The night after my gravel roll I sat at my computer with my fingers on the keys. My hands were all scraped up. My forearms and elbows, too. My chin and cheek. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation chapter on Kathy Acker, who by then I’d met. I stared at lines of hers I had typed and referenced as part of my critical discussion on the screen:
Every time I talk to one of you, I feel like I’m taking layers of my own epidermis, which are layers of still freshly bloody scar tissue, black brown and red, and tearing each one of them off so more and more of my blood shoots in to your face. This is what writing is to me a woman (ES, 210).
When I went to write words over the top of hers, kind of I felt like I might throw up. Instead of the dissertation chapter, I began to write a story. The first line that came out of me was: “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”
Please understand, I loved reading literary theory — I mean I devoured the primary texts as if they were romance novels — I dove into the discourse as if its waters were mine alone — my body song swam in between currents of language and thought. But trying to write critically, academically, hurt.
A lot.
Why would someone do that to novels? For what purpose, other than a sadistic impulse to hush, silence, incarcerate art? It seemed like a violence to me to write that way about literature. It seemed false at best and repugnant at worst — murderous even.
In my dissertation the novels I’d chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art. White Noise and Almanac of the Dead and Empire of the Senseless — a book which I promise you, if you’ve never read it, will scrape your eyeballs. Books in which culture towered and collapsed, border identities defied the cult of good citizenship and revolutionaries turned back on their liberators with fire for hair. Wars of militarization and wars of race and wars of gender and wars of fathers and language and power and wars of just the human heart played out page after page, taking my breath away.
When I set my hands to writing literary criticism — that act of writing so legitimized by white male knowledge — I felt like I was a torturer. A killer. A Betrayer. An abuser. I slept with three of my professors — two men and one woman — I think trying to get the body back into discourse. HEY! What about bodies? The noisy, wet, rule-breaking body that seemed erased by all that lofty thought. It didn’t work.
OF COURSE I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn’t let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I’d never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman.
To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. And I’m here to write a dissertation.
Yeah. Right. Whatever. And anyway, where did you even come from?
Oh, I think you know. I’m from your father. Now open the goddamned door.
My father. Whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film. Whose intellect I carried in my blood rivers. That’s when my two mes had it out. The me I’d forged to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me I’d never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in my hands, hiding like the crouch of dreams in my fingers. My father’s daughter.
“I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”
The night after I jumped from the train of things, at the computer my heart raced. My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt — bruised and cut from falling from a train — or a marriage — or a self in the night — I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book.
Until my very skin made screamsong.
Short Story
SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book Her Other Mouths. In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.
I did finish my dissertation though. It felt like walking through fire. A crucible. I called it Allegories of Violence. By some bizzaro twist of fate it got published too. I still think it happened to someone else. But something weirdly good came from it. The two mes? We began to get to know each other. Intellectual me and blood bodied me began to hang out. Brush each other’s hair. Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other’s backs and clink glasses late into the night.
But there was a cost.
I was in my eleventh year of marriage with the Devin. I was a teacher of things, having achieved a doctorate and publications. But that woman I’d let into the house ravaged who I had been. Her zany brain force would not go. I didn’t want to fuck. I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go numb every night. I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head. I didn’t want to drink until I dropped. I wanted to write. A whole other book. My husband became like a willful unruly child to me. A submerged one. And though my love did not leave, it went down into deeper darker places.
Devin’s life moved bedward, fueled by alcohol and woman need. On one of his travels to another country for the first time without me, he found a foreign bed. While he was in Vietnam I waited for the word “husband” to come back. Days and nights. Then weeks. Then one morning I didn’t get out of bed. Days and nights. When I had to pee, I did. When I was hungry, I cried. When I was awake, a white nothing. At night I ate small white sleeping pills. Something I learned well from my mother. More and more of them. When I slept, I hoped to die.
Finally a gentle friend broke into my house because he was worried about me. He and a bull dyke named Laurel broke down the front door of my house when I stopped showing up at work. He put me in the shower. Then he wrapped me in blankets. Then he fed me. Literally. Then we watched old movies for three days until I looked at him and said, OK.
I thought of Brody and his clarinet and beautiful black kid hands. I thought of my best friend in Florida, the one my mother had outed out of my life. Of my arch angel, Michael and how we both left the Lubbock and made up lives. There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you.
Devin did come back, but we were never again together.
He drank himself ever womanward. I entered my female family lineage — a suffering that once I again claimed it, felt as familiar as a mother. Daughter. Sister. Home. Her name, depression.
In that long thick underwater I lived the life of a devalued woman. Not a wife. Not a mother. No one’s lover. No job or book gave me value to myself. I felt like a pointless woman sack. I lost pounds of flesh having no one to share a body with. My clothes began to hang off of my body as if I were someone else. Other women would compliment me on my supposed intentional feminine metamorphoses, and I’d smile, but I felt like an insect. In the morning I’d lose interest in washing my hair or brushing my teeth partway through, and find myself standing naked dripping in the bathroom staring at the floor or holding my toothbrush in the air, foam dripping from my mouth.