Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

A day or two after our supposed breakup, I would call Jared at bedtime and ask him (“I’m so sorry I got angry, I was just hurt, I really need to see you and talk to you”) to rescue me. But he would be drunk and high on blow, an indifferent stranger for as long as this particular binge lasted. I would go on calling this indifferent stranger, praying that this time he would not answer the phone surrounded by the racket of people convincing one another they were having fun, and would not tell me I was boring the shit out of him, and would not hang up on me while I was sobbing that he was hurting me so much, I couldn’t stand it any longer, please just come over and talk to me.

I lay back down, still gripping the phone. No need to be patient. Patience would not return him to me. He would be returned in the way of pain and its alleviation. This particular pain, in this particular moment of my particular life, was to be in love with an absence. It was not death, not violence, not rape. Everyone suffered, there was no reason I should be spared. I opened my mouth wide, squeezed my eyes into old, hard vaginas sewed up tight. Long, sharp, violent lines flew out of my chest, stabbing the walls and ceiling and floor, gorging the earth straight through, searching. But the absence was hiding inside my room, my bed, my body. There was nothing I could do to force its revelation. I tilted my head back and pressed my chest toward the ceiling. Wait — the violence was golden — lines of strength come to save me. But I did not want to be saved. I wanted my love to exist outside my body. But whenever I tried, however I tried — that time he said that thing, he looked that way, I said this thing, he took it that way, I broke down, he broke — stop. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my fists into my abdomen. If my heart and mind would only give up hoping, become so drenched in absence that they gave way…Morning now. A woman’s voice perfectly suited to whole wheat toast and Earl Grey tea, under my window, retreating, I can’t make out her last word — come back, please, no need to rush off. Stay. Chat. I won’t judge you, I promise.

When I managed to get out of bed, the reflection of my naked body in the mirror stabbed me. I looked good, I liked my body. That was the thing I still had. It gave me nothing. I was relieved when the mirror caught me at an ugly angle — belly pouched; breasts pointy; thighs big and heavy, pulling my face to the floor.

—

When I complained about Jared to any of the girls I drank beer and complained about boys with, I liked when the word abusive came up. It was neat and respected and freed me of responsibility. One of the girls I knew worked at a home for battered women. During a group discussion there, a social worker asked one of the women why she had stayed with her husband. A chorus of female voices crooned, “Because she looooves him!” But I wasn’t a battered woman; I didn’t know what I was. Jared would always apologize and I would always let him back in. And then I had to explain to my friends that his behavior wasn’t really abusive, that he just drank too much and said stupid things. Soon there was no one left to complain to.

Except for my mother. She loved to talk on the phone when Rick was at work and her new kids were at school. The person who was drunk and invulnerable to his love for me was not really Jared, she assured me; it was the disease. “But, honey, they’re all addicted to something,” she said. “Alcohol is better than strip clubs. Trust me.” I told myself that alcohol was better than strip clubs when Sober Jared finally called and said he missed me and did I want to ride bikes to the diner? Yes, I did. I always wanted to ride bikes to the diner with Jared. Just the idea of it made life feel so decadent and generous, made me and Jared seem like the best of friends.

I could have tried to get him to stop drinking. But he was self-medicating, and if he stopped drinking, he would be overcome by an anxious depression nursed throughout a neglectful childhood and a decade of partying instead of working, and if I were the one who insisted he give up booze, I would be solely responsible for helping him cope. So after he went to a few AA meetings and pronounced it soul-deadening, I believed him when he said he wasn’t really an alcoholic; he just needed to drink a little less. Some nights — many nights — he met his modest goal and we had fun. Life was fun. I liked drinking, too. And I could not help him change his life in ways he hadn’t the courage to change it on his own. Or so I imagined my mother would have told me, if I had the kind of mom who said things like that.

KANDY

I did believe it was possible for a person to change. I had known other versions of myself that allowed me to hope the situation I was in would not be my life. I just couldn’t leave the situation. I loooooved him.

I decided to backpack around Sri Lanka for a few months, to try to free myself of my addiction to Jared, so that something new might happen. The only thing that had changed tangibly for me since I’d moved to Carpinteria four years earlier was a two-dollar-an-hour raise. Jared thought that if I was willing to take so much time off and spend a grand on a flight, the two of us should have ourselves a delightful holiday much closer to home. “I’m trying to get over you,” I said. “Good luck,” he said, and rolled on top of me. We were lying in his bed on a Wednesday morning; fog pressed against the window; I dug my fingers into the flesh above his hip.

When I got home from work that night, the travel guide I’d ordered was waiting on my stoop. I looked at the charmingly cheesy photos — palm trees, sunsets over the ocean, monks kneeling before Buddha statues — and booked my ticket. I liked the idea of going to a tropical paradise that was also a recent war zone. Not long ago, the Buddhist government had won their war against the Tamil Tigers by bombing the shit out of the Tamil-populated north. In preparation for my trip, I read articles about the thousands of civilians killed, the emergency laws overriding civil rights, residential land seized by the military. I wanted to believe my attraction to other people’s suffering was compassion, but more likely it was a twisted need to justify my own unhappiness. Either way, Sri Lanka was perfect.

It also appealed to me because it’s a Buddhist country, and Buddhism had helped me in my childhood, although I didn’t realize it was helping me at the time. I thought it was some desperate New Age nonsense my mother clung to now that her dancing career was over and she had no choice but to teach Pilates to sixty-year-old women with platinum hair. Her friend Sharon gave her some meditation tapes that she swore were totally life-changing. Throughout elementary school, I often found Mom lying on her back on the living-room rug, bound in a silk face mask, listening to a dude with an Irish accent asking her how it felt to be clothed in her particular biochemical garment at this particular moment on this particular planet. The tapes made me want to puke, and I told her so. Once when my father and I were joking and laughing in the kitchen during one of my mother’s solitary séances, she marched into the kitchen and asked us to please keep it fucking down, she was fucking trying to meditate. “Just notice, just feel,” the Irish dude intoned. “Free of desire, free of judgment.” Mom slammed the kitchen door as she rushed back to his voice.

Part of my mother wanted to be quiet and sacred and take up as little space as possible. But her needs of the moment were always louder than her will. The quiet part of her brought me to a Buddhist temple every Sunday — a schoolhouse-like structure painted bright reds and yellows and adorned with gilded statues of beaming fat men, filled with dark-skinned people carrying fruit offerings and clutching long bead necklaces in their palms. My mother and I would sit in the back of the temple on flat, lumpy cushions while a man at the altar spoke a language we couldn’t understand in a singsong hush that reminded me of Goodnight Moon , and the people around us — most of them wearing white — rocked slightly on their heels, their palms pressed together at their hearts. My mother was different at the temple. She never wore lipstick, she didn’t laugh for no reason and touch strangers on the arm. She sat cross-legged — back straight, eyes closed. I watched her with a concentration that felt like magic. Our knees touched. Sometimes I would jiggle my leg so that I could continue feeling the contact, whose sensation had been numbed by stillness. Only by agitating my body could I feel it clearly. I didn’t realize that the point of stillness was to stop feeling the body and feel something else instead. Mom was so still that she didn’t even tell me to cut out all the jiggling.