En Caul
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Like Margaret Mead, I’m fat with memory; hundreds and hundreds of thousands; millions of memories. I keep meaning to sit down and actually count them. It would be strange to bring that upon myself, to let them come at me willy nilly, good and bad in a great deluge. The 14th of February: I’m with Mom in the art museum, making homemade valentines. We press pulp into window screen and sprinkle flowers. When it dries, rose petals are embedded into brand new paper. Sometime else, we’re coming home from the lake. Dad’s impatient in an MG convertible. He yells at us to duck so he can drive beneath a stalled train. Mom says, “Nope. No fuckin way.” As she unloads us, the train starts. Dad insists we would’ve made it but he's wrong.
Mom gave us life a few times. Cue Saturday morning cartoons. She-ra and He-man. Sister and brother. We brandish light spitting swords and hold them towards the stars. I HAVE THE POWER! The word “power” is a reverberating echo in the mountains of New Mexico. A rattlesnake catches me coming outta the outhouse. I close my eyes to the soap. All the hippies showered at Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch. There’s so few ghosts in attendance. I expected vaginal caves dripping pink-blue-green. I expected clouds, serene and wobbly like a child’s drawing. Op! Another! The phone rings with congratulations and then the doorbell. Men exclaim over a giant bottle of champagne, tall as a toddler, but men can’t handle success. Man of The Hour hulked out. He wrecked the kitchen and wrestled the stove. He tore O’Keefes Clouds from the wall. Daytime clouds sailed into the dark yard. Glass shattered. The stove followed. In the car, I hugged a koala. It was my birthday. I’m newly 9 but I’m back in New Mexico being born. The whole commune is in attendance. Not the guru though, a conspicuous absence. He’s scared of the baby. Their whispers are giddy with fear. They’re already telling a story so I don a costume. I come out in a caul. They claim I made eye contact with everyone in the room except my mother. It was only then that I screamed, as if I recognized them and knew well enough to be afraid. My first assessment of this incarnation was that I was well and truly fucked. |
DIA VANGUNTEN
did not eat pink horseshoes on her 8th birthday. She does write magical realism. “En Caul” is part of a larger project that explores the stories we tell, the stories we don’t tell and how we mythologize to survive. |
These assholes again?
A caul had currency in that crowd. Folklore calls it a magical signifier. The veiled traveler retains something of her last world and perceives the next. These babies are destined for greatness. They possess darkness. They are bad omens. They are good luck. Is the caul the amulet and the baby the lucky one? Or is the child but a charm? There seems to be some confusion.
This could go on forever. I could never collect everything into one jungian pile. I’m a hoarder in the house of memory. The floorboards bulge with crowded bits. Is it a fire hazard?
My facts: It was my birthday party but I showed up late, after midnight, wearing only a veil. Like Solome. My outfit caused a ruckus. A real hocus pocus. No one noticed the missing afterbirth.
Hard fact: Almost killed my mother. (I grabbed the amniotic sac but left the placenta behind.)
My fictions: A viral tiktok, I’m a puppy with a fluffy voice -- “I was born a dog. I identify as a dog. But according to my mom, I’m just a bayyyyby.” *bashful batting paw* #itme
Mom texted an article and a fact: A so-called “ Mermaid birth” is rare. Only 1 in 80,000 are born “en caul.” I felt sufficiently special for being born with panache. Mom followed up with three exclamation points. (!!!) In that particular telling of the story, we left out the part where she crawled across the desert. The guru said it was drama. The doctor said it was sepsis.
*
When the Doctors asked about stress, I scoffed. This was a physical thing that was really happening. This was REAL. My actual physical body was malfunctioning. I called them “falling episodes'' as if I were a wane Victorian landing on a velvet chaise with a soft plop. I was a balloon sinking to the ground....limp and lilting. It actually felt like that, like I was losing myself in slow motion. I was not especially surprised when this new gravity overtook me.
I’d felt its weight bearing down between my shoulder blades,
*
I got the drifting pauses from Paul who got them from Betty. She’d press her teeth together and lick her lipsticked lips. I feel this in my own face. Mom snaps and says again how she hates it. Your Dad and Betty did the same thing. Like them, I’m embarrassed. I’m wounded. I say “I was just thinking” which seems only fair. Mom scowls. She doesn’t know what she knows. They’re called absences. They’re called epilepsy. I never use that word though. I will recall the girl from high school and how the boys used to say “Throw her in the pool with a box of tide and get yer laundry done.” The first boy to say it was my cruel, clever boyfriend. Obviously I’d prefer to forget that. I thought I was somehow better than her. I didn’t know yet that we were both epileptic mopheads who fucked the same guy.
Stigma is the world remembering all the shit, all at once, a great echo of ouch.
I’m blue in Betty’s blue kitchen but she’s long gone. Uncle Donny’s on a jag because I live in a rough neighborhood, where rich white people used to live. Grandpa Floyd and the brothers would rollerskate on the top floor of an old grand. A ballroom. Donny mentions which mansion but I have one of my absences. Donny ain’t bothered. He launches into a story about Grandpa’s Grandpa. The cops were chasing him so he hopped a train. They cornered him in the caboose and he had a fit and fell off the back. Or the cops pushed him and he hit his head on the tracks, had a fit and died. There's always two versions. We have fits in our family. I laugh because it’s true. One of us is always causing a scene. I ask him about Uncle Herb. Did he marry his aunt or his sister in law? Donny’s into genealogy now so he snaps: I'm your cousin. I just blink at him.
“Tell Donny how you ignored Floyd’s little ticker. He chased after her in his bathrobe screaming ‘No granddaughter of mine is gonna drive a death car!’ He exposed himself. Robe came undone, colostomy bag and everything.”
I explain: “Grandpa said it was a death car because it was a black sports car.”
“It was two death cars! One was a head-on collision, the other had a totaled rear end. They soldered two halves together. We got a letter from the state of Michigan.”
I yawned, a big yowling stretch of the jowls. I yawned again and again, in painful repetition. Dad said, “Oh I'm sorry, are we boring you?”
It was a fit: a focal seizure of the frontal lobe. I thought I was just exhausted, like down to my bones. In my cells, mitochondria called uncle. I’m not your uncle, I’m your cousin. You’re not tired, you’re dramatic. Drama drama drama. This is how you bully the body. Someone taught my mother and she passed it on to me. Jewelry, quilts, grandfather clocks, ancestral trauma.
*
I’m back with Betty on beechway. Day of the giant champagne. Floyd’s at the party but Grandma stays with us. I open presents in Betty’s blue kitchen -- a stuffed koala and magical unicorn stickers. When pressed, the oily iridescence is misplaced. I blew out 9 candles....no, wait. It was 8. I had a Holiday Inn slumber party for my 9th birthday. On my 8th birthday, Betty felt sorry for me so she let us eat sugar cereal. Pink horseshoes floated in a spoonful of milk. We watched cartoons. A single girl smurf in a sexist society. Care Bears had it all figured out: their token characteristic just emblazoned on their midsections. He-man made his appearance and my brother leapt to Grandpa’s chair. I HAVE THE POWER! I was too busy with fret and pink horseshoes. The men were drinking. Betty’s dread was contagious.
*
Two men followed me to the gas station and watched from velveteen seats as I filled Mom’s tank. The elder lit a menthol and diagnosed me as possessed. She used to be so spirited but now she’s drained of life force. She's her mother’s familiar.
(How dare they? I HAVE THE POWER!!!)
Nah, ya don't. Dad picked you up at the hospital. He took you to inkie’s for pizza but you fell out and took the gumball machines down with you. There's gumballs and blood and broken glass. And spilled ink. Inkies. There was a toy capsule and inside, a tiny lantern. Neon green.
Noooo. The lantern was Tucson. You lied to mom because you were too small to be walking to Safeway with pilfered quarters. You’re at Dad’s now eating the most delicious peach cobbler
from the neighbor’s farmstand. Ice cream on top. You’ll never know this taste again. You’ll put the spoon down when mom calls. “Where the hell have you been? My car is outta gas!”
*
When the doctors asked about stress, I laughed. I provided proof of my former vitality. By day, I worked at an inner city day camp. By night, I was a cocktail waitress at a jazz club. I was a workout addict, a daughter, a sister. I was the proprietor of Velvet Elvis, the city’s only vintage clothing store. Through it all, I was a 4.0 honors student. (Mom and I were a power duo on campus. We attended the same classes. I was an academic wingman.) I didn’t do everything all at once but it feels that way. I packed it in because I didn't have long to be that person.
Doc scribbled as my sisters slipped past the curtains. They curled goose-prickled shoulders. “Mom won’t come in. She says you’re faking. She says to say she knows.” They hung their heads. The doctor made another notation.
“You’re not allowed to be sick. Mom’s already the sick one.”
They knew the drill. We were supposed to feel her pain over our own. She hijacked our nervous systems. She keened all night while we begged her to stay on Earth. She had nothing to live for. We struck life and death bargains that expired every 24hrs. It was a grim quotidian task. The doctor surveyed my sisters, their terror and disarray. They needed haircuts. I reached for my gaggle but the doctor said, “Girls, go get your mother.” She’d already driven off in a huff, squealing wheels and burning rubber.
I jumped to my own defense: “It’s not psychosomatic. It’s physical. It’s in my body.”
I sound like the killer in the 80’s movie about the babysitter. The caller is inside the house. The doctor said, “Stress isn’t helping.” I didn’t like his knowing look. I’d just met him but he’d already seen too much. I called my sisters close and tugged my gown past the two patches with metal nubs. “Don’t mind my new bionic nipples.” They laughed and leaned against the bed.
The doctor said, “Something’s gotta give.”
I packed it in because....rebellion. I planted flags on the mantle of identity.
Proof of life had overtaxed the machine. Mom was wrong. It wasn’t an invention. I wasn’t looking for attention. I wanted release. I still wonder if it's just a ruse to get rest. I even asked a neurologist if maybe I might’ve faked the EEG results by “trancing out” during the two hour test. No kiddo, that’s not how it works. He tells me my brain spikes 6 times every so many seconds.
*
I once slipped into momentary despair because I was stupefied by mittens, what they were or why I had them. Gloves would’ve been an easy guess. Long term memory was locked away safe but short term memory was a sieve. I stopped reading fiction. Couldn't follow the story. I abandoned a novel. Couldn't tell the story. I stopped ordering pizza because I once forgot my address. I moved out of my beloved 4th floor walk-up. I wasn’t dying on those stairs. I didn't answer 3am calls because I couldn't drive. No more groggy runs to the gas station. Eventually the seizures waned. Short term memory returned and long term memory unlocked.
I got a motorcycle and started writing fiction again.
*
Inside a toy capsule, a tiny lantern glimmers neon green. I try to hide it from my mother.
The radio says there's a kodachrome -- a rainbow! -- but mama is gonna take it away. The holographic universe says it can never forget itself because there’s a galaxy in every star. Ego insists there’s a primordial essence that sets each person apart. If you’re old enough to see yourself in babies then you know the smallest portion holds the whole. Each shard of self is a gestalt record. A gob of slime carries the genome. Identical twins meet in Minnesota for the first time. Their similarities prove that “personhood” is DNA. At best, we’re a random jumble of genetic components that makes us different from our sisters.
Self is essentially unstable. There is no fixed point of being. Time isn’t linear and “personality” is a process. Identity is a turning wheel, a tilting windmill. It’s dutch tulips and portuguese fishes. As far as I know. The Greeks think I’m Greek. I tell them I’m from the Azores and they clap their hands. That settles that. The semen of seamen! I don't spit into a tube because I want that clap to be true -- a lie in the sunshine. Coming off the train in Piraeus, we smelled strawberries. It’s been years since a strawberry smelled like itself. We buy them and shiver. The sun is setting and a winter wind is whipping off the water. Greece is cold in December.
Fire is feasting on New Mexico. A controlled burn got out of control and joined forces with a flame that laid dormant underground before rising up in fury. She burned slow through three snows, three melts. Under the wildflowers, down deep, she was a red hot ember. That whole time, she was sparking. A seizure. A tendon turns in my right eye, like a jump rope, and hurts for days after. Gumballs are rolling. Clouds are flying. Who am I?
I thought I knew that much at least but what a naive notion. We’re warped by the lies we tell to protect the people we love.
Life is bundled memories. Brain is the turtle that holds up the whole world. How many selves have I been already, just in this one single life? My story is 1000 stories. These stories can be told thousands of ways. Heroes and villains are trading cards, easily swapped.
A caul had currency in that crowd. Folklore calls it a magical signifier. The veiled traveler retains something of her last world and perceives the next. These babies are destined for greatness. They possess darkness. They are bad omens. They are good luck. Is the caul the amulet and the baby the lucky one? Or is the child but a charm? There seems to be some confusion.
This could go on forever. I could never collect everything into one jungian pile. I’m a hoarder in the house of memory. The floorboards bulge with crowded bits. Is it a fire hazard?
My facts: It was my birthday party but I showed up late, after midnight, wearing only a veil. Like Solome. My outfit caused a ruckus. A real hocus pocus. No one noticed the missing afterbirth.
Hard fact: Almost killed my mother. (I grabbed the amniotic sac but left the placenta behind.)
My fictions: A viral tiktok, I’m a puppy with a fluffy voice -- “I was born a dog. I identify as a dog. But according to my mom, I’m just a bayyyyby.” *bashful batting paw* #itme
Mom texted an article and a fact: A so-called “ Mermaid birth” is rare. Only 1 in 80,000 are born “en caul.” I felt sufficiently special for being born with panache. Mom followed up with three exclamation points. (!!!) In that particular telling of the story, we left out the part where she crawled across the desert. The guru said it was drama. The doctor said it was sepsis.
*
When the Doctors asked about stress, I scoffed. This was a physical thing that was really happening. This was REAL. My actual physical body was malfunctioning. I called them “falling episodes'' as if I were a wane Victorian landing on a velvet chaise with a soft plop. I was a balloon sinking to the ground....limp and lilting. It actually felt like that, like I was losing myself in slow motion. I was not especially surprised when this new gravity overtook me.
I’d felt its weight bearing down between my shoulder blades,
*
I got the drifting pauses from Paul who got them from Betty. She’d press her teeth together and lick her lipsticked lips. I feel this in my own face. Mom snaps and says again how she hates it. Your Dad and Betty did the same thing. Like them, I’m embarrassed. I’m wounded. I say “I was just thinking” which seems only fair. Mom scowls. She doesn’t know what she knows. They’re called absences. They’re called epilepsy. I never use that word though. I will recall the girl from high school and how the boys used to say “Throw her in the pool with a box of tide and get yer laundry done.” The first boy to say it was my cruel, clever boyfriend. Obviously I’d prefer to forget that. I thought I was somehow better than her. I didn’t know yet that we were both epileptic mopheads who fucked the same guy.
Stigma is the world remembering all the shit, all at once, a great echo of ouch.
I’m blue in Betty’s blue kitchen but she’s long gone. Uncle Donny’s on a jag because I live in a rough neighborhood, where rich white people used to live. Grandpa Floyd and the brothers would rollerskate on the top floor of an old grand. A ballroom. Donny mentions which mansion but I have one of my absences. Donny ain’t bothered. He launches into a story about Grandpa’s Grandpa. The cops were chasing him so he hopped a train. They cornered him in the caboose and he had a fit and fell off the back. Or the cops pushed him and he hit his head on the tracks, had a fit and died. There's always two versions. We have fits in our family. I laugh because it’s true. One of us is always causing a scene. I ask him about Uncle Herb. Did he marry his aunt or his sister in law? Donny’s into genealogy now so he snaps: I'm your cousin. I just blink at him.
“Tell Donny how you ignored Floyd’s little ticker. He chased after her in his bathrobe screaming ‘No granddaughter of mine is gonna drive a death car!’ He exposed himself. Robe came undone, colostomy bag and everything.”
I explain: “Grandpa said it was a death car because it was a black sports car.”
“It was two death cars! One was a head-on collision, the other had a totaled rear end. They soldered two halves together. We got a letter from the state of Michigan.”
I yawned, a big yowling stretch of the jowls. I yawned again and again, in painful repetition. Dad said, “Oh I'm sorry, are we boring you?”
It was a fit: a focal seizure of the frontal lobe. I thought I was just exhausted, like down to my bones. In my cells, mitochondria called uncle. I’m not your uncle, I’m your cousin. You’re not tired, you’re dramatic. Drama drama drama. This is how you bully the body. Someone taught my mother and she passed it on to me. Jewelry, quilts, grandfather clocks, ancestral trauma.
*
I’m back with Betty on beechway. Day of the giant champagne. Floyd’s at the party but Grandma stays with us. I open presents in Betty’s blue kitchen -- a stuffed koala and magical unicorn stickers. When pressed, the oily iridescence is misplaced. I blew out 9 candles....no, wait. It was 8. I had a Holiday Inn slumber party for my 9th birthday. On my 8th birthday, Betty felt sorry for me so she let us eat sugar cereal. Pink horseshoes floated in a spoonful of milk. We watched cartoons. A single girl smurf in a sexist society. Care Bears had it all figured out: their token characteristic just emblazoned on their midsections. He-man made his appearance and my brother leapt to Grandpa’s chair. I HAVE THE POWER! I was too busy with fret and pink horseshoes. The men were drinking. Betty’s dread was contagious.
*
Two men followed me to the gas station and watched from velveteen seats as I filled Mom’s tank. The elder lit a menthol and diagnosed me as possessed. She used to be so spirited but now she’s drained of life force. She's her mother’s familiar.
(How dare they? I HAVE THE POWER!!!)
Nah, ya don't. Dad picked you up at the hospital. He took you to inkie’s for pizza but you fell out and took the gumball machines down with you. There's gumballs and blood and broken glass. And spilled ink. Inkies. There was a toy capsule and inside, a tiny lantern. Neon green.
Noooo. The lantern was Tucson. You lied to mom because you were too small to be walking to Safeway with pilfered quarters. You’re at Dad’s now eating the most delicious peach cobbler
from the neighbor’s farmstand. Ice cream on top. You’ll never know this taste again. You’ll put the spoon down when mom calls. “Where the hell have you been? My car is outta gas!”
*
When the doctors asked about stress, I laughed. I provided proof of my former vitality. By day, I worked at an inner city day camp. By night, I was a cocktail waitress at a jazz club. I was a workout addict, a daughter, a sister. I was the proprietor of Velvet Elvis, the city’s only vintage clothing store. Through it all, I was a 4.0 honors student. (Mom and I were a power duo on campus. We attended the same classes. I was an academic wingman.) I didn’t do everything all at once but it feels that way. I packed it in because I didn't have long to be that person.
Doc scribbled as my sisters slipped past the curtains. They curled goose-prickled shoulders. “Mom won’t come in. She says you’re faking. She says to say she knows.” They hung their heads. The doctor made another notation.
“You’re not allowed to be sick. Mom’s already the sick one.”
They knew the drill. We were supposed to feel her pain over our own. She hijacked our nervous systems. She keened all night while we begged her to stay on Earth. She had nothing to live for. We struck life and death bargains that expired every 24hrs. It was a grim quotidian task. The doctor surveyed my sisters, their terror and disarray. They needed haircuts. I reached for my gaggle but the doctor said, “Girls, go get your mother.” She’d already driven off in a huff, squealing wheels and burning rubber.
I jumped to my own defense: “It’s not psychosomatic. It’s physical. It’s in my body.”
I sound like the killer in the 80’s movie about the babysitter. The caller is inside the house. The doctor said, “Stress isn’t helping.” I didn’t like his knowing look. I’d just met him but he’d already seen too much. I called my sisters close and tugged my gown past the two patches with metal nubs. “Don’t mind my new bionic nipples.” They laughed and leaned against the bed.
The doctor said, “Something’s gotta give.”
I packed it in because....rebellion. I planted flags on the mantle of identity.
Proof of life had overtaxed the machine. Mom was wrong. It wasn’t an invention. I wasn’t looking for attention. I wanted release. I still wonder if it's just a ruse to get rest. I even asked a neurologist if maybe I might’ve faked the EEG results by “trancing out” during the two hour test. No kiddo, that’s not how it works. He tells me my brain spikes 6 times every so many seconds.
*
I once slipped into momentary despair because I was stupefied by mittens, what they were or why I had them. Gloves would’ve been an easy guess. Long term memory was locked away safe but short term memory was a sieve. I stopped reading fiction. Couldn't follow the story. I abandoned a novel. Couldn't tell the story. I stopped ordering pizza because I once forgot my address. I moved out of my beloved 4th floor walk-up. I wasn’t dying on those stairs. I didn't answer 3am calls because I couldn't drive. No more groggy runs to the gas station. Eventually the seizures waned. Short term memory returned and long term memory unlocked.
I got a motorcycle and started writing fiction again.
*
Inside a toy capsule, a tiny lantern glimmers neon green. I try to hide it from my mother.
The radio says there's a kodachrome -- a rainbow! -- but mama is gonna take it away. The holographic universe says it can never forget itself because there’s a galaxy in every star. Ego insists there’s a primordial essence that sets each person apart. If you’re old enough to see yourself in babies then you know the smallest portion holds the whole. Each shard of self is a gestalt record. A gob of slime carries the genome. Identical twins meet in Minnesota for the first time. Their similarities prove that “personhood” is DNA. At best, we’re a random jumble of genetic components that makes us different from our sisters.
Self is essentially unstable. There is no fixed point of being. Time isn’t linear and “personality” is a process. Identity is a turning wheel, a tilting windmill. It’s dutch tulips and portuguese fishes. As far as I know. The Greeks think I’m Greek. I tell them I’m from the Azores and they clap their hands. That settles that. The semen of seamen! I don't spit into a tube because I want that clap to be true -- a lie in the sunshine. Coming off the train in Piraeus, we smelled strawberries. It’s been years since a strawberry smelled like itself. We buy them and shiver. The sun is setting and a winter wind is whipping off the water. Greece is cold in December.
Fire is feasting on New Mexico. A controlled burn got out of control and joined forces with a flame that laid dormant underground before rising up in fury. She burned slow through three snows, three melts. Under the wildflowers, down deep, she was a red hot ember. That whole time, she was sparking. A seizure. A tendon turns in my right eye, like a jump rope, and hurts for days after. Gumballs are rolling. Clouds are flying. Who am I?
I thought I knew that much at least but what a naive notion. We’re warped by the lies we tell to protect the people we love.
Life is bundled memories. Brain is the turtle that holds up the whole world. How many selves have I been already, just in this one single life? My story is 1000 stories. These stories can be told thousands of ways. Heroes and villains are trading cards, easily swapped.