thing, had never, in fact, stolen anything in my life.  He just leaned back in his seat and told me the writing was too good to be mine and that nothing was cited.  I stared at him, slack-jawed, and showed him on his computer screen where I'd cited, using the required APA format, everything in-text.  And he said, "Where's your References page?"  And I said, "It's attached to the email I sent you!"  And he saw then that he had neglected to open that file.  He opened it, and there they all were.  I told him I was a creative writing major, that writing is what I did, that I was in the Honors Program, that I was a Dean's List student, that I was, in short, a good girl.  He handed me a tissue and gave me a hardly audible apology and told me I'd earned an A on the paper.

The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I took a road trip from my school in Rhode Island to California where I would spend the summer.  On my way back across the country, I was driving through Las Vegas when a cop stopped me.  It was the first time I'd ever been pulled over, and I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve it.  When the cop came to my window, the first thing he said was, "I just want you to know you didn't do anything wrong."  I was no law student, but this seemed off to me, possibly even illegal.  He told me he'd just noticed I had out-of-state plates and that when he'd run them, they hadn't come up, but he admitted the computer system might have been slow.  In any case, he wanted to see my license and registration.  We did the whole dance, and he let me go...because I hadn't stolen the Kia I was driving.

This is all coming up for me now because I've been studying Step Two in my 12-step program, which states that we "came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."  And I'm realizing that after all these years, after all these incidents that prove that being good has nothing to do with the world and its order, I'm still trying to be good.  At some level, I still worry that the rules are the only thing keeping my world from falling into complete pandemonium.  I worry about this even though I know it's a lie, even though I know there are necessary betrayals and situations ensnared in gray communications and accidents and feelings that defy logic.  There is so much in this world that does not make sense and that cannot be controlled, and if I want to stop feeling like a victim every time I open my mouth or don't open my mouth or drive or simply just exist, I have to put my faith not in rules, but in a Higher Power, who doesn't play by the rules--at least not the ones we make--because if he/she/it did, there would be no sanity!  I'm not saying that rules are made to be broken (although some are!) but that I understand now that rules won't keep me safe or enable me to trust; in a world full of imperfection, only God can do that.

On Fighting

You can learn a lot from watching the animals, especially those closest to you.

I often watch my slightly cross-eyed Siamese mutt chase my housemate's slightly overweight black feline, Bliss, around the house as she periodically turns to hiss at him, and eventually, swat at him, and then, in a fit of desperation, growl at him.  He either thinks she's kidding or, like me, has difficulty discerning or sometimes respecting boundaries because he gets right up in her thundering aura, right up in her sharp, green-eyed glare, and soon they are rolling around on the floor in a ball of black and white and buff, Fin's teeth grabbing what his impotent, declawed paws cannot, Bliss's nails glancing off my metrosexual cat's pristine coat.  At this point, I stand and yell at them.  Neither my housemate nor I needs a vet bill just because our cats got high on a catnip-filled pillow and couldn't control themselves.

When I walk into the living room less than an hour later, I find Fin blissfully licking Bliss's head like he's forgotten her fierce mountain lion roar and angry talons.  Bliss, for her part, lies on the carpet like an innocent black lamb and lets Fin put his tongue all over her.  Is this the equivalent of makeup sex?

You can also learn a lot from watching kids.  (I know that's an awkward transition from a rhetorical question about sex, but stop allowing yourself to be distracted; I have important things to say here.)

Have you ever seen kids fight?  Of course you have.  You were once a kid, and so you haven't just seen them fighting, you've been a participant.

I grew up with a fraternal twin sister who was a head taller than I was (okay, AM) and a little brother who was my size so that when strangers stopped us to tell our mom how adorable we all were and to ask our ages, which would lead our mom to explaining she had twins, these people guessed that either my brother and sister were twins because they both had brown hair or that my brother and me were twins because my sister dwarfed us.  What our sizes meant in the realm of sibling warfare was that when either one of them pissed me off, I couldn't rely on my physical strength to win the fight.  My brother, though smaller than my sister, was stronger than I was and was also a boy, so naturally he seemed more dangerous, and my sister was definitely stronger than I was.  When I explained this predicament to my mother one day when I was eight or nine years old, she laughed and told me to moon them.

"Moon?" I'd asked, confused but eager to acquire this potential weapon.

"When they say something you don't like," she explained, "pull down your pants and show them your butt."

I didn't understand how my bare bottom could beat my brother's terrifying, skin-twisting pinches or my sister's ability to sit on me until I cried, but I had nothing else in my arsenal.  So the next time they pissed me off, I dropped my drawers and waved my ass triumphantly, like I had just stuck the American flag on the moon.

Incredibly, this worked.  They were so taken aback, so dumbfounded, and dare I say it, thoroughly rebuffed, that they dropped their words and fists and stared in horror before screaming, "Mom!  Mom!!!  Carol just showed us her butt!"

Unfortunately, my new weapon's novelty wore off soon after my brother and sister began reciprocally dropping their drawers whenever we had a fight.  We exhibited so many moons, we could have opened our own planetarium.  But you know how it is; eventually, you take the moon for granted, and the weather cools down, and you grow a bit self-conscious, and you stop wanting to expose yourself to your brother and sister.  So, gradually, without discussing it, we stopped mooning each other.

After I stopped taking my clothes off to thwart my biological nemeses, I was still scrawny as ever and still under attack, so I started playing dirty.  I pulled my sister's long, brown hair.  I sunk my teeth so deep into my brother's arm forensics specialists could have made molds from the indents in his flesh.  I pinched the softest skin I could find.  I dug my nails in.  I flicked the delicate curves of an ear with machine gun speed.  I threw shoes.  I kicked my sister meaningfully in the crotch so that I could feel the unyielding wall of her pubic bones against the laces of my sneaker.

To be honest, I don't remember how most of these fights resolved.  I know some of them ended on the side of a road with my dad's hazard lights blinking and a stick rising and falling on a couple of land-locked moons.  Some of them ended in time outs and groundings.  But the fights that our parents didn't see--I'm not sure about those.  I can report, however, that none of us ever broke a bone or lost a pint of blood or an eye or more than a few fingernails' scoops of skin in one of our duals.  And I can tell you that we have more resilient, more open, happier relationships with each other than many other people have with their siblings.  And now when we fight, no one has to reveal an asshole or receive a bruise.  We just say, "Shut your hole!" and everything is solved.

I'm wondering why this is.  How can I tell my sister to "shut up" or to "quitchyerbitchin'" and then two minutes later sit beside her on a train, both of us sharing our lives and laughing like she didn't just deliberately antagonize me and I didn't just say a few unsavory things to her?  How do we let stuff go so easily?

I've been pondering this transition from crotch-kicking to mostly-civilized-sparring because I want conflict with a significant other to go as smoothly as a quick barb--"Shut your hole, Carol!"--and witty rebuttal--"Not until you do!!!!" that ends a minute later with no hard feelings.

I've read that couples should practice conflict resolution techniques to strengthen their relationship.  They should learn the art of "compromise," of "give and take."  They need to "negotiate" and focus on "common ground" and on building "win-win" situations.  They need "I-statements" and time to "cool off" and feelings and objectivity at the same time.  They need ground rules and respect for self and other and a firm feeling that they are a "team" rather than enemies.

As you and I both know, this is all bullshit.

Conflict resolution, in the way that therapists talk about it, is a myth.  Compromise is a short way of saying "lose-lose," and deep down, or maybe only as deep as our subcutaneous layers of fat, we all know that "win-win" is a fantasy, like low-fat ice cream or diet soda that doesn't give you cancer.   Don't get me started on negotiation, which is what happens just before two countries lose their shit and go to war, and let's not discuss handshakes, which are modern torture devices in which both parties can covertly express their seething resentments as they "settle things like adults."

Ah, and then there's the fighting that happens in the pregnant silences where words normally reside but have since taken flight, having sensed toxicity in the air between the parties.  Indeed, some of the worst fights live in the realm of passive-aggressive "communication," wherein one or both parties have given up on language but don't want to go to jail for domestic abuse, either.  This is a dangerous place to be because problems thrive on pent-up anger and hurt, and all that energy could eventually leak into a lashing out that is far more devastating than the silence.

If the answer isn't in language, and it isn't in silence, if it isn't in paperwork and laws and theories about feelings, where is it?  Certainly not in guns and fists, which leave people broken or dead.  No.  I argue that the solution to conflict lies in two cats scrabbling in the living room, in kids kicking each other in the junk.  To settle conflict "like adults," we must regress.  I didn't reach the point of being able to tell my brother and sister to "knock it off" without first pulling their hair.  So we must get physical, but in relatively harmless ways.  This means we either need to learn how to wrestle, which is a fairly benign contact sport, or just decide to do the makeup sex before the making up.  Then both parties will be calm enough to say, "Fuck it.  Whatever it was, doesn't matter.  We're both dehydrated now and in pain.  And we broke a lamp.  So let's just focus on getting to IKEA to replace it.  Maybe while we're there, we can fight about something else and then test out the mattresses."

Because not all conflicts can end (or be ended with premature-) makeup sex, I argue that we all take up wrestling.  Not the WWF style, but the kind high schoolers do on the gym floor.  The kind that involves contortionist Gumby moves and those soft helmets and a penis next to a face during a serious pin.  In the end, it won't matter who's on top because both parties will have sweated and grunted it out, and if they are sexually attracted to each other and have even an iota of energy left, they can have some makeup sex too and then maybe talk about the problem in a rational way.  If they have to.  Or they can just be like cats.  Who aren't going to be using bullshit I-statements to talk about their "feelings."  They'll just be licking each other's heads or crotches and calling it a day.  Now, doesn't that sound good?

CoDA Files: The Adult Child

When I was nine years old, I drew a picture of my mother and the man who would become my stepfather having sex.  I used Crayola crayons and a sheet of white paper.  I drew his penis large and pink and pointy, and positioned it in the center of all those peach-colored limbs, a dagger coming down on my mother with her eyes popping out of her skull, her mouth hinged open so wide her cheeks and chin never made it to the page.  I double-traced all the lines, pressing firmly into the paper so that even someone who was blind could run a hand across the back and know what it was about.

They used to lock us out of the house, leaving us to cast our lines in the canal or invite the neighbor kids over for a game of kick the can, which is what we were playing when we heard the moaning.  It sounded like how Hurricane Andrew had sounded from inside my mom's work friend's house where we'd waited out the storm the summer before.  Not lonely or even angry or upset, but deep and long and edged with the sky and ocean and all that is too big to be fully seen.  We could hear their groaning even over the noisy din of the air conditioning unit, which sat on the ground beneath the master bedroom's window and was always running, on account of how cold he liked to keep the house.  I remember how none of us said what we knew, how despite knowing what we would find, we jumped like kangaroos outside the window.  We stood on tiptoe and pressed our noses to the glass and strained our necks to see between the bent mini blinds.

Later, after they'd dressed and he'd had a cigarette and his martini, I called him and my mom outside to where I stood on the grass beside the dock beneath a calm Florida sun.  When they were close enough, I whipped out the drawing from behind my back like it was a knife, driving it into their hands. 

If you'd asked me then why I'd drawn it, why I'd shown them, I would have told you I wanted to hurt them, but I wouldn't have been able to adequately explain how my drawing could be capable of that.  I may have gotten as close as saying I wanted to show them that I too could trespass, that I could violate their privacy and disregard their boundaries and their needs the way they'd disregarded mine.  I wanted to prove that I hadn't lost all my power, that I wasn't as small and insignificant as I seemed, that I should not be taken for granted.  And that I could see them for what they were; I was no fool.

They held that drawing of them with the waxy, popped-out eyes and gaping black-hole mouths bigger than their necks, and laughed.  They laughed and laughed, even as I hid my growing disbelief and helplessness behind a glare. 

My mistake was in thinking that I was showing them something ugly about themselves that they wished to conceal.  I thought I could manipulate them with their shame.  But I'd misjudged the situation.  They weren't ashamed.  They were so far from feeling guilt, they didn't even relate to the grotesque caricatures I'd depicted.  I'd thought I was holding up a magic mirror, that like the mirror in Snow White's fairytale, I could show the truth, and it would be received as if it were a weapon.  I didn't understand that the drawing was a mirror for my insides, that I'd just revealed myself.

When they laughed, I knew I had lost.  He would continue putting it in my mother, and she would continue driving to his house in the middle of the night, disappearing inside as we lay sleeping in the van beneath the yellow glare of a streetlight.

I'm writing this now because no less than three times yesterday did I run across variations of the maxim that we don't always get what we want or feel we deserve.  And because lately I have been wrestling the codependent in me.  When she wins, I morph into an adult child, one who pouts and thinks mean, unfair things, one who would sink a few biting words into your ear if you dared defy her.

When I was a child, before my parents divorced (and a bit afterwards too), I threw tantrums.  To this day, I have never seen a child throw a tantrum with the same level of passion and commitment I did.  When I hurled myself onto the ground, I did it with the fervor of a Justin Bieber fan groping the stage.  I hugged the earth (or checkered supermarket floor or hot asphalt parking lot or restaurant carpet) and kicked with the force of an Olympic swimmer and the grace of an enraged grizzly bear.  I howled like a dog caught in a trap.  I screamed demands and on occasion bit and scratched.

Usually at some point just before this epic scene, I would threaten my mother.  I would brush my unruly blond hair out of my face, cross my arms, and with the hardness of a rock tell her I was going to run away.  Sometimes I'd go to my room and pack.  A couple of times I even made it down the block after my mother waved goodbye to me at the front door, but I always chickened out with the reality of my situation, which was not that I loved my mother or would be lonely, but that I wouldn't be able to take care of myself.  When I wasn't threatening to leave, I would threaten other things.  I'd swear off food, hoping my mother cared enough about me that she'd give in to me before I starved to death.  I'd tell her I wasn't going to school or that I wasn't going to get dressed or that I was going to break something she cared about.  My need to control was profound.

Sometimes the fit itself made everything better because my mother would gather me to herself like I was a wounded yet dangerous animal and hold me tight against her chest until all the fight had left my arms and legs, until her perfume and the soft skin of her neck and the gradually slowing thump of our hearts was all that remained between us.

There are things we grow out of.  Namely, pants and shoes.  But unless we make a conscious effort to change our perceptions, responses, and behaviors, we don't actually grow into adults.

My most memorable adult temper tantrum took place when I was twenty years old.  I had locked myself in a bathroom to keep my girlfriend from reaching me.  Picture it: darkness because the light was off, the sprawl of a skinny 5'2" body on the floor, legs and arms flailing, fists punching the linoleum, an angry voice shouting itself hoarse on the daggers of words rising and falling: "I hate you!  I hate you! I hate you!"  And then, because she needed leverage and she'd long ago learned that threatening to run away was useless, she grabbed a bottle of aspirin and held it like it was a bag she'd packed, like she could take it if she had to and never come back.

Now, years later, in moments when I look at that scene, instead of always seeing it through the same funnel of sadness I used to when the thought of suicide was still as close as a medicine cabinet, I think to myself,  HOLY FUCK, I was actually going to kill myself because my girlfriend kissed someone else, and it's so absurd that I nearly laugh.  I look at that girl on the bathroom floor, and while I feel compassion for her and her pain, I also see what she's doing--she's having a fucking temper tantrum.  That is, in fact, what I was doing.  Because I didn't like what someone else did, and I didn't like how I felt.  It came down to this: I didn't like that things weren't going my way.  And I was going to do something about it, by God.  I was going to kill myself.  THAT would get me what I wanted.

But I didn't kill myself.  Because I knew deep down that ending my life wouldn't get me what I wanted, which I wouldn't have been able to tell you at the time but which I now know was to be loved.

I would like to say I don't throw fits anymore, but that would be a lie.  These days, when things aren't going my way or I'm feeling neglected or misunderstood or powerless, I am still prone to tantrums, but in the interest of appearing mature, I keep most of the flailing and yelling on the inside.  I have more awareness than I did when I was a kid, and that can sometimes prevent a fit, and I have more tools because I have gone to therapy and I go to 12-step meetings.  But every now and then, I feel myself slipping, my hands groping for a crown and a scepter, my mouth contriving manipulations.  In those tremulous moments when I can feel myself about to say anything, do anything, to have just a bit of power, I am grateful to have the serenity prayer, words spoken at the start and finish of every meeting, a reminder that I am not alone, that I am not powerless, and that sometimes the one watching over me denied my wants not because she didn't love me, but because she did.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Have I Made You Uncomfortable?

My last relationship ended in early June of this year.  There's a lot I could say about why it ended, but I want to focus now not on the causes but on one of the effects.  When we broke up,  I endeavored to take a careful look at myself and at every relationship I'd ever entered.  Why?  Because I'd really wanted that relationship to work.  I'd really wanted her to be The One.  In fact, I remember telling her in our last couple of weeks together that I'd thought she was the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with.  But the truth was that sentiment was not new to me; at some point in all of my significant romantic relationships, I'd wanted Her to be The One.  It didn't make sense to me to become part of a monogamous relationship if I didn't fully believe in my investment.  In any case, with this last breakup, I had to wonder why I'd failed once again.  I began a serious investigation and eventually faced a truth I hadn't been willing to acknowledge before: any of the women I'd been with could have been "The One," but I had rejected all of them because I was not One with myself. 

That sounds really hokey.  It sounds like that Eric Fromm bit about how you can't love others until you love yourself, just dressed up in Buddhistic wording.  And I suppose it is.

What I mean is I thought I loved myself, that if I met myself in a bar, I'd pick myself up and get married, no problem.  But the truth is, I would have been miserable with me!  Why?  Because I didn't trust myself.  I have discovered that in a relationship, lack of self-trust leads to lack of trust for the other, too.

I didn't trust any of them.  It wasn't just that I read my girlfriends' diaries.  I also scrolled through their text messages and browser histories.  I scrutinized their mail.  I dug through their underwear drawers and closets.  In most cases, I wasn't looking for any one thing in particular.  I wanted to know all of their secrets.  You'd think that the less dirt I found in my searches, the more I'd feel I could trust them.  At least, that's how I figured I should feel.  But that was not so.  The less I found, the more convinced I was that I just hadn't found the truth yet.  I searched harder.  I'd invent stories around the things I did find.  If I found, for instance, that my significant other had been looking at porn, I'd figure she was secretly repulsed by me or wanted to punish me but just wasn't saying anything.  If I found that she once had a crush on one of her friends, I'd assume she was settling for me, that given the choice, she'd rather be with someone else. 

Do you see a pattern here?  I was convinced the person I'd chosen to be with did not actually want to be with me.  How could I think this?  The truth was I didn't like the scared parts of myself, my insecurities and fears, and I was convinced that these women could see my demons and were as repelled by them as I was. I did not think I was loveable, despite all the good things about me because I wasn't perfect.  As much as I wanted to be perfect, I wasn't, and the shame I carried around this fact prevented me from being able to fully accept love from another person.  It prevented me from loving myself.  Fromm was right. 

So in the past few months, I've been turning towards my broken places.  I've been sharing with you all the stuff I always kept under wraps for fear of being "found out."  The truth is, our secrets are only as dangerous as we perceive them to be.  The truth is none of us have anything to be ashamed about.

In the spirit of relinquishing my fears, I've turned a bright light on myself.  I have chosen to believe that nothing I have done is so wrong that I can't love myself anyway.  And it's been liberating to share my demons with you.  But frightening, too.  The secrets under the secrets are the ones that really make me tremble.  It's one thing to tell you, for instance, that I would, on occasion, drop my cat over our balcony when I was 14 years old and frustrated--and blame it on being 14, and another to tell you that I knew what I was doing was wrong at the time and that doing it always made me feel like a horrible person but that I did it anyway while condemning people who were cruel to animals.  It is hard to share these things, these haunting moments that I created and cannot undo.  Because I worry that like I have done, you will look at this collection of dark fragments and judge me as being evil or fucked up, a horrible person, crazy, selfish.  Because in those moments, I was.  I was mean.  I was selfish.  I was horrible.  What I did was fucked up.  And it's clear that nearly every fucked up thing I have done has hurt someone or something else, but probably not as much as it hurt me.  That's how this world is, that's the law.  What you put out comes back to you threefold, they say. 

Imagine dropping your terrified cat off a balcony, the tension in his muscles, the limbs rigid, paws expanded, pupils wide.  Imagine his heart racing under your palm, the sick swell of a shadow in your own chest.  How you already felt horrible just holding him over all that open air, how in your mind, it was too late, you'd already done the deed, so you let go.  And when he landed and ran off, seemingly unscathed, you felt the weight of his mistrust heavy in your veins, and you hated yourself.  But that didn't stop you from doing it again.

I used to be proud of my arms, the skin of my wrists smooth and white.  I knew girls who cut themselves, who threw up their lunches or starved themselves, who took laxatives to relieve their self-loathing.  I used to think I was better than they were, better than the kids who were drinking themselves into a stupor, who were addicted.  But here I was throwing my pet from the second story of my house, literally projecting my self-hatred.  Perhaps I thought if I could throw my cat far enough away from myself, I could get free. 

I share too much now.  This is not my belief, but my observation of how others perceive me.  I have friends who cannot read what I write or hear what I say because it makes them uncomfortable.  I wonder if I am touching their fears.  I wonder what makes something inappropriate to say.

The other day I read a discussion on a friend's Facebook wall about the legality and morality of public nudity.  Some people argued that they themselves didn't care whether people ran around naked but that they disapproved because of children.  And I thought, angrily, "Take responsibility for your discomfort.  Don't hide behind children, who are innocent and in some ways wise, who don't give a shit what we look like under our clothes--they know, and they don't give a good Goddamn. WE are the ones who decide to be scared of our bodies.  WE are the ones who ascribe meaning to a nipple or a penis.  We are the ones who judge." 

If I make you uncomfortable, I am glad.  You have some work to do.  You might wonder what it is about my words that brings you to close your ears or eyes.  Do not pretend that I am ignorant, that I don't realize what I'm saying, that I'm simply not aware I'm "over-sharing."  Do not be "embarrassed" for me.  Own your discomfort.  You might realize that I am not the issue, that it is in fact your own demons that have built a wall between us.  You might realize that we can only be as close as your willingness to recognize and take responsibility for our own fears and secrets.  When you can sit in a room with me and listen to me talk about the times I told my mother I hated her, when you can sit beside me and hear me say that I was relieved when my father disappeared, that I'd wished it, when you can sit with me and think about your own dark spaces and not leave the room, we will move through our discomfort together, and all our walls will come crumbling down.

The Secrets Beneath the Secrets

Sometimes, you think someone is telling you a secret when she is really just sharing something that you would keep secret if it were yours.  We don't give away anything that truly worries us.  We only share the stuff we can handle getting out, even if it doesn't feel like it as the words slip from our mouths, even as thoughts of how the information might be used against us, of how we might be perceived, sweat our dreams.

When you reveal something you've been hiding, it's because you have something else you're not sharing, something else that lives under that secret, another secret unto itself, one heavier with shame, one you think you won't ever be able to tell.

When I tell you that I looked through not one but three of my ex-girlfriends' journals, stealing past their secured drawers and password-protected defenses, the electric tingle of a Jerry Springer segment rushes up through your guts, shimmies in your heart.  It trembles at the corners of your faint, unintentional smile.  You feel the chill of the moment I slipped into the shadows, the hot fraction of a second it took for me to decide to flip a page or click a button and force my eyes into the role of accomplice.  You want to see me caught.  You want to see me get away.  You want to read their journals, too, but let me take the fall.  I am your hero, the one who crossed the line you always wanted to but never did.  I am your enemy, the one who violates privacy, who trespasses in the halls of the heart and mind, the one who might read your diary next.  I am not to be trusted.

You wonder why I've told you this.

But you are distracted.  The journals are a red herring.

You should not stop at the knowledge of these women's words, the image of the pages, white in my hands, the sentences scrolling into paragraphs on a computer screen.

What else, you should wonder, have I done?  What other, darker things?

Because I just gave away the journals.  You didn't even have to ask.  I told you, but because I did it in a whisper, you believed what I was saying was sacred.  This is how it's always done.  It is how you've done it with your priests, friends, lovers, parents, children, pets, bosses, colleagues, strangers.  You have hung your head over a cross or a bottle or your hands and confessed your sins without anyone putting a gun to your head.  You have told yourself it was hard to say the words, but we both know the truth.  They slipped out of you like a sigh because holding them in became harder than letting them out.

When I was seventeen, I stole my brother's girlfriend.

We could discuss the language here if we wanted to.  How "stole" in this context would be an objectification.  How dramatic it is, too.  We could have a whole conversation about choices, about responsibility.  We could slip into the world of cliches that exist specifically for cases like this one.  It takes two to tango.   It's a dog-eat-dog world.  (Or a sister tramples her brother's feelings on the way to fulfilling her hormonal goals world.)  The facts here matter a lot less than the truth.  But nonetheless, I will share them.

Fact: I met my brother's girlfriend online in the days of AOL when she instant messaged me, saying she was new in town, and because she was a little younger than me, my brother's age, I told her I'd introduce her to him so she might have a ready-made friend, and I did, but she and I continued talking and getting to know each other as my brother and her got to know each other, too.

Fact: She and my brother began officially dating not long after they met, and he fell hard for her.

Fact: My brother's girlfriend kissed me one night maybe five or six months into her relationship with my brother while she and I were watching a movie in her room.

Fact: I did not kiss back.

Fact: I told her if she wanted a relationship with me, she'd have to break up with my brother, that I wouldn't go behind his back.

Fact: It didn't occur to me that I would hurt his feelings whether or not the relationship was behind him or in front of him.

Fact: She broke up with my brother, and we started dating.

Fact: My brother did not invite girls over to the house after that.  He told our mother he didn't want me stealing anyone else.

The Truth: My brother's tears.  All the receipts for flowers he bought her while she was thinking about being with someone else.  The gold ring he gave her just because.  How he loved her more than I did.  How I loved him more than I loved her but did this to him anyway.  How long it took to repair the damage.

And so you know this now, what I am capable of.

And you feel sated.  Like unless I've murdered someone, there isn't much more I can say to drag you any deeper.  But you'd be wrong because I just gave that story about my brother to you.  Just gave it away.  Don't you remember what I said about this trick?

Here is another: I faked my own homicide when I was sixteen years old.

Closer, still: I led my twin sister, the person I loved and trusted most in the world, to believe I was dead.

It was hard to do.  I had to think carefully about what clothes I'd wear, what props I'd use.  I found a crowbar in the garage, pulled a knife from the block in the kitchen, grabbed a couple of rags from underneath the sink, pulled out a few tomato-based condiments.

I carried a rag, dowsed in barbecue sauce and ketchup, along with the crowbar to the front porch, set the bar by the welcome mat and the rag closer to the steps.  I left the front door open a crack.  It would be just dark enough when my sister got home so that she wouldn't notice the smooth, un-dented door frame.  But she'd see the black, serpentine outline of the crowbar, the ruddy handprint on the door.

I took an old t-shirt and slashed it with scissors.  I smeared ketchup and barbecue sauce around the gashes in the cloth, and before pulling the shirt over my head, spread the condiments all over my abdomen.  I finished by dabbing a bit on my ears, cheeks, and neck.  I pushed it though my hair like it was styling gel.  I smelled like a summer cookout, but in the glow cast by the the snowy TV screen, it wouldn't matter.  All she'd notice was the slits in my shirt. If she touched my face, her fingers would come away sticky, warm, and red. 

In the living room, I turned on the television.  The black and white dots fizzed and popped.  I set the condiment-smeared knife on a rag by the couch.  (I couldn't risk my mom yelling at me for messing up the carpet.)  I grabbed the portable phone from its cradle, smeared blood over its raised, plastic buttons, clicked it on, and listened to the dial tone until it broke into a harsh beeping that would let my sister know the phone had been off the hook for a long time, disconnected.  

I lay down with the phone loose in my grip.  I contorted my body, forcing my limbs into painful positions that would prove this wasn't a prank.  I practiced not breathing.  I listened for the crunch of wheels on gravel, for my sister's car barreling up the long driveway, branches and overgrown plants scraping metal and glass.

I slowed my breathing as I heard the car door slam.  The screen fuzzed in front of me, casting an eerie blue-white glow on me and the phone, softly beeping in my hand.  Footsteps on the flagstones.  Footsteps on the porch.  A gasp.  The front door creaking open.

"Carol?" Her voice trembled.  I reminded myself that laughing now would ruin everything.

A step forward on the wooden foyer floor.   She could see my body from the front door, but did she know what it was?  Another step.  Softer steps on the carpet in the hallway leading to the living room.   

Again, closer, just above me now, my name in the form of a question, tears catching on the letters.

The phone, lifted from my bloody palm.  A hand in my sticky hair.  I reminded myself to be heavy and limp, like an overcooked strand of pasta.  She shook me.  This was supposed to be funny, but I didn't feel like laughing.  I could hardly breathe.  

As she reached for the phone, I opened my eyes.  "Got you," I said, and she spun towards me with wide, relieved eyes, like I was a miracle.  She threw her arms around me and cried into my hair.  Her perfume washed over me until I could no longer smell the ketchup or barbecue sauce.  I closed my eyes and let her hold me.

What do you think of me now?  Is your lip still trembling with the thrill of revelation?  Or are you sick? Have you put some distance between us so you will not have to relate to the years of pain that 16 year old with the sauce in her hair must have been trying to escape from there in that living room while in the crush of her sister's arms?  Did you know that this is something that teenager can never undo?  That her sister still brings it up, often in the company of others, and that the one who pulled the prank knows that her sister does this not to hurt her but to show the depth of her hurt?  The sister, the one who believed the person she loved most in the world had been murdered, wonders why her sister would do something so mean.  She wants answers.  But there is only the sound of forbidden pages turning, of lips trespassing on lips, of a phone beeping into the night.  And under all of that, something deeper still, something yet to be shared.