Rage loiters in me, like those welfare mothers always on the Internet at the public library. Dating sites is what they’re doing. My rage is similar: ignorant and sexual. I have degrees, sure. Though I will say, none of them are in frames—such a tacky, insecure ethos. Recently, as an excuse to leave town for a few days, I attended the Women’s Cultural Studies Convention in Grand Rapids. Immediately I was depressed. The hotel decor was too menacing, the wallpaper a tableau of shaggy oxen flanked by rosebuds resembling human livers. The women used too many words, were all fetishists of their own bad ideas, constantly scribbling in the margins of everything: New books, obscure journals, takeout menus. “Marginalia,” they liked to say. “Your marginalia is extensive!” or “Pardon me, I wasn’t trying to peek at your marginalia!” Like scientists in a singles bar. The self-satisfied jargon. The pretend poetry.
Shit and fall back in it. Just give me the goddamned discourse.
The keynote speaker was an astounding bitch. Premier pornography scholar and behavioral theorist Trisha Gregory. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a runty, rat face. Her hair was a tangle of frizzed chestnut with a patch of white that fell over one eye, like she was an erotic villain. During her address she pointed at people, delivered degrading analyses of everyone’s body language. The topic was “Performative Proximity.” I’d never heard of it either. The audience squirmed and giggled, until it was their turn. Several walked out of the old red hall with their arms gruffly crossed, prompting Trisha to serenely whisper into her little microphone, “Take note of the closed posturing as the offended exit the room. One might assume they’re asserting a dominant stance, but this configuration only serves to further demonstrate the rawness of their vulnerability.” The microphone was very close to her mouth. The words hissed through the hall like a mechanical snake.
Afterward, in the lounge, I drank too much. Trisha was there, reveling in her own disdain, surrounded by a gaggle of elderly lesbians. I wedged between them to order more wine. “Audacious presentation!” I said, not meaning to sound so enthusiastic. She smoked a long, black cigarette and stared at a painting on the wall of a woman wearing a dress made of parrots. I reached out to shake her hand. I mentioned my own research. It came out strewn and incompetent. I continued to blabber until I’d finished my merlot. She seemed exceptionally slim, right up to the hips, where she carried an alarming width that narrowed abruptly again after the knees. She said she needed to use the restroom. Something about the tone, the raise of her immense eyebrow, suggested I follow her. We went to her hotel room, where she offered me more wine and asked if I was into fisting.
“I thought you had to use the restroom?” I said.
She stared at me.
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it,” I said. I stood unsteadily before the tinted hotel window, feeling insane in my cheap slacks. Moments later I found myself being finger-banged on the bed while being called the most terrible names. I did not call her names, but slept on the floor afterward using my ugly pants as a pillow.
In the morning she offered me a copy of her most recent book, Morphologies: The Undoing of Eden. I asked her to sign it. She already had a pen out, flicked her name in a giant loop across the final page. “You should include a number,” I said, “where you might be reached.”
Her pen hovered in a bored, reluctant way, but she obliged. “Don’t ever call me,” she said, in a sad tone.
My partner, Miriam, is dying. Primary peritoneal carcinoma. She’s resigned herself to it and stopped treatment over a year ago, before we even met. Two months into the relationship she decided to reveal this. She didn’t expect us to last so long, she said. Miriam was a new lesbian. Her illness offends me. Of Trisha, Miriam would probably say I’m being destructive. Death ripens the heart, turns it soft and penetrable as rotten fruit. I suppose I want that same: the freedom to destroy myself in whatever manner I see fit.
Back in Kentucky, I drive directly from the airport to the university. I drink purified water in the Women’s Studies Department where I currently hold the position of the Belva P. Fanny Chair in Sexuality. This is not a title I like to say aloud, for obvious reasons. The office is too dim. The tiny lights of the office equipment blink with tired alarm. I am on sabbatical, and it’s a Saturday, so I won’t have to encounter any chatty colleagues or dumb-eyed, homely students. I clip things from old medical journals. I xerox photographs of vulvas. Vaginas are such varied items. One, a hillside of wheat split by a narrow path. Another, a window gaping out into nothing—some lonely warmer dimension. Others, if you squint, are like gutted rock quarries. At home, I will tack the pages up like wallpaper in the dining room, a collage to the pioneers of modern gynecology. But also, a crime scene, a repository of clinical smut, a pervert’s dossier! This is not the living situation of an adult. But I am writing a book. Working title: The Dyke Pageant. It is an investigation, among other things, into the failures of Albert H. Decker, M.D., D.O.G. He is the source, in my opinion, of decades of misinformation. I was more fervent when I first began. A year has passed. Things are different. I am still waiting for a viable theory to discover itself—something beyond “This guy was an idiot and asshole.” I long to lurch like a mad person from the sludge pit of academia, if one can even use the word “academia” in the same sentence as Eastern Kentucky University. But I am interested in paychecks, unlimited access to the copy machine.
Another thing: my mother died two winters ago, and I’m living in her house—a rural outpost on three acres of the Daniel Boone National Forest. On the drive home I listen to the university library’s only available audio recording of Trisha Gregory. It is her first book, Substrata of Outsider Erotica, read by the author. I pay more attention to her voice than to the theories. Her tone is even more dramatic on tape, like an oboe filled with gravel.
Outside of Bowling Green the bald landscape undoes itself, rising into the foothills of the Appalachians. A heavy rain tears ditches along the side of the highway. The house is outside of Williamsburg, off the road, concealed among a row of crooked hemlocks. I turn down the drive just as the last sight of light drains off behind the pines.
Miriam and her dogs are asleep in the spare room, tangled up like dirty rags on the bed. Miriam is an animal lover. Which might explain why she’s with me. She saves the mangiest strays. Last week, she nabbed a lab from the parking lot at Auto Zone. Being a kind of scientist, I find great sadness in the domestication of animals. She stays in the spare room with the mutts most nights, claiming I grind my teeth during sleep. I retire late and wake before her. She sleeps often. I write and read and take long walks in the woods. Sometimes she’ll get up and ask to come with me. Sometimes I let her. On the walks she asks about Mother: the time she found a finger floating in a can of green beans, details of her rural girlhood and, Miriam’s favorite, the one about Mother hearing voices in the neighbor’s barn. Miriam’s interest in Mother annoys me. With Miriam here, I dream of Mother too often and with an eerie lucidity.
I like the house. I feel something for it, in the way one might feel toward another human, but with less contempt. It was Mother’s childhood home, where she returned to live and die after her second divorce. It was always a disintegrating place. Her father built the original cabin in 1931. I remember, as a girl, pulling back a loose corner of carpet to see the year carved into a floorboard. The place was once a one-room cabin in the woods but is now an expansive maze of poorly built additions with a crumbling chimney jutting out like a lumpy phallus.
Dead animals rot in the undergrowth and plants rise up in purples and yellows like colorful claws reaching from the corpses. Algae grows on everything. Lichen suture themselves to rocks and feather out in crooked strands. Decay swells in every direction—like a concerto, or a rash.
Eastern Kentucky is the Half-South. They say “worsh” instead of “wash.” “Yonder” instead of “over there.” There is something sinister in the clangor of the dialect.
These are not my people. I run from them. I turn away in public places.
When I received the call saying Mother was dead, I honestly wanted to feel something. But I was just thirsty. I was sleeping, alone in my bed. I pictured her alone too, sitting in the recliner in the cabin, eating fruit from a can. She had not lived here for many years. It had sat empty, with her in Shepherds Manor. I imagined wild animals had moved in, were breeding and nesting in the bedrooms, pissing on the furniture. I pictured saplings jimmying apart the floorboards. When I did move in, months later, the place was like a water-damaged issue of Antique Living. There were stacks of broken-down cereal boxes and Banquet dinner trays piled like turrets on either side of the stove. A raccoon crawled out of the fireplace.
It is still saturated with odors, suspended in Mother’s weary attempt to have it seem middle-class. It groans occasionally with an old woman’s desire to return to the dirt and trees.
I settle into the paraphernalia. The thesis of Trisha’s book, as far as I can tell: “The physical body is a reflection of internal desire. It communicates all emotions through inadvertent gesticulations.” Is this news? She claims that when we are deliberately projecting one emotion, a truer, more private one is exposed, uncontrollably. Albert Decker would agree with this, except he’d call these symptoms of “a delinquent behavioral process.” “Bisexualism in females,” according to Decker’s Office Gynecology, is “characterized by variations toward a masculine constitution: great height, broad and bony shoulders, a narrow and only slightly inclined pelvis; her thighs will not touch, she will possess outstanding artistic talent, above-average intelligence.” Nowhere does he mention absolute lesbianism, the insipid or ignorant butch—only a clever, perverted housewife.
The refrigerator is full of salad dressings and there is a sad assortment of empty potato chip bags tucked beneath the sofa cushions. Miriam did the grocery shopping again. She is hungry always for these nonfoods. I sneak out onto the deck and phone Trisha but hang up after three rings.
Miriam hunches like a dope before the dog bowl, scraping bacon off her plate. The idiot mutts nip at each other’s faces.
I am a particular woman. I have developed a romance with the arrangement of data. All photos and specimens are defined and annotated in the exhaustive legend I keep in corresponding notebooks: the uterine sound, the Pederson speculum, the cervical cannula. Sometimes, in the early hours, while looking at the photos, I am struck by a lustful gruesomeness. Decker too was a fussy record keeper, with an aversion to surgical gloves, one will notice, as he holds back the labia in his patients’ photo logs. Even as I wallow in his errors, I respect the tenacity. In the X-rays over his light box the stern bones of the dyke glowed like fluorescent cylinders. He could point as easy as if it were on an atlas, to the specific location of her psychic imbalance, her emotional conflict and sterility. His was the premier science of justified homophobia.
Miriam insists I see the hummingbird feeders she’s hung from the branches of the gingko tree, like a Christmas tree for hummingbirds. There is an infestation. I stand next to the tree in a red baseball cap and the birds rush my head. I keep still. Miriam whispers, “Don’t open your mouth, Adelaide. They’ll fly right in.” She hoots, swats one away with her plump hand. She asks if people can eat hummingbird. “Of course,” I say, “in some countries they eat live hummingbirds, snatch them out of the air mid-flight and bite directly into the breast. Certain quick-reflex, small-handed women and gay men are especially good at snatching the birds.”
“Really?” she asks.
“You’re a goon,” I say.
The dogs line up on the other side of the sliding glass door, begging to get out. Miriam is laughing as she slides it back. The bastards charge. The sound of the barking and Miriam’s laughter causes the birds to scatter. They race like a squadron out of the yard and over the frog pond. They’re very nervous animals. “Bitches! Fuckers!” I yell at them.
After dinner Miriam plays her Eagles CD on the stereo and opens all the windows so that a grass-filled breeze blows through the house. I help her up onto the giant oak dining table. She slides out of her culottes, lays her face on the table and shows me her ass. She keeps her knees tight against her chest. Her backside is like a monstrous, pink beach ball, her thighs goose-pimpled. I press my mouth against the hood, my chin to the opening. I close my eyes and suck her clitoris. I lubricate my hands with oil. And fold them. I insert two fingers, then four. I keep the fingertips together as I penetrate her. It’s like turning down the slickest cul-de-sac. While giving her head I think of a CPR class I took in college, of the plastic doll used to demonstrate mouth-to-mouth. Her vagina has that plastic taste, except more tart, like spring water.
“What was that about?” she asks later, eating shredded cheese folded in a pickle slice. Toy tacos, she calls them.
“Did it hurt?” I ask.
“Was that the point?”
“No.”
“Well, it felt good. When I’m with you I feel better for some reason,” she says.
“I feel unruly,” I say.
On the rotten deck I read. I call Trisha again but she does not pick up.
I force myself to work. I sit down and draft an outline of chapter three, which, as of today, I’m calling “The Cunt Curator.” I end up making a long list of alternative chapter titles: “Twat Collector,” “Homeward Bound 4: The Reckoning,” “Toy Tacos.”
Decker reads the body like a textbook. “Masculine traits,” he writes, “in the modern female, are quite often evidence of a physiological and psychological disorder.” In his photo logs, which I scrutinize too often, the labia part and the vaginal openings distend, as if to venerate their own meticulous architecture. In my outline I write: “Science is a scrupulous attack of the self. Show me an unhealthy craving and I’ll show you a pocketknife.”
I have no idea what this means. A hummingbird has gotten into the house and snapped its neck during an effort at escaping through the skylight. I sweep it off the floor into the dustpan; it lands in the trash with a tender thud. Minutes later the dogs have toppled the can and are fighting over the soggy corpse.
When I first met Miriam she was standing beside a truck loaded with yard ornaments, wearing a hot-pink tracksuit, holding a greasy paper sack in front of Big Dog’s barbecue stand. She was crying, in an obvious way. I walked past her with my head down, to order my loose meat sandwich. I could hear her talking to herself while I watched a ragged teen spoon coleslaw into a Styrofoam cup. On the way back to my car she yelled, “Hey! Hey, girl! Hold up. Listen.” She’d locked her keys in the cab. She was still wiping tears off her face when she asked if I’d give her a ride. And there was her neck, like a short loaf of bread, and her forehead, flat as a tabletop.
She is not a beautiful woman. She is malleable, capable of filling small rooms with her body. I imagine hiding things in her heft. Her voice is shrill as a kazoo.
Now we’re lesbians of the land: twin valves opening against each other in the darkness of the master bedroom, contrary figures hoeing rows in the garden. We are the cat and the crawfish. Other times, the lady and the friend. I hold the dogs back while she cleans their pen.
The librarian’s fingers seem swollen. I detect a smell of Lysol as he hands me my ordered books. I read at a little desk made for a child and watch the man climb a stepladder in order to reshelve the reference material. The welfare mothers peck ferociously at their keyboards while their dirt-faced children wander among the stacks. In her third book, Meta Porn Heroine, Trisha writes: “A researcher will often find herself blocked by the biases of her own deductions, even as an object’s meaning mutates before her. One is handicapped, as in life, by the malfunctions of our own prejudices and desires. It should come as no surprise that these personal preoccupations are rampant among leading pornographic scholars.” I want to discuss this with the little librarian. Instead I gather my things. I could apply Trisha’s logic to a mailbox if I thought long enough about it. Every idea lands sharply, and then ripples into nothing. At home I call her again. This time someone answers, a man. He says his name is Landon and he’s feeding the fish. “Trisha is in Bucharest,” he says.
“For how long?” I ask.
He claims to take down a message but when I ask him to repeat my number back he says, “I’m off. Thank you!”
The call throws me into a panic for the rest of the day.
There are four photos of patient D568 in Decker’s source material, with either her eyes blocked out or the face softly blurred. Her body, though, is always unmistakable and vulgar. At forty-two years old, D568 is as awkward and angular as an adolescent male. Decker charted the patient’s development over thirty years, like a timeline for biological deviance. “Prototypical housewife-queer” he calls her. She looks like me. We’re of the same “sexless” frame. There is a blank utility about her, suggesting only shapes. I feel less lonely when I look at her.
I take out a sheet of paper and write across the top, “I am my own test subject.”
Miriam and I go to a bar. My hair is clean and I’m wearing a button-down shirt. What is here for the irreverent dyke? Pole barns, a sad library, Walmart, endless isolated hollers full of coyotes. Miriam is sitting with her girlfriends and wearing a dress she made herself from a checkered tablecloth. There is a hole cut in it for her head. I buy drinks for everyone. “Doesn’t she put you in the mood for a picnic?” I ask her friends. She laughs but her friends hurry toward the dartboard. They seem defensive in their leather skirts and tight T-shirts. Each of their shirts has something printed on it: drama queen, rock star, diva. They are all over forty. “Are those their Christian names?” I ask Miriam.
“No,” she says. “Those are job descriptions.”
She shotguns several beers and we attempt a clumsy game of pool. She insists we leave and go for barbecue. We drive and eat the sandwiches. Miriam makes a mess of herself. She is a tablecloth smeared with barbecue sauce. She wants to show me a field. “I’ve seen one before,” I say. We arrive and we get out of the car and she points to some lines cut into the tall grass. “I don’t get it,” I say.
“Look at it for a minute,” she says.
So I do. I stare for a long time until suddenly I can see that there are words mowed into the wheat. You have to tilt your head a bit, lean against the grass. “Hello,” it says, and then just a few yards away, “Goodbye.”
“Ain’t that something? Drama Queen’s husband did it with a riding mower.”
“Looks time-consuming,” I say. Miriam turns to cough. She hacks for a minute and out of nowhere vomits onto the ground. She heaves a few more times, until it seems there’s nothing left. I consider putting my hand on her back but she vomits so casually it seems silly to comfort her. It just falls right out of her mouth. She has the simplest expression on her face. She has done this many times. Her thin hair twirls around her head in the wind. When she has finally finished she says, “I’m sorry I threw up.” She pulls up her dress to wipe off her mouth. I get a full shot of her legs, sturdy and pale and vast. “Do you mind if we go home? I smell like puke,” she says.
Half-asleep on the sofa, with Miriam in the spare room, I touch myself. I think of her legs and Trisha’s head, of the place where Miriam’s thighs begin to touch right above the knee, her enormous backside, the outline so visible through the thin fabric of that terrible dress. I think of the abrupt transition between Trisha’s waist and her unbelievable hips, her clever insults. I climax to the image of their ghastly hybrid.
I have clipped Trisha’s photo from the dust jacket of Morphologies and Eden and taped it inside my desk drawer, next to the unsharpened pencils. I open the drawer too often. “Let your life be a document for the world to study and despise!” the prologue reads. Her words are a confirmation, of something: every pervert distinguishes herself by the manner in which she chooses to condemn others?
Typically, in the earlier stages of theoretical discourse, pages amass until a puzzle appears. I’m supposing here. I’ve never written a book before. I have an inkling and a self-imposed deadline. There is repetition, I know that, and hypotheses extending like slippery tentacles. There are paragraphs lined up like the variables of a long equation with no solution. Drowning comes to mind, a constant sense of doom. In this way you can tell a book is alive.
I dream of Mother. I am looking out the kitchen window. She is outside, holding a bucket. She is looking cautiously into the bucket, as if it contains something dangerous. I open the kitchen window.
“The neighbor!” she yells sulkily. “He and I want you to have this!”
“What’s this regarding?” I ask, pretending not to recognize her.
“This here’s birdseed.” She smiles like a crook. She is proud of the birdseed, I realize. “The neighbor used to make it for me all the time. I was a good woman, Adelaide. You might wanna fill them feeders since I can’t do it.” She nods in the direction of the numerous bird feeders that hang from the awnings.
“No,” I say. “You’re dead.”
“I know,” she says, sitting the bucket down. “Have your friend fill them anyway.”
She turns around to face the rigid pines, where the creek splits the woods. She removes her old blue bandana and scratches her head. “See you later,” she says. Her gait seems angry, but she gives me a little wave as she crosses the bridge.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Masses of paperwork, big boxes of manila folders stuffed with menacing, shadowy xeroxes. Books stacked waist-high around the desk. So many naked women and illustrations of arcane gynecological equipment, orifices packed tight with instruments, X-rays of fallopian tubes shimmering with dye.
“Maybe I’m a masochist?” I say to Miriam over lunch.
“Are those the people who eat their own hair and fingernails?” she asks.
I offer her more cooked carrots.
“My friends used to call me the Nursing Home,” she says.
“Why?” I ask.
“I was the place where all the old men went to die.” She laughs enormously, making a spectacle of herself, showing her fat tongue, pink as chewed-up gum.
“All of your boyfriends were senior citizens?” I ask. She likes to make me guess at things.
“More or less,” she says. “I feel my weight has kept me from finding a good husband.”
I can’t tell if she’s joking this time. I’m inclined to say it has more to do with her face, but I don’t. “There’s someone for everyone,” I say. “You should move to a big city.”
“No,” she says. “That’s not an option. Maybe there are other options here now,” she says, piling carrots onto a slice of buttered bread.
“Doubtful,” I say.
After lunch we follow the little creek through the trees.
“I even dated Rupert,” she says, “the old dude who lived over yonder. We once were engaged. He’s passed now. It was intense though,” she says. “Which is why it didn’t last. He was too demanding, sexually.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say, though I can. This was Mother’s old neighbor. I’m forced to picture Rupert and Miriam together. His feeble gnome body perched on top of Miriam’s beastly thighs, stabbing into the folds.
“And I’m only thirty-nine,” she says, smiling, shyly fluffing her hair with her palm, as if to signal she knows she looks good for age. She indeed has the face of a giant infant. “You know how people can be,” she says. “They want a woman to be their everything and then nothing at all.”
We cross the bridge. We walk through the woods until we hit the tree line. There is a long stretch of electric fence. The grass is sparse and I can see ragged animals bending to graze at scattered blotches of green.
“He loved his goats,” Miriam says. “His daughter takes care of them now.”
“He’s the one,” I say, “that Mother used to work for when she was a teenager. The one that grew dry corn. And my Mother would shell it.”
“Oh!” Miriam says. “For feed. He loves feeding things,” she says, winking, running her hands over her solid, head-sized breasts. She makes a loud clicking noise with her tongue and the goats lift their heads. A few of them amble over, but change their minds and eat more grass instead. “Do you feel closer to your Mother here?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“I do,” she says.
The story Miriam always wants to hear is one Mother used to tell me when I was a kid, about the shelling of corn for Rupert. Mother described the hand-cranked sheller he kept in the barn, and how hard she had to work to get the corn through. She was working in the barn after school one day when a man whispered to her from outside the barn. “Lucille, when will you come for me?” he said. My mother’s face always scared me when she described the voice. Her eye would twitch. Like someone had called up to her from the hottest caverns of hell. It was one of those dizzying childhood moments when I knew she wasn’t just my mother but also a woman living alone in the world. She’d asked what the man meant and when he didn’t answer she stepped out of the barn to see that no one was there, just the goats chewing garlic near the fence.
I am feeling troubled today by how similar my build is to patient D568. Perhaps my arms are longer, my shoulders narrower? The whole endeavor is beginning to feel like fodder. I play the game again where I allow my eyes to fall out of focus so that the vaginas are not vaginas but instead: sea slugs; aquatic plant life; dry, veiny leaves; compact mounds of fresh clay. I’m waiting to stumble upon a formula. I wouldn’t consider myself the sort of person who sees patterns where there are none, though maybe I am not myself. It seems important to acknowledge how consistently we are encouraged to see ourselves in such uniform ways, goaded into it, slowly, from girlhood to old age, enticed by the shallow rewards that come with correctly performing our femininity. Like a hot, horny pork chop dangling from a string, a diamond ring on a razor-sharp fish hook. And we are marginalized, of course, if we can’t produce femininity in a recognizable way. One becomes prone to imagining her body in a dozen untrue ways. Every mirror is a funhouse mirror.
Miriam returns from the grocery store with all the dogs in the back of her pickup truck. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday. Her hair looks uncombed, the curls tangled and jutting out in odd directions. The dark circles under her eyes have grown more pronounced. She snaps the truck door closed with her powerful hip. “Trudy! Timmy,” she yells, prompting the dogs to leap out of the truck. The two small ones trail behind. The other two chase each other around the yard like manic children. Their names are, shamefully, Pat and Benatar. “I’d have ten more if I could afford to feed them!” she says, always, to anyone who shows the slightest interest. They make my skin crawl, most days, especially when Miriam wants to discuss what will happen to them when she dies. All day the dogs are in tow, their claws clicking like tap shoes on the hardwood. The deception of dogs disgusts me. The lie of pretending to lead, when of course they’re just following in front, looking back constantly for approval. I ask Miriam if she’d like to help me plant the garden. She says, “I would! How wonderful,” clapping her hands together, exciting the dogs. When I look at her, when I see her reaching to pick up the terrier, or straining to pull the detergent from the shelf above the washing machine, I imagine pulling off her khakis and pressing my mouth against her anus. I want to own her, and please her.
At the feed store a gathering urge overwhelms me. I fill my basket to the brim with seeds. Miriam has rented a gas-powered tiller. It turns out to be a joyously loud machine that is often hard to handle but fun because it is so unwieldy and tough. After the ground is ready we consult one of Mother’s books to determine the best method of planting. On one end is a variety of greens, the other tubers and corms. When you’re standing on the hill near the shed, the fresh plot looks like a grid. The parallel lines are comforting. The dogs trot the perimeters. They wrestle like mongoloids in the grass. After dinner I find my favorite hairbrush half-chewed under the buffet in the hall.
Miriam goes into town for dinner and the moment she’s out of the house I phone Trisha. I leave a message this time, telling her that she should come for a visit. I water the garden and read in a lawn chair near the woods. When I go back into the house there is a message on the machine. I am sweating as I play it back. Trisha’s voice is tired and cold. She declines the invitation, saying her schedule is full. She sighs into the receiver and quotes Foucault: “We return to those empty spaces, don’t we, Adelaide, that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false or misleading plentitude?”
I return her call but she does not pick up. I leave a message as well. “When I think of Foucault,” I say, nearly screeching, “I can’t help but imagine a bridge troll in a bobby helmet with an ass full of anal beads. So it’s hard to take what you’re saying seriously.” I sit by the phone for almost half an hour before giving up and dialing Miriam’s cell instead.
“When are you coming back?” I ask.
“Never,” she says. “Or in a couple of hours.”
Another dream of Mother: “I’ll get you a shovel,” she yells from the bridge, her boots booming on the planks, a tear in the seat of her overalls so big you can see her long johns. She heads in the direction of the goats. Miriam has her head stuck out of the kitchen window, giving me a stupid look.
I say, “What are you doing, eavesdropping?”
She says, “I can hear you talking to your mother even if you think I can’t. Don’t do this, Adelaide.”
“Don’t do what?” I say, lying, because I know I’m working out a deal of some kind with Mother. “You’ll thank me later,” I tell Miriam. “Get the animals ready!” Miriam slams the window down without taking the prop off the sill. The rod splinters everywhere. Mother comes back with a shovel.
“You’re going to need this,” she says.
When I open my eyes there is the stiff, ridiculous sense of an omen on me. I hate the feeling.
I sit on a bucket and leaf through Nonoperative Physical Measures in Gynecology. It’s probably not something a person should get worked up over, but I do. They’ve got these women spread wider than the Cumberland Gap, most of the faces carefully cut out, an alluring anonymity that stirs my libido like a spoon.
I stay out late, making notes in the back of my book and watching the sun do its little show along the property line before it burns off completely into the woods. Inside I rinse sweet potatoes. I ask Miriam to cook them for dinner. She is bitching about another headache, more nausea. She says she needs brown sugar to make the potatoes but we don’t have any. “Sweet potatoes is made with brown sugar not white,” she says.
I say, “Get off your ass and go get some.” She bends down to scratch Trudy. She rubs the dog behind the ears before walking off down the hallway where she figures I can’t see her. She stands there a long time just staring down at the carpet. After a while she comes back into the room and plucks the keys from the hook. “I’m going to the store to get the brown sugar,” she says. “Will you ever finish this book?”
“I doubt it,” I say.
“What else do we need?”
“A bag of ideas. A pound of insight,” I say.
“Vanishing now,” she says. “Poof. Goodbye.”
If I get at Miriam slow enough and long enough I can bury my hand inside of her. Once it’s in, I open my fist slow and lissome as a cloud. It is then that she is my property.
Lately the dogs spend too much time inside the house. I chase them into their pens with a flyswatter and in an hour Miriam has let them out again. As soon as she unlatches the doors they run about and abuse the furniture. How quickly an outdoor dog becomes an indoor pet. Fuck you, Miriam. I never wanted dogs. She lugs them around like infants. How willing those dogs are to please, to soil the rug, to return later to a shit stain and lap at the ghost of their own waste.
Miriam and I stand near the toolshed. “The hysterectomy was wrong,” she says. She’s emotional today.
“Mother had one,” I say. “Like removing perishables from a broken-down refrigerator!”
“Children were just always something I thought I might like,” she says.
“Just thinking about little children makes me want to drink,” I say. “This is why you treat those damn dogs like babies,” I say.
“In a way, I’m sure,” she says.
She weaves a small wreath out of weeds—black medic, some wood sorrel. She presents it to me. It fits perfectly around my wrist.
Cancer is a shy bully. The gutters are filthy. I get a ladder and clean them.
Later I brush my hair in front of the fogged-up mirror, using the chewed-up hairbrush. In bed I listen to the dogs tapping against the kitchen tile. I yell through the bedroom door, “Lie down, for shit’s sake.”
“They must hear something outside,” Miriam says.
“Of course they do,” I say. “When do they not hear something? When do any of us not hear something somewhere—the sneaky rodent of life burrowing inside the clogged gutters of our subconscious! Shh. Listen. I can hear it right now.”
“Oh, Lord in heaven. Is this because of your mommy dreams, Adelaide? Or because you can’t think of anything smart to say in your book to win that old lesbian bitch’s heart? Or because I’m dying? Why do you treat the world like a trash can?”
She gets out of the bed and laughs all the way to the kitchen. Suddenly Miriam is a satirist. There’s nothing like the humor of a self-loving fat ass. I can hear her filling the water bowls. I’m sure she’s rubbing the dog’s heads, kissing them on the mouth. I hear the sliding glass door open as she lets them outside, where they can root around and investigate in their usual idiot manner. It’s a while before she makes it back to bed. No doubt she fixed herself some food too. She should be losing weight, but she grows bigger. The wind outside is loud, and unusual. We’re situated in a shallow valley. All around is the sound of a low, satisfied sigh.
Page twenty-three in Decker’s Handbook of Gynecology for the General Practitioner: “Menstrual abnormalities are frequent in the masculine female. Her pubic hair extends toward the umbilicus. She struggles to achieve sexual gratification, either alone or with her partner. In general, there is much hair, growing disobediently from her knuckles, her nape, and on and on as if trying to cover her, censor her in the face of civility. Her sexuality is a condition that must be corrected.”
Decker wants to cure her, not merely for her own sake, obviously, but also for her restless husband’s.
On a Saturday I cut words from antique medical records and arrange them into more potential chapter titles. Miriam leads the dogs on a walk up to the ridge. I have: “Hormone Girdle,” “Manic Cervix,” “Genital Apron.” Miriam shows back up at the house almost four hours later, without her dogs. “I guess the dogs are out there trying to dig up an opossum. How’s it going?”
“I think women have been trained to hate themselves. Also, they’re moles,” I say.
“Whatever,” she says.
“Those bitches couldn’t dig up a T-bone,” I tell her.
“You might be onto something,” she says.
“Your hormone girdle is too tight,” I say.
When Miriam lies down for her nap I call Trisha to hear her raspy voice mail rumbling over the telephone. I unzip my jeans. I pull my underwear to the side. I can almost feel her staticky breath against my mouth. Her voice detonates me like a land mine. After I hang up I decide that when I finish the book I will dedicate it to Trisha. It will be for her, and, if done correctly, she will feel awe and affection toward it.
I nap too, and dream that Mother insists I seal the deal. “It’s certainly a perfect trade,” she says, “hell of an opportunity!” She is prodding forcefully with a wooden oar in a large metal trough full of corn. She moves the oar about as if she’s rowing through it, like a little muddy pond. I move closer and realize that she’s mixing a goat into the trough, covering it with corn. “We’re backwoods,” she says. “This is what we do. It took me a while to work out the details, but this should do it.” She’s making something in the trough. She insists I taste it. I do. I wake and I feel an enormous kind of relief that lasts for hours. I write until sundown.
There are small contradictions. They blemish the pages. I trace them angrily. It is certainly difficult to separate the body from its mannerisms, the shape and its performance, the origin of both. Does the hipbone make the lesbian? Or the lesbian make the hipbone? I resort to binaries: man/woman, penis/clitoris, angular/rounded, fertile/desolate, intelligent/overweight, ugly/overweight, old/young, dead/alive. Veracity is hinged to discomfort like a snake’s jawbone to its skull. What good are we? Where are these confirmations of the parallels between the swells and reductions in one’s passivity and dominance? I have convoluted the aim. I am trapped in a dumpster of possibilities.
After she’d heard the voice in the barn that day, Mother knocked on Rupert’s door. No one came. She knew they weren’t home. There was no car in the driveway. She went back to the barn to finish shelling corn. She started feeding the corn into the crank again when she noticed that the bucket was swarming with wireworm larvae.
The larvae hadn’t been there before she’d stepped outside. Someone started screaming. I explain to Miriam that the last time Mother told me this story over the phone, she stopped talking and I thought she’d hung up, until finally she yelled, “It was the man outside the barn, Adelaide, screaming for me! He wanted me! He wanted to kill me!”
“That makes sense,” Miriam says. “Put that in your book.”
“No,” I say, “it doesn’t.”
Miriam spent the day searching for the dogs. “Where could they have gone?” she asks.
“How would I know?” I say.
“Don’t play dumb,” she says, picking at a bit of food she’s discovered on her blouse.
“Farewell,” I say.
She weeps in her chair on the deck.
It was hours before Mother finally convinced her father to walk back over to Rupert’s with her. He was a suspicious man, with an oily comb-over. They found a goat strung up in the electric fence, its mouth wide and stiff from screaming. “There’s your ghost,” her father said. For being such a bigot, Mother was very superstitious. It’s obvious that the two are related.
In the recliner, looking out the picture window into the yard after dark, I imagine Mother running out of the woods, charging terrified through the leaves and tangled undergrowth. The trees are thick. When my mother was a girl, the house would have only been the single room I’m sitting in. Outside would have been the vaporous blue of a rural nightfall.
I have a handful of usable pages. I imagine each new word as a bacteria growing off the last. Writing about the body is suddenly an easy allegory about the ego. In last night’s dream Mother was trying to pry open my fist. I was holding something. She said to me, “What if Miriam isn’t dying?”
I woke abruptly to find Miriam standing over my bed. “Did you kill my dogs?” she asked.
“Shut up, Miriam,” I said, still drugged with sleep, angry at her for the proxy sentimentality of these dreams.
We’ve been searching. We walked to the ridge and back four times. We made circles around the property. “Maybe they’re just hiding,” I say. Or maybe they have fled—from her flagrant mortality, with their dog instincts. Perhaps they are preparing for her death.
Miriam’s face is half-lit under the yellow motion-sensor light above the porch. I expect the dogs to go running down the hill in front of the cabin, chasing a car, howling at the tires. But the country is quiet. Someone is headed toward town in an old pickup, kicking gravel dust up into a rolling cloud that drifts back over the yard like an enormous poltergeist in the moonlight. I ask her to come inside, please, but she says she can’t. “Can you hear that? I hear barking,” she says.
After I’ve been asleep for hours, she comes into my bedroom again, saying, “If you go out by the shed you can smell them. I can smell the rotting flesh.”
“Stop,” I say.
“They’ve been gone so long they have to be dead and I can smell them. I hate this. I hate that they’re gone. I have the right to bury them!”
“Your dogs are going to come back,” I say. “They’re out there eating shit right now.” I open my arms and put her against me—a balloon on a pencil.
I look for the dogs again. I walk a mile in every direction, crisscrossing through the trees, calling out until I am hoarse. I can hear Miriam calling too.
I am walking east, up toward where the cliffs begin at the foot of the ridge, when I see them. At first I hope they’re lying there asleep. I holler for them but sure as hell the fuckers are piled up like garbage, ugly and lumpy as old meat. Parts of them are scattered from where something has picked at them, the skin curled like paper around their rib cages. A knot rises. I sit there on the ground, staring. There is the stench, ripe and unfriendly. Mother refused to speak to me for a year after I told her I was gay. And after that she never mentioned it again. This is what I’ve inherited. A backwoods dream full of animals and dead homophobes. It is pungent and meager. It is homely, and hardly soothed by strange sex.
Miriam is sure I had something to do with it. We haul them back to the property in a wheelbarrow. I get the shovel from the garage and dig four holes while Miriam stands there petting the hard bodies. She steps back and I lift Trudy out of the wheelbarrow. Miriam says, “I want to lay them in there myself.” So I let her. I don’t want to touch them. The smell is stupid. She ties a shirt around her face and lowers each dog into her pit. I push the dirt back over the graves and then wait on the deck while she paints their names on scraps of plywood with some old paint she found in the shed. Of course the shovel is strange and heavy in my hands. She props the signs up in front of the mounds. She puts the boom box on the windowsill and plays her Eagles CD. I hide inside the house, holding X-rays up to the window, imagining what could have happened.
Probably Trisha will leave my life the same way she came in—an exotic snake crawling out of a toilet. Trisha is a dirt wasp trapped between a storm screen and a windowpane. Miriam is a magnolia in a bowl of water.
I dream Mother is walking with me to the garage. I give her shovel back to her.
“The dogs are dead,” I say.
“No kidding?” she says.
“We buried them,” I say.
“Sure,” she says. “Good. I bet your lady is upset,” she says.
“My lady?”
“Yeah, your woman. She’s your woman now, ain’t she? She’s upset? But she’s feeling better too, ain’t she?”
I hand her the shovel and we go out into the yard. She wants to walk over to the dog graves, so I take her over and show them to her. She tells me to plant grass over the graves.
I say, “I might.”
“Do it,” she says, “or else you and your lady will have to look at this until the grass grows back on its own. And that’ll be years from now.”
It is the self-devouring nature of theory—or maybe the road to resolve: A word appears, and then a sentence, and many ideas begin to take shape, then suddenly, more words, more theories. Some unwittingly cancel out preceding ones. Is the truest thing then left intact? When does the draft become a document? At some point every theorist will devastate herself. “One theory eats the other,” I write across the title page of Chapter Three. And: “Learning is a ceremony in which we eat many possibilities only to crap them out again afterward.” Just when you think you’ve proven something, you realize you’ve also opened yourself to the very opposite. One can locate me here, among the fallacies.
I have already gone to bed when I hear Miriam humming to herself in the bathroom. I get up to check on her. I am in the kitchen and there, standing on the other side of the sliding glass door, is the lab, Trudy. I am sure. I have to cover my eyes. I hear the tap of a paw on the glass just as Miriam comes out of the bathroom. I look at her, then back at the door, but the dog is gone. “My head stopped hurting,” Miriam says. “It’s weird. I feel”—she hesitates—“better!” She begins to laugh uncontrollably, until tears are running down. When she catches her breath she asks, “What are you doing?” She must see the look on my face. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I’m going outside,” I say.
I stand on the deck, watching a low fog smothering the grass. There is nothing, only the sound of an owl whooping somewhere beyond. I call out. I have a sensation of something electrical happening in my mouth. “Trudy!” I yell.
Miriam rushes out to stare at me. “What the fuck are you doing? God, you’re a bitch. What is wrong?”
“I thought I saw something!” I yell back, my hands and head vibrating.
“Some ideas must germinate for years,” Trisha writes in the last chapter of Morphologies and Eden. “They take a lifetime to grow into something good and intricate. If you hold any idea underwater long enough it will start to break down, like a prisoner of war. Is this a good thing? Does the filthy husk fall away? The purest kernel left intact? A tortured prisoner will confess to anything. On the back of the oldest print of D568 I write, in very small print: “The body is the spirit’s weakest echo.”