In ohio i can feel my shoulders widen. You can just breathe there with all that straight land, fields and then fields. The midwest sea. Steve says I’m prettier in the summer, and maybe it’s the freckles he likes, but he says it’s that I seem more open. Not shut down, burrowing in sweaters, head down for winter. 81 degrees today.
Steve and I drove to Columbus, Ohio yesterday and then drove back today. We went there to see Neko Case sing. I’m not sure why she didn’t come to Detroit or Ann Arbor. She’s shy and awkward and her lyrics are perfectly strange. That shyness, and her lyrics that feel like they’re written in a very quiet, personal space, it contrasts profoundly with her voice — so strong and externally emotional. She had drawings and moving photographs of tigers and cardboard things projected behind her as she sang. I found on YouTube the first song I knew of hers. Blast it.
He led you to this hiding place
His lightening threats spun silver tongues
The red bells beckon you to ride
A handprint on the driver’s side
It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small
And Popsicles in the summer
Deep red bells, deep as I’ve been done
Deep red bells, deep as I’ve been done
I am both one who mumbles and one who hates to repeat herself. It is unpoetic to have to repeat myself, and the sentence loses its timing and natural rhythm on the second round. I know this is snobby. Steve often asks me to repeat myself, especially when he’s on the computer and I speak up. This is understandable, especially because usually when he’s on the computer he’s actually working. Still I feel it in my gut, a small tug of frustration.
But I don’t speak clearly. I am shy, and words sound dangerous when they’re pointy. I slur them together like safe water.
This morning:
me: Guess-what-temperature-it-is-outside?
steve: what?
me: 28!
steve: 48?
How could he hear forty instead of twenty? They sound so different.
And another time, the other day at the bank.
lady: What’s your name
me: Courtney. C-o-u-r-t-n-e-y.
lady: C-o-u-r-t-s-e-y?
How could that lady have heard an S and not an N? They sound so different. What planet am I on.
Granted, when I was twenty years old, I sneezed too much with bad fall allergies, and then suddenly my right ear started ringing and hasn’t stopped, the tea is always ready. With the ringing, I also lost high-frequency hearing on the right side. It makes organs in churches sound like marching bands in bathrooms.
I read yesterday from several sources that after a baby is born, the father’s testosterone levels descend and his estrogen levels rise. Supposedly it’s to make the man more sympathetic, compassionate, squishy — to make him find the baby cuter. It must work, because while I’ve heard many stories of men walking out on their pregnant wives, not many men see the baby and then run away.
I wonder how far away the men have to be to have this hormonal transformation. Can they be at war overseas while their wife is in labor and then suddenly they don’t want to fight anymore?
With the hormones I’m on artificially, Steve is already sympathetic. I can’t tell what cravings are mine and which are his. You probably want cheese fries right about now, don’t you? he’s asked more than once near midnight. He makes delicious cheese fries; I eat very few of them. Instead I am obsessed with arugula and grapefruit. For breakfast all week I’ve had a salad. I swig grapefruit juice out of its big container. Yesterday I tried to make myself have take-out thai for lunch, but I turned the car around just after I backed out of the driveway. I came right home to make an arugula sandwich.
I don’t know if it’s the extra estrogen and progesterone, but yesterday I saw a puppy and cried. Steve did not. The dog peed on the owner as he held it in his arms, and I sang to him puppy-dog songs and rubbed his beautiful nose and let my hands travel along his puppy-soft fur. I’m pretty sure it’s an outcome of all these shots: being cranky to my husband, but crying for puppies.
I haven’t been wanting to draw, I’ve just been wanting to write. I go to my studio and my drawings say hello and tell me what is wrong with them and I walk past them and sit at the desk to write. Yesterday I sat in my dining room all day and wrote nonsense, almost all day nonsense, and then I spent three hours cooking dinner and in the middle of the bolognaise sauce i realized what to do and let it simmer while I wrote a stronger draft.
Nor have I been photographing very much. Just phases I guess. But then yesterday I went on a walk after dinner and there was this beautiful dead grass on the ground that looked like a drawing to me. I picked it up to draw it. And today on a walk this morning, there was the strangest blossom cluster and I picked it up to draw it. I feel it itching in my fingers, I really do, suddenly, a tingling of wanting to capture something.
And then today online, I found garima saxena’s art books (garminasaxena.com –> books). The energy in them is something I relate to very much. A certain energy that I think I lean towards when I’m making.
I was sure it was fall this morning. I felt my shoulders tense. I felt ready for the beauty — the neon haze of wet leaves — and the preparation toward cold. I felt the layers of clothing, and the boots, and walks that begin tense and end shed. Hot showers. Harvesting what we have worked for all summer. I was sad to realize that the cold rain meant spring.
My grandfather grew up in Alberta, Canada, and when he tells this story his face rains with tears.
He was young, like six or seven, and he and his sister had to travel many miles to and from school each day. They had built a sled that their horse pulled so that they could get to school more efficiently. But there was a snowstorm one day that piled up snow up to the horse’s stomach, and the horse pulled them and pulled and pulled and then couldn’t anymore and sat down, buried in the snow. They were buried, too, and the snow kept coming.They couldn’t see the school and they couldn’t see their home, many miles from either of them, all of them covered in snow. They held each other to keep warm and cried. Many hours passed.
Their teacher asked, Where are the Mandryk children? but no one had seen them. They had not missed a day of school before. The teacher knew that they were in trouble. She left the school children warm and unattended. She went out on her horse toward the Mandryk house, her own horse struggling through the snow. After some time, she saw their horse buckled and buried, and the children covered in snow. She put them on her horse with her and carried them safely to school.
It is wild to realize that my grandfather and so I would not have lived if it were not for her. I can picture her clearly. I read a New Yorker essay this morning about two female teachers (“Roughing It”) in the cold of Colorado and I thought of her. So much energy was expended then to keep alive and to take care of each other, to scrub clothes and build fires and make and mend. She was sturdy and tough and maybe not artistic. Life didn’t have room for that. I feel close to her when I am making — my own paint, bread, dinner; drawing and writing to record or slightly save.
Last year was the year that the city suddenly traipsed every sidewalk and put metallic silver spraypainted circles on the slabs that were cracked. We had until November to fix them. Now all over the city there are brand new slabs like new teeth next to old, gray slabs. Old, old, new, old, old, old, new. About $125 per slab to fix. On a walk one morning last year we counted as we walked up our sidewalk: eight new slabs. Three months to find the money to pay for them. And now all over the city in handwriting on wet concrete is the date, 2008. It makes that year seem extremely remarkable. That was the year that people wrote in the sidewalks. Boris 08. Allen loves Frances 2008. Pioneer Field Hockey 08. If history is what we write about, then that was the year that everything happened.
I’ve been so tired that yesterday I went to read a book and I don’t even remember sitting down in the chair; I was out for two hours in the middle of the day. I coudn’t have helped it. I swear I don’t even remember it. I was overcome when I awoke with those feelings that come sometimes for everyone, that I’m not sure what my purpose is, what my passion is, why I’m here, what I long for, what drives me, what could even satisfy me. But even in those moments, there is always this beauty in the world. I am so grateful for that. Feeling alone last night, unquenchable, I sat out on the stoop by our porch and just felt this overwhelming beauty of the world. I can always see that. There is always visual beauty, even when I’m despondent. The sky was very dark and clear, and the air was body temperature, I didn’t have to tense my shoulders in to stay warm. It was so quiet, the synapses in my brain stopped reaching for something that wasn’t there and we all stayed still. A machine to slow the world. Sometimes being outside at night alone is both the most lonely and the most unlonely time.
On Easter, when miracles were known to happen in the far past, the eggs transformed into embryos. 24 were taken, 21 were mature enough to inject manually with sperm (it’s called ICSI), and 13 survived the process and lasted through the night. The doctor called us Easter morning to tell us what he had found. In church it felt clear to me: Jesus suffered, Easter was the end of his suffering, the suffering was worth it.
It hasn’t been easy for me to get over this procedure being not my choice, and not just that, but having to go through this pain because of a decision based on trauma in my husband’s past. Maybe there is a difference between (A) looking in the fridge and finding it empty, and (B) knowing that he ate all the food in the fridge. The pain is difficult to take. Because of the surgery of cutting into flesh, my stomach is swollen and tight as a drum. I have to walk very slowly and hunched over so that it doesn’t hurt too much, in the posture as if I am looking for pennies, but even then it hurts. On Saturday we went out into the world and the medicine suddenly caused me to collapse on the sidewalk; Steve tilted me home, I was sobbing, I slept for six hours, in too much pain to even pee. My estrogen levels, which on Day 1 — mid-March — were 64 and on Day 15 were charted at 4,400, have not made me easy to live with. Today when he snapped at me for being cranky, I wanted to fire down blame — an incantation of this isn’t my fault, I don’t want to be this way, I am sobbing in pain because of what you did. I should have said I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, he repeated after he punctured me in the hip last night, the needle inserting more hormones one-and-a-half inches into my muscles. On one hip he drew a cat and on the other he drew a rabbit (it was supposed to be a dog). He pierced the rabbit in its cheek because two nights ago he pierced the cat and it bruised. This has not been an easy time.
But to my seventy-year-old friend this is unquestionably a miracle. She couldn’t have a child because of her infertility in the era in which she was born; I can. That’s the point. And if another technology had not been invented just in time, she would be blind right now. Two of my friends have complete placenta previa, where the food source for the fetus is blocking the fetus’s exit — before the process of the C-section, both my friends would have died of blood loss. They both get to live. For all my frustrations that this isn’t the way I wanted it, my fears that this isn’t the way god wanted it, my concerns about what embryo the doctor will pick to be my child that god didn’t pick, my confusion about what on earth to do with the embryos we plan to freeze, I know that I am so very lucky. Tomorrow morning, the pick of the litter will be put back in. Just like Mary, a virgin birth.
