In my sickbed my father removed my sweat soaked clothing. My father redressed me in underwear and pretty nightgowns. My father stroked my hair. Kissed my skin. My father carried me to the bathtub and laid me down and washed me. Everywhere. My father dried me off in his arms and redressed me and carried me back to the bed. His skin the smell of cigarettes and Old Spice cologne. His yellowed fingers. The mountainous callous on his middle finger from all the years of holding a pen or pencil. His steel blue eyes. Twinning mine. The word “Baby.”
Late at night, my mother would come home from selling beautiful homes to other people. She would come into my room and sing I see the moon. And kiss me. And say, “Don’t you cry, Belle, everything’s gonna get better. You’ll see.” And leave early the next morning.
There is only one other time in my life that I have experienced the delirium I entered during those weeks. Because there are times when a soul has to leave a body, times that are not death. Some people know this like a hymn. I knew she — my body — was still there, but I left her lifeless in the arms of a father.
I went into a white. Inside the white, there were sunflowers. And lapis colored glass. And deep aqua pools. There were beautiful rocks everywhere — but you had to find them. Small and exquisite journeys that took all day. Like in a very good dream. Inside the white too there were stories. As if written on the walls or floors or sky of the white. The words. You could see them. Reach out and touch them. Just like the rocks. You could pick up the rocks or words and carry them. Sometimes the wordrocks sang. After a while I believed in them more than my own life. I thought, it would be possible, even beautiful, to die.
But even girls whose strength has abandoned them are made to come back. And so I began to eat again. Taking the fork or spoon from my father’s hand. I began to get up out of my bed and walk — wondering, is this what my mother felt like after all those months as a girl in a body cast, finally touching the floor and moving her legs, breathing in something called will? And mercifully. I again entered the water. To swim. Away from my father’s house, every day I swam a tiny piece of self returned. And the strength of … the strength of a girl.
Everything about him was in his hands.
A Burning
WHEN I WAS 13 I CONFESSED MY FATHER SECRETS IN the black box of catholic to another father in the house of our father who told me I should not tell lies.
Honor thy father.
Say seven Hail Marys.
It’s wicked to make up stories.
For three days and three nights I prayed to the thing called god so hard I choked on the spit in my mouth. I clenched my hands until they went red. I dug my fingernails into flesh so hard little scarlet moons appeared. I shut my eyes so tight I thought my forehead would bleed. My head, my heart, everything on the inside was burning.
No matter how many times I entered the cool waters of the pool, I left the wet with a fire in me.
Mercy did not come from god the father. Mercy came from a book. That was the year I read Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West. My sister gave me the book when she left our father’s house.
At 13, I found most of the book terrifying. And I had to skip many words and pages that I did not understand. But I already knew who Joan of Arc was, because my sister had explained it to me. Girl woman with a war in her. Voice of a father in her head. And so I knew if I kept reading I would come to her burning. I didn’t want to and I couldn’t not.
Joan of Arc’s burning scene is on page 341. Instead of a crown of thorns they placed a tall paper cap on her head. She did not die until the fire reached her head. People saw all kinds of things — one person saw a dove leaving her skull. Despite the oil, sulphur and fuel used, her entrails and heart would not go to ash. The executioner had to throw them in the Seine.
I could see her. How it looked. How it smelled. How her hair went to flame. How the bone form of her skull appeared, until her jaw and teeth shown, a terrible smile or a scream, before she burned to crap.
I’m 13 reading that. Honor thy father. It is wicked to make up stories.
I’m the rest of my life a burning girl.
That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.
I didn’t hate the fire. I hated the people who did not believe her. And I hated the father that let her burn. And I hated the men who… I think I hated men. The more I was around them, the more I came close to spontaneously combusting. Drawing them dangerously close to the flame.
The Hairy Girls
GIRL SWIMMERS ARE HAIRY.
I don’t know how much you know about these things, but competition swimmers don’t shave their legs unless they are preparing for the big meet, Regionals, State, Senior Nationals, for instance. So when I was a girl who barely had any hairs looking up at the towering corpus of Nancy Hogshead from the puny viewpoint of the pool, their leg hair was downright scary. And they had pube hair sticking out of their suits up at the top of their thighs and going into their business. Boy. Talk about terrifying.
OK that’s a lie. It wasn’t terrifying. It was mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop staring. It made me into a mouth breather.
When Jo Harshbarger showered in the locker rooms, all I saw was her legs as something I longed to pet, and her stuff as a little furry special place, especially since as a girl I was afraid to look at tits or twats or even faces.
That’s a lie too. I stared at tits and coochie as hard as a drunk eyeballing a fifth of vodka.
These hairy women — they were — they were mythic. As a kid, I had no idea what they were in real life — students, girlfriends of something, females who used hand-held hairdryers, people who shopped at the mall with purses and drove cars around — but at the pool and in the locker rooms they were mythic. I think that’s why I remember so many of their names, these larger than life to a kid women — Jo Harshbarger and Evie Kosenkranius and Karen Moe and Shirley Babashoff.
Lynn Collella Bell.
I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom’s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I’d ever seen. Making me hippoventate.
Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I’m pretty sure drooling … it’s a wonder I didn’t pass out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open.
For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I’d get on my stomach and butterfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating — this whatever it was I had in me — I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap.
Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up.
You know, now that I’m thinking of it, it didn’t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn’t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman sex thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my slutty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.