When I bend over the toilet, I think a lot about how my heart is a volcano, like that quote from Kahlil Gibran. It’s dumb but it moved me—spoke to my shifting tectonic plates—and I wrote it down on a Post-it I stuck on my desk: “If your heart is a volcano how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?” It stayed there until a bad day, working on this book, when I suddenly loathed the quote with every ember of my being and crumpled it up and threw it away.
Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.
So, Kahlil Gibran. I know what he’s saying, but even rhetorically he is making exactly the wrong point. The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.
Dream House as the Pool of Tears
You talk on the phone, but soon she stops picking up, stops responding to your texts. “If you don’t want me to worry,” you tell her when she finally answers, “if you want me to feel safe, you’re not doing a very good job.” Your body feels huge, swollen, as though it is pressed into the room’s corners and your limbs are growing out of the windows.
“I don’t care,” she says, so softly that you know it’s true.
“Are you still seeing her?” you ask.
You cry and cry.40 You cry into your phone, flood it with saltwater. It stops working.41 So she breaks up with you over Skype instead. Her face is pinched and regretful.
“I still want to be your friend,” she says.
When it is over, you stare at your dark, dead phone; a rectangle of black glass. It grows in your hand, larger and larger, and you discover that, instead, you are shrinking. By the time the realization hits you, you are three feet tall. One foot. Six inches. And then, up to your chin in saltwater. You wonder if you have somehow fallen into the sea. “And in that case,” you think, “no one will come and get me.” You soon make out, though, that you are in the pool of tears that you had wept when you were nine feet high.42
“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” you say as you swim about, trying to find your way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.”
40. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C482, Taboo: weeping.
41. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C967, Valuable object turns to worthless, for breaking taboo.
42. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type A1012.1, Flood from tears.
Dream House as Mrs. Dalloway
On the night of the day she breaks up with you, you are meant to host a party for one of your professors after her reading.
To hang Christmas lights around the dining room, you drag a thrift-store bookcase over to the wall and stand on it. You are reaching up and up when you hear the particle board give. You don’t fall off, you fall through it, and that’s where John and Laura find you: standing in the ruins of the bookcase with blood trickling down your legs, sobbing gushily.43 (At the ocean at your feet, a Dodo paddles by, waves to you.) You are embarrassed that you thought a cheap, piece-of-shit set of shelves could bear your weight; you are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are embarrassed to be throwing a party in this state, embarrassed to be alive.
“What happened?” John asks, and when you don’t answer he repeats the question, and then he leads you to the couch and asks Laura to get some Band-Aids. Laura rolls up your leggings and cleans the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. John sits next to you, resting his wide hand between your shoulder blades, anchoring your shuddering skeleton.
John calls one friend, who calls another, and soon all the people you’ve spent a year and a half not confiding in have shown up on your doorstep. They find you lying across the couch and get to work like the mice in Cinderella—sweeping, cleaning, making shopping lists.
Someone asks you if you’ve eaten, and someone else answers for you (“Nope”), so someone else orders a pizza. You sit there, a glass of water in your hand, as they all crisscross in front of you, being kinder than you think you deserve.
The doorbell rings. As someone signs for the pizza there is a blur of color and light, and suddenly something small and warm is in your lap. It’s a puppy, a tiny, wiggling hound puppy with massive paws and a whipping tail. When you get a good look at her, you realize she belongs to your neighbor, who is also coincidentally your therapist (Iowa City!). You pick up the puppy, who is writhing with inarticulable joy, slathering your face in sloppy, flat-tongued kisses. You are crying as you carry the puppy outside, where you can hear your therapist and his wife calling her name. You go to the fence, and your therapist apologizes—they’d been loading up the car and she’d gotten away. Your therapist does not say anything about your shiny red nose and tearstained face. “I’ll see you next week,” you whisper as you bundle the vibrating creature over the fence. Home once again, the puppy gives you one last kiss, darting across the barrier like a clandestine lover.
You rally enough to dress and light the tea candles. The party hums around you, a machine that doesn’t need you at all. A tremendous success.
43. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C949.4, Bleeding from breaking taboo.
Dream House as Apartment in Chicago
You and your friends decide to get out of town, and you arrange a trip to Chicago. You left a broken phone behind, but this does not stop you from touching your pocket reflexively, wondering if she’s been trying to call you.
Even through your grief, you appreciate the trip: you sleep on the couch of the sublet you rented together and only wake up because your friend Tony gently crab-claws your foot poking out from beneath a blanket. When you look around the room, all of your friends sleeping so close to each other, like kittens, and you want to curl into a pile with all of them.
Still, you cry at meals, you cry in the streets. When you break off for small-group activities, you go with Ben and Bennett. You love them both, and mostly you love how they will not emote at you or ask you how you’re feeling. You go to the Art Institute of Chicago and spend a lot of time in two places: the Thorne Miniature Rooms and Ivan Albright’s That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door). Both fill you with a queer pleasure; both make you cry. One makes you feel immortal, godlike: as if you are a time-traveling spirit, hunched up in the corners of nineteenth-century English drawing rooms and sixteenth-century French bedrooms and eighteenth-century American dining rooms, watching the lives of the mortals play out in miniature dioramas. The other makes you feel small, as if you are prostrate before death’s flickering veil. Small, and then even smaller, and soon you find yourself paddling in your own tears, again. You hear something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and you swim nearer to make out what it is. At first, you think it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then you remember how small you are now, and you soon find that it is only a mouse that has slipped in just like you.
“Would it be of any use, now,” you think, “to speak to this mouse? Perhaps he’s a Cuban mouse, come over during
the Ten Years’ War.” (For, with all your knowledge of history, you have no very clear notion how long ago anything has happened.) So, you begin: “¿Dónde está el gato malo?” which is the first complete Spanish sentence you can think of. The Mouse suddenly leaps out of the water, quivering with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry, afraid you have hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats, good or bad.”
“Not like cats!” shouts the Mouse. “Would you like cats if you were me?”
“Well, perhaps not,” you say soothingly. “Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish you could meet my cat; I think you’d take a fancy to it if you could only see her. She is such a dear thing,” you go on, half to yourself, as you swim lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she’s such a capital one for catching mi—oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry again, for the Mouse is swimming away from you as hard as it can and is making quite a commotion. You call softly after it, “Mouse, dear! Do come back, and we won’t talk about cats!”
When the Mouse hears this, it turns around and swims slowly back to you: its face is quite pale (with passion, you think), and it says in a low, trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why I am afraid of cats.”
It is high time to go anyway, for the pool is getting crowded with the birds and animals that have fallen into it: there is a Duck and a Dodo (Amy Parker’s “trusting, extinguished bird”), a Lory and an Eaglet. And among them, every stranger who has ever seen you cry in public is doing the breaststroke. You turn from their pity and lead the way; the whole party swims to the shore. At the water’s edge, the creatures and the strangers disperse into the streets of Chicago.
When you arrive home, there’s a message in your inbox: “I’ve made a mistake.”
Dream House as Sodom
Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt,44 but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again.
44. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.
Dream House as Hotel Room in Iowa City
She emails you to tell you that she is staying in a hotel room in Iowa City, and will you come see her? You say no, no, but then you go anyway.
She says she is in town to see you, that she wants to be with you, and you bring a box of her things to leave with her but end up staying instead. You scream at her, and cry. At some point, there is a knock on the door. You open it, and a slow-speaking, square-headed Iowa City bro stands on the other side. He has a strange, eerie smile. He says that the two of you should come party with his friends, do you want to come on over? They have booze, and other things. You don’t learn what the other things are, you just close the door. You stand there for a second, then flip the deadbolt.
She comes up behind you, to hug you. You pull away so hard you smash into the door. You turn and slide down to the floor and she says, “Shhhh, shhhh,” and you beg her not to touch you, but she does. She leans in to your head. “Did you change your shampoo?” she asks, and you nod because you have. You have sex with her because you don’t know what else to do; you only speak the language of giving yourself up. “This will work,” she says to you as she touches you. “Amber means nothing to me. When I think about her, I feel sick. This will work, I promise. I love you so much.”
The morning after, you go to a restaurant next door. A gorgeous baby coos from the adjacent vinyl booth, and it makes you cry so hard the waitress writes with a blue pen on your Styrofoam box of leftovers: Have a beautiful day! Maria. You are startled because she’s written your middle name, and you think to yourself that she’s sending you a message before you realize it is her first name. You take the box of her things back to your car, drive home.
A week later—after you’ve convinced yourself that everything is going to be okay and you’ve gotten a new phone—you run into a woman who asks if your girlfriend has found an apartment yet, since she’s been here in town, looking. You are confused, but then later that night, when a friend tells you about a rumor she’s heard through the grad-school grapevine—your girlfriend is dating Amber, back in Indiana—you realize so many things all at once: She is not planning on moving in with you. You have made some bad choices.
You call her, tell her what you know. Even here, on this incontrovertible hook, she equivocates so smoothly you can barely see her squirm. It is, she explains, merely complicated. She simply has too many wonderful things in her life; she is having difficulty making sense of it all. “I cannot be an attentive girlfriend while I love someone else,” she says, finally, and then it is over for good.
Dream House as Equivocation
In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange:
“Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?”
Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”
“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.
“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.
Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.
The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse.45 Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem.46 Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals.
But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing.47 There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!
Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity. In an e
arly lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.
Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.
45. Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it—unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.”
46. Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above … do you plan to tell her later?”
In the Dream House Page 14
