Dark Room: An Inventory

  

When I was in the fourth grade, my family moved into an old farmhouse across town. My father pulled up the rotten carpet in my new bedroom above the basement and found holes in the wooden floor. He assured me they weren’t big enough to fall through; however, the holes were big enough for me to look through and see my mother doing laundry in the basement below. Sometimes, she’d wave to me from the half-dark.

I was afraid to walk on the floor, let alone sleep in my bed, which was precariously perched on that floor, so I laid down a futon in my closet and slept in that enclosed space.

Sleeping in my closet gave me the illusion that I had control over my life.

*

My father was the reason we moved to a new house, a new school district. A year before, he had an affair with my elementary school music teacher, who also happened to be the mother of my best friend. After my mother found out about my father’s affair, she kicked him out. Then, one rainy night, he came back. He knocked on the door to our home, and when we opened it, we found him standing there, drenched in the rain, holding a bouquet of wilted flowers. I have no idea now how much time had passed between these two events.

*

The new house was a gamble. It cost too much for us to afford. It needed a lot of work. But it gave us a new setting in which to reinvent our family story. The new house was surrounded by woods. Woods that were threaded by a shale-bedded creek. 

*

Before the affair, my father was the smartest man in the world. He always knew all the words in the Reader’s Digest Word Power column. After the affair, he became something I could see through to the floor below.

*

At first, my mother thought she had indigestion. A stomachache. Her doctor agreed. You should stop eating so many salads and nuts. Six months later, the doctor finally scheduled a CAT scan. By that time, the cancer had spread from her ovaries to her abdomen wall. Her belly puffed out. I just thought I was getting fat, she told me.

*

After the affair, my mother let my father walk through the door with his bouquet of wilted flowers, and she agreed to move to the new broken-down farmhouse with just a wood burning stove to cook on, but she never placed those flowers in water.

*

Years before, when we lived in our first house, a child was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night while her parents slept in the room right next door. Her name was Polly Klaas.

For months, my mother would check under my window every morning for footprints. Later we’d realize, this was the same time my father was having the affair.

*

Several months later, I woke in the middle of the night, unable to breathe. I crawled to my parents’ room, wheezing. My mother scooped me up and took me in the bathroom to breathe the steam from a hot shower. Slowly, my breath came back.

*

Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis. Its symptoms included shortness of breath and bloating. Often, the uterus was thought to be the cause of these symptoms. Plato thought the cause of hysteria was the uterus wandering through the body like a lost balloon.

In the 2nd century, Galen warned that the unused female seed (what is contained in the ovaries) would turn poisonous, thereby causing hysteria.

*

When women speak with male doctors, they aren’t always taken seriously, even though they are talking about the experiences they are having in their own bodies.

*

Ovarian cancer kills more women than any other cancer because it is misdiagnosed and not discovered until it is too late. Eight women in my family have died from it, but no one ever spoke to my mother about the risk. She had been told that all of these women had died of “female problems.”

*

The cancer looked like sesame seeds. It was everywhere, explained the surgeon in the post-op meeting. We were all crammed into a small closet-sized room. He made us film him saying the words, There is nothing we can do, so we would believe him later.

*

I moved back to my childhood home as an adult when my mother was sick. After she died, I found, in the basement of our family home where we had moved to start a new life, the love letters my father had written to my music teacher, my best friend’s mother. My mother must have found and saved them. At the time my father had the affair, I knew about it and thought it had been a brief interlude. A tiny departure from the regular narrative. But the letters tell a different story.

The letters are harder to forgive.

*

Since my mother died, my father has been revising his memory of her. He remembers how close they grew while she was sick. He doesn’t remember any of the decades before the diagnosis.

*

The night my mother died, I went out on the porch to breathe some fresh air. It was dark—a night without stars. All of a sudden, I heard the sound of hundreds of horses galloping on the hillside beside our house. When I looked, there was nothing there—only the memory of the motion and sound.

*

My brother claims our mother visits him as a red-tailed hawk or a hummingbird.

*

We each remember her life and her death differently. My brother has erased all the rough edges around my mother’s life. She has risen like a balloon in his mind. Where I see her anger. Sometimes, I hide in its dark room.

Last winter, when my mother had been dead for a year and a half, I fell at the gym after a workout and couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, the doctor tried to give me a story about what was happening in my body. He told me it was all in my head. I should go on vacation.

I stayed sick for five months. The doctors never figured out what was wrong.

*

I had never imagined a universe where my mother was dead.

The first week after she died, I was overwhelmed by her silence. My phone, which had been filled with texts from her, sat mute in my palm.

*

As women, we are told not to be angry. We are supposed to keep our anger in a little room so that it remains contained.

*

I was the first to identify my mother’s body after she died. When I entered the hospital room, her body looked empty on the bed, like everything that had been contained inside it had fallen through a trap door.

*

When I was in the fourth grade, I remember learning about what the insides of my body look like—the bovine shape of the uterus and its two balanced ovary horns.

*

When the oncologist first examined my mother, he said—his fingers inserted in her vagina—Your mother has a good, strong uterus. Two weeks later, he removed her tumor-ridden uterus.

*

It wasn’t until I got my first ultrasound at 29 that I was told that my uterus and ovaries didn’t look like most other people’s. One ovary tipped up. The other tipped down. My insides, like my outsides, were unique to me.

*

After my mother died, I was angry at her oncologist. Why didn’t you tell us she was going to die so fast? He said There is no way to know how the tumors have spread until you open her up and look inside.

*

Polly Klaas’s body was found weeks after she was abducted. I had forgotten about this information until I researched it recently. The night she was taken from her room, Richard Allen Davis, the man who would later be convicted of kidnapping and murdering her, was discovered by police officers because his car was stuck in a ditch. The two officers took him in to question him, but he was not arrested. Many speculate that he had not yet murdered the 12-year-old girl, that he was hiding her in the woods near where his car was stuck and, had he been arrested, she could have been saved.

Richard Allen Davis is still alive on death row in San Quentin today.

*

My brother remembers that my father was only gone two months. During that time, a hot air balloon landed suddenly in our backyard. In it were a newly married man and wife. When the wife washed her hands in our sink, she left her wedding ring on the basin.

*

The body can be a prison when you are sick. You do not have control over when you eat or sleep. You feel like you are locked in the cell of your sick body. My mother never trusted her body. She starved it for years. When I was a teenager, she bragged that once she lived off carrot juice and popcorn for months. When she was dying, she wanted nothing more than to eat.

*

My mother never believed she was going to

I never believed my mother was going to

*

My father still lives in the old farmhouse. Within six months after my mother’s death, he began dating. Everyone assured me that this is normal for men who lose their middle-aged wives.

*

I wonder where that couple from the balloon are now? Are they still married?

*

When we first moved into the old farmhouse and my father tore down the walls of the kitchen, we found a plastic replica of a statue of a Greek goddess buried in the wall. My father wanted to throw it away, but I insisted on saving it and carried it to the creek where I’d build a fort. I didn’t have any friends in our new neighborhood, so I spent days in the silence of being alone in the woods. The goddess became my companion.

*

When I returned to the house years later to take care of my father whose memory had been erased, that silence threatened me.

*

Polly Klaas’s family still lives in the town near my house, but they no longer live in the house where the abduction happened.

Tourists drive by their old Victorian to see where the abduction took place, as if this is where they would encounter Polly.

No one visits the woods where she was murdered.

*

The true-crime podcast I listened to a few weeks ago revealed to me that I had all of the dates wrong about Polly Klaas’s murder. The event didn’t happen at the same time as my father’s affair. Somehow, my brain had switched the disappearance of Polly with the disappearance of my best friend.

*

Before the affair, my best friend and I spent every weekend together at swim meets. We had sleepovers where we stayed up late and played games like Bloody Mary. In the game, you turn off the lights, look into a mirror and say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary in hopes that you’ll see the face of the murdered woman step forward into the mirror. No matter how many times we tried, we never saw her.