On Not Belonging by Diane Seuss

On Not Beloniging

By Diane Seuss

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” James Baldwin

When I was at an artist’s colony on the east coast, I had a bad case of the not-belongings. Now, let me back up and say as a young thing I defied belonging. Even a whiff of conventionality re-curled my ironed hair. Once I got through the I-must-have-a-white-haired-doll phase of childhood, I began to ruinate the whole idea of holidays. Post-nuclear family (and I do mean nuclear) my loathing gave birth to identical triplets. An ugly, self-echoing trinity it was, howling for the apocalypse. During the fall and winter months, when Hallowthanksmas really digs in its cat claws, I now go full-groundhog and tunnel underground, my heartrate registering as nonexistent on the big cardiac probe. I hate it—and have hated it since the day I received the dubious gift of consciousness—when people do stuff because that’s how it’s done. It reminds me of when my ex-mother-in-law would rake my body up and down with her eyes, leaving hen scat in the wake of her gaze. “Di will be doing the dishes,” she’d cluck, handing me a moldering sponge. Who am I, Cinder-fucking-ella, I wanted to holler, but I was a bride, and brides have to turn in their voices before entering the lace confines of the bower.

By the time I reached the artist’s colony, all of that was behind me. Post-marriage, I had gone through the decontamination ritual of hooking up with a baseball player and a neighborhood cop. I had turned to wearing underwear as overwear. I painted my walls the colors of a whole bag of Dum Dum suckers. You like blue raspberry? Welcome to my sewing room, though I’ve never sewed a stitch or sutured an incision in my life. In order to keep us on track, let me just cut to the chase and say I was in the third circle of my necessary debauchery, the first being the removal of the eyes from the white-haired-doll, the second being Dum Dum interior design, and the third being something I’ll call, for want of a better word, poetry. Now as you know, (I’ve flipped into Lecture Mode here), poetry has a long pubic history. And no, that’s not a typo. Like sausage, or game night, it means many things to many people. Some consider it an act of languaging. Others, just an act, be it vaudeville, trapeze, or ventriloquist-and-dummy. For me, it’s been a way of sewing, and I’ve already established I cannot sew. It’s been a way of being a blood donor when I’ve been endlessly rejected by the screeners at the blood bank.

Speaking of blood: When I walked onto the sacred territory of the artist’s colony, I smelled something like pots and pans, or the mercury once used to fill drilled teeth. It was only on the second night, a night I’ll call The Night I Realized I Was Smelling Not Pans Nor Mercury but Blood, that I realized the land, the earth, was ichor-ish. Sanguine-ified. As my mother is known to say, it was stockpiled in bloody hen turds. It was not a present-tense blood—America has some pretty good machines for cleaning up contemporary massacres—but old school. Constitutional. The blood that no bleach can decolorize, no mere menstrual rag can absorb. There was no wifi in the cottage, no TV, and therefore no old cowboy shows to distract me from the bloody truth of American history. The blood was a haunting, and it was not fond of me.

The next day, a day I now think of as The Day the Food Was Delicious but I Felt Weird in My Clothes, I entered the dining hall with trepidation. These were sophisticates, a different sort of sophisticate from those I met on the other coast, though I felt equally weird over there. For some reason, I made a snarky comment about people being obsessed with gluten, and an older resident, who clearly had his ducks in a row, came right out and told me I shouldn’t judge the gluten-sensitive. I also announced I’d seen a bright orange fox leaping through the meadow as I walked to breakfast.

“Oh yes,” another artist said. “That one is full of ticks.” They could not have known I have a tick phobia—a phobia of all parasites of the blood-sucking variety. I stood and walked to the coffee vats to pretend to add cream to my mud. I take my coffee black. I just needed a break from feeling like a jiggly-boobed interloper. My boobs, long ago released from the tyranny of the brassiere, jiggled like clown-headed frauds. Have you ever felt so odd in your body that you trip over your own shoelaces, and your shoes don’t even have laces?

Walking at midnight to the never-closed library on the meadow edge, carrying an insignificant flashlight, trifling against the blood under my slip-ons and the trees curtained in plasma-fog, I met the ghost of James Baldwin wandering toward me on the path. I was aware that he’d been a resident here, decades earlier. He lived in France for a good portion of his adult life, and he died there, too, in Saint Paul de Vence. He called it a “refuge far from the American madness.” A necessary exile. In life, he was not a tall man. Only two inches taller than I am, and I’m a shortish, stubby, peasant-class piece of shit with skin the hue of kindergarten paste.

Ghost-wise, his elegance added inches to his frame. When his elegance intersected with my vulgarity, just outside the chicken coop where the hens laid mint green and sky blue eggs, his eyes—I hate to even use the mother-in-law verb again but I must—raked over my frame. The effect was a sort of raking me over the coals. “If you’re so afraid of ticks,” he said in that voice, “you might consider not terrorizing the wild turkeys.” He must have seen me earlier in the day, shooing away the turkeys who were drawn to my cottage, the smallest one at the colony. They clumped outside my window like dirty laundry. For some reason, they bugged me, like mourning doves bug me. Once Baldwin passed me by, his cigarette smoke spiraling handsomely, I picked up my pace and used my secret key in the library door, immediately hitting the computer to google “do turkeys eat ticks.” Indeed, they do. Up to two-hundred a day.

That night, I lay stiffly on the twin bed and read the library’s copy of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, his early tale of expatriatism, identity, and desire. I used one of those apps on my android to play the sound of birds and rain and ocean waves. That’s how afraid I was of the silence, and the blood that lined it, and the artist-ghosts who navigated it, like Neruda’s admiral in “Nothing but Death.” The Baldwin novel was a small paperback version, like something you’d buy from the book section of an old drugstore. I had to squint to read the type. But the sentences were fluid with lostness. With heat and grief and shame, roiling like curdled cream in coffee that was supposed to be black. I dug my claws into it, carrying it with me to meals, where I’d begun to dine alone, and bringing it to bed with me, like a lover who hadn’t made up their mind about me. I planted my tent stakes in Giovanni’s Room that whole month, when I arranged and rearranged my book manuscript on the floor of the cottage, and sharpened the axe blade of my loneliness. I needed to be lonely, it turns out, more than belonging, more than home, more than love. There was no plot of land, no village, town, city, country, in which I belonged. I didn’t even know how to belong to a group of brilliant, soulful artists sitting at a long wooden table eating scrambled eggs and toast. To belong, I’d decided young, is a pretense, like Xmas, like wedding bells.

I’d like to end there. It feels tidy, and who doesn’t like tidy? But that would mean I must expunge the whiskey-fueled night toward the end of the residency when three geniuses improvised “Lush Life” to my reading of the poem, “I can’t listen to music, especially ‘Lush Life,’” from my collection Four-Legged Girl. It would be to excise the fact that maybe I did not belong, but I was embraced, and I likewise did some embracing. I still felt jiggly and frowzy, like a bad case of overkill, but I stood up, I was there. After our impromptu performance, there was celebration. I actually let myself go a bit, shot the shit with strangers, tipped the community bottle to my lips, until a woman who’d seemed to be a bit exiled herself, who’d begun sitting with me at meals, came up to me, eyes swimming with crude oil and rage, and hissed in my face, “You like that dick, don’t you?” an accusation or a curse or a come-on, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what dick she was referring to. All I said was, “Not particularly,” brought a napkin up to my face and wiped off my lipstick, and quickly slid out of the room.

That night didn’t instigate art, but it celebrated it, and I have never known what to do with celebration. I may take after my grandfather the barber, who really only felt right with himself while cutting hair. Remember those noisemakers that you blow into and a curly thing unfurls into the onlooker’s face? I googled them. They’re called party horns. On Reddit, a user said that in Spanish they’re called matasuegras, mother-in-law killers, which seems—apt. I have never been able to blow, without ambivalence, into a mother-in-law killer. In high school, I tried, one balmy night, to participate in the decorating of our class float for homecoming. I think the float-makers, who I did not know, invited me because they associated me with art. I ended up sitting in the corner folding Kleenex into poorly constructed carnations to stick into the chicken wire of the float. It would be pulled by some kid’s truck, which needed a new battery. I didn’t rise out of that chair until I slipped out of the barn and walked home. To join in would kill something in me, the very thing that allowed me to assess the madness from a distance, even if that madness resided in myself.

Much earlier in my life, my mother picked me up from second grade, to tell me my father had died. Our small house that day seemed filled with men. Male friends and relatives wearing suits and drinking coffee. I think I sat for a few moments in one of their laps, but I didn’t want to be held, nor to be in the presence of adults. Soon, I left the house to walk the five blocks to my Brownie meeting, which I didn’t want to miss because we were going to learn how to make a tote out of an empty bleach bottle, and I’d already imagined using it to store my marbles. It was one of those spring days the storybooks call “brisk.” I felt the breeze and temperature acutely, like I was missing a few layers of skin. When I arrived at the troop leader’s house, late for the meeting, I paused on the stoop, pressing my face to the screen door so I could experience the group without me in it. There were my friends, sitting on the floor in patchy rows. As I listened, I realized they were praying for me. “Diane!” the leader cried when she saw me outside the door. She seemed embarrassed, like she’d been caught with her hand in Jesus’s cookie jar. She led me into the small, hot room, wrapping me in an embrace that hurt, given my lack of epidermis. As soon as I could, I sat down in the corner and got to work, cutting away the top of my bleach bottle and punching holes around its rim. When I finished it, and walked the long way to a home that now seemed alien to me, I felt a perverse joy. I was fatherless. Homeless. I didn’t know the word then, but I knew the feeling: My condition was irrevocable. But I’d made a thing, and I could swing it through the air by its drawstring like a maniac.

Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021), winner of the PEN/Voelcker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocksand a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her sixth collection, Modern Poetry, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2024. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.