The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch

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СКАЧАТЬ run my father threw a plate at the sliding glass door. I waited for the shatter but nothing happened. Another night he ripped my swim bag to shit, my suit and goggles flying into the air. Once he followed me all the way to my bedroom door. I could feel his words at my smoldering shoulders. He stopped in the doorframe. When I turned to face him, he was shaking with anger. Then he said, “This is control. I’m controlling myself. You don’t know how far I can go.” We stared at each other.

      I thought: this is your daughter leaving, motherfucker.

      But other nights he’d become the man whose desire had twisted up inside him. The closer we got to my exit. On an August night with rain as hard as drums he sat me down on our living room couch. He put his arm around my shoulders. He rubbed my far arm with his big thumb in creepy circles. His voice was more calm than is possible to make a voice. Then he narrated what boys would want to do to me, how they would put their dirty hands up my skirt and part my legs and finger fuck me. How they would reach inside my shirt and fondle my tits and grab my breasts. Suck them. How disgusting boys would be, their hands, their hot hips and breath, their wanting in and up. And what they would do with their dicks, me sitting there next to him on the couch feeling the heat of him touching his dick even without looking, my skin making pins, clenching my teeth inside my mouth, and him saying how I should say no, and how I could find the strength to say no by remembering I was his daughter, that he was the only man for me.

      In my head: this is how you know he is insane. This is why to leave now.

      I’d thought of leaving before. In the run away ways, but also the year my mother tried to commit suicide, my sister made a courageous return from the sanctuary of graduate school to see if I wanted to come with her. I was 16. Her coming and asking me - somehow it had been enough to get me through two more years.

      I thought about the secrets I had stored up inside my body. How many times I’d crawled out my bedroom window to get in a car. The unstoppable fire between my legs. A fire not his. I thought about vodka. Nearly drowning. By the time he sat me on the couch to tell me I was his, I was miles away from daughter. A black suitcase making shape and story in my dreams. I felt like there was a muscle between us. The muscle was my sexuality. Not his.

      Our filial showdown happened in our garage the week before I left, next to my mother’s station wagon and my father’s Camaro Berlinetta. I went there that night to get the black suitcase out of the garage. I planned to take it to my room and fill it and fill it. When I found it, I unzipped its mouth. It smelled like cigarette smoke. I opened it, and inside were two of my father’s shirts from some trip. I stared at the shirts until my neck prickled with anger. I took a wad of cloth from one and shoved it in my mouth and bit it at hard as I could - so hard my head shook. Then I took them out and put them in the trash.

      When I got back, I explored every compartment of the suitcase. A tube of Certs. Part of a wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. A comb. Two condoms. I picked it up and shook it. Finally it was empty of him. I zipped its mouth. I stood up to take the black suitcase to my room, and then there was my father. I heard him before I saw him, and when I turned to face him he was standing just underneath the lonely garage dangle of a bulb, his head weirdly illuminated. Then he began to yell, a slow nonsensical roll at first, but humming quickly into a roar. Like engines on Camaro Berlinettas do. He called me a slut, he named my sins, he listed all my mistakes and shortcomings and shameful behaviors - all the acting out that lived up and through me to bring me to this daughter moment.

      Maybe they were all true. Maybe he was right. Maybe I would become the slut fuckup he said. But I was also a very good swimmer. And he was not.

      He grabbed my arm at one point, and though I could feel the bruise forming, I never let go of the handle of the suitcase. I felt I could swing it into his head any time I wanted. Somehow that night my girl shame and fear were nowhere in the room. I thought the thought of somebody’s son. You don’t know how far I’ll go, motherfucker.

      I looked him in the eyes. Blue on blue.

      I felt the width of my shoulders and the square of my own jaw. My adrenaline rushed up like before a race. Nothing he was saying was beating me down. I think maybe he saw that, because he shifted gears and began to rage about what I was doing to my mother - did it make me happy that it would kill her? My leaving? Just like my selfish shit of a sister? Is that the kind of person I was? A selfish bitch who wanted to kill my mother? You and your sister - such high and mighty assholes - you think you are so much better than anyone else?

      My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us. That’s what opened my mouth.

      Fuck.

      You.

      Motherfucker.

      I said it again, louder, and again, until I was screaming it, screaming with the lungs of a swimmer. Then I said get the fuck out of my way you fucking sadist, and I swung my suitcase back, and he drew up his full height of father and pulled his arm back and fisted up his hand until it white knuckled and his face went red and he clenched his teeth and those eyes, those rage filled father eyes … so I did what I was born to do. I leaned in as close to his face as I could and said do it. Suitcase ready.

      It was his voice I used.

      It seemed we’d die in that moment. But all it took to leave that room was this body I had. Though I did hear him breathing - out of breath - at my mighty back. And I did consider what being punched in the back of the skull might feel like. I believed I could take it.

      I carried the suitcase to my bedroom. I went in. I closed the door behind me. I took off my clothes. My skin smelled like chlorine and sweat. Summer heat snuck through the screen of my window. I put my head down on my pillow. I waited. I heard a car go by. I heard a dog bark. I could hear a shiver of wind in the shrubs outside my window. And Cicadas. And frogs. I waited and waited. And then I didn’t. I put my hand between my legs. I parted my lips. The wet slid my fingers around and around and fast and hard. I closed my eyes. I thought about Sienna Torres shoving her fingers up my wide open cunt, as open as a mouth screaming motherfucker. I came so hard it shot out of me. I didn’t know until that night a girl body could do that. Shoot cum.

      The first things I put in the black suitcase were a flask and a box with what used to be my mother’s hair.

       Deliverance

      TO BE BORN HAS MANY MEANINGS. HOW MANY TIMES WE leave a life, enter a new one. How it felt to fly out of the airport away from my family’s home at 18: watch the airport grow tiny and then the land go smaller and then the strip of shitty sand that is Florida recede and disappear. Girl in the sky weightless as water.

      Where I was going was Lubbock, Texas. When I got to Lubbock, whatever Lubbock was, I felt positively delivered. My own room my own friends my own food my own alcohol my own music my own sex my own money my own thoughts my own body my my my freedom to be whoever wherever however rose like a volcano in me - like something that had been pressed down so far in a body it had to explode. What all college kids feel. Though only some of us are carrying daughter rage secrets in our skin and bones. When the plane landed in Lubbock my swim coach picked me up at the airport. The woman who had paid for me.

      It took about two weeks for the Lubbockness to set in.

      Until May of 2009, Lubbock, my friends, was dry. Not arid. Though it’s that too - arid enough to choke on. But it was Alcoholess. Except in bars and restaurants during certain times. To purchase “packaged” booze, you had to drive 25 minutes or more to a drive-through liquor barn type alcohol hut. Load up. Drive back. Stealthily sneak your load up at night through the side doors to the girl’s СКАЧАТЬ