My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
a woman! I thought. Sister said, “Pray against the spirit of Jezebel.” Each night, I said a rosary in bed, counting pearls, sometimes following it up with the Angelus, even though I knew that prayer was only said at certain times of day, hoping that nobody would mind. Afterward, I would try to think happy thoughts, as my dad had told me to do when I was afraid to sleep, and then I’d try a Regina Coeli or Salve Regina, and more happy thoughts, but eventually, I ran out of happy thoughts and rote-memory prayers, and I thought of regal Jezebel, and of Mary Magdalene hanging with God and the boys so easily, and I’d sometimes drift off thinking that someday, I could wake up being a woman who rules the world.
As my primary and secondary school years passed, and I counted the hours until college, my longing turned to acute craving, to something like a nutrient deficiency I could feel in my body. In high school, I would finally take on a boyfriend. Jake and I dated for three years, into college, but he wasn’t my perfect love, even though he often gave me flowers, gifts, and handmade cards. We regularly professed our love for one another, and at first, I did mean it, but at sixteen, I wasn’t prepared to keep meaning it for so long.
In that virginal space, in which my flesh had no saintly reason for abstinence, my desperation took the form of a sort of ugly love medicine. I longed to touch someone whom I really wanted. I had my opportunity to lose my v-card to Jake, but I just couldn’t do it—he had become too much like a family member. I still thought I meant it when I told him I loved him, but it was a kind of love that even the nuns would have been comfortable with.
Eventually, when I was a college sophomore, I summoned up the resolve to break up with him. I knew it would hurt him—worse, because I was his world, in a way that I could no longer handle. He asked for a two-month extension. I considered it, at first, but then let myself go. By then, my limbs fit my torso, my haircut fit my face, and I didn’t need to study Cosmo’s glossy secrets to trick boys into liking me. I wielded phenomenal powers. I went too far, too fast; knew too much, too soon. A few years later, curious friends and even boys whose hands were wedged between my waistband and pelvis would ask me, “How many have you had?” as if they wanted to see whether I was okay to drive. It was a question of the very young adults, those who want to know how their numbers measure up. Mine began to feel like a statistical outlier, eventually, because I had been so terrified of the burden of sainthood, the pain of my torment, and I tried to lance my wound, but I cut deeply, and, calling it sacrifice, calling it progress, kept cutting.
A Cascade Autobiography
PART 4
When I was five, my kindergarten teacher split the class into Pilgrims and Indians with construction paper costumes to teach us about our national heritage; my parents had explained to me that I was Indian, and the classroom taught me what that meant. When I was six, my dad taught me how to spell “Cowlitz,” and I wrote it at the bottom of my drawings. When I was seven, I became obsessed with mermaids, certain that I could fuse my legs into a fin if I pressed them together firmly enough under my modest sub-desk plaid. At eight, I created dioramas of buildings where other Native people’s ancestors slept, and though the teacher told me this was my heritage, I was not certain that I believed in cacti or mesas, having never seen them.
Faster Than Your Heart Can Beat
Imagine a vise, Martin says, in which you are both the thing being held and what holds it in place, metal grinding on metal, that shining embrace.
ENID SHOMER, “MY FRIEND WHO SINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST”
Only penetration counts. I never let them stretch me for good, I remain virginally tight. Of course I keep a tally. Each addition proves that I am not afraid to repeat my mistakes until one of my decisions happens to be good. Counting backwards is a must.
#24. You might be a hologram. I might be psychotic, conjuring up the deep wells above your clavicle, your lips ten times softer than the skin inside my wrists, your hair the color of the gold that hangs from my neck and ears when I want to gleam. I never even asked for you. I would not have known what to ask for, could not have imagined the strong arch of your eyebrows. I don’t even have to ask you to take it slow. “How am I so lucky?” you ask. “How am I so lucky?” I ask. People want to know whether you’re my boyfriend, officially. I want to know whether you’re real.
You’re not. Two months in, we break up in my car. I draw a graph in the air: my affection started down here and went up, but you started at the same place and plummeted down; I end with my index fingers in the air, pointing at nothing. I cry for two days. Two weeks later, sitting with good friends on rocky Alki Beach in West Seattle, I take pictures of my pastel high-tops. In the bright sunlight we’re finally seeing lately, I see every pore on the lavender leather, and I see my shiny shin pores, and I know that I’ll start to forget you soon, but I couldn’t dump myself if I tried.
#23. My best friend broke up with you months ago. She has granted me permission to add you to my list. Months after you two stop being civil, I go over to your apartment and step around the jumble of the possessions you aim to sell before migrating south.
You say you cannot wait for the rebellion, that MDA is ecstasy’s prettier cousin, that Bill Murray makes a better Hunter S. Thompson than Johnny Depp does, that you’re really into this Native resistance in my blood, that my breasts are a nine point five out of ten. You want to know about her new boyfriend.
The sex is fine. The hugs are excellent, exactly what I was looking for, what I bartered access to my insides for. We are alike, unsure of ourselves but inflated by the blustery notions we stuff inside our chests to keep us from caving in. You define your identity by what you are counter to; I define mine by my voids.
Long after you’ve left town, my friend and I drunkenly conduct a year-in-review of what we’ve been up to and how our tallies have swelled. Astonished that we didn’t mind sharing dick, she says, “We’re kinda like Mormon wives now.”
#22. I want you more than I have ever wanted any bartender. I see you twice a week at karaoke. Your Acqua di Gio, cologne of choice of frat boys, pokes into my scent memory. We flirt for weeks while I watch you charm the customers; we have a couple of platonic-feeling dinners that I wish were real dates, and I learn that you hate the bar, hate flirting with men for tips, but the unspoken truth is that you’re not skilled at much and your body is compact and hard. I tell you I’m going to teach you about how to write essays for your community college class, but instead, we get trashed, and you take me home. You do me for five hours. We only rest when you go outside in your boxer-briefs and piss on your neighbors’ house. You keep doing me long after my vadge turns to baguette crust. When you slur that you love me, I tell you to shut up and come.
I tell you I am taking your studded belt, and if you want it back, you will come to my place soon. All the bar patrons have seen the belt circling your waist like Saturn’s rings. This trophy lies on my bedroom floor while you tell me, twelve hours later, via text, that you made a mistake that we should never speak of again; while I drive around at night, wishing I had never been born; while I give you my order at the bar and pretend, for your sake, that we have never met.
In a few months we are pals again. On the bar’s anniversary night, I pass by as the fleet of bartenders and bar-backs gather on the sidewalk for a photo. You wear cross-trainers with your tux, like a boy going to prom, and for the first time, all my attraction is gone, and I almost love you like a sister would.
When you tell me that you got so mad at your girlfriend that if you were gay and she were a dude you would have hit her for sure, I have to stop with the love.
#21-18. During my first long Seattle winter, you men come and go like customers at the café where I work. None of you have last names. You have Prince Albert piercings and shaved body parts. You crumple my dress into a ball, try to tear it off me, or lay it over an end table. You buy me drinks and steal my credit card. You dwell in trashy bars and sometimes my quiet bedroom. You leave suck marks, bruises, and scratches on my body;