In the Dream House

In 2012, when the general public believes the end of the world will occur, Machado suffers her own personal apocalypse. It takes place in a park, where the “trees were punctuated by birds” (186) and the idyllic landscape gives Machado no warning about the pain she will go through that day.

As Machado sits in the park with her partner, her personal apocalypse happens when her partner confesses to being in love with her classmate Amber. The two drunkenly kissed once, and Machado’s partner now believes she is in love with Amber. Machado leaves the park and, in scrolling through posts from an online recycling community on her phone as a distraction, finds someone giving away a box of old library catalog cards. Machado decides to pick them up to make a collage. Later that evening, her partner arrives at her house insisting they can still make things work.

In the wake of her partner’s unfaithfulness, Machado considers how her antidepressants often make her nauseated to the point of vomiting. She questions the nature of volcanic activity and why people choose to live near volcanoes despite the threat of destruction. She concludes that, despite the possibility of suffering, a more creative and emotionally engaged life is possible near such sources of danger.

Machado and her partner continue to talk on the phone following her partner’s unfaithfulness. Eventually, her partner breaks up with her to be with Amber. Machado cries for a seemingly endless time, long enough that she compares her tears to an ocean that she would willingly drown in.

On the same day that Machado’s partner breaks up with her, she is supposed to host a party for her graduate cohort following one of their professor’s readings. Her friend John organizes their friends, and the group decorates, buys food, and hosts the party so that Machado doesn’t need to worry. Her friends are kind to her in a way that she doesn’t believe she deserves.

Machado and her friends plan a trip to Chicago. Though she is full of grief over her breakup and “reflexively” checks her phone to see if her ex-partner has contacted her, Machado enjoys being with her friends and visiting the exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago. When Machado returns to Iowa City, her ex-partner sends a message that their breakup was a mistake.

This chapter compares Machado’s relationship to the biblical myth of Lot and his wife: When the Old Testament God destroys the city of Sodom, he commands Lot’s family to not look back at the city, their home, as they flee from it. Lot’s wife, however, can’t help herself, and she looks back; as punishment, God transforms her into a pillar of salt. Machado is the wife in this situation, turning into and out of a pillar of salt at the whim of her partner, a capricious God.

Machado’s ex-partner visits Iowa City and asks Machado to meet her in her hotel room. Machado does so, and the two have sex: “You have sex with her because you don’t know what else to do; you only speak the language of giving yourself up” (196). Afterward, they speak on the phone, and the ex-partner's continued love for another woman permanently ends their relationship.

Machado references Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home.” This chapter’s discussion focuses on the “rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse” (198) and the belief that lesbians would need to adopt a sense of masculinity before they would start abusing their partners.

This chapter presents a short story about a queen searching for love. At first, the queen’s counselors bring her a squid, and the couple have a “magnificent” connection. The queen eventually grows bored of the squid and seeks out another companion, finding a bear to fall in love with. The queen writes the squid several letters in which she argues that they can still be friends. The squid simply replies that it cannot be lovers or friends with the queen, as the squid knows the queen to be unfaithful. The story ends with the queen lonely again.

President Barack Obama visited Iowa City just before Machado’s breakup with her partner. On the day that the couple broke up, Obama publicly expressed support for marriage equality. Years later, Machado notes the bitter irony.

Machado returns to the image of the void in the aftermath of the breakup. She struggles to “describe the space that yawns open” (207) in her partner’s absence. It is difficult to imagine herself with another person. She doubts she will ever be able to be intimate with someone again.

Though he is a Republican and does not support gay rights, Machado’s Uncle Nick remains someone she likes. He does not know she is bisexual. The day following the breakup, Uncle Nick surprised Machado with a visit. His unexpected kindness causes her to break down crying and explain her whole history with her partner. Uncle Nick tells her that “[e]veryone’s heart breaks in the same way” (209) and offers support despite his unease with gay rights. His kindness alleviates some of Machado’s sadness.

Following the breakup, Machado tries to distract herself with new hobbies. She begins doing CrossFit with her friend Christa. After one workout, she checks her phone to find nine missed calls from her ex-partner. Machado rushes home to seek advice from her roommate John, who encourages her to resist by blocking her ex-partner's number. After doing so, Machado listens to her voicemails, noting that each is more “unhinged” than the last. She keeps the voicemails only to lose them forever when she buys a new phone several months later.

Machado calls Val to catch up and reconnect after the breakup. Val tells her that she was never in an open relationship with the ex-partner. Machado then goes to party with her friends from the MFA program, ending the chapter by telling her friends that she will tell them the story of her relationship.

To better understand her agency in the abusive relationship, Machado uses metaphors to conceptualize the complex reasons behind her willingness to stay in that relationship. She cites the imaginary experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat, an instructive story that the scientist Schrödinger invented to illustrate how absurdity can result from misunderstandings of quantum theory. In the story, one such misunderstanding leads to a paradox in which a box conceals a cat that is both dead and alive. Machado’s metaphor says that somewhere, there is a box that holds all the possible reasons that she stayed in the relationship—her low self-esteem, desire, desire to be desired, desperation, loneliness, and more. Yet she will never be able to open the box. Just as Schrödinger’s cat was both dead and alive, so her reasons—however contradictory—are all simultaneously the answer to why she stayed with the abuse.

In the summer after the breakup, one of Machado’s male former lovers is in town and asks to see her. She agrees to get drinks with him, feeling all the while that she’s just “doing what he’s asking” (214) and not invested in spending time with him. She drops him off at his hotel room, denies his invitations into his room, and drives home.

Machado attends a workshop at UCSD. Since she once lived in Berkeley, Machado drives there to visit with an ex-boyfriend. They go for dinner. After drinking, Machado begins telling him about her experiences in the Dream House and how much she has missed herself. He drives her to his place in his convertible; there, she feels “at peace” and happier than she has been in a long while. The next morning, Machado finds out that one of her friends’ houses has burned down.

Machado and Val begin talking more frequently on the phone. When Machado drives from California back to Iowa City after the workshop ends, Val flies out to accompany her on the road trip. They visit the Grand Canyon. While staying in New Mexico, Val kisses Machado; the two begin a relationship on the journey. They often talk about the ex-partner and the Dream House.