In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. —Zora Neale Hurston

The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost

that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house.

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.

I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions.

And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it.

And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other.

If you could harness

that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until...

trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs.

Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that?

How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you?

Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

a commenter said to you that you were pretty and smart and charming, but as long as you were zaftig you’d never have your choice of lovers. You remember feeling outrage, and then processing the reality, the practicality, of what he’d said. You were so angry at the world.

You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

She loves you. She sees your subtle, ineffable qualities. You are the only one for her in all the world. She trusts you. She wants to keep you safe. She wants to grow old with you. She thinks you’re beautiful. She thinks you’re sexy. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something stunningly filthy, and there is a kick of want between your legs. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like the luckiest person in the whole world.

By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.

Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord.

The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it.

But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.

A line has been crossed—you’ve fallen in love.

This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness.

You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She haunts your erotic imagination.

desire tinged with obsession.

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.

This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.

the necessary sacredness of private space (of the body, of the mind).

Cheap thrillers with apocalyptic themes and biblical righteousness: Could there have been anything else so perfectly constructed for your teenage self?

Then one day you learned that rapture could also mean “blissful happiness,” and you understood, fully: that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.

Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness.

The literature of queer domestic abuse is lousy with references to this27 punctured28 dream,29 which proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, a sprained wrist. Even the enduring symbol of queerness—the rainbow—is a promise not to repeat an act of supreme violence by a capricious and rageful god: I won’t flood the whole world again. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Do you trust me?

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.

Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system.

You have always been a hedonist, and she is there to indulge with you, with an animal hunger that matches your own.

She sits there, looking butch, and pats her lap. You sit. You haven’t had many boyfriends or girlfriends, and none of them—and certainly

no flirtatious people in your past—have ever gestured to you like this. You feel calm, content, a little high. Just a girl sitting on her girl’s lap.

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

“If you want to be my friend, you must do two things. First, forget I am a lesbian. And second, never forget I am a lesbian.”33

This is the curse of the queer woman—eternal liminality. You are two things, maybe even more; and you are neither.

The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another.

“Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?”

This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?

You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me.

You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh;

It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to.

She says she loves you, sometimes. She sees your qualities, and you should be ashamed of them. If only you were the only one for her. She’d keep you safe, she’d grow old with you, if she could trust you. You’re not sexy, but she will have sex with you. Sometimes when you look at your phone, she has sent you something stunningly cruel, and there is a kick of fear between your shoulder blades. Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like she’s determining the best way to take you apart.

like a good friend who can’t shed a bad lover.