5:30 am and the sun is coming up fast. In the few minutes it took to post another look at my building, the sky has lightened from a hot orange glow above the houses to a salmon yellow aura behind the trees. If you don't get up right now, you're going to miss it.
***
6:30 am and yes, you've totally missed it. So now I'm off to the tub.
***
Caleb:
"He wished for annihilation, to lie down in eternal oblivion, in an insensibility, which, compared with what he experienced, was scarcely less enviable than beatitude itself. Horror, detestation, revenge, inexpressible longings to shake off the evil, and a persuasion that in this case all effort was powerless, filled his soul even to bursting" (165).
Ah, the power of humiliation. Been there. Recently.
***
Her mother rang my doorbell yesterday afternoon while I was feeling mostly seclusive and unhappy with myself and nearly didn't answer the door but for her persistence. I didn't know the woman downstairs ringing my bell, didn't recognize her, was thinking on my way down the stairwell that she must be looking for someone below me, or for the people in the attic, but when I unlocked the door she said: you're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. And for one shrill hysterical second I remembered the time I came home from a high school football game after getting jumped by the Garcia sisters, and my parents showing up at their parents' house (to talk, they said) with me sitting in the truck all bloody and blue, and that their mother--mother of five sisters--threw her screen door open when she saw us and flew out in a great cloud of pink nightie and that my tiny little mother somehow dropped her, tore open her gown, and twisted the shit out of her great big breasts while my father threw punches at their father from across the fence and I sat in the truck feeling that I've never had an ounce of dignity and that this proves it. You're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. You threatened to call DCFS about my grandson? And this is when my hands started to shake.
***
But? There is enough self-serving arrogance in service to others to assume it may call itself dignified. The meek, as they say. The teachers! But this is worthiness always in peril of taking care: do you trust me in a bad time to act appropriately towards you? Wouldn't if I were you: I fuck up all the time. Oh I know the right answer. After. Sometimes during. And still I can't see you for all the me--the train of me--that came before you.
***
Department of Children and Family Services.
***
A statistic from a speech the president at Pima Community College made on one of those worthy dignified occasions. Something like: our average student is an unmarried Hispanic female between the ages of eighteen and twenty something, holds down part time or full time work, and has one and 2/3rds kids. The math is wrong here, I know, no matter. What I'm getting at is that kid? That's Lindsy. Hell, that kid is the Garcia sisters. To a certain extent that kid might've been me. Which maybe tells you why she's living in my attic. I conjured her.
***
My building. My attic. You see my problem.
***
Associative logic again: two separate cases, same courtroom, same judge. In one case the Garcia mother is holding her soft pink nightie in her lap with her purse and the Garcia father sits next to her. He is wearing boots, cowboy boots with high polish, which means he has dressed for the occasion, they are his niceshoes. I have never seen my father in cowboy boots--his niceshoes have tassels--and remember thinking there! That's one thing you know they don't like about you. My mother and father are there, and the judge, and me. In the other case, just the three of us. My mother and father have had restraining orders on each other since separating, and the judge is saying, in light of your daughter's testimony against you, Mr. Franco, you just lost your case. Or he is saying, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia, you have no sign in your yard against trespassing, so you have no case. Mrs. Garcia holds up her gown and says what about my property--she ruined it. My father holds up his hands and says what about my children? My hands were shaking then too.
***
5. From a wrong connexion of ideas.
Some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another: it is the office and excellency of our reason to trace these, and hold them together in that union and correspondence which is founded in their peculiar beings. Besides this, there is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom. Ideas that in themselves are not all of kin, come to be so united in some men's minds, that it is very hard to separate them; they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding, but its associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together.
John Locke, "Of the Association of Ideas," A Essay Concerning Human Understanding
***
the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together. Guess what that reminds me of.
***
My father at the fence throwing kicks at the Garcia father, or my father at the fence with our clothes in his hands, or my father at the fence, my mother in his arms, sudden, swept up as if to be carried over a threshold. It was night, I know because my brother and I woke him when we tried to sneak in the front door for the clothes we'd forgotten in the dryer. But in my memory there is daylight and I can see her face when he drops her over the fence. I hear her head hit the pavement. It sounds like my head. She looks like she is sleeping.
***
From the comment box:
"Yes, lovely writing, but what happened then?!" Meaning, I think, what happened with Lindsy's mother? Well, not very much, but maybe that's the point.
***
"I conjured her." What a romantic thing to say: conjured. What a superstitious thing to say. You tried to get out of that place, but the Garcia sisters followed you to Galesburg, Illinios and settled into your attic in the shape of an 18 year old girl, her toddler son, and his sometimes father? And her mother? Ringing your doorbell?
But I have been trying to say: yes, that's it exactly. That's narrative. A whole gang of unaffiliated points all held up in likeness, in contingency, in progression, in parallel, until it begins to seem necessary that one day after months of the screaming and the crashing and the baby wailing for hours on end, and after months of sleepless nights waiting for the police to arrive, it all becomes incredibly familiar. Because it seems I have done this before.
So I open my door to the back stairwell where they are having it out good and I look her in the face and I look her baby in the face and I am shaking I'm so pissed because the baby is so scared and I feel just like he does. Scared. And I start screaming. About the drugs, the violent fighting, the doors being left unlocked, the loud parties at 4 am. And at the end of it I say: you don't care about that baby. You'd better care more or somebody's going to take him away from you. And she says: you're no better than I am, yelling at me in front of my baby, are you? You're just as bad.
***
And is this likeness insignificant--should I believe that knowing it is surely not necessary? The mind sticks things together, is less willing to unstick them in such matters. But which matters? Which matters matter? When you get the living crap beat out of you, you tend to remember it, but why form your story on it? Because your hands start to shake when you think you see it again? Is that a good reason to tell a story?
***
Because you've never hit somebody like that, wouldn't know how to do it if you had to, but they let you see how it's done, the sisters, just as Lindsy was determined you'd hear everything, know everything, and that's a terrible intimacy. It means you're one of them. One of the family. Kin.
***
Or else it's a wrong connection of ideas.
***
You're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. You threatened to call DCFS about my grandson?
Uh, yes. I did.
Is there anything I should know? I am worried about him.
***
