Sara Quinn Rivara: STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN • Cleaver Magazine

Creative Nonfiction by Sara Quinn Rivara
STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN

My sisters and I covered our parents’ minivan in maxi pads as we drove through Ohio, a thin line of cigarette smoke easing from the open windows. Our parents listened to the Golden Oldies, stopped only to buy more cigarettes, a case of Budweiser. Our dad drove for an hour before he noticed. Jesus Christ, Laura, he said to my mother. My sisters and I read aloud and in sign from the Three Investigators and ate red licorice and off-brand cheese puffs and pinched each others’ thighs when we got annoyed, little half-moons from our fingernails on our soft skin.

I was twenty-eight when my son was born. I was terrified that I would leave him in the car, that I would wake and he would not be breathing beside me. I wished my body clean every night. His father called my midwife, told her I was crazy, asked if there were pills. You’re my wife, you are supposed to have sex with me, there is something wrong with you, are you frigid, are you crazy.

Once, a writing teacher gave me rules: no dead dog poems, no dead grandmothers, no dead fathers, no mothers at all. No more poems about the moon, he said.

Years later, a more-successful-than-me poet pressed his knee between my knees on the porch during a writing conference. I was thirty-three, he was seventy. He licked his lips: I’d fuck you if I were younger.

Years later, I would tell my own students: no poems about rape. Just because it’s awful and true doesn’t mean your readers will care, I told my students. That’s on you.

What I should have said was—I can’t read anymore what you’d like to do to women.

Before I stopped teaching, a student handed me a story that described murdering a woman with a knife up her vagina. It was called “The First Time” and the speaker, the woman, said at the beginning I hear it hurts but I am not afraid, I am excited. He is so handsome. The writer was a man, maybe thirty. I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. After I told him no more stories about violence, he handed me a story about an arguing couple in a pickup truck. The wife was silent, so silent, until they hit a curb and her door sprung open and she tumbled out because, of course, she was already dead. My dean said you aren’t allowed to tell students what they can and cannot write about. When the student complained that I’d given him an F, my dean said if I were you, I’d wear fewer skirts. My dean said dear, it gets better when you get older. Believe me. She sat stiffly behind her desk. Exactly how can anybody fail creative writing anyway? She asked. It’s not like there are rules.

In sixth grade, when I was trying to catch a fly ball in gym class, my bra broke and my shirt lifted to my chin and my breasts swung in the open air. What a slut, girls whispered in the locker room. Hey Sara, it doesn’t matter what your face is like! one of the boys shouted. The gym teacher shook her head. You should have known better, she said.

When I was thirty-six and my son was eight, we moved two thousand miles away. I left my tenured teaching job. I left everything. For eight years, my son and I would have to travel cross-country a dozen times a year, on my dime. In order to move, I had to get married as the state of Michigan did not consider a promotion, or terror, or running for my life good enough reason to move my son. What I wish to be told is that I have done the right thing. That I am not a terrible mother.

If you hadn’t asked for a divorce, then you’d be able to see your son every day, my son’s father told me. This is my fault. Whatever happens. Original sin.

Once a boyfriend told me he was going to write a novel about a man who was lost in the median woods. It’s ten yards across, how could he not find his way out? I asked.

It’s not attractive when a woman swears, the boyfriend said. He was one of many. He was drinking wine on the couch in his underwear. He fucked me anyway. It was mediocre, but I thought that’s all there was. He took me to his cabin in the northern woods and we hiked through the snow and he told me he could fight a bear if he needed to. You seem like you were a good wife, he said when I told him about my first marriage where I was miserable. Though, it seems like performance art.

When I wrote, anonymously, about having had cervical cancer, having contracted an STD from my ex-husband, he told me to stop. What if my grandparents read your blog? I broke up with him a few weeks later at a restaurant.

When I picked up my son from his father’s house, he had rug burns down his spine. Fucking whore, his father said. Yeah, sure. Fine.

Don’t you get tired of talking about the past? my new husband asks. He is kind. He is different. Look, I say. The past is a museum. A mausoleum.

Don’t write poems about motherhood, a famous poet said while I was in graduate school, or breastfeeding, or taking kids to soccer practice. Jesus, that’s boring. There is nothing profound in that. He let his hand glance my bare knee. It was summer in North Carolina, and I was young and beautiful then.

Sara Quinn Rivara is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently LITTLE BEAST (Riot in Your Throat), a finalist for the 2024 Oregon Book Awards. Her work has appeared recently in ONE ART, Colorado Review, CALYX, West Branch, and numerous other places. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.