Sarah Destin
Study of Kindred
A drive home from Magnuson Park, today, or whenever you read this
I want to stop. I try to stop. I walk along Lake Washington and pound my feet into the dock to shake them from my flesh, get them out of my bones, the liquids coursing through my veins, the hereditary puzzle pieces telling hair to curl, nails to chip. I punch pillows, breathe deep, smoke weed, buy a dog, fuck a stranger, eat a tamale—
still—they will not leave.
***
A drive home from elementary school, silent
I am eleven. There is no blood running down my legs. I’m still taller than the boys.
Fridays after lunch, we sit in a circle and the teacher leads Socratic seminars. We talk about life because we’re becoming grown, and we must be the sort of adults who think about big questions and small questions and medium questions and even fleeting thoughts that only linger for a moment. The air conditioning pumps loud, trying to overpower the sweat dripping down our faces.
The teacher writes Parenting in chalk with his neat cursive. He says his father whipped him with a leather belt as a boy,
and none of us say anything. I can feel my cheeks grow pink.
The teacher looks at me, at my ruddy complexion and freckles, and it’s as if we’re sharing some secret. He asks me what I think. What I think of parents who hurt their children. My face is lobster red.
I want to give a good answer, a smart answer. An answer that says, yes, I’m just a girl, but I sit up at night and try to fix the broken things scattered around the floor, the cupboards, the doors.
Nobody hits me, I want to say, but that isn’t the question.
My answer is trite: All violence is wrong, something a beauty pageant girl would say.
***
A drive to Gene’s Market, old Volvo
Over breakfast, my mother and I would have the same conversations over and over, cyclical and predictable. My mother would tell me she dreamed of running and I’d say I had those dreams, too. In mine, I’m Thumbelina-sized, running from a giant fox. She’d say, no, I wasn’t being chased this time. I was running. It wasn’t a nightmare.
***
A drive to the New Hartford McDonald’s
The better of the two McDonald’s in town, by far. The fries are warmer, more golden, the burger meat less likely to be that raw-but-not-raw, brown, mushy gunk. You know it’s a low moment when the only food you can keep down is from McDonald’s, that you’ve crossed into some sort of six-year-old level of picky eating that is completely unsupported by the size of your body. If you told anyone how little you can eat in a day, they would never believe you. Now, you know this is fine. The pharmaceutical companies have created shots to cure you of yourself, and everyone with half a brain knows they were wrong to say your fat body was a result of mental illness. That you were not passively trying to kill yourself, but desperately, desperately, trying to stay alive.
***
A drive from Redding to Portland, moving out of state alone
It’s so easy to believe you, to write me off as crazy. Hysteria is tidy. It’s not my fault, of course not, no one would say that. Women scream, cry, throw fits. Men beat things with their fists. Yes—I should have outgrown it once I was done with melancholia and lukewarm bathtubs. But the rage never left. A determined stare in the mirror. Do you know how a gaslight feels on the stomach lining—lying, churning with rage? How the rage burrows into the chest like a bucketed rat held to a flame.
I would burrow into you. Press my fingers up to your organs to see how firm a kidney is when it’s fresh. I would tell you to call me crazy as my lips met the salt along your ventricle walls.
***
A drive through Kootenay National Park
During the Dust Bowl, the women stuffed wet rags into every corner and crevice at night, but each morning, they swept up buckets of dust. The children went to school with homemade gas masks and goggles because the dirt in their lungs was worth less than making a profit.
Today, the forecast says smoke, but all I see is dust. Dust Volvo, dust lake, dust field, dust deer carcass, dust glacier. I came to the mountains for clarity but got haze and dirt and a dog trying to groom its paw off. I’m no better off now than as the girl in the classroom, trying to put words to the lack.
***
A drive through rural Pennsylvania, backseat of a minivan.
I loved a candle in every window enough to forget humidity. The black and blue—so nice, bonnet and smock. I could imagine no pain in the ordinary, no boredom in needle and thread, no jealousy between girls who lied like sardines under their mother’s stitched quilt. Nothing more satisfying than churning butter, letting the dirt fill the gaps between the toes and a pint of ice cream on a Saturday night.
Plenty of time to pray it away after the sun blesses every silk hair of corn.
But I am not a member of the blonde, faithful flock. I am restless elbows thrusting, reaching for my piece, reaching for someone to say this is enough, this unruly body with no taste for stillness is enough. You do not need to force out the dark curls, the wide stomach, the endless questioning. This fury does not need to envelop you.
I think I will live in a suburb, a city, a rural town. I am right. I think I will pretend to be Amish and shutter my windows, hold my candles in the crypt. Beg for excellence, for a pure mind. I will. I will always want to believe the love could have come without the fear.