{"id":1995,"date":"2023-01-28T19:36:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-29T01:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1995"},"modified":"2023-02-15T18:52:10","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T00:52:10","slug":"wrong-bathroom-by-caren-beilin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1995","title":{"rendered":"“Wrong Bathroom” by Caren Beilin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Guest starring Adania Shibli\u2019s Minor Detail<\/em>.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

An artist was trying to make art and it wasn\u2019t easy. This artist got upset. He started beating the people he lived with. He started shoving them around and holding their necks close to the sink and trash can. I am an artist trying to make art with my uneasiness with domestic abuse. I keep thinking about it and trying to make art out of its ropes and blenders. I keep wanting to stream something. I keep leaving the scissors outside. This morning I read half of a novel that the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli said she wrote over 11 years, in which a soldier an Israeli soldier rapes and buries I mean he kills he orders to be killed he buries her in the sand in the desert I mean Negev, and I sat on my patio obliterated\/heaving about it about rape and rape\/Israel and I guess Adania made art about a kind<\/em> of domestic abuse when you\u2019re a Bedouin and the desert is your domestic space. Rape is more than death, so I wondered how will I ever in my own art deal with anything and thinking then about domestic abuse\u2026You\u2019d think at this point I<\/em> was abused in a house. You\u2019d think that\u2019s where this story is trending and that a coming confession is going to hop onto your face. My confession wouldn\u2019t be like that! My confession of domestic abuse\u2014that I did it? Had it? Suffered it?\u2014would be like the sucking prong of a slug leg.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I was, this beaten woman trying to make sense of my life against the sense of the house. Did I run out of it? One or two times? Did I call 911 asking for pizza delivery hoping the operator was trained in this as the code? No I never did that. Did I say yes and yes and yes and yes and is yes meaningless? Yes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stories are not helps. They lack sustenance. As far as being beaten, it\u2019s endlessness. There is endlessness inside of men. Stars are wearier than the men. How do you change the human? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But some people theorize in groups or at clubs that a redeeming thing about artmaking or stories in particular is that you end them. You can reach resolution. Things end and\/or begin again.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ok. I\u2019ve been living with an abusive man. I go report him. The police detain him and friends encircle him in transformative justice tactics designed to get him to say he\u2019s accountable for all the beatings. They surround him and hold onto him. He\u2019s not trash. I go live with my cousin, a cruel type but crookedly redeemable in this instance. I smile unsure at her loud dinner parties (no masks) and beg off to sleep, eventually publishing my accounts and these stories are published in The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>. Very impressive! What a good ending I find myself in the middle of but I find myself in the bathroom of The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em> offices because I\u2019ve come up to shake hands with the editorial staff and anyone else who wants to come out for a handshake. Hey look who\u2019s here! This story ends with me falling asleep by one of the toilets in the bathroom. I guess I got overwhelmed. I tried to be sociable, I said something to one of them out there, \u201cA period is the biggest lie a sentence ever said,\u201d and everyone said that was really good. Wow, where\u2019d you come from<\/em> kind of thing. I guess I got overwhelmed and I\u2019m wrapped around this toilet and now a male editor is pissing almost directly onto my face which is a surprise. I\u2019m in the wrong bathroom.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat<\/em> (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2022). Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD<\/em> (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain <\/em>(Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania<\/em> (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us<\/em> (Diagram\/New Michigan Press, 2012). Shorter prose appears in Fence<\/em>, Territory<\/em>, Dreginald<\/em>, and The Offing<\/em>. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here I was, this beaten woman trying to make sense of my life against the sense of the house. Did I run out of it? One or two times? Did I call 911 asking for pizza delivery hoping the operator was trained in this as the code? No I never did that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[66,84],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}