By JV Genova
“I go for a walk in a familiar area and realize how now my body feels unfamiliar to me; it’s a home in which I know all the vessels, all the nooks and ways of movement but again I find it difficult to rest as I am hyper vigilant, like waiting for the baby to cry except now it’s my body crying.”
0. Haunted by so many questions, I went for a walk in an unfamiliar town in the hopes I’d find myself. Why does a body revolt, begin to eat itself away? The Greek root of the word tumor is onkos, which really means burden. Instead of finding myself, I found two deer lying in the shadows of a dark gray church. They curled their bodies in the green grass below the stained-glass windows, under a spreading crabapple tree, and never once moved their antlered heads, though they watched me closely.
1. When I remember my hometown, I remember the oil refinery on the south side. Stack after gray stack rising into the deep blue sky, tendrils of smoke and flame rising from the tops. In a field below, visible from Interstate 25—where some people made their escape, speeding out of town—cows grazed in the shadows. I often wonder what those cows thought—if anything—the day there was an explosion at the refinery. I often wonder how many of those cows had tumors, or if they were slaughtered for steak before the tumors got big enough for anyone to notice. Many days, the wind blew hard enough, the smell of the refinery wasn’t too noticeable. But on a sunny day, if we decided to picnic in the park or toss the Frisbee, the sulfur, rotten egg odor would permeate, the air thick with its chemical smell.
2. Mom always kept the ashtrays in the house clean. It was rare to find an ashtray with more than a butt or two in it. There was one red glass ashtray, oblong, that was rather pretty. I loved when it sat empty on the coffee table. If the sunlight filtered in and hit it just right, it would cast red prisms on the walls. But it never stayed empty. In a photo album somewhere, there’s a photo of me as a baby, plump and pink skinned, grinning up at my mother, who appears to be about to change my diaper. My mother leans over my small form, smiling, her permed brown hair a poof around her. To her right, next to the baby powder and wipes and stack of diapers, sits that red ashtray. A cigarette rests in its one notch, smoke rising next to me. It gives my chubby face a cherubic haze.
3. It’s sometimes difficult for single mothers to feed their children. Sometimes, there isn’t quite enough money to last the entire month. The cost of being poor is doled out over time in a number of ways. After school, the best days meant a processed frozen chicken patty pulled from a box, warmed in the tiny oven and topped with a slice of American cheese—plasticity turned to gooey warmth on top. But even on payday, in the shadows of the refinery when the midwinter sun sits hovering—trying to hold its place in the relentless and unstoppable wind—there are perhaps a few frozen Salisbury steak dinners, maybe canned green beans or corn. If it’s summer, a treat in spaghetti squash with meat sauce. During the really good years, there might be fresh summer corn. In middle school, lunch is a warm pretzel with hot molten cheese-like sauce that holds like rubber to the dough, salt sitting unmoving in the orange congealment. In high school, if I remember to bring a dollar, lunch is a bag of Cheetos and a Mountain-Dew; if the right people asked me to lunch, it meant a Big Gulp from the 7-11 down the street filled with Mountain-Dew and cheap vodka. This might help me get through math class, where it’s become clear what my strengths are, and they aren’t in that room. What I’m saying is: I didn’t see a bulb of garlic or a stalk of fresh asparagus or the green and rippled leaves of spinach until I moved to California in my twenties and drove past farms there. And I know now more than ever what my strengths are.
4. Other potential strengths often had to be magnified: long hair blown dry and held in place with hairspray that came in aerosol cans that fogged the bathroom and left sticky, clear, paint-like droplets on the cabinets and walls and fumigated the entire house with a chemical, slightly pleasant smell. Or thick makeup applied to cover every last pore, followed by carefully applied eyeliner the color of black ink, except for that brief period in which mascara in an unnatural blue hue was all the rage. Lotions, creams, and powders, man-made and man-approved and intended to catch the attention of men. Little pretty containers of endocrine disrupters, because the future doesn’t really matter when there’s a party tonight, and K.C. says he’ll drive me with his other friends. (I wouldn’t have known what endocrine disrupter meant, anyway.) I will sit in the front seat, next to my cousin whose hair is even taller than mine and holds even more Aqua Net. The floorboard of the huge old black Lincoln is worn away by rust, a hole in the steel that spreads to a width of two feet and is covered by a big piece of cardboard that flies up and into my face when K.C. drives through a puddle. It splashes everyone, but everyone just laughs, and when the police car behind the big old Lincoln glows red and blue and we realize we are being pulled over, everyone drops their cans of Black Label and Busch beer into the empty speaker holes in the doors. The holes, gaping, are there because K.C. took the speakers out to put in better ones but never got around to actually putting in new ones. The cop lets K.C. off with a warning (maybe his last, as last I heard, he’s in prison) but the cans will forever rattle around inside the doors and that old car will always smell like beer. At the party, there will be drinking card games and a bottle of Night Train and K.C.’s bicep tattoo that reads clits tits and bong hits and this should really tell me everything I need to know about him, but it does not save my cousin from having a baby with him before she graduates from high school.
5. The office that housed the local equivalent of Planned Parenthood—though it was not that; it was run by the county health department and may or may not have been a response to the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation—was where we all went for care once we passed the threshold of thirteen. A squat nondescript building, it was one of the most popular places in town for teenagers. A fishbowl full of condoms sat on the counter where local teens would be able to grab a handful without condemnation or questioning; a nice lady in a white coat would give us a pap smear and birth control pills even if we were only fourteen. She might note that I wasn’t a virgin, but she would do so without judgment—questions of consent were never raised in earnest. While questions of consent might never be offered and I would leave without fully understanding consent, I would leave with a seashell shaped container of subdued pink containing color-coded pills. These pills I down with Mountain Dew after stubbing out a Marlboro Light because strokes and other terrible medical things only happen to other people. Because I live in a place where to question what might be healthy or unwise is really just being not strong enough and so I power forth, going to the best parties which are always on the south side in the trailer park. There, the kegs go in a bathtub full of ice and the bathroom door never locks and no matter how you time it, someone will need a beer when you need to pee so it’s best if you take a friend to the bathroom with you—to hold the door closed, unless you want a hallway full of people with red solo cups to see you sitting on the toilet mid-stream, which at that point in my life would be the worst thing ever, but only because I had no idea what’s to come. So I took the birth control pills with a self-discipline better applied to other areas of my life, and I did this for so long it becomes difficult to track or remember how long those little pills have been a consistent part of my day, every day, until the years stack up and even though I know there is a slightly elevated risk of breast cancer, that pales in comparison to being like so many other girls I knew; girls who got pregnant young and then got stuck because the baby’s dad always took the nearest exit and it’s so much harder to leave town unless it’s on your own two legs only. Anything else would just slow me down, make me feel like leaving is too scary, until at some point when I might look around and stop seeing that town for what it really is: a place somehow both stagnant and windy, small but firmly rooted in the wide-open plains that make it seem like the sun is plopping down for the night right across the next hill.
6. According to my mother, in a story I’ve heard in different iterations over time, she was resting, pregnant belly large and looming, as my father, his mother, and sister sat at the kitchen table. Mom overhead their discussion, which turned on what I should be named. Various highly femininized names were tossed about, names such as Tiffany or perhaps Debbie. Angrily, because it was offensive to her that they might discuss the naming of her baby without her input, Mom walked into the kitchen and said, the baby’s name will be Jonnie, whether it’s a boy or a girl. I share the name of my father, though with a different spelling. I also share the middle name of my mother: Lynne, a name that was predominantly male until after the start of the twentieth century. Being a female with a conventionally male name has offered both benefits and challenges, such as when I was a child and would ask a friend to spend the night but if I had not yet met her parents, sometimes I would be asked to come meet them just to prove I was actually a girl. Did your parents want a boy? I am often asked when meeting a new person, and despite the number of times I’ve been asked, I do not have a response. I do not know. But what I do know is this: Men can get breast cancer, but it is one hundred times more likely to affect women. In about half the cases, the woman has no known risk factors. While a family history of breast cancer increases the risk of developing breast cancer, no one in my family had breast cancer that I know of. Simply being a female is a risk factor, regardless of the standard gender of your name.
7. Red solo cups. Red dye number 40. Plastic Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven lining the cabinet. Bright red Slurpees, after driving across town to the nearest 7-11. Might as well buy a pack of Marlboros while there. Grab a bag of Doritos to eat while driving home, sunroof open, refinery smell wafting into the car while “Baby Got Back” or maybe some Lynyrd Skynyrd plays loudly. Canned green beans. Leftovers—including the canned green beans, if there is a vegetable—heated in the microwave in plastic containers until piping hot. Red Bull and vodka, shot after shot until one day I think I might vomit just from the smell of the Red Bull when a guy at work drinks it. Red licorice. Red hot dogs, spinning in their case in the convenience store next to the place where I work, hungover and craving the spicy, greasy meat. I walk there through the shop where motorcycles idle and the smell of exhaust remains on my clothes, outside to where the refinery stands sentry, pillows of fumes and bright orange flames rising. I walk back with the terrible spicy hot dog, sipping a giant soda, through the exhaust and the mechanics smoking their cigarettes, past the pictures of naked women they all have hanging up in their mechanic’s stalls (until the boss says they can’t have naked photos anymore, maybe because I was hired and am the only female, so they all take those little stickers that are intended to repair a hole torn in a piece of notebook paper so you can put it back into a three ring binder, and they use those stickers to cover up nipples and assholes and spread legs and they think this is funny). I bum a cigarette from the service manager who keeps a pack in his shirt pocket after eating this hot dog.
8. And one day I find myself taking yet another birth control pill, except now I’m in my late twenties and washing it down with a Miller Lite that functions as a sort of appetizer for the Jim Beam later, both of which will be dinner. And then I blink and I’m washing down the pill with a big glass of red wine which might be followed later by whiskey, and I do this even when it doesn’t taste good anymore and it’s not fun anymore but because what else would I do?
9. Due to my fears of having a child too young, I determine I must never have one, until I meet a man who makes it seem as if it might be possible to have a child and not totally fuck the kid up. A man who might not leave suddenly, or cheat, or lie. This is an unexpected thing, this unexpected man, and it takes some time to determine what to do. No woman in my family—with the exception of my grandmother—has been married fewer than three times, some as many as six or eight times, and because of this and the men* I’ve known, it has been relatively easy to determine marriage is a doomed prospect. But then this man asks me to marry him, and though I fully expected to panic and either say no or just not go through with the wedding, I did go through with it, because he is steady and calm both in life and in his love for me. And after several years together, including five years of marriage, he says he wants to try having a baby, and I decide that maybe it would be fine to leave this one to fate. I assume—oddly, given my nearly incessant fears of pregnancy—that somehow, I won’t get pregnant easily. And when the little stick you pee on six weeks later shows two faint lines, I am shocked not only that my body has taken part in this creation, but also that I managed to wait this long. Just be sure you have a baby by the time you are thirty-five, the doctor had said, because it just gets risky after that. On a sunny, green August morning, I deliver a daughter, and the following month, I turn thirty-six. This allows me to believe—close though it may be—that I have dodged the risk inherent in later-life pregnancy. I was thirty-five, after all, when she emerged, crying and presenting herself to us in much the same way my shock at becoming a parent did: messy and loud, refusing to be ignored.
*These men have included, but are not limited to: the one who did not like it when I said no, and so he ignored it and kept going as if he did not notice my tears that wet his naked shoulders and made my mascara run and my voice stop working, then later stalked me when I broke up with him; the one who cheated on me on every possible occasion, because men have needs and it’s evolution, we’re supposed to scatter our seed; the much older men who didn’t seem creepy at the time, because I was so young and didn’t really know any better and just wanted someone to tell me it was all going to be okay.
10. The baby cries a lot. And though—or maybe because—I nurse her like a champ, she only really seems to sleep when she drifts off on my chest after nursing. In the middle of the day, sitting on the sofa while the dog sleeps at my feet, I nurse her until she falls asleep and if I remain there, where she can keep her head upright and her forehead resting just below my collarbone, it’s fine. But I find it so hard to sit still, to not do other things while the baby sleeps, so I move, gently and slowly, to lay her down in her crib, where she can rest with the door closed and the baby monitor on alert. As soon as I lay her down, she begins to cry, and after a few days, we’re both so exhausted neither of us can think straight. At night, I must sit up to nurse her or she doesn’t stop crying. As soon as I move to lay her back down, she begins to cry. In desperation, I put her in her car seat and this works. The pediatrician says she has reflux—lying flat is painful for her. They call in a prescription, and I hesitate to fill the little dropper and give her the drug because she is so perfect, so rosy and innocent, and I am trying so hard not to be the kind of parent who keeps an ashtray near the baby’s changing table, so that I somehow (in my exhaustion) don’t recognize that the medicine is not the same as secondhand smoke or other chemicals. I’m trying so hard to do the right thing, and though I eventually cave in and fill the little dropper to the marked line with a white liquid from a brown glass bottle, placing it carefully just inside her little pink lips and dripping the medicine into her throat, I feel terrible that this seemingly flawless child needs something to ease any pain—where did I go wrong? So even when I can sleep, I don’t, because I feel guilty that she’s in her car seat when she isn’t even in the damn car, car seat resting on the floor by my bed. I don’t sleep because I worry that any second she will wake up crying, and my eyes stay open for so long they hurt when I blink them. All these things happen until one day, a palpable lump can be found, and I find myself contemplating the reasons for this lump, for the ways in which this body has revolted and attempted to cave in on itself, consume itself. I go for a walk in a familiar area and realize how now my body feels unfamiliar to me; it’s a home in which I know all the vessels, all the nooks and ways of movement but again I find it difficult to rest as I am hyper vigilant, like waiting for the baby to cry except now it’s my body crying. I want to lie down in the cool grass outside this church, a different church, a white clapboard church, to sit like a deer unmoving, curled under the branches of the crabapple tree.
We live under an illusion of control. Perhaps it’s simply human nature to speculate, especially during crisis: there is a need to be able to explain the things that upend us. Maybe it’s a way of making sense of chaos—of working to instill order on that which cannot be controlled. When there is no easy answer, the “what ifs” can feel like an endless hamster wheel of chances and there is rarely one capital-T truth. I’m always looking for the gray area, the shadowy possibilities. I am trying to center the experience of this fear and a tendency to try to put into order countless probabilities.
JV Genova holds an MFA in nonfiction from Colorado State University. She recently decided to leave academia for government work. When she isn’t writing, she dabbles in photography and grows potatoes. She cannot believe she is someone’s mother. She can be found on Twitter @jv_genova and on Instagram @jv_genova.
