Under My Bed and Other Essays

by Jody Keisner

Overview

Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father? Keisner’s fears mature as she becomes a wife and mother, and the boogeyman under the bed shape-shifts, though its shapes are no less frightening—a young aunt’s drowning, the “chest chomp” in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother’s belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: “Don’t be afraid.”

In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496230478
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Series:	American Lives
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jody Keisner is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Threepenny Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and AARP’s the Girlfriend, among other periodicals. Find out more at www.jodykeisner.com.
 

Read an Excerpt

Under My Bed

I know women who enjoy being alone in their homes at night. A
single mother at my daughter's preschool, for instance, says she lives
for uninterrupted hours of André Watts's piano playing when her
children are elsewhere. Another, a former student of mine, binge-watches
Breaking Bad on Netflix while her girlfriend works overnight
shifts as a nurse. And a third, whose husband regularly disappears for
weekend hunting trips-not regularly enough, she says-spends
her alone time absorbed by home improvement projects. These women
celebrate having the house to themselves. But I don't. At least, not
during the hours when the sun goes missing. At the risk of sounding
melodramatic, when I'm home alone after sunset and something
triggers me, which happens often enough, what I experience is the
antithesis of pleasure. It's closer to terror.

Case in point: I'm drinking wine and watching a romantic comedy
in my living room, relishing my freedom, when I spot a moth
bumping into the only lamp in the room. Who let the moth in? That
morning my husband, Jon, rode off on his motorcycle for a four-day
guys' trip. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and I can see no
farther than the old ash tree in my front yard. Hours earlier, I sang
my daughter Lily to sleep in her crib. It isn't the moth I fear, but
what I imagine its presence in my home signifies. A gristly lump of
anxiety catches in my throat, followed by the slow turn of a key, and
the drawer to the filing cabinet in my brain where I lock away my
greatest fears-break-ins, sexual assaults, kidnappings, murders-slides
open. Memories of every crime tv series I've ever watched
where women and girls are regularly and disproportionately brutalized
(Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), every eighties slasher movie
where young women are terrorized (A Nightmare on Elm Street), every
movie based on real serial killers (The Hillside Strangler), every statistic
or true story I've ever read about violence against women (at least
one woman is raped every hour in America and about twelve out of
every hundred thousand women are victims of homicide)-sprint
down neural pathways in my brain. Will the moth become a clue, like
those that help csi : Crime Scene Investigation detectives determine
the victim's (usually a woman) cause of death or the identity of the
perp (usually a man)? An image flashes in my mind: the cocoon of
the death's-head hawk moth being extracted from a dead woman's
throat in Silence of the Lambs. My pulse quickens. How has the moth
gotten inside? I haven't opened a door since I took my daughter for
an afternoon walk in her stroller. The windows on the ground floor
are closed and latched, a task I feel compelled to carry out when Jon
is away, even though we live in a suburban Omaha neighborhood
populated by tidy, slow-moving seniors.

I stand and turn off the movie so I can focus. The loudest sound
in the house comes from Lily's upstairs bedroom, where her sound
machine is set to "rain." I sniff for the smell of a cigarette Jon and I
have never smoked, listen for the squeak of a door being opened, and
walk into the kitchen to look for shoe prints on the clean kitchen
floor. There, I make a discovery. The sliding glass door is unlocked,
the screen door behind it slightly open to the deck and backyard. I
imagine the moth fluttering against the kitchen door, drawn to the
dim light from the living room lamp. I imagine a man stepping from
out of the shadows, quietly opening the door, and stepping inside, not
noticing the moth on his shoulder. I know a man is hiding inside of
my home, just as I know there isn't one. Or is there? If people always
knew when intruders had broken into their homes, no one would ever
die this way. I think of the thousands of bodies of girls and women,
stuffed into garbage sacks, or left naked by a riverbank under a pile
of leaves, or left to decompose in a basement. I can hear their cries,
their choked-off warnings: Watch out for him! I grab a chef 's knife,
the knife that slices through a whole chicken, flesh and spine. There's
only one way to be sure. I'll have to check.
 

Table of Contents

Preface
Part 1. Origins
Under My Bed
Recreationally Terrified
Fracture
The Secret of Water
Firebreaks
Haunted
Part 2. Under the Skin
The Maternal Lizard Brain
Neural Pathways to Love
Body Language
Side Effects
Part 3. Risings
My Grandmother and the Sleeping Prophet
In-Between
Runaway Daughter
Woman Running Alone
Gratitude
Selected Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Keisner debuts with a riveting essay collection that revisits her painful past. . . . The essays attack difficult material straight on, but Keisner's smart, clear, and incisive writing cuts deep."—Publishers Weekly


"In her luminous new collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Keisner interrogates fear—personal and collective—from one sharp angle after the next, with a special acuity for the fears known best by women and mothers."—Jeannine Ouellette, Brevity's Blog

From the Publisher