Alex Chasteen
A Wives’ Tale
I used to live in hearty American cities but I live in a village now. I wave at the postman, I wave at the mayor, I smoke out of screenless windows and always miss the sun going down. All I do is walk up, up, down, down again, dizzy and bored and so far from home. Last summer I swung on swing sets until my legs scabbed and I laughed drunk in the mud. I ate fried chicken in front of the TV and forgot my own name trying to think about anything but sickness. When I was eighteen I walked along the river every day and ached through it. Now I buy painkillers from French pharmacies and collapse crying under the guilt. In France, it’s not ibuprofen or Tylenol or Advil but Doliprane, a brand of paracetamol. It comes in a little yellow box. The pills are longer than American ones, heavier, with more of a taste. They’re weaker, less aggressif, than American equivalents, and theoretically more natural. The French use it for everything. They don’t like putting anything unnatural in their bodies, whatever unnatural means. I double their dosage without even thinking about it. I’m tired of natural, and I’m tired of weak, and I’m tired of being in so much pain I can’t move off the couch. If my body hurts me I’ll hurt it back.
I remember the first bottle of ibuprofen I ever bought, twenty-one years old. It was small and white from a corner store. When you’re raised in a family that thinks every ailment is a symptom of spirit, feeling the pain means you’ve already failed, and treating the pain is giving up. The healing happens in words, in saying them and believing them, not in the body. I hid the little bottle tight in my fist all the way home. I kept thinking it would slice me somehow, but it was smooth, all soft lines in my palm.
When I was a child I got angry. I practiced anger; I got good at it. I tested out movie screams, I revised rants, I mouthed out fucks in front of my bedroom mirror until they came naturally. I practiced anger against myself, watching it rebound. My body transubstantiated. That’s the power of blood. I became the body of everyone I raged at—my arms: my mother, my legs: my father, my hands: my doctors, and my stomach: everyone else. Louise Hay in reverse—if it comes out of the flesh then it comes out of the mind. It flushes all the evil out. I read once that they still use leeches, sometimes. If used correctly they work.
For my fifteenth birthday my parents took me to the sea. It was cool that day, windy. I slipped away unnoticed and hid behind the big black rocks. I took off my cardigan and held myself out wide like a witch casting. I shared this part of myself with the water before anyone else. In the salt wind everything stings. This, too, was one of my mother’s cures: warm salt water in a tall glass, chugged until you sound like yourself again. It tastes like drowning in Florida, somewhere off the Gulf, with white sand everywhere. And then one day you prepare to flinch and you drink and realize that you can take it.
What do you do when the marks are all gone? When your body replaces itself? A real ship of Theseus situation. Do you think he carved a new name into its hull? Or did he use the old one, just so everyone knew it was still his, cleaner, better boards and all? Even when it was sturdier and sailing smoother, do you think he trusted it less?
When I first moved out of my parents’ house, for months I listened only to music by girls with bad boyfriends, the kind of boyfriends you need help from the law to get away from. I waited until my fingers had already numbed to look for gloves. Even coming from California, I knew the cold. Before, we used to live on a road that was a circle that was a hill and in winter when the cars tried to drive up and out they all slid right back down to us. Once on the ice my mother slammed her car into a tree and broke some things. She got a cast and plenty of pills to recover and no one noticed anything was wrong until the ice melted and she sent the car slamming right back into the trees again, circling around like a good joke. Yes, I knew all about ice.
So now I’m twenty-three and keep finding myself back in the snail shell city. Cross the city in a straight line and you’ll go backwards, forwards, backwards in time. I walk in circles so that I can see the same things again. I always try to write in shapes: the shape of an arrow, the shape of a shelf, the shape of a game, the shape of a clue, the shape of a driveway, the shape of a confession. If you see a shape you have to prove it—isn’t that what geometry taught us? I never did like numbers in the shape of things, not graphs and not fractions and not city districts. And I’m seeing the same things again, which means I’ve been walking in circles.
The problem with writing about medicine is that I don’t know an American who isn’t terrified of the doctor. You don’t need to have watched any deaths to dread the ER. The problem with writing about praying the illness away is that everyone does it, because what else are you going to do? Growing up, my mother kept a revolving door of women coming and going, friends and patients, rivals and colleagues and enemies and customers. I never knew if they were sick or selling something or over for a cup of tea—but me, oh, they knew all about me. My mother never claimed she could cure cancer, but she came close, with her arsenal of words that hit so hard they felt medicinal. Words and mirrors and oils and supplements and energy magic and spa packages and audiobooks and meditation and breathing exercises, breathing so deeply on the patio at night all alone. She never understood why she could help everyone but us, why everyone came to her for healing except her family. Why my brother and I flinch away from the smell of lavender or bergamot, why we can’t stomach certain powdered vegetables, why my father walks away when he recognizes certain voices talking on the TV. Not when everyone else in California is lining up on her stoop begging to be saved.
The thing I can’t reconcile is this: I’ve watched the pageantry for years, through the tarot phase and the Ouija phase and the muscle testing phase and the reiki phase and the crystal phase and every other cleansing whim. I’ve watched the women who come go and get better and I’ve watched their funeral announcements come in the mail. I watched my mother pronounce me “off,” as in turned off like a router, spiritually vegetative, when I turned twelve and stopped playing along with the game. I’ve watched women shut down when, for all their balanced chakras and their saged homes and their raised vibrations, they stay the same, and their husbands still die sick, and their sons kill themselves, and their daughters never get better. I know where in her closet my mother keeps her funeral shoes. But I also remember this:
The week we moved to California my father found something under his tongue. Doctors diagnosed him stage three and my parents compromised by choosing every treatment: the radiation and the reiki, the surgery and the spas, the crystals and the dieting and the yoga and the past life regressions. And it was California, where you could try anything. I went into the sauna with him just once. I brought Calvino with me but I couldn’t make out the words. The mirror cities and the thin cities and the sign cities and all the waters of Venice melted together, so I left, me and the pages canal-drenched, feeling nothing but wet. But when we went in on the scheduled date, the doctor said the tumor had somehow shrunk, smaller than was possible. He said, I don’t know what you’ve done. I don’t want to know. He also said, even so, if the surgery had come just two weeks later, he never would have spoken again. It was so hard, in recovery, to take hold of the notes he handed me. He said things in there that he would have never said with his mouth, and it was hard to focus, reading the man he nearly became, this novel father who only existed in text. The copy of Calvino was his first, from college where he studied Italian, and I nearly gave it back.
That winter, my mother dragged us to our first and last Christmas service. I guess she believed in God that year. My father couldn’t quite speak yet but he tried to sing, screeching “Silent Night,” full volume and off-tempo, not forming the sounds right and approximating the lyrics. My mother and I laughed so hard, some man in Christian uniform asked us not to come back. We tried not to laugh, but aside from him, everyone was just singing so beautifully. And what do I, a decade later, do with this?
I swallow smuggled ibuprofen and betray her. I take turmeric shots and betray myself. I spy a tarot deck on a girl’s bedside table and feel sick. Blackout drunk on Napa wine I start reading her friends’ birth charts and my mother is furious and delighted. Finally, finally I’m becoming like her. And I’m not because I don’t really believe. I’m not because I use it to gossip and flirt and never do anyone any good, but she’s not wrong, that it’s all the same sort of nonsense. The nonsense I use to sleep with girls, she used to save my father’s life, or at least his tongue. Because none of it works until it does, because it’s all scams and pyramid schemes until I never have to learn sign language. Or, I haven’t so far.
Even now I catch myself. When I feel something in my throat I fall asleep to affirmations that I am healthy and well. The only sick I ever get is sore throats and I know what the Hay-Dyer-Chopras have to say about it: failure of communication, failure of language. Wanting to say something and not saying it. Not knowing what to say for yourself. Dishonesty as a rule. I only ever get sore throats but I don’t see what all my lying has to do with it. I don’t take the vitamins, but I can’t throw them away. I cook with the oils and pretend I can’t taste them. When I stretch in the morning I hear her voice in my head: you are a tree and your branches grow up, up into the sky, all the way to the heavens, and your roots stretch down, deep into the earth, all the way to its core, and feel the energy flowing through you, up into the sky and into the soil, through your body like a current, can’t you feel it? And yes, yes, I can feel it. Something heavy and liquid pouring up and out of me. She feels so many things I can’t, but this—yes, every time.
I confess just once, to a friend in college, that I still believe some of it. We’re waiting for the bus, hiding inside from the rain, crouched on marble steps staring at natural history exhibits. I explain to the dusty corals and their pink backsplashes that sometimes I intend things in my thoughts and they happen, too rare and specific to ignore. And sometimes I will away my sickness and wake up healthy again. And there’s some things I’ve seen that I can’t explain. And “Silent Night.” The rain pounded so hard that afternoon, and I guess the bus came. I don’t remember the end of the story. I know I’m crazy, psych ward straightjacket style, and I know she’s crazy, tin foil hat new age conventions savior delusions style. But there’s some thoughts that are unbearable to me. I know we take the same shape and burn the same in the sun.
On my last visit home my brother and I went for a walk. Curse of the suburbs, we live in a circle again. We went around and around telling stories. I straighten out the lies our parents tell him about me and he catches me up on what I’ve missed. The one he tells me that I can’t take happened years ago, when I still lived there. There were months, maybe years back then, when my brother couldn’t leave bed. He barely made it to school most days. He talked about pain, aches and pins and throbbing with no source. And my mother and I, we knew the men in our family were weak. A cold had my dad shivering on the couch for weeks. A twisted ankle left my brother bedridden. They were plagued with pet allergies and food allergies and asthma while our women’s bodies were strong and pure and relentless. As she screamed and scolded him, so did I, furious that this lazy little baby of the family wouldn’t just face school like I had to. I should’ve known then. I shouldn’t have needed to learn that after years she broke down and took him to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a muscular condition and advised him not to skip his meds, which got thrown in the garbage at home, the diagnosis recycled. And I, the eldest, with only my father permitted to drive me to my appointments and to pick up my medications, used to psychiatrists ignored and prescriptions unfulfilled, should have known.
Just like I did, my brother has learned to love school. Like I did, he learned which events took the longest to run, how to be the first one in and the last one out, and how easy it is, being this person, looking impressive and dedicated instead of scared and tired. How easily your body adapts to being there, hands first to volunteer and legs last to drag you home. For his college, my brother and I are thinking Maine. What other good can I do him, out here in the snail shell city, or home, in my Vosgian village of nothing?
I eat the rinds of saucisson when I know I’m not supposed to. I walk circling and circling nothing like a hawk starving to her death. I talk in my empty apartment in a language no one here knows. I open all the windows and watch the high schoolers smoke and the street cats pace. I listen to music and call myself a devil. When I go into the room where I used to keep the anger it’s empty, dusty as an old locked exhibit, untouched. I miss that girl, the one who got angry when things were broken. I used to feel so much, a motherlike range of emotions. Now I just cry when I can’t open the childproof caps. Last summer a friend offered Tylenol when I felt bad and I was appalled by the simplicity of it. No inscrutable universe to call upon, no family secrets to solve, no past lives to forgive. Impossible to tell if it worked when the guilt made me more nauseous than before. I still remember where my father hides his Advil, at the back of the bathroom cabinet behind the extra razors and the contact cases. To their credit I did try to swallow half a bottle of that one, thinking it would do more damage than it did. It was the strongest stuff we had in the house. I didn’t know it took years of liver damage from excessive dosage to start to kill you. Nowadays I fight to take the taste of two. Nowadays I don’t even know if something’s wrong inside me, if I’m dodging diagnoses or if I’m just okay. If I’m strong or scared or just twenty-three and American and fine.
For nearly two years when I was in middle school, my mother was waylaid with something no one could figure out. She struggled to move, always weak and sick and tired. She couldn’t find anything in Eckhart Tolle or Louise Hay or any of her books that matched how she felt. Psychics and mediums and energy healers couldn’t find anything wrong. When she broke down and went to them, doctors and CAT scans and MRIs couldn’t find anything wrong. Instead she collected diagnoses: from a specialist who connected her symptoms to early pancreatic cancer, which killed her uncles and her grandparents; from a military whistleblower who described a secret Black Ops injury my mother gained during their service together; from a healer who saw through her skin and blood to an alien parasite wrapped inside her. I came with her because it was my job, to listen, to know what was going on, to look out for her. For years I watched my mother gather stories that explained it. The childhood trauma when she was ten, seven, four. The generational trauma. The disease, the parasite, the psychic wounds, they slowly stopped showing themselves. In time to pass the baton to her husband, she got better. Whatever it was, she got better.
When I write about these years in stories, my teachers and my classmates refer to the character of the hypochondriac mother. The manipulative mother, who demands so much, who takes so much, for an illness that isn’t real. I sit in silence like I’m supposed to. I don’t know who’s wrong. If I’m writing it wrong, if I’m being too cruel, if I’m remembering in my favor. If it’s them who don’t get it, who don’t live in our world, who didn’t have to watch the most alive person I’ve ever met become so tired. If I’m being fooled, being scammed, believing the best again because she’s the only mother I’ve got, and it’s everyone else who can see it. The bus came; I don’t know if I’m crazy or stupid or brainwashed or just too forgiving. I write her into stories to ask her, and my peers ask if the mother isn’t too cruel, if she could be written with a little more generosity. I can’t tell them: she gives her entire soul away. I can’t tell them: she’s more generous than I’ll ever be. I can’t tell them: I have no idea what to believe anymore. I hide from her on holidays behind the veil of the Atlantic Ocean and she hangs up on me when she calls. I know I’m crazy, but I don’t know if I’m the crazy one here. She lies to my friends about me, but I lie to my friends about her, too. I’ve stopped putting her in stories for now. But even now as I write I wonder if I can feel something tickling in my throat. Even now I wonder if I’m feeling dizzy. The words can’t start working until you believe them. When I was angry the anger burned the way forward for me, but nearly all those scars are gone now. I don’t know now which rituals will keep my tongue where it is. I leave the white thing sitting on it, and it’s heavy, so heavy, so impossibly heavy I don’t think it will go down but it does, easy as breathing, as if I didn’t even have to think about it, as if I’d been doing this all my life.