She is a Mess
George Hendrik Breitner, 1894
by N. West Moss
She is a mess in so many ways. Fat to begin with, and unkempt, hair like a bird’s nest. No sense of style, always hoping to find that one perfume to make her identity snap into focus. Discipline. She lacks discipline. Flosses five nights in a row, then forgets until her back tooth starts to ache and then flosses again for five nights in a row. Puts her glasses who knows where. Every night some new spot.
She remembers being taken to the pediatrician when she was Eight-years- old for chest pains. He could find no cause. Now in her fifties, she understands that the chest pain was just pure, pure worry. But in the dark of night, she lies in bed thinking: Little Girl, you were right to be worried.
She is uneasy, waking up night after night, staring round-eyed at the ceiling, certain that her life has come to nothing, even when everything is essentially alright (she has no debt, she reminds herself -- she has a happy marriage). In her secret moonlit heart, she fears she is a ship permanently wrecked on needle-sharp boulders.
She never had a coherent plan for her life. In her 20s she slept with everyone. It was a good thing – gather ye rosebuds and all that. It was a delight, is what it was, the way messiness equaled freedom. There were no diseases transmitted, she broke no hearts (((((well ... she broke one heart))))). She snuck out of men’s beds in the dark, hopping on one foot and then the other in their driveways to slip on her shoes. And she was beautiful. She can see that now when she looks at her students. Even the ugliest eighteen-year-olds with slack jaws and too-moist lips, even the ugliest eighteen-year-olds covered in acne and shivering with the most pathetic longings are stunningly beautiful to her now, the way the most delicious tomatoes of summer have puckered, scarred flanks.
She is a mess, holding how many advanced degrees and still no full-time work, no career to speak of. She has no children either. What a wasteland she turned out to be. When she was twelve, her cousin (she’s still too afraid to say out loud that it was her brother) took her aside. “Men don’t like women with hair on their bodies.” She, of course, had hair on her body. Later he whispered other things, “Men like women who swallow” and worse. She gave such weight to his countless, long-ago edicts. How he hated her then, his wish for her erasure palpable, and how he hates her still, violently, how he strides through the world announcing all he hates as though the world is punching its catcher’s mitt waiting for his derision. At Thanksgiving, he walks around now, white-haired and wrinkled, talking volubly about his hard-ons. She hasn’t gone to Thanksgiving in years, isn’t even invited any more. The memories of him are like a cobweb she walks through and has to shake off, over and over forever. How do people stop themselves from being haunted? She wants to know.
There are other cobwebs – a break-up with a boyfriend decades ago. One dim night he asked her for a blowjob before admitting that he was already living with someone else. And he actually loved me, she thinks. And it makes her a mess that people do such things, even to people they love.
She gets all worked up about greed, about the guy in the BMW who cuts everyone off. The entire concept of ‘shareholder value’ rattles her cage, how the world is all me, me, me, and almost never us, us, us. It lays her so stupidly low, and yet she knows it’s pitiful, her indignation housed in such a fruitless life.
As a hedge against the mess, she invites people over to sit and drink gin with her behind the rhododendron on the porch. She picks up litter from the roadside – maybe the broken world can still be mended. She endlessly encourages her students, even while keeping from them the fact that hard work is worth almost nothing in the world anymore.
She keeps writing too, making art like a freezing man trying to light a match. She plants elephant ear bulbs the size of coconuts in her garden. The wriggling worms in the turned-over dirt awaken in her some kind of stuttering desire to protect. There is tangible worth in not-yet sprouted bulbs and earthworms. They are her shareholder value.
If things had been better, if she had been able to have children, or a conventional career, if she had been an unafraid child, if she hadn’t been taught to hate her own body by her own family, well maybe she wouldn’t have become who she is, wouldn’t have written books. She thinks about that, about the price of being an artist. If she hadn’t been afraid of her own father, if she hadn’t worried all the time, if her brother hadn’t called her a whore for wearing mascara, if she hadn’t lived a life unprotected by the people who were supposed to protect her, well, who’s to say how the crucible of her particular life shaped her. For instance, if her father had never locked the car doors and shouted into her face on her thirteenth birthday, “Nobody will ever love you!” perhaps she would not have driven herself to be as loved as she is, which is pretty thoroughly loved, really. Her father loved her a lot, too, even as he screamed at her. Another fucked up kind of love. Another thing to contemplate on the cliffs of 3am.
She figures that probably none of the mess of her life can be blamed on anyone though. Maybe she was just born broken. Maybe her father held her head under water when she was three to stop her crying because she deserved it. She does think that sometimes, believes it even, but in daylight she asks, how could that be? How could a three-year old ever deserve to have her head held underwater? Talk about gorgeous. Every three-year-old is a pie-slice of goddamned perfection. Right?
Still, evidence shows that she is a mess, wearing this inside-out T-shirt, oh god, and it has a stain. And she wore it to the bank she just remembers. Her hair is so messy a comb won’t go through it, just like when she was a kid and her mother raked a brush through the snarls, yanking her head back on its neck-stalk. Everything is tangled, everything is broken, asymmetrical … but also luminous.
She is luminous.
And now, as the sun comes up she can see it. If she decides to write weird books that may never be published, and plant five hundred thousand elephant ears all over the property, if she wants to stand in the rain by the birch tree getting soaked so she can watch the mallard ducks nest by the pond, no one will stop her. She can do what she wants. The only one submerging her now would be her.
Look at her, mess that she is. She has managed to steer her life to this pond full of rain, turtles poking their snouts above the water line to inhale fresh air, mallards dibbling at its surface, a tipped over willow weeping its new spring leaves into the water. There is no hope but still there is hope, and maybe wrecked is how things are supposed to be, half swallowed by vines.
She is no wasteland. She can see that by the light of day. Her world is filled with porch cocktails, with the warm velvet of her snoring husband’s back, with the tumbleweeds of cat hair in the living room, the stain on the shirt, the teacups in the sink, the stories spooling from her. There is no angry hand at her neck (although she still sometimes imagines it there), trying to submerge her head in a sink-full of fury. Every morning when the sun rises, her story begins anew. The pond, with its peepers screaming their lungs out, with its tipped over everythings, cries, “Good for you!” Good for you, the willows murmur. No one’s been able to wreck her yet, try as they might. Good for you, she tells herself. Goddammit. Good for you.
N. West Moss is the author of the memoir Flesh & Blood, coming from Algonquin in October 2021.
