At number eleven forty-five, North Booth street in Dubuque, Iowa, stands an old white house with lilac bushes in the front yard and a limestone wall and a garden behind it. Closer to two decades ago now than one, a man and a woman offered what they could afford and moved in with their baby and their intentions to build a life and a family there. In dreams of their daughter’s happy childhood, they splattered paint onto the playroom walls and gave her a big bed to roll around in at night. Maybe this question never occurred to them, because they had the simple, glad answer waiting at home in the afternoons, eating snacks after school, but it plagues my mind every day: what is a daughter? A happy child, belonging to good parents and their love. An excitable child, squealing in glee and gratitude at the gifts on the table for her birthday. A dependent child, in desperate need of a mother’s healing kiss on her scraped knees. Most of all, an innocent child, blind to all of the pain in the world, oblivious to the corruption that will inevitably find her someday, and still free of the misdeeds that, as humans, we innately and outwardly commit.
I feel like more of a strange and wicked monster now than a child, a daughter. Sometimes I feel like I could collapse from the guilt. Sometimes for no reason at all, but now mostly because I have become a strange and wicked monster. I have read and heard the venomous, vindictive words of two ex-husbands, I have seen the wrath of methamphetamines rain down on her, an innocent victim, but no injury inflicted could be worse than the one that goes unnoticed: the one that I cause.
Some night in the early spring after my nineteenth birthday, I commanded my tolerant friend, Jenny, “Don’t you believe me? Take me to the river. Right now.” She looked at me incredulously, but she drove to the port anyway. I took off my dress and walked into the water. The cold stung my skin, but I kept wading while Jenny pulled her hair back into an enormously curly ponytail and rolled up the legs of her pants. From the dark, lamp-lit sidewalk on the opposite side of the sand, she waded in after me; as I knelt, my knees sank into the Mississippi River mud, and I made a resolution. “I will be a different person,” I said with conviction, “I have been filthy for the last year. Baptize me of that person. I’m ready.” I held my breath. She didn’t count to three, I just fell under the water in her arms. I came up cold, dirty, and inhaled deeply, but I was clean.
On an early winter day of my nineteenth year I drove to my mother’s house, reveled in the skill and artistry of her newly finished basement, absorbed her maternal love and hospitality, and used her washer and dryer before heading home; but I made a stop along my way. As I sat in a parking lot with a black woman from work and smoked a couple dollars off a blunt she had in her pocket, I got a text message from my mom, asking if I was home safe. I could feel the guilt bubbling in my stomach already, but I pushed it aside to take one more drag. I drove home immediately afterwards, and I got there safely, but I could feel the shame setting in with every one of forty-two stairs I climbed to that apartment.
I was in the apartment then, and I knew I had to wash the dishes, but instead I sat down and watched the belligerent drunks out the window. Suddenly I felt nauseous. The weed was bad. I was bad. I ran to the bathroom and I started to vomit. I gagged. I retched and heaved, but I stopped myself. My stomach was full of food. I was bloated with the leftovers that my mother had worked hard to pay for and I was about to send them down the toilet. How despicable. How ungrateful. So I suffered the nausea and thought about what I had done until my heaving turned from nausea to sorrow. I moved from the toilet to the bed and sobbed until the skin around my eyes burned and I was almost retching again; that night, I slept well.
(writing the second half of this currently, will post as finished. if anyone sees this please offer critique if you can)
