In the Dream House

Because Machado’s ex-partner moved to Iowa City for an MFA program, Machado often saw her in the neighborhood immediately following their breakup. Machado and Val begin dating. When Machado confesses the panic that seeing her ex-partner causes in her, Val sends her a vial of angelic root, meant as a talisman of protection. Machado does not believe in the power of such talismans yet wears it anyway, as it reminds her that Val cares for her. However, the vial also reminds her that nothing will truly keep her safe.

Machado tells more people her story of the Dream House. She notices that some will listen, others will become closed-off, and others will doubt what she says. She feels frustrated and desperate.

Machado admits to wishing that her ex-partner had beaten her; this might have left a bruise, and at least then she would have some evidence of the abuse. She imagines having a series of photos of herself with bruises to be able to show people. After so long in a mindset of uncertainty, doubt, and paranoia, Machado wishes only for something concrete to be able to define her experience by.

The only proof Machado has of her experiences is that of her nervous system, “[t]he lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness […] my memory has something to say about the way the trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus” (225). Her readers, she acknowledges, have no reason to believe the events of her story. She cites José Esteban Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, which introduces the term “ephemeral evidence” to describe the forms of evidence that do not fit into the traditional archival records.

Machado wonders if there are any feminine public figures who have hidden lives as abusers. She is “struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women” (227). She notes that queer women have more to prove to the general public because of discrimination but that perpetuating a lesbian utopia—such as she did with the Dream House—is even worse.

Machado shares that, to pursue writing this memoir, she went to Yaddo, an artist’s retreat in upstate New York. There, she entered “full performance mode” (229), wearing more confident clothes, going to the gym, and attending dinners where she drank a lot of wine. She had crushes on two other attendees. At the end of her stay, she told an ironical version of her story in the Dream House, emphasizing how it brought her into her new relationship with Val.

The narrative returns to Machado after she leaves the relationship. Years after the breakup, she finds a memory card from an old camera. On it, she discovers nude photographs she once took of her ex-partner in the Dream House. She briefly considers keeping them, but as she can’t decide what that would accomplish, she deletes them all with “an irrational twinge of loss” (230).

Machado wonders how her relationship would have turned out had her ex-partner never turned abusive. Among her fantasies is one of herself, Val, and the ex-partner in “a polyamorous success story” (231). Despite the pain of the relationship, Machado wishes she could relive it from a new perspective and with a new ending.

Because Machado had never encountered the idea of lesbian domestic abuse before the start of her relationship, she was eventually shocked to find that many self-help books had already been published on the topic. Additionally, these books had stories that closely described her own experience. She’d spent too long believing (and wanting to believe) that her experience, her love and her pain, was special. She notes, “[T]he world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you [as a lesbian] an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt” (232).

Machado mentions having read about queer domestic abuse survivors. One woman, Anne Franklin, wrote an essay describing how her former lover once stoned her on a beach; to escape, Franklin swam out into the sea. This image—of a woman being stoned—has stayed with Machado for many reasons. The term “stoning” has so many connotations: a capital punishment for being gay, Stonewall, and more.

Outside Iowa City, Machado visits an anechoic chamber with a friend. An anechoic chamber is one in which no echoes can be made; Machado notes how every sound in that chamber was distinctly heard, down to her own blood in her veins. She claps; nothing answers back.

This chapter presents a fictional scene in which a crew of people, having left Earth generations previously, return to Earth without the knowledge of why they left in the first place. They define their confused feelings of doubt and uncertainty as nostalgia.

This chapter’s title includes a French idiom for the sensation of thinking of the perfect reply too late. Machado flies to Cuba with her brother to visit her ancestral home in Santa Clara, discovering along the journey that Santa Clara, Cuba is the sister city to Bloomington, Indiana. After arriving, Machado’s stress on remembering her ex-partner causes her debilitating stomach issues, which are then banished by a Cuban woman during a ritual.

Machado walks around Santa Clara wondering at the psychic implications of sister cities. She feels she is walking around Bloomington at the same time, half expecting to see the Dream House in reality. Her brother shows her around Santa Clara while describing places and events their grandfather once told him of. Machado can’t quite reconcile the image of her grandfather, currently a dementia patient in the United States, to the macho man her brother describes.

Machado claims that after the Dream House, she developed a sixth sense—an uncanny instinct for danger—as if she had been infected with the virus of abuse and her body was now capable of sensing potentially threatening people. This instinct comes in the form of a “physical revulsion” that arises seemingly inexplicably when meeting certain people for the first time. She is proud of her body for communicating with her.

Machado critiques the very medium of her memoir: “That there’s a real ending to anything, is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing” (239). She doubts that she will ever fully complete the story of the Dream House, as her experiences with domestic abuse will influence the rest of her life. After musing on the idea of endings and even mortality, she concludes enigmatically, “There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: ‘My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.’ It’s the only true kind of ending” (239).

Machado describes her experience writing part of her memoir while living in rural Oregon. The natural surroundings of her artist’s residency informed her writing practice. She wishes she had “always lived in this body” (242) of peace and acceptance. Machado does not end her memoir on a definitive note, rather expressing the notion of continual movement by echoing the Panamanian folktale referenced in the previous chapter: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you” (242).