She reaches down to grab something else, and you find yourself delving into deep wells of childhood experience: playfully outrunning your little brother, who is determined to put something gross in your hair. The house is a circle, so you run away from her, toward the kitchen, and she follows you, like your brother would when he was seven, and you dart through the office and the hallway and then into the bathroom. You slam the door and lock it, and a millisecond later you jerk away from the knob when the whole door shakes, as if she’s hurled herself against it. She is still screaming. You back away toward the far wall and slide to the floor. It sounds like she is trying to break the door down.
You are there for some time, but you don’t have your phone and can’t say how long, exactly. Eventually, the sounds stop. It is eerily silent. You stand and unlock the door. You come out trembling, crying. She is sitting on the couch, staring into nothingness like a doll. She turns and looks at you, her face slack.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “Why do you look so upset?”
On that night, the gun is set upon the mantlepiece. The metaphorical gun, of course. If there were a literal gun, you’d probably be dead.
30. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type E279.3, Ghost pulls bedclothing from sleeper.
Dream House as Sniffs from the Ink of Women
Norman Mailer once said, “The sniffs I get from the ink of women are always,” among other things, “too dykily psychotic.” In other words, one woman writing is mad and a woman-who-loves-women writing is mad squared. Hysteria and inversion, compounded like interest; an eternally growing debt. Mailer’s use of the adverb dykily suggests that, for him, disinterest in his dick must be a species of psychosis.
Narratives about mental health and lesbians always smack of homophobia. I remember watching Girlfriend in college—a rare Bollywood film about queer women—in which a wrench-wielding, butch lesbian seduces a gorgeous femme, but eventually the femme pulls away and falls in love with a dude and the butch goes ballistic, becoming possessive and violent before dying in a fall from a window.
I came of age in a culture where gay marriage went from comic impossibility to foregone conclusion to law of the land. I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.”
Dream House as Haunted Mansion
What does it mean for something to be haunted, exactly? You know the formula instinctually: a place is steeped in tragedy. Death, at the very least, but so many terrible things can precede death, and it stands to reason that some of them might accomplish something similar. You spend so much time trembling between the walls of the Dream House, obsessively attuned to the position of her body relative to yours, not sleeping properly, listening for the sound of her footsteps, the way disdain creeps into her voice, staring dead-eyed in disbelief at things you never thought you’d see in your lifetime.
What else does it mean? It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider;31 that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.
In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost:32 you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do. After all, you don’t need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.
31. Bennett Sims has a wonderful horror story called “House-Sitting.” You have never forgotten this paragraph: “You are not being superstitious, you do not think. It simply stands to reason. For it would be like sleeping in a house where a family has been slaughtered: whether or not you believe in ghosts, there is the atmosphere to consider.” It spoke to you, as an agnostic who still can feel when the air in an enclosed space is not quite right.
32. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types E402.1.1.1, Ghost calls; E402.1.1.2, Ghost moans; E402.1.1.3, Ghost cries and screams; E402.1.1.4, Ghost sings; E402.1.1.5, Ghost snores; E402.1.1.6, Ghost sobs.
Dream House as Chekhov’s Trigger
A few days after the incident at the bowling alley, and the day before you are to return to Iowa, she asks if you want to go to a concert at a local bar. You don’t—you’ve hated live music for years, its many demands on your body and your bedtime—but you are afraid to admit that, so you go. This is your first mistake that day. You meet friends there. You buy a beer but sip from it only occasionally, because you want to be able to get in her car and drive at a moment’s notice. It’s a Chicago band, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, and they’re actually all right. You sit through a set before you begin to feel exhausted. Being exhausted is your second mistake.
“I need to go home,” you tell her softly, leaning into her ear. “I’m so tired, and my flight is kind of early tomorrow.”
She seems pleasantly relaxed. “Do you want me to come home with you?” she says.
You relax—this response seems so normal. This is your third mistake.
“I don’t care,” you say. “If you’re having a good time, I can take your car and leave you money for a cab. Or you can come home with me. It’s up to you, my love.”
“You don’t care?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say. “Either way is fine.”
“So you don’t care about me. You don’t care whether I come or go.”
“That’s not what I meant. I just meant—”
“You don’t care whether I live or die,” she says.
Inside you, something stumbles to the edge of a precipice, falls off.
At the car, she tells you to let her drive.
“No,” you say. “No. You’re drunk. I won’t.”
“Give me the keys or I will kill you,” she says. She is kidding, probably. You no longer appreciate the joke.
“If I give you the keys, you’ll kill us both.”
She gets into the passenger seat. The whole way home, you keep waiting for her to dart over the barrier between you and grab the steering wheel. Instead, she closes her eyes.
You walk inside with her screaming at your back. You are calm now. You’ve learned from the last time. You’re already stronger.
In the bedroom you strip off your clothes, then go into the bathroom, lock the door. The shower hotter than you can stand. You are warmed immediately; the sound reminds you of a storm.
Then she’s there. Maybe you didn’t lock the door properly, maybe you didn’t lock it at all—and she is still screaming. She rips the shower curtain down from its rings. You back up. You aren’t wearing your glasses so she is just this fuzzy pale mass and her mouth is a red hole. The water falls between you.
“I hate you,” she says. “I’ve always hated you.”
“I know,” you say.
“I want you to leave this house right now.”
“I can’t. I don’t have my car. My flight is tomorrow.”
“Leave this house or I will make you leave.”
“I’ll sleep on the floor. I’ll leave first thing. You won’t even know I’m here.”
You slide down to the floor of the bathtub, sobbing, and she walks away. You sit there until the water hitting your body is icy. After a few minutes like that, you reach over and turn the handle to off, shivering.
She comes into the bathroom again. When she gets close to you, reaches toward you, you realize she is naked.
“Why are you crying?” she asks in a
voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach.
Dream House as Soap Opera
She doesn’t remember, she tells you before you go to sleep. She remembers being at the bar, and then crouching over you naked. Everything in between is darkness.
Dream House as Comedy of Errors
The next day, you wake up next to her. You pack, and try to convince her to get moving, because she has the car and you have a flight to catch. She is sullen, angry, snaps at you when you remind her that the airport is over an hour away. She takes her time. Puts on her makeup. Drives, for the first time in her life, very slowly.
When you get to the airport, the security line is long, and the TSA agent confiscates your metal water bottle, which you have forgotten to empty. As you pull your heavy suitcase through the airport, you start to cry because of the water bottle, except it’s really not the water bottle, and a kindly employee with crimped hair—in 2012!—stops to ask if you’re all right. You feel terrible about thinking that thing about her hair; also you sort of want to hug her. And you want to cry and explain that the TSA agent stole your favorite water bottle because he wouldn’t let you drink its contents, because perhaps he believed that the bottle contained the liquid from a bomb and by drinking it you would turn into that same bomb, or probably he was just on a power trip because his face didn’t change when you begged him to let you keep what you already owned, and also you’re afraid you’re going to miss your flight because your girlfriend spent her time this morning putting on her face, an expression you’ve always found sort of funny and vaguely sexist but that now just strikes you as horrifyingly ominous, because it suggests that she has one face and needs to put on another, and you saw underneath it last night, when you were so afraid and cowering, and she was screaming, and you were hiding from her, hiding from the woman who once told you she loved you and wanted to have children with you and called you the most beautiful and sexy and brilliant woman she’d ever met, you had to hide from her in a bathroom with a lock on the door, and if your family found out they’d probably think it proved every idea they’ve ever had about lesbians, and you wish she was a man because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men, and how she probably wouldn’t understand but the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR, and then you feel bad because for all you know this airline employee could be queer, she could understand.
You collapse into your airplane seat with minutes to spare, the last person to board the plane. You are sweaty from running, and you are crying, and you keep sucking snot back up into your nose. Your seatmate is a businessman in a charcoal-gray suit who is definitely regretting not springing for first class, and he keeps looking over at you. And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you’re going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.
Dream House as Demonic Possession
You have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing.
After she blames those nights on a kind of amnesia, you do research while she mopes around. She feels bad, so bad, she says. There is remorse there, true remorse, and yet sometimes you catch her composing her face into sadness. You google memory loss, sudden onsets of rage and violence. The internet gives you nothing, except one article about how it has been shown that heavy marijuana use can, theoretically, trigger an onset of schizophrenia, if one were already genetically prone to it. This is terrifying; you feel deeply for her. You try to present your various theories, but she scoffs at all of them. She hasn’t been smoking much pot, she says. She doesn’t have schizophrenia. She says it with such disdain you begin to wonder if you’d exaggerated the events of that trip, whether perhaps you are remembering them wrong.
This is not to say that you seriously consider demonic possession. You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in God or any accompanying mythologies. But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on a priest?”
That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces. “But she was possessed, see.” “Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn’t it?”
At night, you lie next to her and watch her sleep. What is lurking inside?
Dream House as Naming the Animals
Adam had one job, really. God said, “See this fuzzy thing? And that scaly thing there, in the water? And these feathery things, flying through the air? I really need you to give them names. I’ve been making the world for a week and I’m exhausted. Let me know what you decide.”
So Adam sat there. What a puzzler, right? It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise, or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.
Dream House as Ambiguity
In an essay in Naming the Violence—the first anthology of writing by queer women addressing domestic abuse in their community—activist Linda Geraci recalls a fellow lesbian’s paraphrasing Pat Parker to her straight acquaintance, “If you want to be my friend, you must do two things. First, forget I am a lesbian. And second, never forget I am a lesbian.”33 This is the curse of the queer woman—eternal liminality. You are two things, maybe even more; and you are neither.
Heterosexuals have never known what to do with queer people, if they think of their existence at all. This has especially been the case for women—on the one hand, they seem like sinners in theory, but with no penis how do they, you know, do it? This confusion has taken many forms, including the flat-out denial that sex between women is even possible. In 1811, when faced with two Scottish schoolmistresses who were accused of being lovers, a judge named Lord Meadowbank insisted their genitals “were not so formed as to penetrate each other, and without penetration the venereal orgasm could not possibly follow.” And in 1921 the British Parliament voted against a bill that would have made illegal “acts of gross indecency between females.” Why would an early twentieth-century government be so progressive? “The interpretation of this outcome offered by modern history,” writes academic Janice L. Ristock, “is that lesbianism was not only unspeakable but ‘legally unimaginable.’”
But this inability to conceive of lesbians has darker iterations too. In 1892, when Alice Mitchell slit her girl-lover Freda Ward’s throat in a carriage on a dusty Memphis street—she was enraged that Freda had, with the encouragement of her family, dissolved their relationship—the papers hardly knew what to do with themselves. In her book Sapphic Slashers, Lisa Duggan writes, “Reporters found it difficult to sketch out a clear plot or strike a consistent moral pose: was Alice a poor, helpless victim of mental disease, or was she truly a monstrous female driven by masculine erotic and aggressive motives? … A love murder involving two girls presented an astonishing and confusing twist that confounded the gendered roles of villain and victim.”34 The story was simultaneously salacious and utterly baffling. They were … engaged? Alice had given Freda a ring, along with promises of love and devotion and material support. Should they execute her for murder, or put her in a hospital for her unnatural passions? Was she a scorned lover or a
madwoman? But to be a scorned lover, she’d have to be—they’d have to be—?
“I resolved to kill Freda because I loved her so much that I wanted her to die loving me,” Alice wrote in a statement her attorneys provided to the press, sounding every bit the possessive boyfriend from a Lifetime original movie. “And when she did die I know she loved me better than any human being on earth. I got my father’s razor and made up my mind to kill Freda, and now I know she is happy.”
The jury chose madwoman, and Alice spent the rest of her life in the Western State Insane Asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee.
Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she had forfeited some essential femininity.
The conversation about domestic abuse in lesbian relationships had been active within the queer community since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989, when Annette Green shot and killed her abusive female partner in West Palm Beach after a Halloween party, that the question of whether such a thing was possible was brought before a jury and became one for the courts.
Green was one of the first queer people to use “battered woman syndrome” to justify her crime. The idea of the battered woman35 was brand-new—it had been coined in the ’70s—but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing: physical violence and a white, straight woman (Green is Latina), respectively. The baffled judge eventually allowed Green’s defense, but only after insisting on renaming it “battered person syndrome,” despite the fact that both the abuser and the abused were women. Regardless, it was not successful; Green was convicted of second-degree murder. (A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that “if this had been a heterosexual relationship,” she would have been acquitted.)
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