Life of the Party Read online

  Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Olivia Gatwood

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9781984801906

  Ebook ISBN 9781984801913

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Zoe Norvell

  Cover art: Fabio La Fauci

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part I.

  Girl

  If a Girl Screams in the Middle of the Night

  Ghost Story for Masturbating at Sleepovers

  No Baptism

  First Grade, 1998

  The First Shave

  All of the Beautiful Ones Were Catholic

  Addendum to No Baptism

  Addendum II to No Baptism

  Gamble

  My Mother Says I Wasn’t a Bad Girl, I Was Just Bored

  With Her

  I Must Have Only Loved Her in the Summer

  Backpedal

  The Autocross

  Murder of a Little Beauty

  We All Got Burnt That Summer

  The Sandias, 2008

  Staying Small

  When I Say That We Are All Teen Girls

  My Man

  Mango Season

  Part II.

  My Grandmother Asks Why I Don’t Trust Men

  The Boy Says He Loves Ted Bundy but Doesn’t Laugh About It

  Here Is What You Need to Know

  Mans/Laughter

  The Lover as a Cult

  The Summer of 2008 at Altura Park

  The Lover as Tapeworm

  Sound Bites While We Ponder Death

  The Lover as Corn Syrup

  The Scholar

  Ode to My Jealousy

  The Lover as Appetite

  Ode to My Favorite Murder

  I Am Almost Certain I Could Dispose of Myself & Get Away with It

  The Lover as a Dream

  My Mother’s Addendum

  Body Count: 13

  Eubank & Candelaria, 2009

  Aileen Wuornos Teaches Me About Commitment

  Part III.

  She Lit Up Every Room She Walked Into

  When They Find Him

  Will I Ever Stop Writing About the Dead Girl

  Elegy for Allegedly

  Ode to the Women on Long Island

  My Girl

  Aileen Wuornos Convinces Me to Put Down My Dog

  Ode to My Bitch Face

  Aileen Wuornos Isn’t My Hero

  A Story Ending in Breakfast

  Blowjob Elegy

  What I Know About Healing

  Sonnet for the Clove of Garlic Inside Me

  Ode to Pink

  Ode to My Lover’s Left Hand

  I Am Always Trying to Make My Poems Timeless

  Ode to the Unpaid Electricity Bill

  Say It, I’m Always in Love

  2041

  Aileen Wuornos Takes a Lover Home

  Another Thing I Know About Healing

  All of the Missing Girls Are Hanging Out Without Us

  In the Future, I Love the Nighttime

  Acknowledgments

  By Olivia Gatwood

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In June in Boston, the sun rises at 5:10 A.M. I know this because, one week, I stayed up every night until that exact minute. I can’t quite recall what I was up doing—maybe pacing my kitchen, moving between my couch and my bed, starting movies hoping I would fall asleep and then stopping them when I didn’t. I am not an insomniac. Far from it—I’ve never had trouble clocking ten hours of sleep when I need it. My sleepless week, and the several more all-nighters between then and now, happened because I was afraid. I was afraid of something very specific: a man climbing through my first-floor apartment window, which realistically could have been popped open with a butter knife, and strangling me in my bed.

  It feels both important and irrelevant to tell you that I spent months before that week almost exclusively consuming true crime. Important because, yes, my fear was shaped by the dozens of stories I’d read and watched that mirrored my phobia, stories that showcased how common and easy it is to murder a girl. One could argue (many did) that had I not read those stories, I would not have kept all of my windows closed in the middle of the summer in an apartment without air-conditioning.

  This media obsession of mine is simultaneously irrelevant because even without it, my fear had been validated over and over by very real, very tangible experiences. There was the first time I lived alone, at eighteen, when a stranger saw me on the street, figured out my address, and left notes on my door insisting that we belonged together. There was the man who tried to pry open my roommate’s window with a crowbar while she slept. The man who sat in the back of my show and laughed every time I talked about women’s deaths. The man who forced open my car door in my driveway and climbed on top of me as I tried to get out. The American boys in another country who placed bets on who would sleep with me first while they walked me home, how I left them on a street corner in the middle of the night so they wouldn’t know where I was staying. And there were all of the men before, between, and after that—men whose names I know, men I loved and trusted—who violated my body, the bodies of my friends, the bodies of their daughters, and, I’m certain, the bodies of countless women I do not know.

  People often tell me that I spend too much time being afraid of something that is statistically less likely than a car crash. But every time I read the news, I am pummeled by stories of missing girls, murdered girls, women killed by their revenge-seeking former boyfriends, and it becomes increasingly difficult to call the murder of women “rare.” It is impossible to call my fear “irrational.”

  I want to believe that the motivation behind most true crime is to bring to light the epidemic of women’s murder worldwide, to use nonfiction storytelling as a method of illuminating a clear pattern. But I don’t believe that. If that were true, it wouldn’t focus on crimes committed by random strangers, and instead would reveal the much more common perpetrators: men whom these women knew and often loved. If true crime were truly mission-oriented, it would focus on the cases that are not explicitly perverse and shocking, the ones that are familiar, fast, and happen at home. If true crime sought to confront the reality of violence against women, it would not rely so heavily on fear-mongering narratives of cisgender white girls falling victim to men of co
lor. Instead, it would acknowledge that indigenous women experience the highest rates of homicide, often at the hands of white men. It would depict the stories of the several transgender women murdered each month, or the countless black, brown, and indigenous women who have gone missing without so much as an investigation.

  The language of true crime is coded—it tells us our degree of mourning is contingent on the victim’s story. While students and athletes are often remembered for their accolades and looks, sex workers or women who struggled with addiction are reduced to those identities as a justification for the violence committed against them—if their stories are even covered at all. The truth is: It is a privilege to have your body looked for. True crime, while being a genre that so many women rely on for contorted validation, is, simultaneously, a perpetuator of misogyny, racism, and sexualized violence—all of which is centered around one, beloved, dead girl. It is a genre primarily produced by men. A genre that complicates how we bond over our love for it, often unsure of who identifies with the victim and who identifies with the perpetrator.

  I found true crime because of my fear. A fear that, for so long, felt absurd and loud and wholly my own. True crime taught me that I am not the only one being devoured by this anxiety. And I am not the only one whose reaction is to consume as much true crime as possible—to fuel and fight it at once. But the true crime I want is written by women. The true crime I want moves beyond the star athlete. I want the stories that honor girls, not sensationalize them. The true crime I want knows that more than half of the women murdered worldwide are killed by their partners or family members. The true crime I want does not celebrate police or prison as a final act of justice, but recognizes these systems as perpetrators too—defective, corrupt, and complicit in the same violence that they prosecute.

  As an avid consumer of true crime in all genres—short stories, documentaries, podcasts, television shows—and as a writer myself, I began to wonder what stake poetry has in that conversation. What happens when we look at the phenomenon of our obsession with homicide and we say, “This is how this makes me feel. This is what this does to me at night.”

  I want to look beyond true crime to understand why I feel the way I do. I want to look at my own life, at the lives of women I love, women I’ve lost, women in my community and beyond, and begin to understand that the fear inside me is a product of simply being alive.

  Yes, I am terrified of being murdered. I am terrified that a man who threatened me on the Internet will come to one of my shows with a gun. I am terrified of rejecting men harshly because of the backlash that comes with it. I am not terrified because true crime told me to be, I am terrified because I have been here long enough to know I should be. This feeling dictates the ways I move: in parking garages, at bars, in my own house. And I have grown to know this feeling so intimately that I also experience a need to protect it—to understand where it was born, to name it, and to say it out loud.

  This is a book of poems about true crime. It is also a book of poems about the many small violences a person can withstand. It is a book about memory and girlhood. This book is, in large part, a memoir of my fear and how it was planted in me as a child, then perpetuated throughout my adult life. This book remembers the ways I have watched women I love disintegrate at the hands of men they trusted, girls found and not found, and, ultimately, how I have healed while keeping some necessary part of this fear intact. Reader, I cannot promise you will be less afraid when you finish this book, but I hope you will feel more able to name what lives inside you.

  I asked earlier what stake poetry has in this conversation. The only answer I have is this: to help us feel less alone in the dark.

  I.

  Sometimes the girls who walk alone

  Aren’t found for days or weeks

  —TRACY CHAPMAN

  GIRL

  after Ada Limón

  i don’t think i’ll ever not be one

  even when the dozen grays sprouting

  from my temple take hold and spread

  like a sterling fungus across my scalp,

  even when the skin on my hands is loose

  as a duvet, draped across my knuckles,

  even when i know everything there is to know

  about heartbreak or envy or the mortality

  of my parents, i think, even then i’ll want

  to be called girl, no matter the mouth

  it comes from or how they mean it,

  girl, the curling smoke after a sparkler

  spatters into dark, girl, sweet spoon of crystal sugar

  at the bottom of my coffee, girl, whole mouth

  of whipped cream at the birthday party, say girl,

  i think, i’ll never die, i’ll never stop running

  through sprinklers or climbing out of open windows

  i’ll never pass up a jar of free dum dums

  i’ll never stop ripping out the hangnail with my teeth

  i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl

  girl next door sunbathing in the driveway

  i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be

  all the girls i’ve ever loved,

  mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls,

  all of us angry on our porches,

  rolled tobacco resting on our bottom lips

  our bodies are the only things we own,

  leave our kids with nothing when we die

  we’ll still be girls then, too, we’ll still be pretty,

  still be loved, still be soft to the touch

  pink lip and powdered nose in the casket

  a dozen sobbing men in stiff suits

  yes, even then, we are girls

  especially then, we are girls

  silent and dead and still

  the life of the party.

  IF A GIRL SCREAMS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

  and no one is there to hear it

  here’s what happens. i’ll tell you.

  if she is in the woods, it shoots

  from the cannon of her throat

  & smacks itself against a branch,

  whips around it like a tetherball.

  if she is facedown in the moss,

  it seeps into the forest floor’s pores,

  & every time a hiker passes through,

  the days beyond her unravel,

  & steps along the sponge-green floor,

  a small howl will fan out from beneath his feet.

  if the girl is in the city,

  the scream gets lodged

  in the cubby of a neighbor’s ear,

  prevents him from sleeping at night

  & so, naturally, he sells it to a secondhand store.

  he takes it to the buying counter

  in a jewelry box & says,

  i don’t know who this belonged to

  but i don’t want it anymore.

  & though the pierced & dyed employee

  is reluctant to take it, she sees the purple

  bags like rotting figs under the neighbor’s eyes

  so she offers store credit.

  & so as not to startle customers,

  a small label will be placed on the box

  that says A SCREAM & each time a person cracks

  it open the girl’s rattling tongue will shake loose

  into the store. this happens for months but no one

  wants to buy it, to take care of it. everyone wants

  to hear it once to feel something & then go back

  to their quiet homes, so the store throws it

  in a dumpster out back, where the garbage

  truck picks it up & smashes it beneath

  its hydraulic fi
sts. the scream will get buried

  in a landfill somewhere in new jersey

  & later the landfill will be coated in grass,

  where a wandering child will see a hill,

  will throw her body against it

  & shriek the whole way down.

  GHOST STORY FOR MASTURBATING AT SLEEPOVERS

  after Melissa Lozada-Oliva

  have you heard the one about the girls

  in sleeping bags littered across the living room floor,

  faces next to each other’s feet, bellies full on pantry food

  and quiet, eyes vigilant to a black cube television?

  in my version it goes like: one girl slithers out into the dark

  and whispers the song of herself.

  soon, they are all on their stomachs,

  pushing up against long johns

  with the mounds of their palms,

  and no one names what is happening, both because

  it will become real and because there is not a name

  for it yet, only the knowledge

  that whatever it is must not be said aloud.

  in another version, a mother is falling into a still sleep,

  certain that her daughter has not yet discovered