The Chronology of Water (13 page)

Lynn Collella Bell.

I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom’s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I’d ever seen. Making me hippoventate.

Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I’m pretty sure drooling … it’s a wonder I didn’t pass out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open.

For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I’d get on my stomach and butterfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating - this whatever it was I had in me - I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap.

Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up.

You know, now that I’m thinking of it, it didn’t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn’t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman sex thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my slutty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.

Look I’m trying to say I didn’t have little girl crushes like you are imagining. And I didn’t have the cliché swimmers are all dykes deal - though lots of swimmer girls regularly spanked
twinkies, I was to learn later - no, it was much more serious. I mean I was in pain. Whatever blue balls were, I was pretty sure I had them. Every day at practice, in the showers, with all that girl stuff right in front of my face. All the soaped up torsos and boobs, all the uninhibited washing of you know whats, the bubbles sliding down their asses and legs. If a kid could coronary from want, I’d be a dead woman.

No, I didn’t want to have a slumber party. I didn’t want to go to the mall.

I wanted to use my hair brush and rubberbands and make someone ... whimper.

I did consider girls my age. Evie Kosenkranius had a kid sister my age. Tina Kosenkranius. I … christ. Will you look at those names? I can’t even look at those names today without going all porno in my head - hey, Evie Kosenkranius has a sister. I mean my god, why couldn’t I just be a 16 year old blond boy with raging hormones and a spanky new flagpole that everyone wants to sit on?

But I wasn’t. I was me, a painfully shy girl kid with a hidden girl bomb in her panties not knowing what the hell to do with it who really, really wanted to … eat someone.

OF COURSE I tried the neighborhood girls my age. I’d invite them into my room to play doctor and they’d just lie there, letting me do anything, sometimes giggling, until they clamped their legs shut. The best I could get out of the deal was to put a blanket over us so the smell would intensify. Something like hay and apples. Then they’d get dressed and want to go do something dumb that girls do. Like ice skating or talking on the phone or mall bullshit.

What I needed was a girl who was older than me. Bigger.

Sienna Torres was a troublemaker young woman from a troubled household making trouble wherever she went. She broke the rules at school, she broke them at home, she broke them at Albertson’s and Nordstrom and 7-Eleven, and she broke them at swim practice. She came late, she skipped laps, she got
swatted with a kickboard in what was perversely known as “licks” for her rebelliousness.

I was terrified of her. The missing ingredient.

Sienna Torres was always late to practice but the much more important thing was that she was always the last one to get dressed. No matter how slowly I dressed, no matter how much I tried to comb and blow-dry my fuzzy white non hair (which took about 20 seconds), I was always dressed light years ahead of her. This meant that all I got was Sienna Torres in my Mom’s rearview sauntering out of the building where a couple of boymen would be loitering. Sienna Torres getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until she was gone, and I was just a stupid kid in the back seat of a car I couldn’t drive. My hands shoved between my legs. My face red.

Sienna Torres was 17 and came to practice with vodka on her breath. I knew it was vodka because her face and skin smelled like my mother’s minus the Estée Lauder. Plus I’d see a flask in her swim bag sometimes. Also black lace panties and a black silk bra and a curling iron and mascara and car keys and cigarettes and Diet Pepsi and tampons and lip gloss and a Walkman and Certs and a very large … hairbrush. I was 12. I was 13. I was 15. I was 35. See? I can’t even remember just from writing about her. She made my breath jackknife every time I was anywhere near her. She made my mouth water. She made me dizzy.

Then a miracle happened. Coming out of the pool and on the way to the locker rooms one evening, I slipped and fell on my ass, spraining my ankle. Not bad enough to alert medics, but bad enough to get attention. A lot. Think about this. Not only did I have every girl swimmer in locker room heaven taking care of me, helping me to shower and get dressed, but when they finally believed I could handle the rest on my own, there were only two of us left in the entire locker room.

Uh huh, that’s right. Me and Sienna Torres.

Sienna Torres was still in the shower, and all I had left was my shoes. So while I tied the slowest, like retard slow, most
careful giant looped bow on one of my sneakers, over and over again, I watched Sienna Torres shave her pussy in the shower.

Soaping up the triangle, her hand making circles where I wanted to put my face. One foot up on the shower stand, her toes curled around the faucet, a palm sized peach peeking out from between her legs. A razor making paths through the white drifts of suds, then nothing but skin folding inward to that dark and daring other mouth.

I’m pretty sure at some point I went cross-eyed.

Terror takes strange shape in a horny girl. It weaves it way up her boy butt and up the V of her torso and settles in her shoulders and jaw so she can’t act right or talk without twitching. After Sienna finished and dried off and put most of her clothes on and blow dried her hair and put rings back on her fingers, when I finished tying the one shoe and tucked the shoe laces in on the other and then pretended my swim bag had something confounded in it, I hop hobbled over to her. She was pulling her hoodie down over her black bra. She was running her ringed fingers through her blow-dried feathered hair. She was turning her head to look at me - only a few inches down from her. Her quadruple pierced ears staring at me going, what?

I may have been excruciatingly shy but I had a gushing in me the size of a swimming pool and I was smart - smart as any of those goddamned boys loitering outside the building-who I suddenly wished were dead - so I said, not quite believing my mouth would even work, “Um, can you help me?” Holding one foot slightly off the ground.

Sienna putting all her crap in her bag not looking at me.

Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma.

Sienna taking a hit off of her flask, then without warning, pushing it over at me, saying “This will cut the pain, I bet.” Smiling her Sienna Torres smile. “Can you handle it?”

You have no fucking idea how close I came to lunging at her leg and humping it like a little monkey. You have no idea how close I came to sucking on her hip bone and crying “mamma.”

But I didn’t do those things. Sometimes you grow up in the space of a minute.

I quite calmly took a big old swig of vodka viper’s flask just like my genetic code knew I could, and I never took my eyes off of her watching me, and I liked it, her watching I mean, because it certainly wasn’t the taste of vodka, which though I didn’t show it, like at all, tasted like what I suspected Estée Lauder must taste like if you drank it.

Then she said, “Being bad is good, huh.” And laughed. I bit the inside of my cheek trying not to cough or barf. Trying to be bad, good.

And then Sienna Torres put her arm around my waist. And I put my arm around her shoulders and neck. And I could smell her skin. I didn’t bite her or anything. I didn’t hump her like a little monkey. And she helped me all the way to my mom’s car which miraculously didn’t kill me with embarrassment, bypassing the boymen waiting for her as always.

I was so happy in the back seat of my mom’s car I thought I might make a water shit in my pants. I watched her in the rearview but this time she watched back. I was drunk with her touching me. I could still smell her: chlorine and vodka and Nivea and sh sh sh shaving cream and Suave conditioner. Nothing, nothing nothing nothing else went in my head all night, all week, all the next year. But that night, about halfway home, I reached down and felt something in my sweatshirt front pocket. I slyly put my hand in there behind the head of my driving mother.

It was Sienna’s flask.

ANGER IS FUNNY.

It sits snarling in you your whole life just waiting for perfect ironic moments to emerge. Wanna know why I got a Ph.D. in literature? Because in the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Oregon Chang Rae Lee told me my story was “trite.” I had infiltrated the writing workshops as a grad student in literature because I couldn’t stop wanting to write stories after the Kesey thingee. When Chang Rae Lee told me my story and its sentiments were trite, know what I thought? I thought I wish I’d meet you in a dark Eugene alley out the back door of a bar so I could punch your smug face in you little prick.

I’m not saying I’m proud of that. I’m just saying that if the things we really thought showed up on paper we’d all be … way busted.

All that day I stomped around fuming the fumes of a woman who doesn’t know how to own her own intellect and blames it on men. I knew how to make a sentence hum. But my Kesey credentials didn’t get me very far, I hate to say. Pretty much everyone at U of O who wasn’t in that wild wonderful “class” hated everyone who was, and thus belittled the crap out of us. Punks. Plus our “novel” was a piece of crap so I simply had no literary currency. The story that had drawn such condescending mouth poo from Chang Rae Lee was from the point of view of Caddy from
The Sound and the Fury
. One of the last things I said to Kesey was how I wanted to write that story - probably every young
woman who reads it wants to - so I did, and that’s what I brought into the MFA workshop. And that’s what Chang Rae Lee called “trite.”

As I made my way through literary history as a graduate literature duck I also wrote a story from the point of view of Dora. Joan of Arc. Emma Bovary. Hester Prynne. Helen of Troy. Sade’s mistress. Medusa. Eve. And the statue of liberty. Notice a motif?

In my story, Caddy is in the present. She lives next door to a tard neighbor boyman. Because she is sexually insatiable, and because he both scares her with his too white skin and his too big for his body head and his giant pants bulge and the sounds that come out of him instead of language and his pure physical brute force, she goes over to his house one day and takes her clothes off in front of him.

He bellows that Benjy bellow.

Then he attacks her and fucks her and nearly crushes her.

She loves it. She laughs until she cries and an ambulance comes.

Trite.

So after fantasizing about the dark alley and stomping around and cursing all things Chang Rae Lee that day, I decided to get a Ph.D.

Fuck all y’all “writers.” Woo Hoo.

I took a break from creative writing workshops - though I have to tell you - I positively HAUNTED the halls of the creative writing department. I don’t know why. I’d just find myself there, looking at bulletin boards, seeing what readings were coming up, grabbing random fliers from the office nerds. Twice I walked by a gorgeous tall guy with a ponytail who looked seriously like Marlon Brando but I didn’t talk to him. Writing student.

Sometimes the choices we make come from jealous lame petty places. But they are as real as it gets.

I entered the Ph.D. program. I went on to gloriously immerse myself in Derrida and Lacan and Kristeva and Foucault.
In Homi K. Bhabha and Ed Said and Gayatri bad ass Chakravorty Spivak. In Dickinson and Whitman and Plath and Sexton and Adrienne you want some of this Rich and Ai and Eliot and PoundBeckettStoppardDurasFaulknerWoolfJoyce (though he kinda always made me want to piss on his grave) SyngeCortazarBorgesMarquezClariceL’InspecteurHenryMillerAnaissexatiousNinDerekWalcottBertoltBrechtPynchonSilko WintersonDjunaBarnesOscarWildeGertrudethemanSteinFlannerymotherfuckingO’ConnorRichardWrightBaldwinToniMorrisonRayCarverJohnCheeverMaxineHongKingstonSapphireDennisCooperKathyyoumakemefeellikemyskinisbeingsheeredoffAcker - cascades of authors kicking Chang Rae Lee’s scrawny little ass. Take that.

Yeah. Up until he won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1995 and it was his book I was assigned to read. I can’t tell you how great that felt. But what nagged at me no matter how far into the literary intellectual pool I ventured, no matter how well I swam its waters, was the story I had yet to write. Itching my fingers like fire.

Two terms later, I tried again. Graduate fiction writing workshop. This time the story I brought in wasn’t about voiceless women characters from literary history. This time the story was about my life. About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments - how I understood my entire life. In the language - image and fragment and non-linear lyric passages - that seemed most precise. The story I brought in was called “The Chronology of Water.”

Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language.