Gas and Water by DeAnn Lancashire
October 1993 Tulare, California
I have to walk carefully. I don’t want to spill. I am carrying a battered black canning pot full of scalding water. The weight of it strains my neck and shoulders as I hold it at arm’s length. I know this is bad on my back, but it must be done. Eight steps from the kitchen through the dining area. Eleven steps through the back part of the living room to the hall. Five steps from the hall into the bathroom where I empty the pot into the bathtub. This is the twelfth trip I have made and I have many more to go. I need to give the kids their baths.
Right now on the kitchen stove, all four electric burners are heating various containers full of water: a dented aluminum teakettle, an ancient stainless steel six-quart stockpot, a four-quart scratched Teflon pot and a warped one-quart copper-bottom saucepan. It would be more efficient to use all large containers, but these are all I have.
As I carry the water through the living room, I try to breathe and move quietly. I don’t want to disturb my husband. He is lying on the couch watching a video, The Last of the Mohicans. Nine-year-old Elias and seven-year-old Enoch are sitting on the floor watching it with him. Four-year-old Hannah is building castles with colored blocks nearby.
In the bathroom I pour the hot water into the bathtub, then slip back through the living room to the kitchen. I put the canner in the sink under the spout and, while it is filling with cold water, I take the stockpot from the stove and carry it through the front room to the bathroom and empty it into the tub. Then I slip back through the front room to the kitchen, turn off the water and heave the canning pot out of the sink to the counter. I put the just-emptied stockpot in the sink, turn on the water to fill it up, take the teakettle off the burner and move the newly filled canning pot from the counter to the empty burner. Then I take the teakettle through the living room to the bathroom and empty it into the tub.
I will do this many times until the bathtub is about half full—enough water for a quick, efficient bath. It won’t be full enough for the kind of baths my children really like: long, deep bubbly baths with toy boats and rubber ducks and dolphins. Those are the kinds of baths I used to give them, but that was before their father turned off our supply of natural gas a few weeks ago.
This is how it happened. In July, about a month after we moved down here to Tulare from Weed, he started feeling kind of weird. He said his vision seemed off and he felt light-headed and disconnected from everything. He said he felt like he was in a bubble all the time, like he was watching himself do things from a distance. He started calling it The Bubble Feeling. I said it sounded like some kind of dissociation, probably due to stress. After all, we had just moved and he didn’t have a job yet. But he scowled at me and said No, that wasn’t it. Since we’ve moved at least 13 times in 11 years we should be used to it by now and besides, he said, he wasn’t going to get a job anyway. We can continue surviving on Welfare while he prepares for a new ministry. Instead of trying to break into the Christian music business, he’s going to be a great preacher. Someone needs to take over for Billy Graham, he says. He also reminded me that I had only one year of college, while he had his B.A., plus enough credits for several B.A.s or even a Master’s degree. He said it was presumptuous of me to play at pop psychology and career counseling.
I did not remind him that I helped him write and edit the “A” papers that earned him his degree. Whenever I have mentioned that he says I’m full of evil pride in my gifts with language. He says a good, humble wife would not mock him for his dyslexia, but would use her gifts quietly to help her husband succeed.
I never meant to mock him; I only wanted to remind him how I helped. But wives are not supposed to keep an account of all they do for their husbands. I couldn’t have written those papers without him anyway. My only part was to listen to him talk, take notes and organize his ideas on paper for him. It’s not like I came up with the ideas on my own.
So, The Bubble Feeling is not dissociation. It’s some kind of poison in the air.
First he suspected freon. Our refrigerator was kind of old.
“It probably has a leak in the coolant tubing somewhere,” he said.
I said, “I’ve never heard of anyone being poisoned by a freon leak in a fridge.”
“If freon can eat holes in the ozone, what could it do to our brains or lungs?” he said. So he moved the refrigerator outside onto the patio by the back door. There’s a roof over the patio, so it’s not like the fridge is out in the weather or anything. But it’s very inconvenient not to have it in the kitchen. There’s something ridiculous about having to go outside to use the refrigerator. I laugh at myself sometimes because it feels so redneck.
The fridge went outside in August. He thought maybe it would take awhile for the residual effects of freon gas poisoning to dissipate from his system. We waited for a week or two, but The Bubble Feeling persisted.
I still thought it was stress, but it might also have to do with the change in climate. We had been accustomed to a 3,500 ft. elevation and breathing clean mountain air. Now we lived in a hot, smoggy valley at sea level. Moving from the Siskiyous to the San Joaquin Valley in mid-summer was bound to take some getting used to, so I said I thought maybe The Bubble Feeling was a combination of stress, smog and having to get acclimated. I said we’d probably feel better in the fall when it’s cooler and the rains clear the air a little.
He pounced on that suggestion. He has been reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the woman who raised the world’s consciousness about how, in the `50s and `60s, we were destroying our environment with the unregulated use of bio-hazardous chemicals in farming and industry. She lamented the rapidly diminishing numbers of songbirds, predicting that one day we would kill all our birds and spring would be a silent season, hence the title. Carson was brilliant and her work helped to outlaw DDT and other dangerous chemicals. But the book was published in 1962—the year I was born. Things have changed in 31 years, in many ways for the better, I think. However, my husband pores over Carson’s dire prophecies for hours and believes he is her last faithful follower. So when I mentioned the smog, he praised my insight. I was just glad he was blaming his problems on air pollution. Now maybe he’d put the fridge back in the kitchen. He didn’t though. He likes the fridge being outside. He says I can’t sneak food to the kids so easily now because he can hear me going in and out the back door to get to the fridge.
I do snack less with the fridge outside, so I guess that’s a good thing for me. But it’s worse for the kids.
When he diagnosed his Bubble Problem as smog poisoning, he started spending more time indoors with the air conditioning on. He still didn’t feel any better, though.
One day he went into his storage room and rummaged around. I was in the kitchen making bread when he emerged from the storage room about an hour later. He was wearing a gas mask.
“See!” he said triumphantly, “I told you this would come in handy someday.” Only it sounded more like: “Phee! I toe noo ith ood tum in anny un nay.”
“I can’t understand you,” I said, even though I knew what he had said. As soon as I said it, a little chant started up in my mind as I kneaded the dough: can’t understand you, can’t understand you, can’t stand you, can’t stand you…”
My husband took off the gas mask to talk to me. He was talking, but I wasn’t listening. My hands kneaded dough, my brain chanted hate and my mouth said, “O.K., Dear. That’s a good idea.”
A few years ago he had toyed with the idea of making and selling pewter sculptures. He read up on it and discovered metallurgists have to wear special masks to protect themselves from fumes. Buying the gas mask was an investment, he had said; a step toward his dream of becoming an artisan. He made a few wax sculptures, but he never followed through on learning how to work with metals. One day someone set the wax figures too close to the woodstove and they melted—along with yet another ambition. The mask sat around for months. I wanted to sell it before we moved—it had cost over $100 and had never been used—but he insisted he might find a use for it someday.
So now he wears the gas mask whenever he goes outside. Drastic problems call for drastic solutions, he says. If it can filter out poisons from burning metals, it must be able to filter out smog. He wears it everywhere: when he goes outside to oversee Elias doing yard chores, when he goes outside to read his Bible in the sun, even when we all walk to the store. It’s so embarrassing.
Despite wearing the gas mask and the fridge being outside, his bubble feeling persisted. He was certain something else was contributing to his problem. It must be a combination of smog and something in the house, he said.
One day he said our natural gas line had a leak. The water heater and furnace were working fine, and everything smelled OK, but he told me to call the gas company anyway. They sent a guy out to do a check up. My husband stayed close to him the whole time watching and asking questions. Then he asked the guy to double-check everything. Before he left, the gas company man assured us over and over that all was clear.
As soon as the guy was gone, my husband went outside to the gas meter and started messing around with it. When he came back inside he told me he had turned off the gas line coming to the house. He sat us all down and explained that we couldn’t trust the gas company. He had watched the guy and asked questions so he would know what to do to assure our safety. Humans can’t smell natural gas, that’s why the gas company adds that rotten egg smell to it, so people can tell if there’s a leak. But if they left out that rotten-egg-additive, or put some kind of filter on our gas line, we wouldn’t even know we were being poisoned.
I said the gas company wouldn’t and couldn’t do that. He said there was nothing the government couldn’t sabotage, and they could and would do anything to get rid of him if they considered him a threat.
I just sat there. I repressed the many logical retorts coursing through my mind. How could you be a threat to the government? You’re an introverted mouse living on welfare in Uncle Sam’s back pocket! You don’t go anywhere without your bedraggled entourage of a family and you don’t have any outside contacts. You’ve got no money, no influence on anyone other than your wife and kids. You? A threat to the government? Don’t make me laugh!
But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I knew it would do no good to try to reason with him. I just sighed and said, “Well, I’d better get some water on the stove. The kids need baths.”
The Bubble Feeling still hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s getting worse. Even Elias and I are feeling it now. Elias says he feels like nothing is real anymore. To me it feels like when I go too long without sleep and I get past the point of being sleepy. It’s a weird feeling of disconnection—like I’m in a dream watching myself do things. I still think it’s stress. Life has been so hard and weird, and it keeps getting harder and weirder every day. But I can’t tell him that. The more I try to convince him of it, the more he tries to convince me it’s poison, and the more upset he gets when he sees I don’t believe him. If I push back too much, he takes it out on the boys. So I just keep heating water on the stove. All day long I heat water for laundry and dishes and baths.
After about 15 or so trips from the kitchen to the bathroom I lose count. I fill pans with water. I put them on the stove. I carry heavy pots of hot water through the living room to the bathroom and dump them in the tub. The tub fills gradually, but the water is cooling, so I must hurry. I slip back through the living room, where my husband and the boys are still watching the video, put the empty pot in the sink and turn on the water to fill it while I take another pan of hot water through the living room to the bathroom.
On one of these trips back to the kitchen, my husband calls for me to watch something. He pauses the video and rewinds to a certain scene. It’s the climax of The Last of the Mohicans and the hero, played by Daniel Day Lewis, is hacking the villain in the head with a hatchet. When the bad guy falls off the cliff, my husband rewinds it and tells me to watch it again.
“I have to finish getting the bath ready for the kids,” I say.
“If you don’t do as I say, I won’t let the kids take their baths,” he says. So I stand with an empty pot in my hand and watch Daniel Day Lewis hack his archenemy in the head again and throw him off the cliff.
I go back to the kitchen, put the empty pot in the sink, turn on the water to fill it up, take the soup pan from the burner and carry it through the living room, where my husband is rewinding the video and telling the boys to watch the hacking scene again, into the bathroom and empty it into the tub.
As I pass back through the living room I say, “It’s not good for little children to watch that kind of violence, especially when you play it over and over.”
“Well, they’d better get used to it,” he says coldly. “They’re going to see a lot of violence when we move to Israel. The book of Matthew says, ‘The kingdom of God comes by violence and the violent take it by force.’ We’ll probably have to kill to help God’s people. Watching this movie helps the kids understand that. It helps prepare them.”
He rewinds the scene again.
“Watch this, boys—you too, Mommy, if you want to give the kids their baths. Stay here until I say it’s OK for you to go.” Then he looks over at Hannah who is playing with blocks. She is not watching the movie. “Hannah, Come here, Sweetie,” he says. Daddy wants to show you something.”
Hannah goes to him obediently. He holds her with one arm.
“Watch the TV, Honey. Daddy wants you to see what happens to bad men.”
“OK, Daddy,” she says.
So Hannah watches Daniel Day Lewis hack his enemy in the head. She watches the enemy fall over the cliff. Then she slides away from her father and returns to her blocks. Her back is turned to the TV. I sit down on the floor with her. My husband rewinds and plays the scene again.
Hannah looks up at me and says, “That bad man! He chopped a guy in the head and pushed him off a mountain.”
“Shhh…” I say, looking quickly at her daddy. He doesn’t hear her. He would be angry if he knew she couldn’t tell the good guy from the bad guy.
“Play with your blocks, baby-girl. Don’t think about the movie. ”
“Bad men hurt people,” she whispers, scowling.
I try to distract her by stacking blocks haphazardly so they topple over. I’m really afraid he will hear how she misunderstood his lesson. If he finds out she confused the hero with the villain, he will do something extreme to make her see it his way. This scares me. The thing that scares me the most is that I can’t predict what he will do anymore. The whole predicament begins to feel like a desperate adventure. I must protect my daughter’s misperception, but I mustn’t let her father know. I feel a kind of perverse exhilaration and begin to giggle nervously.
“Watch this, Mommy,” my husband says to me in his imperative, warning voice. He rewinds the hacking scene again. I direct my eyes toward the television, but I look at the wall above it. He thinks I’m watching but I’m not. I focus very hard on the wall and not on the TV. He plays and rewinds the scene over and over and over. I try to think of something else, but I know Daniel Day Lewis is hacking his enemy in the head over and over and over. I know his enemy is falling off the cliff over and over and over. My two little boys are watching this. They’ve been watching this same scene for an hour.
What is this doing to them?
My mind divides. The front of my mind is numb, apathetic, resigned. The front of my mind says: You can’t do anything about this. Just go along with him. It will be over soon. But the back of my mind is agonizing, furious, poised to lash out. The back of my mind screams: This is sick! This is crazy! This must stop!
I think maybe I can stop this. I can pretend to go along with him and even pretend to like it. I say in a mesmerized voice, “Show it again, please.”
“No, that’s enough,” he says. “You can give the kids their baths now.”
I get up and go to the steaming kitchen. A lot of water has boiled away in the time I had to spend pretending to watch that scene play, rewind, play again over and over. The stove is splattered from a billion boiling bursting bubbles. My mind begins a little chant as I continue with my chore: A billion boiling bursting bubbles, a billion boiling bursting bubbles…
I put the empty pot in the sink and turn on the tap. While the pot fills with water I take the saucepan full of boiling water off the stove and carry it through the living room, where my husband and the boys are watching the movie credits. I carry the saucepan into the bathroom and dump the water into the tub. I slip back through the living room, where my husband instructs the boys on killing and Biblical warfare. I pause and look at him lying on the couch lecturing my little boys. He is quoting the Old Testament and gesturing with the Rod—the one he uses to spank them. My little boys.
In that one instant my mind snaps like a bursting bubble. The numbness is gone. A sharp clarity reconciles the divided parts of my mind. The bubble feeling is gone.
And then, six little words come unbidden to my mind.
I know these words to be true. They are easy words. A first grader could read these words.
I am living with a monster.
I let these words simmer in my brain.
I’ve thought similar words before, but I’ve never let myself hold on to them.
Instead of exorcising such words with prayer as I usually do, I let the words come to a rolling boil.
I am living with a monster!
I consume these words. I savor them. They become part of my mind and heart.
When I realize that I truly do believe this, I become very afraid. If this is true, that he is a monster, then I have to do something about it. But what? What can I do? If I try to leave he’ll kill me or he’ll take the children.—I know he will; he’s told me he would—and I’ll never find them. He said he’d kill anyone who tries to take his family from him—but that’s because he loves us so much. He needs us.
I return to the kitchen. The steam envelops me. I’m in the Bubble again.
I put the empty saucepan in the sink and fill it up, move the big canning pot off the burner, put the saucepan on the burner, pick up the canner and take the eight steps from the kitchen through the dining area. On my third step through the back part of the living room I hear little Enoch’s plaintive, lisping cry, “I’m thorry, Daddy!”
On my sixth step I hear my husband shout, “I told you to pay attention!”
I take the other ten steps into the bathroom. As I pour the water into the tub I hear Enoch’s muffled howls emanating from the couch cushions. Eyes on the floor, I follow my path back to the kitchen through the living room. I do not look up. I know what’s happening.
I hear the familiar sound of a heavy stick whistling through the air over and over and over. I hear it making contact with the tender skin of a little boy’s back over and over and over. The front of my mind says, This too shall pass. The back of my mind screams, Do something!
I know I have to burst the bubble again—and I have to do it soon.
But first I need to give the kids their baths.
One Response to “Gas and Water by DeAnn Lancashire”
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it is so disturbing to know this is true
you conveyed it well
i felt her horror, her weariness, the kids draining innocence, his madness.