“Why?”
“Because his favorite song is ‘Desperado.’”
I kept staring at the television as my wife stared at me. I had confused my real life with an episode of a classic situation comedy. So, yeah, I think you know by now that I am definitely going to conflate shit.
138.
Sonnet, with Fabric Softener
1. This is a poem about an epiphany. 2. This is also a poem about folding laundry. 3. It may have been Mark Twain who said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” 4. I live in Seattle, whose weather is much like San Francisco’s. 5. I believe it was Tom Robbins who said, in describing Seattle, “It wasn’t really raining, but everything was wet.” 6. I say, “Our laundry room, even in summer, used to be the fucking coldest place south of Alaska.” 7. I’m one of those husbands and fathers who love to do laundry but don’t fold the clean clothes with any regularity. This greatly irritates my wife. “You already did the laundry,” she often says. “Why can’t you go the extra step and fold it?” I never have an answer to that particular question. 8. Marriage is filled with, among many other things, laundry and unanswered questions. 9. For sixteen years, my wife and I cleaned and folded (or did not fold) laundry, and froze while doing so. 10. And yes, it was a minor annoyance—we weren’t risking hypothermia—but why shouldn’t one be comfortable in one’s home? 11. On a bright note, the cold room truly made us love wrapping ourselves in sheets hot from the dryer. 12. For sixteen years, I often thought of wrapping my fresh-out-of-the-shower wife in sheets hot from the dryer, but it was too damn cold to be naked anywhere near the laundry room. 13. Then, one day, I bought insulated curtains at Target and hung them in all the doorways of the basement, where our laundry room is located. This immediately made the laundry room at least fifteen degrees warmer. “That’s all it took?” my wife asked. “Yes,” I said. Technically speaking, this is called an epiphany. 14. Dear wife, I’m sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I’ll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.
139.
Complications
IN 2016, WHILE traveling to a Journey concert with my wife and older son, my brain crafted a mixtape of ballads.
Sad songs about unrequited love.
Minor chords.
One piano key.
The silence between notes. The silence between songs on the mixtape. The hiss of absence.
“You know,” I said to my wife as she drove us along. “I just realized that every Indian boy on my rez who ever punched me is dead.”
“They were all your age?” my wife asked.
“My age or older. A couple of them were eight or ten years older.”
“Are you sure they’re all dead?”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” I said. “None of them made it to fifty. Most of them didn’t make it to forty. A few didn’t make thirty.”
What is a person supposed to feel when they realize all of their physically violent childhood bullies are dead? And dead so young?
I felt like I didn’t have the right to mourn my tormentors’ deaths. I didn’t love them. They didn’t love me.
“Why am I so sad about them dying?” I asked.
“Maybe you believe in redemption,” my wife said. “Maybe you were always hoping for some reconciliation.”
“Maybe it’s survivor’s guilt,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
I remembered the day when one of my worst bullies caught me alone on the outdoor basketball court behind the school. He wrestled me to the pavement, sat on my chest, and spat in my face.
I closed my eyes and pressed my lips together.
But then he held my nostrils closed.
I tried to hold my breath.
I tried to hold my breath.
I tried to hold my breath.
But then I gasped for air.
And my bully spat in my mouth.
This happened almost forty years ago. I don’t think about it often. Maybe once or twice a year. Only once or twice a year. Only once or twice. Once or twice.
A friend asked me if I would trade some of my childhood trauma for some of my stories and poems.
“Straight-up trade,” my friend said. “God takes away one pain in exchange for one poem. Would you do it?”
“No way,” I said. But I think the real answer is “Yes, yes, of course I would, of course. Let me make a list. Let me trade away the worst three things—that Unholy Trinity—but I want to keep all the rest.”
140.
Photograph
ONE EVENING, NEAR midnight, I called my little sister and told her that I was going to reveal, in this memoir, that our mother was the child of a rape. It was a family secret that I would not have publicly disclosed while my mother was alive. In order to write honestly about my mother—about her cruelty toward me—I knew I needed to reveal that she was conceived by a cruel act. There are reasons, justifiable or not, that my mother was so often vindictive toward me and the rest of the world. But she was also generous and kind to many people. She was generous and kind to me. She was contradictory. She was an unpredictable person—a random mother. And she was angry, yes, but she angrily provided for her children. She kept us mostly warm and mostly safe and mostly fed. And that was no small accomplishment for a woman who’d been hurt so much—who was the child of the greatest hurt. And I know you have read this story in this book a few times. But I must tell it again and again.
“But Mom wasn’t made by rape,” my sister said. “She was raped. And that’s where Mary came from.”
Mary was our half sister. Our big sister.
“But Mom told me she was conceived during a rape,” I said to my sister. “I was, like, twelve or thirteen, and she sat me down and told me her mother was raped. She told me who raped her mother. And that she is the daughter of that rape.”
“No,” my sister said. “Mom was raped when she lived in California when she was a teenager. In Sacramento. By the husband of the woman she was living with.”
“Mom told me she only spent a day in Sacramento,” I said. “She said she got off the bus, had a bowl of soup in the bus station, then got on the next bus heading back to Spokane.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” my sister said. “But Mom was sent to California because she was being so difficult on the rez, I guess. Then she was raped in Cali. But nobody believed her. They blamed her. Then she came back to the rez pregnant. Then, later, after she gave birth to Mary, she moved to Montana and married a Flathead Indian.”
“Yeah, but I thought that guy was Mary’s father,” I said.