PROVENANCE by Debbie Urbanksi
The first day, my husband David and I laughed about the emails. We assumed they were a new sort of spam, a kind that made you cringe: “Child Abuser,” one subject read. And then the message, in an all caps, 24-point blinking font “PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD BE STERALIZED. NO CHILDREN FOR YOU.” Ha, ha. Sterilization. Funny. By the third day, we stopped laughing. The messages began containing details that strangers shouldn’t know. The name of my daughter Jessica. A description of Jessica’s childhood bedroom. Incidents between Jessica and her father and myself that should have been forgotten. One message was a simple list of our private data: address, phone, social security numbers. On the fifth day, someone attached a photograph of our house, photoshopped to look like the house had exploded, with gaping holes in the aluminum siding and blood splattered on the roof. The messages were signed with code names like “Also Abused” or “Another Victim.” By the week’s end, hundreds of messages waited to be read, their subjects containing an escalating obscenity.
I haven’t seen Jessica since she moved to the West Coast, practically as far away from my husband and me as she possibly could, though I don’t take the distance personally anymore. I’ve imagined her returning home numerous times, but imagining isn’t the same thing, is it. I know she would like our neighborhood better now. To get to our home, for instance, you follow the road past the latest Starbucks and the fancy boutiques, past the parking lot of SUVs and foreign-made cars. You take a left past the new development, where the single-family houses are isolated mansions, with pillars at the entranceways and privacy fences that hide the backyard. We have always lived on a safe street, but this neighborhood used to be more working class. The people who lived here used to only drive Fords. Recently, our town was voted one of the best places in the country to raise a family. We’re right up there on the list, along with Fort Collins and Naperville. My daughter said it was nice that our town won an award, but she’s not coming back unless I claim responsibility for the tragedy that she calls her childhood.
Our phone began ringing at odd times in the night, at 3 in the morning, at 4 in the morning. On the other end were kids with high-pitched squeals. “It’s Jessica,” they said. “Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me. It feels good, hurt me again.” David and I tried to laugh it off, only it wasn’t funny. It brought up certain events that we didn’t discuss anymore, memories that were fickle and volatile and crude, the kind of things you find by looking into toilets.
But if someone were to ask about my daughter’s childhood, I would not open up our closet and start pointing out the grotesque shadowy things hanging there. I’d begin with the quiet view from Jessica’s bedroom, which overlooked the neighbors’ backyards, where cedar fences formed protective borders around each home. At night, the neighbors lowered their blinds, and in the morning, they raised their blinds, moving quietly through their small activities. It was the nicest view in our house. From her bedroom, you could see everyone’s tended gardens. In our yard, we had a garden too, or we tried to. We planted apple trees that never gave us fruit, no matter how hard we shook them down. “No forbidden temptations for us,” David groaned. But other things in our yard grew. In the summer, we got on our knees, David weeding around the tomatoes, Jessica sprinkling the lettuce and chard with water. There was sunlight and an open sky and heat. I don’t think Jessica remembers this. Every family has its discontented years, but at certain times in my daughter’s childhood, I watched our lives turn so peaceful that they bored me. I know there were particular moments seeped in warmth, this yellow, like the color of an imaginary sun.
It’s easy these days to make one’s self out to be a tragedy. Take my daughter for instance. She writes one of those recovery blogs, the kind you hear about on Oprah, containing minute infuriating details of a childhood the author believed was wrong. Because she was one of the early bloggers to tear her past open, letting everyone who wanted to gape at her raw and messed up insides – she built quite a following for herself. She plays the uncomplicated role of the sainted lamb, while her father and I are cast as whirlwinds of violence, hurling hate and fists in her direction. I recognize certain memories that Jessica dwells on in her writings, but other memories are a mirror world, where everything is reversed and off. What my daughter doesn’t understand: some people don’t get their happiness. Happiness is not the point of everybody’s existence. Even as a child, I knew this. Never did I expect all those baubles and fairy mothers and wishing wells. I could have made myself into a tragedy also, but I needed to be other things.
My husband tells me to go call our daughter and say I’m sorry for everything bad that ever happened to her. “This is how we get our daughter back,” David says. He misses the idea of Jessica as much as I do. “These are supposed to be the good years. This is supposed to be the easy part, the payback,” David says. “And I want these prank calls to stop. I think Jessica can make them stop.”
I explain how Jessica wants more than an apology. She wants acknowledgment written in blood and carved out of my own arm. She wants me on my knees, groveling, as I confess how I was her bad mother. David shrugs. “Maybe you were,” he says.
“Should I have taken her away from you?” I ask. “Were you in danger of doing permanent harm to her? Did your self-restraint go out the window?” I sense David’s anger rising, but there isn’t anything solid behind his emotions anymore. His anger now is a wall you touch and it harmlessly falls down, like a joke wall made from cardboard bricks, like in those cartoons which I never found funny, where the punch line is a lot of characters pretending to get hurt in various exaggerated ways.
What if an act of rage is caused by love so maddening that the rational mind can’t deal with it? What if violence is the form that someone’s love takes? My family’s love was not the small thing you displayed in a fragile glass case. It was vast and it smelled and it stained us. Versus those polite families who sit on their untouching hands to watch, around them, the lace doilies do nothing.
From nuncrat723@yahoo.com: “what I want to know is why did you do it. do you wake up in the morning and wish you weren’t born? do you regret your life? have you tried cutting off your hands? would that make you feel better huh? that would make me feel better do you want to go backwards and do everything differently? well ha ha you can’t so you better be able to live with it or get out of here right now.”
Around the holidays, we hosted a party for our neighbors, who arrived at our house with exaggerated merriment. I was trying to pretend these people were my new and cobbled family, all of us stuck together in the middle of our lives, all of us missing our children, who had left us to go elsewhere. That night, my friends told me I looked distracted. They urged me to put down the tray of deviled eggs and rest. It felt good to be cared for so generically by so many well-dressed people, though I knew when they left in the late evening, this caring for me ended, their attention shifted back towards themselves and their worries and how to fill up their own vast houses. The phone rang all through the party of course. My cell phone too. The pranksters had gotten that number also. I could have taken the phone off the hook, but I hated being out of reach for a minute, in case I was needed. My guests glared at the ringing phones with surprise and irritation.
After David and Jessica argued, and if he hit her, the places he hit would be reddening like crass accusations, and if he didn’t hit her, it would be his uncontrollable voice from the heavy ceiling, hanging there like pointed spikes, like terrible chandeliers of sound – David entered our bedroom, locked the door, and demanded sex. The first few times he did this, I called him ridiculous and spit in his face. He let me leave the room, and I went straight to my daughter’s room, where Jessica had her face and her neck and whatever parts of her body she could manage shoved up against the window, like she was trying to break out of there, but couldn’t figure a way around the glass. I wanted to explain to my daughter the complexity of an adult’s love, but she railed against me if I touched her. She took her nails and tore them across my arms, and she tried to scratch my cheeks and neck too. She was like her father in that way, and I told her so. Hurting people because you loved them. Still, I let her do what she needed to do to me, but I could see my presence beside her was no help. Eventually, I gave up trying to soothe her, and the next time, when David entered the bedroom and locked the door, I lay down on the bed and removed my clothes, and David came at me with force. He insisted I keep my eyes open, the lights on, that we look at each other, and when he chanted, “I love you,” he said I needed to chant that too. Neither of us smiled. There were rules and instructions and these times were very pleasurable for me. I’m not proud of this fact. For Jessica’s sake, I tried to rein my body in and keep it tethered and grounded, but I couldn’t. There my body was, panting like a dumb animal in heat, stinking in its pleasure. When I heard the floorboards creek outside our room, I knew it was Jessica, in disbelief, still sniffling, her eye pressed to the crack between our bedroom’s double doors.
If there wasn’t some kind of love behind every single movement of my life, then my life had no point to it. My life was nothing. I loved my daughter just as I loved David, though it is possible that one’s love might do nothing good for the beloved. It is possible love is not transformative. That one may be loved and the love sits there crushing the beloved’s lap like an ugly heavy hard stone. I have seen mothers strutting around like their love for their child is a bunch of peacocks, all iridescence and awe-looking and what good does that do for a child either, to receive a bunch of prettiness, all for the show of it.
It’s all very easy, to look back and see that there were obvious roads to take, and let’s say one road led into a dark forest, but the other road led into a dark forest too, a different sort of forest. Both looked unbear-able to me at times, though I’m not one to dwell on my lack of options. If you thought you were like God, above it all, I suppose it would be easy to see which way you should have taken. Anyway, it’s not even like life is a straight path. It’s not even like there was a branch in the road for me. A long time ago, I entered the forest, and the sun filtered through the trees, and I stood in the shadows and watched the evergreens tighten around me, and there were no alternate paths, no exits, only one way forward.
The last time I saw Jessica, she carried a small suitcase that could contain only a few changes of clothes. She kept the suitcase near her the entire night, to flaunt how much she was deserting in her move to the West Coast. This was her farewell dinner. We ate leftover turkey with pale gravy. The sky darkened to a deep consistent gray. The neighbors turned on their yard lights, which were like spotlights, illuminating only certain things, only the things they wanted to show off. The rest of the yard drifted away into the dark.
After dinner, I sat with Jessica in the living room. I put my hand on her hand. She said, “This house is haunted and why am I the only person who sees what’s underneath.” I asked if I did anything in recent memory other than act kindly toward her. She said, “Dad went crazy for awhile. But you weren’t crazy.” Then she opened her mouth and I expected something else ugly to come out of it, something I could bat away, but instead, in the shape of her mouth and her quietness, as if she couldn’t speak, a memory came back to me, or part of a memory, like a bright light and a blow to the head. I didn’t think about certain things like that anymore. I turned away from my daughter. The light faded.
David tells me to stop reading the emails already but I can’t help it; I read through them nightly as a kind of self-flagellation. From underground-ketwrks@hotmail.com: “you think you are hot stuff because, why, you are alive? your daughter is alive? but barely, how many things are haunting you when you close your eyes? one thousand? one hundred million? god has a list right here of those things you shouldn’t have done he is sharing it with everybody.”
All the men I knew who grew up working class in my childhood neighborhood had tempers of old countries inbred in them at early ages. So David’s temper was to be expected. But when his parents died, of course things got worse, because he went mad for a little while, descending into some low-lying place where he couldn’t see a thing because there weren’t lights.
David’s parents used to ask him, “But when do you take us to Europe? When do you move us into the big house on the hill?” He was their American Dream. He was supposed to make their hard work and decades of stupid jobs worth it. David told his parents, just you wait. But he became a salesman, not a surgeon. He sold liquor to bars. Then he woke up one evening, his parents were dead, and he realized here ended the story of his potential greatness. No one on Earth expected anything grand from him. He told me his dead parents came to him at night and they didn’t say anything good. I watched his anger, like a mesmerizing white heat, funnel from his hands into the nearest things around him, which happened to be us.
You can barely see the stars out where we live anymore, though I don’t think that’s anyone’s fault. I don’t think it’s necessary to assign blame for that. That last time I saw Jessica, after our conversation escalated into an argument about forgiveness, she shoved me away and left the house, and things were silent for a while, for an hour or two, until I sent my husband to drive up and down the streets looking for her. We still had her suitcase, for Christ’s sake. David came back in half an hour stinking of smoke and said he couldn’t find her, but I wondered how hard he looked, or if he just stood on the side of the house, smoking cigarettes and staring up at the light-polluted sky. Of course we would live our lives better if we lived them over again. Nobody would make any mistakes the second time around.
At our holiday party, one of our neighbors, Alice Crowley, positioned herself near the phone. “This is ridiculous. Someone needs to get a hold of you,” Alice said. I told her not to answer it. I only picked up calls whose numbers I recognized on the caller ID. Alice raised her eyebrows. “Pray tell more,” she said, leaning in towards me, expecting gossip. I knew the sorts of things the cranks were saying now. The calls had gotten worse, with sounds of obscene violence and sex in the background, and who knew if it was real or not. We needed to go to the police about it, but the thought of explaining why this was happening exhausted me. All the neighbors already knew certain things of course. Sound carried in this neighborhood. They had heard our old fights, even if my husband shut the windows before hand, and likewise, they weren’t perfect. We had heard their arguments too, their little uglinesses.
When Jessica became two, David ordered me to stop breast-feeding our daughter. “Jessica is practically an adult,” he joked at first, and then the joking stopped. He thought nursing a toddler must be like masturbation, like I was getting off on it. Partly, it was my fault. I didn’t need sex with him anymore. David tried to draw me in the bedroom, and I feigned tiredness and irritation every time. I kept my clothes on as he stripped down then I gave him a hand job. My body belonged to my daughter, whose affections were enough for me. I lay on the bed with my shirt up and bra unsnapped, and Jessica giggled and leaned her head over me to suck one breast then the other. Those first few sucks, her eyes rolled back in her head, like I was giving her some kind of fix. Then she drew me back into her focus. Her arms explored me as she nursed, her little fingers working their way to the soft spots of my side or my back or my other breast, like she was trying to find out where I ended, if I ended. This started as the physical form of my love for my daughter, but it became the physical form of all my love. I thought, this must be how the statue of some god feels, adoration and worship and these hands all over them.
When Jessica latched off, a dribble of white on her chin, she leaned in to kiss my lips, and those kisses were like touching a spot that hadn’t been touched before, like touching the interior of an eye or the back of one’s throat. I knew some of the kisses went on longer then they should have. I knew I should have turned my head to the side so her lips landed on my cheek. Usually I locked the door when I was nursing, but once, when I forgot the lock, David roared into the room and saw my shirt up, and Jessica sprawled on top of me, leaning her tiny mouth toward my mouth. “What is this,” David hollered. He hollered, “How can I not be enough for you.” He pulled Jessica off the bed and told her to go play in her nursery, then he pinned me down to the mattress and shoved my left breast in his mouth, sucking clumsily as he did things with his hands that generally would have caused me pleasure.
Love is a complex thing. People think for some reason how love is always pretty and bright, how it makes us better people. Sometimes it’s like this. But love is also nothing good. It makes us do things we wouldn’t have done otherwise. It’s an excuse and an explanation. It nails us to the floor and forces us to watch. It hints at this golden yellow warmth and then we spend our lives chasing after it, thinking if I move this way, if I turn my body this way, it will be more comfortable, it will make me good. It’s not like you have a choice, if you’re given love that is ugly and hurts at times. You have to love something in your life regardless. I’ve heard of certain people who get up and leave their pile of ugly love behind, expecting they will find better, but I was not one of those people.
At a certain point in my life, I realized I wouldn’t be the person I thought I would be. I wouldn’t be as good as that person was. Sometimes this is all anyone gets. You make yourself want what you have.
The emails came from parents too. For instance, the email from powereddown4@gmail.com ended like this: “I hope your heart is rotting, that you never get your daughter back. You deserve pain and you make parents everywhere (who actually love their children) sickened.”
When Jessica was young, strangers approached her to finger her hair and tell me what a beautiful child. Her blond hair curled at the bottom, and when she smiled, it wasn’t that exaggerated grin that kids put on for show. “How on Earth did you make a child like that?” strangers asked me. A talent scout for a children’s modeling agency handed us his business card. Jessica possessed that sort of face. I could have looked at her forever. Now, in the photographs my daughter sends us from time to time, she looks like any ordinary adult, like a stranger. If Jessica wasn’t my daughter, I wouldn’t pay her any attention.
Girls from my childhood married their high school prom dates and had their third kid at 21, but when I turned 25, I hadn’t met a man I liked well enough. My mother explained options would not get better. “Join the convent or get married now,” she told me. So I became engaged to a delicate piano tuner named Gregory. We set our wedding four months out and then found little else to discuss. Each Sunday and Wednesday, I sat in Gregory’s apartment and watched him restore the old pianos that crowded his living room. He worked at them and worked at them until a single note was pure and full. And then, onto the next note. And the next. He never played music on his pianos. He found melody unnecessary, and besides, I don’t think he knew any songs.
I met David when my wedding was three months away. David’s brother lived on the next block from me, and David was often there on the weekends, fixing cars with his brother in the driveway. He had the overdeveloped muscles of someone who moved heavy things around for a living, and when he moved to grab a wrench or an oil pan, he acted like the simple act of walking exposed him, like parts of him were always being hung open and no one should be looking there but that was how he had to walk around. One afternoon, David noticed me watching him. He motioned me over and asked me to help test drive his fixed-up Mustang. In the passenger seat, I flashed my engagement ring around so we all knew I was taken.
David didn’t care. He drove me to the forest preserve where I had never been driven, following a road that twisted deep into the woods. After parking in the shade, he slipped the ring off my hand and threw it out the window, into the piled and dead leaves. It was fall. There was a lot of leaves. I’d never find the ring again. I feigned upset and hysterics, but David climbed on top of me and held all my hair in his fist and yanked my head back. I felt something obscene rising out of me, a raw and panting shape.
Gregory hadn’t touched me once, he hadn’t wanted to touch me. His fingers on the piano, me watching his fingers on the piano, that was as far as we went, and the polite kisses on the cheek in front of our families, like we were birds pecking at each other for show. I had already imagined our polite lives: perched on the edges of our beds, fully clothed, pressing against each other, but only in certain spots. I liked to think Gregory held an image of me in his head while he quietly masturbated in his bathroom each morning, but honestly, I had no idea. Gregory could have gotten off on the image of piano keys, the black keys on top of the white keys moving under his hands.
David pushed me into the back seat of his car, where he tucked a sheet beneath me, his hands smearing oil and grime everywhere. When he kissed me, he inhaled deeply, like he wanted to swallow the air from my lungs. I felt like an explosion seconds before whatever exploded: the expectation of noise and pain and a magnificent heat. He smelled like car parts and Mercurochrome from the raw cuts all over him, and when he saw me looking, he pressed my hands into his sores. I told David afterwards that he’d have to marry me, now that he lost my ring. And so Gregory became a dial tone in my ear, while David entered like a steam train, a screech of iron on iron and the white billowing smoke of his life that filled my every available space.
In an email, gxr243@gmail.com wrote, “I saw a cat drowning and no one needed to tell me to dive into the stupid pool and save the animal.”
I grew up in an undercurrent of violence. Everyone I knew grew up there, with parents obviously in love but also haunted by God knew what, so our apartments were haunted too, the walls thin, and as a child I heard everything. I saw the sticky shadows and shattered plates, the blood prints on the walls and the broken things. During the holidays, my cousins and I received one present each, and if we didn’t love the gift enough, my father reached over and broke the toy. “Better?” he would say. Back then, mothers laughed at such things, and they didn’t leave their husbands for it. When David did something similar to Jessica, she cried like he had broken her arm, which he hadn’t done.
When Jessica has her own children, I know what she’s thinking: that she will never clench her hand to form a fist, that she will never make her offspring feel badly for one instant. Let her try to be that sort of parent. Let her chop off both her arms so she can never hit her children, and let her rip her tongue out too. What she is ignoring: how this extravagant anger was given to us by our parents, and it’s part of her too. It’s right there, in the deep center of her, in a place without light where things grow anyway but not the sorts of things she ever wanted, things without eyes and without flowers, which she’ll bury under the heavy stones in her but they won’t stay buried forever.
I told Alice, do not pick up the phone, but Alice answered the phone and what they said to her, on the other line, paled her, like she had any right. “What did they say? What? What?” I asked Alice. David grabbed the phone from Alice’s hand and told her to mind her own god damn business. Alice collapsed into the chair and looked sick, like she was going to vomit on my kitchen table. She was making a scene. Conversation in the room stopped and someone turned off Bing Crosby crooning about the snow.
If you only love the good parts of someone, how is that love? Isn’t that the point: to love what’s wrong in someone also? People aren’t puzzles. You can’t pick out what you want in them and keep the rest. I watched David with Jessica when she was young, all roughhousing and giggling as they raced each other through the kitchen, David on his knees chasing a toddling Jessica who kept herself just out of reach. He could make Jessica laugh like I never could. I remember thinking, I will never be able to replace what right now he is giving her.
In another email, trtafit01@gmail.com wrote, “there are no excuses, people who hit children should be tortured, shot in the hands and then the face, then their dead bodies desecrated beyond recognition by the hands of abuse survivors.” Everyone these days plays the role of the righteous, as if they knew anything about it.
“What is going on?” Alice demanded, as if she hadn’t made mistakes either. “What is this? What kind of sick joke?” People at the party stood listening, waiting for my explanation. At least my child was still alive, I thought. Years ago, when Jessica was 17, Alice’s oldest son killed himself in their garage in some messy way. Before this, Jessica had thought the Crowleys were perfect. She had begged us to be more like them. People in the neighborhood claimed they didn’t know why the Crowley son committed suicide, but the rumors were that everyone knew why it happened, and it had something to do with keeping up appearances, the son stealing money from his over-trusting parents and then losing that money on something stupid, like betting horses. Our family was by no means perfect, but we never pretended to be something we were not. Nobody ever shot themselves in our garage in a messy way. I went with Jessica to the funeral of that boy and tried to grab hold of her hand throughout the service. All along I was thinking, this was your perfect family, Jessica, your perfect shatterable family, that woman with snot dripping from her nose, and that shocked girl wearing her fancy black clothes from some out-of-town department store. I wouldn’t have said any of this out loud, but that was what I was thinking. I was thinking how sometimes the best lessons we can teach our children have so little to do with us.
This is what happens. People have babies and they cradle their babies in their arms. They make sure to do this in public, they parade by a lot of people’s houses to show off what a gentle parent they are. They tell themselves, I will never hurt this child. And for awhile, they don’t hurt their child. They might grow frustrated; they might leave the baby on the floor if the baby is crying and colicky for hours and can’t stop. They leave the baby safe on the floor and come back and hold and comfort the baby like they’re supposed to do. Then their baby gets older. They tell themselves, I won’t be like those others, I won’t hurt this child, I won’t be like those low-class parents in the brochures that the doctor’s office keeps handing out, those lost parents who slap their kids around. They think their love for their child will protect them, that their love is worth something. Then there is a lot of blinding light, like if they glanced up accidentally into the sun. They feel themselves splitting into two different substances, and one part, the shadowy part, goes off and does whatever things it does on its own, they have no connection to that one shadowy figure, because they themselves are sitting quietly on the bed, peacefully, in love with their child, their hands folded and eyes shut.
After I gave birth to Jessica that October, I remained home with her for a year. That’s what the books said mothers should do so I did it, though I wasn’t cut out to be a stay-at-home mom. I wished babies did more. I wished more was required of them. Daylight was brief that time of year, and I remember the quiet and maddening afternoons, when Jessica would be wailing in my arms and all the world could offer me, in its shrunken state, was a sound, a piercing sound. The books said, talk to your baby, or else. So for a year, my conversations were one way. They were babbles of nonsense, an over-described reality. “Look at that red truck driving by the green house. Look at the small boy bouncing the round bright ball.” David hovered on the fringes. His hands were nervous and uncertain and getting in my way. He asked me, “When do you go away and my wife comes back?” I spent entire weeks near the window, rocking Jessica while brown leaves clogged the gutters. Sun cut through the branches, exposing the deserted nests at the treetops. I saw no birds all winter.
Several months passed before I fell in love with my daughter. I remember the moment – when a neighbor reached for my child and Jessica thrashed and wailed and clung to my neck, like if she left me, some essential part of her would disappear. Who on Earth could deserve this sort of adoration? But I pretended right along with her, that I was necessary to her existence, that somehow I was better than any other. Had my life ended there I wouldn’t have cared. I entered the room and Jessica looked up, her face brightening like I was her own vision of a good god. I fulfilled her totally and completely. How can a person recover from such affections? It goes to your head. Of course it goes to your head. After that, everything else in my life could barely matter. I prayed to whomever, let me keep this. I prayed, do not let this change, and then things changed.
Debbie Urbanski’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Verse, Natural Bridge, GulfCoast, Cimarron Review, and The Lyric Poetry Magazine. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.