Just South of the Solar Plexus

Foreword

Here’s the thing about cancer. You find out real quick that you’re going to die. Most people don’t find out that they’re going to die until they’re, I don’t know, sixty or seventy years old. I found out when I was thirty-three. I was lucky. I was given a second chance with life at a very young age.

As I finish the first draft of this book, I’m asking myself why I’m writing it at all. Why would I tell this story? The first answer is it’s an exorcism. My first life is one that, while rich and strange, I don’t want to repeat. This book is my exorcism. Get all up in the darkness. Get dirty. Then, bring my shadow into the light. And then, burn it. Get clean. Exposure is a weird way to burn but, when something burns, that fire is gonna be seen somewhere by someone, if not everywhere by everyone. So why should I be the only one to gain light and heat from that fire?

The second answer is that I see some parallels between what I did to myself in my first life, and what we as a Western society have been doing on a grand scale for centuries.

The third, and the one with staying power, is that this is what I do. I write. This is the story that has been given to me to give to the world, the way I give: by writing. My first life has given me my second life.

Acknowledgements

I thank first my son. I thank Creator for making him my son and making me his mother. Because I was given the gift of giving life, I came to know life in ways that are more profound, more beautiful, more awesome than can be said here without writing a second book.

I thank next my sisters and brother who have been beside me from the beginning, always and forever, without fail, in sun, storm, sleet and hail. They are each equally precious to me in all their beauty.

I thank my parents. They made me who I am, for better and for worse, and I could not have been given to anyone else. I hope to be as meaningful to my son in all the ways I will surely bless him and fuck him up, too. They gave me the world in every way they could, and love, to boot.

I thank Chandra, Carla, Kamey, Katie, Stephanie, and Anna. They are the sisters Creator made for me; they bring me home to myself and their own spirits every day, whether I am being wholly impossible or not. They are each a shining light I need, each in her own tints, tones and hues.

I thank Nyles, who believed in me enough to share with me his whole self and his whole world, and teach me enough to make me more compassionate. I thank Peter for being my godfather and giving me more blessings than I can count throughout this exorcism. And I thank Myles for his midwifery of this birth, his friendship, and his incredible artistic heart.

All names in this work have been changed.

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PART I

Chapter 1: A Voice is Born

Iwas three years old playing in the hallway of my first house. It was winter in Indiana, dark outside, blue, black, purple, about dinner time and cold outside. Midwestern cold. That house was always the warm amber color of the caves of Lascaux, with just as many tunnels leading to dark chambers in which it was easy to get lost in the mind and the soul—daydreaming and discovering. I was playing with one of those old motorcycle toys where you pull the zipper and it sends the toy racing. I don’t recall what I said or did, but I remember looking at the knees of my mother’s Wranglers as she replied in perfect clarity, Oh, she’s so SENSITIVE! It was the first time I remember hearing it, but it was far from the last, always with that same intonation. The message was clear, sensitive was bad.

The same year, summertime, my father took me camping with his Sierra Club friends. As my father tells the story, we both woke early and got up. He was making coffee, getting breakfast. Once he’d had a pipe and settled a bit, he realized that I was not nearby and went looking for me. I don’t know how far off I was but I had quietly collected a small pile of box turtles, which I caught in the lake nearby and piled up under some trees. Not a bite or snap on me, as calm as you please.

I am independent, quiet, brave, adventurous. I don’t need help, and I don’t ask for a chaperone into the world. I need to see what is out there; I will go; and when I get there I will connect with who and what I find.

I was still three years old, and we were at the 4th of July fireworks with my grandparents. Twilight was just passing and we were sitting on a blanket. The grass was cool and blue. I was holding close to my heart a birthday present from the day before—a black baby doll I named Jessie. She was one of the Strawberry Shortcake dolls. When you squeezed her stomach you smelled oranges. I recall the fireworks were erratic and some people got burnt. A fire must have started because we were all packing up. I wasn’t scared, but I was very alert. And I adored that doll! Years later, I think I was about 22, I asked my mother why on earth she got her white three-year-old a black doll. She said simply, You asked for ‘a brown baby’.

Once, I was four years old, it was nap time and my mother came in the room while I was supposed to be sleeping. I had been pretending to be pregnant and I had Jessie stuffed in my shirt. I was embarrassed for her to see me, so I turned over on my stomach. I remember it hurt pretty badly laying on Jessie’s hard plastic arms and legs. How much I must have wanted children. To be pretending to be pregnant at just four years old.

These are stories that happened in the first few years of my life. I was born in a small town in Indiana, that I haven’t seen since. I have very few memories of that town but I remember the house there with the clarity of needlepoint. The house was spread out, a ranch with a small front yard, almost treeless. My room had small windows that were high up, but I got nice sundown light there. The kitchen was a walk-through between a den with a big wood-burning franklin stove and the dining room. In the front was a living room, the colors were all cool sky blues. Adjacent to that, a hall and dining room, and a hall that ran to the three bedrooms. The colors are the 70s, that pervasive amber light, always, no matter the season, and everything else those blues and browns and burnt oranges. Everything is an afghan or a corduroy.

Off the den (shag carpet, wood paneling, bird dog printed upholstery) was a pair of glass doors going to the backyard. The backyard was vast and limitless and ended in an evergreen forest. I have no recollection of going into those woods. I don’t think I would have. It would have been like wandering into my own strange heart, unprotected. I was not ready for that yet. I did that in the safety of those dark chambers in the house. The wandering outside into forests comes, but later.

We had a vegetable garden. It was big and square, everything planted out in neat rows. I recall eating green beans off the vines, and yellow caterpillars everywhere eating the rounded bean leaves. They were warm from the sun but snapped nicely and were sweet. I remember my mother being around a lot. Always doing something—laundry, cooking, but she’s always right there in my peripheral vision. A soft, calm presence.

My mother is lovely. Nurturing, selfless, patient, and empathetic. She spoke in a soft voice, took her time to answer. She rarely yelled. She was easy to be with, cheerful but not so energetic. She always had ideas: taking us to places like nature centers where we made cornhusk dolls, baking together, teaching us to sew and knit. She wanted to be with us. She asked us about our days, she listened when we answered. She never judged, she never gave uninvited advice. She respected us as people with thoughts and ideas and individuality—autonomy, even. She was gracious, always giving what she had. I never saw her buy a piece of clothing for herself until I was in high school. She would make coffee for everyone first thing. She would bring it to you. She was happy to serve and give and be present.

My father worked outside, long hours, six days a week. He was towering, more-than six feet with a solid beard. He smelled like flannel, tobacco and wood shavings. When I was a child he was quiet, but he could have bursts of energy and explosive fun, throwing us babies feet up into the air, buying insane amounts of fireworks, taking us fishing for trout and finding watercress in the sand creek. He also had a temper, but at that time it showed as impatience. I think he was often exhausted. We would see him laid out in front of the Franklin stove asleep for hours on Sundays.

The first child is my older sister. Like my mother, she was quiet, patient, easy to be with, and understanding. Red hair with bangs, big cheeks, and bigger yellow eyes, adorable. She was always drawing, and she could always find the beauty in a thing. No one knows me like my older sister. We played together constantly, and she was always trying to help me, no matter how much I didn’t want to be helped.

I am two and a half years younger than her, spunkier, goofy, with seemingly none of her even keel, though both fire and water—both of which changed and grew. But I was said to know things there was no way I could have known, and to be deeply compassionate, sensitive, loving, smart.

Less than two years after me, another sister. Wildly happy, crazy sweet, and born with a face like a perfect, French china doll. Porcelain skin, massive smile. Like me—alternately stubborn and easy-going. Unlike me—less sensitive, witty on a dime, and funny instead of goofy.

And eighteen months after her, a boy born far too early with far too many challenges, who proved to the world that all the doctors were wrong. He can be a genius, and he will, like me, go anywhere and do anything with idealism and adventure.

My mother’s last pregnancy was very hard, and she almost lost my brother several times. I sometimes imagine that this was difficult for me, too. The age I was, just three, with an older sister who was independent at six, a younger sister who was barely eighteen months and needed her mother, and then me, the middle girl who could entertain herself, wasn’t able to be helpful, nor a good conversationalist, nor needful of too much. There is a portrait taken of me that year wearing a yellow flowered dress, but my hair is dull and hanging loosely down, the fire in my eyes barely a glow, and my mouth is sullen and silent. That was a hard year for me, too.

My mother was hospitalized a lot; neighbors and people from church came to help. One imagines I perhaps did not get enough attention, but when my brother was born two months early with collapsed, underdeveloped lungs and airlifted to a NICU in Indianapolis, I decided to love him to death, not to compete with him. Everyone thought he would die. Or be deaf, blind, mentally disabled. He is none of those things and now tests with a genius IQ. When he came home, I refused to come to dinner and sat next to his basinet all night. They say I would sleep in his crib with him, even when he was very little. My besabuela called me the "dry nurse, in Spanish, of course.

Up to this point—I had just turned three years old—we had not yet moved, but that would come to be a defining feature of my life with my family: moving. Always moving.

When I was four it was a small town, down the mountain in Tennessee. The house was big and old and had a high roof. It was apparently a tin roof, and we had a black walnut tree in the back yard so that when there was a storm or wind, and the walnuts came down on that roof, hitting and rolling endlessly, I really believed the world was breaking apart. I don’t remember being scared, just alert. Very alert to it all, lying in my bed hearing these big black walnuts coming down as summer was becoming fall and you knew the wind was really talking about nothing but winter.

This house had been an old courthouse in this tiny town at the foot of a spirit mountain, the blessed and cursed place. And they had hanged people in the basement, which was unfinished, nothing but cinderblocks and dirt. My father says we kids were never down there, but I have a picture of it in my mind. The brown settled dirt under so much dust, which hung in the air like souls, and caught the light from a window.

There was also a well outside near the house. My sisters and I were playing there once, a humid, heavy summer day. Overcast, probably a nice summer storm coming. There were frogs and fish in there, and I fell in. It wasn’t a big deal, getting me out or anything, but I did fall in. The well was rectangular and deep, and there was a brick border all around it, and I remember the greens of the moss, chartreuse and oak, on those dark bricks bordering the water. Like some Ophelia, there I was in the water. It was a good story that my sisters liked to tell. Exciting, a little dangerous maybe. But I don’t recall being startled or scared, just alert to all these very specific colors and the day: grey, rust, moss green, that dry yellow-green of old moss, the brown and black depth of the water, which was in shadow and so very dark, and very deep. It’s a visual memory for me, filled with feeling, not emotion, but sensing what is around me. I guess I just climbed out.

When I was still four years old, I started school in a blended kindergarten class, half first grade, half kindergarten. My teacher, Mrs Clay, loved me but I had no idea why at the time. She had a beautiful head of full, silvery-white, soft hair, a lovely southern drawl, and a big happy laugh. She was probably in her early 60s, and had a soft, smooth, beautiful moon face, but she also broke a paddle with velocity holes drilled into in on my kindergarten crush. So you heeded her.

Mrs Clay called me Miss Mariah. In retrospect I think she loved me because of what is known in the North as spunk, and in the South as sass. I know I was like that, because I was often described that way, but I don’t remember ever behaving in such a manner as a young kid.

A family friend called me The Enforcer. He said I was passionate and had some sense, apparently, of authority, but again, I don’t recall