"Un/Hinged" by Amanda Gaines

Amanda Gaines

Amanda Gaines

Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer and Ph.D. candidate in OSU's creative writing program. Her poetry and nonfiction are published or awaiting publication in Yemassee, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, New South, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Ninth Letter.

Un/Hinged

A Dream
There’s a cottage atop a pink hill, chrysanthemums and wizened dandelions skirting an emerald lake. There are frogs, of course, blue squirrels sporting dinner gloves, chickadees who make house calls when necessary. Inside, a little fallen angel works on an elixir for permanence. She doesn’t need to feel lonely anymore, her once-beloved halfway across the country, sipping on PBR, courting faceless women. She doesn’t have to worry about her empty-nester parents, sitting silently side by side while watching a detective inspect a dead girl’s finger for prints, eating freeze-pops. In the basement of her cottage, she swirls purple vials of trust and welds locks out of wishbones. She smooths a blueprint across her table. This time, she thinks, let’s approach it from a new perspective.

Reality
There are two sets of joints in each finger except the thumb. Proximal and distal; confounding little things. When I was in elementary school, I remember someone telling me that each time someone popped their knuckles, the tendons grew thicker. I imagined gnarled branches shuddering and shooting off inside my hands. That’s how you get arthritis, they warned. But I couldn’t stop pressing my bones together, couldn’t stop twisting the tips of my fingers, couldn’t stop relishing in that hollow crack of sound. The damage, I figured, had already been done. I don’t remember the first time I popped my joints, but I imagine it was painful. When I used to try to stealthily pull my once-beloved’s toes, he would screech. That hurts. They don’t move that way. I’d try to explain. After the first break, it starts to feel good. After that first moment of separation, of splitting, the body begins to need it. 

Once,
my father took my bedroom door off its hinges. I was in middle school. I’d been fighting with my mother in the kitchen before I stormed off to the solace of my room. I hadn’t realized my father had followed me before I slammed the door. I almost caught his face in the frame. My father is a large man. Gentle. Six feet tall, two hundred pounds. When he forced the door open, I felt as if I might fly back, as if I might grow wings out of shock, as if my desire alone could pry a window loose and provide an escape. You need, he said, to watch what you say to your mother. He left and came back, toolbox in hand. He took a flat blade to my golden hinges. Tiny screws lolled like severed heads. I sat there fuming, wondering why he hadn’t defended me. I watched him strip the one thing I could count on to give me comfort and heave it to the shed like a dead body. He eventually replaced it after I left for college. He measured, cut, and hung a new one in its place and still, it doesn’t quite fit. The damage was done. It never shuts all the way.

Now,
men in denim and stained white t-shirts tape pieces of brown parchment paper to every window of my small home. In the process of repainting the exterior, they’ve ripped off each of the window frames. Pieces of old wood splinter and spread across the lawn. Sawdust slips through the cracks of my front door and coats the living room floor like confectioners sugar. I’m in graduate school, reading about surrealism in film. The men blare Christian rock outside and pull from their Mountain Dew bottles. Surrealism, I read, is interested in conjectures. Surrealism refuses to be here, but is always elsewhere. I highlight the passage in blue. One of the men slides electric tape along the corners of each glass frame, blocking out the sun. Someone changes the station to Hot 100 Hits. I imagine myself inside a brown paper bag, swinging in the hands of a younger version of myself, squished against a ripe, browning banana. The sound of old-school piano instrumentals reverbs through my wrapped house. I am being boxed up, haphazardly packaged. The rooms in my home are pitch black and have been for almost a week now while the men continue their labor. I imagine my angel snapping her fingers and lilac paint sliding down the chipped panels of my house until the whole thing looks like an Easter egg. I think of how my father has never called me just to talk. Of how the last time I saw him, he told me I don’t worry about you like it was a compliment. The singer on the radio promises to leave the door open.

Denotation

  1. un, [uhn]: not
  2. hinge [hinj]: that on which something is based or depends

Connotation

  1. After hitting sixteen, I haven’t been single for more than four months.
  2. My therapist asks me questions we both know the answer to. Would you say your happiness hinges on whether or not your romantic relationships are working? Where do you really see this going? I cross my legs. I don’t want a partnership that looks like my parents. I think I live in a dream world. The first time we met, I told her that I was worried I was borderline. My grandmother had it. My mother, with her Masters in psychology, likes to pretend she knows too much to have it. You, my therapist informs me, feel things more than most people. I tell her, Alone, I am not enough for myself. She sighs. When he leaves you, which he will, you'll need to have a plan.

Three Truths

  1. My father almost left my mother when I was in elementary school. He even packed a bag. My parents fought often, but that time felt different. I remember sitting at the top of our basement’s carpeted stairs, listening in, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
  2. My mother had accused him of lying.
  3. I can’t remember much about that day, but I recall how the clap of the car door shutting convinced me that anything was possible. That even the most solid parts of my reality could be taken apart.

A Lie

  1. Even after my father stayed, I was sure. I was not enough to keep him there.

A Dream
In her kitchen, an angel plucks strawberries from her hair while two cats measure out sugar. She waves her hand and sends knives careening over to the cutting board. Juice pools in it’s sliced creases and drips down the cabinets. She wears a red gingham apron and no shoes. A chorus line of hummingbirds hover in her window frame, mouths open, and The Shirelles fill the room. The angel bangs about the house, balancing a bottle of champagne on her head. She invites all her winged friends over and together they get drunk on honey. Go crazy, she tells them. She reads her palm and wonders what it means to have a splintered love line. The door to her basement yawps and she turns the hummingbirds up. The door to her basement shakes and she makes a mental note to order duct tape. The door to her basement strains against its hinges. She prays that nobody notices. 

Reality
In ASL, the sign for “unhinged” requires one hand. The speaker bends the ends of their fingers at each joint, makes a claw, and twists the air next to their ear. The motion reminds me of prying the lid off a jar of strawberry preserves. Of pressing a cup into a sheet of biscuit dough. It’s the kind of movement I imagine I’d make if the world suddenly went quiet and I was the only one who seemed to notice. 

Once
I move to attend graduate school, I find a new therapist. Upon meeting her, she asks what I want to work on. I have a lot of trust issues, I tell her. She asks me questions, nods. At the end of our session, she asks, Tell me about your mother. I sigh. I love my mother, I begin, but her moods are volatile. I look out the window. Squirrels parkour off my wooden fence. My dad and I, I laugh, used to joke ‘Better you than me’ when things got bad. My therapist furrows her brows. That’s not funny at all. She looks at me and her face betrays her concern. He should have protected you. I try to backtrack. He was. You had to be there. She adjusts in her seat. You were.

Now,
my once-beloved and I have broken up again. He left me right before I moved across the country for graduate school and again, now, before the start of my second year. The timing was terrible. Is terrible. When he told me We work better when we’re together, I believed him. We spent a lot of nights examining our pitfalls. We spent a lot of nights apologizing. Now, I try to pick glass from the window my once-beloved punched off kitchen tiles that’ve been smoothed over by floorers and cry. He severed an artery, was rushed to the hospital where doctors told me he would either die or lose his arm. That night, my once-beloved and I had been drunk. At the bar, he told me my friends never cared about me. I retorted quietly. At least they didn’t leave. At that, he left me again. Before my once-beloved shattered my window, I trailed after him, asking questions. We circled one another in my living room, yelled at one another, as we had so many nights before. He wanted me to be soft as dough. Pliable. I wanted to know what I had done to make him so angry. Before he punched that window, I locked him out of my house. He tells his family and friends that he did it to get back inside. But I’d been standing in front of it. I know now, after considering that squarely centered hole, the ocean of blood that painted my kitchen: it was me he wanted to hit. Just recently, my uncle, my father’s twin brother, commissioned me to edit his football memoir. My father isn’t mentioned in it. This breaks my heart. I call my father and ask him if he’s happy. What I don’t tell him: Do you feel seen? What I mean: Do you know how much I love you? Before my once-beloved shattered my window, I confessed to him after a long month of arduous budgeting, tedious college projects, and simple long distance, I’m worried about you. He smiled. We, he told me, get to worry about each other. Even after the window, the blood, the fear, I didn’t leave him. He visited me a month later from his grandparent’s house in New Orleans where he was recovering. I cried, telling him I was convinced he was waiting to get the things he’d been storing at my house, waiting to be done using my body as a place to put his desire, to leave me. I wouldn't do that to you, he said, guiding my mouth down his hips. You are making yourself miserable. It surprises me how easy it is, realizing, reading the message he sends as soon as he leaves my house, the message in which he tells me he can’t bring himself to care about my emotional wellbeing, but hopes we can be friends. I was never part of his plan. That I am to blame for much of my heartbreak.

Denotation

  1. un, [uhn]: one
  2. hinge [hinj]: a jointed device or flexible piece on which an attached part turns

Connotation

  1. I always wanted to have a twin. A body upon which I could base and build myself. I didn’t really want to be a twin, but I lusted after the ability to look at someone and see myself clearly. Isn’t that all a child is, really? A smaller version of the self, split between both parents? Isn’t that all a partner is--a reflection of the qualities we are lacking? What is a dream if not a function of this desire, if not a bridge between the self and ideal, collapsed?
  2. There’s a small park a mile south of my childhood home where I used to play with my father. I was a weak kid so the monkey bars never really served my ego, and the slides proved lackluster when my long body filled the entire tube. I took comfort in the swingset, where I could control the speed and height of my movements. In the air, suspended, nothing could touch me. From time to time, I’d pump my legs harder than usual, extend them until my knees resembled pale, wrinkled balls of dough. I’d reach a certain point midair, almost parallel to the ground, and the chain would go slack, shuddering at the joints. The vibrations from the strain sank my stomach. I knew logically that I wouldn’t fall, that the chain wouldn’t snap, but in the moment, I was convinced that the set would break. After I reached that pinnacle, I’d dig my heels into the earth and scuttle to my father’s truck, ready to go home. I didn’t enjoy the sensation of going that high, but I continued to do it every time I sat on a swing. Potential destruction is compulsive. This was the biggest risk my child self was willing to take, which is to say, I have always played it safe.

Three Truths

  1. My mother almost left my father when I was in elementary school. She even packed a bag. My parents fought often, but that time felt different. I remember sitting at the top of our basement’s carpeted stairs, listening in, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
  2. My mother was convinced there was something he wasn’t telling her.
  3. I can’t remember much about that day, but I recall how the clap of the car door shutting convinced me that anything was possible. That even the most solid parts of my reality could be taken apart.

A Lie

  1. Even after my mother stayed, I was sure. I was not enough to keep her there.

A Dream
The angel decides to do something different. She pulls her hair back into a curly topknot and dons a pair of paint-splattered overalls. She slides on green rubber river boots. She puts on her favorite pair of sanding gloves. She rummages in her purse and pulls out a pair of golden goggles and straps them tightly across her eyes. She hammers a sign on her front door. Please, no guests, today. She puts a kettle on the stove and hushes it to low boil. She brings out the big guns and uses a Phillips to yank each screw out of the basement door. She claps and the duct tape covering the seam gaps crumbles into a giant ball that her cats eye with intrigue. She isn’t worried about stripping the holes she’s made. She isn’t worried about the pooling sweat on her back. She isn’t worried. The door doesn’t come off easily, but it does come off. She looks into the basement, demands. Leave. It slowly makes its way up from the basement and fills the house. It opens windows, turns off the stove, fills the air with the scent of car dust and sweet cotton. It applies a bandaid to the angel’s thumb where her tools had rubbed it raw. It stays.

Reality
There are lots of hypotheses that explain what happens when we crack our joints. When we apply force to our bones, we separate them while reducing pressure in the cavity between them. The movement dissolves gases in the fluid surrounding these joints, which creates a bubble. The bubble then rapidly collapses in on itself and creates an audible pop. But, in 2015, research showed that these bubbles stayed in our fluid even after cracking. The sound, they believe, is not the product of a collapse. It is the sound of reformation, of two joints coming back together again.

Once,
I dreamed I was an angel.

Once,
I asked my mother what I inherited from her and she told me, My hands.

Once,
I asked my father how he put up with me growing up. I was such a bad kid, I told him. I fought with mom almost every day. He gripped the steering wheel. What? he asked. You were a great kid. That never happened.

Once
I screamed at my once-beloved for hours. You left me, I wept. How am I supposed to trust you, now? He looked at his hands. I don’t know. I just hope you do.  

Once
I had all the information, I still made the wrong connections. 

Once
I let go of the fantasy, I let in a lot of love.

Once
my mother grew up a little, she began to even out. It would hurt her feelings to know I find this hopeful.

Once,
when I was a child, my father used to ask me to sit on his back while he did pushups. He needed the added pressure to get stronger, he told me. Won’t I hurt you? I asked. He laughed. You don’t ever have to worry about me. Outside, carpenter bees burrow into our log walls while my mother’s tulips open. I sat between his shoulders counting each click of his elbows.

Once
the men working on my house finished, all I could do was picture my once-beloved inside of it.

Once,
my mother cried to me over the phone, telling me, I am so afraid that one day I will get a call from someone telling me that he has killed you. I thought of my once-beloved, losing blood, crumpled against the side of my house, my newly restored exterior shattered on the ground. I didn’t know how to tell her I was dreaming. Instead, I whisper, I love you. I’m worried I lost myself in the fantasy of us. He and I both have hurt each other. But I think we could be better, or at least, that I deserve it. Three truths. A lie.

Once
I dreamed I was an angel, I started getting in the practice of imagining again. This was mostly just giving names to things I always wanted, collecting all the pennies I ever wished on and painting them in technicolor. I guess what I mean is it took stepping out of the dreams of us to realize I was enough for myself again. I guess what I mean is I am grateful for these wings, for painful freedom. What I mean when I say unhinged: beauty, unbecoming. Loosened, not lost. Never without, not really.