47. This No True Scotsman fallacy could bend these narratives in every direction conceivable; create a kind of moving goalpost that permitted an endless warping of accountability. In a firsthand account of her abuse in Gay Community News in 1988, a survivor wrote: “I had been around lesbians since I was a teenager, and although some of them had troubled relationships, I was unaware of any battering. I attached myself to the comforting myth that lesbians don’t batter. Much later, when I was ‘out’ enough to go to gay bars in a town that was liberal enough to tolerate them, I saw that some lesbians did indeed batter. However, I thought they were all of a type—drunks, sexist butches or apolitical lesbians—so I decided that feminist lesbians don’t batter.” Activist Ann Russo put it more succinctly in her book Taking Back Our Lives: “I had found it hard to name abuse in lesbian relationships as a political issue with structural roots.”
Dream House as the Queen and the Squid
Here is a story I learned from a squid:
There was a queen, and she was lonely again. So she summoned all of her counselors, who then summoned all of the personages in the land so she could find a companion of her very own.
The counselors spent much time in deliberation, and after three days behind closed doors they brought her a squid, with no small amount of pomp and pageantry. She was utterly delighted. The squid was everything she had ever wanted: pearlescent and damp, sinewy and intelligent. The squid, in turn, was delighted with her own new situation. She had, from afar, admired the queen, and could hardly believe the queen had chosen her as her own.
At first, their friendship was a magnificent one. They traveled to the edges of the kingdom, and the squid would bring the queen beautiful baubles from tiny sea caves at the coast. The queen took the squid to visit distant dignitaries, and at night they trawled the shadowed halls in search of midnight snacks. It was a companionship defined by its tenderness, and the two were unspeakably happy.
But after a while, the queen grew bored with her companion. Those were difficult times. Sometimes the queen left the squid locked outside her study, and the squid would sit upon the dry, cool stones praying she would be returned to her bowl before her skin turned to paper. And even when the queen and the squid kept each other company, the queen was distant, often cruel. She would flip the squid over and drop little pieces of trash into her gnashing beak. And the queen would scrub whatever surface the squid touched, scolding her for her thoughtless messes. (The squid, as you know, has three hearts, and all of them broke over and over in her time with the queen.)
One night, when the queen was sleeping, the squid decided to gambol about the palace. She found her way to a mop bucket and wheeled herself around the corridors, enjoying the silence. After she had traveled some distance she found herself at the end of a hallway, before a very strange and heavy door. The squid was about to turn around and leave when she heard something.
She opened the door and slid into the dim room.
The smell was terrible. Not the organic stench of death but the wine-dark depths of sorrow—thick and bitter. And the sounds—the squid had never heard anything like that before. The low moan of water draining from a bath; keen wails darting through the room like bright birds.
The squid’s large eyes began to adjust to the light. When she realized what she was seeing, she wheeled her bucket as quickly as possible back down the hallway and back to the queen’s room.
Some time later, the squid looked out the window and saw that the queen was cavorting with a bear. The bear was beautiful: massive and shaggy and radiant. The squid, heartbroken, knew she could not even begin to compare. When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town.
When the queen discovered that her squid was gone, she was enraged. But once her anger receded, she knew what she needed to do. So the queen sat down and wrote the squid a letter.
“My dearest creature,” she wrote. “Before I begin, I must ask you to keep an open mind and an open heart about the following missive.
“I love you, and I will always love you. The fact that you refuse to come to my chambers, even just as a companion and not as a lover, stills my heart. You seem to believe that the fact that our love has ended means we can never be in proximity to each other, and I beg you to reconsider. I have loved many creatures in my lifetime—a goat, a honeybee, an owl—and despite the fact that our love did not endure, I still see them regularly. We are still friends. Just because I have found happiness in the companionship of a bear does not mean that our time together meant nothing.
“I am sorry that things did not work out between us. I have, as I hope you would agree, behaved honorably and beyond reproach. I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings. I would have thought that you—intelligent creature that you are—would know better.
“The truth is that you have been with me during a very difficult period of my life, and I am sorry that I have not been on my best behavior. But such is love! What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever. Does that not please you? None of this jealousy or betrayal; just a friendship based on mutual trust. I hope one day we can meet each other in some neutral space, our pain limned with understanding, with all of this behind us. I faithfully await your reply.”
When the squid did not reply, the queen wrote another letter:
“Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle, and that we could travel like we used to. I’m so sorry about the bear. The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you. She is still here in the castle but when I pass by her I have a strong desire to turn and run in the opposite direction. It is only you I want, my little cabbage. Not that I want to eat you, ha-ha! I just want you nestled in my stomach for all eternity. Please come back to me. Come back to me and I will pledge myself to you as I knew I should have many months ago. I have been a fool, but please, help me be a fool no longer. Marry me. And when we die our bodies will be scattered in the heavens as twin constellations, the queen and the squid, and no one will have known happiness like ours. I love you, I love you, my sweet darling, I love you. Faithfully and Truly, Your Queen.”
After receiving this last letter, the squid began to construct a reply. She spent many hours writing and discarding drafts of letters; some took longer than others. She lamented the use of her ink for such an exhausting and pointless purpose. Eventually, she penned words that satisfied her. She sent her letter off by messenger and then made her way to a local farmer. There, she exchanged coin for a horse and a waterproof bladder that could be suspended from the saddle. The squid slurped into the skin and bade farewell to the town where she had suffered so.
When the letter arrived, the queen opened it with trembling hands.
“My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.”
Here is a story I learned from a bear:
There was a queen, and she was lonely again.
Dream House as Thanks, Obama
Right before the breakup, Barack Obama visits Iowa City. He comes to talk about student debt, and you are a student and you have so many kinds of debt, so you go. Your heart feels like a picked-off scab hot with infection. You get there late and are shuffled into an overflow room, where his speech will be viewable on a screen. You’re mad at yourself for being late, sad to be shunted off into another room. It feels, like so many things these days, a sign.
Then, just before the speech starts, Obama comes into the room where you’re stewing. The bleachers are crowded but there is room on the top step, a place where you’re definitely not supposed to be standing because there is nothing behind it
but air. Your strongest friends pull themselves up and help you follow. You look out over the crowd and see the president—your president—walking before the crowd. You’ve never seen him up close before. He waves and smiles and begins to speak, and the air in front of you glints with smartphone screens.
You close your eyes. You can feel the metal of the bleacher step bending minutely below your feet like a tuning fork, and you think I am more than six feet from the ground. It would be so easy to die; a brief moment of faintness; a temporary abandonment of your body’s rigor. A man in front of you has a shirt on. “Obama ’08: He’s ready to go!” Yes, you think. Yes, she is. I know.
The day you break up for the last and final time is the day Obama announces, publicly, that he supports marriage equality. It is a Wednesday in May 2012. Your little brother’s twenty-third birthday. Joe Biden had, unscripted, bumbled into a public statement of support a few days before.
“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama says in that sweet, thoughtful, politician-y way that irritates the hell out of you and also makes you want to hug him.
The first time you voted for him, in 2008, you woke up to the simultaneous news that he’d won, and that California had rejected the possibility of you marrying a woman. It was a sweet-sour morning; through the fog of a hangover, you watched his victory speech with your roommate. “I’m sorry about Prop 8,” she said softly. You shrugged. You celebrated him despite his position on gays marrying because he was the best thing possible at that moment; imperfect in a way that affected you but was generally good for the world. You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty.
Years later, so sad and shattered, you laugh at his statement because you can’t think of what else to do. “Great timing,” you say to your laptop screen. “Thanks, dude.”
You figure it out: you take a Xanax and sleep on and off for days.
Dream House as Void
It is hard to describe the space that yawns open in your life after she is gone. You have to make yourself leave your phone at home; you have to practice ignoring it. You keep reminding yourself that you are accountable to no one. You try to imagine sex with other people and struggle to visualize it; masturbation is near impossible.48 You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if they will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine.
48. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C947, Magic power lost by breaking taboo.
Dream House as Unexpected Kindness
You have this really Republican uncle, Nick. Like, really, really Republican. Ann Coulter books on his coffee table, Fox News spewing technicolor paranoia into his living room, and a huge collection of guns that he insists on showing you because he knows it makes you uncomfortable. (You’ve never been able to explain to him the utter terror you felt the only time you shot a gun: an older guy you were crushing on took you out to a range and you both used a Glock to send old hard drives spinning to the dirt. You tried it because he’d said, “Most women are too small and slight to deal with this kind of kickback, but you’re strong and solid, so here you go.” You took the gun—because you were flattered by this assessment, because you wanted to sleep with him, because feminism—but then regretted it immediately. You were terrified; you felt like the gun was going to explode in your hand, kill both of you, and afterward you swore you’d never pick one up again. For a long time, that hunk of metal sat on your windowsill, sunlight streaming through the bullet hole. But when you moved you threw it away.)
Nick lives in Wisconsin, and being in the Midwest you see him from time to time. You like him, despite yourself. He might represent everything you loathe, politically speaking, but he’s a giant teddy bear and he always calls you his “favorite Democrat,” even though you haven’t identified that way since college.
The day after the woman from the Dream House breaks up with you for the second time, Nick calls you. He sounds jolly on the phone, explains that he’s coming through town on business, and could he swing by for a quick visit? You say sure, then hang up, then immediately begin scolding yourself. Not only are you not out to a man who thinks highly of Bill O’Reilly, but you’re a mess. You haven’t showered in days. You run around trying to throw yourself together, and an hour later you see his huge car chugging down the street. He gets out, waves to you, and starts up your sidewalk. He is a few feet away when you start sniffling uncontrollably. His face expands with concern. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the dam, and you begin to bawl.
“Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.”
Everyone’s heart does not break in the same way, but you know what he means. You both go inside and sit down on the couch. For the next hour, he tells you stories about his various breakups—he’s been married three times—and gives you advice. “Join a club,” he says. “Take up a new hobby. What about boating? Do you like boating?”
You laugh, and for the first time in what feels like a year, you smile.
Dream House as Memory
You spend the month after the breakup doing unofficial CrossFit with your friend Christa, who is brilliant and kind and pushes you. “You’re a natural athlete!” she says admiringly over and over again, and it is hilarious because you are so fat and the furthest possible thing from a natural athlete, but the year’s events have given you uncanny focus, and it’s true that you have been improving: you can now lightly jog a mile without stopping and deadlift two hundred pounds.
One day, as you drag your aching body to the locker room, you see that you have nine missed calls. They are all from her, the woman from the Dream House, and there are voicemails to match. Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone.
He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal. He runs around like Mickey from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” adding his own energy to the noise. “Resist, Carmen, resist!” he cries, slapping the counter with his hands and hitting pans with wooden spoons and amping up the music as loud as it will go.
(In Angel Street, when the police sergeant finally makes contact with the tormented, gaslit wife, he tells her firmly, “You are up against the most awful moment in your life, and your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.”)
You feel suddenly infused with the discordance, and yell “fuck you” at the phone (which has done nothing but its precise function!) before attempting to figure out how to block her number. You end up googling it, and once it’s done, the phone goes silent. But the voicemails are there, and you ask John to turn down the music.
Each one is a little different. Some are steeped in sorrow: I love you, I miss you. Others are threatening. You fucking cunt, pick up this phone right now. (As if she has forgotten you own a cell phone and not a landline, and you are not standing still in the kitchen listening to her voice on an answering machine while she’s leaving her message.) You are so deeply freaked out by this seemingly unhinged sequence, like a bad a
nd offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, that you try to imagine her leaving the messages—where she might be in the Dream House. You imagine her threatening you in the bedroom, weeping for you in the living room, pledging her undying love in the office. You think it will make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse.
You save the voicemails, in case you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade your phone a few months later, they are lost.
Dream House as Denouement
You have planned a chat with Val between an end-of-semester barbecue and a house party. You leave the former later than you intend, so when Val calls, you pull over on a shady street. It is so strange to hear her voice, soft and sweet over the phone. You chatter nervously at each other for a few minutes before arriving at a mush of apologies and tears.
“I can’t believe you agreed to be in an open relationship,” you say to her.
“She cared about you,” she says. “I didn’t think I had a choice.”
“Before that.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I met her, she was in an open relationship.”
The silence on the end of the line is long and slow.
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
When you arrive at the house party, your friends all stare at you and ask if you’re okay.
“I need a drink,” you say. “And then I need to tell you a story.”
Dream House as Schrödinger’s Cat
Was it the arc of the universe? The natural result of centuries, millennia of wrongheaded politics? Was she trained to find you, or were you trained to be found? Was it the fact that you’d already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other? The fact that your heart had been broken that one time and you desperately wanted to feel it unbreak? That you felt complete with someone loving you? That you just straight-up loved being desired, desiring someone, coming all the time? That you got addicted to her smell, her voice, her body? That you figured this was what you deserved? The superpredictable result of a religion that pathologized sex but never talked about relationships? Terrible sex ed? Bad timing?
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