Sharon Doubiago is the author of three published book-length poems, Hard Country (West End Press/ 1982, University of New Mexico, reprinted 1999), South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh Press, l992) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and The Husband Arcane. The Arcane of O (Gorda Plate Press, l996). Her poetry collection, Psyche Drives the Coast, (Empty Bowl Press, l990) won the Oregon Book Award. Her poetry collection, Body and Soul, (Cedar Hill Publications, 2000) includes her third Pushcart Prize, "How To Make Love To A Man," and was a finalist in the PEN WEST 2001 Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is Greatest Hits- 1976-2003 (Pudding House Publications). She has two collections of stories, El Nino (Lost Roads Press, l989, 1990), and The Book Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Graywolf, l988, 1989), which was named in 2005 by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission to the List: One Hundred Books of Oregon literary history, 1800-2000.
(www.ochcom.org/100Books.) Over a hundred uncollected poems, stories, criticism, essays, memoirs, and creative nonfictions have appeared in anthologies, magazines, newspapers and literary journals, including ZYZZYVA, Winter, 2006-7), Five Fingers Review (Fall 2006), The San Diego Reader, (November 2006), The Santa Monica Review, (Spring 2005, Fall 2002).
She is a board member of PENOakland.
"Let the Images Rise:" My First Poem
from My Father's Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Girl, Book VI
Poet
There is a pain---so utter--- It swallows substance up--- Then covers the Abyss with trance--- So Memory can step Around---across---upon it--- As one within a Swoon--- Goes safely---where an open eye--- Would drop Him---Bone by Bone.Emily Dickinson
"One recent study looks at a hundred women who were seen in an emergency room as children. Doctors recorded then that these girls had been sexually abused. Researchers went back fifteen years later and asked these women if they had been abused as children... Forty percent of them said no."
Sue. A. Meier
"I do not think the rape affected me as profoundly as my adherence to those laws of concealment and secrecy my mother put into effect-silence could be the most eloquent form of lying."
Pat Conroy
"Nelly, I am Heathcliff!" Emily Bronte (Freshman English theme paper)
(Journal, 1974)I want to write like I dream, how the mind in sleep puts things together it won't awake---
I am twenty. Thinner. Becoming smaller. Darker. Twenty two. Pregnant for the second time but for the first time against the father's wishes. I make this girl for our boy. It hurts. I'm mature, on top of things. The most miserable nine months of my life. I am not angry but she is. She wakes up inside me, turns over and over through the mute amnesiac ancestors. My will, my beautiful choice growing my Third Eye She will be onto herself
I'm twenty-three. I begin to break the vow. I start with the word damn. Damn this and damn that. It's painful, like pulling teeth, like a mouth full of rotting teeth. I'm such a phony. I pray to Jesus to help me to say damn with abandon, with dignity, the word with wings, as it once, in a pure moment, flew from me.
I'm thirty. I wear a thrift store yellow silk lace lingerie top and hip hugger bell bottoms almost everyday for three years. When it's over a hundred I rinse the top, put it on wet. In minutes I'm cool, dry, clean, finally beautiful* Then I stopped writing so as not to remember any thing else
I was formally introduced to poetry in Mr. Mikkelson's Basic Ideas in Literature at Palomar Junior College in San Marcos. He gave us two poems, a "good poem and a bad poem." Both were about mothers. The assignment was to compare the two poems showing which was which and why.
I didn't know. The sentiment expressed in what turned out to be the bad poem was love. The language was the way everyone I knew talked, the way I talked; certainly, the way I express love. Profusely, directly. I love you! But Mr. Mikelson said the poem was sentimental, feminine, not believable, nostalgic, clichéish, and Hall Mark Card writing. He ridiculed the poet, and the poet's so-called love for his mother.
The good poem was Sonnet to My Mother by George Barker. His mother is sitting "huge as Asia" under a window drinking gin. This woman is not your typical All-American-and-apple-pie mother as depicted in World War II movies or in Hall Mark Cards. "She will not glance up at the bomber or condescend/ To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar." Again and again Mr. Mikkelson returned to that image of the mother being huge as Asia and to the magnificent language—"that she will move from mourning to morning." The poem with it's dense images and language, strange mother and severe syllabic and line count, the thing that made it a sonnet, felt, well, fake to me, and not of love.
I understand now that the major difficulty I experienced was from what felt like an attack—on my psyche, my language, my roots, my class, my ethics (gin!), my mother, my gender, on the way I love: my basic identity. I couldn't exactly think this. My mother raised me to loathe such thoughts, to believe in an egalitarian America. To identify with a class, for instance, was to contribute to a class structure.
Mr. Mikkelson was newly from Brigham Young University, and published in Field and Stream Magazine. I see now that he was most likely a Mormon. One of his assignments was to write My Most Unforgettable Character and submit this to The Reader's Digest. I wrote Sam The Bankrobber. I remembered bursting into tears in the back seat of the car, Mama driving down Olive by Ramon's old house, the shock of Sam's arrest and revelation of who he really was, but I didn't write that. I certainly didn't tell that he caught me and Sergei making out on the floor, that he ran and got my father, that they watched "for at least five minutes to be sure of what you were doing," and that this more than any other moment in a string of very bad moments, ruined my last two years in high school, and probably, at least in part, our marriage. I emphasized as instructed the humor, how funny it all was now four years later. What a character.
And so, this writing assignment was also disturbing. It was boring. Now I would say formulaic. To get published in The Reader's Digest felt like you had to go under hypnosis. You had to reduce your consciousness, tell only a tiny part of what you knew. You had to do this for the sake of the poor retarded reader, to condescend to and/or trick him. Writing, which I'd been drawn to, now felt dim, the beginning of pixelation.
And even for my submission, The Reader's Digest rejected my submission. And then, endlessly, I pondered, was it the subject matter, my writing talent, or what?
Next I took Creative Writing from Mr. Mikkelson. Every week of that summer session we wrote in a different genre. (What a word.) Poetry week: again, what is a poem? Everyone else seemed to know. One guy called himself a poet. He sat in the very last row of the very crowded class, in the corner up against the two walls, so hip, so cool, maybe angry in his white surfer mid-calf pants and thongs and sun-streaked strings of hair. I sat in the last row too, on the opposite end, polite, fashionable, married, a mother: pretty.
Mr. Mikkelson explained that a poem doesn't have to be about something pretty, or romantic, this is the big mistake would-be poets make. Furthermore, Twentieth Century poetry doesn't rhyme. This was great news, I hated those old rhymes! The little poetry I'd heard always gave me the willies. (These days I joke that I must have been tortured to death last time in the meter and rhythm of those rhymes, the fire set as the priest recited.) He spoke about memory and the images we carry from memory, as in our dreams, and sometimes, unfortunately, from real life, about letting them come out through the pen on the natural rhythm of the breath. He read a famous poem about a street full of garbage. I saw the old men from Rancho Los Amigos de Los Angeles hobbling and wheeling their chairs down Industrial Avenue, skirting Trinity Bible Church on the corner, disappearing up Main. I hadn't thought of those guys since we left there end of the Seventh Grade. He spoke of the importance of specific detail and I saw their handicaps from polio, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, birth deformities, the wars, indigency and alcohol (gin!). I saw that one guy in particular, unbelievably spastic, his pinched head bobbing up and down like a seapalm in a rising surf. The kids mimicked him and I hated that. It was unnatural for me to remember those old guys at all, but it felt perverse to try to write of their handicaps. To write the specific details felt like I was doing what the kids did, mimicking them.
But I was a compulsive straight A student. I began by describing my beloved church on the corner, the Sunday marquee that welcomed all in the name of Jesus. Then,
The evil old men who daily tread The walk that cornered God's good church. Down the street they came, one at a time (as if they scared each other, too) From the county farm three blocks away, Braces that scraped, Wheels that creaked, Canes that prodded, They turned the corner... And climbed the hill in conflicting lines, Out of sight, Maimed and mangled, as if Disfigured by choice... We thought so, anyway As we came out of hiding, snickering. We thought so, We still lived in God's good world.
I had a long way to go, mainly in consciousness and language, but "Pharisaism," my first poem, is similar to what will always come out of me when I can allow the tapping. Writing will take me to what is regularly denied, by myself, and everyone. Everyone's a poet. But finding the wherewithal to give voice to the self's inner knowledge is one of the great hurdles.
I'll have to work longest of all not to lie about myself for fear of the charges of ego. Until that moment of writing I had not seen that my church did not welcome, much less reach out to those men but I'd always seen the unChristian cruelty of the neighborhood kids. I had never thought the old men were maimed and mangled by choice (and therefore sinners who deserved their exile from the church.) My placing myself in that snickering "we" was untrue. We're awash in false humility but deeper, we are self-censored, we are disempowered from knowing and giving ourselves. I was realizing this as a new mother. More than anything, I knew I must protect and encourage my son's true self. Becoming a mother and becoming a poet were similar psychic work.
The images of their exposing themselves from the tumble weeds, and other frightening occurrences with them, rose too, but I couldn't say that yet either. (Specific details? The specific penises to me from the specific tumble weeds? The specific ejaculations and where I am on the walk to the store for our daily bread? The pantless man clutching a knife behind the wheel at Dakota and Main? The leering bloody eyes and broken mouth in the bathroom window when I climb out of the bath hissing "Fuck! Fuck!"? To tell these specifics would be like coating the crib bars with my own excrement (a word I don't think I knew then), as my baby boy had just done in exuberant "creativity." Of course I knew better. My story could not yet be carried in language—it can barely be carried now—much less in full consciousness. What I needed to say first about my childhood was that I saw their humanity, the old men were victims, this is the vision of Jesus, we are to forgive and love and by this our neighbors will be healed; to not do so is to be pharisaic, a Christian hypocrite; more seriously, a contributor to their continuing decline, a perpetuator of their suffering. If in writing my first poem, when my professor instructed let the images inside come through your pen like breath and I saw my father at me, as I did, right across the blackboard behind his butch blond head, and in the hills driving home that day, I knew, of course, beyond the fundamental wash of forgiveness, not to allow those details into language, not to go that much up against the temple, not even inside myself.
But my self is deeply in the vision of this poem. How good it felt to finally be able to say, if inadequately, what I knew on my twelfth birthday when Nancy Meir went spastic mimic-ing that poor man struggling by and all the kids convulsed in laughter. How that man bore it, kept proceeding down Industrial, I still don't know.
I got the word "Pharisaism" from my Grandmother's 1928 Bible Encyclopedia, a source I still use. I remember a kind of breathlessness in using a new word I wasn't sure of, a kind of dread for being a fake, of making a mistake, but also a kind of magic. The Pharisees "were intolerant of those who differed from them." They were the moneychangers that Jesus threw out of the temple, a story my mother cited from the bathtub as proof that Jesus was not a whimp, afraid of confrontation. My mother wasn't being anti-Semitic, Jesus was a Jew, everyone knew that, but the Old Testament of the moneychangers was about the Law and the New Testament was about Love. (My concern about that word as the title of my first poem continues to this day. Are the Pharisees a people I'm being intolerant of?)
At the end of poetry week Mr. Mikkelson called me and the poet, the one who pressed himself into the back corner, so funky in his beach clothes, his burnt aura, so rhymey and feral and intellectual and contemptuous and experienced in poetry, and from San Diego, and of whom I was shyly, weirdly fascinated, to stand before the class and read our poems. (It was like being in the last week of the first grade when the teacher called me and my secret boyfriend Raymond to the front of the class and awarded us for being the best behaved boy and girl of the year. Dear Jesus-to whom I rarely prayed now-don't let my mouth open up like then!) Mr. Mikkelson said our poems were real poems.
My mother kept my poem in her Bible for the rest of her life, the one I gave her for her birthday that same year, 1962. "When I read it I knew that Sharon was a poet."
I also wrote a short story for this class which Mikkelson said didn't work. It was based on my best girlfriend Susan's secret pregnancy the year before and then her search for the couple who adopted her son at birth. Mr. Mikkelson said the story was cliché-ish "like a Tijuana soap opera." Again, I felt mortification and confusion. I couldn't say then that my teacher, who wrote on proper subjects like fishing and hunting, was being, however well-meaning, sexist and racist. I just felt a confusing alarm, sort of flabberghasted. Write what you know, he had lectured. I didn't know what a Tijuana soap opera was. I knew Suzi and her lost son, a true story that I had lived. What is literature?
He praised one line about the sounds of children playing down the street as she approaches the woman's house. Somehow I knew it was the best line too, but felt a suspicion that it was simply the most easily identifiable. The street was the one we'd spent so many Sunday afternoons on in Pasadena when I was a girl. Having our picnic in the car under the cool shade of the thick-leaved flowering trees. (Details: I still haven't identified those fantastic trees.) What we had actually been doing was watching Penny's house, my long ago given-up-for-adoption first cousin, hoping to get a glimpse of her. And the street would be like the one on which I would later find Suzi's son in L.A. Eating my lunch, doing my homework, watching his door, hoping to get a glimpse of him for her.
Let the images rise on the natural rhythm of your breath as your dreams do in sleep. But, professor, what would happen if I allowed my images to rise? What would happen to my father? To my mother? What would happen to my parents' marriage? What would happen to my marriage? What would happen to my son? What would happen to our country if we allowed the images, if we wrote poetry? Marilyn Monroe died that summer, her diary stolen from her house the same night. Everyone said (even then, in Southern California anyway) she was murdered because she was about to tell what she knew about Cuba, President Kennedy and the Mafia. And Earnest Hemingway died that summer too. One morning Mr. Mikkelson announced his suicide. He said the same thing my parents always said, you get so smart you go insane. "Hemingway suffered from his intelligence." "I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't learned to control my thoughts," my mother will write me on the publication of my first book, Hard Country. "What frightens me is that poets commit suicide."
My sister, Bridget, was at Palomar too. She was writing her big paper for English, that is, for Dr. Boehm, by reputation the hardest class to pass, on Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth's younger sister, and her scandalous love affairs—then, an almost shocking theme, such a current affairs subject, and now in hindsight, very interesting, very telling in regards to her and her relationship to me. But in those days I barely knew my younger sister though there we were on the same campus. Sometimes, suddenly encountering her on the walk to a class it would seem like waking to her far away on the other side of our small childhood bedrooms.
In Ceramics I made a magical bird of clay. He was "abstract," in his lack of detail (as hard to let go of as using them in writing), and mounted on a platform with black iron (clothes hanger) legs. Part of his magic was that the clay was deeply buffed with Johnson's floor wax (on hand under my kitchen sink) which when fired looked like wood. I gave him to my father for his 46th birthday, thinking he would be especially intrigued with the wax-trick technique. "Your father's meditation is sanding," Mama always said. The hours I put into waxing my bird made me think of him. In another life my father would have been a sculptor.
When he opened my present he laughed. Then he became insulted, then enraged that I would give him "modern art." I was hurt, then perplexed that I didn't anticipate this. I meant to bring him joy, not insult. He may have thrown it against the wall. I have remembered it that way. Once again my son was standing in the living room of the Ramona house with all the rest of the family witnessing his grandfather's contempt for his mother. On TV Jacqueline Kennedy was giving her celebrated tour of the White House. I never saw the magic bird again.
I didn't exactly remember then my clay elephant and Dalmatian/Prehistoric monster I'd made for him in the second grade and how offended he was by the dog. "Sharon's modern art" that looked more like a penis than anything. But now I think that's what my father reacted to that Valentine birthday thirteen years later when I gave him the abstract bird, about the same size and, though beautiful, to my eyes anyway, of a similar shape as the dog (his erect penis). My father saw his rape of me coming out of me via a kind of Rorschach art. His seeing his penis in my eight year old clay sculpture was rather stunning in its sophistication. His hatred for all things Freud was up there with his hatred for modern art and Richard Nixon. My father may have been just a good old Southern boy, as Mrs. Ritchie described him when I visited her after Mama died to ask why the neighborhood committee thought we should be put in foster homes, why they ran off our caretaker and if she knew he'd raped me, to thank her for her concern, but he was no dummy. Mrs. Ritchie said she didn't remember. I fully anticipated that but not the other thing she kept saying: "You understand, I loved your mother."
In the last years of his life there was a bird he himself made in his Florence Oregon home, a bird very similar to the one I made him for his Valentine birthday in 1962. I was newly married to a sculptor which triggered the memory. "I thought you hated abstract art, Daddy. Do you remember the bird I made you?" He just nodded, looking at me with his heavy-lidded, sad eyes.
On the night we married, two weeks after I graduated from Ramona High, Sergei quit speaking to me and did not speak to me again in our seven years and two children, though he carried on exuberantly with all others.
For better or for worse, that's the vow. Until death do us part. That's the vow. Divorce, in our world, was still unacceptable and carried the stigma of failure—in our case, a stigma prophesized for us by everyone. I married from parents and a grandmother who did not believe in divorce. I didn't believe in divorce. Everyone had argued at me that I was too young to marry. I was not, my love for him was not. We would make it. Forever, that's the vow. I would not fail marriage. Or him, whom my father detested.
For better or worse: I would be the world I wanted. I would be the love I wanted. I guess I was being a saint, the perfect wife. I was being with him as I was with my father. This was a test in which I would prove my love.
I assumed that somehow (I wracked my heart and soul trying to figure how) his behavior had to be half my fault, because it takes two and marriage is about compromise and it's forever, that's what we vowed at the altar, and I loved him.
I assumed that suddenly at the altar he became afraid, suddenly he couldn't trust me. His father deserted them when he was five, his mother broke down, took him home to her parents, went into her old bedroom and did not come out for years. His beloved grandmother, virtually now his mom, promised she would never leave him in the Yonkers school. But his grandfather was jealous of him, threatened either he goes or I do. So one day, a trick to get him inside the gothic monster building, she disappeared. From eight to fifteen he lived in Yonkers School. There were Christmases only he and another kid were there, and a janitor he feared and hated. He had a breakdown at the altar fearing he was being set-up for betrayal and desertion again.
Emotional withdrawal from intimacy was common (if not so extreme as never uttering a word) with men of my generation. This is the way men are and I am still turned-off by whiny, nagging women. That could not be my fate.
And then we had children, Daniel Clarke and Shawn Colleen. Sergei was a good father, enthralled and happily involved with them. (I remember at Danny's birth actually allowing the thought what will I do if he treats him the way he treats me?) He was a good father except in his not relating to me, a factor hard for me to consider given that it wasn't much different from my pariah role in my birth family.
I remember my whole being responding to Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, The Great Stone Face. My husband the Great Stone Face. I was moved to a depth I hadn't known since my Bible studies for Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, a story, "The Beast in the Jungle," in the voice of a cold, non-responding man like my husband. When Nikita Khrushchev visited Disneyland and warned Americans they didn't understand the oblomovian personality of Russians, I found the Russian novel Oblomov. I became a literature major in the same spirit I'd pored myself into the Bible as a girl, to understand, to make my life, now my marriage-for-life, meaningful. Bearable.
What I mainly remember of our seven years (my mother's seven year itch!) is the heartache, my constantly breaking heart. Constant trying to figure what I was doing wrong, what I could do to break through to him. And a loneliness unlike any pain I will ever know again, that this was to be my life forever, that no one knew what my life was or who I was with the great bon vivant, Sergei Doubiago. I remember that my lips literally ached to be kissed. I found myself fantasizing turning away from a man trying to kiss me. It was my only fantasy.
And I remember our nightly sex. We made love every night. Almost always in the middle of the night, out of sleep. He'd turn over to me around three or four, after he'd come home from his midnight shift, an electronics engineer at General Dynamics working on our secret space shuttle to the moon, the race against Russia, his lost father's country. From sleep, from dark, from the anonymity of the blankets and the suburbs, from time and in time our two children, we sexed, his face buried in my long hair and the pillow. It wasn't making love, it was just fucking, but I thought I felt love for me in his body even if he couldn't speak to me. Maybe that's why he couldn't speak, it wasn't that he was unemotional, he was too emotional. There was never anger or wrath in our sex, there was a vulnerableness that created something akin to tenderness. And great gratitude in me. I'd have orgasms in rapid succession, his pelvis bone against my pelvis bone, telling him I love you. Telling him thank you. Telling him it's okay, whatever.
I've never again had the kind of orgasm I had with him. They were clitoral, one would go to the next in rapid succession. One after another without pause, rather than the usual starting over. I'd sigh, fall into deep breathing, involuntarily begin to whimper, gasp, moan and then scream-my talking to him; my little imageless poems coming on the breath from deep inside. Then he'd come, and withdraw back into sleep and silence.
When I told my mother, staying with us the month Shawn was born, November 1963-it was probably also the shock of the assassination that released the secret, that he hadn't spoken to me since the wedding—her reaction was sorrow for me.
"He can't help it," she said.
"I know that, Mama."
It was an enormous psychic journey to leave Sergei, as large as any I've ever undertaken. It included examining and leaving all my early religion too. (I left God the Father but not Jesus the Son.) It was going against my whole life and identity, and certainly my family's. He can't help it, is how I explained it to our children, five and two, when it was finally over, how I explained him to them up until recently. So that they are condemned to the same pattern, chronically rushing in to the vacuum he perpetually creates, to understand, to love and forgive him. "You've always wanted something from me," he snarled recently. Yes, I guess so.
I left him. He found the letters of the lover I had then—only then after all those young years of heartbreak and loneliness amidst constant outside male attention. He actually became emotional about my lover, broke down and actually talked to me. (He called my mother and told her I was having an affair, knowing what I steadfastly refused to know, how it works in my family.) I returned to him, instantly, painfully agreeing that he could have a lover to make up for mine. But not even that appeased his agony. One day in one of the arguments he slugged me in the face, the right cheekbone and eye, Daddy's old target. The second time he hit me, a year after my return, he left; he cried he had to, he couldn't take the chance of doing it again, he'd hated his stepfather for hitting his mother. I loved him for that.
Now, as a single mother, I had to get my degree. (Now I had an excuse to go to college seriously; even to graduate school. Secretly, I had no plans for a job. I just wanted to study. I wanted to learn all there is to learn, all that humanity has figured out so as to grow from that, to make a better world for my children, for all people. I knew deepest the trap of putting a job first, that fall of my birth family, the Edens. I wanted to prove this wasn't necessary. I wanted to study the immense mystery: Life. I wanted to honor my children, their true selves, strengthen them for the real world.)
During the first separation and before he found the letters he took his vacation time to keep the kids during the week while I attended summer school at San Diego State. I stayed with my sister Bridget, who was pregnant with her first child, in Pacific Beach. One afternoon, bereft, I went up to Ramona the back way from the college to spend the night with my parents. My geology class was as intriguing to me as it was difficult. I wanted to see if I could grasp the geology of Wild Cat Canyon through the Borona Indian Reservation. The news on the radio was that Adlai Stevenson had died. My mother would be sad. She loved that man.
The old barn-red house on Olive Hill was being remodeled, expanding ranchstyle spectacular with lots of glass and decks. I missed its former mountain cabin look but I was happy for my mother.
They had moved into the bedroom Bridget and I had shared, bigger and more pleasant with the huge pepper tree in the window. Their old room was now the guest room. There was a crib for Shawn, and Chelli, Clarke's daughter, exactly six months younger than Shawn, and in a couple of months, for Monique, Bridget 's, which made it crowded. There was only a narrow space between the crib and the double bed.
It felt strange to be alone. No kids, no husband. To be alone with my parents in the old house. Alone in the bed of their old bedroom. I could hear my heart, breath, and blood echoing off the walls of the universe. (That's the way I wrote it in my first journal.)
A beautiful, familiar young man entered the room, came up the narrow space between me on the side of the bed and the crib. He bent over me, touched the inside of my thigh, was coming down on me. I struggled to scream through the paralyses of sleep. I fought him, his overwhelming physical strength, the engulfing darkness of his Goliaith chest. I struggled to reach the nightstand light, to turn it on. If I could turn on the light he'd disappear. I wrestled with him, his forearms, my arms against his arms, pushing them away, my arms twisting and tangling in his. The fast slapping of his skin on my skin, the smell of his flesh. I screamed, managed to get to my feet, was fully out of the bed fighting him off, banging against the crib, beating him away trying to keep me from turning on the light. When I finally got the light on and he disappeared, I realized I'd screamed at least three times loud enough to wake my parents.
I stood stranded between the bed and crib. My whole body, arms and legs but especially my heart, hurt from the terror and the effort to scream out of my sleep; then, more and more awake, in confusion and humiliation. How could I lose control like that? How will I ever explain those screams? I'd surely awakened my parents.
But no one came. And then I fell into grief, overwhelming sorrow for the disappeared man.
A few weeks or months later I was again sleeping in my parents' old bedroom. This time Shawn was sleeping in the crib. The man came in the room again. The terror was so great it felt like I was having a heart attack. Again, no one responded to my screams except Shawn, who started crying. I grabbed her, rocked her back to sleep in bed with me. I remember waking to my mother's nightmare screams when I was little. The sorrow and regret, the feel and smell of his flesh, the sense that I'd failed him. Whatever did he want?
The next evening I was down at their closed office, Edens Real Estate, studying. Mama was taking care of Danny and Shawn. Suddenly, middle of a paragraph I was reading, I remembered the nightmare and then the terrible sorrow that came with it. Then I remembered that it had happened before, the first time I slept in that room. I remembered what I've never been able to forget, the man from the very first night we slept in that house, who walked through the kitchen and living room and then stood at our door, breathing heavily, one of my all-time worst nightmares. I called them up, excited. "Did you hear me screaming last night?" "Well, yes, we did," Mama said, "was something wrong?"
"There's a ghost in that house!"
How thrilling to think this. Wow! Our very own ghost. When I hung up I wrote in the small notebook journal I was keeping on the advice of my Creative Writing/ Poetry professor, Henri Coulette, for the next week's poem
O Male He is there even when I open my eyes thrashing at him in my 4 am screams O Male why do you come now? Here? O male as I lay back sighing fool.
I tried to remember everything about him. Why was I so terrified? He was handsome, young, in an exquisite gray suit. Or a white dress shirt, jacketless. He wanted me to go with him. My fighting him hurt him, broke his heart. He pleaded with me not to turn on the light, he fought to keep me from it. I kept seeing him leave through the door, fleeing back down the hallway, his shoulders hunched around his chest, screaming no! no! no! The nausea I was wracked with for having failed him rises as bile even as I write this. His sorrow that I would not go with him.
I looked up Jacob's Ladder and his wrestling with "a man until the break of day," in Grandma's Bible while still in Ramona that weekend, trying to understand what the Ladder is with the angels of God ascending and descending. Something about my ghost seemed of that story, the thing over me. I couldn't shake the feeling of having failed the Angel. Why was I so afraid?
Of causing him soul death.
My ghost haunted me. I told of him to my family, to the men I was dating, then to my new love, Max, to my girlfriends, to my sister (who to this day argues it was a real ghost, not a dream hallucination of our father; she saw him a number of times too in the Ramona house.) I even told our new neighbor when we moved to L.A. Esther conducted weegie board séances, came up with a story about a man in 1913 who died in a Victorian garden on the spot where the Ramona house was now, a story of a woman he loved. Maybe he killed her. She brought back instructions that I am to release him, that he's stuck in the Ramona house, that only through me can he get free. All this was even more mystifying. I was fairly certain there was nothing on that hill in 1913, that by then it was already a long abandoned Indian village site, just metates left in the morteros y ollas of the granite slabs. Any true ghost of the place would not be wearing a white man's suit. In 1913 Grandpa was in Arizona, that was the only personal connection I had with that year. I can believe now that some of the haunting stems from him, and is "Victorian," but I couldn't think that then.
I determined that the next time I slept in the room I would not fight him no matter how great the terror. I would try to meet him. I would try and go with him. This would be a spiritual task. His soul needed release. I needed to know who he was.
But when I slept in the room again with this intention he didn't come. He comes only when I don't expect him. He comes to have his way with me, not me with him. He comes only in terror—in vulnerableness, danger. In all the years I called him "my ghost" I pondered the realness of his flesh, the feel and sound of his flesh slapping my flesh. That a ghost could have flesh and sound and smell.
I was home, in my parents' former bedroom. I was on my father's side of the bed, in the space he slept in for years. I was sleeping alone for the first time since I left their house as a bride, actually for the first time since Bridget 's birth, who I'd been living with again. Family restirred. Being married had been a shield to the memories. I was beginning to write. Let the images rise. It was the crib over me. (The crib like my brother Clarke's in Hollydale.) I will learn in time I can't have anything above or over me while sleeping or I'll hallucinate my ghost coming down on me. And it was the remodeling of the house. Like the nightmare I had the first night I slept in the Ramona house, of my head falling off, rolling down the Hollydale dime store aisle, walking headless then in the arms of my mother, sister and brother, like those I had in the Hollydale house whenever Mama rearranged the furniture, moving, that is changing things in the environment, stirs things in the psyche, disrupts the psychic blocks built to keep me safe (and in habit of mind —that is, mindless).
And the ghost came too that first time (that I remember) because my new love's wife found us in bed that summer, me in orgasm. I opened my eyes at screams not mine, to a woman over us, screaming and screaming. Until that moment I hadn't known Milton Foster was married. (You can keep your vow never to be with a married man only if you know he's married.) How memory and the mind work. That horrible experience of her over us, the shocking revelation in orgasm of his betrayal of her with me, of me with her and however innocent, of my betrayal of her, awakened the memory of my father over me, his betrayal of my mother with me. But mostly the memory started because we had dissolved the marriage, the structure that was held together by not thinking many many things.
For years I said I'd recognize my ghost anywhere. I looked for him in crowds and on the street. The mind is a natural riddle maker; this is how it works both to inform and ("sighing fool") to fool itself. Of course you would recognize him, Sharon, you know damn well who he is, but you keep turning on the light. You keep struggling to stay in the day consciousness that's allowed you to forget. In fact my ghost's young face looks like the twenty-two year old in the photo of my father that surfaced for the first time that summer (his face punctured by pen holes made by my little boy). And the forty-three year old father, wearing a grey suit, who is escorting the bride down the aisle in the wedding album.
What did my father think about my screaming, the ghost/haunted-house theory? "I've never forgotten what I did to you for a single day of my life," he said when he confessed. Did it fill him with terror, the fear of exposure, as did my modern art, my getting an education? Was it at such times that he redoubled his campaign to vilify and demonize me to the rest of the family so that no one would believe me if I told? If I did become a writer like Mama kept prophesizing?
When I got home the early evening after the second appearance I limped in pain as I came from the car. My old arthritis, or whatever it was, had flared up in my ankle for the first time since high school. He was standing, hidden, under the front pepper tree, watching me. "Hypochondriac," he hissed, just like he did that first time in the second grade. I could hardly breathe for the sharp cut through my chest, the ankle-collapsing hurt. But something else too-almost consciousness of his conscious cruelty. I never had "arthritis" again.