The Chronology of Water Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  I. Holding Breath

  The Chronology of Water

  Metaphor

  On Sound and Speech

  The Best Friend

  Suitcase

  Deliverance

  Love Grenade I

  The Other Lubbock

  Zombie

  What It’s Not

  Crooked Lovesong

  Family Drama

  This is Not About my Sister

  Ash

  II. Under Blue

  Baptismal

  Swimming with Amateurs

  Father

  How To Ride a Bike

  The Less Than Merry Pranksters

  III. The Wet

  A Happy Childhood

  Illness as Metaphor

  A Burning

  The Hairy Girls

  Nemesis

  Love Grenade II

  A Body in a Kayak

  Writing

  About Hair and Skin

  Harder

  My Mother Demonology

  IV. Resuscitations

  A Drowning Scene

  Distilled

  My Lover, Writing

  Short Story

  Gray Matter

  Secular Miracle

  Dreaming in Women

  V. The Other Side of Drowning

  Run On

  Collision as Metaphor

  How to Love Your Mother After She’s Dead

  Your Tax Dollars At Work

  Conversion

  Ecstatic State

  The Scarlett Letter

  Sun

  In the Company of Men

  A Sanctuary

  Angina

  How to Hold Your Breath

  Water

  The Other Side of Drowning

  À La Recherché du Temps Perdu

  A Small Ocean

  Wisdom is a Motherfucker

  Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

  Copyright Page

  FLOODED WITH LIGHT and incandescent beauty, The Chronology of Water cuts through the heart of the reader. These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages. You will feel rage, fear, release, and joy, and you will not be able to stop reading this deeply brave and human voice.

  DIANA ABU-JABER, author of Origin: A Novel

  I LOVE THIS book and I am thankful that Lidia Yuknavitch has written it for me and for everyone else who has ever had to sometimes kind of work at staying alive. It’s about the body, brain, and soul of a woman who has managed to scratch up through the slime and concrete and crap of life in order to resurrect herself. The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us.

  REBECCA BROWN, author of The Gifts of the Body

  FROM THE MOMENT I picked up The Chronology of Water, I couldn’t put it down, and I thought about it long after I’d finished. Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitch’s most secret places, where, really, we all want memoir to take us, but it so rarely does. The reader emerges wiser, enlightened, and changed.

  KERRY COHEN, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

  THIS INTENSELY POWERFUL memoir touches depths yet unheard of in contemporary writing. I read it at one sitting and wondered for days after about love, time, and truth. Can’t get me any more excited than this.

  ANDREI CODRESCU, author of The Poetry Lesson

  THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER’S central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction.

  DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger : A Manifesto

  I’VE READ MS. YUKNAVITCH’S book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary.

  CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Pygmy

  LIDIA YUKNAVITCH’S MEMOIR The Chronology of Water is a brutal beauty bomb and a true love song. Rich with story, alive with emotion, both merciful and utterly merciless, I am forever altered by every stunning page. This is the book I’m going to press into everyone’s hands for years to come. This is the book I’ve been waiting to read all of my life.

  CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild

  This book is for-and written through - Andy and Miles Mingo.

  Acknowledgements

  IF YOU HAVE EVER FUCKED UP IN YOUR LIFE, OR IF THE great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you.

  Energy never dies. It just changes forms. My beloved friends and mentors Ken Kesey and Kathy Acker are in the space dust and DNA and words.

  Thank you Rhonda Hughes, editrix extrodinaire, as well as all the people at Hawthorne Books for believing in my writing. Bold Swimmers.

  Thanks to Lance and Andy Olsen, my artheart heroes. And to Ryan Smith and Virginia Paterson, through the miles.

  To Diana Abu Jaber, thank you for saying to me twenty years ago about a single story, “I think this might be a book.” It just took me a really long time to get it.

  Thank you to the less than Merry Pranksters, particularly Bennett Huffman: rest peacefully, Bennett, you were the best among us, chaotic, beautiful stardust.

  A great waterfall of thanks to Michael Connors for, well, everything, and to Dean Hart, for making the everything possible. Thank you for mercifully loving all the me’s I have brought to your doorstep.

  Thank you to the greatest writing group in the history of ever: Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Wysong, Diana Jordan, Erin Leonard, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk. And Jim Frost.

  Special thanks to Chelsea for writing the introduction, and to Chuck for inviting me in, and to Chuck and Chelsea for reading early versions of this manuscript and helping me to not lose my marbles. Well at least sometimes.

  I would not be around to write this book had it not been for my sister going ahead of me. To Brigid who was Claudia: how to thank you for the lifeline of your enduring love. You have carried me well. Sister. Friend. Other mother. Poet of most tender thunder.

  And though words suddenly seem remarkably puny, my pounding heart belongs to Andy and Miles -you make me able to be. Write. This love. Life. I didn’t know.

  Introduction

  Chelsea Cain

  LIDIA AND I ARE IN THERAPY TOGETHER.

  That’s what she calls it. Technically it is more of a writing workshop, at least that’s what the rest of us would like to think. It works like this. We meet once a week. Some of us bring work. We all critique it. Then someone goes into the bathroom and cries.

  Lidia joined two years ago.

  Chuck Palahniuk brought up the idea of inviting her. “She writes this literary prose,” he told us. “But she’s this big-breasted blond from Texas, and she used to be a stripper and she’s done heroin.” Needless to say, we were impressed.

  I already wanted her to sit by me.

  There was more. Chuck told us that some really famous edgy writer-I didn’t recognize her name, but I pretended that I did-had
given a talk at a conference about the State of Sex Scenes in Literature and she’d said that all sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch. Maybe Chuck didn’t tell us that. But someone in the group did. I don’t remember. I think I was still thinking about the stripper thing. Areal-life ex-stripper in our writing group! So glamorous.

  Yes, we said, invite her. Please.

  She showed up a few weeks later, wearing a long black coat. I couldn’t see her breasts. She was quiet. She didn’t make eye contact. She did not sound like she was from Texas.

  Frankly, I was a little disappointed.

  Where was the big hair, the Lucite platform heels? The track marks?

  Had Chuck made the whole thing up? (He does that sometimes.)

  How was he describing me to people?

  Lidia had pages. That first night she came. She shared work. If you are a writer, or really a human at all, you will recognize how terrifying this is. You show up and sit down with a group of strangers and share your art, having no idea how they will respond, these assholes marking up your pages with their pens, judging you, leering at your tits.

  She read us the first chapter of her novel The Small Backs of Children (due out with Hawthorne Books next year), while we all followed along with the copies she’d passed out. They say that alcoholics remember their first drink, that lightening feeling in your body that says yes-yes-let’s-feel-this-way-all-thetime -well, I will always remember the first time I heard Lidia Yuknavitch read.

  I thought, this is how writing is supposed to be. I thought, man oh man, she’s good. I thought, I want that.

  Literally. I wanted that chapter.

  See the protocol at workshop is that we bring in pages, hand them out, read them out loud, and then go around the table for comments. After that, we collect the pages, which by then are theoretically covered with highly useful notes. Work does not leave the room. We never take home anyone’s pages. They don’t let scientists take home uranium in their pockets after a day at Los Alamos. That’s the deal.

  But I wanted that chapter. I wanted to take it home so I could read it again and again. I’d never felt like that about anyone else’s work, ever.

  I considered stealing it.

  I could pretend to put it in the stack as the pages were collected, but then palm it off the table onto my lap and slip it onto the floor into my open purse. I didn’t want to ask her for it. She already thought we were all perverts, the way we kept checking out her chest.

  I decided to play it cool. We went around the table, all of us giving feedback, happy, exhausted, delighted that she didn’t suck.

  I tried not to blather, counting on the fact that there would be more, more writing, more Lidia.

  It worked. She came back. The next week. Amazing!

  She workshopped that book, and this memoir. And the more I’ve learned about her, the more in awe I am.

  To start, she isn’t really from Texas. She just went to college there, which is a totally different thing. She does have nice knockers. For the other stuff, you’ll have to read the book.

  I’m just looking forward to getting a copy I can keep.

  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -

  - EMILY DICKINSON

  Happiness? Happiness makes crappy stories.

  - KEN KESEY

  Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

  -JOHN KEATS

  I. Holding Breath

  The Chronology of Water

  THE DAY MY DAUGHTER WAS STILLBORN, AFTER I HELD the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn’t it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body.

  I sat on the stool and closed the little plastic curtain. I could hear her humming. I bled, I cried, I peed, and vomited. I became water.

  Finally she had to come back inside and “Save me from drowning in there.” It was a joke. It made me smile.

  Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain. It’s hard to know what to think of a life when you find yourself knee-deep. You want to climb out, you want to explain how there must be some mistake. You the swimmer, after all. And then you see the waves without pattern, scooping up everyone, throwing them around like so many floating heads, and you can only laugh in your sobbing at all the silly head bobbers. Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief.

  When we first found out the life in me was dead, I was told the best thing to do was deliver vaginally anyway. It would keep my body as strong and healthy for the future as possible. My womb. My uterus. My vaginal canal. Since I had been struck dumb with grief, I did what they said.

  Labor lasted 38 hours. When your baby isn’t moving inside you, the normal process is stalled. Nothing moved my child within. Not hours and hours of a Pitocin drip. Not my first husband who fell asleep during his shift with me - not my sister coming in and nearly yanking him out by his hair.

  In the thick of it I would sit on the edge of the bed and my sister would hold me by the shoulders and when the pain came she would draw me into her body and say “ Yes. Breathe.” I felt a strength I never saw in her again. I felt the strength surge of mother from my sister.

  That kind of pain for that long exhausts a body. Even 25 years of swimming wasn’t enough.

  When she finally came, little dead girlfish, they placed her on my chest just like an alive baby.

  I kissed her and held her and talked to her just like just like an alive baby.

  Her eyelashes so long.

  Her cheeks still red. How, I don’t know. I thought they would be blue.

  Her lips a rosebud.

  When they finally took her away from me, the last cogent thought I had, a thoughtlessness that would last months: So this is death. Then a death life is what I choose.

  When they brought me home from the hospital I entered a strange place. I could hear them and see them, but if anyone touched me I recoiled, and I didn’t speak. I spent whole days alone in my bed in a cry that went to long moan. I think my eyes gave something of it away- because when people looked at me, they’d say Lidia? Lidia?

  One day in their caretaking-I think someone was feeding me-I looked out the kitchen window and saw a woman stealing the mail from mailboxes on our street. She was stealthy like a woodland creature. The way she looked around - darted her eyes back and forth - the way she moved from box to box, took some things, not others - it made me laugh. When she got to my mailbox, I saw her pocket a piece of my mail. I belly laughed. I spit a mouthful of scrambled eggs out but no one knew why. They just looked worried in that uh oh way. They looked like cartoons of themselves. I said nothing of this, however.

  I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away. When I took all the baby clothes I’d been given for my newborn and arranged them in rows on the deep blue carpet with rocks in between them, it seemed precise. But again it worried those around me. My sister. My husband Philip. My parents who stayed for a week. Strangers.

  When I calmly sat on the floor of the grocery store and peed, I felt I’d done something true to the body. The reaction of the checkers isn’t something I remember well. I just remember their blue corduroy aprons with Albertson’s on them. One of the women had a beehive hairdo and lips red as an old Coca- Cola can. I remember thinking I had slipped into another time.

  Later, when I would go places with my sister, who I lived with in Eugene, out shopping, or swimming, or to the U of O, people would ask me about my baby. I lied without even hesitating an instant. I’d
say, “Oh, she is the most beautiful baby girl! Her eyelashes are so long!” Even two years later when a woman I know stopped me in the library to ask after my new daughter, I said, “She’s so wonderful - she’s my light. In day care she is already drawing pictures!”

  I never thought, stop lying. I didn’t have any sense that I was lying. To me, I was following the story. Clinging to it for life.

  I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

  All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I am thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me - there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory - but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.

  AFTER THE STILLBIRTH, the words “born dead” lived in me for months and months. To the people around me I just looked … more sad than anyone could bear. People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter. No one was any good at being near us. They’d accidentally say stupid things to me, like “I’m sure you’ll have another soon,” or they would talk to me looking slightly over my head. Anything to avoid the sadness of my skin.