Abandon Me

by Melissa Febos

  I read now about adolescents sucking on more obvious parts of each other in group activities that seem to preclude the secrecy and innocence of my own unsayable awakening. I don’t so much mourn their lost childhoods. I lost mine at first opportunity and sex isn’t the only way to do that. But I do remember the vacancy of those earliest and most obvious sex acts. I met desire under that faded beach towel, to the sound of cleats knocking the cement basement floor. What I mean is, the neck is always innocent. The parts of us we cannot see are touched most deeply, are most needing to be seen.

  However insistent or ravenous the hickey, it is by nature temporary. There was a time when my beloved and I considered getting matching tattoos on our ring fingers. We spent hours laboring over meaningful designs. For months I made appointments that she canceled at the last minute. She resisted that permanent mark for the same reason that I wanted it. Despite our mutual obsession, we did not trust each other.

  Another year later, she revived the idea. As we drove past desert tattoo shops, she’d point. Let’s do it, she’d say. Why not?

  I’d nod, but never pull over. I had already stopped believing in the power of such symbols to make anything permanent. I had already stopped wearing her hickeys.

  They say that passion wanes, that trust grows in its place. But after two years together, she and I still grabbed at each other like animals, like people who might never taste that particular salt again. Our passion never guttered. I kept waiting for trust to grow. The only thing to count on was our hunger, and the ways our bodies fed it. No mark of passion can make a love stay. It can only prove that it was.

  I know the impossibility of the hickey, whose urge is not ultimately to mark or be marked, but to possess and be possessed. I cannot render anything precisely in words, as I cannot crush my lover’s body inside of mine. All I can do is leave a mark—the notation of my effort, a symbol for the thing. That is the endless pleasure and frustration of the writer and the lover: to reach and reach and never become.

  I could not make her mine any more than she could make me hers. The best I could do was to show her how much I wanted it. To press my mouth against her pulse, and open.

  CALL MY NAME

  When I was seven, my sea captain father at sea, my mother a strobing lighthouse of missing, I stood alone in my bedroom, renaming all my toys Melissa. You, and you, and you. A child’s narcissism, maybe. A punishment for my dolls. I didn’t choose my name, but I could choose to give it away. A small triumph. But no matter how many dolls I christened Melissa, the sound of my name still shocked me: hum of M, soft L, hiss ending openmouthed. Melissa, my teacher called each morning. Here, I flinched.

  It was a ribbon of sound, a yielding sibilant thing. Drag it along a scissor blade and it curls. I wanted a box, something with corners I could feel. Zoe or Katrina. Those girls ruled the school bus. You could press your fingers into Melissa. It was hum and ah, and esssss—more sigh than spit.

  On family vacation in Florida, after days pickling in the hotel pool, eyes pinked from its blue brine, my mother asked me, Melissa, why, when the ocean was steps away, why the pool? Because the pool has sides, I told her. I was already spilling out, grasping for edges. And what chance did I stand against the ocean? How many times had the sea taken our captain and left her beating the shore with her hands?

  It was an early lesson. The ocean disappears things. It is a hungry, grabbing thing. In its deep, there is nothing to reach for. Next to it, I was a girl gulping a woman’s grief.

  Jean Piaget believed object permanence to be learned within the first two years of life. That is, a thing disappeared continues to exist. But what if it never appears again? Or disappears long enough to learn to live without it? By two years old I had already learned two fathers. One addict. One sea captain. My birth father was Jon, a name like him, just a man. The Captain had two names: Robert for the merchant marine, and rounder Bob for his intimates. Bob, so close to Dad. Both taught me how to watch someone leave and not chase them.

  When I asked my mother, Why Melissa? I already wanted a new name. Jackie, Britt, Tina. You can drill a hole with Jackie. You can slingshot a rock with Britt. Even Tina can hurt somebody. Melissa was bringing a ribbon to a swordfight. Melissa was leading with my softest part.

  A word shapes the mouth with want and wonder for its object. By six, I knew that Jessie down the street fit her name. Jessie was fast and blonde, a streak of girl, hook of J, dot of i, bared teeth of long e. It is no wonder that to hold Jessie in my mouth came to feel like holding Jessie in my mouth.

  On her knees on the bedroom floor, Jessie pressed two naked dolls together, clicking their immovable parts. What are they doing? I asked. You know, she said. And I did, so I told her. I named the sex parts I knew. She repeated them back to me. Those strange sounds turned in the space between us. And they were ours.

  I used to repeat words under my breath, on the way to school, in the bath, chanting their sounds until they detached from their meaning. The moment when those sounds fell free of their object—like the moment the swing hung horizontal to its frame, the body weightless, just before gravity clutched it back—giddying. It unlatched something in me, the proof that anything could be pulled apart, could scatter into dumb freedom, a bell ringing not for dinner or church or alarm, but for the simple pleasure of making it ring.

  Just as Jessie and I chanted those words, unlocking the riddles of our bodies, I chanted my name. I pressed it against my teeth. To give it edges. To shake loose what it carried. To teach it meaning.

  I learned the magic of repetition from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which I found on a thrift store shelf, filmed with dust. I studied it as Franny Glass studied The Way of a Pilgrim, mesmerized by the idea of incessant prayer. Like me, Franny incanted a set of words—the Jesus Prayer—hoping to syncopate their intention with her heart’s beat, the surge of her blood, turn even the mysterious work of her organs holy.

  Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, goes the prayer.

  Jesus was a cool guy, the Captain said. But religion was not. The nuns who swung wooden yardsticks against him and his brothers were not. My abuela told them to be good, to pray, to beg the help of no one but God. My abuelo had beaten them senseless. Help never came.

  Praying to Jesus was not for anyone in our family. But I loved the word mercy. The idea of falling to one’s knees moved something in me that I tended like a secret.

  So I left out Jesus. Have mercy on me. Under my breath, on the way to school, in the ripped back seat of a white Subaru with a hand up my shirt, I waited to detach from the definition of my daily life, to feel the blooming quiet of something holier.

  Even those ancient monks, writers of the Philokalia, believed that the repetition of words, and willingness, was all one needed. Faith could be summoned in the self, in saying, in the body. One didn’t need to believe in God to walk toward God. I only had to believe in a word. So I started looking for it.

  The Captain did not give me religion. He gave me other treasures. A bloom of desert roses the size of my arm, a freckled ostrich egg, true pirate stories. Jon, on the other hand, had given me native blood, which meant something only because it showed on my face. It was the one thing that reminded me of him, every time someone asked me, What are you?

  I wished it had meant something to him, that he had given me a name I could decipher. Then everything might be different. He might be someone other than a drunk stranger living in a Florida trailer. And then who would I be?

  My history seemed to end, or begin, with this name. Melissa. We packed those seven letters and a few boxes in the car. My mother and I drove away from him. We didn’t take anything else. Lucky, I was told, to have wrecked so young, to have washed ashore with no memory.

  True, I did not remember my first father. But forgetting, like leaving, does not erase someone. The Captain became the only dad I knew. And every time he left port, we wrecked again.

  A new father brought me a new name. One from Puerto Rico.

 
; The origin of Febos is not simple. There aren’t many of us. My abuela told me that Febos was changed from Febo, because my great-grandfather thought it too close to feo, which means ugly in Spanish. A cute story. And a lie. Or myth, maybe. The uglier our own stories, the more some of us need pretty ones.

  The Captain’s grandfather, Amador, was a jíbaro—mountain-dwelling peasants, laborers of mixed indigenous Taino and Spanish blood who had worked alongside slaves on the cane, tobacco, and coffee plantations.

  Amador, from the Latin amare, meaning to love. Ironic, as he was a monstruo. Or alcohol, and that breaking work, made him one. My guess: he was a lover. Sometimes the only cure for a soft heart is hard hands, or the elixirs that change them.

  In the mountain village of Cayey, Taino for “a place of waters,” the Captain’s father, my grandfather, Modesto, at the age of seven, woke from sleep to find his father attempting to hang him by a noose from the ceiling. He never slept in Amador’s house again, but under the cars of neighbors, returning days to care for his mother and younger siblings.

  Modesto, from the Latin modestus, means “moderate, sober,” though he also drank himself mad. The terrible legacy of his father was nothing a name could remedy. Those hard hands carved my own father, whose first mercy was the sea.

  The Captain, on his voyages, made a habit of searching the phone books for Febos. The only reference he ever encountered was in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which the Febos gang are a band of marauders who roam the Pyrenees.

  He was looking for something, too.

  At ten, in my bedroom, under alpaca blankets brought home by the Captain, I read the dictionary. I broke it open, the book an anchor sunk into my hips, each half covering a thigh. All afternoon I mouthed its wonders, this marvel I could open and close, soothed by the murmur of its onionskin pages.

  Books were fickle ships, their mercy finite. The longer the better—Roots, Clan of the Cave Bear, Les Misérables, Gone with the Wind. I never wanted to go home. The twilight of stories fell like those of late autumn: all sweet and scary in their slipping, purpled shadows and smell of winter. Still I hurtled through them, my dread thickening as the remaining pages shrunk.

  But the dictionary. All books held words, but the dictionary was words. It was a solar system of names, like the stars the Captain pointed out over our house: Polaris, Mizar, Arcturus, Vega, Mnemonic, Chasm, Nautilus. It pulsed from that low shelf in our living room, more magnetic than the crap black-and-white television on the old Singer sewing machine, than the fetal pig suspended in the jar in my science classroom. I looked into words as I looked up to those celestial bodies, calling out their names.

  Mnemosyne. First generation Goddess, namer of all things. Titaness from whose own name we derived mnemonic, a word I loved for its swell—a wave of sound, the break of it. A word that moved but knew its own end.

  Mnemosyne. When they met her, the dead faced a choice: drink from the river Lethe and forget the terror of this human life, or drink from the river Mnemosyne and remember. Those who drank to forget were reborn. Those who chose to remember continued, carting their dark histories across the western ocean to paradise.

  Memory: my first drink. I stole a dusty bottle from my kitchen cabinet, labeled in a language I could not read. I poured that potion into me and felt the heat and churn of its work. I forgot myself. I forgot my mother leaving, this time, to live somewhere else. I forgot the Captain’s grief, how it sank every object in our home: the desert rose, the ostrich egg, me. I forgot my own missing.

  I drank to forget and I stopped caring where words came from. I stopped wondering what made them, what made me.

  Something drew taut in me at twelve, and by fourteen it snapped. I said yes and no at all the wrong times. Yes of my thumb jut over Route 151, summoning the open door of an unknown car. Yes with a lighter flame held to anything that would burn. Yes to my friends’ older brothers’ hands and brother’s friends’ hands. Yes, yes, yes. Is anything wrong? No.

  The summer before ninth grade, I kissed my best friend. By soccer season, I had no best friend. I cut off my hair. When a senior grabbed my breast in the hall between classes, I said nothing. I quit high school after one year. What could they teach me that I didn’t already know? The Captain did not approve, but what else was new? He was a rule follower. Half the time he was gone. Soon, I would be, too.

  I changed my name from Melissa with an l, to Melysa with a y and a single s. The double s had been a liability. That soft middle. All those curves. The small i—I’d found a way to cut it out of me. Melissa was unmoored, like the dinghies in the harbor that local boys hijacked and abandoned in the marsh grass, or left knocking against a far dock, oarless. An x, or a k, or a t would have been ideal, but I settled for y. Not barbed wire, but rope. Melysa, with that y, would stay tethered.

  In the United States, approximately 17,000 people change their names each year. In nearly all states, “A person cannot choose a name that is intended to mislead.” But what if one’s given name is misleading? Melissa made promises I didn’t want to keep.

  Melysa with a y lasted a year. Occasionally I still find it printed inside the cover of a book. The first feeling is shame. Because I wanted to change myself? Or because I thought it would be that easy?

  Shortening my name did not lessen me for long. I moved into the basement and Melissa swelled again to fill it. I read Plath and Lorde and lay on the floor and wished for Duras’s lover. No, to be that lover. To say everything in so few words. I wished to be silent but blistered with sound. I breathed it into my dark basement, into girls’ mouths, into my hands. I prayed for such small hands but I was a Hekatonkheir, hundred-handed and hungry. You touch too hard, said the first girl I loved. I rode my bike from ocean to ocean but her words followed me.

  So I left home. And though I loved that dirty water, Boston was not box enough. Even New York could not quiet me.

  Then heroin did. Drugs emptied me, refilled that space with vapors. Even the fiery melt of crack was an emptying: inhale it, and exhale the unseen self in a smoky swarm. The crackling splatter of me in that hot glass skillet—the abracadabra of evaporation.

  How can I explain this? To hear my name and feel nothing. Freedom. Melissa became a mannequin of moveable parts. I could make her do anything. Dye my hair. Change my clothes. Answer an advertisement in the newspaper: Young woman wanted for role-play and domination. Good money. No sex. It was a challenge, and I had something to prove. Names meant nothing in that place. Melissa stepped into the elevator and Justine stepped out. It wasn’t me. Those men could call me anything and I never flinched. It felt like choice.

  At the end, when I had descended so far beyond the bare fact of myself that it was no longer escaped, but lost, I’d whisper into my cupped hand, Melissa. A caught bee, its familiar hum held to my ear. Melissa. I wanted to go home. I wanted a new word for help. I wanted a name for what remained underneath what I had become. It was the first time I admitted that Melissa might be such a name.

  My mother kept bees when I was a girl. They lived in a white wooden hive behind her garden that resembled a chest of drawers. A small buzzing bureau. From the kitchen window, I could just make out the black specs of them, moving in and out, sometimes crawling on the face of it.

  When she harvested, I stood in the yard and watched her careful movements. She wore head-to-toe white and a veiled hat—Victorian, astronautical—a bride of bees with a smoking can in her glove instead of flowers. Her hand on the bellows, smoke streamed from the spout, a potion to slow the bees as she plundered their hive.

  She lifted out the frames so carefully, the ready combs heavy with honey and capped with wax. The bees’ song swelled across the yard as they rested on her white arms and clung to the netting over her face.

  With a knife’s stroke she uncapped the comb and revealed each oozing hexagonal hole.

  Sometimes, she handed me a broken comb and I held that warm hunk, its sweetness dripping down my forearm as I fought not to crush it, ached to close m
y hand around its torn geometry and feel its honey cover my knuckles.

  Melissa fed the infant Zeus honey. That mountain nymph’s bees delivered it straight into his mouth. This is the most common story, though there are many. I have looked for myself in all of them.

  The bee nymph was known for introducing sweetness to men in the form of honey and thus taming them of eating one another. A civilizing influence. My mother didn’t feed me sugar until I was nearly four years old. Honey was the only sweet my mouth knew and her undressed cakes more manna than any frosted future ones.

  She tried. Honey might have tamed a different daughter. Sugar’s grit might have better smoothed my wild. I suspect I would have eaten myself alive either way.

  In other versions, Melissa hides the sticky-lipped baby to prevent him being eaten by his father, Cronus.

  Find me a history without a monstrous father. Find me my father. There, in the shallow of our pond, dragging a metal rake, water darkening his cuffed pants. He’s at it again, said my mother, shaking her head. He raked that muck all day, tried to beat it back and clear a path. But our pond was algae and animal—its murky depths could not be cleared. It is a waste of time, my mother said, when there is so much to be done. Overnight, the path disappeared. Again, he raked. My mother left him. Still, he kept raking. He did not crush gold cans of Presidente, like his father had. He did not collapse the drywall with our bodies. But I saw him weep in the yard. One hand on the fence, he folded over.