aiguardent: a journey into human solitude...

Tuesday: I pushed the stroller around aimlessly for awhile. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my contact list looking for someone other than Sarah to call. It had only been a few hours since she left and I thought I should be able to hold out longer than that. I called Davi and hung up when she didn’t answer. I put my phone back in my pocket, walked a block, pulled it out again, and called Sarah. It was one of those awkward conversations where you can’t really hear each other and it doesn’t really matter anyway because neither of you really have anything new to say ‘cause you just saw them and you’re mostly just missing them because you know it’s going to be a week before you see them again. We had hung up before I reached the end of the block. I pushed the stroller down Granville to the park by the lake. I unbuckled Keira and set her down to play. She had no interest in the play ground and instead insisted on climbing down the rocks to the beach. At first she was shy of the water—letting the waves hit her toes and then running back up to the dry sand. I would stand with the water lapping at my ankles, kicking sprinkles back at her. Eventually she waded out to me, and fell over, and loved it. Pretty soon she was squatting and hitting the water with her arms as hard as she could and shrieking every time she splashed herself and entertaining the cute old couple that had climbed down the rocks with their folding chairs and sun umbrella and were sitting pretending to read the newspaper.

Saturday: I woke up at 5am, hungry, because I had fallen asleep without eating dinner the night before. I pulled on a sweatshirt and poured a bowl of cereal and watched an episode of Queer as Folk. I liked the song that played during the credits, after Justin ties Brian’s bracelet back around his wrist and walks away, so I went online and bought it. And then bought some other songs and uploaded some songs and made a melancholy mix. I lay back down and sort of slept but mostly just kind of stared out the window and wallowed. I finished my book. Around 2pm I finally got out of bed and did the dishes and cooked some potatoes and eggs for potato salad and cleaned up the scraps of fabric coating the floors. I shoved all my dirty clothes and towels and sheets in my duffel bag and put on my work-out clothes and walked to the laundromat. After putting everything into wash I went for a 26-minute run. I ran out to the lake and then along the break wall, down to Hollywood beach, and around to the path and back. I tried to do intervals, picking a tree or pole to sprint to and then falling back into a jog, but mostly I felt weak, and worried about going to Milwaukee next week and not being ready. I changed my clothes to the dryer and ran to the gym. I felt weak there too. At one point though this guy caught my eye and told me I was really dedicated, which made me feel better. It's funny how compliments can make you feel good even when they come from random people that probably don't even really know what they are talking about. Like this dude doesn't know me or what I do or that dragging myself out of bed twice a week to do forty minutes of shoulder strengthening exercises isn't even close to dedication when you measure it up to all the gym workouts that Pam and Farrah have been doing in order to prepare for the world cup in a couple weeks. I jogged to the laundromat and picked up my clothes, went home and showered and got dressed. Then Rosie and Sandy picked me up and took me out to dinner at this Thai place in Lincoln Park. Then we went and got coffee at Bourgeois Pig and I heard their whole how they met (thirteen years ago!) story. Then we went to this play that I had gotten them tickets for at the Goodman. It was called Aiguardent and it was part of the Latino theatre festival. It was really weird. It was a one woman show and there was hardly any talking, just some mumbling in Spanish that you couldn't really hear. It started with her lighting a cigarette and for awhile the only light you could see was the flame of her match and then the lights slowly came up and she was sitting in a dining room chair (slumped a little bit like teenagers sit, or how you sit when you are tired or feel defeated) and there were wheels on the bottom of the chair. She started slowly moving and spinning, but she was only moving her feet and by her expression and posture it almost seemed as if the room was moving instead of her. Then she spins up to this dining room table that also has wheels and she starts moving with the table. It all felt very reminiscent of how I felt this morning as I stared out the window and willed myself out of bed, kind of depressed, but almost relishing in it. There was a wine jug on the table and she kept wanting to grab it, but then stopping herself. It seemed like it had to be about more than just controlling an addiction to wine though. It was like she kept trying to keep her thoughts off of the wine, but also enjoyed the game of resistance she was playing with herself. Eventually she begins to drink the wine and then she is pouring bottles and bottles of it down her throat and on the table and on the floor. Six big jugs of wine she pours out all over herself and onto the stage. After it's gone she looks out and hits the table with her arms, like Keira in the lake, and the water splashes everywhere, and you can see each little droplet in the stage lighting. Then she does it again and again and again. Then she is on the floor "swimming" through the wine and under the table and flicking the liquid out into the audience each time she kicks her feet.

Sunday: I’m sitting in the box office of the Goodman and a woman calls asking about the play going on tonight.

“Aiguardent?” I ask.

“Yeah that one. Can you tell me what it’s about?”

This is actually the first time someone has asked me this and I fumble. “Well, it’s a one-woman show, and uh… there’s a lot of dance…”

“Have you seen it?” she asks.

“Yeah. But it’s kind of hard to say what it’s actually about.”

“And you liked it?”

“Yeah. I did."

new books make everything better

scene of me yesterday: i'm sitting outside of visionary eye care professionals at clark and foster. i kind of want to cry. i had an appointment for 5:30pm. i biked down and filled out the new patient form. when i brought it up to the front desk, i handed them my insurance card as well and asked if they accepted blue cross. he played around on his computer and told me i wasn't in their system. i asked how much an appointment would be and he told me $100 if the doctor had to dilate my eyes, and more if he wanted to see me again. i asked if that would be necessary. he answered with a blank stare, (slash didn't). i told him i just wanted to buy contacts. i don't even need him to look at me. i'm sure i sounded dramatic, and it's not this dude's fault, but what the f? i hate dealing with this sort of stuff, (p.s.). clearly, because the contacts i have in right now i should have thrown out a couple months ago. anyway, i cancel my appointment and walk outside and i'm frustrated with the whole impossible medical/insurance bullshit system and even more frustrated with myself for always being such a baby about dealing with this stuff. fortunately my favorite bookstore is across the street. i figure as long as i'm down here with the afternoon free now, i may as well stop in, and ultimately spend money i don't have to spend. which i do. i have three books in my hand after wandering the store, but i talk myself down to two: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago by Robert McDonald and Kathie Bergquist. the one that gets put back is The Rivals by Johnette Howard. all three of these books have been on the constantly growing list in my head. my friend marian told me about bechdel's graphic memoir over breakfast one morning last spring. marian and i have some stuff in common with bechdel: we're homos, we went to oberlin, we're creative (marian makes pretty postcards and is entering a master's program in book and paper arts at columbia college in the fall, i'm hoping to get into a master's program at northwestern for creative nonfiction writing). i was pretty excited to find it yesterday. it took me awhile to track it down because i was looking too hard--it wasn't in the mix of other comicesq books, it actually had it's own table and a sign with a picture of ms. bechdel herself, to let us know she was stopping by to say hi and sign books in a couple weeks. the field guide i read about in the reader last week. i think the woman author of it actually works in the bookstore i was wandering around in. she may have actually checked me out. it seemed like a book i should own, loving the gays and exploring this city as much as i do. a small part of me is against guide books though. i worry that the great places they describe will suck once they are populated by people following a guide book to their entrance. and i'd kind of like to discover them on my own. anyway, i caved. the rivals has been on my list since it came out. i try to read everything on women and sports, especially with a queer edge, as research for my own project/future and because i can't get enough of it. but i also need to branch out, hence the decision to postpone my purchase.

i bike home and decide to do laundry so my day can still feel somewhat productive. mostly, i'm just excited to sit down on the curb and start reading fun home while i wait to move my clothes to the dryer. my girlfriend meets me at the laundromat with the same look of frustration that painted my face earlier. she has spent the whole day working on a finance assignment. she expected to be done hours ago, and instead feels she still has hours to go. i tell her it's okay because i have a new pretty book to distract me. which is the truth. she is sitting over my laptop at the kitchen table. i am propped up in my bed, the next room over. i have twenty pages left when she finally decides to quit. she tells me she wanted to take a break a while ago, that she was staring at me waiting for me to look up and tell her to take a break, but i was absorbed in my book. i shrug and smile. 'i would have looked up if you said something,' i say. 'i know,' she replies.

rugby

April and I needed rugby. We didn’t keep the team going so that Davi and Jenny and Buster would have rugby at Oberlin, we kept the team going so that we would have rugby at Oberlin. If there was someone else to do it, we would have gladly let them. It was in the last couple weeks of my freshman year at Oberlin when I walked into that rugby meeting. I wasn’t sure of my role on the team yet, having only played a season, but I knew I wanted to at least voice my passion for this sport and this team and its existence. In electing officers, and namely a president, I was going to vote for the person that would build the program back up, get us the numbers to play a full game without having to borrow players from the other team, make sure we had cars lined up to travel, and jerseys and balls packed, that there would be more than five people at practice and that when we were at practice we would do something more than gossip and toss the ball in a circle. I was quiet for the first part of the meeting, listening to the discussions among the upperclassmen about who was going abroad next year and who had too many other commitments, a couple people threw out names of people that weren’t at the meeting, “Maybe Chris would come back. What’s Flinch up to next year? Is he graduating?” April and I shot worried glances back and forth to each other. The lack of commitment in the current season had been frustrating, but I couldn’t stand the idea of no rugby at all.

“We just need to recruit more—update the website, put flyers up in the fall. April and I will be here during preseason/orientation week. We can try to get the freshman before Frisbee gets to them.”

Everyone in the room nodded at my suggestion, looking a little more hopeful. I fed off that hope, and fell into a motivating speech listing what we already had and what would be easy to acquire, the same sort of speech I had made time and again when my high school soccer team was not only lacking varsity status, but sometimes enough players to field a team, a coach, a smooth grassy field with lines and regulation size goals, and even a bus to our away games.

I didn’t intend for my speech that day to be an election speech. I wasn’t trying to be president. I’d been playing wing for a season. I had just started to get a handle on what everyone in the backline is supposed to be doing. I was clueless about the pack. They were that mess of people that smushed their bodies together and drove over the ball, so that we could get it out and run with it. I was also only going to be a sophomore and I planned to play varsity soccer again in the fall. The other committed upcoming sophomores were voted in as treasurer and match secretary, and then Sarah Cole nominated April and I for president. April could head things in the fall while I was playing soccer, and then I could take over in the spring when April would be occupied with varsity softball. We had no choice but to accept.

We started in right away. I made a new flashy rugby website as my final project in my web design class. I wanted to have an opening page that would stream some sort of ode to rugby across it. I requested April’s help in composing it. A couple of nights later, my roommate and I were up chatting after going to bed, when April burst into the room clearing her voice and reciting from a crumpled sheet of paper:

Rugby?

Isn’t that like football, they ask.

Yeah, but without the pads, I respond.

Before any other game I wonder if I’ll win.

Before a rugby game I wonder if I’ll survive.

But with each successive tackle I am able to forget

the paper that was due four days ago,

the fight with my ex-girlfriend,

and the bloodstain on my shorts from my overflowing keeper.

I laugh through my mouth guard and let all the bullshit slip away

because I can say ‘Saturday’s a rugby day!

April found a book on rugby rules and drills and we put more time into studying it than we did studying in any of our classes. Another night she ran into my dorm room at two in the morning with a rugby ball and pulled me out into the hall. “When you played basketball, could you make a behind the back pass, right? Can you do it with the rugby ball? Do you think that would be obstruction?” We practiced our behind the back rugby passes in the hall for a little while and then moved out to the grass in front of the dorm, yelling at a friend walking past and asking if she would come run at us while we ran our play.

April and I talked about rugby so much that my roommate developed a hand signal to indicate when she was annoyed with us for “talking rugby” as she called it. "Talking rugby" included reminiscing about past games and practices, dreaming up rosters, plays, and drills for future games and practices, drooling over new balls, uniforms and ruck-pads, and listing the people we knew that would make good rugby players and strategizing how we would get them to join the team.

Fall semester, we arrived on campus two weeks before classes started. I had preseason training for soccer and April was working as a dorm R.A. We taped signs in every stall in every women’s bathroom and on the tampon dispensers too that read “bleed more than once a month, play women’s rugby” and had the website address printed on little tear off strips at the bottom. We had a ton of freshman trying out for the soccer team that year. At the first meeting, we went around the circle making introductions. When it was my turn I said, “My name is Magdalen. I’m a sophomore, from Wisconsin. I play rugby. You should too. In the spring. (Or if you get cut, I thought.) Soccer players make great rugby players.” My coach shot me a look from across the room. She had tolerated me playing rugby. I think she knew that if she made me choose, I wouldn’t be playing for her anymore. But she wasn’t too keen on the rest of the team dump tackling, rucking, and mauling for their off-season work outs. More than the risk of injury, I think she feared the risk that players wouldn’t come back to soccer. I didn’t care. Soccer would always exist. Soccer didn’t need to fight. It was Varsity. Varsity was fresh jerseys, different colors for here and away, clean and folded and laid out in front of our lockers on game days. Varsity was a coach bus parked outside of the gym half an hour before the scheduled departure, stocked with bagels and water and granola bars and movies playing on mini TVs above the seats. Varsity was game stats posted online so when you scored a goal everyone knew it and congratulated you in the cafeteria lines at dinner. With Varsity, I didn’t need to worry about anything but myself. Everything else was taken care of. Out of my hands.

It was also out of my hands when I sat on the bench knowing I could contribute so much more if given the chance, when my teammates told me the same, when I stayed after practice to practice my cross and finish and the only coach that stayed after with me was my best friend on the team who had all the technical skills I lacked, seeing as she had been playing since she was five and I hadn’t started playing until my sophomore year in high school. Just as it was out of my hands when my high school wouldn’t let my soccer coach give out a MVP award at the athletic banquet because soccer wasn’t a varsity sport, even when he said he would buy the plaque himself.

I’m not usually a crier. If I get hurt I play through it or come out. I always hated the girls that cried on the bus after losing basketball games in high school. I didn’t really see it as the end of the world. We lost every game. Did they really think we were going to win? Or that crying now would make anything better? Get over it. But after the last soccer game of my junior year season, I lost it. It was a frustrating game to begin with. We were capable of winning, but didn’t. We were all off of our game and playing harder, but not smarter, to make up for it. All of the seniors were sad because it was their last college game ever and it wasn’t how they wanted to end the season. In the back of my head I knew it was my last game as well. I had been frustrated all season and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. We would do sprints at the end of each soccer practice and I would rock them because I was so annoyed with everything and then I would pick up my bag and walk to the very north end of the athletic fields where the rugby team practiced and I would watch from the sidelines, cheering when there was a good play and instructing when there was confusion. After practice I would join the circle of ruggers and we’d all sing: “Rugby women are the biggest and the best, ‘cause we never need a break and we never take a rest, and we set a better ruck, and we give a better fuck, and when it comes to rugby we never get enough. Out on the pitches, out in the scrum, rugby women will make you come. We’ll build mauls, kick balls, score on you, and when it comes to tries, we’ll take two, three, four, sixty-nine.” On game days I would get back from soccer and find the rugby girls drunk and sprawled in my yard, handing me their beers so I could catch up, and filling me in on their game and the social that was held after where both teams got together and drank and sang. Even though I hadn’t decided yet that I wasn’t going to play soccer after my junior year, I knew. I came out of that last game biting my lip, trying to keep it together. My coach brought me aside, thinking I was crying because she had taken me out, or because we lost, or because I had messed up a penalty kick. I just shook my head as she searched for an answer to my sobs. She had never seen me like this. But I didn’t even have it sorted out for myself then. I just knew that soccer wasn’t right for me anymore. It was like moving on from a relationship that you know isn’t working, but you still have so many memories and attachments to. On the bus my best friend, the same one that had stayed after to coach me so many times, held my hand and tried to cheer me up by making jokes. Every time I looked up at her, I just cried harder, hers was the face I was leaving. But I knew she would be fine. I needed rugby. And rugby needed me.

It’s definitely easier to have things be “out of my hands.” Easier to not be the one in charge, not be responsible. But I get bored when things are easy. I don’t see the point. I want it to be raw, messy, real. And that’s rugby too: no pads, no time-outs, no fouls, continuous play. There are rules. You can’t tackle above the shoulders. Passes must be backwards. You can only tackle the person with the ball. You can’t play the ball on the ground. Once a ruck is formed you must drive over the ball in order for it to be playable. There is an order, but the theory of the game is simple. You hold the ball in your hands and run forward in an attempt to place it over the line. You can stiff arm. You can pass. You can kick it ahead. To defend, you tackle. Unlike soccer and basketball that have so many rules about where and how you make contact, in rugby you can never be too aggressive. The players that excel at rugby are the ones that go out full tilt. You can’t hold anything back. You’re going to come off the field muddy and bruised and bleeding. And weightless.

grandma dale

     When my dad told my grandma that I was a lesbian, she paused and then said she had always wondered about her Aunt Anna. I’ve only seen Aunt Anna in a small black and white photo, framed in a thick gold oval and resting on Grandma’s bookshelf. Her hair is short and gray and permed. She has a short string of pearls and pursed lips. She doesn’t have the soft roundness or smile to her face of an Aunt who comforts with candies and kindness; her cheekbones cut sharply, her stare is direct and firm. I think she was a schoolteacher, never married, a reader, she owned a canoe. When I picture Grandma as a girl trotting down the block to visit her Aunt Anna, she looks a lot like me running up the driveway or taking the shortcut (that was actually longer) through the woods, stretching my steps to take the stairs up her porch two at a time, knocking on the door and walking in before she had answered, kicking off my shoes, lifting the cookie jar lid more out of habit than hunger, plopping down in the easy chair and surveying the room: the full bookshelf (my books—a series of Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures and later the American Girl books—were on the bottom shelf), flowers freshly cut and centered on the table, empty vases along the top of her cabinet, birds outside her glass doors at the feeder and on the deck where seeds had spilled. We would sit and chat. I would tell her all the ways in which my brother’s had been mean to me, probably exaggerating to get more sympathy. As I sat in her lap and she read aloud, I would poke at the veins that protruded on the top of her hand, trace them and push them together under her skin. Her knuckles were thick with arthritis. She would pause in her reading to comment on how ugly they were, saying that’s what happens when you get old. I look down at my own hands now, squeeze tightly at my wrist until my veins fill and pop a little, imagine her loose pale skin over wiry veins and knotted joints. Those hands: bizarrely strong in the places they are flawed, like scars, thicker and tougher where there was once hardly any protection at all.

     When Grandma was a girl she wanted to be a schoolteacher like her Aunt Anna. It was the depression and her dad was drunk and then gone. It was her and her sister and her brother and her mom. She did what she needed to do to keep going, found refuge in the bookcases that walled her aunt’s cramped apartment, saved the money she made working at the local movie theatre and babysitting in a bank account that she had opened herself. She was going to be a schoolteacher like Anna. She would wall her apartment in books like Anna. She would get out, get away from her mom and sister that pretended as if things hadn’t changed, that bought new clothes and dainty shoes that were too small. She couldn’t leave them completely like her dad had. She was still subject to their pleas, they were still her family, but she knew she was better. She was like Anna. She finished high school and went to collect the money she had been saving, dreaming of college and escape; instead she found that the account was empty. That was when she learned how her mother and sister had been able to keep pretending. It was needed to get by, her mother responded nonchalantly when confronted. It was used for the family. How else could they do it with their father gone? What does she need school for anyway? A husband is what you need. And you won’t get a husband looking like that, that’s for sure. I’m just looking out for you. I am your mother remember.
     Grandma signed up for nursing school. It didn’t cost anything, as long as she committed to work. She didn’t particularly like taking care of people, but she was good at it, practiced at it, she’d done it most of her life, and it was the closest she could get to independence. She left home and lived in the dorms, practiced sticking needles in oranges, worked as an aid, changed sheets and bed pans, and handed out little paper cups of pills. Every morning she would get up early to swim. In the summer some of the other girls would come down with her to the river, they would all pile in a cab and split the fare. In the fall and spring the other girls complained the water was too cold, and Grandma would get up earlier and walk. In the winter she went to the Y. She liked swimming she told me. She laughed when she described her suit, one piece and rubber.
     She married too and raised four kids. My dad was the third. She kept nursing, picking up night shifts and putting away the money she earned. Checking it weekly to make sure it was still all there. She put all four of her kids through college, starting with Judy, the eldest and only girl, who became a schoolteacher. When dad was a kid they moved a lot. Grandpa would get a new job or lose the one he had and they would up and leave, always in the middle of the year and always to the protests of Grandma and the kids. After one particularly bad period when they moved four times in three years, Grandma finally said no, that he could leave but that they were not leaving with him.
     I never met my Grandpa Dale. He died of a heart attack, soon after my parents wedding. After the kids had grown and Grandpa had passed, my Grandma started traveling. She went to Europe and Australia. She gardened, she read, she owned a camper van. When my parents bought the farm and built their house, she had hers built just up the driveway, tucked away in the woods. She woke up early and did her stretching exercises, made coffee, and visited with my dad before he started his day working between the blueberry rows. Sometimes, I would wake up early and run up the driveway and join them. This is how I know her: in a house walled with books, alone but not lonely.
     It has been this way for as long as I can remember—a constant. The garden has fewer and fewer annuals each year, the cookie jar is more often filled with cookies bought at the store, conversation becomes more disjointed, but she is still always there in her house with her books and her vases and her birds and her strong knobby hands gripping her coffee cup. I pick a book up off of her coffee table and ask her how it is. She wrinkles her nose with slight disgust, oh that’s just something Judy sent me, it’s okay, and she goes on to tell me about how much she really likes reading biographies and how she read this great biography on Truman, and what a good president he was, what a good person really, down to earth and honest. We talk about this book every time I visit.
     This is the memory I keep anyway, because really I know that she has since had to move out of her house into assisted living and then into the nursing home. Her house is still there, just up the driveway from my parents, and the cookie jar, but they are empty now. In her room at the nursing home, the framed picture of Aunt Anna is propped on her dresser, next to a vase of fresh flowers. She is ready to die. She has been ready for awhile. She is content to live each day and go when she is supposed to. I am surprised, and not, with each day that she keeps on living. When I go to visit her and the confused look on her face doesn’t match the confident look I remember, I worry she’s not even really there anymore, that she doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on at all, but then she squeezes my hand, those same firm fingers gripping my own, and she smiles. She asks me how I am. Her face is blank as I respond, telling her about Chicago and work and rugby. I know there is nowhere for her to store new information any more. It won’t be kept straight. She won’t remember. But then so clearly, so confidently she looks at me, and tells me I’ve done well, I’m doing well, I will do well. I don’t remember the exact tense and really it seems as if all three tenses were used and implied at once, that I’ve got it together, always have and always will, that she is confident in that, that I have that strength, that she continues to pass it on to me as she presses my palm in her own.

art

We drove up Monday night. The drive was familiar—Chicago to Oberlin, seen through the windshield of Kari’s red mustang with the busted heating flow that demands feet to be wrapped in a fleece blanket when riding passenger side or roast when driving. When we got there, it was exactly as I expected it to be—undone. I had imagined coming in at the point of break-down and taking control, reminding them that the goal was not perfection anymore, but completion, as I had done so many other times when one or the other had come to me throwing pens and crumpling papers. But this time the goal of perfection would not be dismissed and they were trading in sleep and showers and food and sanity in hopes to obtain it. Leila’s craziness was comfortable…familiar. Davi was a zombie—typing or sweeping, slowed by exhaustion but never pausing and never taking my suggestions for quick fixes even though she told me everything was better now that I was there. While Kari settled in measuring and hanging pictures on the wall, at ease in their insistence for perfection because she couldn’t imagine doing it any other way, I had to stop myself from contributing, knowing my rushed and imperfect efforts to finish and go to sleep would just leave Davi and Leila with more things to stress over and fix.



Kari and I decided we would stay and help until Black River opened and we could go get breakfast. I had hoped to take Davi. To see if maybe she would be a person again, if I could get her out of the studio and get her to eat. But she said there was too much to do, that she couldn’t leave. And then I didn’t even really want to go myself, but it seemed like we had to because we had purposely waited this long. We had gone for a walk a couple hours earlier to see the Ilan billboard at sunrise like Davi had said was best and check the Black River hours on the door. It was so nice to walk out of that timeless den of distress and mess to see the half-light of morning and unmarked snow on the sidewalks. And Ilan really does look best in the sunrise—so good.

At breakfast I wanted to cry. I was so tired and so cold. I think I was probably rude to the waitress. I couldn’t help it. Kari was perky and trying to make me laugh. I wanted to cry. She wanted me to talk to her about what was wrong. I told her I hated seeing Davi not take care of herself. And I was also thinking something about her… about being together or not together and wanting to be or not wanting to be… or something different all together. In that state everything seems so clear and so blurry. Like I all these pieces made sense and no sense. I wanted to talk, but not to her. I wanted to write. So I could go back later and see if any of it was right. More than that I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be warm. I ordered peppermint tea and washed down as much of breakfast as I could, kept pushing it past the lump in my throat, trying to swallow that too. We drove back to Davi’s house and pulled all the shades down in her room, put on as many layers as possible and still I felt like I would never get warm again. I was too cold and cracked-out to even think of refusing the spoon Kari offered.

I woke up feeling so much better. We went out to eat again. Sesame chicken. And then we met up with Morgan to go watch West African Dance Class. We all had different peeps that we were there to watch—Diana, Genevieve, Davi. I just liked being there in general. We all walked out of Warner together. The three couples and the dancers were dancing and imitating the other girls in their class and laughing and being so beautiful and Davi was smiling and it was my Davi again and it was so good to see her laughing and being a person again. And Morgan and Diana are so beautiful—individually and together—so beautiful. I can remember everyone’s laugh right now. Diana’s deep and Gen’s with that weird hiccup thing and Morgan’s awkward and the way each sets off the other. So good. I walked with Davi back to Fisher, via Diana’s apartment for a fishbowl. We found Hope’s bike outside of Firelands and it sparked Davi’s enthusiasm. I rode it back to Fischer while she galloped along side. We walked in, and I wasn’t sure if that much more had actually been done, or it was just being able to leave and come back that changed the way we saw it, but for the first time is felt manageable, like this might actually get done.

Three hours passed quickly. We ran back to Davi’s house to shower and dress, stopped by the Feve to find her family and friends and drink a beer, and then headed over for the opening. There were so many people there I hadn’t even thought about seeing, plus all the others I had been looking forward to seeing for weeks. Rian and Davi were talking and I included myself in the circle. Rian gave me a big hug, her son hanging off her hip completing the hug with a silly grin on his face. We talked about rugby and the film project. I offered my help at any point. She said she wanted to interview me, maybe she could even make a trip to Chicago. I was grinning so hard the whole time. I told her if she thought Oberlin rugby beautiful and the culture crazy, to just wait until she got to Nashville. We parted without good-bye, but I’ll see you at NashBash.

After a few beers I walked up to Melsen and told him I really wanted to see his work too. That Davi talked about it a lot and I always really liked the stuff he did in the silkscreen class we took together. He smiled shyly, said I could find most of his work online at melsencarlsen.com. We talked more and he asked what I was up to these days. There was an awkwardness in the question. Instead of answering the question, I acknowledged the awkwardness, said it should be awkward, we weren’t really friends before, friends of friends, but I never really knew him, but all the same, it’s never too late to start. Then I said I was living in Chicago, and asked what his post-Oberlin plans were. He said that Reese was looking at grad school and he would follow her. Well him, he’s transitioning, Melsen said. I told him I was glad they were still together and happy. I felt like we should have hugged then, but we didn’t.

At one point I was talking to someone and I looked up at the map on the wall. There were two people standing on the ladder. They wanted to draw the great lakes onto the map to locate their places and they had Davi’s map book opened to my page in order to get it right. It made me happy.



Later in the evening, I walked past Leila’s piece. Her and Davi and Marisol were all sitting inside with their feet in the pool. I wanted to be a part of it, but I didn’t want to intrude. I pretended I didn’t notice that they were all there when Marisol shouted at me to join them. In some ways, it meant the most that she was the one that asked, that she felt like I should be included in that almost sacred circle. All of this beauty that wasn’t mine, but I still felt so connected to—that I couldn’t claim ownership of and would never dare too, yet still was so affected by in that deep way you are only affected when you are intimately involved. Davi and Leila stood up in the water and were holding each other’s faces in their hands and their words were drowned out by the crowd, like music in a movie when the words are secondary anyways. Leila’s mom was taking pictures from outside the pool. I asked for the camera and walked around them clicking. In a movie the camera would circle them so that they are the only clear image and everything outside of them is circling and blurring and the music gets louder and is on point. It’s when you cry because it is so damn beautiful: That connection. The hands gripping faces. The intense intermittent hugs. The expressive faces. The tears that are held up by grinning cheeks. You cry because before that moment in the movie, you have seen them struggle, you have watched them hurt and want and need, you have seen those pieces of beauty, you want them to be okay, to be happy, they deserve it, they are worthy of it. You kind of want to be that person that makes them okay/happy/worthy. You would do a good job of it. But since you aren’t in the movie, you are glad when they find it somewhere. It makes you cry.



After a few hours, the crowd dwindled. I was drunk. Davi went home to sleep with Hope. I passed Kari on the phone in the stairs on my way to the bathroom. I asked who she was talking too even though I knew it was Zoe. Her reply was rude. I didn’t matter what her reply was. We were both drunk and didn’t feel like being nice anymore. I left with Leila and Morgan and Micah and Linda. We went to the Feve. The rest of the evening was blurry. I think Micah bought all my drinks, like a good big brother. At one point Morgan and I went downstairs to say hi to Diana as she closed the downstairs. Morgan helped her push tables back and put chairs up. I requested Rhino shots and we got whipped cream all over our faces, except Diana who had this expert way of drinking them cleanly. I left the Feve with Leila and Jolie and went to a party above the hardware store. Kari was there. They were playing Quarters. It wasn’t our crowd. Lelia danced on our laps to entertain us. We left and went back to their place and ate some cold take-out from the cartons. After Jolie went to bed, I remember Leila sitting on the chair in her living room and me sitting on the floor with my head on her lap, or near it. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it seemed important. I went home and crawled into Gen’s huge bed. I don’t remember if Kari woke up. I think I may have ignored her if she did. She had sent a txt earlier in the evening asking if I was mad. I didn’t really care. I didn’t respond. For tonight, I just wanted my people.

I woke up in the morning and showered and dressed. I walked over to the gym and walked past Jane’s door. She saw me and called out to me like I hoped she would. I sat down in her office and we had the best chat about my new life plan to be a rugby coach. She was so helpful and formal and goofy and for once it was just the right balance of it all. She gave me good websites to check out, said that she believed rugby had a chance, said that I was on the right path, that I needed to just stay involved and keep coaching as much as I could, that I should have other things to fall back on, that she would keep her ears open for rugby now and pass on anything she hears. She gave me a little NCAA women’s championship pin as I was leaving. She said she wanted to give me something. She said I could put it on a bag or on my bulletin board and look at it and gain motivation from it. Oh Jane.

Then I went back to Fisher and had my own time in the space. I walked around and read everything. I read the comics that Davi had framed. I assumed they were all ones I had read before and was happy for new ones. She is really so good. She knows how to pull out the right bit from a story that makes it funny/touching/etc. I want more. I took the book of maps off of the podium and curled up in her “bed” with it. I loved it. Each map tells a story. I wanted to know more. I hadn’t looked that closely at Kari’s before. She had included Bayfield on her map as one of four important places. She drew the farm and listed all the different varieties of raspberries and blueberries, something I’m not even sure about myself. Our maps are so good together, perfect really, cause in many ways they were formed together. How can she give that all up? How can she not see it? And for what? There’s no Philly on her map. No NYC. What does she see in her? It’s so empty. Yet she chose that over me.



I climbed down out of the loft and walked around the corner to the rugby pictures. I guess you could say I walked over to what I chose over her. I had only glanced at the statements while we were hanging them up and now I went through and read every one. They were beautiful. I was crying. It was the first thing that had actually made the tears tip. The sentiment that hung above all others was that you couldn’t explain rugby, and that when you are talking to other rugby players you don’t need to you, that explaining it somehow takes away from what it is. I wondered whether this book idea is a good one, but I still believe we can find the words, even if we never find them completely adequate.



I walked over to Leila’s installation and walked around inside, taking notice of all the tiny details. I wish I had time to listen to the ninety minutes of audio that piece them all together, but I resigned myself to knowing that they did. Davi’s class began to arrive and walk around. They gathered to talk. Leila and I stayed outside the group and had our own conversation. When they were ready to begin crits, Johnny looked at Leila and asked if she was going to join them, and then he looked at me and asked me as well. Again it felt good to know that I was included, almost without question.

At one point in the discussion, Melsen asked about how it was to have real family and chosen family in one room mingling together. Leila and Davi acknowledged that there were some awkward moments, like at the opening when Ellie yelled something about getting high and then was introduced to Leila’s father, but that’s also what it’s about. This is their family portrait. It’s one family—not easy, not smooth, but real—past and present and ever evolving and blurring.

I thought a lot about where I fall in this family. Of course there are friendships and bonds to the other Oberlin kids there and almost a matronly relationship to my little ruggers, but I am glad it doesn’t stop there. Leila’s older brother buys my drinks and I shove Davi’s little sister’s shoulder instead of saying hello because it means the same. Leila’s mom gives me a hug when I extend my hand and says she has never met me yet she feels like she knows me. Interesting how before we all know each other (and since many of us will probably never really completely know each other) we live in the stories that the person that connects us tells. This thing, this art, this show, that’s not even mine, but kind of is--I wanted all my people to see it, to be reminded of how we are all connected. (and affected.)

jon

(that's him on the right... i'm in the middle.)

You know that thing, those things, you hold on to. One moment in time… maybe you don’t even remember the exact place or time or the person… but usually you remember the person and one sentence. And maybe not even the exact words, but the essence. And because you have remembered it again and again it has been revised and given another angle of meaning each time it is remembered.

This is what I remember: I was in Seattle. It was January-term, my sophomore of college. I was twenty—such a frustrating age, so close to finally being an adult. I was living with my brother for the month. He had a one bedroom apartment and he was hesitant for me to come to stay with him, but also encouraging. He is twelve years older than me. He left for college when I was six years old. I date my earliest memories by whether he is in them. Little kids see everything one sided. They understand the roles of those that are there to comfort them, but they don’t understand what it means to the comforter to be able to comfort. Children are completely genuine in their roles. They don’t realize they are benefiting anyone by needing, they only know to need. They aren’t pretending. They really can’t reach the door knob. Or tie their shoes. Or defend themselves against big brothers. But bigger brothers can do these things. And in doing so, they can move from needing to be needed. I slept on a futon that I rolled up and stored in the closet during the day. I worked at a community center three days a week—batiking pillows cases with the kids and painting the walls of a reading room blue. I did my own batiking the rest of the week. Jon had set up a “studio” for me on the porch. Half of it was roofed so I could be out even on the warmer rainy days, with the escaping drops hissing in the hot wax. For the Christmas before he had made me a set of frames for stretching the fabric. They could all be screwed together to make one huge frame. Or used individually for smaller pieces. During that month I stretched and waxed and dyed and waxed and dyed and ironed four large squares of fabric. Jon thought it was a good start. I was able to really experiment with the materials, he told me, suggesting that none of these squares were yet art. He is always the most critical of my work. I promised to make him something for his apartment in thanks for the frame, but it didn’t happen that month. We drank a lot. And smoked a little. We sat on his porch and it was the first time I had spent that much time with him since I was six. Since I could remember. We talked about our family and about the roles we each play. He likes to tease me about being the baby. About needing. About getting my way. In agreement, I told him I thought I was probably a brat when I was a kid. I remember having a friend over and thinking she was getting too much attention, so I spun in circles with my play purse loaded with wood blocks. I spun my circles closer and closer to her until the blocks hit her and she cried. And then I was scolded and she was comforted and it all back-fired. That’s all I remember but I’m sure I was a brat. Jon said he remembers that I was always reading. That I brought a bag of books with me everywhere. Even before I could read the words. I would just look at them. And no one could tell me that I wasn’t actually reading. He remembered the day I was born. He said I was smiling. He said that everyone else was smiling. He looked at me and said that our family got better the day I was born.