Joseph’s meaning was fixed to his surface, his election marked too early. The clothes make the man, and invite corrective violence. His brothers and Potiphar snatch the garment-as-alibi, and the only way to survive clothing is to disbelieve it. Garment and dreams speak so the person doesn’t have to.
It was red, velvet trim and it fit me good
Standin back from the looking glass there stood a woman
where a half grown kid had stood
The basement of our Lee’s Summit house remained unfinished. Betty, his architect patient, swapped her sessions for renderings, and a couple of grey windowless rooms got erected, then abandoned. Dark grey cement, plywood, thousands of dusty books, a strange bounty of my mother’s things: a wig from radiation treatment, some jewellery, her makeup and perfume. We used it to run down the stairs after spinning round three times before the bathroom mirror saying Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary. Run down, open the door, do a lap, then back up, slamming the door, panting.
Her clothes and shoes, the navy blue silk dress, the yellow striped cotton sun dress, the sculpted white satin blouse with thirty tiny satin buttons down the front she’d made herself, the ones he couldn’t part with, remained in his walk-in closet, but they never entered a pantheon or became untouchable. Over the years, they disappeared. My sister, perhaps, still has some, but I let everything deteriorate. I played her classical guitar until I was sent away. He never bought new clothes, and was proud of that.
Aunt Becky gave my sister a locket inscribed with the words “to thine own self be true.” Since it was heart shaped, I assume it was a wry nod to the country song Fancy, popularised by Reba, not Polonius’ speech in Hamlet, which she was familiar with through Kenneth Branagh. Like all of our relatives but Jim, she had a closer relationship with my sister. There was a locket conversation I was not privy to, but saw them from the stairs, both tearing up — maybe she had just gotten her period or had sex for the first time?
She handed me a heart-shaped locket that said:
To thine own self be true
And I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across the toe of my high-heeled shoe
It sounded like somebody else that was talking askin’
Mama, what do I do?
Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy—
they’ll be nice to you.
I was not privy to any initiatory conversation of my own, but Jim often made time, quietly doing a puzzle or craft with me or assigning chopping tasks and pouring me a taste of wine while he prepared an elaborate Indian meal, taking hours to perfect the puff in his puri. Quill and I spent much of our school vacations with them, either in Salina or driving to Estes Park, Colorado to rock climb and hike. Jim fell free climbing one year and navigated the steep passes with both arms in casts. If Jim was driving, he often played the White Album or The Police. Becky’d turn her her head back to us and ask if we could guess the meaning of the song, then offer that Scylla and Charybdis were a many-headed monster and a whirlpool in Greek mythology, trying to recall which was which, but anyway, it means “between a rock and a hard place.” Alabaster is a fancy word for white stone that Sting conjured to rhyme with master — Mephistopheles, just another name for the devil, she said, the gold being the alchemical goal, alongside the mundane ring. Wrapped Around Your Finger is a story about a young man having an affair with an older married woman, she said. Initiated by her, he bargains with the devil for her to want him the way he wants her, she says — the servant is now the master, she says, that part’s almost literal.
When she drives, she prefers to listen to Il Divo, because the singers are so handsome, and often remarks on younger men’s “buns” — her husbands, too, though. From all the running and sport he does, he has a consistently better ass and thighs than most. That’s fine, she says, but she could never date a man with better hair than her — like the men of Il Divo. She was a beautiful woman, a graceful body, an almost Hollywood looking face and Farah Fawcett hair. Mom is good with song lyrics, Chris, our slightly younger cousin would say. She wasn’t from the midwest — Connecticut or Rhode Island — or maybe she really was from Wichita. She’d wanted to be a pilot, but gets vertigo flying, and she gets seasick on the water. Meaghan, the younger daughter, was moody and contrary when she was little. You have ugly breasticles, she said once after brushing against me, and I realised it was time to get my first bra.
Becky collected beautifully illustrated children’s books, multicultural tea sets, faberge eggs, gems, herbs and had a respectable feminist book collection, including a moderate mythopoetic section on witchy things. The property in Salina had an herb garden full of lavender, a hot tub in the corner of a giant deck whose staircase led down to a large pond. You canoe across to reach Jim’s shed, where he woodworked. He made her a large, terrifically complicated loom from which she draped a partly finished project. He was working on a wooden sailboat. In the winter, we ice skated on the pond. Chopin Liszt, she titled her grocery pad, inserting the foreign sounds she preferred — milch, bouef, pfeffer — and ask Chris if he could name the composer streaming on NPR at the moment. Many words in the household were francofied, slavicized or otherwise bastardised. The orange cat, Milo, became Milosovich, office was orifice, and the suffix -icles worked like Russian diminutive -chka.
It was Jim who played — piano and classical guitar, gently picking on lazy mornings with his clay mug striped in shades of blue and brown half filled with specialty coffee, a ray of sunshine beaming next to his wooden stool. I played by ear, interested momentarily in a Tori Amos song or a Beethoven or Bach. When I got stuck I’d find the score and plod through slowly or play the track for him to show me. The part in Leather where it sounds like an old player piano — “this is modulating all over the place. Something like this?” He’d bang out an approximation, and I’d try to correct him humming — I could hear a lot better than I could play, but not technically. He’d doubled his BA in piano, and was also skilled with birdcalls. My mother was the only one he could recruit for winter camping trips—the rougher the better, alternating between cassettes of Scheherazade and ornithology instruction on the drive out. He said that when they knew she only had a few more weeks to live, he rigged the camper with medical supplies and a special bed to go one last time, but didn’t make it very far. Everything I know about my mother is from Jim. My dad was still in love with her, and only had one phrase: “I don’t know why she married a dodo like me.”
Before him, she only dated men if they were useful — for their car, for tickets to a concert that Jim must also be invited to. She got a PhD in research psychology and saw several psychiatrists and psychoanalysts — Jim never knew what was wrong, but said she was close to committing herself before she met my dad. He didn’t like him much personally, but he was always grateful to him for helping Donna — whatever he did. I was pretty sure that he did absolutely nothing but meet her as she was. In their single wedding photo, she is wearing a simple white knee-length cotton dress with short sleeves and a tie at the waist, black heels, blonde hair cut and styled like an unfussy, midwestern Monroe, smiling inquisitively with squinty eyes, lips pressed together. She’s holding a bouquet of downturned yellow flowers partly hidden between the couple’s legs, gripping her other hand at her side in a tight fist. I know that grip — it took years of dance training to lose it. My dad has his arm around her proudly, his other hand in his pocket, a full smile, also squinting, chest puffed out, a bit chubby and balding, but with dark black hair, a modest suit he probably wore to work and a carnation pinned in the front pocket. They are standing in front of a small monument in Bolivar, Missouri, a small town Jim said they went to avoid one or more jealous analysands from spoiling the wedding day.
From the time Quillen was born, whenever he visited, Bach played in the background — inexplicably, from then on, it appeared she’d listen to nothing else. He never asked why, because he had a sense it kept her afloat. I was stubborn like her, and I knew from the way he looked at me sometimes — uncannily, stumbling over an intrusion — that she inhabited me in ways I’d never understand.
I knew before I overdosed that it would be the last straw with my half sister, Alex. She and her husband John moved in when my dad’s Alzheimer’s got bad and moved out with us to a different suburban cul de sac when he got violent. Alex put him in a nursing home a year or so later, after I’d been shipped out West, sold the house, and donated everything in it that wasn’t fit for the trash, to clear the energy. John was in the military, and he once was stationed in Germany, where they often ate raw meat. He was balding young, so he shaved the rest of his head. A decade later, when it appeared I’d become a dancer, he told me that’s what he wished he’d done — tap dancing. He had a slightly lilting, cozy way of speaking. I was listening to Lydia Lunch and on one of the few occasions he dared scold me for letting my makeup leak all over the carpet, I repeated one of her monologic lines to him: Big man with a gun. At some point he started co-directing the nursing home Alex managed as a social worker. He was skilled in interior design and each of the rooms were repeatedly reassembled. All the houses in each branded suburb look the same, but they had their eye on the one across the street. When it went on sale, they sold the one they were living in and bought that one.
Mandracchia was calm when I called, I calmly told him what I did, and Kirk rushed over to take me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. The doctors scolded me — overdosing on lithium could have left me dependent on dialysis— but I hadn’t planned any harm, and technically, it all ran smoothly. Having recently read Wurtzel, I’d groomed my diagnosis as bipolar: I could have easily gotten uppers for ADHD, or even Valium, but I preferred understated depth of the dull trace metal. Kirk was at the bedside, and I waited for the news on where I would live next— it was just my intuition, but I was right — Alex wouldn’t allow me back. I had been reading On The Road. I stayed with Jim and he noticed a keloid scar on my leg, offered to remove it. He injected the anaesthetic and when he made the first cut, I asked why he was cutting it sideways, perpendicular to the scar, and he explained how it needed to go with the natural folds of the skin for the scar to heal invisibly this time, properly. He waved the little piece of flesh over me, clutched by surgical tweezers, and asked if I wanted to keep it before stitching me up. I climbed a tree the next day and it split open — he refused to sew it again.
Jim procured custody of me, Quillen stayed with Alex. I changed schools, and the principal asked me if I’d like a particular student to give me a tour. You have any freaks? I asked. He called in Heather, a beautiful black haired waif with piercings. She was far more hardcore than me. I tried meth with her, but despite my admiration for junkies— Heather, Kurt and Courtney, Lydia Lunch— I lacked a direct sense of escape through drugs, they never settled beyond novelty. Or maybe I was with the farmer couple first. There was another foster child in the home, a Black girl a few years younger than me they were going to adopt, who called them Mom and Dad and urged me to do the same. Therapeutic foster care guaranteed guardians’ continued custody, so I’d be back and forth from wherever I was. By age 12 most of the state options are group homes or temporary emergency placements. In Salina there is a malt shop famous for its 100 flavours. I would jog on the country roads — everything completely flat. There always seemed to be more gravity on those flat roads than the treadmill, but there was no gym around.
I was the only girl using a boys home as a day residency in the summer. I suppose since I’m not a boy, they couldn’t lodge me overnight. The boys tried to get me to suck their dicks. Two of them I think? I licked one, once, just to try something new. The horses I remember better. The horse trainer taught us to ride naturally, without a saddle, holding on to the mane with one hand and the reign with the other. At first I would ride the white mare, but whenever I was around the huge, dark brown stallion, she noticed he calmed — she was attentive to relational dynamics. He didnt allow anyone else to mount him, but I was able to ride him, and she could get the bit in, when I was nearby. I sometimes came through the rhythm when the horse trotted slowly across the prairie. The trails, those beautiful parts of Kansas so dry and windy, where you can see forever. There were a few ruins around to assign as day-trip destinations, but mostly just steppe.
Jim and Becky decided to move to Topeka for an ER position, to be closer to his father, and, I guess, for a little more cultural life. Everyone would miss their beautiful home, but there was already a plan for highway expansion that would encroach on their garden and spoil the quiet. I rode with Jim as he made trips with a rented Uhaul, and took advantage of the long drives to ask about my mother. Jim never tired of talking about her. He took great pride at finding the greasiest truck stops, but there was always a questionable salad bar for me. I was a competent mover, piling books into boxes with obsessive endurance. Like my dad, he had thousands. In Topeka, I had my own room in the basement, with my own bathroom.
They took to writing notes to me, the sticky handed bulimic, to wipe off the sticky prints on the cupboards after a binge, to ask me to do this, stop doing that. All confrontation was handled via sticky note— a neon flutter was always a bad omen. Later families let me know the important things via notes, too. Once, the social worker prompted Becky to say something nice about me. “She reads profusely” she pronounced, letting it ring, unencumbered. I was an imposter: I wasn’t really reading, I was scanning for style. I never had a clue what was happening in the novels, nor in the sticky notes, or anywhere within the minds and lives of the people I lived with. I had a handle on the style though, sure. Jim was asked to attend a meeting about my entrance into the gifted program. I had a crush on my English teacher, and asked the school counsellor for an IQ test when I found out that the gifted program would allow me independent studies with him. “Her IQ is exceptionally high” The counsellor stressed for the second time to my uncle, watching him visibly unimpressed. They could slot in a study in Creative Writing with Mr Arnold, she said, by dropping home economics. “If anyone needs home ec, it’s you,” Jim told me later that evening.
So I had both Home Economics and an after school study with Arnold, as I called him. Fake accounts of incest written in verse on long yellow legal pads to rile him up, word salads of tantra and Beat leftovers, a pill bottle with glitter, a razor blade and a lock of hair. He wrote me 20 years later, drunk telling me he still had it. “My bed is warm” —he’d found my new email online. There was another student, Jeff, to triangulate. Arnold waitered at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Lawrence on the weekends. I found his address in the White Pages and occasionally I’d get Christy to drive by as we played Don’t Stand So Close to Me.
George says in LinkedIn: I worked for Menningers in therapeutic foster care and had 9 young ladies live with me at various times. They are all doing fantastic and I hear from each and everyone one of them. My first one was 16 when she moved in and stayed til she was 18. She is now an attorney for the Marines. So proud!
Georgina was a large woman with short curly hair and a low voice. I drank her Baileys in my coffee day by day over the course of a month, taking the thermos with me to school. Only for the flavour. She found out and made me buy a new one. She was proud of herself for figuring out the times when I threw up. It’s because she could smell it— but only faintly.
Mary was a goth punk, we both played guitar. They were relatively poor, and we would smoke the butts of her mother’s cigarette by lighting them on the stove. I lived with Mary in the basement, almost a workshop, decked out in music and film paraphernalia, guitars and a trumpet, cooler clothes than I had. You can use anything you want except my razors and my deodorant, she said. I used her razors and she found out, upset, saying again that she didn’t mind I used everything else but please not something so close and intimate as a razor. Once I was shaving fast and sheared a long strip of skin off my shin. I put a long transparent plaster over it from my uncle’s ER kit, and we were outside the Woodward’s home — before the Shirazis, in the rich suburbs — Ewan removed it and drank the pooled blood. He was tall, blonde, from a good family, his brother was in Harvard, he was both a good student and rebellious, creative, muscular, an impossible beauty, it was only a matter of time before he saw how marginal I was — I was new to the school, I changed every time I had a new foster parent — my position hadn’t yet solidified. E-Wan, the substitute teacher pronounced it from the roster. I had just been fired from a call centre when he broke up with me — I could only hold that job for a couple weeks. I protested, why, and he erupted in startling anger: You’re so square you probably don’t even piss in the shower.
I wondered if he heard the line from his brother, who he admired, but I knew there was some truth to it. I dont care if you fuck your brains out — my uncle yelled at me once — and I had been having sex, but had never felt pleasure in it, just procedure, so the comment out of his mouth was obscene. I came back from school on a day like any other and on the porch of the Shirazis there were policemen. They took me to a juvenile detention centre before they were able to place me, before I could read any sticky notes telling me why. There were a few others in Topeka. I ran away from somewhere — who knows who— and found some friends in the Denny’s one evening. Ezra hosted me for a while then passed me on to another waiter, older, with a Britney Spears poster in his basement apartment. I played dead, sleeping in his bed, he climbed on top of me, I was stone, “You cant handle this” he said a few times, before he went to the toilet, and I grabbed my bag and left. By that time, every cop siren I heard could have been for me. A cop car passed me while I was fleeing and stopped, so I was right. At the detention centre they do an inventory before they confiscate your belongings — all my underwear was gone.
The Woodwards were a couple in a posh suburb. Another Jim, his wife Mary became jealous too — I’d talk to him and not her. At the time, even though some of my favourite musicians and writers were women, I didnt like women as a whole. I couldnt understand why they didnt just shut up and do the things they were complaining they weren’t allowed to do. A friend Katie who played in the band with Mary and I lived on the same lake and was learning Cantonese to prepare for her exchange in Hong Kong. Her dad was also a psychiatrist. I saw Arnold slink out of the variety show when she and I played guitar for Mary’s band — he slunk back to catch up with me to tell me I was great. I was always getting ear infections because I dressed too slutty in the winter. Mary got angry at me when I missed another day at school, till a doctor confirmed it was a bad one, gave me some antibiotics and told me to get some ear muffs and a scarf. I found an anthropomorphic dildo in the closet of my room — I guess it was a dildo, I guess it was Mary’s, it had eyes and a nose, not just life-like. She decided it was best I leave — I had been close to Jim, and it made her uncomfortable.
Uncle Jim had a shed outside his Topeka home too — Becky never went out there. I often came to chat with him while he woodworked, or climbed on the rock wall he built. He bummed smokes from me, reminded me not tell his wife or kids. He’d worked as a surgeon in Bosnia during the war, where everyone smoked and went to the disco after 20 hour shifts. He had been in a rut — Becky didnt like the idea of Bosnia any more than his freestyle climbing, but he needed to do it — he recalled wearing a bullet-proof vest to drive with some friends to Mostar, and brought back Hard Rock Sarajevo t-shirts with bloody bullet holes painted on, cringing as we called dibs on them. He’d always ask me if I wanted to work his shifts at the hospital in Topeka and outline what I need to do: ibu, paracetamol, antibiotics, and an occasional stitch — mostly just listen to them as a psychologist would, he says — and he would take over whatever job I had at the moment — truck unloader, waitress. He taught rock climbing in the flattest location in the country. One day in the winter I asked him why my finger and thumb were numb, turning a little blue — It’s peripheral neuropathy, Raynaud’s phenomena. If you stop smoking it will go away. By the way, can I have one? He lit the cigarette and he told me his wife made an ultimatum. It was her or me, she had said. “Am I going to choose you over my wife and kids?” he smoked with elegant angst. The last book he was really into was Kundera. I volunteered my expulsion. Garbage sorting. Now in state custody, the only option was a group home in Great Bend. I had to get provisional grades from all my teachers before withdrawing. A’s, B’s, a D and an F. Arnold hesitated for a moment as I stood before him and marked A’s for both courses.
Arnold kept a correspondence with me as I moved, from his personal handle, Sartoris. He knew I wanted to be a writer. “I haven’t truly suffered yet, and I’m dreading it with curiosity” I wrote. To become a writer or an artist — it is hugely understated— one needs a non delusional relationship with the outer world. Of course, this is highly subjective, but we can say the territory itself is objective. The nondelusional territory is the territory of the people who are middle of the road or left wing and reasonably well off; who, even if it has to be with a little bit of effort, enjoy an article in the New Yorker. They wear fashionable clothes but never think about fashion, and exit the family home with some scar tissue, it’s true, but with a confidence and knowledge of the Other. In this territory, one can dialogue with high culture and be aware of low culture, too; one knows when a voice matters, from any arena. The fabric itself is missing, in the States: the culture is painted on the enterprise, not woven into history or being. That’s where the delusion spills over — the obsession with guns, supplements, astrology.
There were a bunch of black trash bags in the driveway. I knocked. The doors were locked — a bit unusual— the lights were on. They didn’t answer. I looked in the trash bags and saw they were full of my clothes— Becky always hated them. Was it Mary’s mom, (did she have a car, or only her ex husband, the Persian Shirazi, who occasionally took us to Taco Bell?) or the booming giant, Georgina Wong in her tiny black and green convertible? It would have been hard to fit the trash bags in there. It could have been the Woodwards in the old van they let me drive. Despite the tiny convertible, I keep feeling it was Georgina. I was living with her part time, till then, but now it looked like I would be there full time.
Disgusting, was all I remember hearing, from whoever was driving me. George. We collected my things and went home, wherever it was. George’s condo, I think.
Becky drove me to the airport because Jim got angry at me. I was having trouble, once again, adjusting to American culture after living abroad — it was the first time I visited Kansas in over a decade, after Thailand, South Africa, and many dozens of shorter journeys. It’s impressive, my uncle said during a drive, that you’re still so passionate about life and have projects that animate you. Most people settle. He was listening to Coldplay, and I told him about the saponins in the herbs you have to foam by hand for ubalawu, a dream medicine. Later, to get around, I borrowed a bicycle. I preferred Cape Town, where I was under outright attack by the cars, than these mellow country roads — followed for miles because the driver was afraid to pass me on the ample two lane road. The suburban schedules of meaty 5pm dinners, dishwashers and movies, the mowed lawns, the provincial cynicism that hovers around the handful of highbrow books the family bats around, my double-bind inclusion, the under-the-breath exclusion. Jim noticed my unease, and refused the camping gear he had previously offered me — you can get along without it, he said, gritting his teeth, and refused to hug me goodbye. I asked Becky what happened, she said it was one of his moods— he has always had trouble communicating feelings.
“I had a dream about you a year or so ago,” she said, while I was sitting in the back seat— was no one in the front seat, next to her? She always adjusts the inside rearview mirror precisely when she’s speaking to someone in the back. “It was so unusual and vivid,” she said. “It seemed to come out of nowhere. Maybe, since you’ve been working with dreams in South Africa, you could help me understand it. It was in the middle of winter, you had rags for clothes, holes in your shoes, and you were dragging something huge and heavy behind you in a field of snow. You were freezing, and it looked like you really needed help. What do you think it means?”
In South Africa, I said, they might tell you to chew on the images for a while. I don’t like to interpret dreams, per se, but rather stay with the images. This was a way to avoid reducing a dream, I said, not that different from Hillman’s advice.