Associative Study of a Blade

Mom sold cases of diced tomatoes and hamburger for sixty or seventy hours a week to men running restaurant kitchens, and she wore shoulder pads and eyeshadow so big no one knew she was pregnant till I was born.

M

om sold cases of diced tomatoes and hamburger for 60 or 70 hours a week to men running restaurant kitchens, and she wore shoulder pads and eyeshadow so big no one knew she was pregnant till I was born. Her best friend Kathleen sold fancy acid de-wrinklers and hyaluronic whatever to sinewed ladies striding by the Clinique counter in Saks. Kathleen could talk so fast her big, injected lips came right off her face and followed those ladies from department to department if they weren’t listening well enough to what her potions could do for them. When our moms sent Kathleen’s kid and me to science camp at the museum, we were armed with fresh white t-shirts, sharpened pocketknives, and one Ziploc baggie each of perfume samples to spray into the nurse shark carcass while we dissected it—Oscar de la Renta versus formaldehyde.

While he was in nursing school, Uncle took the family cat from the freezer (dead just that day or the day before) and set it on the Thanksgiving table next to a scalpel and a set of kitchen scissors to thaw out before the dissection. I wasn’t born yet, but I’m told everyone had to wait a long time for dessert. My question has only ever been whether or not Uncle had already married Aunt, and thus whether or not Aunt’s cranberry sauce—cold, green apples (chunked), orange marmalade—had yet become the family cranberry sauce. Was the cranberry sauce next to the cat as Uncle dissected it. Did Mom and Grandma and little Cousin Two have cranberry seams for lips, and did Cousin squeal, and, also, does a partially frozen cat bleed.

In medical school, students learn that if the cadaver they are dissecting starts to bleed, they’ve actually just nicked their own finger with the scalpel. Human bodies don’t bleed after dying (nor do cats or sharks), but it’s easy enough to slice into a living digit without noticing in the frigid air of a laboratory. Near or right after death, blood pools in the lowest parts of the body and coagulates, taking its warm colour and wetness with it, and bodies used for science are cannulated and flushed anyway, so that no red remains. My friend tells me this, a woman who looks very much like I do, but with a bigger affect—more heft of self—to fill in broad shoulders and a distinctive chin, plus the puddle-blonde hair she dyes a deep red. Uncle sharpened Mom’s kitchen knives for us every Christmas; like students, we never knew when we’d caught a thumb tip until the drip from an elbow into a saucepan or the grate of the stove.

Some creatures that live in icy enough water or below a certain depth evolved not to have hemoglobin in their blood, so it runs clear, or green, or blue. Octopi. Crocodile icefish. Apparently, what makes blood red also makes it sluggish in cold and under great pressure. Growing up, I knew for a fact that it only takes 58 seconds to die of hypothermia in Lake Dillon, the reservoir in the Front Range that provides almost half of Denver’s water. Cold like that conjured a twisted longing for me. Constriction, lithe limbs narrowing in the dark. A hush. It was, I think, a gendered longing but not one that I can make sense of in the usual ways. I wanted to be the kind of girl carved sharply from stone, a sort of feminine defined by its non-offer of warmth. I wanted everyone to quiet down. In the mirror, I practiced a small smile that said: I know what’s true. Mostly, I follow the rules. Of course, fact is only a word—learned as anything else is. The truth is more like: the reservoir’s water is cold enough to immobilize a body, to slow its circulation so much that it’s impossible to swim, in less than a minute. Then, it’s drowning that you die of. 

It was, I think, a gendered longing but not one that I can make sense of in the usual ways. I wanted to be the kind of girl carved sharply from stone, a sort of feminine defined by its non-offer of warmth.

Daddy’s sister and her horrible husband once came from Arizona and then turned their rented sailboat turtle—sail underwater and hull just a shell on the surface—on Lake Dillon. I’ve never seen them move faster than leisure or slugs, but they clambered on the bottom of that boat like stink on shit. That’s how Mom’s family would say it. Marilynne Robinson had an uncle who turned a boat turtle too, on Lake Pend Oreille, which forms the setting for her novel, Housekeeping. She never knew him but says it was perhaps the story of his belovedness and his drowning that haunted the lake for her, making it the type of place that might swallow an unhinged train full of people, as it does in the book. Pend Oreille, carved deep by glaciers in the last major ice age, can hold a lot to be true at once. As an adult, it’s my favourite place in Idaho to swim, but only by the shore, where the sun gives my blood a chance. As an adult, too, I finally found withdrawal into ice to be, perhaps, as violent as the noise of my family and its big womanhood and manhood and hollers anyone could hear down the street. From Mom, I asked for old jackets, padded in the shoulders with her young gestures toward inhabiting space. My shoulders, by then, hunched forward in a posture that stuck my collarbones out like perches for small bird claws.

Whenever Uncle was in trouble as a kid, Grandpa would pull out and open his switchblade, turning its sharp end toward his own hip and passing the handle to Uncle. Grandpa would point with his eyebrows to the door. Once a week or more, Uncle took Grandpa’s blade down to the willow to cut a switch so that Grandpa could whip him good. Mostly, Mom got it from their mom and Uncle from their dad. Something about growing into the right image. Mom was too pretty, I think, for Grandma to tolerate, and she had too big a mouth. Of what Uncle was too, I’m not sure. He pinched each branch end and stripped it of leaves before bunching a handful—not too big or small—together on the walk back up to the house. At the threshold, Uncle folded the knife in on itself, locking the safety into place, and then crossing over.

The truth is that I go now to Lake Pend Oreille to scream underwater. I take Mom’s screams and Uncle’s silences and tether them to my own—cherry stems knotted in my mouth—before I let them loose under the clear blue. I can’t figure what size to be: if smallness and silence are always cold or always suppressed; if magnitude is always crushing and colonial or if it’s aspirational freedom. I scream and scream and no one on shore can hear anything, and the stems keep catching on the backs of my teeth. This lake’s clarity is one reason why it houses the Navy’s largest submarine testing site in the country in its depths. It’s why, too, my screams might matter here more than they would somewhere else, caught and kept in the net of something outside my body. Underwater microphones are tethered all throughout the lake to its muddy bottom. The hydrophones are so sensitive that they can hear when it rains from more than 1000 feet below the surface of the water. Sometimes I yell to the lake secrets that I don’t want to keep secret anymore, like that I walked out on the shark, my family’s toughness seeping from me. Like that I walked straight to the bathroom with my tiny perfumes, and I hid in there for hours. But also that I uncapped each bottle and dumped it down the toilet. I didn’t want the cold body, but I didn’t want, either, that which could cover the fact of its deadness.

The problem, I learned, with hiding (Uncle probably learned too) is that—on the scale of personal failings—hiding is bad but being found and witnessed in the failing is so much worse. One night when Mom was angry, I ran from her house to the playground in Daddy’s neighbourhood in a snowstorm. I bundled my puffy parka-ed body and my blanket in the yellow plastic tunnel and watched the snow turn nighttime white for hours out the tiny cutout windows. Eventually, the metallic wail of a police siren shoved me down and out of sight.

Annie Dillard writes of water turned cloudy with the larvae and shed skin bits of rock barnacles. Or. Annie Dillard writes of Rachel Carson writing of the way they “hatch into the sea in milky clouds.” There are mouthfuls of women in these women. A cool spew of hatchling women from women. I’m after the sounds that come out when I fill a mouth with as many things at once that are true as I can find. The submarine Kokanee, like many others, went to the bottom of Lake Pend Oreille unmanned, only listening, one of many designed to study acoustic stealth technology in the lake’s silt. I, too, am an unmanned watercraft slicing silence with big, pregnant silence.

There are mouthfuls of women in these women. A cool spew of hatchling women from women. I’m after the sounds that come out when I fill a mouth with as many things at once that are true as I can find.

The year I was certified as a scuba diver I was ten, sent to the bottom of Chatfield Reservoir outside Denver holding a yellow rope so I wouldn’t lose the others undergoing examination. I did lose the rope: an accident, an opened hand in a moment of forgetting myself and my circumstances. I sat on the mucky bottom, breathing slowly and clearing my mask and clearing my mask and fearing the bends. Criss-cross applesauce, I tried and tried to see my hands move before my face (impossible) and listened for the moment when a guide would realize they’d lost me and knock a carabiner into their oxygen tank to help me find my way back. I did not hold my breath; do not hold your breath, I said to myself and counted one two three in, one two three out, one two three in. Sound is a small and a large thing. This, like the gasp in a movie of someone on the edge of dying. The water pressed in. On shore, finally, I peeled back four millimetres of neoprene from my white-blue torso, spilling bland reservoir water and urine to the gravel. My lips swell when I sob, faster than my eyes do.

One of Mom’s men got caught in a fishing net 90 feet under deep blue Pacific, the trip a prize for Mom and all of the heads of lettuce and cloth napkins she’d sold to the restaurant industry. He fought—like a man—against the spider’s web until near the bottom of his oxygen tank and then was saved by a diver, gentle and quick, who passed over a yellow backup regulator before cutting him, one thread at a time, free. After, on Maui, we bought a dive knife as long as my forearm. We practiced strapping it to our thighs and whipping it, sharp and warm, free. Lightning speed.