The Bully
by FEATURED WRITER
Abby Vines-Lopez
Abby Vines-Lopez, Portrait of the Artist, ink, colored pencil, pencil, marker on notebook, 8.5 × 11.5 inches, text from an Instagram post (Swoon), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
The Bully
Abby Vines-Lopez | FEB 2025 | Issue 42
I.
in the hospital with me there was a tall blonde boy with angry scrapes on the back of his neck, sockless in his institutional orange sandals. he walked laps around the halls, the skin of his feet opening to the unforgiving plastic. when i suggested socks, another patient suggested that i was witnessing organic harm reduction. there was wisdom in that blistering walk & it was not cure.
i was there after a quick disaster. i'd married a man & had a child. my father died within two months of the birth. we moved south, my bright idea, to be closer to my husband's family. my work became indisputably meaningless. a new psychiatrist canceled twice. on the weekends, my husband took our child to his parents' house an hour away while i went to 12-step meetings & smoked as many cigarettes as i guessed i could get away with.
this is your nervous breakdown speaking, your nervous system, your case of the nerves, the bundle of nerve fibers needle touched on the thin metal table while you wept & sweated. this is the callouses you walk on, the bony angle of your left foot whispering about the months you couldn't walk. this is the pressure behind your eyes (surprise!) & it eats where you play. this is the aching center at the back of you, your blind spot. this is the jitters under your ribs, wings that have been fluttering since your mother dropped dead one january twenty years ago. this is the impossible portals in your skin that carry the mess of a life. this is the bloom across your cheeks- algal, not floral. this is you at age 25 on closson street looking through the mirror at middle-aged you, middle-aged you looking back as through a self.
II.
last saturday i took my daughter to a cousin's birthday party where there were two enormous jumping balloons. my daughter & her cousin jumped in tandem, careful & enthusiastic about each other. my daughter's body betrays her exertion with extra sweat & ruddy cheeks. during reluctant forty-second breaks we fed her koolaid & helped her on with a dry shirt while she asked what the holdup was. people commented on the sweat, on the red cheeks, as though it were evidence of a problem.
a body performs, a body performs a miracle, & we have been discerned by the looks of it. in our family we joke about my daughter's big legs—so obviously mine next to the skinny legs of her dad's family. lately she has begun to love sleeping in shorts because she can stuff her transitional object between the layers of cloth on her behind. she likes to stuff her shirt with small pillows for belly. i saw her last week modeling in front of the mirror, shorts & shirt stretched over lumps of pillows, the living room a private catwalk i was only barely allowed to notice. can it be that she felt beautiful & confident making her body look like mine? the answer lives in our bodies but ask us anyway.
when i try to account for myself, i look in the direction of my childhood but can't make out the scenes. i see joan, my best friend from elementary school. i looked her up on facebook recently, on schedule with my tendency to create social media accounts for brief periods of such accounting, & then destroy them. during my most recent tear, i contacted joan. i asked her to fill me in on what i can't remember. when i asked her what i was like, she reminded me that i was invited to parties but that i declined the invitations. she reminded me but it didn't ring any bells, except the bell that's rung under memory, that plucks like a nerve half dead of disuse. our conversation ended abruptly when i mentioned that i'd been married to a woman prior to my husband, & that my daughter is trans. i remembered confessing to joan in third grade that i suspected i was a lesbian; her response then was commensurate. joan is the first person i had sex with, the experimentation of childhood gone slightly serious.
I dreamed that I was in the backseat of a car being driven too fast on a winding & icy mountain road. I'm the bad driver, the I of me, & my body's in the backseat, afraid of me.
I have been terrified of my body, as though she were the problem. The problem is that I was so young when my body became a problem that there is no before.
I want after but there is no after. There is only the problem, folded into my body, itself a problem, alongside other also problematic selves of me. The bodies I have been shown. Through their cracks, selves show. The selves I've been are buried in my body. Like Anne Carson wonders in a thing she calls Memory Town: is 8 miles deep enough. 15 miles? 140?
I dreamed that I was in the backseat of a car being driven too fast on a winding & icy mountain road. There's a woman in the driver's seat. I know she's queer from her haircut. She wears a camel colored coat (boring) & smiles back at me with something akin to sadism. I recognize her as an archetype through her almost sexual sneer. Slowly the image is written as if on a tarot card: The Bully.
When I was in middle school, I put dog biscuits in another girl's locker. If I pointed out that she was a dog, everybody looked where I was pointing instead of where I was, which was worse.
I was a bully in my first marriage, which was to a quiet woman frozen years before I came along. I kept her cool. I'm a bully in my second marriage to a man who bullies back. You wouldn't be out of line if you told me that two wrongs don't make a right but in this particular case you'd be wrong.
Life is too much to bear. Or death is. I hear we can write our bodies out of the backseat. I don't want to do any more reckoning.
I ask The Bully, "Can you pull over & let me out?" But it wasn't in the dream & somewhere along the way I lost my imaginative prowess & I'm the type of asshole (you can hear The Bully, I'm still in the car) who carries buckets full of resistance like heavy gold jewelry under my skin.
Resistance is a comfortable place. The pause is not. I ended most therapy sessions with my last therapist by suggesting to myself that I slow the everloving fuck down. Once she, not a young woman, climbed onto the floor & placed her hands around my ankles, breaking a seed under the skin of the earth.
Lately my way of being disabled is to go hard & then I'm down for a day or four.
I visit long lost family & push my body through. I take my daughter & my husband to Grant's Farm because I have pictures of my long dead mom with me there when I was a kid. I want my daughter to have pictures of me & experiences with my side of her family in case I die like my mom did. I take my daughter to the Jewish cemetery where her great grandfather Sol is buried, the one after whom she is named, & we place rocks, which are crumbling cement of road or cemetery building, on the graves of each of our family members, my daughter at 5 in her Elsa nightgown like a flower girl at a wedding.
During the visit I saw a photo of my mom from the years she was sick. I didn't know there were photos of her from that time, she didn't allow it, hating what years of prednisone had done to her face. I didn't recognize her at first, it'd been more than twenty years since I'd seen her face as it was when I knew her. It's strange to look at a photo of your mom & not recognize her. There's a moment of narrowing down who that woman in the photo might be, smiling beside your father, & the stranger moment of knowing you're looking at your mother but can't recognize her. It's disorienting like dementia.
The next card I'm pulling is a second unearthed photo of my sick mom. She stands beside me when I was sixteen. It's a family photo, we're both dark haired & round-faced in our black clothes. When my daughter began to grow her dark hair long she looked like my mom after there were no more photos. There were no photos & no one around who'd met my mom so no one saw it but me. This tarot card has been doctored—my daughter's round face from her Pre-K class photo has been affixed to the old photo of me & my mom. There the three of us are, twinning.
For Jessica, Katie, & Elizabeth.
Abby Vines-Lopez is a disabled mama and partner, former case manager, and former hospice volunteer. She is also a motherless daughter living with her family on Apache and Tiwa land near the Rio Grande. Despite obtaining an MA in Thanatology she didn't learn the first thing about grief. Hard laughter, now that's something she could write a book about.