HORIZON IN BLUE by Goran Petmil
We are capsized.
It’s strange to look at the horizon, a concept more than a fact, a destination more than a current location, the future more than the present, a possibility rather than a reality, to get one’s bearings. And yet, this is what we do. When we are carsick or otherwise off-kilter, vertiginous, we are told to look at the horizon to stabilize, to recover. Recover what? So often when we are in a state of uncertainty, we are advised to look outside ourselves instead of within.
Outside, such as it is during a pandemic, and smoky from too-close wildfires, I feel invisible. No one with any power to do so seems to be righting the ship. The careener-in-chief spins the wheel and mocks our nausea. He is his supporters’ rough beast, spewing hate and lies, and now virus, as he slouches toward Putin.
And he never
shuts.
the fuck.
up.
My son and daughter want to know only two things: Is he going to be re-elected? Is he going to jail? I cannot offer definitive answers, the kind children prefer. When they were little and we were going to the doctor, they’d ask, “Are we going to get shots?” If they were, I’d say, “Yes.”
O! the wailing.
Better than lying, I’d tell myself, gripping the steering wheel.
Clinging to lies has never made me right myself.
A recurring theme in literature written by women and marginalized people is the feeling of invisibility, of being a porous container, of dissolving at the edges. There are things to enjoy about this feeling; everyone likes to float sometimes, when they choose. But forced upon you: it’s baseless, not grounding. Feeling my feet on the earth, soles flat and calves oaken trunks, is how I re-align. I am self-conscious about it, though. When I am in nature, I am In Nature For the Purpose of Setting Things Right.
Lately, even Nature can’t do it. Besides, the air quality here is unhealthy for sensitive groups. I am nothing if not sensitive.
Crouching helps. The crouch comes before the spring, the moment before you take action, when you gin up your hopes and intentions. It is the making of intentions that stabilizes me, gives me balance. The spring, the act, is the afterthought, the extension into the world that dilutes me. In birthing class, you do a lot of squatting, to prepare for the act, and then you push, when the time is right, and then the thing is out of you and in the world.
There are ways to pull the fruit of your squat back in to you, to hold, and conspire. Hold loosely; too tight, and they can’t crouch with you.
When my daughter was a baby, her hard palate shredded my nipples and made them bleed. Still, I nursed her, not knowing what else to do. I put her to my shoulder, a towel under her chin, held her, patted her and through her, patted myself. Everything will be all right. We are crouched now. There was no horizon that I could see through my sleep-deprived eyes. When I lowered her away from me, there was blood on the towel. Can this be normal? I searched for the horizon. No one was coming to help, to tell me how things definitely were. Grasping wildly, I found other ways to keep her alive.
We are waving white flags of surrender, visoring our eyes to look for the people coming to save us. I can’t see anyone. Can you? We are sequestered and alone.
I will do it.
I find myself insisting that she go to her father’s house for the legally mandated time, even though I don’t want her to. Don’t forget about her, I am mouthing to him. It feels unnatural to send her away. She always comes back by, during the legally mandated times, if only for a few hours. I ask her questions, and she seems to like it more than usual, these days. I make her a grilled cheese, which when she was younger, she called “girl cheese.” I never corrected her. We play the traditional game where I guess who is her favorite teacher this year, and who is her least favorite teacher. I am very good at this game. I am always correct.
She comes back to me for a meal she won’t get over there, that only I know how to provide. She reads aloud to me: Donald Barthelme’s “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood. I close my eyes and marvel at my daughter’s skilled inflection. I take most, but not all, credit for her.
The stories are about conflict, arguments with two or more sides, endless sides. They are absurd, and they make us feel sane. We take comfort in imaginary arguments.
Her assignment is to write a story about an argument. She brainstorms. She starts to write a story about a mother who dies.
“I can’t write this, people will think I’m a bad person,” she says.
Welcome to the wonderful world of fiction! I think.
“You can write anything you want to,” I say.
I leave a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales on the desk, my desk, which is where she works. She says it’s the only place in the house she can concentrate. I forfeit.
I leave the book, angling it for maximum visibility, but say nothing about it. “Ninety percent of what you’re thinking of saying to your teenager, don’t,” a child psychologist once told me. I joke with myself about stitching this on a pillow. I would sleep on the pillow, I think, my cheek pressed into the needlework until it’s permanently embossed on my skin.
It’s very hard not to say everything I want to say.
“I want the mother to die,” she says, curling my hair around her finger, “but I’m not sure how.”
“You will figure it out,” I say. Do I want to say more? I don’t think I do.
She writes a story about a daughter who, against her mother’s stern admonitions, steals peaches from their neighbor’s tree. The peaches are so alluring, why shouldn’t she have some? Of course the mother finds the tell-tale pits hidden under the daughter’s pillow, an argument ensues, and the daughter throws a peach pit at her mother. It lands in the mother’s throat and chokes her. The daughter buries her mother in their yard, thinking, “Soon I will have a peach tree of my own.”
I love the story so much and tell her so. All 100% of what I want to say, I say.
There are no repercussions.
After a few hours, she returns to her father’s house. I watch “The Piano,” which I haven’t seen since it originally came out in theaters. I felt I needed to watch it the way one needs to take medicine. The way I take medicine is always as a last resort. I cry within the first few minutes, sobbing and ugly and grateful my daughter isn’t here to see me, she might recoil. There is a scene in the movie where the mute mother and her daughter are communicating in their mixture of sign and speech. When the husband comes in, the women stare at his intrusion: so rude. He backs out of the room. I understand this now, and it makes me neither sad nor smug. There are cliffs in the movie, and lots of ocean. The horizon brings no relief until the very end, when the mother decides to embrace her own freakishness. The piano, her reason for living and source of joy, rests at the bottom of the sea.
“We’ve always been weird,” I say to my son, “but I think we are getting weirder. Do you?”
“Yes,” he says, on his way out the door, probably to look for something less weird.
The view from my desk in the corner of my bedroom upstairs is of dilapidated rooftops and obsolete 1960s television antennae, there is nothing prophetic about it. I cannot see any horizon from there, nor can my daughter as she works in my chair. But the horizon is no longer mine to seek, to steady myself. I must be still, stone-faced, an archetype; I am now her horizon. Steady, girl.
I make too many faces to be an archetype.
Later that night, when she comes home, my daughter asks me to read her a bedtime story. Corduroy, her favorite as a toddler. Mine, too. It’s about finding safety and love, someone who’ll care for you in a way you didn’t even know you needed. I choke up on the first page but fake my way through it, move to a higher octave. Are you ok, my daughter asks. I’m fine, I say. She pats me, and lets me kiss her goodnight.
Within the Margins
"You must be a friend" gets me *every time*