As a motif, a chiasmus is a world within a world where transformation is possible. In the green world events and actions lose their origins. Like in dreams. Time loses itself. The impossible happens as if it were ordinary. First meanings are undone and remade by second meanings.
I didn’t sleep much the first two years in the forest house. Miles, bless his hungry little head, wanted more milk than any man alive. All night. I thought of my mother — and my own unquenchable, milkless mouth. If this boy wanted milk, I would give it to him. Maybe all our lives were being reborn in the forest.
My exhaustion was of course epic, but only in that way it is for everyone else, too. I taught full-time shooting for tenure so we’d have a shot at a life. Andy too exhausted himself. We taught in alternate waves day and night and parented by passing Miles off like a football between us. Thank god for breast pumps and bouncy chairs.
The exhaustion of new parents is absurd. Beyond absurd. But I’m not about to get all righteous about that. In fact, it’s something else altogether I want to tell you. I think our exhaustion in the green world brought us to our best selves. Listen to this: the first two years of Miles’ life? When I was supposed to be depleted? I wrote a novel and seven short stories. Andy wrote a novel and three screenplays. Read that again. How is it that so much writing happened inside the least amount of time or energy?
Green world.
We had no time. We had no energy. We had no money. What we had was making art in the woods. So when Andy turned to me one night over scotches and said “We should invent a Northwest press that isn’t about fucking old growth and salmon,” and I laughed my ass off, and then said, “Yeah, we should,” we just … did. Which is how the zenith of our depletion changed into the zenith of our creative production. Andy and me, we had another child. An unruly literary press, which we named “Chiasmus.” Turned out, there were lots of writers in the Northwest who were tired of old growth and salmon. Our first publication was an anthology called Northwest Edge: The End of Reality. Because, you know, it was. Everything we were before we were this, utterly transformed.
Shakespeare.
In our forest we gave art to life, and life to art made us.
Angina
I KNOW. I’M MAKING ANDY SOUND LIKE A MAGICAL MANSAVIOR. You’re going to have to forgive me. It’s an effect of meeting someone who is your equal. It’s an effect of an astonishment: that I love men.
And it’s not like we have some relationship from a movie. For instance, in the beginning, we fought. Boy howdy. I fought like a woman whose father had betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her. He fought like a man who never had a father and whose mother’s heart didn’t quite reach him. Working out our childhood wounds at each other. Because … because we could take it. Because there was something on the other side.
People — I guess I mean couples — don’t like to talk much about fighting. It’s not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look… sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.
When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere — out and away from a body — like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art.
Though like anyone else, our arguments are sloppy and dumb and artless. We look like cartoon adults, just like everyone. Like the time he put all our living room furniture out on the lawn. Or the time I grabbed his computer mouse and bit the cord in half. Yeah. Subtle. But I gotta tell you. People who never get angry frighten me.
Andrew: man-warrior. From the Greek.
Lidia doesn’t mean jack-shit, by the way. Figures.
And then there are the little sufferings that make a bond as strong as love.
When I was 38 my Andy woke up to pee in the night. I heard him in that wife way, even as I was half asleep. Before we went to bed, we had heard some eulogizing about Ken Kesey’s death on NPR. I’d cried some. Him too. Then we went to bed. When he got up to pee, he turned the bathroom light on and shut the door.
Then I heard him fall, like a tree landing on the roof. I ran into the bathroom and he had passed out. He was on the white tiled floor, on his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, white as death, seizuring.
I yelled his name at him. I put his feet up on the edge of the tub and held his head in my lap trying to give him a mini blood transfusion. He came to, dazedly. I called 911. I put a comforter around him. A firetruck full of paramedics came. I dressed my son while they hooked my husband up to wires and electrical machines. They put my husband in an ambulance and my son and I drove in our car — the ambulance took the freeway. I took the back roads. I was there 12 minutes ahead of them. At the hospital he lived. We discovered a triglyceride problem that scared the shit out of us.
The next week, driving to work in my car, I got an earache and my skull felt like a lightning bolt fracture had cracked it open.
My father’s voice filled the ball of my head, curled around the lobes and through the canals of gray matter. It closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.
I began to not only hear my father again, but as clearly as you see the face of your husband, your wife, in front of you, I saw my father’s face at the moment of his drowning. On his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, seizuring.
I nearly wrecked the car twice, unable to see the road or anything else, my ears gone crazy, the deep baritone of his voice making my brain ache.
How to Hold Your Breath
KID STORIES.
What sad little bobbers we all were.
Here’s a pathetic little image: me at age two in a hooded baby blue parka and little red stretch pants jumping off a 25ʹ dock into Lake Washington, yelling “WIM.”
They say, and keep in mind the story comes from my now dead crackpot parents, they say I’d jump in any water I saw. Pools. Rivers. Lakes. The Shojita’s carp-filled garden pond. That I was simply drawn to water, and I’d run and leap with one of those silly toddler glee smiles smeared across my face, and then I’d sink like a stone.
Somebody, usually my eyerolling sister, would have to jump in after me every time, and pull me sputtering to safety.
So when I was three my mother signed me up for swim lessons. But it was my father who put me in the car, drove me to Lake Washington, took off my little clothes and threw me in.
In November.
I was by far the youngest kid there.
I can’t tell you I remember any of this, but I sure the hell can conjure up an image of my own skin bluing in the icy waters. And I feel pretty certain I have muscle memory in my mouth of my teeth nearly shattering from kid cold chatter. If I learned to swim that year I did it in a frozen zombie state, under the heavy weight of father, who, every time I came running out crying stuck his hand and arm out of the station wagon window like an angry god and pointed back to the water.
If there is more to that story it drifts away when I go near it — it’s too far back, or too deep.
When I first began writing this story my son Miles was seven. So that means I’m seven too sometimes. I mean my seven year old me swims back during the course of an ordinary day all the time, whether or not I’m ready. Miles absolutely loves swimming pools. The thing is, Miles can’t exactly … swim. When Miles gets in the pool, there is no other way to say this, he’s a spaz. And he’s wearing more weenie water gear than a special needs deep sea diver. Don your protective gear: goggles, life vest. Then he wades in and has the time of his life, prepared for any aqua danger, looking like a water nerd. When he’s in the water he laughs and laughs. He shows me all the things he can do in the water, things that amount to splashy little circles or pushing his way across the pool like a water bug, and says, “Lidia, look, I’m doing swimming.” He throws his little arms around and kicks his unsynchopated legs and holds his head in this sort of strange crane upwards, his mouth in a little smirk nowhere near the water, his goggle-bugged eyes looking my way. It drowns my heart.