Emily Jalloul
Wasp and Orchid
My mother is born and raised in New Albany, Indiana, a small town opposite Louisville, Kentucky just across the Ohio River. From my mother’s bedroom window, she can see the K&I Bridge that leads into Kentucky; she can almost hear the river rushing. My mother grows up on the corner of Dewey and Butler, at 1631 Dewey Street, a Victorian two-story painted white with a small yard, five doors from the house where her mother—my grandmother—lived from eight years old—1613 Dewey Street.
My middle name comes from my mother’s mother, June. Her name was June Rose, though she’s born in November. Daughter of Huntley and Alene Hockersmith. Huntley is a plumber, a man who uses his hands, cracked dry in the Kentuckiana winters. Huntley and Alene have six daughters, June the first. At night, Huntley goes into their daughters’ beds or he brings them down to the basement.
Childhood trauma can have epigenetic and intergenerational effects. Studies have found that children who experience abuse can display changes in their genetics, which can affect the way genes are expressed and used. One study found that children who had been abused showed drastic changes in genes linked to cancer, heart disease, bipolar disorder, and depression, among other physical and psychological disorders. Another study found that one-third of those who survive child abuse become abusers themselves once they have children.
My therapist sits across from me next to a window so that the afternoon sun pours in besides her. Today I notice she’s blown out her brown hair into waves. When I tell her I keep waiting to feel fulfilled, she says I have low self-worth. Actually she says I have little belief in my self-worth. She says I’m porous, more susceptible to penetration or permeation. Of course she’s right. Everything is so heavy. Nothing without meaning. When I throw away a recyclable, I feel its heft.
Growing up in Indiana, my mother is often beaten by her mother, whose blueblack rage fills all corners of the house, her hands gripping the whip or paddle or belt, anything in reach. “You knew her mood by her pounding up the stairs,” my mother says. She is fearful, afraid to tell her mother when she compound-fractures her elbow, worried she’ll be told to get a switch off the maple out back for the hassle and cost of a doctor’s visit. She sleeps on the broken arm until her mother discovers the blood in her bed.
I’m twelve when I begin emptying my mother’s vials of Stadol, a narcotic pain reliever, prescribed to her to treat migraines. Usually administered intravenously before surgery or during labor, the drug is also available as a nasal spray to treat chronic pain. Stadol, otherwise known as Butorphanol, is not well-known: there are no news reports about it, no books written about its effects. Though similar in chemical structure, each like photocopies of the other turned on its side, Butorphanol is more potent than Morphine. I search and find the small brown bottles scattered in her bathroom drawers, her nightstand, her purse. I pour the golden liquid down the sink, refilling the bottles with water so she doesn’t notice them empty. I don’t know this will cause withdrawal or that she has other bottles hidden.
My therapist tells me that our brains seek out and hold onto information we need. For years knowledge can remain suppressed, submerged, a raft held under water waiting to break surface.
Botanically, rhizomes are a part of the plant that exists under soil, a hidden pathway connecting one stem to another, holding both roots and shoots. Rhizomes don’t have clear beginnings or endings; they grow expansively from every direction, both into and out of the soil. Postmodern theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari apply this to philosophy, describing a nonlinear way of looking at history. They use this metaphor to suggest there is no distinction between an individual and a collective, there is no center or origin point.
My mother’s one sister, Denise, married Ed Green, when Denise was eighteen. Denise and Ed had kept their relationship secret for several years because Ed was twelve years older than Denise.
Ed becomes like a brother to my mother. When she’s twelve, she starts spending weekends and summers in Lexington at Denise and Ed’s house. He owns a couple McDonald’s, making him the wealthiest person my mother had ever known. In the afternoons, she swims in the lake and then walks into one of his restaurants and orders anything she wants. Her first luxury. He teaches her to water-ski and drives her around the horse farms. He makes her feel special. He makes her feel seen and cared for.
Researchers estimate that one in five to one in nine girls will be sexually abused. Of cases reported, 93% of victims under eighteen know their abuser. Almost 60% of these are acquaintances. Over 30% are members of the victim’s own family. Victims of sexual assault often suffer psychologically for years, especially if unreported or repressed, and they are three to four times more likely to suffer drug addiction, PTSD, and major depressive episodes.
One summer, my mother tells me she went to stay at Denise and Ed’s house, get away from her chaotic childhood home. A few weeks in, they’re watching TV late at night. Denise goes to bed, and my mother and Ed stay up to finish whatever movie they’ve put on when he wraps his arm around her and gropes her, cupping her small breast in his hand.
In the background, the first bombs dropped into Iraq blare from the living room TV as my father stops me in the hallway. “What is she taking? What is she on?” he asks me. I stare down at the white tile floor, shiny from the day of bleaching and scrubbing the way my mother had taught me to do. I notice the baseboard is dusty. “She’s fine, she’s not on anything,” I say, thinking of the yellow pill organizer in her purse filled with Xanax and Amitriptyline and Percocet we picked up that morning from the Walgreens by the beach.
My mother had been hallucinating conversations with travel agents, falling over herself as she tried to pack lemon juice and staplers with toiletries. “She’s fine, dad,” I repeat, pushing past him to get a dust-cloth to wipe the baseboards. She always liked returning to a clean house after traveling.
When I tell my therapist about that moment in the hallway when I was twelve, when my father stopped me to ask what my mother was taking, I start to see clearly how the three of us—my mother, father, and I—became like a three-legged stool, dependent on each other to function.
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of deterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogenous elements, form a rhizome.
When the Vietnam War ends in 1975, my mother’s oldest brother Carl returns home an alcoholic. In the backyard, there is a small shed where he keeps extra booze hidden from his parents and siblings. My mother finds him there when she is looking for a hoe. He attacks her, tackles her to the ground, pins her body beneath him and tries to take off her clothes, puts his hand under her shorts embroidered with daisies and peace-signs. Her mother comes looking for her (or maybe she heard the shouts and grunts) and finds him on top of her. She screams his name before picking up a shovel and hitting him over the head with it, pulling him off as my mother goes running back to the house, leaves in her hair falling out behind her.
I come home from class one summer afternoon, sunlight radiating off asphalt. I’m taking Remedial Math II, in the hopes I can start college algebra in the fall term, and I thought about staying on campus to do homework. Once inside the house, I wish I had. The curtains are pulled and it’s so dark inside, when I open the front door the sudden flood of light reflects off the white tile floor. Our dog meets me at the door, tail wagging nervously. She sheds in the summer and piles of her hair line the baseboards like tumbleweeds, scattered along the tiles we used to bleach. My mother has been sleeping on the couch while her room is repainted deep blue, and when I check on her, asleep there, I notice she’s peed herself. As I try to lift her, to pull her to the bathroom, she’s stands, stumbles a few paces, and collapses into the TV stand. I watch her moan on cold floor, and—for just a minute—contemplate turning around and going back to campus, leaving her here alone.
My mother always disliked Florida. When my father first accepts a position as city engineer and buys a house in Boca Raton, she doesn’t leave Indiana. Instead she drives the twenty-or-so hours every few months, staying a long weekend. After the first trip, she returns home and tells her mother she could never live there—so flat and hot, so manicured and artificial. Lawns all green and meticulous, women’s nails covered in acrylics. So many perfectly manufactured teeth. “The beach is pretty, but I hate the sand and the ocean scares me,” she had said.
Years later, she and I are eating a picnic in the backyard under the slash pine she hates so much when she tells me that if her mother hadn’t died, she wouldn’t have ever left Indiana for this “miserable place,” which means Florida, which means my home, and as a child, I wonder if it means me too.
One day in a doctor’s waiting room, she asks me if I remember the Kavanaugh trial. When I answer yes, she recalls to me, her words flooding out of her, a memory. Bobby, she tells me, was thirteen, a couple years older than her, when he pinned her to a bed in the room above someone’s garage. “I never remembered until watching that trial. I told your daddy when I remembered and I asked him if he thought I was dirty now, if I was ruined.”
My mother has always been fearful, double-checking doors are locked, alarm set. She sleeps with a baseball bat, knives in the top nightstand drawer. Insists on wooden rods in windows despite locks, always leaves a porch light on. Long after our German Shepherd dies, she keeps up “Beware of Dog” signs. She reads that a dog’s sound deters break-ins so she buys an alarm that barks aggressively whenever its sensors are set off. She answers the door yelling at a nonexistent dog, “Get back, get back, stay!”
Feminist therapist and trauma researcher Maria P. P. Root argues women in the United States, and most of the world, live aware that they are vulnerable to attack, likely by a friend, family member, or acquaintance; in most women, this fear causes what Root describes as second-hand rape trauma. This is especially evident, Root argues, if the woman feels she would face disbelief, or that she would be blamed for the rape or attack. Other trauma experts suggest that some level of insidious trauma exists in women and people of color, those who inherit legacies of trauma—in other words, the stories we tell or the stories passed down to us live within us. They manifest into a shapeless figure, lurking in our subconscious, telling us we have reason to be afraid, to walk with our keys in our fist, to always look over our shoulder.
My mother is the last of five. An unplanned pregnancy. In the picture of her in my mind, she’s smiling, her teeth are small and uneven. But her clothes—a blue corduroy jumper and long sleeve yellow shirt—are clean and pressed. Her face is thin, skin bright and clear. The year is on the back, a slanting cursive I recognize. 1970. She digs dandelions out of the grass with teaspoons; she plays tag football with her brothers. Already her body has known betrayal. Already it knows weight.
After her mother dies, she drives down to Boca for what she intends to be the last time. She pulls into the driveway and my father greets her there, but he isn’t my father yet. And she isn’t my mother. They hug, he kisses her cheek and forehead loudly, lips smacking. How long have they been doing this now—he here in Florida, her there in Kentucky? At least a year. She looks in his eyes behind his glasses and tells him she can’t anymore. Or maybe she says she won’t. It doesn’t matter. Three days later, they buy gold rings from Sears and visit the Delray Beach County courthouse. In a month, she’ll realize she’s pregnant, and the following May, they’ll have a daughter they name Emily June.
Women raped before the age of eighteen are twice as likely to be raped as an adult. Poor women are more likely to be assaulted than affluent. Women aged fifteen and under are more likely to be assaulted. More educated women more likely to be assaulted, especially by a partner. Women who drink or do drugs, women who use public transport, who go out alone. Women who say yes, who say no, who say nothing.
At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.
One day, a neighbor in our apartment complex sees me parking, sees my hands full of plants and grocery bags. Asks if he can help, asks if Brandon and I eat tamales, he’s just made some, he’ll bring them over. He picks up my bags before I can refuse, which I have done in the past many times. I’ve rebuffed him rudely, and now I’m trying to be nice. I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch. He walks me up to the apartment and walks in, sets down my Kroger bags. He’s being nice, kind.
But the entire time, I’m wondering, Are you a predator?
Emily Jalloul is a Lebanese-American poet and PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at University of Tennessee, where she serves as managing editor for Grist: Journal of Literary Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (University Press of Kentucky, 2023), Bodega Magazine, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere.