West Trade Review Spring Preview: "p a l l i a t i v e" by C. "Meaks" Meaker

C. "Meaks" Meaker

C. “Meaks” Meaker is a queer, non-binary writer most known for playwriting (Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center, Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee Writers Conference, MFA University of Iowa). Their playwriting work has been developed across the country (Seattle Repertory, Kennedy Center, About Face, etc.). Their plays have been published with Dramatic Publishing (Buckshot) and Original Works (Chaos Theory), as well as productions and development in Seattle, Chicago, and D.C., among others. For this work, they’ve been nominated for a Stranger Genius Award and Gregory Outstanding New Play Award.

p a l l i a t i v e

When my mother was a little girl, she stepped on a needle. She described the sensation to me as one she barely felt, because they are fine things, needles, meant to slide in smooth. It is still in her left foot. I’ve asked her about the viability of surgery, but it’s a needle. So small. Only slightly inconvenient. Some days she winces because it strikes a nerve, or pinches a vessel, or skims along bone.

But most days, most days, she forgets it’s there.

We met as collaborators — she was an actor, I a playwright — and afterward, she invited me to every event she attended. I ignored these messages believing she was Midwest-polite in a West Coast city, until one night, sitting alone at a friend’s wedding no less, I dared myself to respond. Leaving the reception, I walk-ran three miles to slide next to her for the 10 p.m. curtain.

During the show, she passed a beer and our fingers touched. “Did you feel that?” she poured into my ear, “Like electricity you and me.”

Ironically enough, the next day was Pride, and I had to march in a dumb tutu with a little red wagon teetering behind me throwing condoms. We said our goodbyes and I thought that would be the end of it. But she texted me multiple times that day, followed me to the parade route, and arrived unannounced at my house after.

I had thrown out my back that morning — the most painful it had been in years — and was not in the mood to entertain. But she wanted to take care of me. I found her ask so unusual that I let her, laughing at her over-acted shock at my empty medicine cabinet. She made food and kissed my neck, and I felt at odds with how quickly this all seemed to be moving, but what did I know?

Cult linguist expert Amanda Montell describes “love-bombing” in her book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. It’s a practice that is exactly as it sounds — overwhelming a person with intimacy so that when things start to get dicey, they doubt their instincts because obviously they’ve just never been loved before. And really, if they had been loved, would they find it so odd, someone asking them to ignore that one small thing sliding into their foot?

I’m not so jaded as to say that relationships are cults, but like cults they do have their own language, their own systems of normalizing behavior, renaming it so it’s friendly, benign, even cute.

She didn’t like to say love, so we said “burrito.”

Those first few months were giggled sex and sweet kisses, the stuff of 90s lesbian films wherein the director puts the good stuff behind a billowing satin sheet. Those ladies (and they were ladies) were not fucking. They made love to an Enya soundtrack and moaned at the appropriate volume and didn’t use toys, not ever. But I was no longer a lady. I had never lusted after someone before, had never felt such intense ache until I realized how much she seemed to want me. I felt chosen. And the chosen can ride faces, grab asses, suck necks. I could dip into all the parts of myself that needed to be filled.

Her nails were often dirty from landscaping, and sometimes sharp, causing an immediate discomfort usually worth pushing through. But the cut was not as easy to ignore when the pleasure subsided. Holding her after, I suggested we could use more than fingers and tongues and she seized up, unfurling accusations about my secret hetero desires she could not satisfy, nor abide.

Six months later, I asked a twenty-years-in-the-same-relationship friend about his sex life. He admitted that, of course, his husband wasn’t the best sex he’d had, but he didn’t marry that guy. He married his love, “And hell, sometimes the sex is really good.”

I sipped my third beer, disclosing nothing more from behind our satin sheet.

a pain story, two states and a lockdown after her

I started experiencing intense headaches during sex, something the internet assured me only happened to men. The laughable statistic neglected so many factors in heterosexual sex that I shared it, and my accompanying symptoms, to a friend. Her unamused silence commanded me to the doctor where they pressed me to go to the ER because of something half-remembered from medical school.

I still waited a day. But again, during masturbation or sex, the headaches arrived as I approached climax rendering orgasm impossible.

In the ER, I described the pain — a skull-splitting pain that surely halved the head of Zeus when he birthed Athena from between his lobes — and then, I rated the pain six out of ten. The long pause that followed didn’t change my answer. Nor did repeating it to mouth-breathing interns who wanted a detailed account and drawn diagram about the squirting orgasm that precipitated the headaches two weeks prior — their concern about the pain almost as diminished as mine.

A female doctor in serious scrubs glared them away, and gave me a referral to a neurologist, suggesting I take migraine pills before sex.

She invited me to stay with her one night, but she wasn’t in her apartment when I arrived. For an hour I called and waited. And then I was sure of the worst. I dialed hospital after hospital, each receptionist unsurprised by the half-grief half-anger questions, begging to know who had DUI’d themselves into the ER. Somehow, I managed to sob myself asleep, dreaming of funerals without bodies or corpse identifications straight out of crime dramas my mother watched.

At 4 a.m. she stumbled into the apartment. Splaying out on the mattress, she smothered my body with drunk desire, grasping at chunks of me.

I tried to pry her off but she couldn’t retain that I was crying; both relieved and furious. She’d pull me closer for a kiss as I was describing how she’d upset me. A look of crushed confusion clouded her eyes when I shouted for her to stop and listen. And then she would reset, baffled by why we weren’t fucking. In the morning, I explained once again and her face shrunk.

“I never invited you,” she said.

I scrolled through my text messages, searching.

Theory #1

Maybe it’s because from a young age I struggled swallowing pills. My tongue never sat right in my mouth. I would palm medicine, afraid of choking on the smallest capsules. Too quick for my little hands, my father caught me, wrestling my fingers open and forcing me to try again.

When she met my family, they fell in love. Her charm blinded as she assisted kitchen prep for my little sister’s wedding, asking me to refill her water bottle with the secret stash of whiskey while she chopped. She described her father and my mother hugged her, two like-souls meeting. All week they laughed, created shared bits and confidential gaffs — smokers and jokers. My mother glowed with the idea of another wedding to plan, that I was not so different from my sisters after all. I spent the week ensuring our relationship followed strict rules for a Tennessee wedding — infrequent touching, secret drinking, be the funny queers who don’t fight.

When we broke up, my mother mourned the loss saying she hoped my ex would find a true, lasting love. I didn’t tell her why I ended things. I didn’t want to admit that I had not been strong enough to see the signs she’d so clearly laid out for me as a child, the ones I’d ruled into law.

Months after our relationship began, she narrated the story of my seduction to her friends — how I pursued her, each of my moves a lusty calculation. I pushed back, confused, filling in the details she seemed to overlook. But her audience was riveted and didn’t need my complicated calculus in the mix. She explained that she had always intended to go to Pride and her messages before we got together had been casual, friend-seeking, polite. She didn’t know how to flirt. She was just passing her beer in the theater, wanting to discuss the lights. And she took pity at my house because I was in pain and she was an expert at management.

So go all our stories — a back and forth of what is true and what is misremembered, each conversation brined in our alcohol of the moment. At the time I was certain I threw out my back that first night because her mattress was too soft, but now, looking back, it might have been pulling that little red wagon through Pride.

But she said she loved me now, even if she hadn’t been the one to pursue me then.

Correction: She felt “burrito” about me.

There are multiple truths to our story — to hers and mine alone and the one we share together. And one of those truths is that some pains clarify only as skin reddens, breathing away from the source of injury.

Another truth: we don’t have a great story or even a satisfying accumulation of them, our climaxes consistently interrupted by uncontrolled hemispheric pain.

about her stories, because I’ve avoided them, because I sometimes doubt

Cliché on cliché: Ani Difranco played and tea candles cascaded light across our bodies wrapped in off-white sheets. She relayed her story, a beer or wine or whiskey in her hand as I held her, horrified by what she described and angry at the many faceless people in her life who had allowed it.

Torn apart, sewn back together, learning how to walk again, encountering bad guys with every intent from robbery to murder to rape, abusive family, abusive friends, abusive relationships, and so much loss. So many stories where her life whistles a tune through rosy cheeks while walking until, out of nowhere, headlights crash on her face and she’s under someone’s tire; but she kept getting up.

Who doesn’t fall in love with a person like that?

Theory #2

Maybe it’s because at seven I had surgery on my back and when I popped my stitches cleaning my room, I was awake when they sewed me back up. The doctor commended my strength as I winced through each stitch.

I pack lunches, make dinners, give massages. I am Donna fucking Reed. I will build a happy life. I will pay for food. We will split the drinks bill. We don’t want children because we’d have to stop drinking, jinks! I help her run lines. She stays quiet while I write, but reads the pages and tells me it’s not quite there.

My style shifts to softer lines. I wear dresses. I want her to tell me I’m pretty. I exercise, but I don’t wear my running shorts because she told me they weren’t flattering — my ass is too flat.

I eat less. Drink more.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened — one apron string tightened at a time.

another pain story

At six years old, I returned from a family beach trip with a second-degree sunburn the size of a placemat on my back. My mother describes cleaning it as I sobbed, my skin flaking off, changing the prescription bar soap from pink to grey. She says I would hide each night from the cleanings, that I’d run soaking from the bathtub only to be found naked in the closet of my room, dripping on clean clothes. But I did not remember it that way. I had only the faintest memory of discomfort when I discovered my old t-shirts with the backs cut down the middle — a funky child-style choice, no doubt — until she reminded me. Such was the mythology of this story that I believed my mother prone to hyperbole until my father commented years later that he did not have the stomach to care for the wound.

Pain is a story told about resilience, overcoming, overwhelming, moving forward despite, swallowing the propensity to whine even though. When pain does not have a story, when it’s a common occurrence, so blinding it can’t be reconstructed, I struggle to identify it — where to store this nameless thing, on what shelf in the body, and for how long.

I did not give enough credit to the way that pain quilts, overlapping and sewn into bone, or the pain one can learn to live with without realizing.

I watch her retell the story about the night she came back at 4 a.m. after I called the ERs. We sit in her friend’s backyard drinking white wine with ice cubes. They laugh through the whole story about how impossible it was for her to focus on the fight I clearly wanted to have because she was so drunk. I join in, filling in details and cracking up at my terror.

At the time, I don’t think I doubted. But maybe this is the start; this moment with our feet floating in a kiddie pool offering multiple viewpoints of something I remembered in my bones. Maybe nothing happens the way she remembers. But to say such a thing would call into question every story she ever told. More likely, I overreacted.

We guffaw to the point of choking, our ice cubes clink-melting their edges away.

Theory #3

Or maybe it’s the fistful of aspirin my middle school girlfriend and I almost swallowed because we thought it would get us high. Luckily, our fear of altered states outweighed being eleven and bored. Later, when I lied to my older sister about my drug prowess, she grabbed my shoulders and elucidated how fortunate I was to be equal parts cowardly and stupid so I had not died the night before.

selfish pains

I drove drunk once, long before her. I was in Tennessee, working for a Borders bookstore with a number of “hate the sin, love the sinners” during the first Obama election. After work, we’d drink at a nearby bar and I’d listen to them talk about non-existent climate change and how I didn’t exist either. I had not processed the depth of my loneliness that kept me drinking with these people who hated me but wouldn’t admit it, because it was not Christian to do so. We decided to relocate to someone’s house when the bar closed, after I had drunk twice the number of beers as everyone else.

One of the revelers was a girl I had gone to high school with and it suddenly became clear she liked me and maybe had always liked me and I was so lonely and she was about to relocate out of our hateful town. So I went, weaving to an unknown location, almost nodding off at the wheel, hoping to feel wanted when I arrived.

We left a wedding reception in a part of the city neither of us knew. She wasn’t supposed to drink because she drove. I wasn’t supposed to drink because I knew she wouldn’t be able not to drink.

We both drank.

She couldn’t remember how to get us back to my house and my phone had no charge. Angrier and angrier she navigated tiny, residential streets in her large truck and shouted at me for not knowing the way. And then she stopped talking altogether as she drove faster and faster, slamming over roundabouts.

I banged out of the car and took her keys when we made it to my house.

Or maybe we ended up at her place with me curled in her arms. I honestly don’t remember how that story ends, only the horror of her careening, nearly swiping parked cars on either side of the street, still relying on luck to shield my cowardice and stupidity despite my sister’s warnings.

a twofer: pain and sex

In Iowa only two years after her, a sex buddy came to my apartment with an endless supply of instruments (some she’d made herself), driving a beat-up truck that was smaller and older than my ex’s had been.

We drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes and watched Poltergeist and talked about caretaking for her dying mother, and then she hurt me — more, I said, I can take more — until I was limping the next day. She admired the bruises she left, the marks she made. I did too. But then she realized how slowly I moved and her admiration drained. There is supposed to be a limit and I was supposed to say “when.”

Once, she clocked that I was no longer in my body while she beat me, so she stopped and made me have, of all things, a conversation. But I didn’t want to stop and I could tell she was holding back.

On days when it seemed like maybe I only ever imagined our lust for one other, she held me or kissed me or fondled my tits in public, and I surrendered. That’s the goal when you find the right one — total submission, right? Walls down, knees bent, eyes up.

Look, true love is kinky as shit if you’re into that sort of thing.

Theory #4

My mother can’t cook or clean. It’s like she went to great pains to avoid these assumed feminine attributes — holdovers from an abusive house that required order, peace. Her stories inoculated me. Abuse, physical or otherwise, was something outside of my mother’s control because she was born into it, but it wasn’t outside mine. And from her experiences she knew that stability didn’t come from crumb-less counters and four-course meals. So, she embraces the soft ease of a dust bunny, the build-up of mildew that signifies life, the tasteless food she thinks she deserves — the way that none of these things end in violence.

I didn’t notice this for years. I thought Comet could clean anything, and who puts salt in rice?

She frequently saw a cousin who lived nearby who she never wanted me to meet. When we finally did, a year and a half into our relationship, the cousin let slip we had never met because I didn’t want to —a lie that had been forged to protect something, but what I wasn’t sure. Cleaning up the dinner I cooked for the occasion, I asked for clarity. She spat back, “Remember when you said it was too early to meet my family?” a comment I made in the second week of dating.

It made sense when she didn’t want me to attend her brother’s wedding. Her family would denigrate our relationship and I would likely lose it at her father, right?

She asked me to pick her up from the airport when she returned but I was too scared to drive her massive truck in SeaTac traffic. She muttered about my inconsiderate ass as she walked away from me at the terminal. Her rage pulsed in waves as I navigated us to an expensive taxi, surprising her with small bottles of liquor for the ride. She spoke in clipped sentences, eyes pointed out the window and performed a smile when the driver asked for directions.

Having endured violent silence or guttural warnings, I offered to leave when we got home. Something broke. She snatched at me in wet gasps, frightened of something beyond and behind me.

I made us dinner. Bought us drinks. Stroked her back till she fell asleep.

Later, her brother asked me with earnest eyes that looked so much like hers why I had not come to his wedding. She jumped in to answer that I was afraid of their parents, but his eyes never left mine.

At the opening of her play, people shouted her name in the lobby and she pratfell or jokey-walked away in response. She asked questions about their lives, rushing to steer conversations away from her life and onto theirs. She held their gazes, her eyes not letting them wander too far, even calling out their need to look away. I stood by her all evening, awed by how she talked to people, how deep she could get so quickly, how much they loved her.

Wet-eyed and walking away, these members of a community we shared turned to me to say, “She’s really something special, you know?”

And I did. I still do.

Most of the time, most of the time it was just fine. We laughed. We watched dumb shows. We drank to maintain.

When things are just fine, subtle shifts in tectonics are harder to detect. The way we carry our weight over one foot to compensate for a slight pain in the other causes a tilt in the pelvis and a new pain to carry in some other part of the body. Adjustments can be made endlessly to accommodate the strain, to preserve equilibrium, to keep things fine.

After a reading of one my plays, I could not find her for hours. The play had been a turning point for me in a very difficult theatre career, and yet, she was not amongst the patrons and artists wanting to dissect the work and congratulate me. After chatting with strangers and friends alone for hours, I finally found her. She confessed that she had feelings for a friend of mine who attended the reading. They’d been chatting all evening — my evening — in quiet corners or smoking in the alley.

“I just don’t want to lie,” she said.

A happy story. One from early in our time together.

It was late. We were walking back to her apartment from… something. A fancy night in a bougie condo with a photographer or a late-night movie eating chocolate popcorn? And, for no reason at all, we started singing songs from the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Our voices echoed around buildings and I learned something new — she could sing.

We turned her infatuation with my friend into a shared joke about how they were going to run away together, like a lesbian Bonnie and Clyde on a hot crime spree to the coast. I wasn’t jealous. She still wanted me, and crushes are perfectly normal, so we both said. But then one day, she would not play along because it was no longer a plaything.

She accused me of jealousy and mistrust. But her crush, my friend, had already confirmed the transgression — entrapment, then, she said. For the first time in two years, I did not speak with her for three days. And then I said I needed a few more. It was not freedom, but the difference between freedom and what it was is difficult to explain. I saw friends. I decided to apply to grad school. I did not know what I wanted from her. But I did still want her and I wanted her to want me.

Less than two weeks later, she flipped her truck and crawled out of the window to escape the crushed driver seat. At the hospital, the doctors were surprised she could still walk considering the state of the truck, but she was desperate to leave, already shaking and sweating through sheets.

In those weeks of recovery, we were in familiar roles again — being sweet to one another, kissing fingers, missing and mourning what had been, and trying not to move lest we ruin it all. The roles no longer felt the same, the apron strings no longer wrapping nicely about my waist. I felt unsure how to fit in with her in this moment, how to care for her. But she’d kiss my palm and say thank you for the soup and ask if I was planning to stay over, and so I did. There’s something about feeling needed that gets conflated with feeling valued or respected. They are different, of course, but that line is very thin.

As she drifted off to sleep one night, I asked if she was drunk when the accident happened. “It was morning,” she said. I asked her if she was drunk when it happened. “No.”

Theory #5

When I first found out about my mother’s abuse, she told me I could write a letter to her father. I remember the letter but not its contents, not even, if I’m honest, exactly what my mother told me about him at the time. But as I try to understand why I stayed, as I tally these theories, all I think about is writing an angry letter to a man I was never going to meet who had hurt someone I loved. The man who hurt my mother, the men who hurt my lover — their faces are unclear but their actions are spiteful and specific. I know how they caused harm and my anger would be righteous and glorious, angelic demise ready to reign down vengeance with well-chosen words.

I still can’t find concrete ways to explain to her what happened between us. And I tried on our late-night calls that persisted far after they should have. Each time, I gave up and surrendered to listening to her breathe and the way she said my name. Sometimes, I wonder, did anything happen at all?

pain stories?

On the last trip we took together, she bawled in our hotel room. My family had invited us on vacation, and their generosity, along with so many other pains she’d never put voice to, catalyzed her heaving sobs. I spent the week insisting we hide our drinking and fighting through barrages of half-day silent treatments about wake-up times and hissy fits about the lack of alcohol. Frustrated and exhausted from making it to the final night, I asked her how much she’d had to drink as if I’d had none. She didn’t answer the question, her incoherence smeared with pitiful remembrances of small things my mother had said to her in the buffet line. I slammed out the door and down the stairs to cool off, leaving her alone to snot on the pillowcase, grieving a childhood she did not have.

Calculated cruelty, or, maybe I was just mean by then, or had always been and that’s why she’d gotten so angry, or sad, or totaled her truck. Or, why, upon deplaning from that trip she said, without guile, “We travel so well together, don’t we?”

I’ve read enough about holding trauma in the body to roll my eyes and know it’s true. When I finally told my mother the real reason for our break-up, years and a pandemic later, she was not surprised. She was not disturbed by the disarming charm and the romance I felt at caretaking. On top of the needle in her foot, her back is a braided knot and she doesn’t dream. She told me that she’s always chalked her dreamless state up to her mind choosing not to remember what she doesn’t need, and yet these things must go somewhere, and the back is as good a place as any.

On our way to get massages, a gift she started treating herself to liberally in retirement, I asked if she was disappointed to know the truth. She stopped me before I explained all the times I should have left, the drinking I continued to do well after we broke up, how I still sometimes watched for her messages. My mother said, “I used to think it was enough if my husband didn’t beat or rape me, but it’s not enough, is it?” Of course, I know it’s not. But I still struggle to make that list of things that would be enough. What replaces feeling needed with being loved? How do you figure out if what this person offers is enough?

Does telling you that my ex and I both sobbed when we broke up change things? That we decided to have sex one more time? That she still asked if she could come with me to Iowa and that I almost let her? That after that first night of fucking, she’d move her mattress to the floor when I slept over so it would be firm and my back wouldn’t ache in the morning? That when we broke up, she sent an email to my mother thanking her for showing kindness, and apologizing for being unable to make it work?

I returned to Seattle for the weekend only a year after we broke up and we chatted on my friends’ porch. Saying our goodbyes, she groped me and pushed me backward into the house with a force she’d rarely shown when we were dating. She commented on my weight gain, but assured me she didn’t mind, backing me onto the couch of my friends’ living room. I yelled at her to stop, and she did, like coming to. She teared up, stammered, and left. Afterward, she reached out to see if she could visit me in Iowa to make amends for her behavior, though she was only half-heartedly participating in AA, something she made clear when she said that wine “didn’t count.”

The thing about dating an alcoholic and becoming (or is it discovering you are?) an alcoholic as you date them is you recalibrate what an ending to a story even is. The benchmarks of completion are usually about self-deprecation and humiliation, not resolution. The climax is unsatisfying if it even exists, and there’s usually only one, but you laugh anyway and say you had a good time.

I told my friend a few of these stories, the ones that could actually be created as stories with beginnings, at the very least, if not with conclusions, lessons learned, or morals mollified. Not all, just a few. But the word finally slipped out, one that I was so comfortable saying about my mother’s stories, but never mine, because I had no scars. The pain had not been severe enough to leave marks, right? I would have felt the needle go in.

My friend reloaded his pipe and told me to block her number. I couldn’t, but I left her question about a visit unanswered — the pain, now named, floated somewhere in my body, waiting to graze a bone.

I smoked with one of her best friends at a theater event on some visit much later, the friend who had laughed at the fight my ex couldn’t remember we were having. I’d heard she moved from Seattle to live with her father. I asked if the friend knew anything more, how she was, if she was okay. The friend confirmed they’d spoken, an hour-long conversation no less, but shrugged at the answer. I persisted and she took an annoyed drag on the cigarette, “Does anyone actually know her? Would anyone know anything about her that she didn’t want them to know?”

I wonder how many stories I need to recount to understand this connection to pain, this narrative unmoored from time that refuses to reveal an initial injury, that refuses to specify a clear and present villain, that refuses to expose its exacting details because we both chose to forget as it happened, that won’t just fucking pick a labeled shelf and sit still.

There’s still a desire for scars, stitches, burns — that mark that lovers leave — a concrete arc from our beginning to an end. It took over sixty years and regular visits to the masseuse, but my mother finally started to dream.

Lying still on the floor of my apartment talking to my friend about the rules my brain invented years ago, my blind obedience to feel at all costs which led me to drink instead of feel anyway, she tells me to stop bitching about my back pain and take something.

I stand in front of my medicine cabinet, filled by my mother on her latest visit because she found its emptiness appalling.

I’d like to tell you that I opened the medicine cabinet and, thankfully not expired, I took something, anything, for the pain. But, as I said, there are no satisfying conclusions to some stories.

The medicine cabinet was empty. My mother had not filled it, because she, like me, does not reach for pain relief with ease.

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