The Cabin in the Woods

                                           

            One year for Halloween my mom took our family to the woods to spend the night at our cabin in Cascade, Idaho. She did not do this for Halloween spirit or to evoke some sort of “spookiness” for the holiday season. She took us up there mostly to avoid the tricker-treaters that would pester our home from the hours of seven to eleven. For reasons that were unknown to me, my mother did not believe in Halloween.

            From the ages of eight to twelve I was deprived of this fabulous childhood ritual. I harbored a small, but well kept, bitterness in my heart for this deprivation, which is why perhaps my first experience with the cabin in Cascade was less than positive.

            It was cold. It was late October and summer had long since curled up and died. Miles away my friends were painted with white faces and whigged with long black hair, stuffing fistfuls of delicious sugar into their plastic pumpkin buckets. That year, Rachel Hirst had dressed up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and her sister Hailey dressed up as a witch. My mother would never in a million years allow me to dress up as a witch. I could, however, dress up as Jesus, should I so choose, or perhaps some other character from the bible. Even as a child, I couldn’t even begin to explain the absurdity of her suggestion. Oh really mom? Really? I thought to myself, What do you want me to do? Run around in a bathrobe and pray for people? My mother was otherwise pretty good at being the “cool mom” except for when it came to this. In this area she had failed horrifically. She became much like the “other” Christian parents, the ones who didn’t allow their children to watch power rangers or wear two-piece swimsuits.

Still, as an eight year old, I had no choice but to follow orders, pack a small overnight bag, and pile into the burgundy suburban along with my four other siblings. We waved good-bye to the city of Boise, wrapped in orange and black laughter, and drove steadily up the mountain road.

            When we passed into Cascade, the town was empty. All the summer travelers had long since returned to the city and the town was left vacant with nothing but the 400 locals to keep it intact. I could never quite put my finger on the silence of that place, but I knew that it smothered me, crawled up and over my bones, seeping in through the car windows and choking me until all I could think of to do was hold my sister’s hand tighter and tighter.

When we arrived at the cabin the air was sharp and cold, bending around us like the witch my mother refused to let me imitate. The corners of the wood floors were littered with mouse feces and I shuttered at the thought of discovering thousands of spiders underneath my bed. My dad instantly began moving about, flipping light switches, and sprinkling rat poison all over the dark crevasses of wood. Imagine putting that stuff in your mouth, I thought to myself.

This was the way my mind worked. Every time I saw ugly, I wanted to know what it tasted like.

The plan was to camp out in the fire lit living room and watch movies until we fell asleep. My mom had promised to buy us as much candy as we wanted but the endless supply of fun sized snicker bars could not make up for the Halloween I was shut out from. I couldn’t seem to shake the stillness that surrounded me, the feeling that we were isolated, in the mountains, with nothing but our father’s hunting stories to keep us company. One by one my family members fell asleep until I was left alone, staring up at the brown chipped ceiling and feeling certain that at any moment an axe murderer would bust through the back door, slaughtering us all and using our blood as a ritual on this darkest of Halloween nights. What a terrible way to go, I thought to myself.

 I was certain that witches lived in these woods. I was certain that the pine trees hosted demons inside them, and that Satan himself was climbing among the branches. It was in this forsaken wilderness, in this eerie small town silence, that my dad was no longer the strongest man on earth, and I was no longer a student at Joplin Elementary, and my name wasn’t even Brenda anymore. It was at eight years old that I was confronted with this giant looming question of my human existence and why I was so absolutely terrified of being alone.

For years after that night, I hated going to the cabin. I would agree to go only if I could be assured that a large group of warm, well-humored people would accompany me. I used the sound of their booming laughter, and the warmth of their fingertips, to balm the shaking unanswerable question of my lonesomeness.

As I grew older, I could never understand why Wordsworth or Keats, some of the greatest writers of our English Literature books, had such a fascination with these woods, with “nature,” with the great mystery that surrounds us. Why would you want to spend your time in that?

I tried it once. The summer after my 20^th birthday I resolved to spend one night alone in the cabin. I had brought my guitar and note books full of empty pages just waiting to catch all of the art that would roll out. I had never taken the time to hold still long enough to see what kinds of things I would find in my lonesomeness. Perhaps I would find God, or the cure for aids, or a new mathematical dimension, or a moment of pure self-actualization. But every time I looked life directly in the eye, she would stare back at me without blinking and I would become absolutely paralyzed. It was in these pointed moments of time when I could hold all of my humanity in just two hands. Looking down on it, I couldn’t help but wonder, apart from being a daughter, a friend, a student, or a sister, who was I, really? Who were any of us? And then I felt a twinge run up my spine, a dark and wholesome spirit that moved over me, like I had fallen into the rabbit hole a thousand times over again. My soul shivered, turning in the wake of its own shadow.

I lasted about two hours, before I packed up all my shit and drove right back down the winding road. I made it home, just after nightfall and fell into the arms of my warm family carpet and the sound of our blaring television. When my dad asked me why I had returned home so soon, I simply told him, “I missed you guys.” And then he shook his head, laughing gently until all of his chuckles laced themselves around me, in a glow that left me in a terribly comforted mood.

Crying at Kmart

I found you in the home care aisle today.

I was looking for a hammer but I found a bungee cord instead and it reminded me of that time you strapped my bike to the back of my car before I left for Seattle.

 And now I am crying in the home care aisle.

And I'm also listening to Gillian Welch's "I dream a highway back to you" which I suspect has something to do with it, but still.

It is raining outside for the first time this season and I can't help but feel like the city, the God, the something, is accompanying me on this sadness.

Most days I am so lonely I pretend that I am someone else.

In case you didn't know,

I haven't unpacked my apartment yet.

The paintings lay stagnant against the wall

and I keep tripping over them on my way out of the apartment which is sort of telling since these days I am mostly just tripping all the time.

A big stumbling mess.

I don't know what I'm doing.

You should've heard me talking to the cable company on the phone yesterday.

You would've died laughing.

You would've pulled me into your arms and kissed me.

You would’ve kissed me long enough to start kissing me in all those places that only you are allowed to kiss.

And dinner would be a little bit later then we planned.

And probably it would be raining outside because this is Seattle and it is raining all the time and we would be in love with it.  

And we would walk to Linda's just around the corner and have a drink and make jokes about each other and about the strangers and fall in love once or twice more before we headed home.

If you were here we could drive in the carpool lane.

If you were here we could walk to the QFC to buy our groceries.

If you were here you could be here.

In case you didn't know,

I don't think of you when I fall asleep at night.

I don't think of your arms,

I don't think of your deep forest chest,

or the shapes our bodies make side by side.  

In fact I don't think of anything at all

and now I have to go,

there are people crowding this home care aisle because they are buying screw drivers and light bulbs and probably they are going to go home and put together their children's beds or maybe change that light bulb their beloved has been complaining about and I change all of my own light bulbs

and I am putting together my own bed frame which is why I am in this aisle in the first place.

And last night a homeless man slept right outside my window and that is fine because there is barbed wire on my fence and I am fine because there is barbed wire around me too in some way. And I will be fine.

It’s just that I am embarrassed to cry like this in public so I am done writing now.

In case you didn't know, I don't think about you when I fall asleep at night.

I said, I don't think about you. 

Underneath My Third Grade Desk

Mrs. Werner stood firmly before our third grade class, with arms folded across her chest, and announced, “From now on, during reading time, no one is allowed to sit underneath any tables or desks for the rest of the school year. Now all of you may go to recess, except for you Brenda and I think you know why.” I felt my heart plummet into my stomach as the other kids jumped to their feet and stomped out of the classroom. I knew exactly what I had done.

            My head dropped to the carpet as I stood to my feet, and slouched over to Mrs. Werner’s desk. I could only manage to glance at her occasionally because the shame was overwhelming. Her brown eyes narrowed tightly against her skin and it reminded me a little bit of my mother. Leaning forward, she reached for the telephone that lay stagnant at the edge of her desk and began to dial. “Are you going to tell my mom?” I mustered enough courage to ask. She turned to me sternly, “No” she answered, “You’re going to tell your mom.”

Mrs. Werner held the phone out towards me and I reached for the white plastic. The dial strummed against my ear almost as loud as my own heartbeat. “Hello?” I could hear the familiar sound of my mom’s voice on the other line. It comforted me. “Um mom?” I began. My eyes climbed up towards Mrs. Werner’s face and then stumbled back down to the carpet again. “Yes?” she asked, slowly drawing out the word in her mounting suspicion. I began to stammer in my shaking voice, “I…I have to tell you something.” I looked up at Mrs. Werner’s face one last time. She gave me a nod of stern encouragement and I took a deep breath.

       “Well I…. I wrote a lot of bad words underneath Mrs. Werner’s table with a black marker.” It sounded even stupider coming out of my mouth than it had in my mind. Mrs. Werner pushed it further, “Tell her what words you wrote.” She said. I sucked in one last pocket of air, “I wrote the D-word, and the S-word, and the F-word.” My mom paused on the other line, “You mean damn? Fuck?” I let out an exhale, “Yes” I answered, “But mom that was from earlier this year, remember? I felt trapped and then you and I talked about it and now I know how to do things differently next time I feel that way.” She was quiet. “Anything else you want to tell me?” My mother’s voice had a way of reminding me that she knew me better than anyone else in the world, that she wouldn’t leave me for anything. 

I paused before her question, realizing that there was not a single word to be found in the soft insides of my mouth. I wondered how on earth I could even begin to explain myself.

It was within moments like these when I thought of the leaders from church and the way I could feel the weight of their eyes clawing down my back every time I passed by. I knew they didn’t like me. Those leaders only thought I contaminated something wholesome and perfect, like all those spotless “good girls” from Sunday school. To them, I was something dirty juxtaposed to something clean. I always wanted to tell those leaders that just because I knew things about the world, didn’t make me dirty. I wanted to tell them that me knowing about violence also meant that I knew about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King.  I wanted to tell them that knowing about sex also meant that I knew about pregnancy and life. But there were too many of those church people for me to ever have the chance to convince. 

I used to want to do things in spite of them, just to piss them off. Like maybe some time in the future I would have sex before marriage with some rebel boyfriend who I shouldn’t have gotten involved with in the first place. He’d be a BAD influence on me and I’d be a BAD influence on him and then we’d just be setting off one big BAD example into the entire universe. Maybe then they’d really have something to talk about. Maybe I could go get pregnant, or do drugs, or drink myself into oblivion. But then I knew that infuriating them like that was only going to hurt me more. Besides, I didn’t want to waste a second of my life doing anything in reaction to their shallow gossip. I pushed their judgmental glares out of my mind and reminded myself that God knows who I really am and that’s all that matters.

To me, God was a big black man. He would come into my room and take up more than half of my bed on those nights when I was crying. He was the only one who saw me hold hands with the mentally challenged student when she found herself confused and scared on the first day of school. He was the only one who saw me sit with Jessica at lunch when all the other girls from our class abandoned her. He was the only one who saw me crying alone in my room the first time I read the biography of Martin Luther King. In my heart I knew that I was good, I just wasn’t good in the way that adults wanted me to be. I knew that I was never going to not run on the black top, or not chew gum in class.

For as long as I could remember, everything that was ugly was also the most beautiful, like sex, or brokenness, or me. I wanted to submerge myself in the pain of the world because to me that was what was real. I was absorbed by the Civil Rights Movement and words like, “fuck” because to me, that was raw honesty. It was within these pockets of honest pain where you could truly find God.

But here in Boise, Idaho, I couldn’t seem to escape the impending feeling that the color white was a box color and I was living a half-life. 

 I felt caught in a box suburbia neighborhood, where we went to box church, and lived in box houses, and drove in box cars, to a box school, where we learned box ideas about American presidents and slavery. I wanted there to be more black children in my school. I wanted every kid to speak more than one language. I wanted to stand on my desk and scream at the top of my lungs that white American history is fucked up, that our lives are fucked up, and that there is an entire world out there that I desperately wanted to be connected to. But how could an eight year old even begin to explain something like this? My soul was underlined with the unwavering certainty that the bubble we lived in was all a façade. There was no such thing as picture perfect happiness and I couldn’t understand why everybody around me kept pretending like there was.

All I ever wanted was to tear that picture apart, to show white suburbia that they are just as broken as the pregnant teenager, or the drug dealer on the street, or the third grader who writes cuss words underneath her desk. We are not so different from each other. But I knew I was only eight years old, that none of these dreams would come to me until I was older and that I would have to find life in the small pockets of exposure that Boise had to offer. In the meantime I stood back and allowed my passion to manifest itself underneath the wood tables of Mrs. Werner’s third grade classroom.

            My mom listened patiently as I gave my explanation for why I had written the cuss words. In that moment I hoped she remembered her high school years, the way she stuffed the ballot box so that the only black couple nominated would win prom king and queen for the first time. 

      She paused on the other line, perhaps seeing the mirror image of herself in me, before finally responding, “Okay Brenda. I love you. Let me talk to Mrs. Werner now.” I passed the phone to my teacher, feeling purged but mostly broken.

            When I came home that night my mom didn’t breathe a word of the incident until I finally found the words to ask her, “Are you mad at me or are you proud of me?” I didn’t know if I was speaking specifically about that incident or about who I was as a person, but I wanted an answer either way. I wanted to know if God was really everything the church leaders had told me he was. Was he really going to glare at me for sitting in a car with a boy, or saying the F word, or wearing a skirt that is a little too short? Or could God really love me in this way? Could he understand me and take me in as his daughter? Would he go on watching me fight for civil rights, or slamming poetry, or visiting the girls in youth correctional facility and then smile down on me and say, “This is my daughter. Isn’t she beautiful?” I wanted to know if it was true, what they say about God, that he loves for who you are. “Are you mad at me or are you proud of me?” I felt my lips shaping these words as a cry of something much bigger than a question; I wanted to know if I was valuable, if I was worth loving. My mother paused, stirring a pot of boiling noodles in our small kitchen. “I’m proud of you,” she said. 

    

Absence

The night you went away, my sister climbed into your closet and pushed your clothes against her face.

She doesn’t want to talk about it.

One month later she asks me how long human scent can be collected in fabric.  
She found you at the bottom of a hat, yesterday. “There he is,” She said, 
“Hi baby.”

The last time I tried to escape from my body, 
I tumbled back down into a hang over and a cup of cold black coffee.

These days

I am surprised at how lazy I am.

 We see you in the form of a hummingbird, or a gust of wind, or a good good joke.

 And that’s nice and everything, but it’s not the same.

This grief has held me captive.

Bound, gagged, and tied.

The worst part is I find no desire to escape.

I lay limp in its arms

like a little girl

fallen in love with her kidnapper.

Our bodies are all we have left.

My sister and mom paint watercolor flowers.

We speak of death like it is an irrational number 
We only know what it was by the hole that it left.

A Sonnet For my Throat

                                                      

My throat is just as soft as you would think,

sturdy loyal windpipe lines my insides,

unpaved wet and soft giggle bright pink.

Swallow that gentle breath and death subsides.

A skipping tunnel of unknown poems.

I can hiccup three quatrains blindfolded,

when my esophagus tastes just like home

and couplets begging to be molded.

There’s one clean, malleable poem untouched

huddled beneath my painted fingertips,

It is a barricaded trachea.

It is a story with no tongue, no lips.

My sacred breath travels that well paved road.

Emerge now from the vomit-corrupted throat.

Tears

     Every person holds a certain number of tears. I have not spent a single one of mine, not really. Until now. Only it is not how I imagined. My heart is not broken. No one has hurt me. I have not seen something particularly beautiful or better yet, particularly ugly and yet these tears fall all the same. They do not explain themselves.
       My mom says that this is good. That I am digging up past pains and pushing them outward. Except for when she tells me this I sigh, because sighing is easy, because you don't have to reach for anything at all, only let something go. And then I ask her to please turn off the light and when she does I roll over and let my etiquette taste my tears.
     What troubles me most is that there is no equation to apply. I am not much for math but these days I am looking for a solution. A way to stop this faucet but I can't come to figure out how it started in the first place. They say if you bury something long enough it will come up unrecognizable. I imagine myself tossing skeletons over my shoulder but they have become so heavy now.
      I try to work backwards, try to trap each of my tears and examine the stories inside them. But the words come out wrong side up and mispelled. I can only make out small phrases like, "the blue house" or "Sunrise church" or "Martin Luther King" but these are only pieces and I am too tired to solve puzzles when sighing is so easy.
     I try to imagine my life as a quitter. How good it would feel to fall into black holes, to kiss the darkness and feel her kiss you back. At long last, to smash into what I'm most afraid of. I guess this is what people would call, "crazy" except for being crazy is the only thing that makes me feel sane, so, what then?
      Every now and again we have to stop pretending. Maybe that's what all this crying is about. Life is laced with breakdowns. Tiny inexplicable reminders of the great mystery that surrounds us. A scratch in the record, a naked face. I revel in this breakdown as the truest moment of my life. But I want to climb out of it all the same.

   

Pink Sundays

  The church foyer creeps with eyes of shattered glass as I make my way into the sanctuary. All of their eyes are sharp and pointing because every Sunday I look more and more like my mother and my mother is beautiful and she makes no apologies for it, so neither will I. I enter the sanctuary and there are lined rows of chairs that stretch for miles and I’m sure that if you took all the chairs out of here I could flip cart wheels for days on end and run barefoot from one white wall to the next and God would still be here and he wouldn’t mind at all. But there are chairs here. And there are candles and ties and families that want nothing more than to be whole all over again so I keep quiet and take my seat.

            When the musicians stand up, I stand up. And then I read lyrics from a power point slide off the back drop of a waterfall, or a mountain, or a cross, and I remember that time at the old church when we didn’t have things like power points, just an overheard and a transparent sheet. We used to sing songs like, “As the Deer Panteth for the Water” and I had no idea what it meant but my prayers were always real. Back then nobody ever questioned my faith because children have childlike faith, even God said so, and that was enough for them.

 That was long before I had boobs. Long before I intentionally wore bright red bras beneath my sweaters, just to feel a small victory inside myself. And that’s weird isn’t it? When something like the color red can make you feel so goddamn powerful? I bet you anything, half the women in here are wearing flesh tones or maybe even white. I had a white bra once. But mine was strapless and soft and nobody ever saw me in it but me and I thought it looked beautiful so nothing else really mattered.

When the music ends we all sit down. And the pastor takes his place at the podium and he is tucking in pant pockets and adjusting his notes. I see that his hands are rough and strong and I wonder if his hands are bigger than my father’s because the size of men’s bodies has always been captivating to me. Growing up, my dad used to rescue me from drowning waters or block me from being struck by on moving vehicles and every time it always took me by surprise. The way his arm could swoop with such unwavering power, the amount of safety he held in one handful. It was comforting to me, to see so much strength paired with so much kindness. Sometimes when I thought of God, I would think of just that, a giant man with strong, kind hands.

The pastor begins his sermon and all at once I am reminded that he is nothing like my father. I am reminded that I am sitting in a sanctuary, that my red bra is unwelcome here and so is my mother’s red nail polish. I grip the sides of my padded, plush seat, and endure as long as I can. The walls are so white and they are all glaring at me and I feel nervous to adjust the hem of my skirt or to cough or to breathe because everything echoes in here and the less attention I draw to myself the better.

I would’ve given up on church a long time ago, except for that I can’t seem to shake the unwavering suspicion that God is here. Somewhere. I keep looking for him behind the smiles of my friends, or the pages of the bulletin, or the gentle drone of our worship songs. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep digging around like this. I want God to be the kind of father that I can point out in a room and know with certainty that he is there, that he is home, that I could go over and touch him if I wanted to. Except for God never shows up to church with a tie and a Styrofoam cup of coffee like all the other fathers do.

The pastor continues his sermon and he is saying something about sex and marriage, and I am only half listening until I hear him say, “Don’t put a stumbling block in front of someone who can’t see.” And he is referring to women’s clothing and then I think of my mother and how she must be one hell of a stumbling block. And maybe we’re all just a bunch of stumbling blocks. And maybe we were all just women once until someone came along and called it a stumbling block so now every time a little girl is born the doctor might as well hold her up and shout, “it’s a stumbling block!” and everyone will cheer and buy pink shit and say congratulations.

I can feel the blood in my veins thickening, and my heartbeat quickens until I remind myself that this is not who we are. I think of my mother again except this time I don’t think of her as a stumbling block, I think of all of who she is. I think of that time she wiped the vomit off the face of a homeless stranger, and then handed him a cookie and said, “You got any kids? I got five kids.” She brought that man to church with her the next Sunday and all Jeff Henderson could think of to say was, “that dress is too form fitting.”

Sometimes the church walls leave me so broken that there’s an aching in my bones. A deep sorrow that buries itself further and further until I have forgotten what I look like, have forgotten my name, or what color of bras I liked in the first place. Sometimes when I sit down in the sanctuary, I crawl inside myself and watch the rest of the congregation move about. The men try to lead the women but they get it all wrong and then the women try to pick up the pieces but they get it all wrong, and now everyone just looks so lost and watching them look lost makes me feel lost and then all at once I’m not really sure who God is anymore or why we are meeting in this ugly brick building, every Sunday, in the first place.

I’ve been to a few places but every church feels the same. There is always those same sharp pair of eyes, the ones that cut and claw. There is always the aroma of brewed coffee and the sound of children playing tag. There is always warmth and kindness. There is always the men who are in charge of things, and the women who believe them. There is the light and there is the dark. There is oppression and there is equality. There is God and there is Satan all wrapped up in one brick building.

I sift through these paradoxes, stumbling through the dark until I accidently grab hold of something truly beautiful, like the way the pastor’s wife held the crying girl after her dad died, or when the entire congregation sang a song without any music. These are the moments when I find God. Except for that I don’t always know what exactly I’m doing here but I have this creeping suspicion that nobody really does. So why should I take someone else’s word whole heartedly when they tell me things like, “Your shirt is too low cut.” How can I be expected to believe anything other than what God tells me?  Mainly, that I am loved exactly as I am. Is it really all that audacious to believe?

These are the things I tell myself when I am left cold and broken by the words of a pastor who will never understand me. He is still giving his sermon and I am desperately searching for God everywhere except for that I can’t find him. I scan the sanctuary up and down, but he is nowhere to be found and the pastor is saying, “Don’t be fooled by the temptress” and I am slipping through the cracks farther and farther. And I am looking and I am looking. And the pastor says, “Wives submit to your husbands,” and I’m drowning and I’m drowning, and then suddenly,

God is there.

I feel her.

 She is a moving graceful tide that sweeps down the aisle and takes a seat directly beside me. I have no idea what she looks like but I am absolutely certain that she has boobs. She is listening to the sermon, and she is humble in all her magnitude, like a silent lamb being led to the slaughter, and all at once I realize where her son gets it from.

I want to know why she has come to me this way and why she is a woman because my whole life God has never been anything but a man with strong kind hands and this whole woman thing is sort of throwing me for a loop except for it’s the kind of loop that I don’t really mind being thrown, because it feels sort of good to talk to your mother when all this time you’ve been talking to your father who is kind and means well, but doesn’t always understand where you’re coming from.

God is not saying anything to me but she is there and somehow that is saying a lot. And then all at once I feel like crying. I feel like sobbing hysterical. But I am in a church and there are people all around me and if they see me break down, they’re all going to think I’m weird. So I keep myself mildly composed but there are still tears that fall silent down my cheeks, the way oppression is silent.

And the pastor is still saying that I am a stumbling block and I am running out of tears to cry, and then all at once, I hear her voice. A gentle authority that sweeps me up and out of my brokenness, she tells me, “You have to forgive him.” And I ask her, “How can I forgive him?” and she says, “I did.” And that shuts me up.

And a moment passes where we sit there, together like that. And after the silence has spilled its last tension, God says to me, “You are a beautiful woman and you’re made in my image.” And I have heard this my whole life, except for it never occurred to me that I am woman and that perhaps God looks something like me, with boobs and brown hair, and soft flimsy wrists. And after I’ve pictured this new image of God she tells me, “You have to remember that I am a mother who loves these men, exactly as they are. Not who they’re supposed to be.”

And then I felt the sanctuary change. And it is not the same sanctuary where I wear red bras to feel victorious or where men are sharp and powerful oppressors. It is a sanctuary where God meets us exactly as we are, where men are our fathers, and our brothers, and our friends, and women forgive them for everything they’ve done to us.