Centering the first year

On year ago today I was in the front seat of a Ryder moving van speeding over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Lousiana thinking, "This would be the greatest place to hide a body." I had been married less than 36 hours and my wedding bouquet, a spray of dark red roses larger than my head, was swinging upside down from the rearview mirror.

Four hurricanes and two moves later, my husband and I celebrated with a quiet weekend together making pizza from scratch to cook on the grill. He stretched and kneaded the dough, singing a little song about yeast farts, while I chopped artichoke hearts and cracked open two cold beers. We dodged each other and the refrigerator door, the dog wove happily between our legs hoping for scraps, and I felt as weightless and exactly right as when I was little kid diving for quarters in the deep end of the pool.

It wasn't always like this. The first eight months, living together in a recently destroyed city, were clumsy and tense. Not having a job or peers and getting lost every time I left the house was like having all the identifying features wiped right off my face. My roots, long buried and (too) deeply established, were naked and trailing behind me, but I had no idea how or where to replant them. I got sick over and over again and I slept a lot. I sympathized with the plowed earth and toppled people of Pensacola.

Interacting with my husband during this time was awkward because I was disoriented and off-balance and he was always there-- there in the bedroom, there on the couch, there at the computer. All the Mine and Yours was now Ours, including space. I ended up taking hideously long showers and reading way too much Dostoyevsky, feeling the characters' overwrought guilt and paranoia as my own and eyeing my husband suspiciously as he retreated into the X-Box, where victories are solid and quick. Was this what he expected when he married me? Surely not, surely he must be disappointed. Is he quiet right now because he's regretting marrying me?

Three things happened, though: I got a job (a crappy one, but I made several good friends), someone began painting the phrase "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in big block letters on bridges and walls around town, and I took a pottery class. The job regulated time, created a separate space for me to putz around in, and brought in some extra cash. The graffiti gave me something to hunt for, measure, describe and puzzle over. I'm still trying to write about its effect on me and its meaning in a larger sense in a city that was so wrecked.

Pottery was something close to religion.

We spent the whole first class spinning bumpy lumps of wet clay into smooth lumps of wet clay. Centering. It takes your whole body, it takes shoving and muscle and then gradually the lightest pressure from the sides of your hands and the pads of your fingers. Honestly, it takes closed eyes and smooth breathing and it takes lots and lots of fucking up because it is the art of fucking up and accepting it and gently moving it into something else. Every Thursday afternoon I drove just over the Alabama border and practiced fucking up, coating my jeans and hair in mud, spinning the soft skin off my hands from the grit of the clay, and at the end of class I would drive home in the dark feeling like my whole ribcage was full of light, like the revelation was enough to make me cry.

My husband and I have been centering for a whole year now. The lurching, oscillating chaos of the beginning has quieted down, and I can feel the shape of something smooth and whole emerging. Here's to patience, closed eyes, and smooth breathing.

The S.S. McShitty

Only pictures can tell the story of yesterday, but since the disposable water-proof camera is days away from yielding its treasures, word-pictures will have to suffice.

First shot: My husband and I, knee-deep in freezing algae attempting to hoist the sails on a small rented Sunfish at the base marina. Our MWR (Morale, Recreation, and Welfare) life jackets glow against the nubbly-gray sky through which a few strands of sunlight reach to the water. We are smiling. Today is my first day sailing on a two-person boat!

Second shot: Out on the water now, waves chuffing at the sides of the boat, my husband is explaining the mechanics of tacking to me while I nervously look for a place to put my feet in the boat's shallow dugout bottom. It is smaller than the foot space in my Honda and two inches of freezing gray water slosh back and forth in it.

Third shot: A mile from shore, and I am finally comfortable with the process of ducking beneath the sail and shifting my ass to the opposite gunwhale when we change directions. My husband and I are huddled together on one side of the boat, soaked in spray. He is laughing and pulling in the sail and I am kissing his ear. The water-proof camera is working double time to keep up with my artsy shots of the sail and the sun peeking through the gray and the water splashing off the bow.

Fourth shot: A stark photo taken seconds after THE FUCKING MAST SNAPS IN HALF, plunging the sail into the water and stopping all motion of the boat a mile from the shore. My husband and I shout in unison, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" We then hurriedly get to work pulling the sail from the water before it sinks, billows in the current, and becomes heavier than the boat.

Next, a series of shots in which we scrap several ideas of how to get out of this situation: 1) My husband plunges heroically into the water and attempts to pull us to shore, but after 30 seconds in the biting cold, realizes that he will go hypothermic before we reach the shore; 2) I try to convince my husband that I am the stronger swimmer and will go for help even though we both know what a wretched sissy I am about cold; 3) we consider screaming at the old man in the fishing boat 300 yards away, but are both too embarassed to do it; 4) we try to ascertain which way the current is pulling us-- out to sea or back to the bay?-- and fail to reach consensus; 5) both of us look to the sky, me wondering how to signal the planes that we are in trouble, my husband evidently flashing back to years of boy scout training.

Next shot, the MacGuyver moment: my husband is hit by a stroke of genius and figures out that by removing the shattered stump part of the mast, he can partially re-rig the sail to the remaining length of mast, shove it into the mast hole at the front of the boat, and partially raise the sail, catch the breeze, and so limp slowly to shore. A few direction changes are required, and in order for him to tack with a partially rigged sail, I must completely compress myself into the tiny bilge water dugout. Finally yoga pays off-- I am a perfect fit!

Final shot: Triumph! We are back on shore, hosing off the S.S. McShitty before checking it back in to the marina, where they will have to take it out back and shoot it like Ol' Yeller. To my utter shock, the man behind the counter seems only mildly surprised at our misfortune. "Yup," he replies, "it's the corrosion. Saltwater gets up in there and before you know it--" snap! He makes a cracking motion with his fists.

Huh. I guess this was covered in the waiver on which I scrawled my name in those heady, pre-sail moments, but still. No hero's welcome? No props for cheating death?

We settle for a blessed retreat to the back seat of my car where we struggle into dry clothes, tangling elbows and feet, both threatening to throw open the doors and alert bystanders to the presence of moon-white naked ass, and, finally, laughing about a good story to tell.

Not a Well Woman

School is done for the winter break and depression has descended like a fog. I've lost track of the last several days and have instead taken to marking time in stranger increments-- late night runs through the heavily decorated neighborhood (this town goes all out for the holidays), random phone calls from my mother, endless batches of cookies that I lose interest in as soon as they leave the oven.

And now a protracted battle with the military hospital, for which I have few kind words. "It's free." That's the end of my kind words. Today has been marred with a string of awkward phone calls, each beginning with the same tired recap of events and circumstances, like a bad sitcom picking up after the "to be continued" cliff hanger because there is no continuity or logic involved in military healthcare.

Imagine seeing a brand new doctor every time you get sick, and having to explain and justify every medical decision made prior to your meeting. I once had an argument with a doctor over why I had been prescribed anti-depressants TEN YEARS AGO, even though I was there for a heinous ear infection that felt like it was gnawing away at my brain. She finally let the issue go when I burst into tears and fell back on the paper-covered table in resignation.

There is also no privacy or delicacy. No matter what may or may not be going on with your VAGINA, you must first discuss it in detail with an 18-year-old enlisted guy from Kentucky. Then you may proceed to your brand new doctor, who will want to discuss something completely different, alter all existing prescriptions, and then dash off somewhere else.

Today it's birth control. Despite the recent hatemail from my uninhabited uterus, I would like at least a little control over my reproductive functions, and up until today this was no problem. But now I'm getting the runaround on why the prescription was never refilled, even though I requested it A WEEK AGO and am now in dire need. I actually got a call from some dude named Bill this morning (why they bother telling me their names is a mystery-- I NEVER deal with the same person twice) nervously asking me if I could maybe drive to CVS, pick up the original prescription and drive it all the way across town to him at the base because my doctor wants to see it before she'll refill it.

What the fuck? Are they still using mimeographs or something? Isn't this what computerized medical records are for?

At any rate, there was plenty of time to discuss this when I brought it up during my "Well Woman" exam, the one where she auctioneered me out of getting a pap smear and all but ran out of the room. It was like she and the other docs were having some kind of relay race and she had to pass the baton.

So Dr. Auctioneer has an appointment with me today at 2:00 and I am not a Well Woman. I am a weepy, angry woman who just wants her fucking birth control and her Prozac and maybe something warm to drink so she can disappear into a book for about a week.

**Update:
HA! Success! Not only am I back with many months' supply of baby repellant, I have gotten the Good Shit, the version I was on for years and years but which the military switched me off of when we came to this town, claiming that they didn't carry it. Apparently it's more expensive for them while being the same free for me, so they thought they'd try me out on something different for a while. La, la, la-- everybody wins!

But no.

For the past three months, my hormone levels skittered up and down, my normally placid (if vocal) uterus bucked and writhed in monthly pain, and the general level of Fucked-Upedness in my mind rose like an ugly watermark.

But today, Dr. Auctioneer, suddenly contrite with me sitting there scowling and shaking in her exam room, revealed a magical form she can fill out that unlocks a secret vault in the pharmacy, from which golden light and birth control pills spill forth.

I felt like kissing her fleeing feet...

Robin joyriding in the Batmobile

I have a confession to make.

But before I do, please consider the circumstances: First, it is cold. That simple fact mitigates anything for me, even murder. I hate being cold. Second, I have no sweatpants. I gave up sweatpants back when I decided it was time to get rid of the Christmas hams hitching a ride in the back of my jeans, and anyone with a fat ass knows that having sweatpants around is like leaving foil and a lighter in the room with a crackhead. And third, I needed to run.

So I borrowed a sweatsuit from my husband, but not just any sweatsuit. I borrowed the fancy military sweatsuit, which screams in CAPITAL REFLECTIVE LETTERS that the wearer survived a very intense training school-- a 3-month soul-killing regimen of You Might Die workouts combined with You Should Die psychological battery at the hands of marine scout snipers.

An ex-boyfriend of mine wouldn't even let me wear his silly frat shirt TO BED, long after he'd graduated, because it was against The Rules, but somehow I am allowed to don these sweats for my piddly run around the neighborhood. How can this be? I am drunk with power, like Robin stealing the keys to the Batmobile. Once I leave the house and start my run, I usurp my husband's badass status and am now the girl who beat the odds, who had to work extra hard to keep up with the guys, running on her own to keep her stiff upper lip fighting spirit so that she can one day defend the world from Evil.

The weird thing is that I actually know a real girl in this circumstance and am nothing like her. She could snap me in half, dip those halves in ranch, devour them, and then belch louder louder than I could scream.

But I block that out and happily continue my run.

The downside to the badass sweats is that I can't walk in them. My fantasy and paranoia and guilt prevent that. I can't even slow down. Instead, I force my legs past the jello point, my lungs past the coated-in-Vicks-vapo-rub burning point, the hitch in my side past spasm and on closer to shiv wound.

Two cars honked at me tonight (why the hell do people do that?), and in my exhaustion I concluded that they were either cheering me on or hazing someone they assumed to be legitimately in the military. More likely they were alerting that crazy looking white girl tear-assing down the street to the imminent explosion of her heart.

I plan to continue this sham as long as I can because it brings me back to my pathological childhood obsession with dressing up and becoming someone else, and it also gives me one hell of a workout-- far, far better than my real self could manage.

PBS and the biological clock

Hark! The timorous clanging of my biological clock's alarm, long praised for being defective and silent.

I am officially receiving hatemail from my uterus. Last night I had a dream about being suddenly and heavily pregnant and having to go about my daily tasks with a belly that rocked and swayed like huge, tumescent fruit. It was not my first preggo dream. They started almost exactly halfway through my 26th year and have been increasing with alarming frequency.

Other changes: my eye snags on particularly cute baby clothes in Target, ones with little footies and dump trucks and little bugs sewn on them, even when I'm there for condoms and pretzels; I react with pleasure when handed someone else's infant, instead of holding the thing carefully away from my body like a bomb covered in feces; and most recent and perhaps strangest, I do not feel the urge to projectile vomit when a pregnant woman discusses her pregnancy with me.

For most of my fertile years, pregnancy has either been a non-issue or worst-case scenario, the image of my genetic materials combined with those of the person with whom I was involved being enough of a nightmare to scare me into uber-meticulousness. About the only steps I had taken to prepare for parenthood were avoiding that huge, full-abdomen tattoo and staying off the heroin.

But now that my husband and I have held the marriage together for NEARLY A WHOLE YEAR, my traitorous uterus (what a great name for a metal band!) has taken the presumptuous decision that now is the time to start pumping out the kids. In idle moments it whispers to me, saying things like, "Hey, how old are you now? 27? Your mom was on her second kid by now. Your grandmother was on her fourth. And what are you doing? Oh, right-- reading the New York Times. No, no really. Go ahead. I'm just going to hang out down here. Getting OLDER."

I do plan on having kids, but I feel like there are so many things I'm supposed to have done first-- I'm supposed to have been well established as a Promising Young Novelist with a healthy 401K. I'm supposed to have at least a master's. And my husband and I are supposed to have been married for at least four years-- four years being the magical and somewhat arbitrary length of time I have deemed sufficient to build a Stable and Non-psychotic Relationship That Will Not Heinously Scar Offspring.

This is all to say nothing of the fact that he's in the military, which brings up such an ocean of variables that I find it more convenient and useful to just bang my head against a table repeatedly rather than try to sort it all out. Stupid war. Stupid, evil president!

So instead I try to be patient. I try to ignore my bullying uterus and vent my maternal urges by tickling my nephew and making him point to his umbligo. But days like this make it harder-- with our recently neutered cable offerings, the best thing on TV today was PBS's show-- I've already forgotten the name-- about this little Scottish pig and his cow buddy. Mel Brooks provided the voice for a sheep. Genius! And I had no one to watch it with.

Poor old PBS-- slowly strangled to death by Republicans (stupid, STUPID Republicans!) and now at the point of shitting the bed. I feel like I'm sitting by the bedside, holding its dying hand and at the same time threatening it that it had better hold on until I have kids.

College degrees well earned

"If you were a dinosaur, you know what you'd be?"

"What?"

"Nipploticus."

"Nipp-- what? Oh... because I grab your boobs all the time?"

"Yeah."

"Know what you'd be?"

"No."

"Naptodon."

A Story of Heartlessness and Cruelty

This is a story about when I was a heartless 24-year-old, about when my fumblings toward an authentic life routinely burned small cities and ran over kittens.

There is a scene in "Dances With Wolves" where Kevin Costner (will his star ever stop rising?) shoots a buffalo as it charges a young Sioux boy. One of the warriors comes over and carves out an unidentifiable hunk of buffalo flesh (heart? testicles? tongue?) and offers it to Costner to devour, apparently as a show of manliness and triumph. Costner takes a girly nibble and declines, but the warrior takes a giant bloody bite and lets out a whoop, kind of a Sioux "boo-yah, bitch!"

I offer this in comparison with something I once did to a man's heart, in full view of people trying to have a nice dinner.

D. and I dated for about a year and half, which was my standard at the time for figuring out that someone was completely and unmistakably Wrong for Me. Unfortunately, D.'s intentions developed along an entirely different trajectory, one involving rings and Crate & Barrel, and he shared this information with everyone but me. Inevitably, right as we reached our separate conclusions, talk of The Future came up.

It was a balmy, batshit-smelling night on the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, and after our movie ended, D. and I walked across Town Lake to the picturesque little gazebo, whose roof looked like a dinner napkin plucked up by its center. He was advancing his case for me to move with him to D.C. on the basis that he thought public policy sounded interesting and maybe he'd like to study it. I resented the cavalier way he insinuated that I had nothing going at the time (in fact I didn't-- I hated my job) and could drop everything to follow him and a hunch.

We reached the gazebo and I sat down on one of the rocks surrounding it. He sat on the grass next to me. We tugged each way on the knot between us and finally It came up. The Future, the Long Term, Us, Marriage.

I told him about a nightmare I had the year before about having to marry some guy in a church basement in the commercial break of a football game. There were Cheetos and my dress had poofy sleeves and the zipper broke. The despair had followed me for days.

"I don't see myself getting married," I said.

"What?" His voice got high and tight. "Like ever?" A family of swans came out of the reeds by the shore and cut long graduated z's in the reflection of the city lights, two large swans and three little ones following. I am not making this up.

"Pretty much."

He sat up on his knees and faced me and his eyes filled with tears. I forget what he said at this point because a riverboat strung with white Christmas lights emerged from beneath the bridge and the occupants, seeing us and the swans and the last reflections of the setting sun, rose from their chairs and applauded us, some lifting wine glasses.

Had they only looked closer, they would have seen the still-beating heart (or tongue? or testicles?) in my hand and the blood smeared across my mouth.

Pap smear reprieve-- going once, going twice, sold!

I think I just got cheated out of a pap smear. I am equal parts indignant and elated.

My hyper-caffeinated doctor, who missed out on a great career as an auctioneer for prize heifers, explained the following to me in about four and a half seconds:

"Pap smears test for varieties of HPV, and there are many varieties but only four or five really cause cervical cancer. You've been having yearly pap smears for what, nine years? And none of them have ever come back abnormal? OK, well HPV grows really really slow, so even if you picked it up the day after your last pap smear, it wouldn't show up today. And since you're in a nice stable married relationship the chances of you picking up HPV any time soon are pretty low, unless of course you find out your husband's cheating on you or you get divorced, in which case your lifestyle would change and then you'd need to make another appointment. Otherwise, come back next year."

Prescription for more birth control and out the door I go. Huh?

Why do I feel vaguely unsettled? Did she just really not want to look at my lady bits? Or did my infuritatingly conservative hairdo tricked her into thinking I am the picture of virtue and therefore immune to disease of any kind? Maybe she really had to poop and needed some quiet alone time.

Once again I am reminded that military dependent healthcare is free, and you get what you pay for.

Another entry mentioning penises

Yesterday we went sailing. Or, more accurately, yesterday we went to the base to rent a tiny two person Sunfish to use at the marina and I, horrified at the 20-knot wind and itchy, gray, weird smelling water, watched from the shore as my husband and his buddy sailed. And capsized. And sailed again.

The first time we went sailing was in Pensacola, and it was a gorgeous, only-P.Diddy-does-this-kind-of-thing experience. The water was choppy and the sky was dramatic because a wall of thunderstorms sat on the city but out in the bay, the sky was aggressively blue and dotted with chunky white clouds and helicopters, and it was raining marines. The helicopters would come out, flattening the waves and spraying surf everywhere, squat briefly over the water and squeeze out three marines, and then peel off for half an hour while the marines treaded water and tried to save strength for climbing a rope when the helicopter came back.

Our friend's boat was large and sleek and sturdy looking, and it had a little room with a kitchen and bathroom below where masochists could hang out and get thrown from sink to couch to toilet and back again. I hung out on the deck and took artsy photos and trailed my legs from the side and generally felt like a fragrance ad in a magazine-- insoucient, sun-kissed, and lovely. Then I took the wheel and tipped the boat at such an angle and at such a speed that even our pathologically laid back friend said, "Um...whoa. Might want to straighten 'er out there, Cap'n."

No such hijinks yesterday. Maybe I'm a sailing snob and won't get on anything smaller than 19 feet. Maybe I was a little unnerved by the skin-peeling speed of the wind. Mostly I think it was the grave warning from the desk rental guy who had a lisp: "If you get thtuck on the far thide of the bay where the currentth are thtrong, jutht wave really big and thomeone might be able to come get you before the current pullth you out to thea." No thanks. I chose the option of walking along the crusty, morning breath bay trying to keep my hair from whipping out my eyes while I watched the man tear across the waves getting great gulps of bay water as he screamed "Fuck yeah! Is that all you got?!"

I also got a chance to watch wind sailing class, which is where the mention of penises comes in. Hosting an intro to the sport on a day with 20-knot winds makes bad memories for the participants and good theater for the spectator. It looks like this: four grown men in three-foot deep water wobbling on surf boards and then bending over granny-style to try and haul this giant sail erect. If they succeed, they spend the next five minutes alternately hanging their butts out over the board in a half-squat and then snapping their pelvises forward in an attempt to stay on the board and pull the sail upright. It looks like someone trying, and failing, to hump another larger being before finally being slapped back into the water. I really think erectile dysfunction drug companies should look into amateur wind surfing as the perfect polite metaphor for their commercials. A voice-over about four-hour, painful erections and blood clots just naturally pops to mind.

My husband and his friend came back hoarse and soaking. So far, no major skin abnormalities from the water, only exclamations like, "Why haven't we done that before now? Want to go back tomorrow?"