No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

She thought: I am in a kind of trance. She was just blowing around. It lasted about twenty-five minutes, a very, very long time to be just blowing around. Mostly, you waft for a second or two, a half second, maybe. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to describe it, to regain the perspective. You say, It was like I was just blowing around, and you wave your arms in the air. But there were no arms like that, and you know it.

They were in a wilderness that was too wild for me, they were living with bears, they were bears, their words flew past deadly animal teeth. I wished I were hearing about this in second or even third hand: “We had a terrible fight,” “I heard they had a terrible fight,” “I had an acquaintance who knew a couple who, back in the early part of the century, had a terrible fight, perhaps even had terrible fights on a regular basis, this acquaintance doesn’t know for sure, she is realizing now that she didn’t really know the couple, on account of the fact that she had mixed intentions with regard to the man in the couple, intentions that now are even more ancient history than this ancient, historical, terrible fight.”

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby’s soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby’s psyche. I whispered: Isn’t that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn’t that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.

Oh, that. That’s not religious. My mom does it with her nails, we call it Backles. Backles? Yeah. She touches your back like this? Yeah. No offense, but your mom might be a pervert. No she’s not. Backles is actually called foreplay, and it’s to get you in the mood. What mood? Reckless abandon.

In the fall of 2001, I met a man named Ed Borger. We all did, actually, the four of us met with Ed Borger once a week; he was our family counselor. This was the year when Lyon had acute allergies, a rageful year spent entirely in my care. The counseling was Tom’s idea; I think he hoped this professional outsider would be stunned by our mess and blame Sarah, the mother, for it. But Ed wasn’t fazed; in fact, he suggested the dynamic had served each of us well. Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family. And we would be left dynamic-less, four people alone with all the wrong feelings for one another.