driving into the sunrise, part I
Tuesday 22 August 2006 | I like a cookie
Because why live here if not to drive into the mountains. Because sometimes a girl has just got the urge for going, for nosing her Daewoo toward the sunrise, from Tet’su-geh Owingeh into the foothills, with a 70¢ maple-glazed doughnut at her side, listening for the first time to the mix CD she made for Mandarin’s annual summer study soundtrack, a CD she’d entitled “wistful,” which she frankly didn’t realize was quite so wistful until she found herself pulled up outside Stunod Niknud at 5:30 in the morning, listening to “Sno Cat.” Half-sobbing (Shit, I can’t let the doughnut guy see me like this) and half-laughing (Oh for God’s sake, I’m sure he sees worse all the time.)
Driving just to drive isn’t something I normally do. Revision: I don’t think I’ve ever done it, other than riding with Voldemort when he did so, when I was hysterical and he was furious; maybe it’s a Missouri thing to love driving for its own sake, to find it soothing.
So this morning the Unnarrator just drove. First down St Francis for the maple-glazed, then heading up again with nowhere in mind. But stopped at the last traffic light, the one where Paseo de Peralta would carry her along its curve back toward town, staring at the indigo clouds to the north, she’s suddenly tossed into 2003, into the final fraught days of failing marriage when she’d be driving wearily home from her despiséd pantyhose job and, stopped at the same light, where she was supposed to turn right to go home, would think involuntarily, with unfortunate echoes of Thelma & Louise, you know I could just keep going.
For some reason always north. Always imagining heading north, into a blacker icier darkness. Why? Where? Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota? Canada? The Arctic?
It all started at the Brujo’s house, when I woke around four from a strange sweaty premenstrual dream (cryptic and clotted with uneasy detail: nude women with men’s genitalia, unrequited desire, Mandarin and I proudly displaying to each other our mutually ineffective and byzantine “systems” for [not] writing, respectively, a thesis and a book). I crawled out of bed, obtained antacids (”new cocoa and creme flavor!”), crawled back in and lay there trying not to twitch, itch or move around. Thinking of the dead, trying not to think of the dead, writing emails, designing web pages (wondering if tables are at all acceptable in XHTML, not wanting to create a bunch of stylesheet div names just to have two dumb columns nested inside the wrap or content divs), and trying to regulate breathing and fall asleep again.
[abrupt and inexplicable change in verb tense]
I manage the not-wriggling part with reasonable success for about an hour, like Lenscrafters, until I become desperately thirsty. Fumbling around on the windowsill for the water glass I sometimes leave there, I finally wake the B.
Brujo [still asleep]: What’s going on? Are you hot?
Un [groping behind curtain]: No…
Brujo: Are you cold?
Un [continuing to rummage]: No…
Brujo [confused]: Well what are you?
Un [perseverant]: I’m thirsty.
Brujo [by now thoroughly bewildered]: But what does that have to do with the window?
For some reason this strikes me as riotously funny, as things can do at 5 am. I try to stifle my giggling in the pillow which of course makes it even funnier.
[À la the seventh day of sesshin when crazy wild joriki starts bubgbling (nice!) up through the zendo, finally bursting completely out of control when the monitor intones sternly, Please be silent! And also like that rehearsal just before the tech rehearsal—the one where the director is losing his/her shit and the actors all start struggling not to break up which just makes the other actors break up which just pisses off the director even more.]
Eventually I’m able to answer, still shaking with laughter, “I’m trying to survive on moisture,” referencing a headline from our private Worst of the Santa Fe New Mexican gallery (”Woman, 88, Trapped in Car, Survives on Moisture”). Thinking about this is a bad idea, and I laugh even more. I stop and apologize. Crack up again. Apologize. [Repeat play.]
The Brujo turns and wraps all his arms and legs around me like a spider, sleepily but firmly. “Stopinate,” he addresses me with groggy authority. “Sleepinate.” But even as he is speaking I’ve quit laughing and started crying. My pillowslip is wet and I know there will be no further sleepinating for me, waves of premenstrual saltwater slopping over the seawall. My heart is like the ocean / It gets in the way.
I put on my jeans, collect my car keys. “I do not approve of this,” pronounces the Brujo plaintively and immediately falls asleep again.
Santa Fe, still dark, never quite deserted.
knees pressed against the leather couch I couldn’t find my bra
and you were so familiar I think that I reached out too far
I wouldn’t have if my heart and my stomach hadn’t fallen so hard
Yesterday in therapy, as I was volubly cringing before the doubled infuriated figures of Herself (wondering, reasonably enough, where her book is) plus my mother (in full-bore fed-up mode), the DBT mildly suggested the importance of trying to develop a thicker skin, and I started saltwatering right then and there. Visceral sensation of being a small person, three, four, five, six, seven, of being verbally reprimanded for something (probably my standby childhood vices, “talking back” or “smarting off” or, my favorite, “don’t give me any lip young lady”) and dissolving in tears.
It felt like dissolving, like losing my edges. Entire long mornings and afternoons, whole days, spent, wasted, not able to stop crying. And the more people told me to stop crying, the more I couldn’t, and the more wildly ashamed I felt, and the more I cried, and the sharper they became, and the more I couldn’t stop.
I told the DBT that it was hard to think, much less hear, “I need to have a thicker skin” without hearing frustrated adult voices. Stop it right now, quit being self-pitying, no one’s making you cry, you’re being theatrical, you’re just like your grandmother, such an actress, you know you’re just doing it to yourself, you’ll just make yourself sick—and did I? or was I pummelled by some affective disorder even then? Time to invoke the behaviorists’ beloved “biosocial theory”: An inherited or otherwise innate sensitivity exacerbated by an invalidating environment in which emotions are met with anger, denied, regulated, suppressed, demonized, feared, ridiculed and/or ignored.
In the DBT’s more pragmatic explanation: “When you can’t get anyone’s validation or sympathy with an emotion that’s at maybe three or four on the thermostat, you have to kick it up a notch to get attention. Then you’ve reset your baseline—instead of being at zero when you’re neutral, you’re walking around at three or four all the time. The next time something hits you, you’re at five or six in a heartbeat. But the more intense your emotion, the more your environment invalidates you. So now you have to turn it up even more. By adulthood, you might be permanently recalibrated at eight or nine.”
Only it’s not permanent, is it; or the DBT would still be a girls’ basketball coach, and I wouldn’t be out $460 a month (plus psych meds).
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