The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Months later I leave My Biker Boyfriend for My Spanish Teacher. It’s sudden and it’s not exactly for or about sex, though I give him whatever he wants, whenever he wants it: upon waking, after lunch on the weekends, midafternoon when he or I return from class, and in the evening after dinner or before bed. I want him to love me. Even in the beginning it doesn’t work: he tells me to sit up straighter, cross my legs, spread them farther apart. He tells me how to undress. He tells me when to talk, what to say, but he doesn’t actually listen. If I hesitate or resist, he takes what he wants anyway. He holds me down while I scream and beg him to stop. I cry out in real pain. This is how he sees me: a mirror that reflects his power always.

  In our apartment there is only one bathroom. The only mirror we have hangs over the sink. It’s easy to avoid. I never see my own eyes looking swollen and puffy. I almost never see the bruises, all the tender openings he’s bloodied. When I meet My Older Sister for coffee, the first time I’ve seen her in months, she says I must be trying very hard to look ugly. Which is certainly not, I think, the kind of person I meant to become.

  To celebrate our first anniversary, My First Husband and I get matching tattoos: a Celtic knot he puts on the fatty part of his arm, near his shoulder; I put the knot on my back, between my shoulder blades, where I can’t see it. Sometimes I forget it’s there.

  When we divorce a year later, I tattoo three flowers on my right ankle. I see them every time I shave my legs, or tie my shoes, or pull my legs up under my body on the couch, in the apartment where I live alone.

  After I move in with the man who will become the father of my children, I get a full back piece: lilies, lilacs, and daisies cascading from one shoulder to the opposite hip; and a prayer in a language I don’t read or speak because I want to keep it private, secret. When it is finished, I start a half sleeve of autumn leaves. Which becomes a full sleeve: an owl, a tree. I pierce my nose, take out the tongue piercing. I take out the nose ring. I start another sleeve.

  Now, old ladies in the supermarket stare and stare at me, holding up traffic at the meat counter, their mouths hanging open. They see me, my tattoos, my beautiful, well-fed children, and can’t process. Old men say things like Why would you go and ruin yourself like that? They shake their heads. They say, You would be so pretty if you got those removed.

  When I ask Dad to watch the kids while I get tattooed, he prays about it for a few days before saying no. He says tattoos are not part of his belief system. He says he knows it probably has something to do with what happened. He knows this but says no anyway. I stand in the hallway while we’re talking on the phone, passing and repassing a pair of mirrored sliding doors, packing my bags for our upcoming trip back home. I watch the reflection of myself talking to him, trying to explain. He’s a thousand miles away.

  Sometimes I feel like a very small person. Like I barely fit around the space of a breath. I don’t speak because I think no one will hear me. I rarely leave the house. Or if I do leave the house, I wear disguises: long hair, sensible clothes, a pretty, fresh-faced mask. I’m disturbed by the sight of my own naked body. I want to cover the bruises on my stomach and pelvis and back.

  Not all of them are imaginary.

  I think sometimes about running away. As when I drive anywhere on the highway and it would be so easy just to keep going. It would be easy to change my name. Easier to drive off a bridge or headfirst into an eighteen-wheeler.

  Sometimes I imagine cutting myself open to look inside, to dig around for the coldest, hardest, pulsing mass and swallow it whole. I want to take it like a pill and let it dissolve inside me. Or smuggle it across the border—any border—and shit it out in the street.

  I want to stitch myself shut.

  DO NOT ENTER. CLOSED INDEFINITELY FOR REPAIRS.

  I enter the room at the back of the building and find him ready for me: capfuls of black, yellow, blue, and red ink, blue sterile tape on the lamp and tattoo gun, Vaseline and paper towels spread out and ready to go. A padded black bench waits for my weight, towels and pillows in place.

  He tells me to lie down. Or to lie back. To pull up my sleeve. Take off my shirt. Unbutton my pants. To lie still.

  Ready? he asks, his foot testing the pedal.

  I nod once and then the needle enters and passes over my skin, leaving a thick black line. The layers and layers of tissue are injected with pigment, absorb the pigment, disperse the pigment down and down and down through the damage that does in fact bleed: the endorphins releasing strength enough for me to run, to jump, to burst through walls if necessary. My heart, my breath: in my chest, as they should be, slowing by the end, exhausted.

  And afterward, when I go home to wash and look in the mirror, I feel the mark in all its swollen fullness: raw and exposed and seeping. My hands shake as I turn on the faucet. I shiver pulling off my shirt. I look at the reflection. It both belongs to me and doesn’t. A play of light in the mirror. This is not my body, I think, feeling dizzy. But then something in me wobbles, collapses, shifts.

  I can feel this body: static, living. Not a surface, but an opening.

  [six]

  AT OUR FIRST session, The Newest Therapist asks me to write two lists: one that describes every terrible thing The Man I Used to Live With ever did, another that describes each thing he ever did that made me feel special and loved. I start to panic. I make excuses. I say, I have a lot on my plate right now. She doesn’t fall for it. She points to the door, says only, Write.

  Somehow, the terrible list is easier to start: how he kidnapped and raped me, how he murdered my cat in our kitchen, how he threatened to abandon me in foreign countries. It’s harder to write about how he saved me from getting crushed by a surge of people rushing the stage at a concert. How he dragged me to the outer edge of the crowd, his arm around my chest. We watched the rest of the show at the crowd’s perimeter, his arm around my shoulder.

  It’s easy to write about the argument we had while traveling in Spain, how he shook and shook me by my shoulders until I wound myself into a tight ball. He left and didn’t come back until I was asleep. He lifted me from the bed so gently, so lovingly, it seemed. I thought he was going to apologize. Instead, he put me on the floor. I remember it so clearly: the fluff of hair under the bed, the cold seams of the parquet.

  It’s easy to write that I’m afraid of him.

  It’s harder to write that he taught me about film, and cooking, and to admit that I’m probably a writer because of him, because of all that happened.

  It’s hard to admit that I loved him.

  When I give The Newest Therapist the list—not two lists but one—she does not put it in my folder like I expect. She puts on her glasses and reads. Occasionally she sighs, or shakes her head. I have nothing to do with my hands, or my face, or my feet. Panic washes over me. Eventually she looks up, her eyebrows slightly raised, as if expectant. She says nothing. She waits and waits for me to speak.

  It’s possible I’m not remembering right, I finally mutter, my hands in my lap, my head pointed in the general direction of the floor.

  She laughs out loud, puts down the list. She asks, Is there any other way of remembering?

  I remember how a late spring rain darkens the tarmac as we board the plane for Europe: a smell like dirt, like exhaust, like grass and engine fumes. I hold his hand and lean into his shoulder as the plane accelerates down the runway, tires spinning across the level earth, lurching into that curved space between longitudes, where at first we do not sleep but turn and rock and slouch across the aisle, our heads bent together or apart; and of all the voices droning on across the ocean his grows the most tender and cruel. I remember a blanket, a swirling indigo scarf, news of a typhoon. When someone leans over the seatback and whispers a question, like an aunt in my ear, I remember admitting to nothing but being an odd pair.

  Odd, too, how cool the hour we shuffle from the plane into the fog-filled Belgian city, too early for the black knot of streetcars and taxicabs, no one in their native streets
at all except four women in hairnets outside the boulangerie, cigarettes leaning out the windows of their open mouths, curtained by the sweet bread-tobacco scent, gossip in an unwelcoming tongue. And odd how our pair weaves and unweaves itself through the stone-gray monuments toward separate beds in a rented room: Too tired, I tell him over my shoulder, for that now. It doesn’t matter. My eyes don’t close for hours that night—a surprise concert of fireworks washing the Grote Markt walls in audible light: too loud, too bright for sleeping. The shadows of anonymous bodies dance across our wall like marionettes, each one dangles over the great crack that branches from the floor to the ceiling of our room in the hostel, and surely beyond: the bond between earth and edifice, brick and mortar, history and memory loosening, sliding, suddenly giving way. And like that: anything can be broken.

  I remember how a scrubbed-clean body can rise like new in the morning. I remember how to pack and repack a bag. I remember how to blame myself for almost anything at all as I watch cities pass, stations pass, rail-side tenements pass: brown, rust-brown, gray-brown; blue unshining windows shuttered against the mist-gray sky. I remember how to share a seat on a train with a man whose touch might make me shudder or wince, who often dozes with his head against the window or takes my photograph while I read a book. I remember how we sit behind a commuter in a wool-blend suit, across from two students playing cards. At the front of the car, there’s a young mother tucking a curl into her infant’s navy-striped cap. Her husband, I imagine, is young and smiling and kind. From my place in the train car I can see how, even on a morning like this, clean sheets hang to dry between the buildings on clotheslines: the white squares bleached bright as beacons.

  We ride the train to Amsterdam, where we pitch our tent at a campground on an island in the IJmeer. At the campground bar, I let a Scottish day laborer buy me a beer. He’s as old as my father, at least, and I’m trying hard to understand what he is saying, the music playing loudly, when I look up and see The Man I Live With crossing the bar, returning from the bathroom outside. He places my beer on the bar and leads me by my arm back to the tent, pushing me through the door, face first into the ground, my cheek hitting a rock under the tent floor, his hands inside me, his whole body inside me.

  In the morning, chickens peck at grass blades, pause to rearrange their feathers. Goats take turns bleating in their pens. Cool lake water laps at the campground shore. The thin metal tab of a zipper, pinched and led in silence along its tracks, bobs in the wake of a head emerging from the tent before dawn. Wrapping itself tight in an unraveling sweater, the heavy skirt shuffles along the gravel pathway, through the fog and early light of morning—campers in their sleeping bags still snoring—toward the shower house, like every other shower house, where steam rises thickly out of faucets, the concrete floor darkened by decades of all that disappears down a drain; this naked body like every other naked body: dark or pale, bruised or ruddy, wet and slouching toward oblivion.

  We ride the train to Paris. We ride the train to Spain. We swim in the ocean and listen to music over glasses of wine. We ride the train to Austria, where the blue bruise of a boat ferries us across a mountain lake. We eat lunch on a balcony, and he takes a photograph of the snow on the mountaintops. I wear a scarf. I lose the scarf.

  We ride the train to Budapest, where we share a room at the hostel with three Australian rugby players who take turns touching my breasts. I can’t remember their names. Does one have a mole on his cheek? The Man I Live With holds up my shirt for them, pinning back my arms. He laughs without smiling, his mouth wide open.

  Or maybe he is waiting in the hall for the bathroom. Maybe he is drawing me a bath. I want to remember being drunk. I want to be standing on the bed, holding my own shirt up, my own arms back. I want to remember that I begged them to touch me. Not how they finally turned away.

  We ride the train toward Slovakia. But the engine stops at the border, stops moving for hours, while uniformed guards move up and down the train cars making everyone stand. Two guards carrying machine guns question a young family: a young mother, a young father, a daughter who whimpers, an infant who wails. No one understands. Other passengers close their eyes, one empties his pockets: passports, tickets.

  This is my documentation, Herr Schaffner. Do not refute who I am! Coins clatter to the floor and roll under the seats. All the exits are blocked. We remain sitting and do not whisper. I try to look like I belong with him. Like we belong here, together.

  Earlier in the day I wander into a musty bookstore near the station. It’s one of those shops a person can get lost in forever: a leather armchair in the corner and coffee rings on the ancient library table near the register. I find a copy of Leaves of Grass, and feel elated to see English in print. Whitman writes:

  The earth, that is sufficient,

  I do not want the constellations any nearer,

  I know they are very well where they are,

  I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

  (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

  I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

  I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

  I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

  I realize, as I’m squatting in the musty bookstore, my back to The Man I Live With, that even if I stand and walk out the door, even if I leave right now and never see him again, unless I come down with amnesia, which happens only on daytime television, I’ll always carry him with me. I can’t will myself to forget his voice, his face, the rough impression of his palm on my hip’s still-forming curve.

  The fact is, The Man I Live With will remember the hostel in Budapest. And the train. And the bruise-blue boat. He will remember the campground in Amsterdam.

  And he will remember them differently.

  I close the book and place it on the shelf, trying not to think about that fact, because thinking about it would mean acknowledging that my story is not the only story. And there is no story in which this, or our life together, makes sense.

  And yet it’s the only thing I will always carry with me.

  We ride the train to Denmark, where he will stay for a month after I return to the States. While I begin summer classes, he’ll stay with one of his ex-wives—not the mother of his children, but the one he married only for the visa—while he tries to arrange visits with his daughters and sons. Before I catch the train for the airport we all have lunch together. They talk to one another in Danish. She glares at me over her plate while she eats her sandwich with a knife and fork, though her mouth smiles and says It’s very nice to meet you. It’s nice to finally meet you. I pick up my sandwich and eat it with both hands, setting it down again to take a long, slow swig from my beer. I say shit and fuck and wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. He puts his hand over hers when she looks far down the street.

  Rain falls in sheets between the train and the platform. He pulls me close, roughly—the last time, I tell myself—and puts his mouth over mine, then places several crumpled bills in my shivering hand. I stuff them in my pocket and bolt down the stairs and across the platform, shouldering my way past faceless passengers, into the train cars about to pull away on the tracks. I can’t remember the city: the buildings, the streets, all stamped out by darkness. But I remember the way back to the room with the cracked wall near the Grote Markt, the single bed, how I can’t sleep with the sound of a guitar played badly in the courtyard, with all the tuneless but joyful singing. I dress and descend the stairs, find a group of backpackers my own age. They introduce themselves and I immediately forget their names. They hand me a cold beer, a lit cigarette. Their open faces also lit. I remember it is morning as the plane lifts from the continent. Somehow still morning when it lands.

  Alone in our apartment, I open all the windows and realize only as the sunshine comes pouring in just how dark our rooms have always been. I ride my bike to class each morning, and to the coffee shop each afternoon, where I recognize a student
from one of my classes. We sit together every day, both of us writing. He is my age, and handsome, I think, and he never touches me, not once, though he sits right next to me for hours every day. In the evenings I go back to the apartment and keep writing, writing. I write papers about folklore in reggae and the Jamaican struggle for independence, and about heteronormativity in contemporary fiction, and poems about the rain-pocked creek bed on my grandmother’s farm and e-mails to graduate programs in creative writing to request application materials. I call My Handsome Friend and we plan to go see a movie together, just as friends. And My Handsome Friend invites his friends, a couple, and we all sneak into the theater where he works and stay out so late, and instead of crushing my face into the ground or pushing me to the floor, they laugh at my jokes and say, Let’s do this again.

  When The Man I Live With returns from Denmark we go back to our normal life. I take classes; he teaches. Once a month he plays poker with his former students and comes home with all their money. When he’s gone, I apply to grad schools, the Peace Corps, any excuse to move away. I tell myself I will leave him at the end of the year. I plan exactly what to say. When he’s home, he wants to fuck: in the morning, at lunchtime, after school, before bed. If I say no, or turn away, or if I find some reason to be out of the house all day, we’re up until three in the morning, him screaming at me the whole time, twisting my words until they tell a story I’ve never heard before, until I doubt myself, until I finally give in, and let him fuck me while I sob face-first into my pillow. Our polite Asian neighbors never complain, never look me in the eye.