In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place;

How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering?

You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer— away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.

You cried in front of many people. You missed readings, parties, the supermoon. You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen. You made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one.

she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.

Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También.

If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new—observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed.

Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky. She did what you’d wished a million others had done—looked past arbitrary markers of social currency and seen your brain and ferocious talent and quick wit and pugnacious approach to assholes.

Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.

There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, of course, is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in

There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter.

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones— do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.[12] They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.

Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand;

The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory.

The curtain rises on two women sitting across from each other: carmen, a racially ambiguous fat woman in her midtwenties with terrible posture. She is typing away on her computer. Across from her, the woman in the dream house, white, petite, and boyish, also typing, her jaw set hard. Around them, the house inhales, exhales, inhales again.

she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know.[19] Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.

Over the course of your relationship, she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: your roommate, your roommate’s girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven’t even met yet, a dozen of her friends, not a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and—in perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise—her father.

That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.

How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.

In the morning, the woman who made you ill with fear brews a pot of coffee and jokes with you and kisses you and sweetly scratches your scalp like nothing has happened. And, as though you’d slept, a new day begins again.

Bergman’s Paula is in a terrible, double-edged tumble: as she becomes convinced she is forgetful, fragile, then insane, her instability increases. Everything she is, is unmade by psychological violence: she is radiant, then hysterical, then utterly haunted. By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison.

reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.

You bawl your eyes out and miss the punch line entirely: the weight you need to lose is 105 pounds and blonde and sitting in the waiting room with an annoyed expression on her face.

Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.

She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break.

You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.

Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

She could have run. The door was open. But it was as if she didn’t even know what she was looking at.

On that night, the gun is set upon the mantlepiece. The metaphorical gun, of course. If there were a literal gun, you’d probably be dead.

came of age in a culture where gay marriage went from comic impossibility to foregone conclusion to law of the land. I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.”

this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost:[32] you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do.

And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you’re going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.

You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to

it would take two more summers to realize it was a book about a house that was not a house and a dream that was no dream at all.

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.

The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.

The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse.

Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing.[47] There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.

You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty.

Eventually, you and Val will come to love each other outside this context. You will move in together, get engaged, get married. But in the beginning, this is what holds you together: the knowledge that the two of you are not alone.

Seven years on and I still dream about it, even though I am four houses/three lovers/two states/one wife past the Dream House;

And so seven years on I am still terrified that if I force myself awake (as I learned to do as a child), she will step out of the dream and into the waking world where I am safe and so far away.

When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler.[49] Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.[50] Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?

You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.

What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?

The irony, of course, is that queer folks need that good PR; to fight for rights we don’t have, to retain the ones we do. But haven’t we been trying to say, this whole time, that we’re just like you?

It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept.