Read Online The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lidia Yuknavitch
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bum with those jeans and that dumpy sack shirt - you trying to look like a man? You look like a goddamn man.” Peering out from behind the door of my bedroom I saw he had his face close to hers. I saw her looking at the ground under a curtain of auburn hair. Then I saw her lift her head and meet his eyes, her literature and art books at her chest like a shield. They looked almost exactly like each other. It made the fact that I had to pee hurt.
When my sister was older, she started wearing this long, dusted gray-purple antique dress to school. And she went out sometimes with men named Victor and Park, both much older than her, men who would drive her away from our house for hours and hours, leaving my father to make a chain smoker’s chimney of our living room. Watching All in the Family . Pounding the arm of the overstuffed sofa chair.
But the big event for me was that she moved down into the basement of the house, into some spooky bedroom we never used down there. There was nothing my father could do but watch, because my mother did it behind his back. My sister was smarter than my never-went-to-college mother by the time she was in high school, but my mother had survivor smartness. Like a savvy animal.
The move, to me, was unbelievable - my sister moved down into the belly of a haunted house. She wanted to. I couldn’t even make it to the unfinished cement floors of the basement laundry room without an adult with me. Down the awful blue carpet stairs, down the treacherously dark and unfinished sideboards of the basement hallway. Through those unnamable smells. Those creepy dungeon sounds of knocking pipes and creaking wood. All the way to the other end of the house, into a room that I was sure I would pass out trying to get to. I remember asking my mother if someone could die from “hippoventating.”
Sometimes I’d just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her, and I’d lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I’d give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I’d start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I’d hold the railing for dear life and say her name into space. Hoping she would come retrieve me.
If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don’t know.
But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or shells or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers.
In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away.
She’d let me get in bed with her, and we’d move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. “ Watercolor covers,” she’d say, and I’d nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repetitive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high.
Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she’d escort me, and I’d be back in the upperworld of things.
What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live
down there that year. How much I didn’t understand where the danger lived.
When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her
When my sister was older, she started wearing this long, dusted gray-purple antique dress to school. And she went out sometimes with men named Victor and Park, both much older than her, men who would drive her away from our house for hours and hours, leaving my father to make a chain smoker’s chimney of our living room. Watching All in the Family . Pounding the arm of the overstuffed sofa chair.
But the big event for me was that she moved down into the basement of the house, into some spooky bedroom we never used down there. There was nothing my father could do but watch, because my mother did it behind his back. My sister was smarter than my never-went-to-college mother by the time she was in high school, but my mother had survivor smartness. Like a savvy animal.
The move, to me, was unbelievable - my sister moved down into the belly of a haunted house. She wanted to. I couldn’t even make it to the unfinished cement floors of the basement laundry room without an adult with me. Down the awful blue carpet stairs, down the treacherously dark and unfinished sideboards of the basement hallway. Through those unnamable smells. Those creepy dungeon sounds of knocking pipes and creaking wood. All the way to the other end of the house, into a room that I was sure I would pass out trying to get to. I remember asking my mother if someone could die from “hippoventating.”
Sometimes I’d just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her, and I’d lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I’d give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I’d start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I’d hold the railing for dear life and say her name into space. Hoping she would come retrieve me.
If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don’t know.
But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or shells or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers.
In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away.
She’d let me get in bed with her, and we’d move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. “ Watercolor covers,” she’d say, and I’d nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repetitive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high.
Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she’d escort me, and I’d be back in the upperworld of things.
What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live
down there that year. How much I didn’t understand where the danger lived.
When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her
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