Hourglass

Julie Marie Wade

What made Marilyn Monroe so alluring? While you may say it was her tousled blond locks or pouty red lips, science stacks it up to her curvaceous, hourglass body shape. Your body shape acts as an unconscious cue to others, signaling health, fitness and fertility levels. 

—You Beauty: The Science of a Beautiful You

 

As a child in confirmation class, I am instructed in the holy math. “Seven is the number of completion,” our pastor says. “It took seven days for God to make the world, so seven days became the length of our earthly week.” He speaks to us as a single mass, the cloud and not the snowflakes, separate and unique.

“But you know that a seven can be made by adding together other numbers. One and six. Two and five. From God’s perspective, the most important of these are three and four.” Pastor John writes 3+4=7 on the green chalkboard; I copy this problem on the first page of my standard-issue St. Paul’s of Shorewood Lutheran Bible. “Three is a heavenly number,” the pastor says. “God is especially partial to three because God exists in three forms. Who are the three members of the Trinity?”

“God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost,” we recite in unison. No wonder he thinks of us as a single person.

“Good! Three represents Heaven, and four represents Earth. When you add them together, they equal all there is.”

Waving my hand, I ask him, “Why is four the number for Earth?”

“Think about it,” the pastor says. “There are four directions on the compass: north, south, east, west. There are four corners in a room. We have four limbs to balance our bodies—two arms and two legs. We even have four chambers in our hearts.”

 

That now was then. This now is later. Every magazine I open, every screen I scroll down, makes similar promises. At YouBeauty.com: Take this quiz to determine your contours. You’ll get specific health, eating, and exercise advice, plus fashion tips to flatter your figure. The human snowflake, it seems, also comes in four forms. Using a science-based tool, created by YouBeauty and reviewed by our experts, discover whether you are an apple, a spoon, a ruler, or an hourglass. And all this time I had been thinking I was a woman.

 

In ninth grade, I start Catholic school where books are bought instead of borrowed. One of the sisters instructs me to stand in the far line by the window.  “You’ll need to purchase a Bible,” she says.

“But I have a Bible, several Bibles. NIV, King James—”

“You’re Protestant,” she decrees. How did she know? How could she tell? If I protest, I will only confirm her claim. “At Holy Names, we require a Catholic Bible.”

 

The first afternoon, outside on the lawn, I open my new Bible, compare it to the old. There are seven more books in the Catholic Old Testament—what we will come to call “Easter eggs” in the era of DVDs. For now, they are a bonus track at the end of a tape, extra footage after the final credits roll. I circle their titles: Tobit, Judith, The Book of Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees. I will have to inquire about these tomorrow.

 

Sister Ann Cornelia is our school librarian. I figure she is the best one to ask, since her spiritual vocation and her earthly occupation both involve books—notably, the Bible.

“You’re thinking like a Protestant,” she says, hands folded on her broad desk, face like a freckled child’s despite her chimney-smoke puff of white hair.

“What do you mean?”

“Listen to the difference. A Protestant asks, ‘Why are there extra books in this Bible?’ A Catholic asks, ‘Why have these books been omitted from other Bibles?'”

“Well?” I prod.

“Well what?”

“Isn’t it the same answer either way?”

“Oh, no,” she says. “The way you phrase a question determines entirely the type of answer you’ll get.”

 

FOR THE APPLE: You are, by definition, round. You have the body people want to cuddle up to. You are not easy to dress, but have pillow-soft breasts and divinely sculpted ankles. For you, it’s all about bringing focus to the top half, up and away from your tummy. Start by loving yourself enough to invest in a decent bra. Cap sleeves help to broaden your shoulders. Look out for tailored trousers that have no bulky pockets or protruding zips. Avoid clunky shoes—your body shape sits well atop a dainty wedge.

 

The encyclopedia is a way to avoid phrasing questions, to skip instead directly to answers—or at least to information. More and more I see how the attribution of meaning will come to rest with the reader. In this way, among others, I am becoming a Post-Modernist.

From dictionaries and encyclopedias I piece together a brief history of the Old Testament: The Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches all recognize the same 27 books that make up the New Testament. There is a disagreement, however, concerning the books that constitute the Old Testament. The Catholic Bible has seven books and parts of two others in the Old Testament that are not found in Protestant Bibles. Catholics refer to these books as Deutercanonical while Protestants refer to them as apocryphal.

 

Deutercanonical v. apocryphal, I sketch in my notebook. A Catholic answer and a Protestant answer. Both can be right, and both can be insufficient at the same time, I marvel. Without the seven chapters the Catholic Bible adds to the Book of Esther, it bears the distinction of being the only book in the Protestant Bible that never mentions God—not even once. And one of the Catholic chapters in the Book of Daniel includes a dragon, which I think we all know opens the door to fairies and unicorns.

 

FOR THE SPOON: Your woes lie around your saddlebags. But your top half is hard to fault. The name of the game is broadening your shoulders to balance those saddlebags. You are relatively flat-chested so you can get away with higher-cut tops. A slashed neckline helps to give the impression of coat hanger shoulders. Or use puffed sleeves to add vital inches. Your legs are short in comparison to your body. Wearing trouser hemlines to the floor is essential to maximize leg extension. A strapless dress is a wonderful thing for a Spoon. The stiff, flared skirt does an excellent job of disguising wide hips.

 

“Hello, Sister,” I say, finding her on a stepstool dusting the shelves. She has cheesecloth in one hand, furniture polish in the other.

“Yes?”

“How are you today?”

“We both know that’s not the question you want to ask.” There is something both vexing and admirable about her ability to read my mind.

“What is the difference between Deutercanonical and apocryphal?”

She corrects my pronunciation and then replies: “Catholics believe the omitted texts from the Protestant Bible comprise a ‘second canon’—that they are Deutercanonical. Protestants believe the texts added to the Catholic Bible contain valuable, historical information but are not divinely inspired; as a result, they cannot be considered part of the canon.”

After a pause, what in poetry I will learn to call a caesura: “What do you believe, Sister Ann Cornelia?” It is a risky question, as I am sure nuns are expected to uphold the party line.

She looks down at me, a sly smile parting the plump flesh of her cheeks: “I tend to favor more information,” she says. “Not less.”

“Even if it’s controversial?” I press.

“If you think about it, really think about it, what information isn’t?”

 

FOR THE RULER: You might find it difficult to find enough length in a sleeve or trouser leg, but being mostly tall, Rulers can carry clothes well. You have lovely long legs, lithe arms, and not too much flab around your girth—your only downfall is your need for shape. The most useful way to counter that is to break up your outline. A single button jacket will always concentrate eyes on the center of your torso. A long A-line skirt pushes your waist upward, giving you a more womanly shape. Kitten heels add delicacy and curve to your straight figure.

 

At the first mass of the new school year, I am intercepted on my way to communion. “It’s OK,” I whisper to Sister Mary Annette. “I’ve already been confirmed.”

“Not in the Catholic tradition, you haven’t,” she replies. I stare into her face, the spider webs around her eyes. “Protestants don’t believe in transubstantiation.” My lip quivers at the sound of the unfamiliar word, another piece of a rapidly enlarging puzzle.

The other girls move past me now, their ponytails swishing.

“The bread and wine carry different significance for Catholics,” Sister explains, one hand pressing down on my shoulder, holding me sessile as a plant—a word we have just learned in biology class.

“What should I do?” I whimper.

The other girls stand before the priest. He places the small moon of the wafer directly onto their tongues instead of laying it, Protestant-style, in the center of their open palms.

“There are two choices,” she says. “You can cross your hands over your heart, and the priest will bestow a blessing. Or—if you prefer—you can simply kneel at your pew while the others go forth to receive the Eucharist.”

Eucharist?

The other girls remain before the priest. He lifts a giant, silver goblet—a chalice I think it is called—and they sip from it, each after the one before her, as if they were not afraid of germs, as if they had never even heard of them. No one chooses her own small glass from the wheel of glasses, the round tray passed from penitent to penitent. The priest wipes the common cup with a white cloth, which is bound to stain. Later, I learn this is real wine and not grape juice, making them under-age drinkers, every one.

Eucharist,” she repeats. “This is a sacrament in our faith. In yours, it is only a ritual.”

Now the other girls step aside and pause (caesurize) before the altar. They cross themselves before the twin statues of Jesus and Mary. But then I realize—I am the other girl. They are not the others. They are the ones, the chosen ones, who know the words without even looking at their songbooks, who know as if by instinct when to stand, where to sit, and when to drop to their knees in synchronized supplication.

A brief history of the Eucharist: For Catholics, the sacrament of Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, involves transubstantiation, meaning the substance, or essence, of the bread and wine changes—in a real, fundamental, ontological way—into the substance of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. The word transubstantiation means that this change of substance is complete: The Body and Blood of Christ are not contained in the bread and wine, nor do they exist side by side with the bread and wine, as in consubstantial doctrines. The bread and wine are gone, completely replaced by the Body and Blood of Jesus. For Protestants, who most often adhere to the doctrine of consubstantiation, the bread and wine are symbolically, rather than literally, transformed by The Words of Institution.

 

Transubstantiation v. consubstantiation, I sketch in my notebook. A Catholic story and a Protestant story. Could they both be right? Could they both be insufficient? I had taken communion since I was eleven, never considering there might be different interpretations of what we were doing at the altar. Confirmation was the affirmation of baptism. This meant that, since I couldn’t remember being baptized as a baby, I had consented of my own preadolescent volition to become a dutiful disciple of Christ. The perks were wafers and grape juice during Sunday service and my own personalized offering envelopes, which came in the mail for all official members of the Church.

 

FOR THE HOURGLASS: Your body is the very essence of what makes a woman womanly. The key is to show it off. It is always difficult for an hourglass to look convincing in weekend clothes. Your shape is too ultra-feminine for trousers. Every item in your wardrobe should work clearly to define your curvy silhouette. Your waist is short and your crotch is long. The bluffer’s way to longer legs is to find a top that is long enough to stop just below your crotch, fooling our eyes into not knowing where your legs end and your butt begins. Beware big loose bat wings or kimonos that will merge your chest and arms into a solid mass. 

 

At my grandmother’s house, my father and his sister are playing cribbage while my grandmother prepares a stew.

“I have a question for you,” I announce, folding my hands on the table to convey the seriousness of the matter.

“Oh, no,” my father jokes. “How much is this going to cost me?”

“It’s nothing like that. It’s about religion.”

My grandmother, knowingly, over her shoulder: “What did I tell you would happen when you sent her to Catholic school? First come the questions, then come the doubts.”

But I already had doubts! They had been with me long before Catholic school. If I was honest, they had been with me long before my first communion.

“Julie, don’t believe a thing you hear at Mass,” my Aunt Linda instructs. “All that pomp and circumstance violates the First Commandment.”

“Well, I wanted to take communion at Mass—”

“Oh, God no!” my father exclaims. “That common cup alone is an invitation to the Plague!”

“They wouldn’t let me,” I murmur.

“Good. We don’t need them. We have our own communion on Sundays.”

“But here’s the question,” I say, feeling my frustration pooling in my palms. “When you take communion—each of you—what are you doing?”

“What do you mean what are we doing?” Aunt Linda leans in close to me, her green eyes narrowing.

“What do you believe it means when you eat the wafer and drink the juice?” I don’t know how much more plainly I can state the question, and my feet tap the floor impatiently beneath me as I wait.

“We believe we’re receiving Christ’s body and blood,” my grandmother says. She wipes her hands on her apron and turns to face us at the table.

Literally, or metaphorically?”

“Well, it’s not literal,” my father says. “We’re not cannibals.”

“See, Julie dear, it’s a ritual.” My grandmother pats my head. “We’re remembering the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross.”

“That’s just what Sister Mary Annette said. She said Protestants believe it’s a ritual, but Catholics believe it’s a sacrament.”

“It’s a sacrament for us, too,” Aunt Linda replies, her voice soft now, slow and deliberate. “Martin Luther named only two sacraments for Lutherans, as opposed to however many they’re concerned.” I frown to convey that this detour isn’t useful to me.

“What are they?” I press. “The sacraments?”

“Baptism and Communion. These are holy events in a person’s life—and they are literal,” she says.

My father sighs. “C’mon, Linda, what are you talking about? You’re just going to confuse her.”

I believe that the bread and wine are altered when the minister blesses them. I believe the Holy Spirit comes into them and changes them so they are no longer ordinary bread and wine.”

“You mean to tell me—” he leans forward now and pushes the cribbage board away. “You mean to tell me that you believe we’re eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ? That’s ludicrous, Linda! The minister can bless it all till Kingdom Come, but put it under a microscope, and you’ll see that nothing’s different. Nothing’s altered.”

“Linda,” my grandmother murmurs, “where in the world did you get such a notion?”

“It’s what I’ve always believed,” she replies, rising to her feet and pushing in her chair. “Faith doesn’t look through a microscope, Bill. Faith defies the laws of science. And now, if you’ll excuse me…” She disappears into the hallway, and in a moment, we hear the door to her bedroom close.

“Well,” I say, to no one in particular. “If Aunt Linda wanted to take communion at Catholic church, I don’t think anyone would have any reason to intervene.”

 

In World Cultures class, Ms. Curran prints the word CATHOLIC on the green chalkboard, then underlines it once for emphasis. “Who can tell me what this word means?” she inquires.

The room falls silent. A few girls turn to each other, arch eyebrows, shrug shoulders.

“OK. Let’s try it this way. How many of you in this room identify as Catholic?”

All the girls except the tall one in the corner, the one with chlorine streaks in her curls and a bottom lip prone to quiver, raise their hands. “So—Erin, Emily, Somebody—tell me: what does Catholic mean to you? You must know what it means if you’re going to claim it as part of your self-definition.”

Ms. Curran is not a nun. Ms. Curran is a married woman who chose not to take her husband’s name, who also chose not to have children. She represents to me a small fork along the monolithic path of possibility, that which is rarely mentioned when a girl is assigned her uniform and the first draft of her life itinerary. Perhaps Ms. Curran too felt like an other, slicing her coffee cake in the faculty lounge between the long line of sisters, wedded to Jesus, and the short line of Mrs. So-and-Sos with their many babies and their battered mini-vans.

“Do you mean…like…Roman Catholic?” Emily clarifies.

“Well, that’s a good point, Emily.” Ms. Curran is invested in the snowflake view. To her, we are never just a cloud. “Roman Catholic implies a certain set of convictions, of religious beliefs, doesn’t it? But the word catholic all by itself, uncapitalized—it’s an adjective. Does anybody know?”

I shake my head, but my notebook is open, my pen is poised.

“It means universal, or inclusive, or all-embracing,” she says, mingling among us, passing slowly up and down the aisles. “In some translations, it simply means whole.”

“Is that because everybody’s supposed to be Catholic?” Colleen asks, but when she glances in my direction, she blushes and turns quickly away.

“You probably all know that the Roman Catholic Church was the first Christian church, so at one time, if you were catholic, you were part of the whole of Christianity. That isn’t true anymore. You can be Christian but not Catholic. The challenge for those of us who identify as Catholic is not to forget that spirit of inclusiveness, not to treat other Christians as—”she studies the red maple outside our window, searching for the right word—”as ersatz Christians.”

“What does that mean?” Erin wants to know.

Imitation,” I say, clearing my throat. “Like a poor copy of an original.”

That now was then. This now is later. I remember Ms. Curran with gratitude, her sincere desire to honor all traditions—she who taught the theology credit that no one else had wanted to teach. World Cultures was code for all the others of the world, all the other ways of knowing, and coming to terms with the unknowable, that had been dismissed, that had been considered ersatz, less than.

How hard it is not to hold humanity to one standard, in all respects—religion, family, beauty. Catholic is a linguistic door that swings two ways: an impulse to include and an impulse to convert, depending on your interpretation of its meaning. The fraught imperative to accept yourself exactly as you are—whole, complete—and to do your best to conform to exactly what is expected of you—universal.

 

From “Slim Waist Holds Sway in History” at the BBC news website: The common historical assumption in the social sciences has been that the standards of beauty are arbitrary, socially determined and in the eye of the beholder. The finding that the writers describe a small waist as beautiful suggests that this body part—a known marker of health and fertility—is a core feature of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic difference and cultures.

 

Sophomore year we take Art Appreciation with Sister Janice. She is Catholic, as in Roman, but not lower-case catholic, not like everyone else. She even belongs to a different order. Sister Janice is what might be termed sui generis, a Latin expression meaning “of its own kind,” unique in its characteristics. She is the only Dominican sister at Holy Names, the Snowflake’s Snowflake, the Oddball Extraordinaire.

I like Sister Janice on principle: her rosy, age-defying face, her close-cropped, peppery gray hair. She is a no-frills, no-gimmicks kind of woman, a fast talker, fast walker, ambidextrous artist and calligrapher. She also doesn’t own any dresses, as far as I can tell, only white knee-high socks, colorful Capri pants, and Hawaiian shirts that billow at their too-big sleeves.

“The goal of this class isn’t to teach you what to think about art,” she says, skittering across the room like a stray marble. “It’s to teach you how to think about art, questions you can ask, methods you can use.”

Most of the students don’t take Sister Janice seriously. They yawn and laugh, pass notes under the art room table. She is all whimsy on the surface, true, but I sense that sadness fuels her restlessness, that loneliness lies behind the neon flash of her smile.

“How many of you have seen this painting before? Show of hands?” She projects a painting of three women standing naked together in a circle, their arms linked in partial embrace. All around the room: small eruptions of nervous laughter.

None of you? None of you have seen this painting—by Peter Paul Rubens, the Peter Paul Rubens.” Sister Janice uses italics in her speech just as I do. “The great Flemish Baroque master?”

Finally, a few girls concede, nodding: “Yes, we’ve seen it,” Therese sighs, speaking on behalf of her friends.

“Observations? Remember: art history, art analysis, and art appreciation all come from the same place. They all start with seeing more clearly what is right before our eyes. And—”she whirls around—”being able to articulate what it is that we see.”

I raise my hand and watch her face come to life like a candle flame. I start to say, “They aren’t wearing any clothes”—which is the first thing I notice—but am superseded by Katie, who declares in a loud, exasperated voice: “They’re fat!” Now her whole corner of the room rocks and roars with laughter. “What?” she snaps. “They are.”

Sister Janice looks crestfallen, but she recovers by pacing to and fro in front of the open window, fingers laced behind her. “Well, fat is a pretty subjective term. What one person calls fat someone else might call robust, heartywinsome even.”

“They have big, dimpled butts,” Therese says, emboldened by her friend’s candor. “And rolls of flab.”

“And cellulite,” echoes a tiny voice in the back.

“Our task here is to try to understand what Rubens was doing, why he wanted to depict these subjects the way he did.”

“I guess he liked big butts, and he couldn’t lie,” a transfer student whispers behind me.

“It’s quite easy,” Sister Janice continues, “for us to confuse observation and interpretation. The brain, almost as soon as it registers an image, begins to interpret that image, and all interpretations contain judgments. We bring a lot of baggage to our interpretations, ideas about what our culture has taught us is beautiful.”

When no one responds, Sister Janice projects a second image on the screen. “This is a painting by Renoir. It was completed more than two centuries after the painting by Rubens. What do you notice?”

She is so hopeful, her body swaying from side to side, her eyes scanning the room for some sign of engagement: hands about to raise, lips about to part. “Anyone?”

I want to offer an insight. I want to make Sister Janice jump with joy and send her, like a wind-up toy, spinning around the classroom. But my tongue turns to sawdust in my mouth, and my ears burn red at the sight of so many bodies.

“The woman in this painting is less fat,” Katie sighs. “Her skin is smooth by comparison—but she still has enormous thighs.”

 

“Slim Waist Holds Sway in History”: Dr. Singh, from the University of Texas, has spent years examining representations of women through history—in one study, he measured the waist-hip ratio of hundreds of statues from different eras. In the most recent research, he looked at how “attractive” women were depicted in literature, analyzing more than 345,000 texts, mainly from the 16th to 18th centuries. There was a trend for slightly larger women in the 17th and 18th centuries—a trend typified by the paintings of Rubens—but demand for a slimmer waist was generally constant throughout the centuries.

 

Thinking is long, and knowing is slow. This is what I have come to realize. Over the next two years, I return often to the distinction Sister Janice made between observation and interpretation. It was hard to have a pure thought.  It was harder still to describe something without evaluating it. Looking at paintings in art class wasn’t so different from flipping through Allure or Vogue or Marie Claire. Art and advertising were rife with women’s bodies—all of them in varying states of undress. The viewer’s eyes were reliably drawn to their cleavage, their midriffs, or their long, supple legs. Faces were rarely the focus, as portraits were less important than studies of physical form.

 

“Niki Taylor is everywhere,” Jasmine complains, back pressed against her locker, studying the newest issue of Elle like there will be a rest tomorrow. “I swear.”

“Don’t you like her?” I ask.

“She’s just so boring: blond hair, blue eyes, slender body, beauty mark…blah, blah, blah. We get it, you know. We’ve seen it all before. If you want to be really beautiful, try being a little different, a little less cliche.”

This was the old snowflake theory, but it seemed safer to me to stay in the cloud. “Tell me something,” I say. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that girls spend so much time looking at pictures of other girls? I never see anyone with a men’s magazine—not even men—but everyone stares at Cosmo in the check-out line.”

“I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Jasmine replies, sliding the magazine back in her bag.

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that.” Why was everyone so defensive these days? “I’m not even sure we’re meant to look at all these women in a positive way.”

Jasmine frowned at me. “Are you going to get all valedictorian about this and have to scrutinize it from every angle—because you know that gets on my nerves.”

“I know. But—” she raises her eyebrows, as if to say this better be good—”just think about it: don’t we mostly look at magazines to cut women down, to find the thing that’s wrong with them? She’s too this, or she’s too that, or not enough of this, or enough of that—it’s all I ever hear.”

Jasmine takes out her Walkman, slides her earphones into her ears. This is her way of letting me know the conversation is over. “It’s like a Where’s Waldo game,” I insist, “and we’re always looking for the flaw.”

 

Mrs. Korkowski is our math teacher. She is a tall woman shaped like a bell with beady black eyes, pallid cheeks, and a large, braided bun balanced atop her head like a knitting basket. Once a year, on Halloween, she lets her bun down, but the hair is so coarse and snarled and gray that everyone wishes she would pin it back up again.

 

Though she is a wife and mother and not a nun, Mrs. Korkowski is one of the few women I have ever met who seems entirely unconcerned with appearance. I suspect that even in the check-out line, she would be too consumed with quadratic equations or analytic geometry—whatever problem she was solving in her mind—to even consider which newest bathing beauty graced the cover of what glossy magazine.

 

I like numbers, but I have a hard time with math. Unlike words, I don’t relate to their practical applications.

“That’s nonsense,” Mrs. Korkowski says in our one-on-one review session. “You count every day, don’t you? You measure things without even thinking. You follow recipes. You divvy up space in a drawer. Math,” she repeats.

“But that’s easy math. I’m talking about the hard stuff.”

“It’s all hard to begin with,” she replies in her cut-and-dry way. “But once you know it, you know it, and there’s power in that.”

“I do like the language of math,” I tell her cautiously.

“For instance?”

“Well, this word asymptote. I like the sound of it.”

“Me too,” Mrs. Korkowski says. “There’s a poetry to math that most people miss entirely. Now tell me what the asymptote is.”

“A line which is tangent to a curve at infinity,” I repeat.

“Yes, yes, you’re very good at memorizing, but what does that mean?”

Haltingly, I confess: “I think that’s what I’m here to find out.”

Now Mrs. Korkowski makes a snorting sound that is either a laugh or a sneeze. “Well, then. Let’s try to get a handle on this, shall we? Let’s interrogate the asymptote, figure out what purpose it serves. Any idea?” I want to say, to make my life more difficult, but instead I hold my tongue and shake my head. “All right. Try this: asymptotes convey information about the behavior of curves. We use them to assess the nature of a curve.”

This I understand. This I can grasp like a rock-climbing hold on the treacherous cliff of calculus.

“So, break it down. What do we know about curves?”

That they’re beautiful. That they’re feminine. That you need them—but not too many or too much—for men to fall in love with you.

I flip through my notes. “That a curve can come close to a line without actually touching it?”

“Quite right—and you’ll like this,” Mrs. Korkowski says, with an almost-smile. “Asymptote is from the Greek for ‘not falling together.’ We assume that eventually the line and the curve will merge, but it’s important to remember that in this context, the line and curve are idealized concepts.” Aren’t they always? “Their width is zero.”

I write this down. “You know what other word I like? Parabola.”

“No tangents, please!” But then she laughs, in spite of herself.

 

“Slim Waist Holds Sway in History”: Dr. Piers Cornelissen, a psychologist at York University, says that the sexual attractiveness of the curve between slim waist and hips may be due to a liking for well-fed women rather than a subtle sign of fertility. His work uses mathematical equations to separate the amount of “curve” between waist and hip which is due to simple fat deposition, and that due to other factors such as bone structure and the effects of sex hormones. He said: “When we break apart that ‘curviness,’ it is almost impossible to find an effect for waist-hip ratio that is independent of effects such as body fat percentage.”

 

That now was then. This now is later. I have passed calculus, as in earned a grade above failing and also moved beyond it. (Or so I thought.) In my grown life, I have become an asymptote of sorts, one who appraises the function of curves: curve balls in baseball, learning curves in classrooms. I live now in the era of Curves, the largest fitness franchise in the world, with machines designed especially for women.

 

A curve was once called a curved line. At some point in time the curve and the line became separate, unique, making the curved line an oxymoron. Like gay straight—a contradiction in terms, an expression you never hear. I wonder about the place where a curve becomes a swerve: to turn or be turned aside from a straight course. I know what it means to swerve, suddenly, at the last possible moment—to avoid a collision (two or more moving bodies exerting forces on each other for a relatively short time). In other words, men and I have not fallen easily together. Tangentially, Curve is the nation’s best-selling lesbian magazine.

 

Interlude

From Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”: My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Beside it, and there may be two or three/ Apples that I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. 

 

We are not done, no matter what we tell ourselves. Not with diets, not with counting calories or measuring with spoons. Quotidian math: the math of preparation, proportion. Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons. We measure ours with artificial sweeteners: Splenda (as in splendid), Whey Low (as in weigh low!)

 

From Denise Duhamel’s “Spoon”: John Updike’s image stays with me—his male character admires a slender / young woman whose collarbones strain toward each other and almost meet / in a dip where he envisions placing a teaspoon. I can’t help but think / that this lovely girl could not let herself eat whatever was once in that spoon / on the spoon rest of her throat, whatever was cooking in her body that became / a willowy stove.

 

I want to be the apple of your eye. But really, I want to be the spoon that rests between your collarbones. (Watch out for those dreaded saddlebags!) But really, I want to be the equal in your life—or at the very least, the Equal in your coffee, your tea. I want to be the fruit of your fall, Eden worth forfeiting for me. I will spoon-feed you the best of my shiny red heart. I will be golden and delicious. But really, I want you to love my ass—or at the very least, to love my aspartame.

From Chris Albani’s “Unholy Women”: But of course these poems are / about men, / which we become by defining how / we are not women / and / so becoming / a shadow devouring the light to find the limits.

 

But really, I want to be your asymptote—to graph the function of y=f(x)—in which y=man and x=woman and f=faith that something will change. As things stand, a man equals a woman and then some. Plato says, The measure of man is what he does with power. What kind of ruler will he be? (She: a Ruler who carries clothes well.) But really, a ruler is a stick made of numbers and lines. If sticks and stones will break my bones, what will words do to me?

FROST: For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.

DUHAMEL: No matter how much I suck air into my throat, I can’t / make a hollow place for a spoon on my neck.

ABANI: And of course there is God / and its problematic relationship to light / not to mention the question of permission / who builds the box, the shape?

Time has a shape. It is an hourglass. Beauty has a shape. It is an hourglass. (Or is it?) Her skin is smooth by comparison, but she still has enormous thighs.

 

Women had power in Catholic school. They were our teachers, our principal and deans, our former graduates who came back to brag about their good jobs on Alumnae Day. They comprised our student body. When we chose a leader, it was a given that it would be a girl.

Women were also our intercessors. In Lutheran church, you could only pray to God in his various forms, but in Catholic church, you could pray to all the saints, many of whom were women, and the most important of whom was Mary (Holy Mary, Mother of God). True, Mary did become a saint for reasons that seemed mostly beneficial to men mostly beyond her control. For instance, I wasn’t impressed that a twelve-year-old girl had managed to remain a virgin. God could have singled out any number of girls with compliant natures and unoccupied wombs to give birth to his son, but I did wonder why he chose to separate this snowflake in particular from the cloud.

On March 25 each year, we celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation, in honor of the day the angel Gabriel appeared to the virgin Mary and told her that she would conceive a child who would become the Savior of the world. The event was sometimes called “Lady Day,” and every girl wore a floral dress and brought her favorite kind of flowers to place before the statue of Mary at the altar. Even Protestants were allowed to participate.

 

“You want to do what now?” my mother asks. Now she’s studying her JCPenney catalog like there will be a test tomorrow. Before I can answer, she holds up a picture of a woman in a long, low-waisted dress with frill sleeves and a sash trailing off to the side. “What do you think of this? Do you think I’m the right body type to pull this off?”

Aware of the thin ice beneath me, I tell her cautiously: “I think you should wear whatever you like, whatever feels comfortable.”

My mother laughs wryly. “The two do not always go together.” Asymptote, I muse—beauty and comfort, a line and a curve.

“It’s the Feast of the Annunciation today,” I say, clearing my throat, “so I need to bring flowers to school. I was hoping I could cut some lilacs from the side of the house. They’re so beautiful, and they always smell so good.”

“What’s this Annunciation business all about?” she demands, suddenly suspicious.

“It’s just a holy day at school. We have it every year. Remember?”

I follow her into the kitchen where she rummages through a drawer for her gardening shears—the small set with electric-orange handles. Unlocking the back door and stepping out into the sun, my mother squints as she begins to snip the fragrant lilacs from their boughs. “You’re not getting in too deep with this Catholic crowd, are you? I hope your father and I have made it clear that their entire religion is based on superstition and blasphemy, and their interpretation of the Scriptures is not to be trusted.”

“I like mass,” I say softly. In a weak and perhaps also a shallow moment, I confess it: “Mass is prettier than Lutheran church. The singing, the language, the look of things—it’s almost magical.”

Now my mother holds the lilacs in her hands, not quick to surrender them to me. “Beware the seduction of beautiful things,” she warns. Who was she kidding? “So often they are not what they seem.”

“But what are they then?” I have felt excluded at Mass before, restricted to my pew, resigned to my blessing, but I have never felt, even a little, deceived.

“What do you mean?”

“If things aren’t what they seem, then what are they? What is it you think is going on?”

“Oh, come off it, Julie! All that hocus pocus with the priest and his ball of smelling salts. Not to mention—praying to women, worshipping Mary.”

“It isn’t worship exactly,” I reply. “It’s recognizing that we can learn from other people’s experiences, that they might be able to help us along the way.”

“They’re dead!” my mother snaps, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. “They can’t help you. Only Jesus can. The very idea…” And her voice trails off as she soaks a paper towel and begins to wrap it around the lilac stems, after which she will add a layer of foil.

Today I am feeling the opposite of Mary, not compliant at all—defiant, bold in my new opinions. “How is it any different—” I argue “this so-called worshipping of women we do in Catholic church—from the way we praise famous women every day?” My mother turns to look at me like I am a prophet bearing ominous news. “The secular culture worships women, too, and mostly for their bodies alone. Not even taking into account their virtues.”

“How much more of this am I supposed to take?” Her cheeks crimson, her eyes filling with tears. “On top of everything else, are you going to tell me you’re a Catholic now?”

“No. But I do say the ‘Hail Mary,’ not just the ‘Our Father.’ And I like the idea that women are though of highly enough to be worth talking to. It isn’t only about the men.”

Now my mother—the most powerful person in our family, the clear matriarch—throws the lilacs into our cereal bowls and runs screeching through the house, calling for my father. “Bill! Your daughter has gone over to the dark side!”

 

But in mass, my uncertainty resumes, grows back again like a weed or a flower—depending how you interpret it. Women couldn’t be popes or bishops or priests; they couldn’t pronounce the blessing over the bread and wine that may or may not become the actual flesh and blood of Jesus. Tabloids reduced women to their bodies. It was true, I reasoned, not just an interpretation: Julia Roberts stuns in gown with plunging neckline! Cameron Diaz looking svelte in designer bikini on romantic getaway! Madonna fans will be dazzled by her post-pregnancy weight loss glam! But when I thought about the women revered in Catholic church—really thought about them—weren’t the most virtuous ones those who guarded their bodies like treasure? And almost as virtuous as nuns were the ones who surrendered their bodies to men and gave them children who bore their fathers’ names? In Mary’s case, she was a surrogate, a means for God to accomplish something he wanted, not truly an end in herself.

As my mother sometimes crassly said: “For men, having a child is ten minutes of fun; for a woman, a lifetime of pain and varicose veins.”

 

Now the priest reads to us from the Book of Luke: “And in the sixth month the Angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou amongst women. And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying…”

I pictured her there, a dreamy girl, tall and sturdy with dark brown hair and a bottom lip prone to quiver; a smart seventh grader with no high school in sight, whose marriage to Joseph had already been arranged. But what if she didn’t want it, any of it? What if she was a poet in her secret heart—the words falling on her tongue like the first soft flakes of winter snow—falling all the while as she scrubbed the floors, ironed the clothes, helped her mother prepare a meal? (Holy Mary, the artist, the prodigy, or was she always destined to be—Holy Mary, the little Ash Girl?) What if she later scribbled those words on the Stenopad beneath her bedside table, read them back to herself late in the night while a lone candle continued to burn?

But now here’s this angel, intruding on her solitude, cutting into the few quiet hours of her time between school and supper: “Fear not, Mary, for thou hath found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be called great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest…”

What if she had simply said No thank you and gone back to her chores? What if she had told the angel the name of another girl just down the road who had been saying how much she’d love to have a baby—someone who actually aspired to be a teen mom?

Instead, Mary acquiesced. She did as she was told. I thought of her leaning into that curve, turning, being turned, from her course.

Was canonization really worth it? Was intercession simply another chore? Think of the poems Mary could have written if she dared.

Soon, Sister Rosemary beckons to me. “It’s your turn, dear—to take your flowers to the altar.”

I clasp the lilacs tightly in my palms and will not release them.

 

That now was then. This now is later. A morning. A library book with an ominous name: The Dead and the Living. “Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds begins with the “ambulance men” who carried Monroe’s body from her apartment. Olds imagines how the fantasy lives of these men likewise came to an end with her death. They seemed to marvel that anyone so beautiful could die. They seemed to marvel that anyone so beautiful could relinquish so much of her beauty in death—could be “flattened by gravity,” could become “ordinary” at last. As a consequence, Olds tells us, “These men were never the same.”

Their lives took

a turn—one had nightmares, strange

pains, impotence, depression. One did not

like his work, his wife looked

different, his kids. Even death

seemed different to him—a place where she

would be waiting.

 

And one found himself standing at night

in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a

woman breathing, just an ordinary

woman breathing.

 

The poem is an elegy. In reading, I reflexively bow my head. And when I raise it again and gaze out the window toward the red maples, I find I am thinking of Mary. It’s not such a great stretch, is it—from Mary to Marilyn? The women intersect, parabola of heavenly light and not enough time. There is no asymptote in the world that can save them.

From “Secrets of Marilyn Monroe’s Hourglass Figure Revealed in Receipts” at The Telegraph: As the world’s most famous sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe had to look after both her creamy complexion and her hourglass figure. Marilyn Monroe’s diet has been revealed in a clutch of grocery store and meat market receipts. One substantial delivery was made two days before her big even of singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. It’s interesting to speculate why Monroe was buying so much food at this time, especially when she knew she had to be sewn into the gown she’d be wearing.

From “Mary—Her Beauty” at Catholic News Agency: Mary’s body never knew sexual pleasure because her soul excluded it for the love of God and mankind. She always exercised, as soon as her reason was able to understand, the virtue of chastity—that is a rational and voluntary control over her entire psychosomatic human sexuality. Through her chastity and virginity, Mary consecrated to her Creator, in a total and absolute way, her human sexuality. She recognized the supreme dominion of God’s absolute and eternal Being over her body, over the thoughts, desires, remembrances of her soul.

Two women, embodied—whose bodies were not their own.

 

When I read the poem again, several years later, I discover I have remembered it wrong. It begins with the men, the “ambulance men,” the ones Olds tells us are “never the same.” (Beautiful Marilyn, Mediatrix of All Grace! What was it they had needed you to be for them—so they could go on living in the old way?) To see her dead, to feel her four limbs heavy and cold, her breasts “flattened by gravity” was to see her becoming human again. (Your body is the very essence of what makes a woman womanly.)

There is no scriptural record of Mary’s last days on earth. Some traditions claim she went to Ephesus, where she met a peaceful, painless death (dormition). Others claim she remained in Jerusalem and was taken to heaven without succumbing to death (assumption). In 1950, Pope Pius XII declared this latter belief official Catholic dogma. Why? Because they could not bear to see her dead, not even in dormition. Because they did not want to bear the “nightmares, strange/pains, impotence, depression” that come after such a death.

 

y=f(x)—in which y=man and x=woman and f=faith that nothing will change

 

Bless them. Bless them to the four points of the compass, to the four corners of the room.

In an unfinished letter to Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe writes: “If I can only succeed in making you happy I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is—that is to make one person completely happy.

Bless them, I say. Bless them to their beautiful, four-chambered hearts.

In response to the annunciation of the angel Gabriel, Mary says: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.

But bless her, most of all, for she is all of us: that ordinary woman breathing.

 

Art by Matt Monk

 

Julie Marie Wade is the author of WISHBONE: A MEMOIR IN FRACTURES, WITHOUT: POEMS, SMALL FIRES: ESSAYS, and POSTAGE DUE: POEMS & PROSE POEMS. Her forthcoming collections are TREMOLO: AN ESSAY, winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize, and WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT: POEMS. She lives with her partner, Angie Griffin, in Dania Beach, and teaches at Florida International University.


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Under and Over Promiscuity — Rome (II)

Lily Hoang

Recently, men have asked me to be their slut. And during the sex act, they say, almost universally, “You’re just a slut, aren’t you?” The mere idea of my promiscuity stiffens them. To them, it is hot and sexy.

~

Walking through Villa Borghese, I find three depictions of Leda and the Swan. Leda’s skin is more radiant than the whiteness of the swan, brighter than the grandeur of the god of gods. Therefore, he takes her.

~

Whereas women, myself included, say with derision, “Slut.”

~

I am a serial monogamist—or, I was. Since I was twenty, I have propelled myself from one long-term relationship to another, never staying single for more than six months. But I am getting older now and the trauma of my last relationship leaves me prudent of men and their intentions. They are untrustworthy and ruthless.
And so I adorn their behavior: fucking in thongs of floss.
Translucent strings of protection.
But for me, those strings of attachment remain, even when thin and invisible.

~

Rape or desire. The parameters of consent should always be obvious.

~

I insist I am not a slut. I say, “Your slut,” and he repeats—they repeat—“Yes, my good little slut.”
I say, “Slap me.”

~

Earlier that day, Leda’s husband fucked her. Later that day, so, too, did a swan. Two men in one day: gods and beasts being interchangeable terms.

~

I am a monogamist who believes that polyamory is the purest form of love. It’s trust, mostly, and it is allowing one’s partner the full spectrum of desire and connection.
About my previous partners I now wonder, did I not love them enough or were they not worthy of my trust?

~

My first time in Rome, I hook up with the Economist. He has a PhD from UC Berkeley, but he is Roman. We fuck in my hotel room, and he leaves because he has dinner plans with his friends. He does not invite me along.
Of the men I slept with on my first tour through Europe this summer, he was the least likely candidate for a second encounter, but I have seen him every day since my arrival this time.

~

This is the longest I’ve been single since I was twenty: eight months and counting. Eight months and without visible end.

~

Barely two hours after I arrive in Rome, a guy from Tinder knocks on the door of my friend Gian’s flat. He’s back in the States to promote a new book he’s published. I have his incredible and huge flat to myself.
Arbitrarily, I tell the guy that I don’t fuck on first meetings. I say, “Nothing below the belt.”
He tries three times to take off my shorts, but I let him cum in my mouth anyway. Later, when he texts, I don’t respond.
He texts again and again. Ten times a day. For days. Later, because I am feeling lonely, I write back.
He invalidates my feelings of disrespect, and I agree to meet him for coffee.

~

The only reason I don’t have penetrative sex with the Philosopher on first meeting is because he doesn’t have a condom.
I had fucked the Economist on first meeting.
I give the same rule about not fucking on first meet to another guy from Tinder because he works at the post office and that isn’t impressive enough for me. “It is very stable employment,” he says.

~

Although no longer a Catholic, I light a candle in every Roman basilica. I kneel and tell God I love Him. I ask Him to let me believe. I pray for my parents and my nephew and my dead sister’s soul and, lastly, for myself. My prayers for my family are specific, but I don’t know what I want God to do for me. My knees are sore from sucking so much dick, and I am ambivalent about the whole concept of a soul.
My only real sin is sex. I am a very ethical person.
And my only real fault is being a woman. Otherwise, sex wouldn’t be an issue.

~

The Economist wants to watch another man fuck me. “When he leaves, I will fuck you again,” he says. But he is not opposed to joining in, too. He says, “You are such a good slut,” and again, I correct him, “Your good slut.” He smirks.

~

My old roommate bragged that he’s slept with probably three hundred women, give or take. Even though he is a notorious liar, I believe him. He is neither slut nor whore.
He’s dominant, manly, a goddamn stallion: “keyed in,” as he likes to say.

~

I swipe left more than right. I find a handsome guy and ask if he will let a friend—the Economist—watch. He writes, “Not the first time. First time, just me and you. Then I will make you an orgy.” He has a PhD in Philosophy and is, like me, a professor. Because he didn’t bring a condom, we pleasure each other with our mouths, and then I use a sex toy and he cums in his hand. He tells me he will throw me a sex party before I leave. He is a Heideggerian. We talked for an hour before undressing and talk another hour afterwards, naked and touching skin. I like him very much. My insecurity tells me he will not see me again.

~

Because we cannot find a third, the Economist suggests role-playing a rape fantasy. Only a minute before he cums in my mouth, he remembers there should be a safe word. I release his dick from my mouth and say, “Watermelon.”

~

I text my friends in the States that I am over this promiscuity business. Then, I add, “After Europe.” They LOL.

~

Dorothy texts, “You’re trusting an Italian, LOL.”

~

Just another one night stand, Zeus and Leda.

~

I have been in three long-term relationships, one of which was a disastrous marriage, and all three men had requested group sex. I refused them the male fantasy of two women at once. I am too insecure to watch my partner desire another woman more than me, and even the suggestion destroys me, offends me that I, alone, am not enough. I don’t tell any of them this and let them think I am prudish. Maybe I am.

~

I feel a hunger for group sex with the Economist. I am so submissive that his desire for it becomes mine. Or maybe I want two dicks at once and am too entangled in gender norms to approve of that desire as my own.

~

“You are good at chess,” the Philosopher says.
Although he had not framed it as a question, I nod to indicate that I am. “Saturday night, then, we will play chess but with humans. I will be king and you will be queen and we fuck the pawns we capture.”
His metaphor is a disaster, so I smile as though he has said something clever. “Pawns are only good for fucking. But you,” he says. He looks at the high ceilings in Gian’s flat.

~

To speak of double standards would be too obvious, but yeah, obviously, right?

~

This summer, I have fucked more men than my previous thirty-five years combined.

~

During my first tour through Europe this summer, I bed a series of very impressive men. They all have doctorates and jobs and they seriously know how to fuck. They make American men seem pedestrian with basic brains, wholly common.

~

In Leonardo’s “Leda,” she is either caressing or choking the Swan. Two voyeur cherubs watch.
It’s just a copy though, and I find myself disappointed in the Borgheses.

~

I leave for Florence in twelve hours and still no word from the Philosopher. Rejection always hurts.

~

An imitation, not unlike my Imposter Syndrome.

~

For the past four nights, I have searched through Tinder while the Economist obsesses on Grindr. He refreshes his inbox again and again. His determination excites me, but I am also disappointed.
This is as much my fantasy as his. I think this is a true statement, but it might be that I’m just trying to convince myself.
When he isn’t there with me, I don’t even open the app, even though new matches keep appearing.

~

Walking through Villa Borghese, I think, “It’s no Versailles.”
The way I compare my body to other women’s and find myself at fault. My sexuality, too.
I feel like a list of wrongs.

~

Four days in Rome and I have engaged in sex acts with five men. I am desirable. I disgust myself. I send the Economist pictures because he cannot be there, because the other men do not want it.

~

I had assumed that the men I’d fucked on my first European tour would be one-night stands, but they have kept in touch, all of them. When I appear in repeat cities, they come see me—to cum, again. I am satisfactory; I satisfy them enough that they want more of me.

~

Ignoring the corruption completely, those Borgheses’ loved to fuck, too.
Papal power: misogynistic hegemony: ah, but that was way back in the day.

~

They don’t buy me dinner, but they also don’t disappear. That means something: like I’m hot enough to fuck but I’m not worth their Euros.

~

Also, that I’m a slut.

~

Because I am careless at Villa Borghese, I don’t know who made the other images of Leda, even though I photographed them from many angles.
It is the Modernist in me, wanting to turn an object, to compress time and space. Or, to simply better understand.

~

At the Keats-Shelley House, I have a long conversation with a girl who works there. She isn’t the curator, but she loves museums. She tells me about the Carpet Museum— although I can’t remember where it is, somewhere in Great Britain—and I talk about the use of technology in museums. She says it can enhance the experience. I tell her I prefer to remain ignorant of the details in order to better understand the space with the whole of my body. And so I regret not knowing the facts: at the Keats-Shelley House and at Villa Borghese.
Because Keats died ten years younger than I am now, his papers are valuable commodities that scatter through the world. I am disappointed that the locked shelves of books lining the walls were not his. “But they’re old,” she says, “dating back to his time.” She points to a red book in our periphery. “That’s Byron’s copy of The Odyssey,” she says. I want to tell her I’m an academic, a researcher—which is and isn’t true—I want to ask her what it would take for me to touch the book, feel it. I want my fingers to touch his mania and genius. But I just let her ramble on.

~

The Philosopher plans me a journey through Rome. He stars the important locations on Google maps, and I make it to all but two. The Museum of Criminology is closed, perhaps permanently, and although I walked through the doors of the Goethe Institute, I don’t walk up the stairs to the exhibit because I am tired and have seen enough culture for one day.

~

All of the letters are encased in glass: to and from Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Their cursive is barely legible. The ink from their quills pools through the parchment, and they made a lot of mistakes, lines drawn through text. I put my face very close to the glass.
Later, even though I am attempting to save my money because I still have two weeks left in Europe, I buy a t-shirt, their first names in Helvetica. I wonder if anyone other than my nerd academic friends will get the reference.

~

“You like to be told what to do,  huh,  slut?”  the Economist asks.  The question is rhetorical, so he demands, “Now suck my dick,” and I do.

~

“Do you want to see old Rome or very old Rome?” the Philosopher asks. He clarifies that old Rome is still 15th or 16th century.
He goes on and on about Roman history and its determined role in the creation of civilization.
I listen carefully and then I say, “You make it seem like there is only the West.” “The United States has no history,” he says.
Whereas I know I have won this one, I say timidly, “There is an entire East too, you know.” It comes out almost as a whisper that he can ignore.

~

A marble statue of Leda. The Swan’s mouth on her nipple; a cherub touching her arm. She is all skin: bestiality and pedophilia: her expression is not one of fear but desire.

~

“I will take pictures and send them to your boyfriend,” the Economist says. “Please, no.”
He slams his hand over my mouth. “Shut up.” I squeeze my legs together.
“Open.” He forces my legs apart and touches me. “You’re all wet, you dirty slut. You want my Roman dick because your Asian boyfriend’s dick is so small.” “Say it,” he commands. He releases his hand from my mouth. “I have never seen such a big dick,” I say.
Because this is only role-playing, I lie to him without remorse.

~

Now, in my mid-thirties, I am becoming slovenly. I attempt to hide it in cute clothes more apt for someone a decade younger than me. I try to make myself feel better by fucking. I need the validation.

~

I text my friend Sarah, “What drives promiscuity? Empowerment or insecurity?” And quickly, before she can respond, “Binaries are so 1980s. LOL.”
We are both feminists.  I don’t want to expose what a hypocrite I am.  It’s embarrassing because I feel like she’s the real deal.
She writes back, “I think both and not necessarily either. Can be other things too.
For me it’s about feeling connected, feeling alive.”
I ask her to FaceTime because I’m feeling super neurotic and insecure and I need someone to give me permission for my sexuality.

~

When I fuck men, I don’t feel empowered, but I do feel validated—and that’s a good enough motivation for me.
Or justification.
I hardly know the difference.

~

In another imagining of Leda and the Swan, she is fully clothed in rich scarlet and gold. Her hair is styled and curled. The Swan’s beak hovers right below her lips, waiting. Her eyes are turned away, shy eyes, and she is smiling.
Because she wants it.

~

The male equivalent of slut is stud.

~

Because my sexual prowess shames me, I am writing about it.

~

Since eighteen, I have been diagnosed bipolar by several psychiatrists, but I insist that they’re wrong. I know myself and I know the DSM-V.
But: for months at a time, I thrive on two or three hours of sleep. Instead of sleep, I create. I make. Then, the times I cannot make myself leave the house. I force myself to go into work, and even though I only work three days a week for office hours, I cancel and worry that my secretary judges me.
Another symptom of bipolar disorder is sexual promiscuity. Compulsion.
Impulsivity.
My rejection of the diagnosis shows my lack of self-knowledge.

~

Prowess or desperation for validation? Or do I simply need a tour guide? Or am I lonely?
All of the above, inclusive of contradictions.

~

Like, I only understood that I’m an extrovert recently. Within the last six months.
I want to be an introvert because that’s more fitting of a writer. I want to fit the profile.
I strive for verisimilitude.

~

In W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” he describes her as not only as “staggering,” but also “helpless,” “terrified,” and “mastered.”
I tell men I want them to use me.
It is not a master-slave relationship. I’m just a sub. And I have rules.
Most people misunderstand the sub-dom relationship. Subs have the power. In relationships that are trusting enough to practice sub-dom, the sub can halt everything at any time. Otherwise, rape by any name remains rape.

~

The Philosopher says, “I want to eat you now.”
I tell him I have just finished my period. My femininity is gross to me. Afterwards, he says, “I love the way you taste.” His kiss charms me.

~

During anal sex, I often whimper, “It hurts.” I beg, “Please, hurry.” The guy, whoever he might be, first asks me if I want him to stop. Then, he pounds away, harder.
I’m never lying about it. Anal sex often hurts me, but I also want him to think his dick is big. I validate his masculinity.
Usually, there is blood.

~

I hit up three basilicas in an afternoon. I drop Euros into the dark wooden boxes and light tea candles. I pray, but not for forgiveness. I pray for hope.

~

The Philosopher calls me “baby” when he explains that he can’t meet up with me. Later that night, he texts pictures of naked girls in ecstasy. I write back, “Very busy.”
He hasn’t responded to my last six texts, two of which contained embarrassingly sexy pictures.
I feel as rejected as jealous. I feel bad about myself.

~

During sex, I like to be told what to do. I am a complete sub and yearn for violent sex. This is dangerous with strangers.
It’s dangerous in relationships, too.

~

“I don’t like the way that guy looks,” the Economist says. “It’s not safe, you know? You’re a woman. It’s just a feeling.”
Even though he never spends the night with me, I get it that he cares.

~

In The Ethical Slut, the authors contend, “Sluts share their sexuality the way philanthropists share their money: because they have a lot to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place.”
Although I am an optimist by nature, I don’t believe in altruism. I think everything has a hidden motive, even if it’s just to make yourself feel OK.

~

From the Swan comes the ultimate slut: Helen and her splendid beauty and epic war.

~

Rather than sex, I convince the Postal Worker to have a threesome with the Economist. He’s very nice and I know he wants me. He’s really hesitant about it, asks repeatedly if the other guy is a good guy, says he’s insecure. “Can’t it just be us?” he asks.
He asks, “This is what you want?”
When the Economist shows up, he immediately slaps my face and tells the other guy that I’m just a slut. “Such a slut,” he says. “It turns me on.”
As I deep throat the Economist, the Postal Worker gets dressed. He shakes his head, apologizes, says, “This isn’t right.”
The Economist says some stuff in Italian, which I can’t understand, but the other guy is unconvinced. He moves to leave and I apologize repeatedly.
When it is just the two of us again, I tell the Economist that he was a nice guy. “You came on too strong. I should’ve warned you.”
Always apologetic.

~

I used to teach Intro to Women’s Studies at an all-girls’ college, and I challenged my students to go twenty-four hours without saying, “I’m sorry.”
They all fail. I do, too.
Reflexive femininity; enforced femininity.

~

I want to impress all these men with my body. I want them to think I’m hot.
And if that is not enough, I tell them my occupation: professor. “La professora,” I say. And then I tell them I’m a novelist. And then I show them my Amazon page.
I am impressive, I tell myself—because I am.
And yet, I know they’d fuck me without any of my accomplishments and accolades. I like to imagine them bragging about me to their friends later.

~

An old grad student of mine texts, “Didn’t we already reclaim slut?”

~

“You’re very handsome,” I tell the Philosopher, “and smart.” Correcting me, he says, “I’m a genius.”
“Sure,” I say in agreement.
“But it’s easy to be a genius because my family is wealthy and I can do whatever I please. I just read books and think.”
“So why are you on Tinder?”
He reaches into his shirt to scratch his chest, undoing another button. “I’m a sex addict,” he says flatly. “I need to fuck every day at least once.” I believe him but am not scandalized.
“I’m kidding,” he says. “I like to practice my languages.”
I’m not completely stupid. This one I don’t believe at all. I say, “I almost never understand sarcasm. If you tell me something, I believe you.” Like how he’d told me he likes to smoke cocaine—except that rather excited me. I’d hoped that one was true.

~

I haven’t smoked weed in about a week and am beginning to feel desperate.
I have an arsenal of intoxicants with me—Xanax, Adderall, Oxy, Percocet, magic mushrooms, and maybe three or four doses of GHB that F— gave me in Barcelona—but I can’t find any weed.
“LOL,” I text my friends in the States. “I guess they don’t need it because they live in MF-ing Rome.”
Indeed, the city makes me high, but not high enough.

~

It’s the easy way out: to blame my excessive drug use and promiscuity on being bipolar.
And my non-existent self-control and impulsivity, too.
My mental illness swipes away my bad behavior, gives it a genesis, infuses me with self-loathing.

~

I only go to Villa Borghese because the Philosopher commands it.

~

When I tell my Roman lovers I am a novelist, they always ask me what kind of novels. “Romance?” they ask.
I am offended every time. “No, like literature. Like art. I write art.” “Oh,” they say, but they don’t understand.

~

A couple weeks ago, in New Hampshire, I get a matching tattoo with some writer friends of mine. We get little envelopes on our wrists, and mine is hot pink. The Philosopher points to it, says, “A scarlet letter,” and licks it.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A BESTIARY (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest) and CHANGING (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology THE FORCE OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE: WRITERS ON ACCESSIBILITY and the AVANT-GARDE. She is Director of the MFA program at New Mexico State University. She serves as Senior Editor at Puerto del Sol, Editor at Jaded Ibis Press, and Executive Editor for HTML Giant.


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The Hollow Places of the World

Kenneth Garcia

The ores of divine providence
are everywhere infused, and
everywhere to be found.
St. Augustine, De Doctrina Cristiana

The margins of the world surrounded me—at least in the physical sense—for hundreds of miles in every direction: a no-man’s land of semi-arid deserts; middles of nowhere; and solitary mountain ranges. I lived in this no-man’s land, in the small town of Elko, Nevada, and worked in its middles of nowhere during the last two years of high school and the first two of college. I spent summers searching for gold in the remote mountains and hills of Nevada, assisting geologists from Newmont Exploration Company. We hiked rocky hillsides covered with gnarled brush and pungent with the smell of juniper and sage. We scoured long-abandoned mining towns and uninhabited landscapes searching for hidden traces of ore. We crisscrossed rugged terrain far removed from towns and highways, accessible only by dirt road or no road at all. When the land became too steep or rugged for a four-wheel drive pick-up, we hiked in with pack mules. The mules hauled our gear: tents, sleeping bags, shovels, metal placer pans, canned and freeze-dried food, water jugs, and rifles. I scooped soil into small canvas bags, labeled them by location and soil type (gritty, loamy, clay-like), and loaded the bags onto the mules. The geologists carried compasses, maps, and binoculars with which to orient us in the vast open spaces. It was big country, country to get lost in, scorched in, or find oneself in.

~

Nevada, western Utah, and southern Idaho comprise a region known as the Great Basin, a semi- arid region in the western United States encompassing some 206,000 square miles, of which 190,000 are desert. The region is bounded by the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the west, the Wasatch Mountains of Utah on the east, the highlands of the Sonoran desert to the south, and the Columbian Plateau to the north. Its rivers and streams have no outlet to the ocean—they flow into one of many salten lakes, where the water stagnates, evaporates into the air, or sinks into the earth, leaving behind alkali flats hostile to life. The mountains and highlands once encircled a small ocean teeming with life. Fifteen thousand years ago, a breach in the land in southern Idaho caused the ocean to drain away through a massive flood with a volume three times the flow of the Amazon River at its mouth. The basin is now dry, silent, and empty, with shrub growth maturing slowly and with difficulty.

Geologists refer to the region as “Basin and Range” due to its intermittent series of mountain ranges running north-south, separated by wide valleys covered with sagebrush, cheatgrass, and Russian thistle (tumbleweed). Author and photographer Stephen Trimble calls the basin a “sagebrush ocean,” stretching boundlessly across the silent uninhabited spaces. The mountain ranges tower over this sagebrush ocean like enormous islands, just as they once rose
out of the watery ocean as real islands.

The region is geologically active. The movement of tectonic plates has stretched the earth’s crust throughout much of the basin, creating hot holes, warm ponds, geysers, steam rising through fissures in the earth, and volcanic seepage. The surface appears calm—serene even—but not far under its crust seething, turbulent energies seek to rise through its attenuated skin. Those intense energies have created a molten brew in which heavy metals such as gold and silver get separated out from other minerals.

Geologists at Newmont were certain gold lay hidden in the hills and mountains of northeastern Nevada, even though prospectors discovered and removed most of the principal veins of gold and silver ore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In those earlier times mining boom towns sprouted throughout Nevada. They had populations of between 500 and 10,000 people, and were home to opera houses, churches, hotels, newspapers, hardware stores,
grocers, schools and, of course, saloons and whorehouses. Once the ore gave out, the populations dwindled, turning the once-bustling towns into ghost towns. Only a few decaying buildings and mine tailings—the waste ore dug from the mountain side—remain.

Although miners extracted the principal veins of ore, plenty of gold remains hidden in microscopic flecks diffused over a broad area. Newmont hired my friend Warren Hardie and me to help look for it. And we found lots of it, without ever seeing it. Only special assaying can detect it and, until recently, no one knew how to extract it profitably.

Just west of Elko a vein of gold runs northwestward by southeastward through northern Nevada, dipping deep underground at places, rising near the surface in others. The gold is dispersed widely so it is not really accurate to call it a vein; rather, geologists refer to it as a “trend,” the “Carlin Trend” to be precise, named after the small town nearby. The trend does not run in a straight line; it twists and turns as it dives and rises. Around 1960 geologists from Newmont Exploration Company discovered where it rises near enough to the surface to extract, and one of the country’s most profitable gold mines—the Carlin Gold Mine— sprang to life.

During the summer after my freshman year of college Warren and I worked at Bootstrap, a site fifteen miles north of the Carlin gold mine, and the home to a small mining operation in the early twentieth century. Prospectors had followed and extracted a vein of gold that ran horizontally through a large hill that stood alone in a great, broad valley. The tunnel, carved through solid rock, remained. Newmont bought the mineral rights and began assessing its gold
content.

I did mostly grunt work and heavy lifting, but the pleasure of trekking the backcountry of Nevada made the hard work and scorching daytime heat worthwhile. We worked in shifts around the clock throughout most of the summer. I volunteered for the graveyard shift, from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., to avoid the scorching sun of day. At night the temperature in the high desert dipped to 50 degrees Fahrenheit—jacket-wearing temperature—contrasted to the mid 90s during the day. Bootstrap was about an hour and a half drive, each way, from Elko, so Newmont provided a
small trailer for us to live in during the week. The trailer had no air conditioning, though, so the night crew could not sleep in it during the heat of the day. Instead we slept on cots in the old mining tunnel, where it was cool, dark, and silent. A heavy wooden door at the opening sealed the tunnel enough to keep critters out. Only the howling of distant coyotes broke the silence. Sometimes the coyotes came close enough that we could hear their yap-yapping near the door. We were safe within the tunnel, but we kept loaded guns within reach, just in case. The interior of the tunnel presented us with both a temptation to explore and a fear of the unknown. The fear kept us near the opening; none of us ventured into the darkness.

I worked on a drill rig that bored deep into the earth. The rigs used 20-foot steel poles, about five inches in diameter, with a hollow center, to drill down. A steel drill bit was attached to the lower tip of the pole, a bit designed for scouring rock and turning it to dirt. As the drill bore into the ground, an air compressor forced air through the hollow tubes of the poles, blowing the loosened dirt up the shaft to the surface, where I collected it in a tub. I took samples of the soil at five-foot intervals, placed a portion of the dirt in a canvas bag, labeled the bag with a number and, on a separate note pad, noted the depth, color, and consistency of the soil. Once the pole drilled down 20 feet, we attached another to it and continued boring. Each drill rig carried thirty or forty of these poles, so we could drill down 500 to 600 feet if necessary. When the lead bit hit a very hard layer of rock, it wore down, forcing us to raise all the poles out of the ground, one at a time, and replace the steel bit with a diamond one (diamonds are the hardest mineral and can cut through almost anything). Normally we drilled down several hundred feet before moving onto another site fifty yards or so away.

Based on the assay results, geologists created a composite map of the mineral content underground. I marveled at human ingenuity, at the ability to investigate nature, to test, explore,and discover what is beyond the range of our five senses.

I worked with an assistant geologist named Fred Buechel, a gruff, overweight man in his mid-forties. Beuchel had worked for several mining companies before, but had not been promoted to any supervisory role. He was a crank, a heavy drinker, and socially inept. Most of the summer employees disliked his sarcasm and cynicism, but I liked the way he used geological terms as cuss word intensifiers, which I suspected he picked up from reading Mark Twain’s
accounts of Mississippi riverboat pilots. Given his profession, it suited him well. He called prominent land forms by anatomical names (tits, pricks, thumbs, elbows), and sexualized references to digging and drilling into the earth. His language had color. He was once married to a Russian woman he found through an advertisement in the back of some magazine. After receiving her citizenship papers, she divorced him. After that, he despised women. His sole contact with them now was an occasional visit to a whorehouse, which one could find in every town in Nevada. When he went to town for “business,” we knew which one.

~

Warren and I hunted rattlesnakes on occasion (one of the drill rig operators said we could sell their venom for cash because medical researchers used it to produce anti-snake venom). The snakes denned in the cavities of rock outcroppings about 10 miles north of Bootstrap. We took poles made of cut tree branches, about six feet long. The tips, sharpened with our pocket knives,formed a Y-shaped fork that looked like your index and middle finger when you spread them. On our initial hunt we came across the first rattler on the road to the outcropping. It crossed the road in front of us. We jumped out of the pickup and grabbed our poles. The snake, sensing danger, slithered up the embankment on the side of the road and coiled itself into a small cavity near the top. We poked at it with the tips of our poles, arms stretched—a good-sized rattler can bite through a pair of leather boots, so we kept our distance. The poking made it angry and its rattler buzzed frenetically, but it soon slithered off to escape the annoyance. As it crawled, Warren forked it right behind the head, the pointed tips stuck in the ground. With its head immobilized the snake couldn’t strike. The rest of its body writhed, trying to get free, but it couldn’t. Warren grabbed the squirming body with his left hand to hold it still. With his right hand he firmly grabbed the neck just behind the head as I held the Y-prong tight. I removed the pronged stick so he could lift the snake up. I placed a small glass jar up to the snake’s open mouth, its fangs on the inside of the jar and its lower mouth on the outside. The pressure against the fangs forced the snake to secrete its venom into the jar.

We milked five more snakes that day, then let them go. Their venom wouldn’t be replenished for some time, so they weren’t dangerous. Before driving back to Bootstrap, Warren suggested we take a rattler back for Buechel. I knew just what he had in mind. We caught, milked, and killed another snake and took it back to the tunnel. While Buechel was in town “on business” that evening we coiled the snake up inside his sleeping bag, then waited up for his return.

As he got into the bag, he recoiled in panic. “Holy crap! There’s a fucking snake in there!”

When he heard us snickering he cursed up some graphic geology words, which grew in number of syllables as he went.

“Goddamn sons of bitches! I’m going to fire your paleozoic asses! Fucking carboniferous potheads!”

In our spare hours, when we weren’t hunting snakes, we played cards and drank beer. Beuchel shot at wildlife, mostly lone coyotes and jack rabbits. His rugged temperament seemed just right for these places—places for men in dusty boots who broke rock with handpicks and penetrated the earth with drill rigs and bulldozers. Men who passed the tracks of cougar and deer, and kicked away the shed skin of snakes and bleached antlers, without wonder, seeking no
messages, wishing only for a gun. They extracted the gleaming substance of earth, stripped away its mystery, without reverence. I was comfortable among them.

I found solace in the vast, silent spaces, too.

~

The more time I spent in the wide-open country, the more I noticed an austere beauty that awakened an inner recess of my psyche that I had not known was there. Like a long, dark mining tunnel, forbidding but also mysterious, I felt lured to explore its depths. Something subtle drew me, though I barely recognized it at first. A sense of the land’s awesomeness, even sacredness, filtered gradually into my mind. I had no words to describe it at the time, and even if I had, my co-workers, especially Buechel, would have thought me “touched.” Treasure of a different kind, I slowly discovered, can be found in out-of- the-way and unexpected places, even in this seemingly desolate region.

While contemplating the vastness of the landscape, I began to detect something like a primordial power in nature—could I call it Spirit?—that seemed to permeate the countryside. And Spirit is a stealthy hunter. It does not gather in packs to surround you, like coyotes. It does not remain downwind lest you detect its presence. It rides the wind and filters through the grasses, suffusing the quiet, hollow places of the world.

During lunch hour—which for the night shift came around midnight—we shut down the drill rig for an hour. While the other workers took naps in the pick-up trucks, I took solitary walks over the hilltop. I lay on the ground gazing at the stars and listening to the night sounds. I carried a flashlight and a rifle, but on many nights I didn’t need the flashlight; moonlight illumined the way. The distant hills and valleys gleamed like quicksilver. Sometimes I thought I sensed a kind of in- and exhalation of the earth, something living, yet invisible. Is the earth alive? Breathing? Is that possible? It seemed such a mystery, like when you lean over to hear an infant’s soft breath, to detect whether it’s still breathing. When you realize it is—what wonder!

One morning, in the tunnel before we fell asleep, Buechel asked,
“Where the hell do you go during your lunch breaks? You got a coyote sweetheart out there or something?”

I laughed. “I just wander around. Have you ever really observed the country out there in the moonlight? You can see so far. And it’s so quiet. It’s eerie, but beautiful.”

“Beautiful! This desolate place? There’s nothing out there but dust, sagebrush, and coyotes.”

“Yeah, but not just those,” I protested. “There’s beauty, too.”

“Yeah, well what’s that stuff covering your boots and pant legs every day? And what are those thorns in your socks, beauty incarnate?”

I knew just what he meant. The land got so dry it turned powdery. With every step we made, the ground belched a miniature dust cloud that settled on our boots and pant legs. The little burrs from cheatgrass seeds clung to our cotton socks and irritated the skin. We had to stop occasionally to pluck them out.

“But seriously,” I said, “there’s something mind-boggling out there, something mysterious, you know?”

“Oh, Jesus!” he said. “All I see is a bunch of dirt and weeds. Mysterious! You get some
sleep so we can go out tomorrow and find more gold. Then you should go invest in Newmont
and be rich as hell. They’ve found a rich lode, for sure. That’s why they’ve brought in more
workers—to work the drill rigs around the clock.”

“We kind of are already, aren’t we?” I said before he finished speaking.

“Kind of what?” he asked.

“Rich. You know, with all that—I don’t know.” I paused to find the words. “With all that spiritual beauty out there.”

Beauty. Spirit. Nature. All kind of mingled and interwoven in ways that were inexplicable to me, as hidden as those flecks of gold, unless you knew how to look for them.“You’re full of it,” he said as he turned over on his cot. “The earth’s just a lump of inorganic stuff with an itty-bitty covering of organic stuff, that’s all.” I intuited otherwise, but did not have the language with which to express my emerging awareness.

~

I brought my mountain bike to work, and began riding in the evenings before my shift began—wandering aimlessly along dirt roads and cow paths. One weekend I didn’t return to Elko with the others.

“You’re staying here all weekend?” asked Warren. “Alone?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me, puzzled. “What about Jan? Aren’t you seeing her this weekend?” Jan and I had dated since high school and usually went out together on weekends. “What’s she going to think?”

“If you see her, just tell her I’m working through the weekend.”

“Just tell her he’s a weirdo!” interrupted Buechel, “that he’s got a breccia brain—you take a handful of jagged little rocks and squeeze them together with cement-like mud, and you get a brain like his that doesn’t think too keen. If he wants to stay here and commune with dirt, let him.”

The next day I biked on a gravel road leading northward. After half an hour I reached the top of a rise where I caught sight of a vehicle about ten miles away, heading in my direction—not really the vehicle, but a cloud of dust billowing upward from a moving point on the road. The dust formed an elongated cloud held aloft by air currents before gradually spreading out and floating back to the ground. I did not want to eat that dust, so I left the road and biked over the untrodden countryside: across creases in the land, through tall sagebrush and Russian thistle that scratched my legs and ankles. I stopped at the edge of a narrow ravine and climbed down it, wondering if I could discern something of its history. Had it formed from the waters of ancient streams, or had the earth cracked and split like wood drying too fast? I rode from one rise to another, horizon to horizon, criss-crossing the valley in a general northward direction, just to see how far the unbounded space could go before I reached something human—a fence, a ranch house, an east-west road, anything. Such a boundless land. An inner void, filling slowly with something I didn’t know, opened as I gazed on the ever-receding horizon. A void at once frightening and comforting. I couldn’t explain it.

I came to a large rock outcropping surrounded by brush. One side of the outcropping had a large overhang about six feet up, creating a shady spot—a good place to crawl into and have lunch. I wriggled through the brush on all fours until I got under the ledge, and sat with my back against the rock. It was utterly quiet except for a breeze whispering through the brush. A few bird feathers and bones of small animals were scattered here and there. A hawk must use this place for lunch, too. Good choice. I wondered if any other human had sat here. Probably not. As I drank water from my canteen, I imagined this recessed nook as a kind of sacred space, and thought this: around the hollow, sacred spaces revolves the busy world that, uneasy with a presence unseen, refuses to know its own quiet center (or at least some inchoate thought that I later translated into those words). I sat still in the nook, listening. The wind whirled about, raw and pure; it filtered through the brush, gently, rhythmically. The place was lonely; severe; comfortable.

During my walks and bike rides I began collecting the sheddings and remains of animals: deer antlers, snake skins, golden eagle and hawk feathers, and dry animal bones bleached by the sun. I hung them from the timber just inside the doorway of the tunnel. I hung the jar of snake venom, too (we never bothered to find out where we could sell it). Buechel pretended to scorn my decorations, but I knew he liked them because on one occasion he brought me a badger skull to hang.

“Here’s something for your freak art show,” he said, and tossed me the skull. A few days later he brought a coyote tail he’d cut from one of his kills. I hung it with the rest.

One day Warren and I were assigned a double shift—all night and the next day. We gouged soil samples from the wall of a ten-foot deep trench dug out by a Caterpillar. After a few hours in the mid-July sun we needed a break. I sat in the last sliver of shade against one wall of the trench. A hard, pointed rock, barely above the surface and hidden by a layer of dirt, jammed into my tail bone. Unwilling to give up the only shady spot around, I began to dig it out. It was firmly lodged. Digging further, I discovered a horn-shaped object extruding from a large boulder below. It was of a different material than the rock, yet encrusted to it. Could it be the petrified horn of some ancient animal? It was too thick to be a deer or antelope antler; more like a bull’s horn. Yet if buried ten feet underground it must have been deposited there millennia ago,long before cattle came to this part of the world. Perhaps a buffalo horn? No, it had spiral-like wrinkles around it. It didn’t look like any horn I’d seen. I chipped off the extrusion from the rock with a hand pick and stuck it in my ruck sack. In the evening I showed it to Buechel.

“Do you have any idea what this is?” I asked.

He turned it over a couple of times, spat on it, then wiped off the wet dirt with his shirt tail. His facial hair showed several days of growth. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, then examined the object with a magnifying glass.

“Coral,” he said. “Coral rugosa to be exact.”

“Coral? Here? I thought coral grew on the ocean floor, in the tropics.”

“It does. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this place used to be under a tropical ocean.”

“Oh, come on. You’re pulling my leg.”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “The slow movement of tectonic plates shifted the continent way up here. That’s a piece of coral, all right, probably from the Devonian period.”

“When was that?”

“About 400 million years ago, give or take a few years.” Buechel was a crank, but he knew his geological history.

“So was this thing alive at the same time as the dinosaurs?”

“Earlier. About 150 million years earlier.” He paused a while. “If you go over to the Toquima Mountain Range, you’ll see plant fossils that are 600 million years old. And I’ll tell you something else. Someday the valleys in the Great Basin will be filled with ocean water again. This entire basin is stretching and expanding, just like the Atlantic basin did after North America separated from North Africa. Eventually the stretching will open a breach to the Pacific Ocean—maybe in southern California, maybe in northern California— but when it does, this will be ocean again and a big chunk of California will be an island. The Humboldt River and all the smaller streams will have an outlet to the ocean instead of emptying into alkali flats. That’s inevitable. Probably not before we get the gold out of this hill, though.” Beuchel, it seemed, knew something about the geological future, too. How could someone who knew the deep history of this land not see beauty in it?

I held the coral up to have a close look. “So this thing lived 400 million years ago?”

“Yeah. Maybe only 398 million.”

“Ah, so it’s not very old, then.”

“Nah. Not much older than your mama,” he said.

“Your mama, maybe,” I said as I tied a string around a wrinkle of the coral and hung it along with the coyote tail, deer antlers, and other items. I pondered my decorations.

“Could any of these animals hanging here have descended from this coral? You know,
maybe the coral evolved into an animal and one of these things is its descendent,” I said.

“Probably not, but you might be, with that fucking precambrian fossil brain of yours.”

~

It was the night of the full red moon of August. We had finished our work at Bootstrap several weeks earlier. We knew it was time to move on when the big yellow earth movers started arriving. Mining engineers, geologists, and surveyors wandered the hillside, surveying, calculating, pointing things out to one another on maps and drawings. Newmont would soon blast the hill with dynamite and shovel loads of earth into the giant trucks, which would haul the ore to the Carlin Gold mine for crushing and heap-leaching.

In a typical heap-leach operation, miners remove tons of ore from hillsides or open pits, crush it into dirt, and pile it onto clay or plastic liners. They then spray large quantities of cyanide solution over the ore. As the cyanide percolates through the layers of dirt, it draws microscopic flecks of gold and extracts up to ninety-seven percent of it from the rest of the ore. This “pregnant” solution concentrates at the bottom of a drainage system, where the miners distill and process it further. We completed our work without seeing a speck of gold. Buechel had predicted Newmont would find a rich lode; the increased activity and earth movers confirmed it.

Newmont sent Buechel and me to the Prospect Mountains in central Nevada, just south of Eureka—a nineteenth-century boom town now turned into a lethargic community of around 350 inhabitants. As we drove through town we noticed a handful of old-timers sitting on benches in front of decaying buildings.

“What do you think these old guys do all day long?” I asked.

“They probably reminisce about the old days and hope a new deposit of gold gets discovered so the town can spring back to life with saloons and whorehouses.”

Buechel and I explored the region surrounding Prospect Peak, the highest mountain in the range at 10,400 feet, and the site of significant mining operations in the 19th century. Extensive tailings fanned out from the mouth of several tunnels. Tons of dirt had been removed, so the tunnels went in deep, perhaps forming honey-combs inside the mountain. We planned to spend two weeks there.

I collected soil samples at 100 foot intervals while Buechel analyzed rock outcroppings and applied drops of chemicals to the dirt I dug up. He smelled and licked chips of rock he broke off with his hand pick, tasting for hints of certain minerals. We worked our way gradually over a nine square mile area, with frequent stops, side trips around ravines, and slow climbs up the mountainside. Because of Buechel’s weight, he had to take it slow. We pitched a tent alongside a spring, and in the evenings gathered firewood, and cooked our meals. We hunted cottontail or grouse for dinner.

The alpine terrain, well above the sagebrush zone, boasted rich grasses, berries, pinyon pine, wildflowers, and springs—good country for sheep-grazing. We chanced upon a flock almost daily. A Basque sheepherder made a point of visiting us regularly, glad for human contact. He spent nights alone in a metal-covered wagon stationed near the bottom of the canyon. He rode up the mountain on horseback each day to check on the flocks and share wine with us
from a leather bota. He spoke little English, so we conversed in pidgin and by gesture.

One morning Beuchel and I discovered two dead sheep lying in the brush. We walked over to have a closer look. As we approached we saw others. Three. Four. Five. Then many others, twenty-three in all. Dead sheep strewn everywhere.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked.

“Dunno,” said Buechel. “Maybe they ate some poisonous plants clustered in the area.”

Later that day, we met the sheepherder and pointed out the site to him. On the following day rangers from the Fish and Wildlife Service came to inspect the scene. They determined a lone mountain lion had killed them, not for food, but for sport. None of the sheep—not one—had been eaten.

Buechel and I did not sleep in the tent that night or out in the open, knowing a killer was
on the loose. We slept in one of the mining tunnels on the side of Prospect Peak. Its shabby
wooden door closed well enough. We kept our loaded rifles nearby.

~

The night witch set loose by the full moon forbade me sleep. I lay for a long time on the cot, pondering the great expanse of geological time and our minuscule span of life within it. Though just a microscopic fleck within its enormity, I felt a strange kindredness toward it. I wanted to walk about, but dared not because of the cougar. I decided to explore the tunnel instead. I put on my boots, grabbed a flashlight and rifle, and walked into the darkness.

I shone light on the walls and felt the layers of earth, one upon another. How old are these rocks? If an ancient coral fossil ten or twelve feet below the surface was 400 million years old, how old was this rock deep inside the mountain? A billion? It boggled the mind.

The tunnel went straight into the mountain for at least a hundred yards, then branched off in three directions. I took the branch on the right, the wider one. After another hundred feet or so,the tunnel descended steadily, deeper into the darkness. More branches. Then cross branches. Again I took the larger one, reasoning it would be the main branch. By following the larger tunnel consistently I should be able to find my way back. After a time, the air became tight. It grew warmer. Another branch veered to the left.

I began following a rise. The vein of ore must have trended horizontally, then twisted downward before gradually ascending. Walking became labored, breathing more difficult, though I was used to climbing hills. I stopped frequently to catch my breath. Altitude sickness? I felt a momentary disorientation. What if I got lost in this maze of passageways? Would Buechel think to look for me here? He was accustomed to my nighttime walks; he would assume
I had gone outside; would look for me in the morning, and wonder if the mountain lion had dragged me off to its lair.

What would happen if I died in here? Would they find me? If not, I imagined two endings. One was this: if Newmont found gold, they would tear down this mountain and my remains would end up in a heap-leach pile, dissolved by cyanide. The second was less dispiriting. The earth’s movement would close the tunnel and fuse my bones with Devonian or Ordovician rock. Some geologist would discover them ten million years from now and place them on exhibit as an example of a primitive hominoid form. Viewers would speculate on what thoughts I might have had, and what dreams and promises I never fulfilled. Would they be able to deduce from DNA that I had thoughts and dreams? Could scientists, by then, recreate my memories—such as bike rides toward a boundless horizon? Could they recreate the wonder and mystery of that?

I continued along the passageway. If I got lost I could shout for help from Buechel—if he could hear me, anyway. I imagined him banging on a placer pan repetitively, and I would follow the sound back. That image led to a curious question, given the circumstances. Would I even want to shout for help from Beuchel? Would death be any worse than the smirk on his face when I found my way back? I could hear his words, “Hey, Tonto, did you find some creature back there with an Archaean brain like yours?” Yet, I knew he would worry.

Soon I noticed a musty, acrid smell. And foul. Was it the odor of death? It grew stronger. Soon I entered a widened chamber, a small cavern of sorts. I shone light all around. There were bat droppings agglomerated on one side wall. They spread onto the floor, rank and hot, the outer layer still moist. Ghoulish stuff. I started to turn back, but then noticed there were no bats. They must be outside, hunting insects. There had to be an opening somewhere nearby. How else could they get out? I continued past the chamber. Soon a hint of outside air mingled with the musty, stale air of the tunnel. As the outside air became stronger I perceived a soft light up ahead. It came from an opening above, right where the tunnel came to an abrupt end.

A wooden ladder, old and decrepit, rose to the opening. Why did the miners use this opening? They couldn’t have hauled ore out through here. An escape route, probably. Two of the ladder’s rungs were missing, others were creaky. I pressed against it, shook it, pulled on the rungs within reach, stood on the bottom one. It was usable. I carefully ascended.

Outside, the full moon glowed fiery orange, not far above the eastern horizon. I walked to the top of Prospect Peak to get the best view, and peered over what seemed the edge of the world. To the north a few dim lights from Eureka shone in the distance. In all directions the sky extended limitlessly and the earth seemed to stretch out with it. The great valley below waited expectantly, like a womb, to be filled with glory. There was a mountain range thirty miles beyond, and another, ninety miles, stretching like millennia over the vast empty spaces. The moon’s light bathed the earth in a soft amber sheen like the lustre of the ocean just after sunset,or before sunrise. Yes, yes, Spirit hovers over these boundless spaces. Seeps in and fills them. The great valleys are like lungs through which it breathes in and out, rhythmically, glacially. The moonlight was gold, space was infinite, and Spirit rested patiently, everywhere. I knew this, though I was unschooled in things spiritual. Something broad and expansive filled me. And I intuited this, too: the long decades and distances between saints are too much. We no longer expect to hear, out of those silent spaces, a word that will bless.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Ken Garcia is the Associate Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. His book Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University received the award for Best Book Published in Theology in 2012 from the College Theology Society. In addition to Hunger Mountain, his literary essays have been published, or have accepted for publication, by The Gettysburg Review, The Southwest Review Notre Dame Magazine, Bearings Online (Collegeville Insitute), and St. Katherine Review. He lives with his wife and children in South Bend, Indiana.

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The Chevra

Goldie Goldbloom

chevra kadisha (Hevra kadishah) (Aramaic: קדישא חברא), Ḥebh’ra
Qaddisha
Jewish “holy society” for the preparation of the dead for burial

 

1.

I want to write about my mother’s life as if she is alive again, as if she never died. But I have not seen her in over twenty years. I have forgotten the way she used to hold her lips, the way she bent to retrieve small items from the floor, the way she looked at me when I had done something wrong. She’s been dead a long time.

She was very tall, more than six feet. By the end of her life, she weighed no more than eighty pounds, but even in the good years, she was thin. She could run faster than anyone I knew. She smoked cigarettes. She had long fingernails and wore stilettos and she made all her own clothing, including the bras.

When I wrote to the man with whom she had a long-term affair, several years after she died, he denied ever knowing her. When I confronted him with photographs, with his nickname, Fishface, he admitted knowing her just a little. She led a “very alternative” lifestyle, he said. He said he liked the mini dress she wore that had large lime green spots on it.

My mother made that dress for my grandfather’s funeral. Everyone else came dressed in black. My father would have loved this dress, she said. She was barefoot. Her black hair touched her bum.

She was angry that her father died so young. I am angry that my mother died so young too. At least she got to go to the funeral.

I have put in my order, with God, to live until I am ninety-seven.

 

2.

I work for the Chicago Chevra Kaddisha, washing elderly Jewish women who have died without relatives, getting them ready for their burial.

I think of this as my pact with God. I’ve got your back. Make sure You’ve got mine.

The time in the rooms with the dead is quiet time, without minutes. The clock never moves. In those rooms, the presence of the dead hangs like a swollen purple mid-summer cloud, ready to burst at any moment. I look up as I work, expecting to see raindrops coming down in huge wet splats on my face but instead there are those appalling industrial tiles, the kind with thousands of dusty holes that are said to absorb unwanted sounds.

The dead make sounds. They don’t mean to. But the processes of the body do not need a brain to tell them what to do.

Sometimes, when I work, I do not need a brain to tell me what to do either.

For a long time after my mother died, my brain lay down and went to sleep, even though I continued, on the outside, to look like an ordinary teacher or a librarian or an artist or a mother or whatever it was that I was being (not knowing) at that moment.

 

3.

The phone rang in the middle of the night. Never answer a phone that rings in the middle of the night. That sorrowful screaming on the other end of the line is not meant for human ears.

My brother was a teenager. He lived in a drug house at the edge of the city. His property had been repeatedly stolen from him. He forgot to pay whoever needed paying. The house was demolished soon afterwards, to make way for a highway, but at that time, at the time when he called me in the middle of the night to tell me that my mother was dead, the house wore a condemned notice, and the boys who lived there lifted a corner of the iron sheet that had been stapled over the back door and slipped inside.

I said NO. I said No and no and no no no, but it didn’t change anything, this disagreement of mine, because my mother didn’t stop being dead.

 

4.

The Chevra Kaddisha does not get paid for their work. The phone call comes in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning or just as you are about to give birth and an anonymous voice on the other end of the line asks you if you are available to help and if you are, if you aren’t pregnant or menstruating or divorced or generally otherwise occupied, the voice tells you where to go and what time to get there and then it hangs up and now you have a dead person to take care of, someone you have probably never known and definitely, now, will never know.

Two other women meet you outside, and you all look sheepish, because you are about to do this thing without words, and knowing that, it’s hard to say anything at all, even before.

You put on plastic coats and gloves and booties. You fill buckets with water. You find combs and orange sticks and make-up remover and rubbish bins.

You glance at her paperwork:

No known relatives

You glance at her arm:

Blue numbers

I don’t go to Australia when my mother dies. I sit on the floor and cry every day. I miss the funeral. My brain is asleep so I don’t care that no one writes to tell me what the funeral was like. It’s less than three weeks since I returned from Australia, I was told that my mother had at least six months to live, I have her ethical will in my pocket and it says that I should choose kindness over beauty, pain over deceit. Seven months after she dies, my brother will send me her diary and there will only be one entry in it, on July 16th. The year isn’t indicated.

In Katanning, the locals thought I had an affair. I was boarding in a home in the town while I did my student teaching. They thought I was screwing the husband. It wasn’t true, but you can’t convince small towns of anything.

Twenty years after my mother dies, my brother will casually tell me, as if I have always known, that the love of my mother’s life was a woman who had a home at the edge of the glittering Swan River. I will be sitting outside, in my car, on a moonless spring night and I will have just told my brother that I am seeing a woman who I think might end up being my wife. In the tender velvet darkness, I will remember going to the river with my mother, every Tuesday evening, and feeding the swans with stale bread while she went inside to talk with her friend.

I would like my mother’s love back. There has only ever been one person who knew all of me and loved me anyway.

 

6.

On May 5th, 2000, I give birth to my daughter, Chana. It is the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

It was hot in my bedroom as I was labouring. My husband was away in Spain. The midwife sat in the second rocking chair, saying nothing. Time didn’t pass. At one point, I said I was exhausted. I said I don’t want to do this anymore, and Kay, the midwife, said Excellent. Looks like we are having us a baby.

The phone rang and it wasn’t my husband. It was the Chevra Kaddisha, looking for a third woman, to help at a Tahara. I was engaged in my own struggle with death/life/breaking/opening. I said no, because I say no to almost anything that comes over the phone.

I wanted my mother to be there with me. I wanted her to meet her eight grandchildren and love them. I thought about her story of how I was born, on a Saturday afternoon near a football field, and how she had thought the cheering was for her efforts to push me out. I had not been home in ten years. I had never visited her grave. I was afraid of it.

 

7.

Once, it was not an old Jewish woman lying on the wooden boards, but a young girl, a child, with black and blue marks around her neck. The Chevra do not speak. We cannot. If we need something, we indicate it with our hands or our eyes. But that time, with that child, we spoke, because our eyes were full.

Sometimes people die holding things in their hands and their fingers close over whatever it is. We do not bury people with anything except their naked skin and simple linen shrouds. If they die with something in their hands, we warm up the flesh with a towel soaked in hot water, and then gently uncurl the fingers and remove the item.

My mother died with a photograph of me under her nightgown, clutched against her heart.  They took her down to the morgue, not knowing the photograph was there, but somehow, the photograph fell out of her hands and cracked on the floor. I wouldn’t have known this except my cousin, who was a medical salesman, went into the morgue at that hospital and saw my photograph, with a crack running across my face, on the wall. That’s Goldie, he said. What’s she doing here?

My daughter Chana was born with the cord around her neck twice and a true knot that threatened to strangle her. Her neck was black and purple before it faded to green and then to yellow. Pant, said the midwife, while I get the cord off her neck. No bloody way, I said. You’re not getting this train to stop.

 

8.

My Auntie Roz called me from Australia to wish me mazal tov on Chana’s birth. Oh and by the way, she said at the end of the conversation, you are going to have to come and pick up your mum. She’s been out in my shed with Rob, but I’m planning on moving. Don’t blame your brother, Roz said. Pete wasn’t up to burying her. I haven’t found a place for Rob yet either.

Uncle Rob died a few months after my mother, also of cancer.

Roz lived up on the Darling Range, outside Perth, in a house Rob built with his own two hands. Once, the bath he’d installed fell through the floor with Roz inside it. It fell down about twelve feet, landed on the rocky mountainside and skidded down to the waterfall at the bottom of their block. Roz was forty-eight when that happened. She was forty-nine when my mum and Rob both died. Her best friend, who was also my mum’s best friend, Bev, died the same year, a horrible year, also of cancer.

“What do you mean, my mum’s not buried?” I asked. I worked for the Chevra Kaddisha and one of the principals of Jewish burial is that we get people into the ground within about twenty-four hours of the death. At the time, my mum had not been buried for over ten years.

Your brother is a procrastinator, Roz said.

 

9.

I went to Australia then. The place my brother lives is considered to be the furthest place in the world from Chicago. It’s famous as the most isolated city in the world, and after I arrived, I was planning on driving out into the bush for another three hours, to bury my mum.

I put your mum under some roses, my Auntie said and though I pictured a beautiful garden with wisteria overhead, and the scent of lemons on the wind, mum was actually out in an old shed in a box underneath dozens of shattered roses that must have been there the entire ten years.  Uncle Rob was in the box on the trestle next to her. He’d have had a slightly more advantageous view of the loquat tree if he still had eyes.

I tried not to think that in that box was my mum, because, of course, my mother wasn’t really in that box.

 

10.

We start at the head. The woman is covered, always, with a clean sheet, and the Chevra lift only enough of the sheet to gently wash the body. The water is warm. The cloths are soft. The movements are slow and quiet. I wash the woman’s hair and comb it out. Each hair that becomes tangled in the comb is removed and put into a cloth bag. If there is blood on her body, we will remove it with a small piece of damp cotton fabric and this too will be placed into the bag and the bag will be put into the aron, the plain pine box that stands in one corner of the room, waiting.

A Tahara begins, though, with a wish. I wish that everything I do will be done with kindness and respect. When this thought leaves my mind, I stop whatever I am doing and refocus my intentions.

Her right side is washed first and then the left. Head, arm, hand, torso, leg, foot. Each small section of her body is dried with squares of cloth before being covered again. When I come to her hands, I hold them within my own, for a moment longer than necessary. This is the last time someone will hold these hands. When I lift the body for the purification, I become the last to hug this woman, the last person who will know the exact shape of her in this world. The dead are as light as birds. They almost lift themselves and fly up to the ceiling.

The last time I held my mother’s hands was in Perth airport, on Sunday, April 16th at 10:20 in the morning. I had been told it was safe to fly back to the United States, that my mother would live for another six months. She had pushed me to go spend the Passover holiday with my new husband and yet, even then, I knew. I was completely certain that I would never see my mother again.

Her hands were large. Her skin was soft, as soft as a warm summer night. The bones within her body felt like old roses and they were as fragile. I held her hands for many moments longer than necessary. I could not make myself let go. The flight attendant called my name again and again. My brother touched me on the shoulder and said You can come back.

My mother put a letter into my pocket. She told me it was her ethical will. She told me not to read it until the plane had passed Adelaide. Goodbye, she said. I love you, she said. I will always love you, she said.

 

11.

The midwife told me that if I ask my children what they remember from before they are born, sometimes, if asked young enough, they say extraordinary things.  I asked my son. He said he remembered a warm beach and a beating red sun. He was three. I asked my daughter and she said she remembered her twin kicking her. She was two and a half.  I asked Chana, when she was three years old, and she said I was your mother and you were my little girl and I used to take you down to see the boats.

Until that moment, I had forgotten that my mother used to take me to watch the ocean liners leaving Fremantle Harbour. They come back, she said, but I only ever saw them leave.

 

12.

My brother, Pete, met me at Auntie Roz’s house, to load Mum into the back of the car. You are angry at me, he said. No, I’m not, I said. I am sad. So very very sad that Mum has been here all this time and I didn’t know.

My brother picked loquats for us to eat while we waited for my uncle to bring the small piece of marble he’d carved for Mum’s grave. He held the fruits out to me in his big scarred hands. Nespole, I said to my brother, because I could think of nothing else to say. In Italy, these are called nespole and you can buy them in the open-air markets in the south. The juice, sour and flesh-coloured, ran down my chin and small droplets fell onto my shirt, saturating the fabric. I wiped my chin with my hand and then I wiped my hand on the back of my thigh. I did not have gloves. I did not have small squares of clean soft cloth for this process. I did not have my book of prayers. All I had was my intention to remember, the wish to do everything with kindness and with respect.

Mama. In Italy, the small children cry mama mama in the streets and women come out of their houses and kiss these children and lift them up and hold them. In Italy, when a death is announced, the newspapers have a thick black border, and in the rural cemeteries, fresh candles are placed on the graves and lit, every evening, and they burn through the night, illuminating the graveyards with the most mysterious and shifting of lights.

 

13.

When my mother died, I stopped calling her mum and began to call her mama.

Mama mama mama

 

14.

We fill three buckets with warm water. We pour the water in a single, continuous stream, from the head to the foot, first on the right, then on the left and then in the center. The woman on the wooden boards, briefly, looks as if she has just been born, fresh and wet and new, and then we dry her again and she returns to being a dead person. We dry from her head to her feet, from the right to the left. When she is fully covered, we lay out the tachrichim, the shrouds in which she will be dressed.

The dead wear the same garments as the High Priest. They wear the same fine linen pants and the same fine linen shirt and the same apron and the same hood. The best linen, when you touch it, is cold.

 

15.

Pete and I drive in silence on the way to the Wongan Hill Cemetery.  My brother’s car cannot be put into reverse or it blows a fuse that controls the air conditioning, the power windows, the radio, the lights and all of the engine gauges. When we stop for petrol in New Norcia, Pete forgets and reverses away from the pump. Fuck, he says, and he hits the steering wheel. I am so fucking sick of this bloody car. He pulls out the ruined fuse and tosses it onto the floor where there are at least a hundred other blown fuses, but then he can’t find a replacement. Well, that’s the air-con, he says. Carked it. Shame we can’t even roll the windows down, he says, though the bloody temperature has got to be in the nineties.

In the heat, the box in the back begins to emit an odour, and now we are both sure that we can hear something that sounds like chopsticks, the faint tap of bones, one against the other. Jes-us, Pete says and then he looks at me. Sorry, he says. It’s your fault, I say. Why didn’t you bury her?

In response, he stops the car, yanks open my door and breaks out my window with mum’s marble headstone. There you go, he says. Fresh air.

He’s not a violent man. He does all this quietly. Calmly. Respectfully. I really am sorry, he says. Mum hated getting hot, he says. I know, I say. In the back, the bones continue to click together and now, more than anything, it sounds as if someone is knitting back there. Neither of us wants to turn around.

 

16.

My mother said that human lives are divided into three sections. The first twenty years are the years of learning. The second twenty years are the years of family. And the third twenty years are the years of exploration.

She said that when she retired, she would get a ticket to China and she would walk, barefoot, from one end of the country to the other. For a woman who prepared for everything, it is strange that she did not have a Chinese phrase book in the bathroom, a map of the Great Wall above her bed.

Right before she was diagnosed with lung cancer, she sold her business and went to live in the far north of Western Australia with a man who had one eye. He mined for gold. She planted tropical palms and wrote letters to me, with drawings of parrots around the edges. When I called home, I had to first radio the Royal Flying Doctor in Port Hedland and ask for Nine Whiskey Echo Victor.

She didn’t get twenty years for exploration. She didn’t get twenty years to walk across China. She got less than a year of drawing parrots and planting palms. And then she got ten years in a shed at the bottom of a garden with my very shy uncle.

 

17.

When the tahara is finished, the chevra stand next to the coffin and they silently ask the dead woman for forgiveness.

I didn’t mean to forget you, we say. I didn’t mean to hurt you or shame you or be unkind.

Please forgive me.

 

18.

We take turns digging a hole in the hard red dirt for my mother’s box. We can’t dig deeper than three feet because below the red dirt there is hard red rock. There are no trees to shade us. Blood-coloured ants scuttle across the disturbed earth. A magpie sits on the top rail of the cemetery gate and says something that sounds like quardleoodlardloo. My uncle’s marble stone has been engraved with the wrong date, or maybe it’s the wrong name. Something is wrong about it, and we stand there and stare at the stone for a very long time before Pete jams it into the dirt. What a fuck up this has been, my brother says.

Typical bloody mum, he says. Terrorizing us in the car. She’d get a kick out of that, I say. Knitting the whole way up here, she was, he says. Another blanket, I say. For when the weather drops into the eighties. You reckon this grave thing will be orright, Pete asks. We’re screwed if she doesn’t like it, I say. Remember when she said she’d prove to us there was a world to come, remember? That’s all we need, an angry spirit chasing us down the track. Flinging bloody knitting needles after us.

Before she died, my mother said that if she could, she would prove to us that there is a world after this one. She said she was smarter than average, and she’d leave us a sign and Pete and I had both laughed. Yeah, we said. As if.

But then there was one morning soon after she died when it was raining, and I, in the United States, was walking next to the river, feeding the swans some bread, and talking about how my mother loved to walk next to the river and fish, and there was a bush covered in honeysuckle and that was my mother’s favourite flower, and then a cloud of hummingbirds flew out of the flowers. Oh, I said! Oh! My mother would be so happy to be here this morning. When I got home from the walk, Pete was calling me from Australia. I just had the most beautiful walk, he said. Next to the river, feeding the swans. It was raining, he said, and I talked about how mum loved to fish. And there was a bush, he said, covered in honeysuckle, and a cloud of hummingbirds flew out of the bush, and oh! Wouldn’t Mum have loved that?

We told that story standing at the edge of a fresh pile of dirt with a bit of marble stuck into the top. One edge of the box stuck up out of the ground and Pete mashed it down with his boot. He bent and patted the crushed box. Sorry Mum, he said. I’m so bloody sorry. Ten years, I said. Can you believe she’s been gone for ten years? She was a good mum, Pete said and we both started crying. And of course the wind picked up and pelted us with tiny sticks and bits of bark and tattered leaves from the years before, and then the wind dried our tears to salt tracks on our dusty faces. Yeah, I said. She really was.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Goldie Goldbloom is the author of two novels, THE PAPERBARK SHOE – a Best Novel of the Year (IndieFab) and winner of the AWP Novel Award – and GWEN (forthcoming), as well as two collections of short stories, YOU LOSE THESE (Fremantle Press) and THE GRIEF OF THE BODY (forthcoming). Her work has been selected for the Best Australian Short Stories, and has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Narrative. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and has taught at Northwestern University ever since being named the Simon Blattner Fellow. She is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, a Brown Foundation-Dora Maar House Fellowship, a Jerusalem Post Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, amongst other honours. Goldbloom is an international speaker of note, most recently as an honored guest at the Assises Internationales du Roman, in Lyon, France. She was a founding board member of an advocacy organization for at-risk LGBTQ minorities and is the writer of the oral history blog Frum Gay Girl.


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Catch Me, I’m Falling

Dionisia Morales

I found out I was pregnant during rock-climbing season. The weekend before the test showed positive, I was clinging to the stone faces that flank central Oregon’s Crooked River. That weekend, like most weekends in the late spring and early fall, my husband, Stefan, and I climbed in the high desert landscape, where outcrops of terracotta-colored tuff weather in the shadow of the Cascade Range. This is where we met and courted, where we—literally—held each others’ lives in our hands at the end of a rope.

Stefan and I had just started trying to get pregnant, so in a way the news didn’t come as a surprise, but the timing did. We knew from friends and books that it could take months or, in some cases, years to conceive and were unprepared when, after only a few weeks of trying, the pregnancy test signaled we were going to be parents much sooner than we’d anticipated. Had I known that that pregnancy test would mark the end of my climbing for almost two years, I might have paid closer attention to the last routes we scaled that weekend. I might have better appreciated the way a slim lip of stone can support your weight, the way your body is made longer by turning into the wall and reaching up on the diagonal. I might have taken more time to notice the rough scrape of the rock’s surface against my hands and paused longer at the top of each climb to admire the view of undulating spires. If I had I known that weekend that something timeless was taking shape in me, I might have taken greater care in observing the minute characteristics of the climbs—the pockets, rails, and shallow dishes, the edges I gripped and pushed off of, and the ones I skipped. But I thought I would have plenty of time to relish each route because I had planned on climbing to the end of the season.

Some women climb through their third trimester; they make special harnesses for pregnant climbers, ones that loop over the shoulders and under the belly instead of cinching around the waist. Because climbing demands keeping your hips close into the rock face and engaging the core muscles of the belly and the back, I imagine a swelling middle and spreading pelvis requires a pregnant climber to learn to work her hands and feet in new ways to compensate for an altered center of gravity. A pregnant climber needs to avoid falls that exert sudden force on the abdomen and take special care when belaying. But no special harness could have swayed me from what I felt was a primal, protective instinct: When the body is weighted with new life, it shouldn’t be drawn up off the ground. Deciphering what you can and can’t do on the rock is always an individual decision; it’s a negotiation of strength, tenacity, and risk. This triangulation of concerns is no different for a pregnant climber, who must also factor in possible harm to the baby. But as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I needed no time to calculate potential hazards or shop for a special harness. My choice was simple: I decided to alight, not ascend.

The weekend before my attention turned inflexibly to my belly, I rehearsed the moves on Vomit Launch, a beautiful climb with an unfortunate name that combines balance and finesse on the lower section, and tops out with a long series of strength moves to the final anchors. Each season, in addition to climbing a variety of routes on top rope, I selected a few challenging ones to lead. The difference between top roping and leading is the difference between hazarding a short, harmless sink into the rope and taking a long, mid-air drop that can result in hitting the ground. On top rope, the climber is part of a closed system in which the rope is threaded through anchors at the top of the route and the belayer takes up the slack to keep the climber on a tight line. But it takes a lead climber to get the rope to the anchors in the first place. When leading, a climber ascends the route with the rope trailing behind her, clipping into bolts for protection along the way. If she comes off the route while on lead, she’ll fall the distance to the nearest clipped bolt below and then past it that same distance. When a leader falls, she is dependent on her belayer’s immediate reaction to block the rope in his belay device and halt her mid-air descent. It happens at the speed of instinct.

The most challenging section of Vomit Launch—its crux—was a graceful balancing act of footholds. If I peeled off the rock at the crux, I would drop until the slack in the rope pulled tight between Stefan and me, and set our harnesses biting across our middles and around our thighs. In that breathless moment tumbling through the air, I would have a split second to calculate the distance between my fear of hitting the ground and my faith that Stefan would brake the rope and catch me. Then coming to an abrupt stop, panting and blinking, I would look up to measure how far I’d traveled, pausing only for a moment to consider the spectacle of dangling mid-air at the end of a rope. And then I would try the moves all over again. Because I had an acute fear of long falls, I first practiced moves on top rope to get them “dialed in” before trying the climb on lead.

In the back of every climber’s mind is the fear of a ground fall. I had seen many climbers come loose from routes and drop into the spring of the rope, but I had never seen anyone hit the deck. However, one day when Stefan and I were climbing in central Oregon, a Life Flight helicopter circled and landed to rescue a climber who had fallen thirty feet to the ground and lay in a broken pile. Remarkably, he regained consciousness and talked calmly to a small group of friends as they waited for the medics to come and carry him out. But all along he was bleeding into his belly and lungs, his organs shaken and split.

“I don’t understand it,” someone told us later in the parking lot. “He was awake. He seemed fine.”

But really he’d been slowly dying before everyone’s eyes.

“We got him to the helicopter and it seemed like everything was going to be fine.” He stared at the ground as he spoke, as if he were looking for something he’d lost.

Although I’d decided to temporarily give up climbing and stay grounded during my pregnancy, I kept active—biking and hiking—for the first twenty weeks. But sometime at the beginning of my second trimester, in a manner both painless and surreptitious, something started to go wrong. I would have stopped biking if I’d known there was a problem. I would have stopped hiking if I’d known the baby was in danger. And I certainly wouldn’t have flown alone across the country to visit my family for Thanksgiving if I’d known I was risking a miscarriage.

“They found something wrong,” Stefan said over the phone from three thousand miles away, the morning after I arrived at my parents’ Manhattan apartment. I took the call in the kitchen and leaned into the receiver, trying to bring his voice closer. I had had an ultrasound just a few hours before boarding my flight and went straight from the doctor’s office to the airport before receiving the test results. Because the ultrasound was part of a routine check-up and there had been no prior signs of problems, Stefan and I didn’t consider that the test might suggest a reason to cancel my trip. But while out for a walk the morning after I arrived, a volley of phone calls started—from the radiologist to the obstetrician, the obstetrician to my husband, and then finally, from my husband to me.

“But I feel fine,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “You can either stay there until the baby comes or come home.”

“I mean, I really feel fine.”

“I know,” he said. “But it could be dangerous for you to fly back. We have to decide.”

In those brittle moments of our phone call, I anchored my focus on Stefan’s voice. One of the most important elements in climbing is the communication between climber and belayer. When I told my parents I’d taken up climbing, my mother’s greatest worry was that the rope might snap. But rarely is equipment the cause of climbing accidents; most often it’s human error, and at the root of most of those errors is miscommunication between the climber and the belayer. In climbing it is important, although not always possible, for the belayer to see and hear the climber; visual cues and verbal commands help guide a safe ascent. When a climber reaches down to pull rope to clip a bolt or calls “Slack,” the belayer responds by letting out line. When a climber’s legs start to tremor, or when she says, “Watch me,” the belayer responds by bracing his body and narrowing his attention. But these are only the basics. Any two climbers who have logged long days together learn to read the subtle signs of stress and confidence without exchanging a word or glance. When I belay Stefan, I am sensitive to an almost imperceptible quiver in the rope. If I look up, I might see that his body is still, and yet there is a quaking in the line, as if his core muscles are vibrating. It is almost always a prelude to a fall. And when he sees me quietly, almost unconsciously, whispering to myself, he knows that I am starting to panic. “You’ve got this,” he’ll call up after me. “You’ve got this.” After so many years and so many routes, we know by the way we hesitate, shake out our arms, or charge up without resting, what is needed. This intimacy of signs and signals was on my mind as I tried to imagine being away from Stefan for the remaining twenty weeks of the pregnancy.

“I can’t do this here,” I said. The line went still as we listened to each other breathing. “I want to come home.”

We hung up so he could arrange a flight back for me on the following day. After I set down the phone, I curled up on the living room couch, holding my belly. I had only just begun to really show. My mother brought me a cup of tea and sat beside me. She stroked my hair and reassured me that everything was going to be all right, but her words rose in a swirl like the steam coming off my cup and faded into nothing. I didn’t tell her that I had decided to go home, because as far as she was concerned, I was home. Instead I told her that I thought it would be better for me to see my own doctor right away and not waste time trying to find a specialist in the city. Her first reaction was adamant: “You should be here, home with your family.” But when I repeated my decision to fly back to Oregon, this time with a quaking voice, she softened her tone: “I just want you to know that we can take care of you.” She kept stroking my hair but stopped lobbying her point. We sat quietly for a while, and then she helped me pack.

 

~

In the years after college, when I moved and settled in cities and moved again, home had always been my parents’ apartment. Even when my brothers and I flexed through relationships and marriages, my parents’ apartment was where holidays and birthdays were celebrated; it was where we played competitive Scrabble, watched weekend championship tennis, and sat around the kitchen table arguing. During the handful of years when my brothers and I had our own apartments in New York City and lived less than a mile apart, we rarely visited each other, instead running into one another a few times a week at my parents’ place. The two years that I lived six blocks from my parents, my mother visited me exactly once to bring me bread, salt, and matches—traditional symbols of bounty, light, and flavor. She arrived at my door two months after I had unpacked my last boxes because she hadn’t been able find the coarse, pink sea salt she liked. When I called to tell her to just get any salt and come over, she told me she’d think about it and that I should remind her the next time I came home. Home can be defined as place of residence, but its real meaning is far more personal and subjective. So in telling my mother why I was risking the flight back across the country, it didn’t seem the time to explain that her apartment, the place where I’d grown up and always returned to, no longer felt like home. Home was now three thousand miles away where I was building the promise of my own family and living a life very different from the one I’d grown up with.

My decision to move to Oregon had mystified my parents, who didn’t understand a seemingly sudden desire to reside in a small town with vistas of wide horizons. But they had either missed or chosen to ignore the fact that, over the course of many years, I’d moved to increasingly smaller locales with stronger connections to the outdoors. It was in one such place that I met Stefan, climbing for a weekend in Oregon’s sage-strewn high desert. I was a beginner climber when we met and spent most of my time belaying him on lead and climbing on top rope. I learned quickly that a good climbing partnership takes a dual sense of faith—faith that the climber will reach the anchors and faith that the belayer will catch any fall. It was a lesson we would learn over and over as we expanded the boundaries of our relationship and eventually married.

While I had no doubt that my parents and brothers would have done everything in their power to find the best doctors and make me comfortable through the second half of my pregnancy had I decided to stay in New York City, I worried that by being away from Stefan my state of mind might kink and unravel without warning. In the years when the apartment in New York City was the center of my universe, my parents and brothers had known me better than anyone in the world. But when I moved to Oregon, when my life began to rotate around new landscapes and new interests, I changed faster than my family was aware. My mother knew that I now liked to rock climb, but she could only imagine in the abstract a vision of me scaling stone towers. My husband, on the other hand, knew, based on how often I dipped my hand in my chalk bag, if I was nervous about making the next sequence of moves on a route. It was similar to how he knew by the way I would clasp and unclasp my hands that I had made a decision—about a project for work, a vacation itinerary, a new haircut—but still needed time to commit to it. He was privy to my quiet ways and quirks, which was why, with our first child on the way, I didn’t want to lose precious time explaining myself. When Stefan and I climbed together, he could sense when I was about to let my body tension slacken. “You’ve got this,” he’d shout, answering my unvoiced questions about whether I should give up and come down.

 

~

 

When I arrived back home in Oregon the following day, Stefan met me at the airport, and we drove straight to the hospital. The doctor explained in detail what Stefan had only been able to outline over the phone. My cervix was too weak to sustain the pregnancy; miscarriage was inevitable without surgery to stitch the cervix closed. The doctor described how my body could not contain the downward pressure of the baby and drew diagrams to illustrate the suturing technique he planned to use. I tried to focus on the details, but little penetrated the dull hum in my head. No matter what the doctor said, all I could hear was that I had failed, that my body had failed, and that because of these failures I’d almost lost the baby. I turned to Stefan for comfort and was alarmed by how frightened he looked.

Because we had discovered the problem so late, the surgery held a higher risk of pre-term delivery. And if the baby came early, it could be born with any of a number of lifelong physical or cognitive disabilities. There was a lot to consider.

“If you don’t wish to take the chance with the surgery, you could opt to abort the pregnancy,” the doctor said.

I must have looked dumbstruck because he quickly clarified his meaning.

“That is, because we are now aware of the problem, with another pregnancy we can deal with it earlier and better.”

I tried to remain absolutely still to prevent any small movement of my face or hands from being interpreted as a response. I held on to the sides of the chair.   

The doctor left Stefan and me alone to discuss our options. Stefan found my hand and took it in his. I couldn’t look at him because I knew I would see in his face what he thought we should do, and I worried we weren’t thinking the same thing. Finally I turned to him with tears and said, “It’s our baby, and we’ll try.”

“Yes, and we’ll try.”

In that rudimentary call and response, we decided to schedule the surgery immediately. I settled into the calm of the decision, not because I was sure everything was going to be all right, but because I knew that whatever came, I wouldn’t have to face it alone.

A Nigerian proverb says: “The world is a pregnant woman.” It means that the world, like a pregnancy, is full of unexpected events whose outcomes are unknown. Some babies are male, and others are female. Some are healthy, and others are sickly. Some labors are easy, others are difficult; sometimes the mother dies, sometimes the child. All the books tell you that things can go wrong in a pregnancy, but the language of caution always seems remote when you are in the bloom of expectancy. You convince yourself that those other women, the ones who have complications, are not like you. Your pregnancy is going to be textbook perfect. You’re going to have the innate strength to do what women have been doing for ages. But that kind of self-confidence has its roots in fear, not arrogance, because it is too terrifying to think that we might tumble from the grace of nature.

After asking a few logistical questions, Stefan and I signed the consent forms, and I was in surgery by the afternoon. In the operating room I was laid out on my back with my feet in stirrups. The table was set on an angle with my head down and all the pressure of the pregnancy pushing toward my diaphragm. It felt like I was suddenly carrying the baby in my throat. Stefan sat beside me dressed in a sterile gown and mask, and held my hand in his.

“Tell me a story,” I said.  

He looked flatly at me.

I knew that look. It was the same look he gave me when I would ask him if we could drive back to the house because I wasn’t sure if I’d shut off the oven. It was the look he gave me when he wanted to say no. I started to get a small headache from the incline of the operating table. I couldn’t see much of what was going on around me, but could make out what sounded like a scene of activity as the nurses and the doctor prepared for the surgery. Despite the bustle, Stefan kept his eyes fixed on me.

“Then tell me all the moves I have to make to lead Vomit Launch,” I said. “Tell me over and over until the surgery is done.”

I saw the small creases of his forehead lift, the way they do when he’s smiling.

“Lean into the bowl, off the deck,” he said slowly. “Take the side pull and scramble your feet up.”

“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes.

“Can you see it? The light stripe running along the good foothold?”

“I see it.”

“Now reach out high and right. Don’t forget to swap your feet.”

I remembered this early set of moves. The bowl was slightly overhung and I always wanted to move quickly to get on to the vertical face of the climb.

“Just a bit higher and you get a good rest.”

Before moving to Oregon, I never imagined I could be happy anywhere other than in the anonymity and chaotic press of a big city. But the volcanic grit and high desert sage captured my imagination the first time I ventured to the east side of the Cascade Range. With my eyes closed, the holds on Vomit Launch materialized one by one, and I rebuilt the landscape a body length at a time as I ascended the climb in my mind. I didn’t look down. My breathing slowed. My grip on Stefan’s hand softened.

I managed to stay focused until the sound of clinking metal broke my concentration. When I looked over my curtained knees, I saw the doctor reaching for an instrument; it pulled me loose from the image of the climb, and I landed rudely in the here and now, laid out on the operating table. Deep in the center of me needles were turning; a series of carefully placed knots and stitches were keeping the baby from falling from my grasp. I felt dizzy and sick. I was losing my grip. I wanted down off the table; I wanted to leave. The spinal block they’d given me made it impossible for me to move my lower torso and legs, but I started to shake my head from side to side, pinching my lips and crying.

“It’s going to be fine,” Stefan said, squeezing my shoulder to get my attention. “Don’t look around. Just watch me.”

When I turned to face him, I saw in his eyes a willed calm.

“Let’s keep going,” he said. “You’re almost past the bowl and then you come to the good holds and a rest before you get into the real business.”

He talked me through Vomit Launch’s sequence of moves a dozen times, adding more detail about the rock and the scenery with each ascent—the coarse sand of the high desert stone rubbed into our hands and knees, the intoxicating fragrance of juniper and sage radiating from the surrounding hills, the views looking down on the lazy wind of the river.

“It’s so beautiful up here,” he said.

When the surgery was done, the doctor came around to the side of the table to explain how everything had gone. He gestured casually to illustrate how he had pulled and stitched. His gloves were covered in blood, beaded in patches on the latex. My first thought was that the blood was my blood, and then it flashed through my mind that it might be the baby’s. I felt weak at the sight of his hands, red and working in the air. What if, after all of this, we still lost the baby? What if I carried him a few weeks longer and he was stillborn? Or what if he came so early that he was sick all his life? Or too sick to survive? A shaking fright came on. My throat pursed. Stefan, still with his hand on my shoulder, stood up to focus on what the doctor was saying. I took in the conversation in pieces: The surgery had gone well; the prognosis was good. But I couldn’t distill the details and struggled to steady my thoughts. I felt myself falling, unable to find anything to hang on to in the sterile, whitewashed operating room. So I shut my eyes again and pictured the sun-burnt stone in my hands, and imagined the caress of hot desert wind on my skin. I envisioned the climb, starting the sequence of Vomit Launch’s moves from the ground. I remembered that a good climber stands up more than pulls up, setting strong feet and pushing with the legs; a good climber keeps hips close into the wall, running fingers and palms along the rock surface in search of pockets, cracks, and edges. I was a good climber. I told myself to stay focused and took a deep balancing breath. Stay focused and don’t look down.

I gently rested my hand on Stefan’s hand but did not interrupt him as he continued to talk to the doctor. I needed him to find out everything he could now, while it was fresh in the doctor’s mind, because we would need those details later to reassure us that the surgery had gone as well as it possibly could have. I knew that the information he was gathering, the questions he was asking, would be important on the nights when I woke in a cold sweat, worried that every small cramp was a sign that the baby was in distress. I tried to remain absolutely still and prevent any small movement from being interpreted as panic. “You’ve got this,” I told myself over and over, working hard to believe it, “You’ve got this.”

 

Art by Matt Monk

Dionisia Morales is a native New Yorker who now calls the West home. She’s sold, packed, and moved her stuff more times than she can count and is familiar with what it means to be a newcomer. Lately, her sense of “being” is closely tied to “doing.” In New York, she is happy to hustle from one place to the next, j-walk, and people watch. But in Oregon, it’s all about climbing, biking, and snowboarding. As a result, she is finding that defining “home” is a wily task.

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Junk Food Killer

D A Thompson

The memory hits me like hunger: sudden pangs, gnawing edgewise. First it’s just a headline and the torn edge of a story. A nutrition professor. His gruesome murder. Fast food strewn all around the apartment. Junk food shoved down his throat. Food smeared on his body. The professor choking, asphyxiating, on junk food. Struggling to free himself of it, but drowning in it.

 

I’m visiting Gainesville, Florida, where I attended college thirty years earlier and where my mother now lives. On my way in, I drive by the Wendy’s that was on the outskirts of town in the early 1980s but is now just another bead on a string of fast food restaurants extending far beyond city limits. That’s when the smell of charred, grease-coated French fries fills my mouth and nose even though the car windows are closed, the scent-and-taste memory triggering not physical hunger but a more nebulous need to unwrap the Junk Food Professor story packed up in my unconscious.  

It was the start of fall semester, 1982, my sophomore year at the University of Florida. The Equal Rights amendment had just failed to be ratified, Ronald Reagan was eight months into his presidency, and Anita Bryant served orange juice flavored homophobia across Florida. At nineteen years old, I’d just moved into the honors dorm, and was about to struggle through organic chemistry, my major. I’d study the molecular structure of cholesterol and the process of hydrogenation that turned liquid oils into saturated fats along with partially saturated cis- and trans-fat by-products. On the personal front, I’d discover Pink Floyd and the Talking Heads as alternatives to Michael Jackson and Madonna, and I’d hear the first rumors about a new “gay cancer.” Later in the eighties, after I’d left, the “Gainesville Ripper” would rape and murder five female students matching my description—petite Caucasian brunettes—before being caught, and the University of Florida would be ranked a top party school by Playboy magazine. But in 1982, it was not rape, murder, drugs, or alcohol that posed the greatest threat to me. It was food.

~

1982 is as good a year as any to mark the time when food got truly scary, not only for me but for U.S. culture more generally. That year, the FDA published its first “red book” on the safety of color and other additives in food, signaling a new era in which food was now synthesized in an industrial chemical plant. “It was in the 1980s,” Michael Pollan has written, “that food began disappearing from the American supermarket,” to be replaced by processed edible “foodstuffs.” Known as “the decade of consumption,” the 1980s was the decade in which sugars in soft drinks were replaced by high fructose corn syrup and in which aspartame was first marketed, quickly colonizing diet soft drinks. Supermarket food was cheaper than ever, and junk food junkier, more processed, and sweeter and richer than anything nature on its own could provide. New packaging technologies and preservatives allowed fast, “one-hander” foods to migrate beyond supermarkets into drug stores, gas stations, and vending machines. The new microwaves could create instant meals around the clock. Convenience foods were suddenly everywhere. Foodstuffs became unnaturally ubiquitous and, as the ad went, “magically delicious.”

Food advertisements, too, proliferated, along with fad diets, Jazzercise franchises, and ever- skinnier models. The messages invaded. Have it your way. You deserve a break today. It’s finger lickin’ good.  Bet you can’t eat just one. Everything around me said “Eat!” Everything around me said “Don’t eat!”

~

My memory jolt about the Junk Food Professor’s murder recurs at a Gainesville Starbucks, where I’m rewarding my caffeine addiction amid students snacking before laptop screens. Coffee is my fast food now. Back when I was a student, there were no Starbucks cafes, no laptops or even computers. Instead, I dawdled in fast food restaurants, huddled over thick books while trying to make my salad last. Three decades later, dawdling over a venti dark roast, I take out my own iPhone and google. I quickly realize that I’ve misremembered the incident in significant ways.  

Howard Appledorf really was a professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Florida. That much I’d remembered correctly. The rest of the memory spent too long submerged in my unconscious, creating its own slant truths.

According to newspaper reports in the Gainesville Sun and elsewhere, Appledorf met at least one of his killers in June of 1982, when he attended a soft drink convention in San Francisco. Appledorf was known as an apologist for the fast food industry—hence his moniker “the Junk Food Professor”—and he allegedly received financial support for his work from the National Soft Drinks Association. More diplomatically, the Special Collections library of the University of Florida housing his papers says of him that, as “[a] national spokesman for the Institute of Food Technologists, he argued that ‘fast foods’ are of high nutritional value.” In professional papers as well as on national television talk shows, such as the John Davidson Show, Appledorf defended the nutritional value of franchise foods. He analyzed such meals as a fried chicken dinner and a burger-shake-and-fries, and found their nutritional value to be at least “adequate,” sometimes “pretty good.” He himself did not like the term “junk food”; he wrote in a 1980 paper entitled “Marketing Nutrition in Fast Food Operations” that fast foods suffer from “an image problem” and that it “is disturbing to see fast food referred to as ‘junk food,’ particularly in view of the wide variety of nutrients found in foods sold in fast food restaurants.”  That same paper condemns the “food activists” and “food purists” for their “politicalization of nutrition,” and implies that eating healthily is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility.

While overt about his controversial, much-maligned support of fast food, Appledorf was in the closet about his sexuality, and seems to have led a double life. In an era just before AIDS outed gay men on a mass scale, forcing a visibility to gay identity undreamed of before, it was far more disgraceful to be homosexual than to be a scientist-shill for the fast food industry. But out-of-town conventions seemed to offer Appledorf opportunities to explore his other life. On his San Francisco trip, Appledorf , who was then 41 or 42 years old, met Paul Bown, 21, on Polk Street, and the two went to Appledorf’s room in the Hilton. There they split a $75 bottle of champagne, and, according to Chery McCall of People magazine, Appledorf “reportedly contracted for sexual services for two nights for $200. Later, he bought clothes for Bown and gave him another $200 before returning to Florida.”

But what happened in San Francisco followed Appledorf back to Florida. In the third week of August, Paul Bown, along with his friends and fellow prostitutes Paul Everson, 19, and Shane Kennedy, 15, showed up at Appledorf’s condo in Gainesville. During their stay with him, Paul Everson stole a check from Appledorf’s checkbook and forged it for $900. Appledorf first wanted to press charges, but when Everson contacted a local television reporter and claimed that Appledorf had molested him in exchange for the money, Appledorf dropped the charges under the condition that the three men leave town.

~

That may well have been the same week that, on campus across town, I entered a bathroom in the Reitz student union building. It was the week before classes started:  rush week. Just as I slipped into a stall some sorority girls entered the bathroom. One was talking to another about purging. I’d heard about this new illness called bulimia in magazines, but didn’t know anyone who did it. “Everybody does it,” the sorority sister said.  

I knew about anorexia, of course, and had already dabbled in it. In high school, during the Bo Derek era, I’d eaten only boiled chicken and vegetables to keep myself under 100 pounds. Over the summers I’d restrict my caloric intake to 800 a day. But such severe energy restriction was hard to keep up in college. While fraternities posted signs saying “No Fat Cows,” I was, according to my hallmates, “porking out.” I could now feel my thighs brush against each other as I walked. I tried a fellow chemistry major’s diet of freeze-dried coffee and nothing else, but couldn’t handle the jitters on top of the hunger. Special K ads asked, “Can you pinch an inch?” For the first time, I could.  

“You just stick your finger down your throat,” the sister said. “It’s hard at first, but it gets easier the more you do it.”

~

On September 2nd, Appledorf left for New York to lecture on nutritional trends at the Good Housekeeping Institute. That’s when the three itinerant young men returned to his home, broke in the back door, and camped out. They pawned some of his gold rings, threw food and clothes around, ate his food and drank his alcohol in front of the television. Before his expected return on Tuesday, September 7th, they bought three Subway sandwiches.

~

Perhaps that was the same morning when, eating my breakfast of Special K in the student cafeteria, I looked up from my newspaper to see a girl from last year’s freshman dorm joining me. I remembered her as a party girl. “I should be eating like you, she said, “instead of this egg muffin. I’m getting so fat. I can’t stand it. Look at how many inches I can pinch. I swear. I wish I could make myself vomit. That would solve everything. But I just can’t do it. I try. I stick my fingers all the way down my throat, but I don’t have any gag reflex left.”  She spoke with such infectious longing, as if bulimia would make her life complete. She assumed I would understand. I did. She sighed and added, “Sometimes when I drink I can make myself vomit. So when I’m drunk I get to eat anything I want.”  

That monologue has remained with me so clearly all these years that what I’ve recreated above has got to be an extremely close approximation, if not verbatim. But even more than the words, I remember the longing, and its flip side of despair.

~

On September 7th, Appledorf returned home. Upon entering, he saw the three men and the state of his house. An argument ensued. At one point Appledorf tried to leave but was blocked. That’s when Paul Everson struck the professor’s head with a frying pan. Appledorf sank to the floor.

At least two of the three men bound Appledorf’s hands, feet, and knees with his own ties and belts. They gagged him, and then put a sheet over his head and a bag over the sheet. Everson bounced on Appledorf’s chest until “the air went out of him.” Bown continued to strike Appledorf’s head with the frying pan until the handle fell off. When one of them put a cigarette out on the exposed skin of the professor’s stomach, there was no response. That was when they realized they’d killed him. An autopsy would determine that Appledorf suffocated. He was not killed with junk food, as I’d remembered.

In dispute is the level of involvement of the young Shane Kennedy. Some reports have him either in the bedroom or outside through much of this, sick to his stomach and vomiting.

~

One day early that semester, around the time of Appledorf’s murder, I passed through the student union, hungry as usual, and the smell of French fries, saturated in grease and lava-hot, overtook me. I bought a carton from the cafeteria and ate. One after another, until they were all gone. Then I went to the bathroom, the same one where I’d heard the sorority sisters talking, and leaned over the toilet. I didn’t even decide, I just did it. It was easy. I didn’t even need to use a finger. Just tightening my abdominal muscles did the trick. And then I was ethereally empty.

After that, food beckoned, always. Everything forbidden was now possible. Food appeared everywhere. It was no longer connected to its natural role of nourishment and became a drug. The cravings went wild. A nutrition professor might have been able to tell me that with each purge, the blood sugar level drops precipitously while electrolytes—which help regulate heartbeat and neurological function—get way out of balance. Such nutritional crashes can mimic a drug addition.

Eternally hypoglycemic, I’d sit in class thinking about my next meal. I was either stuffed or starving. I couldn’t get off the Ferris wheel. In lecture hall one day, light-headed with hunger and hypoglycemia. I felt my fingers tingle, then curl into claws. I didn’t know how I’d manage the lock on my bike when I couldn’t move my hands. Was I too faint to walk home? Could I make it back to the dorm? Or would I have to stop at the vending machine and get those crackers with the synthetic cheese or peanut butter. But at 300+ calories, along with the neurological panic and elevated heart rate such a caloric jolt would instigate, I’d have to start the cycle all over again.  

And again and again. When the Appledorf murder happened, I was the one choking on the food shoved down my throat.

~

  After they realized Appledorf was dead, the three men staged the crime scene to look like a ritualistic murder. They arranged four plates in the room, three with the remains of their Subway sandwiches and one empty of food but bearing a note saying, “HOWARD, I wish you could join us.” Inspired by the movie Times Square, they wrote “HOWARD, we love you sincerely. The slez sisters” on the wall, and, inspired by The Shining, added “murder” and “redrum” in red ink. Everson scrawled an insane, unsigned confession on a steno pad. Then they fled north in Appledorf’s Pontiac Firebird.

Appledorf’s three killers were caught fairly quickly, thanks in part to the cooperation of New York’s gay community, and prosecuted for their crimes.  

~

In retrospect, Appledorf’s story, despite its role in my memory, is more about the era of the closet just before AIDS. I see it now as an illustration of the harm that the closet can do, and, relatedly, an uncanny preview of the rapid movement of the AIDS virus from San Francisco to New York with many stops in between. Food in this drama was merely a decoy, which the killers used to both reveal and conceal their real pathologies. In the next decade, psychologists studying eating disorders would similarly say that these pathologies, too, aren’t really about food per se; food is the correlate at hand, in this culture of abundance and consumption, through which to ineffectually express/displace harder-to-articulate problems. Cultural critics would argue that eating disorders express not simply individual anxieties but societal conflicts. They are a kind of “compromise formation” through which young women negotiate their culture’s impossibly mixed messages about gender and consumption.  

At any rate, my memory of Appledorf’s murder fell for the murderers’ decoy that the story was about food, when it was really about things like the closet, class, power, and complicated systemic problems I didn’t know how to recognize, much less analyze. My memory metamorphosed the Junk Food Professor’s story into my own.

~

If my deceptive psyche projected my own crisis onto the Junk Food Murder story as it unfolded, and allowed my own unconscious needs to shape its narrative, then it performed a well-recognized displacement. Sometimes memory works like a dream. I would learn in a literature class that semester that, according to Freud anyway, the psyche reveals by concealing, offering truths through myth and metaphor, containing unacceptable desires in those bright, diverting wrappers. Like so many dreams, my false memory—or nightmare—may be truer than the true version, at least for me.  

~

I was lucky. I got chest pains, and rushed to the clinic fearing a heart attack. The pains turned out to be only a chest wall muscle spasm—probably developed from the strain of vomiting—but when the doctor saw my potassium level results she read me the riot act and scared me straight. I immediately gained ten pounds and settled into a more conventional self-disgust.

Still, I’ve been fighting dual impulses—fear of fat and longing for calorie-rich processed food—ever since. Even now, here in this Starbucks, a middle-aged woman, I sit with my coffee, longing for and loathing the turkey panini, whose warm, greasy smell overtakes the scent of charred coffee beans. I’m as consumed by this savory sandwich I’ll never eat as by my return-of-the-repressed memories.  

I say I’m lucky because I could have died from my disorder. Up to 30% of bulimarexics do. Another third recover. The final third linger on, bound and gagged by unnatural appetites. It’s not merely the extreme eating disorders (like bulimia and anorexia) that make up the death tolls of our junk food era, though, but also diseases resulting from what even Howard Appledorf called “the malnutrition of affluence”: the increased Type II diabetes incidence, the heart and circulatory conditions, the cancers correlated with dietary and body fat, and other diet-and-lifestyle-related illnesses. It’s these low-level but widespread food and consumption disorders that ultimately kill us culture-wide.

~

So maybe the story is one of Junk Food Killers after all. Ever since 1982 the junk food industry has taken our collective national metabolism captive to the point where we’re choking on overconsumption. As a culture, we now need tracts like Michael Pollan’s bestseller Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual to re-teach us how to eat in the most basic of ways. “Eat food. Not too much.  Mostly plants,” is his most famous, overall guideline, but he also offers sixty-four additional common-sense guidelines, such as “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” Perhaps it was not 1984’s Big Brother but the food industry that loomed over us and invaded our most intimate spaces, inducing us to pinch our inches and discipline our bodies even as our collective food desires got more and more out of control. 1982, the year the Junk Food Professor was murdered, may well be the year we began to develop the national eating disorder we’ve been struggling with ever since.  

 

Art by Matt Monk

D A Thompson is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University where she helped to develop the new master’s degree in Creative NonFiction. She has published creative essays in venues such as The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction Passages North, and Briar Cliff.. Her piece “Mishti Kukur” which appeared in The Iowa Review, was awarded The Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a memoir and a novel.


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Nocturne in the Key of We

Laura S. Distelheim

Five o’clock a.m. on a morning last fall, in the Walgreens of an affluent suburb on Chicago’s North Shore, where I have gone to buy batteries for my flashlight on my way to the beach to watch the sun rise, and where the only other customer, a man in his early twenties with a thicket of curly blonde hair, approaches me. “Excuse me,” he says, his deep set brown eyes singing a song that should be accompanied by a twelve-string guitar. “Do you know of anywhere that I could maybe get a cup of coffee at this hour?” I direct him to the Dunkin’ Donuts over on the highway, and what I notice as soon as he leaves is that his loneliness remains behind, staining the too-bright air in the pharmacy’s aisles between the Advil and the Band-Aids and the Nyquil and the Crest like the afterburn left on a retina when a camera’s flashbulb has gone off.

Later, when I’m ankle deep in sand with my back against the lifeguard chair and Lake Michigan a tapestry of moonlight and mystery spread out before me, I find myself thinking about that moment and about that man, and about how, if I had looked out the store window just after he left, I would have seen his taillights etching their red scribbles across the darkness and then dwindling into the distance; and about how, if I had driven past the Dunkin’ Donuts soon after that, I would most likely have seen him sitting there, beyond the neon pink and orange OPEN 24 HOURS sign—on a stool at the counter, maybe, or in one of the beige vinyl booths—a solitary figure fossiled within the amber of the fluorescence and framed by the blackness of the night, while, outside the windows, the eighteen-wheelers would have whistled past, swallowing the highway up into the speedblur beneath their tires.

I know a woman who worked the overnight shift at that Dunkin’ Donuts for a time, who walked there every evening after night had set, and walked back home before morning had broken, to the room at the top of a splintered, sagging stairway, up above a bowling alley, where she lived with her five children, in a tiny town nearby that has become home to immigrant and migrant laborers. I asked her once if she was afraid of the darkness she had to walk through for what took her nearly half an hour, and of the highway she had to cross, and the shrug she offered me as an answer needed no translation. What choice did she have? it said. I think that, if she had had the words, she also would have said that she has so many fears, in so many shapes and sizes, that she keeps them all close to her and wears them in layers, like sweaters, knowing that any she peels off and leaves lying around will be snatched up by her children, who will wrap them around themselves and button them up to their chins.

“Do you know if my mom is working tonight?” her eight-year-old daughter asked me one Saturday morning when I was driving her to the library to get some information for a school project she was working on, and I told her that I was pretty sure she wasn’t, that I thought I’d heard her mention that she had this weekend off. “Good,” she said, turning to the window to watch the train tracks that bordered the road we were traveling on slip past, and I heard her release a sigh that made its way forward to hover beside me.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and she turned to face me, our eyes meeting midair. “When she’s out at the night?” she said, shrugging a shrug that echoed the one I’d seen her mother give. “My heart keeps jumping around inside me and counting the minutes until she’ll be back.” When she sighed again, though, it was with satisfaction. “Did I tell you? She’s teaching me how to make flan? Maybe she’ll teach me tonight again even. I love it when Mami stays home.” It was the third room they had lived in in as many months, one from which they would be forced by fire a few weeks later, but that’s what she called it: home.

That’s what that man in Walgreens could use, too, I find myself thinking on the beach that morning. Not a place to have a stranger pour him a cup of coffee, but a place to have someone he loves teach him how to make flan. Strangers with coffee pots are easier to find, of course, I know, envisioning all of them out there across the land. All those pink and orange OPEN 24 HOURS signs aglow all through the night—on the street corners of New York City, where the windows of the high rises are punching rows of yellow squares out of the darkness up above, and in coastal towns in Florida, where the parking lots in front of them are fogged with ocean mist, and in hamlets far out in the middle of the prairies of Wyoming and Montana, beneath stars that are clustering into bouquets that purple the dark.

I see them in smokestacked cities up north, and in the farming villages of the quilted midwest, and in southern towns that twitch with restless heat, and I see them out in Las Vegas, surrounded by zippers of sequined marquees that are working overtime to prove that loneliness lives elsewhere. All those pink and orange OPEN 24 HOURS signs and all those people sitting at all the booths and counters beyond them, waiting for the morning light to paint a new day onto the face of a world they wish felt more like home. And then I find myself envisioning all the people behind those counters, too, pouring coffee into Styrofoam cups and tucking doughnuts into white paper bags, all the time thinking of their sleeping children, who, in fact, aren’t sleeping at all, but are tossing and turning on top of their covers, waiting for the sound of the key in the door that will let them know they can breathe evenly again.

And I even find myself envisioning those truckers in the driver’s seats of all those eighteen-wheelers whizzing past, and wondering what images (of what lit windows in what waiting houses or apartments or trailers or rooms, on what streets in what neighborhoods in what towns in what states) they might have hung from their rearview mirrors or pasted up beside the moon beyond their windshields, like a night light plugged into the loneliness, to guide them through until dawn.

Standing there in the sand, with the first screes of the gulls and the first bass notes of the ducks just starting to intertwine with the shhshhing of the waves against the shore, I’m almost certain that I can hear the clacketing of those tires on all those highways, and even more certain that I can hear the litany of longing within it, the way the jazz composer Dave Brubeck once heard the embryo of a riff within the galloping of the hooves of the horse he was riding. Ba da dump, ba da dump, ba da dump, he heard, as he explained in an interview years later, and there it was, a syncopated symphony in 3/4 time, writing its blue notes across the lead sheet of his mind.

There would be more than enough time, I imagine, for a trucker motoring at 75 miles per hour in the general direction of whatever loading dock he’d been instructed to head to next to start giving thought to what it means to have a permanent place in this world. So that, somewhere along the way, out there in the vastness of a nameless, starless distance, as he’s being devoured by the dark and then rebirthed by each light post he passes, only to be devoured again as soon as he moves beyond the outer reaches of the range of its glow, and as he’s twirling his radio dial and diving into, say, KAGH’s pool of listeners in and around Cressett, Arkansas, and then shooting out its other side, toweling off its music and diving right on into KHMB’s pool of listeners in neighboring Hamburg, and as he’s slicing past lit billboards that shout out to him like preachers from the pulpits of their stilts in the grass along the highway, to REFRESH ON THE COCA-COLA SIDE OF LIFE and to MAKE AN APPOINTMENT FOR A HUNGERECTOMY WITH SNICKERS and to TAKE STOCK IN AMERICA WITH U.S. SAVINGS BONDS, and as he’s ghosting past or around or sometimes even straight on through sleeping towns that will never guess he’s been there when they wake in the morning, it’s possible that he might start working out the algorithms of the algebra of absence and the geometry of goneness in such a way that will leave him feeling homesick for a place he’s never been. A place, he might start to speculate, that could exist just past that not yet illuminated point where the land will meet the sky once day arrives, or even, who knows? just around the next bend in the highway.

Or maybe here, you might be thinking, in this suburb on Chicago’s North Shore where I’m now standing just beyond the glistening ruffle of the waves upon the sand, shawled in the sapphire dreamlight of almost-morning, but don’t be so sure. Because here, when I drove through the silent, charcoaled streets on my way to this beach, past houses with porch lights on and curtains drawn, I saw televisions and computer screens flickering in upstairs windows, and couldn’t help but think about all the separate stories being played out, side by side, within those houses’ walls, and about how you don’t have to be sitting at a counter beyond a pink and orange neon sign to know that longing is OPEN 24 HOURS, and so is fear.

So that, even right here, swaddled in the middle of a suburb in the middle of the country, several layers above the uppermost tier of the upper middle class, when you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, it wouldn’t take much for you, too, to start reciting the basic tenets of the algebra of absence to yourself: If x = what if the deal doesn’t go through? or what if the promotion isn’t offered? or what if the bid isn’t accepted, or the meeting comes to naught? and y = what if one of us gets sick, or one of the children gets into trouble, or the marriage doesn’t last, or all this luck just runs out? then wouldn’t x + y = you, tossing and turning on top of the covers, or bleary eyed at your computer, searching for iwantguarantees.com, or propped on the couch with the remote in your hand, flipping from a man in a green apron touting the virtues of the Veg-O-Matic, to a documentary on the mating habits of the Tanzanian wildebeest, to a rerun of Roseanne and back, waiting to breathe evenly again?

We’re all proficient in the algebra of absence and the geometry of goneness, I think. All aware of how hard we have to fight to find a place in the world, and then of how much harder to keep it from slipping away once we do. Remember that song sung by the eyes of the man who approached me in Walgreens? Forget about setting it to the accompaniment of a twelve-string guitar. It’s probably better to imagine it as a choral piece, with parts for all of us, instead. Soprano, alto, tenor, bass, it really doesn’t matter which we choose, as long as we’re all lending our voices to the mix; as long as we’re all harmonizing our hunger into a communal composition that, sung tutti, all together, as a drumming of desires, can’t help but thrum with solace when it echoes back to us.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Laura S. Distelheim received her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her essays have appeared in An Intricate Weave: Women Write on Girls and Girlhood, Whetstone, Chicago Tribune Magazine, DoubleTake, and Pleiades. GRACE NOTES, her collection of essays, received an award from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

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These Things Should Not Happen

Michelle Webster-Hein

We took a walk this evening as we often do. My husband pushed my daughter in her stroller as I walked alongside. There are things I notice each time we pass them—the morning glories a block down that wind their cursive tendrils round the fence posts, the fat yellow cat who glowers after us from the makeshift throne of her lawn chair, the Cape Cod nearly hidden beneath the weeping of a funeral party of willows. In one yard a thicket of blackberries. In another a bed of cherry tomatoes. Standing sentry at the park the orange-leaved tree that warns us of the coming cold.

 

Yesterday on my kitchen radio I heard about a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo whose child was cut from her arms with a machete. I should say I saw one woman and child in my mind, but there were actually hundreds. Hundreds of women and children hacked to death by machetes. Other children in the vicinity were tossed down wells. I can’t remember why. Afterward I squeezed my daughter so hard and long against my chest that she began to cry. I didn’t think it should frighten her to be loved so.

 

When I was twelve, my friend’s father Chet was crushed to death by a semi while he raked tar on the side of the highway. I knew him from church services and church picnics, from volleyball games and sleepovers I shared with Emily, his 12-year-old daughter. His son Jordan and I had begun a secret romance a couple of months before Chet died—the sort where you slip each other notes, speak infrequently on the phone late at night, and glance at one another across the pews when you think no one’s looking. I suspect Chet knew of our longing; I imagine it amused him, brought him joy.  

 

Sometimes I take my daughter to the library, other times to the park. We sit on a blanket in the grass, and I blow bubbles. They mystify her. She stretches her whole body after them. When they pop, she studies the empty air with a furrowed brow as if to say, these things should not happen.

 

I attend a talk at the university. A man from the Democratic Republic of Congo describes how in his country rape is used as a weapon of war. After the militants break the women, he says, their husbands cannot forget their powerlessness. In this way, the people’s spirits wither and die. Then it is easy to sweep the broken families from the rich land like so many empty husks.

 

A woman in my hometown dresses her goose. It is plastic, white with a yellow beak, about three feet high. It stands at neck-stretched attention on the front porch next to a line of boxy yews. I pass the goose on the way to and from my parents’ house, and each time it sports a new look – always seasonally inspired. A Santa costume. A raincoat with matching bonnet.  A pinafore of hearts. A sundress. Striped Uncle Sam suspenders and a top hat. The dour black cloak of the sober pilgrim.  

 

Back when I was eight years old and the center of everything, I suspected that the world was designed for the express purpose of testing me. Everyone was in on it, even my mother. The stories that were too dreadful to be true – stories of kidnappings and murders and war – were actually untrue. My only responsibility was to react with appropriate horror and disbelief so that onlookers would admire my empathic spirit. Also, so that they would not know that I knew they were lying.

 

This morning I smooth down my daughter’s curls and find a lump, hard and inescapable, the size of a chickpea beneath her ear. I’ve noticed it before, but it was smaller and soft—the doctor told me not to worry unless it changed. So I call the office and request to speak to a nurse, who tells me it may well be nothing but suggests I bring her in to make certain. The appointment is in two days. Tonight I will forget to eat dinner. Somewhere out there a woman is dressing her goose.            

 

Most would have thought Chet rough at first glance – he was bearded, spoke in a gruff voice and wore a working man’s flannels. But with me he was as gentle as a baby. And he noticed things. He noticed when I had something to say even though as shy as I was, I wasn’t likely to say anything. He noticed when I didn’t feel well or when life was weighing heavy on my mind. It wasn’t that I ever made a fuss. I sat where I was told to sit and did what I was told to do, but Chet could tell. I know because of how he looked at me, his large brown eyes the eyes of a vigilant deer, and because of how he mixed humor with hope. Sometimes I accompanied the congregational hymns on piano, and after service in the church lawn he’d softly box my shoulder. “You keep playing piano like that, you won’t even make it to junior high. They’ll just pull up in a limo and whisk you straight off to New York City.” He looked and saw and understood all at once. He remembered how the world can deluge the young, how it can surge the shore and suck them under. So Chet built his own floating harbor, his stack of sandbags. I wanted to marry Jordan in part because I cared for Jordan but in part because then Chet would be my father, too.

 

In the DRC, combatants pitch a 15-year-old girl into a pit and rape her daily for three months. Her friend, also in the pit, dies 6 weeks in, about the time the 15-year-old girl realizes she is pregnant. She spends the next six weeks watching her friend rot. Inside her girl’s body, life anchors its obstinate root.

 

Chet died August 5th, 1993, at approximately 11:00 a.m. After his death I asked my mother for the precise time and wrote her answer in my diary, then looked up the word approximately and wrote that down as well: “Near or approaching a certain state, condition or goal.” It’s 11:00 and Chet is approaching the state of death, is oblivious to its swift pursuit as he scrapes the tar rocks over the asphalt seam just ahead of the roller with its hot black wheel and engine whine that drowns out those horrific seconds when the other men leap into ditches and shout one another’s names. It’s 11:00 and the sun shifts imperceptibly, the clocks align and a trucker spills hot coffee on his crotch or fiddles too long with the CB or simply succumbs to the hypnotic white line he’s traced since Atlanta, since midnight or Sunday or was it maybe even July he wonders and is still wondering in that warmly blissful near-sleep of eyes rolled back, lids lightly closed when a horn bleats, the ground beneath his wheels crunches and dips and a deafening wrench of metal jerks him awake.

 

At the university, the Congolese man says, “If we tell people what is happening to the women, they will stop listening. They cannot bring themselves to listen.”  

 

If my calculations are correct, the woman has been dressing her goose for nearly twenty years. It gawks on. The other day it boasted a black jumpsuit with golden studs. A large, glossy pompadour was fastened atop its small head.

 

August 5th, 1993. Soon after 11:00 our phone rings with a cheerful chirrup. My mother answers, hangs up, climbs the stairs, news of death in her throat. I blink for a minute, shake my head, walk past her, jog down the stairs, sprint out the side door past my father, who is locking the carcass of a turkey in the smoker, the scent of which will haunt me for the rest of my life but especially on that day as I run, as I ride my bike, as I climb the maple, as I try to read, play piano, watch TV – one thing after another after another until I find, at long last, that it’s approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, and I am approaching the state of grief, have exhausted all possible distractions when it rams me, annihilative as a semi, and I lie down on my bedroom floor and weep.    

Later that afternoon, we bring the family a platter of smoked turkey muffled in Saran wrap. Emily and I lie across her bed. That morning, she tells me, her father woke her up to kiss her goodbye – not a typical gesture. He knew, she says. He should have stayed home. Jordan sits in the living room and stares calmly at the wall. I say hi, and he sends me a puzzled smile. When his mother told him the news, he closed himself in the garage and beat the wall with his fists. He has washed them, but they still trickle blood. The bruises across his swollen knuckles are already beginning to purple.

 

Now twenty years later when I visit my parents, I drive past Chet’s cross where it stands nestled in the long grasses on the side of the highway. Several minutes later I pass the goose. I scan the roadside intently lest either of these objects slip past unnoticed. First, the white wooden cross with its sash of faded pink satin roses and his name, Chet Weller, nailed across its arms in black capitals. Second, the goose trussed up in its new ensemble – inscrutable, undying, attended. Why I must acknowledge them I don’t quite understand except that to be acknowledged is their purpose – to remind me that good people die randomly and young, yet there are other threads woven throughout the tapestry of life. For example, there is the comic, the slightly zany. There is the ubiquity of the ridiculous.

 

I scrutinize my daughter for signs of distress. Is she unusually tired? Is her appetite diminishing? Has she forgotten anything she once knew? Each of her actions is an occasion for observation, each storybook an exam. Beneath the high-pitched sing-song of my voice runs a current of urgency. Where’s the kitty? Can you point to the kitty? What does the kitty say?

 

Once when I was eleven years old and drifting off to sleep, I was struck by the certainty that my life would end that night. I was not sick or suicidal, just perfectly sure that I would not wake the next morning. I cried at the thought of my bereft mother and father, my brother and sister, my friends. I cried as I imagined my funeral. I cried that I would never again play piano or read a book. After tiptoeing into my parents’ room and trying without success to convince my mother of my imminent death, I returned to bed and cried myself to sleep. But then the unimaginable happened. I woke up the next day in perfect health, dressed, ate breakfast and caught the bus to school. At least, one version of myself did. In someone else’s universe, however – in someone’s universe who could bear the pain – I was convinced I had died. The school principal’s universe, perhaps, or the universe of a second cousin I had played with a handful of times. In this way, I thought, death would always be distant. Death would renew my appreciation for life, my gratitude for life, but it would not come close enough to crush me.  

 

I envy the woman who dresses the goose. The act betrays something that often escapes me. Frivolity, I think. Aimless enjoyment. Pleasure in the mundane.  

 

For a couple of years in my mid-twenties I worked with SXI (severely multiply impaired) kids from ages three to nine. One evening near the end of that era I found myself chasing a double dose of Vicodin with a six-pack of beer. A student I loved, Cece, a mere nine years old, had been slowly dying all year – since I had met her – though in truth they’d forecasted an early death from the day she was born. She had lost her ability to walk, then to stand, then to use her hands. Her seizures became longer and more frequent. She was fine-boned and thin with snappy brown eyes and freckles and a glossy black page-boy haircut. She was goofy and sweet. She loved to play little tricks on her classmates and ride therapy horses and visit her friends in other classrooms. Her coffin was small and white. I wore a skirt she would have loved. I never met her brother, who had died a few years earlier of the same disease. After the funeral, her parents wrote me a thank you letter. With it they enclosed a picture of Cece standing outside. Her eyes glow brightly, as if her head is full of sunlight. I cannot bear to look at the picture for very long. Her eyes shame me for reasons I can’t quite grasp. I was a little afraid of her; she was so delicate and so brave. She understood something crucial, something that she could not tell me, something that I do not, cannot know.

 

After the talk at the university, I approach the Congolese man and ask him what can be done to help. He directs me to a booth at the back of the room. I scrawl my signature on a petition for the U.S. government to suspend all non-humanitarian aid to Rwanda, whose government is arming and funding the rebels currently ravaging the DRC. I pick up a few fliers about activist groups and a fundraising hike.  

 

My daughter’s appointment is tomorrow. Today I sit her down so that I can chop vegetables for dinner, and she clings to my knees and screams. Eventually I give up and sit with her on the floor, build block towers that she, with the vehemence of a spiteful god, knocks over again and again and again.  

 

After Cece had left school to die, I visited her at her home. Her mother let me hold her like I used to do in class when she wasn’t feeling well. This time she felt smaller, emptier inside. Her skin had turned a pale grayish green, and her face had swelled, lips and cheeks and eyelids thick with fluid. She shook violently. But she seemed to remember me. She couldn’t use sign language anymore, but I think she remembered me. Her body still leaned against mine with its queer, familiar heft. When I handed her back to her mother and said my goodbyes, Cece fixed me with the same intent stare, urgent now, desperate to communicate something her failing body could not.    

 

Sometimes the goose is an opportunity to roll my eyes and wonder. Has the goose’s growing wardrobe demanded an entire closet? Does the woman organize the outfits according to season? Color? Holiday? And does she sew them herself, or does she order from a store? Could there be entire catalogues of goose costumes? Could there be a human being whose job it is to dream up new outfits for plastic poultry? To account for their short legs, their long necks, their substantial middle girth? To use these unique measurements to an advantage?       

 

Weeks later, I find the Congo fliers in the back of my car. They’re wet and the ink has smeared. I slip them into the recycling discreetly, as though I am being watched.  

 

I bought the six-pack on the way home from Cece’s. The bottles had barely begun to sweat when I popped the first cap and poured the dark bitter beer toward the two white pills already leaching comfort at the back of my throat. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, shoes on my feet, purse strap over my shoulder, sweater smelling faintly of her home, her soap, her souring skin. I tilted my head back and drank and drank.  

 

Though I’ve thrown out the fliers, the lecture continues to haunt me, so I find the Congo Activists of Michigan online. I register for their hike, sign up for their updates. I send out impassioned e-mails, raise three hundred dollars, walk five miles. I collect my friends’ used cell phones and computer parts and donate them to an organization that helps youth in the DRC set up social networking cells. I attend Congo Week at the university student center where I help catch people as they are passing and ask them to sign a letter to the Secretary of State. Send a postcard for peace in the Congo? Some say yes. Most say no, thank you, or they tell me that they are in a hurry. One girl pauses reluctantly. She is weary but willing. “What exactly do I have to do?” she asks.  

Two or three have heard of the crisis. They thank us for our work. The rest we give yellow half-slips of paper with a short summary of the conflict and a link to a documentary. When I leave the student center, I find one of the yellow sheets. The wind has blown it against the post of a bridge. It sticks there for a moment before slipping off and floating down into the dry bed of what used to be a stream.

 

Doctor Marla tweaks my daughter’s tiny nose before tiptoeing her fingers back beneath my daughter’s ear. I swallow hard, study the floor, think how this might be the moment I will recount years later, the moment when everything changed.  

 

Since 1994 the deaths from the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo are estimated at a little over six million. Such numbers are difficult to comprehend. Think Holocaust.  Think Rwandan genocide times seven. Think two Chicagos, think two Arkansas. Or if that doesn’t work, think a driveway of stones, think a field of wheat with its waves of ripe, golden heads. Or think of Chet and his children. Think of the woman who dresses the goose, of Cece, of my daughter. And then think of yourself and how precious you are. Think of your lover and your parents and your siblings and your children and the women you have loved and hated, and the men, and your teachers, and your coworkers, and all the men and women you have seen standing behind cash registers, and all of the people you have passed in cars, and everyone you have passed on the sidewalk; think of the children who have made you smile, and the children who have made you laugh, and the children who have cried when you were flying in a plane or shopping for groceries or just trying to read a book in a coffee shop, and the children who ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk in front of your home, and the children who you see riding up and down other sidewalks, and the children you have seen at the beach in summer running into the sea, and the children you have seen in the winter sledding down hills. I stress the children because mortality studies on the DRC conflicts report that three million who have died have been children, young children, children not even strong enough to lug minerals out of mines or to shoulder guns – children under the age of five. One Chicago of dead children under the age of five.    

 

I have seen the goose woman once or twice puttering about her yard. She looks as I expected her to look – short and solidly built with a stiff, gray hairdo. I have seen her watering her peonies in the mid-morning, sweeping leaves into tidy rows in the afternoon, but I have not seen her dressing her goose. I think perhaps it is part of her daily routine. She wakes, say, at seven o’clock. Dabs morning cream under her eyes, fishes her partials out of the water glass. Then she remembers the goose, and her heart quickens a little, reminds her of when her children would wake from naps and cry to her from across the house. Their voices were always so sudden and ardent that wherever she sat immersed in laundry or paperwork she would gasp a little and run to the nursery and stand a moment at the door with her hand on the handle, basking in that voice that called for only her. No, the goose is not the same, but as ludicrous as it is she still feels like she is taking care of someone – not the goose but maybe Mr. Henry, the neighbor five houses down, who always passes by dutifully at 8:30, behind his golden retriever. Or maybe her widowed Aunt Edith who visits when her rheumatism permits. Or maybe even someone she has not met, a young girl, a woman who drives past and cranes her neck for a brief glimpse of the goose’s new ensemble. A woman who thinks often on sad things. A woman for whom the goose, though she may not know it, is a relief.

 

Cece’s gaze still haunts me. I fear she was saying, “This never should have happened.” Or maybe, “Don’t forget me,” or, “Where is your anger?” or, “Don’t despair. When you die, I’ll find you, and we’ll talk.” Worst-case scenario: she was trying to tell me just how much she hurt, just how much she was afraid.  

 

Before I left my work with the handicapped children, I took pictures. Pictures of Julio dancing as he hummed the tune to “Twinkle Twinkle,” his right hand raised in its constant salute. Pictures of Janelle shooting me her trademark sideways smirk. Pictures of Harry carrying his lunch tray, a skill we had mastered over several months. Pictures of Micah lumbering to the office, the attendance sheet clenched in his determined grasp. Pictures of Meredith turning toward my voice with her sunniest smile.

 

“That’s a swollen lymph node,” Doctor Marla says. “We see them all the time, especially at this age. I hope they didn’t bring you in just for this.”

 

In the DRC, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs women’s fistulas after rape or childhood pregnancy has torn their bodies apart. One evening, rebels invade his home. He ducks the gunfire, but his security guard is shot and killed. For the safety of his young family, he flees to Belgium. But he is haunted. Who will sew the women up now? Who will stitch their delicate organs back together? Certainly not me with my fundraising hikes, my postcards, my meager collection of outdated cell phones. Certainly not me, who scans articles from the safety of my home while my daughter naps on her soft mattress or patters from room to room, raising a toy in her fist like a dictator claiming a country. A few weeks later, Dr. Mukwege returns to his hospital in Bukavu. Further north, militants once more take the town of Goma. Refugees flee. One man, an article tells me, sprints from the city gripping a Thermos. He carries nothing else. In another article there is a picture of a father pushing his two children from town on a bicycle. Beneath their two thin frames, sacks bulge over the crossbars. The mother follows behind, bent forward under the bags on her back. She has hooked them over her head that she might use the strength of her neck, which bows forward so heavily she has no choice but to stare at the ground.

 

I showed a friend the pictures of the handicapped children, wanted to share their dear faces with someone I loved. I had only clicked through two or three shots when she stood up from the couch.  

“You hungry? I’m hungry,” she said, directing her gaze out the window.  

I tried another friend. The same thing happened – the silence, the shifting, the change of subject. Before meeting them, I would likely have done the same, would have been struck mute and sorrowful at the sight of their crooked faces, twisted limbs. I would have seen Julio’s thick eyebrows and missing fingers, Janelle’s wayward eyes, Harry’s milky stare, Micah’s giant helmet, Meredith’s wheelchair straps biting against her torso. I too would have been keenly aware of the tragedy and oblivious to the triumph it underscored – that life had carried on, despite its imperfections, and gifted the world these wonders, too.  

 

For a short time after the doctor’s news, relief dizzies me, makes me giddy. I whistle as I tug my daughter’s arms into her sweater. I skip out to the car as she bounces along on my hip. But the relief quickly fades. Yes, we have escaped death’s specter, but it will undoubtedly return. If this is some trifling exception, it is also a harbinger of the loss to come. One of us will bend over the other’s body after she has died, one of us will mourn and mourn and find little comfort.  

 

In the fall there are the orange and red warnings of cold. Chet’s and Cece’s bodies rot into velvet pillows under six feet of dirt. In the winter there are red berries capped with snow, cedar boughs that smoke green in the fire. Julio sings his favorite song. My daughter laughs whenever the cat walks into the room. In the spring there are days so suddenly warm and happy you feel like you are ten years old. A sixteen-year-old mother dreams of pits and screaming. In the summer I believe the green will never end; it is always a surprise when it does. A father pushes his whole life on a bicycle. A woman wakes up each morning and dresses a goose, smoothes a jogging suit over a white plastic back, slips on the matching headband thoughtfully outfitted with a nylon strap that promises to hold fast no matter the wind or the rain.   

 

Art by Matt Monk

Michelle Webster-Hein is an essayist and fiction writer from Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she finds herself moved by a multitude of common and not-so-common subjects. Her current projects include OUT OF ESAU, a novel set in a rural Michigan village, THE LOAD YOU CANNOT CARRYa memoir of a global child psychiatrist, a children’s novel for my precocious daughter, and a series of meditations.

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Bloodsport

Liz Blood

Richard, a Filipino tricycle motorbike driver, agreed yesterday to drive us from Alona Beach, where we are staying, to the Sunday afternoon cockfight just outside of Panglao. He’s a quiet man, but patient with my gaggle of questions. I take to him right off the bat. Are there snakes here? Have you lived here always? There are and he has. Are you Catholic? Do you have children? He is and does. Do they like the beach? Who taught them to swim? They do and he did.

Richard is youthful, but not young. When he smiles, wrinkles form tributaries at the corners of his eyes, betraying his boyish brown face. Like the tires on his bike his hair is inky black except for the salt and pepper gray beginning to overtake his eyebrows. Richard doesn’t drink and declines my offer of a beer when I return from the convenience store, though back on the road he points out the Tanduay rum posters we keep passing.

“You like to drink? It’s very good,” he tells me.

I imagine a younger, childless Richard, hanging with the boys, barefoot in the street, passing a soccer ball—and maybe a bottle—back and forth as daylight wanes and the salty breeze picks up. Though my friends and I offer to pay his way, Richard refuses to join us at the fight.

“I don’t like the fighting,” he says as he lays back on his bike, positioning his head in the shade. A ball of guilt like a thought I’ve bagged, weighed down, tied, and sunk to the bottom of my gut drops in my stomach. The beer doesn’t chase it away, but I move on. The four of us—three boys and I—agreed before we came to the Philippines that we wanted to see a cockfight. Our reasons were varied, but mostly boiled down to the fact that cockfighting is a little like forbidden fruit. Cockfighting was outlawed in my home state when I was fifteen years old. We indulged a thirst for adventure, something we could excuse by being in another culture. So off we go for hours while gentle Richard snoozes in the shade, feet on the handlebars, a bony arm hooked over his eyes.

The Panglao Cockpit Arena is set back from the road, obscured from view by hundreds of motorbikes and a mess of shrubbery and trees. If it weren’t for the signage noting its location, passersby would have little idea what goes on there past the rickety wooden fence and through the homemade turnstile. After paying a nominal admission fee, visitors—mostly locals—move through the gate and into a courtyard lined on both sides with wooden stalls. Everything here is built of wood stained with years of rain, blood, and dirt and smells damp, with a hint of mildew. In the stalls where women sell coconut juice, fried breads, beer, Cokes and single cigarettes, the wood is worn, a dingy dark grey.

Crowing cocks call out from opposite corners of the arena, each cry hails louder than the grunts and bawls of men. The winged creatures are everywhere, every which way—tied to posts, wandering the grounds, blocking the path to the bathroom, in between legs, in men’s arms. Not one cock is caged. Here, the earth is moist. Dirt, dark and damp and soft, sparsely covered by splotches of grass and scattered drops of blood. Filipino men and boys carry the gamefowl like women carry toy-sized dogs—the birds’ ribcage resting on the forearm, the hand cradling the breast. And like women with small dogs, these men talk to their pets, stroke them, pamper them, clutch them like a beaked purse. These cocks, bred to fight, are more like the pit bulls of U.S. animal fighting lore. Affectionate and loving even to their masters, these pets turn carnal in a second, revealing a ferocity and a hidden strength. Men examine each others’ fighters with eyes made larger and brighter and more intense by the burnt sienna brown of their skin and the golden, purple-black, deep red feathers of the cocks.

At the back of the courtyard sits a vaulted open-air barn. Palm tree trunks serve as pillars to a rusting, corrugated metal roof. Visible through the slats of wood, men stand shoulder-to-shoulder on bleachers, waving their arms placing bets, flicking their hands back and forth, exclaiming words and numbers rapid-fire, as indecipherable as the cocks’ crows. One makes his or, in my rare case, her way into this roofed structure through a small doorway on the courtyard end or by climbing over a railing at the back. Sunlight seeks whatever gaps it finds and falls onto the raised dirt floor of the cockpit. Sweat glistens on the men in the ring; light turns their grey hair silver and black hair hematite. Rays of light and spokes of darkness alternate like keys on a piano; jagged lines of faces are illuminated throughout the arena. I push through the crowd of shouting, smoking men to find a place to stand, elbow-to-elbow, front to back, knee to knee. A slight breeze chills the beads of sweat on my neck. I raise my head, still working my way through the congregation, and come to a bit of a clearing. The arena floor comes into clear view. In this instant, the shouts of men and cries of roosters swirl together with perfume of tobacco and blood, rum and sweat. The afternoon air seethes with sharp impressions of life and death, of an urgency made more immediate by startling each sense.

A fight is about to begin and I am bewitched. Forget that I’ve lost my friends, forget my sunburned skin and the sweat trickling down my back, forget Richard on his bike, my family across the world—there is nothing else at this moment but the vibrating surges of excitement lighting up this small patch of dirt in Panglao.

The handlers each grip their respective fighters by the hackles while the referee also secures them. Because the cocks wear a gaff—a razor shaped like the blade of a scythe—attached to the back of one ankle the handlers are careful to hold them at arms’ length. The referee says something indistinguishable and the handlers shove the birds towards one another headfirst, close enough that a strike could peck the opponent’s eye out. Their wings—so richly colored they might be paint—flutter and the crowd’s collective voice dies down to a hush, enough to hear the whoosh whoooosh of feathers. A crow erupts like a battle cry if I’ve ever heard one, as if the bird has picked up a bugle to sound its aggression. The handlers drop them to the floor and they rage. Puffs of dirt are kicked up as the birds flip over one another. Light glints off of the gaff—glittery and tragically beautiful. Their wings slash and I hope one might get away but then remember cocks don’t fly. Instead, those wings swoop and slice through the air and dust, boomerangs sailing through the leafy crown of a tree. The sight is both brilliant and bleak: a flurry of feathers, streaks of red and yellow and black. I find it impossible to keep an eye on just one bird as they lash out relentlessly at one another, aiming for a kill zone.

They will kill or be killed; theirs is a stark and simple existence.

And then it happens.

I hold my breath.

The loser—now only a bird in form, no longer a tumble of color—shudders, stumbles, and spits up blood. The gaff penetrated his lung beneath the wing. His neck lurches forward, his head follows, lilting to the side, and he falls limp to the floor—a lifeless, feathered pile that, despite the heat, will quickly turn cold.

I had never seen a living thing die before, much less get killed, and I wonder again at that dull feeling in my stomach, at the human delight in obvious suffering. Voices pro- and anti-cockfighting sound off in my head, but I hush them, take in the scene: the men huddled over fences, watching from bleachers, arms waving, faces zealous, bets placed, cries bursting forth. This could be the cocksure horde on the trading floors of Wall Street; fight night at the Coliseum. When the bird lands that fatal blow to the other—the blade piercing a kill zone, which might mean the heart, a lung, a slash through the neck—and the loser staggers, goes limp, twitches, it’s the ultimate show. Nothing commands an audience like a killing. To behold life leaving the body is like watching someone you love drive away—growing smaller and more remote with each heartbeat. It is water gone down the drain; it is downy dandelion wisps floating away with the wind.

Cockfighters talk of destiny. They say cockfighting fulfills what a cock is born to do: fight to the death. And, possibly to the envy of some men, the gamefowl meets its destiny head on. Cocks lack both doubt and reservation; their presence and intent in the here and now are unadulterated. They don’t tax themselves with thought of money or career or of right versus wrong. They are bound by no sense of time beyond this heartbeat—no past, no future; there are no meetings to attend or dates to uphold, only this one which is happening now, thus receiving full attention from the little being. Indeed these are qualities to admire—and they have been admired throughout the sport’s nearly 3,000 year-old history. The Greeks used cockfighting to engender bravery and vigor among soldiers before battle. Soothsayers warned Marc Antony of Caesar’s power, citing the fact that Caesar’s cocks always beat Antony’s. A spectator feels the breath of history raise the hairs on his neck when he views a cockfight, old as history itself.

But how can we ever really know what something is born to do? A cock is born to fight because we control its upbringing. Might we also say it is born to laze about the yard and welcome the rising sun, surrounded by a brood of hens pecking at scattered seeds? Or is it born to strut about proudly and serve as a symbol for handsomeness, dignity, and a no-fear attitude?

A man in torn jeans and sandals lifts the dead bird by its feet. The head flops, no longer working against gravity. Blood drips onto the floor and death, with its peculiar energy, fills the air. A boy looks on, perched in a tree outside of the arena. His eyes meet mine and I am overwhelmed by his stare.

My thoughts take leave of the arena and the repeated deaths of these flightless birds. They go to Richard napping in the shade. Was he born to drive a trike and wait on wide-eyed tourists? “Everyman’s work,” wrote Samuel Butler, “whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” But a portrait is very different from purpose—it is an observation rather than intent. I can look at a bird and essay a portrait. I can look at Richard and see a gentle man waiting patiently for money to take home to his wife and children—the children he taught to swim in the ocean—the ocean which engulfs this tiny island where men play at life and death in different ways.

After several hours we leave the cockpit and return to Richard for the ride home. He looks refreshed and smiles at us. From the time we come into his view to the time we reach him, he stretches a smile full of grace that cleanses the world for a moment and brightens an already vivid afternoon. He seems genuinely happy to see us and his smile makes me self-conscious at the same time it comforts me, like when someone loves you and you’re grateful for it, but feel a bit undeserving.

“Did you like it?” he asks.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I say, but as the last word leaves my lips I know I did not get it quite right. Gripping, might have been a better word. Intense, even. We drive back over the dusty roads that have baked all day in the sun that is now setting behind us, and home to the rest of our group and dinner.

___

Just over a week later I am in another town on another island having a glass of beer with strangers. My friends and I walk into an open-air bar and we are each immediately greeted and grabbed by different groups who want us to sit down and have a chat. I watch, sort of bewildered, as my friends are divvied up as if the bar crowd had divined our arrival and chosen who they wanted where. I am the last to be invited to a table and it is one made up entirely of men. They are jovial; most have great big bellies that heave as they laugh, which they do immediately after their friend summons me and I accept. Certainly they are as surprised as I am. The man to my left asks for a cup with ice and he pours me some beer. He teaches me words in their dialect of Tagalog and writes them in my journal.

“You should come teach English in the Philippines,” he says. “You should marry him, he’s an architect,” he tells me, pointing at the man across the table from me. “You should visit Dumaguete again and come to one of our cockfights.”

“Do you raise fighters?” I ask.

“I’m the pit manager.”

“I went to a cockfight on Panglao.”

He tells everybody at the table. They are surprised and laugh again. And I understand their surprise, but my appreciation of the event is no less real, no less awakening than theirs. Their world of cockfighting is, most often, a world separate from women. Like many cultures and communities, that has changed some, but for the most part cockfighting is a man’s domain. This was apparent when I entered through the wooden gate in Panglao and took my place standing among the men in the bleachers. Light and dark cast the same shadows on my softer features that it did on theirs. I may have winced more, but I never shut my eyes. What these men are dealing in—basic matters of life and death—cannot be separated by gender.

We have more beer and conversation and when I try to excuse myself from the table to leave, he asks me to give him something so he can remember me. I sit back in my chair and look down, trying to think of a thing to give. I pull off the only accessory I have—a small bracelet made of wooden beads carved in the likeness of skulls.

“Here,” I say. “You can have this.” He puts it on, pulls it near his face and peers at it through squinted eyes in the dim light.

“What are they?” he asks, maintaining his puzzled expression.

“Skulls.”

His big shoulders move sharply and quickly at an angle away from me.

“Why?”

“Well, I guess to remind us that we will die, but we are alive now.”

“I don’t like it,” he says with shake of his head and flick of the wrist. I look at this man and smile slightly, unsure what to say, what to think. That he is more disturbed by my style than I am by his lifestyle will strike me only later.

Perhaps jewelry is a woman’s domain. Or perhaps this man, surrounded by death daily, carries around enough reminders.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Liz Blood is a nonfiction writer and editor from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her essays, interviews, articles, and stories have appeared in HuffPost, AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Sierra magazine, Oklahoma Today, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 2018-19 Oklahoma Center for the Humanities fellow, a 2018-19 Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellow, and an adjunct faculty member at Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA in creative writing program. Liz holds an BA in English from Westminster College and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also hosts Seven Minutes in Heaven, a reading series of short fiction and nonfiction.

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Letter to my Son Jacob on his 5th Birthday

Mimi Lemay

 

 

Mimi 1

 

It was a frigid New England February day, much like this one, when we were first introduced. Of course, I imagined that I knew something about you beforehand, by the way you moved and kicked and somersaulted in my belly — by your satisfied silences and painful protests. The only ‘real information’ I had was that you appeared to be healthy, and that you were a girl.

I prepared your sister and our home for your advent: Another crib with attractive floral bedding, matching dresses, spring bonnets in duplicate and coordinating bathing suits for the summer. Your dad protested all this unnecessary expenditure, but I slyly reasoned that birthdays a half year apart meant that hand-me-downs would be seasonably unsuited. And so I dreamed, and I clicked, and adorable and trendy confections in pink and purple and mint and magenta arrived at our doorstep. It was folly but it was fun.

When we finally met you were momentarily silent. You took a pause to adjust to your surroundings before announcing your presence as I anxiously strained the only autonomously movable part of my body, my neck, to catch a glimpse of you around the blue curtain where the surgeon had extracted you from my womb. The surgery had been painful, the anesthetic insufficient, but all that was forgotten as every fiber of my being was focused on your unseeable presence. And then I heard you. You didn’t whimper, you didn’t cry, you didn’t squall. You ROARED: “Here I am!” Soon after, as you lay swaddled near my head in a white towel with pink and blue stripes, I was able to gaze into your eyes through a happy haze and introduce myself in return.

“Hello Princess,” I said, “I’m your Mama.”

Mimi 2

Your dad often recounts the moment he held you first. Your hearty, solid body, your pumping fists and legs and the surprised thought, “This one is a different model,”comparing you to your dainty sister. In the weeks after, we would share all the funny and not so funny moments with our friends: the attempted VBAC, the insuing complications and that hilarious moment when the anesthesiologist, from her poor vantage point at the head of the gurney called out, “It’s a boy!” Hilarious, because you were not, most definitely not, a boy.

What you most definitely were was a spirited little thing. As you grew, you had a way of fearlessly barreling around and into things that earned you the nickname “honey badger.” For mild plagiocephaly (flat head), you wore a bright pink football helmet for several months before your first birthday. We assigned your audacity to the fact that the helmet protected you from the consequences of most of your escapades.

mimi 3

 

Mimi 4

You had a curiously deep voice and a blithely cheerful personality. As our second child, you benefited from the benign inattention of more relaxed parenting. However, despite its charms, your ‘knock about-edness’ began to concern us as time went on. You lacked coordination, constantly falling off and into things, sometimes seeming to deliberately throw yourself into the couch or floor. We contacted our local Early Intervention specialists and after a lengthy assessment you received services for Sensory Perception Disorder, a minor hiccup in an otherwise pristine medical record.

When your baby sister came along you were still in diapers. You welcomed her with generosity, with no significant jealousy or displacement. You three were so close, so affectionate to each other. Our family was complete. Three healthy, bright, beautiful girls: we had spun the wheel of fortune and won the jackpot. There were no clouds on the horizon and the sun shone in perpetuity. Of course I exaggerate. There were tussles and tiffs, bumps and bruises, reflux and influenza, terrible twos and tormentuous threes. But for the most part, I was grateful beyond measure that our lives were so lovely, so ordinarily good. I enjoyed posting pictures of my darling daughters, now dressed in triplicate, to Facebook, and I reveled in the compliments we received.

Mimi 5

 

As you crested the middle of your second year you developed a curious habit, a persistent routine. You started to change your clothes repeatedly, maybe 10–12 times throughout the day. I reacted with both annoyance and mounting concern. Your pile of sartorial rejects meant exponentially more laundry. Goodbye matching dresses. My concern was that your habit was tinged with compulsion. When you woke up crying at 2am one night begging to be allowed to change into a new outfit, I called your pediatrician. Since you did not display other signs of compulsiveness we associated your desire to change with your general sensory seeking behavior. You were changing clothes in order to feel the fabrics rub against your skin. Children with a sensory deficit often seek sensations because they do not experience them to the full extent that the rest of us do in the ordinary course of our day.

This theory held water for only so long, for soon after you started preschool at 2.9 years, you became attached to one particular garment — a short-sleeved cornflower blue turtleneck sweater with a brown dog on the front which you wore for the next six months with few exceptions. You wore your ‘doggy sweater,’ day and sometimes, if you won the battle, night. You wore it over your tutu to ballet class, and over your holiday dress to see Santa at the mall. I ordered several more on eBay. Again, I cursed silently as I increased the frequency of my laundry to accommodate your needs. Since the weather was chilly we had a temporary reprieve from having to figure out how the doggy sweater would work on top of swimwear. I decided to fight that battle come spring. But by the time spring arrived our struggles over the doggy sweater would seem trivial compared to something new and far more alarming.

Mimi 6

 

Mimi 7

 

In the interim between the advent of the doggy sweater and your third birthday you set a stake in the ground and declared yourself a boy. At first we bantered with the word “pretend.” We explained, and you acknowledged, that you were pretending to be a boy. At preschool you tentatively assigned yourself to the male faction of the class and you were told that you were pretending, and that pretending was fine as long as it didn’t interfere with the workings of the school day. When I was told that you were told that you were pretending, I nodded and acquiesced. It made sense. This new thing was foreign and it was troublesome and above all, it seemed unhealthy. Another obsession. Another whim.

Whim or not, our home soon became a battleground over gender with you constantly pulling me, your dad and your older sister into unwilling skirmishes. You would glare at us with your huge defiant brown eyes and say, “I AM A BOY,” and I, a great believer in the principle of the inverse proportionality of parental disapproval to a child’s sedition gave little protest. I would sigh: “That’s fine sweetheart. You can be what you want to be in our home.”

I kept your sister off your back when she protested your apparent disregard for basic biology (which we explained to you). We started to have discussions about the narrow-mindedness of gender expectations: pink and blue, dolls and trains. We assumed that you were stating a preference for things un-girly. We couldn’t comprehend that you could even conceive of what gender was when you had barely begun preschool. So we told you to go ahead and wear boy clothes, and that gray was a perfectly acceptable favorite color for a three year old girl, and that yes, if it was important to you, we would call you Jackson, or Max or Jake or whatever the nom du jour was.

Mimi 8

Mimi 9

 

You never asked us to call you anything but Mia, your birth name, in the public arena. But our soothing acceptance never seemed to be enough. You became watchful and guarded at school and in public. At home, there were many occasions that you let go, hitting, kicking and punching, wailing and screaming: “Don’t talk to me!” “Get away from me,” and frequently, “You ruin everything!” Your anger seemed atypical, in excess of the ordinary emotional vicissitudes of being three.

You had always been jolly and loving as an infant but now I was the only one you would kiss and hug — you frequently exploded if anyone else tried to show you affection. Sometimes, even with me, if I casually brushed your hair with my hand or gave you an unsolicited hug you would recoil and bark angrily at me. And that was another thing — your new, quite unsociable habit of pretending you were a dog when people addressed you. You would lope around in a circle, as if chasing an invisible tail, tongue hanging out, “Aarf! Aarrrf!!” leaving us to explain your odd behaviors. To be fair, we had many peaceful moments and it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes you relaxed and your beautiful happy nature shone through. Those moments were a blessing, a dream — and I cherished every one, bracing for the next upset.

I knew that being ‘as a boy’ was important to you. I knew little of the word “transsexual.” I had first encountered it as a young adult, riveted to the dark thriller Silence of the Lambs, in which the antagonist, “Buffalo Bill,” skinned his victims in order to create for himself a ‘woman’ body suit. I was aware that there was a newer term — transgender — and that, in my way of thinking at the time, younger people could be ‘afflicted’ with this too. It was weird, it was beyond the pale, it was, to my current shame, slightly grotesque. I did not truly believe that it applied to my beautiful, round-faced, bright-eyed, innocent preschooler.

But then one day in the late fall of your third year I attended a routine parent teacher conference. Your teacher expressed her concern in hesitant tones: “You know, Mrs. Lemay, has it ever occurred to you, is it possible — that Mia may actually believe she is a boy?” You had just learned how to write your name, all jumbled letters and fat precious pen strokes. We were so proud of you. You however, did not share our pride. Apparently, when required to write your name you would comply, but then immediately cross it out. This obliteration of the marker of your given identity spoke volumes about how you perceived or rather, refused to perceive yourself.

Reality, which had been hovering just out of conscious reach, struck. My stomach churned. I tasted the ash in my mouth (I never understood that expression before). Tears stung as they welled up in my eyes. I tried to stem the flow out of embarrassment, wiping my eyes and nose on my sleeve, standing in the middle of the bare auditorium, no box of tissues in sight. Not my little girl. Not happening. Please wake up.

I stumbled through the next days in a painful haze. We were a few weeks shy of winter break and I reached out to a friend of ours, a therapist who had worked with at-risk LGBTQ youth. As we stood doling out cheddar cheese bunnies and pretzels to our raucous offspring on a play date she confirmed my fears — we should consider that you might be transgender.

I pressed her to tell me what that meant. Not the dictionary definition, but what the implications were: to your future, to your physical and mental well-being and to our family. I heard words like “outcomes” and “high-risk” and “medical intervention” and statistics like “over 40% attempted suicide,” and my world started to unravel. She tried to temper these dark things with words of encouragement and moral support, however it was impossible to process any further. The blood was rushing too strongly in my head as my heart was being carried downstream with the vestiges of my fantasy of a wonderful life for you.

I freely write about the negative emotions that the possibility of your transgender nature evoked with regret, but no shame. By now, you know how proud I am of you, how happy I am to be your mother, and how I perceive your unique nature as a precious if puzzling gift. At the time though, it was a devastating blow.

I began to grieve, waking up in the early morning hours biting my pillow to silence the sobs, my sheets bathed in the stink of bad dreams. I was losing you, my precious daughter. You were in the room next to me in peaceful childhood slumber, but you were most assuredly slipping from my grasp, hurtling into a void of social rejection, physical mutilation and suicidal depression. I felt helpless. I began, as many parents do when faced with a child that has unique needs, to ask, “What is the treatment?” by which I meant: What is the cure.

I called the Gender Management Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital, and although you were too young for the program they referred me to a therapist who had experience with transgender youth. She was not covered by our insurance at the time but was willing to speak with me at length on the phone. She advised me that many children — up to 70–80%, who present as gender-non-conforming (running the gamut from tomboy/effeminate to truly transgender) revert to their assigned, or ‘born’ gender upon reaching puberty. Oh phew. What a relief. “Keep things fluid,” she further advised, “Try not to box your daughter into making a choice either way. Just show support.” All good advice and I was temporarily buoyed by the hopeful news. To my desperately seeking ears, this meant you might well be going through a phase. How wonderful.

And so we left things. You asked to cut your hair and we gave you a sweet pixie cut. Keep it fluid. It was all about compromise those days. Slowing your inexorable march toward all things boy. For your dance recital, your instructor graciously allowed you to wear a tux with a bright pink bow-tie and cummerbund to match the sequined tutus your classmates wore. Your wardrobe was by this time mostly boy clothes. I say mostly, because I snuck in girl clothes in dark colors…they had tiny embellishments, embroidered hearts and bows that reminded me that one day, you could be my little girl again. In my eyes, they also served to ward off the questions I imagined I would have to answer about your appearance to those who knew you as a girl.

Mimi 10

 

For a while you tolerated this deceit, but you soon became quite canny at the subtleties of gendered clothing. You would reject the white Peter Pan collar in favor of the crisp button-down. A-line shirts and ruched sleeves disappeared from your drawers, along with velour and Lycra. Hanukkah and Christmas came and went and you received superhero action figures and matchbox cars from us and your wonderfully perceptive Grammy and purple pajamas and pink pencil sets from well-meaning loved ones who didn’t understand the extent of your preferences. You jumped for joy with the one and wrathfully rejected the other. Even I still clung to the belief that if you could only see the gray areas between the pink and blue you might find yourself at home somewhere in between. Hence the Katniss Everdeen doll that made its way into your heap of Christmas loot. I still recall your look of utter disdain.

Mimi 11

 

It was soon February again and we celebrated your fourth birthday. And you grew taller, wiser and accomplished many things. Over the winter break I had tentatively broached the topic: Would you be happier with a boyish/unisex name at school? You categorically refused. Your answer gave me a covert thrill of hope. I dared to dream that you were not fully committed to being a boy, and that you would be one of the preponderance of kids who ‘figured it out’ because their parents didn’t make a huge deal out of it. For use at home, you settled with us on a name which sounded similar to your given name in order to avoid the confusion of the daily merry go round of arbitrary boy names. We urged you, and you accepted the name Mica.

It was your dad who came up with a brilliant scheme — when you went to school, you could add an apostrophe, a little sickle on top of the “I” in Mia that would stand in for a letter “C.” This would mean you were writing Mica, not Mia and therefore you needn’t cross it out. We all giggled at the subterfuge and it was enough, for a while.

But I knew in my mother’s heart that you were not truly happy. Not like your sisters. Not like the unburdened joy that I thought you ought to have felt coming from a warm loving home with plenty of affection, positive experiences and toys galore. There was an un-childlike, persistent sadness that lay about you like a pall in those years which should have been so magical.

Mimi 12

 

You see, I believe that what had happened while I was wasting my energy hoping that you would make peace with your biology was that we had become unwitting contributors to your fracture into two different people: “Mica” and “Mia.” Home and school. Boy and girl. Unguarded and guarded. Open and shut. Reality (yours) and role-play (ours).

On the home front things were most certainly getting ‘better,’ or should I say, ‘easier?’ Your tantrums subsided as we managed to convince you that we were truly OK with you being a boy and that we believed that what you felt about your identity and your expression of it was your choice. Your sister had become a huge support in this regard. Not many five-year-olds could act with the grace and compassion that she did (and still does). She stopped teasing you about not being a ‘real boy’ and accepted our mantra that “what you are in your heart and your mind is far more important than what you are in your body.” The hard knot of your anger started to dissolve. We all basked in this momentary detente.

In the early spring of your fourth year we went on a glorious trip to Disney World where you were the only kid we saw in a Prince Charming costume. You glowed when strangers stopped and remarked, “Isn’t he adorable!!” and “What a handsome little man!” and we didn’t correct people, because we knew how much you enjoyed being ‘mistaken’ for a boy. The status quo was an OK place to be.

Mimi 13

 

But back at school, activities and in our community at large you remained markedly withdrawn. Our reports from your teachers were that, if prompted, you joined in group activities. You rarely, if ever, engaged your peers in free play. The day you hugged your teacher for the first time brought her to tears. I believe you occupied a special place in her heart and that she felt protective of you. I am so grateful for the good people in our lives.

Despite the fact that you were beginning to relax in the classroom, you continued to erect walls between yourself and others. The barking and loping persisted, and always there was the hood that would come over your eyes that said: shutting down now. In my ignorance I even wondered at times whether you were touched by a mild form of autism, but it seemed incongruent that this behavior turned on and off as if by a switch.

It was that playdate at Papa Ginos that shuttled me right over the edge from keeping it fluid to the time is now. To be truthful there were many small fissures forming in the Theory of Status Quo as I have now come to see it. There was your tearful sister begging me to force you into a dress so that “people will treat her nicer.” There was the sweet little girl at a birthday party that asked me about you: “What is that? Is that a BOY or is that a GIRL?” There were the burgeoning signs of dysphoria (“What’s wrong with my body? Why did God make me like this? Is he stupid?”).

But what finally broke me from my unhappy trance was nothing more complicated than a post-last day of school pizza party where I got a chance to see you interact with your classmates outside of a structured setting. Everyone was there, the boys, the girls, and most of the moms. You sat down at the edge of a gaggle of girls and tucked into your slice. No one jostled you in friendly banter, no one yelled, “Come on Mia! Let’s run to the end of the restaurant and back!” The happy little bodies were in constant locomotion, stepping around you and over you as you sat staring at your pizza. Then you looked up at a group of boys being disciplined by their frustrated moms for running amok, “Sit down Jack! Behave Grady!” and the expression on your face skewered me. It was a hunger that I had never seen before. You weren’t confused. You knew where you belonged. You just didn’t know how to get there. What if it was I who was responsible for showing you the way?

School was officially out for the year. You were signed up for the next year. Another year, deposit down, of living two lives. Open-shut, boy-girl. I watched you carefully during the next week while you enjoyed a camp run at your preschool, and I thought and I weighed, and I deliberated and I doubted until a million possible futures nearly drove me to distraction. What if? Your dad and I talked long into the evenings after you had gone to bed and in the mornings before we emerged from ours. A video had gone viral in the weeks before. A slideshow of a transgender boy, not much older than you, whose loving California family had supported his public transition. We wondered if seeing the pictures of this boy who was so obviously happy in his ‘new skin’ could make you believe in the possibility of your own fulfillment.

It was Friday, June 13, in the evening after your last day of preschool camp when we called you upstairs into your Dad’s office. We told you we had something for you to see and so you sat, engulfed in your dad’s big black swivel chair as he cued the video on his laptop. I translated the words into ‘kidspeak’ as they began to flit across the screen, accompanied by wonderful, endearing pictures. You viewed intently and solemnly as young Ryland Whittington was transformed from a beautiful little girl with golden locks into a handsome smiling boy in a buzz-cut and tuxedo. When the video ended you asked to watch it again. Then you sat staring at your hands. We asked you what you thought about the boy and you shrugged, stone-faced. The walls you had erected were made of hardier stuff than we expected. But the moment was now. All three of us in this room, your palpable pain, the resolution we needed to help you find.

So I got down on my knees and took your soft, still baby-like little hands in mine. I asked you to look at me but when you lifted your beautiful gaze to mine, I was momentarily speechless. I rallied: “I believe you,” I said and I didn’t bother to wipe the tears with my sleeve this time. “We believe you. All we want is for you to be happy, but you need to help us understand what will make you happy.” Your dad knelt down next to you too. “Do you want to be a boy all the time like that boy we showed you?” he asked gently. Your eyes filled immediately. “I can’t,” you responded with a quivering lip. “I HAVE to be Mia at school and Mica at home.”

So we told you. We told you about the choices, any of which you could make — or not. We told you that these choices were yours. Among which, you could continue at your school as Mia. Or, you could go there next year with any new identity and finally, more radical yet, we could find you somewhere to start anew, to simply be the boy you had insisted for so long that you were. You paused a long while. I didn’t know if you could do it. I didn’t know if you had the faith in us to tell us what you truly wanted. I didn’t know if you could imagine a future where you were whole — one identity: body and mind. You broke the silence. “I want to go to a new school. I want to be a boy always. I want to be a boy named Jacob.”
Mimi 14

 

Mimi 15

 

Jacob, my love. It’s been nine months and change since that fateful Friday and so much has transpired to make us believe that the journey we are taking together is the one we need to be on. It’s been tough, make no mistake, and solving your more immediate identity crisis did not resolve all the latent feelings of shame and sadness that you have suffered. But the powerful effect of your transformation was almost immediately felt by all who knew you and loved you.

Within days of beginning life anew as Jacob you began to stand up straight and look people in the eye. You stopped barking like a dog and running for cover. In allowing your transition, we were only hoping to help your spirit survive. We did not expect the seismic shift in your personality that we experienced. You cracked your first real joke within a week, took a fresh interest in learning your alphabet (ironic since school was out) and so much more. You started to cuddle and kiss, laugh and sing —and the dam just broke. You talked and talked and talked as if someone had taken a muzzle off your mouth. You took up hobbies, collecting anything and everything you found that piqued your interest (mostly detritus: scraps, stones and screws you picked off the street to my chagrin). That summer, the world opened up its treasures to you.

Your dad and I were astounded, delighted and profoundly gratified. These positive experiences were crucial for us, because those early days were laden with fear. We were always double, triple, quadruple guessing our decisions, approaching each “re-introduction” with trepidation. It all seemed so fragile. We fretted: Who would break your trust? Who would clip your wings? Who would sneer or giggle or laugh, sending you running back for cover? But you were strong, not fragile. You were brave, not weak.

Together we weathered the firsts. The first time we wrote your name — yours, a triumphant experience, mine, accompanied by a floodgate of tears. The first time I asked someone to call you Jacob, and finally, the first time that you did. Your first Christmas acknowledged as a boy. You confessed afterward that you had half expected Santa would forget and bring you Mia’s presents. Oh baby. The first public announcement, followed by a deluge of love and support from beloved family and friends — their support carried us and continues to carry us. The first week of the new school (you were obsessed about the bathrooms for the longest time) and the first time we ran into someone from your old school (it was awkward, we survived).

Mimi 16

 

Mimi 17

 

Jacob, my love, it is you that have transitioned us to a life less ordinary, and so much more meaningful than it ever would have been. Thank you deeply for your sacred trust. The mystery that is you may never be amenable to a full resolution. I don’t know what’s beyond the next bend in the road but I am no longer afraid.

I believe in the goodness of people. And I believe in your ability to dispel much of the ignorance and intolerance in those you may encounter. I look at how fine a human being you are becoming— far beyond my meager original intentions — and I know that the future is bright for you. I am no longer afraid.

And it is because I no longer fear: the outcomes, the medical interventions, the bigotry, that I will not be filing this birthday letter in a box in our attic with those of earlier years. Rather, momentarily, I will set these words free — relinquishing my control over their trajectory and destination. Their intent is to provide comfort and strength to another mother or father with an aching heart. To provide the message: It doesn’t get better. It gets awesome.

For I have seen and wish to share remarkable things. In those early days as Jacob, I saw the most authentic parts, in the deepest reaches of you, begin to unfold. I saw you take your first huge breaths. I saw the clouds above your head scatter and run. At first there was a silence, as you paused to take in the new world around you, and then you roared: I AM HERE!! It was then that I realized that we had indeed met before, but that truly I had not recognized you that first time. It was then that my grief began to depart as I knew in my soul that you had always been my son, Jacob.

And so always, my love,

Mom

 

Art by Matt Monk

Mimi Lemay is an international advocate for transgender youth. She and her family meet regularly with legislators, business leaders, educators, and clergy to share their vision of a more equitable world. She is a member of the Parents for Transgender Equality National Council at Human Rights Campaign and holds a master’s in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

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Stuck

Joey Franklin

“A million freemen may yet inhabit those counties which, while their wealth lay hidden, were disregarded for more fertile parts, but which, when developed, will furnish forth the wealth of an empire.”

–Charles Walker,
The History of Athens County, Ohio 1867

I walked through the double doors of the plasma center at eleven a.m., right behind a man who looked like he’d just spent the night in his car. His hair pitched awkwardly atop his head, and his loose T-shirt hung low beneath the trim of his bomber jacket. I stood behind him in line at the reception desk and looked around the room. I had imagined a rusty, back-alley nightmare of cracked linoleum, flickering fluorescents, stained lab coats, and crumpled dollar bills—the grime beneath the folds of Darwinian capitalism. Instead, I was greeted by starched lab coats, bleached teeth and ponytails, waxed floors, and a computer-automated check-in system—the highly polished face of a multi-billion dollar industry. I waited in line and watched the receptionist give instructions to the man at the counter. Then she waved me forward.

I read waivers and signed forms and stood for my picture. She took my weight on a digital scale, and then led me to a touch-screen computer console where I answered a long questionnaire, mostly concerning my history of sexual contact with drug users and prostitutes. I pushed the “no” button over and over, except after the questions, “Are you male?” and, “Are you feeling healthy and well today?”

After I completed the questionnaire, another young woman in a white coat pricked my finger, measured my iron and protein levels, my blood pressure, and my temperature before sending me to the nurse for a physical, where a woman in blue scrubs checked my balance, asked about tattoos and drug use, and lectured me briefly on getting plenty of protein and fluids. Then she led me to an empty place in a row of brown, vinyl reclining beds situated at the rear of the donation center.

My fellow donors, already prostrate and hooked to donation machines, were distracting themselves with magazines, paperbacks, and other reading material. One donor held a portable DVD player in his lap. Another had his face buried in his phone, and another just lay there with a vacant expression on her face, one arm in her lap and the other at her side, her forearm turned upward to expose a vein. A single crimson tube draped low from her elbow toward the ground and then arced back up into a machine that clicked and beeped at her side.

“Lie down,” said the young woman in the white coat, but with the sweet Appalachian twang of her voice, I could have sworn I heard, “make yourself at home.”

 

Once upon a time, Southeast Ohio had the largest coal deposits in the world. At its peak, the coal industry extracted more than 55 million tons of coal a year from more than one thousand mines around the state. For decades, coal from the region fueled American industry and brought thousands of immigrants to the Appalachian countryside. They settled in small villages that grew up around the mines, and breathed life into a region of the country long overshadowed by more promising territory to the west.

Of course, Melissa and I didn’t know any of this when we moved to Athens, Ohio, a college town built on the western edge of the Appalachian range. We’d both grown up in Oregon, less than two hours from the Pacific Ocean, and we went to college in northern Utah. Droughts and endangered salmon and BLM land and wolf packs were a normal part of our local-news reality. East of the Mississippi might as well have been East of the Nile.

What I did know about Ohio came from memories of my high school history books and those large pull-down maps that hung above classroom chalkboards. I could picture Lake Erie and the great dipping curve of the Ohio River, and I knew that the land in between had been the nation’s first notion of a western frontier, but that’s about it.

As for Appalachia, I knew even less, mere caricature: Hatfields and McCoys, trailer parks and drawled speech, kids named Billy Bob and family trees that didn’t fork. For us, coming to southeast Ohio was nothing more than a means to an end; a brief stop for graduate school on the way to somewhere better. I never once thought about the people who’d come before me, or why they might have chosen to stay.

 

Reclining in my donor bed, I watched Jason, the phlebotomist, move from machine to machine with a grace and offhandedness that surprised me. As he checked meters and unwrapped tubes, he rattled off the details of the donation process. Plasmapheresis, he called it, explaining that he would insert a needle into my arm and the blood would start flowing into the large, almond-colored machine standing beside my bed. He explained that the plasma would be separated from my blood in a centrifuge and that the residual red blood cells would be pumped back into my body. He warned me that I might get a metallic taste in my mouth, that I must keep pumping my hand or the machine would stop working, and finally, that despite blinking lights and warning systems built into the machine, there was a slight chance that air might enter a vein, which could make me terribly sick or maybe even kill me. Then he placed a clipboard in my hand and said, “Just sign here that you heard me explain that.”

 

The first white settlers came to southeast Ohio in 1787, led by a Revolutionary War veteran named Rufus Putnam. He had the ear of President Washington and the entire Northwest Territory to choose from, but instead of the fertile Miami River Valley to the west, or some economically strategic location closer to Pittsburgh, or Lake Erie, Rufus and his men chose the tumbling, rolling countryside of southeast Ohio. Other settlers thought Putnam and his company was crazy, but Putnam had a vision for the region and dreams of a bustling metropolis on the banks of the Ohio River, an economy fed by rich farmland and a thriving fur trade. His advertisements described a “delightful region…of a much better quality than any other known to New England,” and for that first exhibition, he signed up 60 men. Still, Ohio was a hard sell for most would-be immigrants. Even after treaties were forced on the natives, even after forts and mills were constructed, even after plans for a university were introduced, only the most desperate and adventurous settlers would take the risk.

 

I had not planned on donating plasma in Ohio, but the impossible math of a graduate student stipend divided by Melissa, me, and our two boys inevitably added up to a visit with a financial aid officer, the small hope of a big loan, and the curious anxiety of mortgaging one’s future for a chance at surviving the present. Add the specter of Christmas on the horizon and you get a perfect formula for fatherly desperation. After just a few months in Athens, I saw a poster for the plasma center hanging on a wall at school. “Save a Life,” it read, and it promised $240 a month. I was sold.

 

During the last decade of the eighteenth century, a slow drip of immigrants arrived in Ohio from the Northeast—families signing on a few at a time for a chance to test the region’s potential. And if that pace had held, Ohio might have remained for many years a sparsely populated forest of fur traders and subsistence farmers. However, shortly after the turn of the century, those farmers and fur trappers began taking notice of the coal. And then the industrial revolution turned that coal into black gold, and by the 1850s large mining interests were laying out a system of railroads to carry immigrants and equipment into the hills, and cartloads of coal back out. Labor came from England, Wales, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere, and by 1884 there were more than 20,000 miners and their families scattered around the region. A man whose children might have starved in the old country could swing a pick underground in Ohio for a few dollars a week, chipping away at a vein of coal so deep and so thick it would take a legion of men two lifetimes to remove.

 

I have good veins, the kind inexperienced phlebotomists dream of at night. Protruding from my forearms “like garden hoses,” according to one employee, they make easy targets for even the shakiest hand. Thankfully, Jason didn’t need the extra help. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he held up the needle. “I’ve been doing this for years.” He tapped my arm, slid the needle under my skin, and just like that, I was a donor, plugged in and pumping away.

While the machine processed my plasma, I read from my book, kept my fist pumping, and occasionally looked up at the other donors around me. The man with the DVD player was still watching his movie, the man with the cell phone was still texting, and the woman with nothing still stared blankly into space. Our machines hummed along, and every few minutes a finished donor and a pale orange bottle of plasma would leave, and a new donor with an empty bottle would fill the void.

After about an hour, I’d donated my quota and my left-over red blood cells were pumped back into my veins for a final time, followed by a 500 ml chaser of saline that was supposed to boost my blood volume and keep me from fainting. On my way out, a nurse handed me a debit card loaded with twenty dollars and told me I could come back twice a week, for as long as I could stomach it.

 

Mining in Ohio was good work, if you could handle it. Small towns near remote mine entrances all around southeast Ohio were full of immigrants who thought they could. The towns had simple names like Coal Run and Buckhorn, and family names like Murray, Buchtel, and Mudoc, and optimistic names like New Philadelphia, New Lexington, and New Pittsburgh: places where people could start fresh, chase the dream of getting ahead, and, in reality, spend a lot of time just hanging on. Companies built shack housing and paid employees in scrip—play money that was good only at company stores. The hours were long and the system parasitic—the success of the mine sometimes determined less by the amount of coal extracted from the ground and more by the dollar value of scrip that never left company property. Many mining families lived on site, worked on site, shopped on site, and if the town lasted long enough, died on site.

 

Just across the street from the plasma center was a Wal-Mart. It wasn’t the only shop in town, but sometimes it felt that way. Sure, Athens had a Kroger, a BigLots!, a Lowe’s, and a few other smaller stores, but no matter how we tried to avoid it, we ended up at Wal-Mart at least once a week. Light bulbs, Band-Aids, diapers, milk, cereal, paint, shoelaces—they were all cheaper at Wal-Mart. And its proximity to the plasma center made shopping there that much easier. More than a few times I finished donating only to pull across the street to the Wal-Mart and drop everything I’d just earned on a few groceries. And there, at Wal-Mart, more than anywhere else in town, I ran into employees from the plasma center. On the way to work, or just getting off, they too made the requisite Wal-Mart stop. Sometimes we waved, or exchanged silent nods, but usually we just kept our heads down, closed up in our own little worlds.

 

Coal mining was not for the claustrophobic. It meant working in dark, low tunnels hundreds of feet underground for long hours with nothing but your partner, your light, and the rats to keep you company. It meant tight quarters and an ever-present fear that a fire might break out, a pillar might snap, and a shaft might seal itself off in a crumbling cloud of dust and rubble. On a Friday morning in April 1856, the pillars of a mine shaft near Blue Rock, Ohio, collapsed, trapping four miners beneath several hundred feet of dirt and rock. Fellow miners dug for days, and, near the end of the second week, they heard voices coming from beneath them. By the time the men had been pulled to safety, they’d spent more than fourteen days buried alive, trapped in an underground air pocket with nothing to drink but a bit of murky water collecting in a pool on the floor of the mine shaft. I imagine the entire town heaving a collective sigh of relief when their men emerged from the mine, but what could those men do but dust themselves off and go back to work?

 

 

Once, during my pre-donation screening, while the attendant was checking my protein levels in a microscope, I asked her if she’d ever seen any accidents at the clinic.

“What do you mean, ‘accidents’?” she said.

“You know, something goes wrong with a donor?”

“Sometimes we have people pass out,” she said. “A few times a year.” Apparently, a majority of problems occur while a person is simply reading about donating. They turn white in the face, get shaky, vomit, and sometimes lose consciousness altogether. One woman became so frightened by the sight of an unwrapped needle that she swore, “Oh my God,” and ran out of the center.

Later, while lying in my donor bed, my machine began to beep. It was a familiar sound. “Just an air bubble,” said the phlebotomist. Two or three times during a donation, the plasmapheresis machine detects the presence of air somewhere in the blood line and it shuts down until a phlebotomist comes and pushes a few buttons to purge the system.

“I think I can handle an air bubble,” I said. The phlebotomist gave me a funny look.

“You think you can handle air bubbles?”

“I mean . . . I can handle the beeping,” I said, and she stopped at the foot of my bed.

“Well,” she laughed. “The nurse tells me it takes at least 10 milliliters of air to kill you.” She said this in a voice that was, I think, supposed to sound reassuring.

 

Families in mining towns lived at the mercy of the companies they worked for—the steady flow of coal their only reassurance against poverty, hunger, and cold. If an accident or strike or dried-up mine rendered a town unprofitable, the company could pack up and go, leaving the men and their families to find other ways of making do.

In 1920, a coal processing structure burned to the ground in San Toy, a small mining town northeast of Athens. More than 2,500 people had moved to San Toy since its founding in 1901. The company town boasted a theater, a baseball team, and a hospital, but instead of rebuilding after the fire, the Sunday Creek Mine Company shut down one mine and eventually withdrew from the city completely. Within eight years the town was empty. What equipment could be salvaged was distributed to other nearby mines, and the hundreds of displaced workers had little choice but to pick up and follow the equipment, leaving behind a ghost town, a tiny scar on the hillside stitched together by vacant rail lines fading slowly into the undergrowth.

 

After I’d donated plasma a few times, I showed my scars to Melissa: two red dots on the insides of my elbows.

“Yuck,” she said, and turned away, unwilling to look. This is the response I got from most people who found out what I was doing. Sure, needles and blood make people squeamish, but it was also the stigma of donating itself—an act that lies on the socio-economic spectrum of desperation somewhere between not being able to pay your phone bill and stealing money from a roommate. People understood why I did it, but most couldn’t imagine doing it themselves.

Melissa never liked to hear me talk about it, and she constantly apologized, as if the whole thing was her fault. She worried about my health, that months of donating would cause irrevocable damage to my body, that for the rest of my life I’d wear a solitary track mark on each forearm, my small badge of courage, a pair of misplaced stigmata—a sign to be sure, but of what?

Rattling around in my mind was a foggy awareness that mixing needles, blood, and money was dirty business, but I didn’t know the details. For instance, in 1971, a Time article reported that more than 100,000 people donated plasma regularly in the United States, most of them “Skid Row bums and drug addicts,”—impoverished, desperate men and women who infected the plasma pool first with Hepatitis C and later, in the early 1980s, with HIV. For decades, the unregulated industry allowed cash-strapped junkies to donate several times a week at multiple locations without any screening or testing of collected fluids. The industry then turned that plasma into anti-coagulant medicine for hemophiliacs, and blood volume boosters for trauma victims. According to some estimates, nearly 20,000 hemophiliacs contracted HIV from tainted plasma, not to mention the thousands infected by hepatitis C. The federal government eventually stepped in and set up proper regulations, but by then the plasma industry had secured its reputation as blood pushers, and donors as the industry’s blood whores.

 

Coal miners were rough, dirty, wild, and ignorant. Or so the mythology says. Going down into the mines branded a person and gave permission to those on the surface to simultaneously pity and revile them. Underground five or six days a week, in a saloon or at a card table at night, coated in and coughing up black dust, miners did not live genteel lives. It’s easy to see how the stereotypes got their start. History books from the region overflow with photographs of miners, almost always sitting atop a mining cart, or posing by a piece of equipment, or squatting on their aluminum lunch pails, their faces stained, coal dust darkening the crows’ feet around their eyes and deepening the wrinkles in their foreheads. Theirs was a life of overalls and boots, of headlamps and thick denim, of grime and whistles and black phlegm. Almost universally, they look tired in the high-contrast of old monochrome photographs; and the way they lean elbows on knees, or lift hands to their hips, one gets the impression that these men were busy, that in the backs of their minds they knew there was coal to be loaded and the day wouldn’t be over until the carts were full. I imagine that a miner, stuck with a company tab to pay off and a family to feed, had little time for worrying about public image.

 

Stick is the verb of choice among phlebotomists, as in “I stuck 15 people today,” and “You can choose who sticks you,” and “Who stuck you? They did it all wrong.” The word choice always seemed so unfortunate to me—the one with the needle sticking out of my arm, the one stuck in the bed for an hour, the one feeling like a stuck cow attached to a milk pump. But I don’t think they meant any harm by it. I often told my phlebotomist I could never stick a needle into someone else’s arm. And maybe that’s why they talked about donors like we were pin-cushions; to dehumanize us, if just a little, to steel themselves against the reality of what they were extracting all day, and from whom.

 

By the late twentieth century, more than 3.4 billion tons of coal had been extracted from Ohio soil. At its peak, the coal industry employed 50,000 people in the state, but by the early 1990s, advances in technology had changed coal mining so much that fewer than 5,000 employees could keep the entire industry running. Today mines are safer, cleaner, and more efficient, but they are also emptier. Appalachian boys whose fathers grew up to be miners because their fathers had grown up to be miners have had to come up with new plans for the future.

 

Since the early 1990s, the plasma industry has worked hard to transform the donating process into the reassuringly sterile experience I endured in Ohio. There are now more than 300 certified plasma donation centers in the United States that collect roughly 15 million liters of plasma every year. The process is, for the most part, streamlined, safe, and secure. In fact, it feels as routine as, say, a trip through Jiffy Lube, with someone guiding you through every step of the process, minding the fluids and hoses while you sit and read a magazine. Plasma donation is a fundamental part of the global medical machine, and while it’s safer and more reliable than it has ever been, the donor pool is still made up primarily of the poor and underprivileged.

Here in Athens, that means the hard-knock locals like the small family I noticed one day as I was leaving the center. A couple was standing in front of the computer kiosk reserved for checking debit card balances and scheduling appointments. Their children had apparently been in the “supervised waiting room” watching movies while mom and dad donated, and now they were all preparing to leave. One child stood in front of mom and another sat on the floor chewing on a drawstring that hung from his father’s coat. The father held a third, smaller child in his arms, a little girl that kept trying to take off his hat. I wondered what the money would mean for them—the extra $120 a week.

I knew what it meant for me—a temporary buffer between my family and the end of my monthly teaching stipend, an excuse to get dessert at Applebee’s, an extra gift under the tree, and gas money for a trip to Cleveland. We needed the money, to be sure, but the poverty I felt was a somewhat artificial one. We had a little money in the bank, more student loan options than I knew what to do with, and I was working on a graduate degree. Donating was never an act of true desperation. I came here to Ohio for school, and school would be my ticket out. Those children huddling around their parents at the donation center, if they’re from Appalachia, will probably want to go to college, but, statistically speaking, they’re just as likely to drop out of high school as earn a bachelor’s degree. They are the grandchildren of miners and farmers and craftsmen, the children of Wal-Mart clerks and construction workers, and, while it’s not impossible for them to break out of the poverty they grew up in, the current system doesn’t offer them much hope.

 

In the spring, Melissa and I took our boys to see the old train depot in Murray City, a defunct mining town tucked back into the hills north of Athens. The drive took about twenty minutes on narrow winding roads that cut through green-leaf forests pocked by the occasional trailer or farm home. Murray City itself emerged from the woods first as a series of small houses, and then a new fire station beside a park, and finally as a few larger brick buildings, including a boarded-up high school, a convenience store, a bar, and an Elks lodge. Beyond that were clusters of small houses and, at the end of town, an old train depot recently converted into a small mining museum. Beside the depot sat a large red caboose that helped complete the picture of a little train stop in the middle of the woods. We parked in a gravel lot next to the depot and climbed out of the car. Across the parking lot was a long narrow greenway that I could tell had once been the train line.

The mines around Murray City were once among the highest yielding coal mines in the world, and that success meant great things for the growing town and its more than two thousand citizens. There were schools, churches, banks, retail stores, a newspaper called The Murray City News, a labor union, and four trains a day that steamed through the small depot. One dollar and twenty-five cents could get you to Columbus for the weekend, but why would you want to leave? Wake up on a Saturday morning and you could visit the doctor, take your kids to the park, and pick up some produce at Lunt’s Groceries, all before lunch. Then you could get your haircut at the barber’s shop on Locust street and still have time to see a show at the theater or watch the Murray City Tigers wallop a neighboring town on the grid iron. At night you could buy a friend a drink at one of twenty-three saloons, and on Sunday morning you could catch a sermon from five different pulpits. The coal brought the people and the people built the town and the town became the center of life for hundreds of miners and their families for nearly half a century.

Looking through the museum’s old photographs of parades and marching bands and city councilmen in sharp bowler hats, it was easy to imagine a happy life in Murray. And it was easy to see why some residents would resort to violence to defend that life. The first labor strikes occurred at the Murray mines in 1884. Locals wanted better pay and companies wanted more output, and that tension broiled up every few years for decades. Striking miners set fires, destroyed company property, and even fired shots at foreign scabs brought in to work the mines. But, amid all this, Murray managed to survive. Even after World War II, when strip mining was rapidly replacing underground operations, and Murray’s mines began to close, the city didn’t fold. Not completely. Even when the last picks and shovels were hauled away, a few people stayed put, deciding to commute to whatever job came next, rather than sell their land and look for something new.

Today, about 450 people live in Murray City. There is no bank, no newspaper, and no grocery store—and all but one of the churches has been shuttered. All the children in town are bused to schools in other cities, and those adults who are not elderly or retired must commute to Athens, or Nelsonville, or farther, for work. Other than the depot and the grassed-over rail bed, the only hint of the city’s mining past was inscribed on a plaque in a park built over an old mine entrance.

My boys poked around the museum for a few minutes, asking questions about old photographs and train tickets and a large bucket of coal in the corner, but they grew restless. We went outside and let them climb on the red caboose, snapping photos as they posed against the overcast sky. When we pulled up to the museum that morning, I wondered aloud to Melissa why anyone would live way out in such impossible quiet. But the quiet my boys sat in as I took their photo was not the quiet of a ghost town. The forests around us laid benevolent siege to the little village in the way only an Appalachian forest can, and I felt both secluded and nestled in a strange way. In that moment, the silent, wet world of the woods was enough of a reason for Murray to persist. Before we left, we climbed inside the caboose and sat on the cracked seats and looked out the window at the tracks below—tracks that had been restored just for this little memorial: two beams of oxidized steel coming in from nowhere to hold up the bright old caboose, and then quitting just beyond the car’s front coupler, a heavy steal question mark that seemed to punctuate the town’s only question: “Going so soon?”

 

One day at the plasma center, a young couple walked through the door as I tapped out my questionnaire on the computer. The man wore a pair of vintage Air Jordans and jean shorts with the words mi raza embroidered down one leg. Tattoos wrapped around both his forearms and around both calves, and he spoke loudly on his cell phone in a thick West Virginia drawl. The woman had blond, curly hair, and a strip of her midriff peaked out beneath the hem of her white tank top. They couldn’t have been older than twenty. I watched as the woman stood on the scale and then heard the attendant give her the bad news.

“Hundred and eight,” she said. “You have to weigh at least one-ten.”

The man rolled his eyes, and I heard him explain the situation to the person on the phone—he had been cleared for donation, but the woman would have to wait out front.

A few minutes later I was all plugged in, and the man on the phone sat a few beds over, still talking loudly.

“A house and a double wide,” I heard him say. “We only pay utilities.” He paused for a moment and then raised his voice: “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “Appalachian Ohio is the poorest place in the United States, man.” He raised his voice again, and continued: “’Cause there ain’t no jobs!” And he went on for several minutes about his struggle to find work, his hopes for starting a business, his affinity for good pot, and his frustration with the cops who wouldn’t leave him alone. “Its like no one’s free up here!” he yelled. But then his voice softened, and he said, “But it’s beautiful, dude. Come up here in the summertime. It’s beautiful.”

By then I’d been living in Ohio for more than a year, and men like this still surprised me: men for whom Appalachia was home in the deepest, most sentimental way possible, men whose families had lived in the region for generations—who knew what it took to put down roots, and also what it meant to pull them up. I have, more often than I care to admit, been guilty of the easy, patronizing conclusion that men like this are simply victims of circumstance, products of their region’s own troubled history, stuck as much by geography as genealogy. And sure, you might call what I heard in his voice anxiety, maybe even a little desperation, but when he said, “come up here in the summertime. It’s beautiful,” his voice hinted at something else—less fear of what a place might take from him, and more faith in what it might have to offer. It was a voice that trusted in the hidden promises of a sleepy Appalachian hollow, a voice he might have heard first from his father, or his father’s father, a voice that sounded that day like an invitation. And perhaps it was something like that voice that called us out to Ohio in the first place, that got me into that donor bed and selling myself a few hundred liters of plasma at a time, a voice from beyond history that calls men and women to settle strange lands and offer their own pound of flesh for a chance at life; a voice that says “come and stay a while—see what happens,” a voice that has echoed in those hills for a very long time.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Joey Franklin is an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. His writing has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Poets and Writers, Norton Reader, and Gettysburg Review.

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White Space

Elizabeth Horneber

1.

After my death, no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find the inscription in my innermost being which explains everything… once I take away the secret note which explains it. –Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), 1843

 

2.

Søren Kierkegaard and I ought to have been allowed to live in the same century.

In the best-known sketch of Kierkegaard, he is facing the viewer. His hair is wild and sweeps up away from his high, gentlemanly collar. He has a narrow face, high cheekbones, and an expression of placidness that borders on either boredom or sadness, depending on one’s mood when one looks at the image. His eyes are made of black ink, and the only thing that gives them the spark of life is white space—a lack of ink, an absence in the place where his eyes reflected the light. This is the spark of emptiness that locks with my gaze and watches me bemusedly.

White space is relief. It is balance. It breathes life and graciously gifts color and darkness with power. It provides room for the viewer to notate or revise. It is easy to forget that white space has its own shape and purpose. In crafting any kind of visual design, forgetting about white space is a mistake.

The white space in Kierkegaard’s eyes is easy to overlook. It takes time and close attention to notice it, appreciate it.

I never tire of this sketch.

 

3.

This same Søren Kierkegaard is the queerest bird of those we know: a brilliant head, but extremely vain and self satisfied. He always wants to be different from other people, and he himself always points out his own bizarre behavior. –Caspar Wilhelm Smith in a letter to his mother, 1841

 

4.

Søren Kierkegaard lived at the same time as Hans Christian Anderson. He was a philosopher whose trouser legs seemed to never be even. The Danish king kept trying to convince Kierkegaard to take a governmental position, but Kierkegaard got a particular sort of pleasure in turning him down. He would make fun of people to their faces and they’d never know it. As such, he was known for being egotistical and irritating. He was a Lutheran (I’m a Lutheran). He avoided the sun, even if it meant awkwardly cutting short a stroll with a friend, or moving from one side of the house to the other at various points throughout the day. He often wrote under pseudonyms, making his already complicated works more difficult to understand. It was never clear whether his works truly reflected his own thoughts or whether they were just mental exercises. Kierkegaard’s mantra: “Believe by virtue of the absurd.” That is, faith cannot be logically defended, or else it wouldn’t be faith.

He was engaged for a year to one Regine Olsen, with whom he then broke ties, and though society at large assumed he’d led her on, we can assume from his writings that he rather felt unfit for a life with her. He was too melancholy, too lost in his own worlds, destined for a life sustained by words and ideas, and not flesh and blood at all.

He has been called the Father of Existentialism.

 

5.

Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day… coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said: “Well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astounding number of walking sticks.) Next he filled the cup with sugar over the rim and then poured coffee on it. It amused him to no end every day to see the sugar melt. –August Wolff in a letter to Hans Peter Barfod, relating remarks by Israel Levin, 1870

 

6.

Though he is considered its father (and so postmodernism’s grandfather), Kierkegaard never used the word “existentialism.” Perhaps he would even have disagreed with its 20th century champions—Sartre, Camus. Existentialists see the world as chaotic and indifferent. One’s place in it, then, is an unanswerable question; the thinking, breathing, isolated individual is free to interpret the world as one pleases, and is also responsible and bound to that unique interpretation.

I have a coffee mug, a gift from my grandmother, which says “Lutheran Church Basement Coffee,” with a picture of a mug sprouting wings and covered with a halo. Below the picture, the words: “It’s heavenly.” On the other side of the mug it says, “Pray, and let God worry,” which is a quote from Martin Luther. Except a piece of the printing got chipped off, and now it says, “Pray, and let Cod worry.”

When I, a twenty-something-year-old, choose this mug to drink from, it is for no better reason than that I am feeling particularly “unique” and “isolated” at that moment.

Interpretations begin from the position of uniqueness and isolation.

 

7.

Kierkegaard’s nicknames:

The Fork. When Søren was a child, between being teased and cheating on tests, he was asked by his sister what he wanted most to be. His response: a fork. Why? Because, he said, then I could spear anything on the dining table.

Hunchback. He wasn’t actually a hunchback, but he had some unknown back ailment. And he slouched often, probably from spending too much time over his desk.

The Crazy Student. When he was at University, and chambermaids came into his room, he scared them just by the way he looked at them. He would sit stone-like and gaze at them with steam and intensity. He maintained that lewd thoughts should be avoided, but “daring expressions” were acceptable.

Choirboy. In school, he always wore the same, dark tweed clothing—oddly cut, short tails, always with shoes and woolen stockings.

Søren Sock. His father was suspected to have previously been a hosier.

The Other One. Regine was later heard to say, “Oh that [my husband, Schlegel] could ever forgive me for being such a little scoundrel that I became engaged to the other one.”

This, more than anything else, cuts me. To some, Søren is the Father of This and That, and to Regine, the only woman he loved, he was The Other One. Though he sent her a note years after her marriage that read, “You see, Regine, in eternity there is no marriage; there, both Schlegel and I will happily be together with you.” Kierkegaard never knew that towards the end, when she was frail and white-headed, she’d begin talking about her husband, about his goodness and their happy marriage. But she always, always ended with Kierkegaard. He was always the last name behind her teeth, in the back of her throat.

 

8.

To Søren:

Lately, I live in a basement that I rent from a single man with a child. His wife was diagnosed with stomach cancer when she was twenty-four years old and five months pregnant. The pregnancy had hidden all the signs, and they delivered her child early so that she could begin chemotherapy. It was too late, of course; she died the same year her son was born. Sometimes I wake up to the boy screaming in the night (he is one year old now), and I hear his father go to him and sing. His voice comes down to me through the floor. I am surrounded on five sides by earth, and little creatures with hair-thin legs crawl into my bed and along the walls. I listen to my landlord’s voice through the ceiling and imagine he is singing to me. But when his sisters come over with their husbands and new boyfriends, when his parents or in-laws visit, when they all gather around the table to eat, when I smell their candles and baking ham, I quietly slip out the door and into the night, unsure of where to go, but knowing I can’t stay there.

Søren, I know this has little to do with you. I know that our lives are wildly different, but I think in other ways they are the same. Søren, your egotistical rants don’t fool me for a second. Søren, I would have led you into the sun, and you would have let me. Søren, I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and I believe in you, and I understand that this, too, is irrational. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be called faith.

Love, Me

 

9.

The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty. He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed… There was a sort of unreality about him. –Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, 1879

 

10.

It did not take long after Kierkegaard’s death to turn his biographies into an industry, especially because he left so much room for interpretation. It seems most of what we know of him has passed through the filter of others’ perceptions. Everything about him is a shadow of a shadow. A voice in a voice. This is no way to know a person, and yet it’s what we try to accomplish, and we do so without apology. These self-proclaimed biographers excuse themselves. As did Kierkegaard’s acquaintance, Israel Levin: “He never managed to understand himself… It was enough for him to form a conception: he ‘poetized himself’ into every kind of existence.”

 

11.

This is how I poetize him into existence.

I think of the slash through the “o” in his Danish name. I am at a bar with my friends, trying to explain Søren to them. And I tell them everything about him is enticing. The sketch of him is enticing. The slash through his “o” is enticing. I’d like to put a slash through his “o.” I want to peel apart his pockets of words, like pulling apart slices of an orange. I want to open him and watch his organs thanklessly perform. Blood, push. Lungs, grow. Heart, a machine—jerk, convulse.

 

12.

Existentialism sprang from the seeds of Kierkegaard’s conception of the “single individual.” The problem: if I align my life with external norms and codes, I lose my individuality, but if I fail to do this, my actions and thoughts are meaningless because they lack a way of being interpreted.

If the Abraham of the Bible had not been stopped by an angel, killing his son Isaac would have made him both individual and incomprehensible to philosophy. And God’s command to Abraham that he kill Isaac was a command given to an individual, not meant to extend to others. To us, this is a paradox. To Kierkegaard, this is the point.

The idea that the ‘quest for the individual’ overrides external moral codes is inherently dangerous, especially if one uses such reasoning to justify crimes. Despite this, the idea presents the question: am I only “meaningful” in relation to the external? Or can I have meaning apart from this?

 

13.

To create meaning, I create logical patterns of thought and construct arguments out of sine cosine tangent, or is it sign signifier? Language is my limping Siamese twin. Though I did not create it, I only know myself through this filter and can’t help but wonder if this is a real knowing, or a real self.

And Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, you poor soul. Once he said, “Next to taking off all my clothes, owning nothing in the world, not the least thing, and then throwing myself in the water, I find most pleasure in speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become estranged from myself.” The world is shaped differently, and one turns it over and over in unsteady hands, suddenly unsure whether it is the same world at all.

 

14.

In the words of others, I am a solid individual. I am “put together.” In control.

 

15.

For a time I thought I was in love with Gene Kelly, with his smiles and tapping feet. He danced with newspapers and his voice was frail, but he sang and sang and was the first to swing around a lamppost in the rain. Gene Kelly was suave. Gene Kelly was immortalized in movie after movie, never tired of the limelight.

I consider him a childish crush. I realize now, instead, how deeply I love Søren. I puzzle over Søren’s obscure, patchy journals and feel this strong urge to laugh at his witticisms, to duly, simultaneously weep and tell him that our love, like one’s belief in a divine being, is utterly absurd, and is therefore the truest form of belief.

 

16.

I want to chide Kierkegaard for never submitting himself to immortalization via the daguerreotype (photography in its earliest days).The only images that have survived were sketched by his brother. His brother confessed that the sketches were incomplete and only a weak reincarnation, a skeleton of an idea.

There in the annals of stuffy philosophers with squiggly beards and wrinkles, Søren is a breath of clean air. He is rows of swooping, slanted Danish words with generous margins—margins for comments and revision and the relief of white space on a page. By accident I imagine those History Channel documentaries where they get low-budget voice actors to read quotes from historical personas, as though in doing so they bring said personas to life, when really they create cartoonish characters. I picture a harsh voice spitting out Danish, pretending to bring passion into a quote like this: “I have just come back from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me—but, I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit ——— and wanted to shoot myself.”

I then imagine a frail Gene Kelly voice saying that, for no other reason than that I have always liked the sound of that voice. This is how I poetize Kierkegaard into existence.

 

17.

Thank god history has known, probably, countless like me, like us. Søren, you’ll pardon the “us”?

 

18.

He seemed to be someone who could understand everything, all worry and sorrow, and who could utter words of counsel, but could not share in that sorrow. Of course this could well have been an illusion that would have disappeared if one followed him into his private little space, but who could have known this, and how much do we humans really trouble ourselves about one another before it is too late? As a rule, we are preoccupied with our own egos, and we accept the prevailing opinions. –Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, 1846

 

19.

Kierkegaard said of Regine, “She did not love my shapely nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet, nor my good mind—she loved only me, and yet she didn’t understand me.” Kierkegaard said, “People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me.”

 

20.

White space.

 

21.

This is actually becoming a problem. I resurrect the man, and I am troubled. Because now I find myself wondering, after all, what his hands would feel like. What his eyes could do to you. Those who knew him talked a lot about the looks he could give.

What looks would he give me?

 

22.

I’m trying to be reasonable about this. Kierkegaard was a man, and after all, what do men do? They eat. They sleep. They shit. They masturbate. Kierkegaard died a virgin. I can only assume this, given his aborted engagement and theological ponderings. It is said that when a man loses his virginity, he becomes a real man. That after entering a woman, he is re-born and emerges from her, made full. I am reminded of what Goldschmidt said about Kierkegaard: that he was shaped like a wayward thought, half-formed, incomplete.

 

23.

I am sitting in Sarah and Ty’s apartment. They live on the top floor of the house where I live, but they are in Germany, and told me I could come upstairs and use their apartment while they are gone. They know I live in the basement, and they know the only furniture I have is a bed and a toilet, and that sometimes I sit on the closed toilet with my computer on my lap when I can’t afford a coffee—a coffee that is really buying me a hard chair to sit on, something people take for granted. So here I sit, surrounded by their married-life clutter. Unread mail. Half-empty jars of peanut butter. Dirty coffee cups. On the wall above the table is a large framed poster, a painting of a bar. The bartender is reaching under the counter to get something for the couple leaning against the bar. This man and woman are standing close enough so that it is clear they are together, but distant enough that we question their relationship. Close enough that their hands, resting casually on the bar, are touching. Distant enough that they are distracted by other things—he, by the bartender, she, by her nails. His eyes are shadowed by his hat. She is pink and orange and red—her hair, her dress, her skin.

The only other person at the bar is sitting with his back facing us. He is alone. Half of his body is in shadow.

 

24.

Imagined conversations with Kierkegaard:

Why, Lissa, what a lovely dress. You are a vision.

Thank you, Søren. I picked it especially for you.

Ah, darling, you shouldn’t have.

Actually, dearest Søren, I’ve been meaning to ask you what you meant when you wrote that “subjectivity is truth, and objectivity is repelled by it by virtue of the absurd.” It seems to me that given the plethora of subjective viewpoints, there would then be a plethora of truths, which denies that there is any one single truth.

My love, your questioning is to be applauded. I could attempt to go on a quest to prove, rationally, that the Christian god is The God. But that runs counter to the point of faith, just as an established church is counterproductive. There is no logical reason for faith. I cannot “convince” you to believe, even if I may want to.

And then he would compliment me on the asparagus and perhaps how my hair looked that day.I might offer to repair his trousers since they seemed uneven. And he might, as usual, gently refuse.

 

25.

Let’s talk about tragic: The tragic, Kierkegaard said in passing (to Israel Levin, who told it to August Wolff, who wrote it to Hans Peter Barfod), is not the act of pain, or blood, or violence. It implies permanence. He described evening in a cemetery and a girl crying to a grave. “Ludwig, Ludwig, are you asleep? I gave you everything. I gave you my honor. Give it back to me.” And then, Kierkegaard added, she throws herself onto the grave in desperation.

That’s his description. To me, this is tragic: a coffee shop, a cup of coffee, a computer. A girl is frantically running her fingers across the computer keys, imagining a dead philosopher’s eyelids, and his probably quite long eyelashes.

 

26.

I imagine and re-imagine people. I swallow their ticks and twitches until the day that I pull them out, like a party-trick—impersonations to impress all my friends. A particular turn of phrase, tone of voice, tensing of the jaw, squinting of the eyes. The intent is not to damage. It is an acknowledgement of the physical casing they have received for this time on the earth, and we are all at the mercy of our casings, after all. There is a bitter humor in it, if we allow ourselves to see it. We are all at the mercy of our real-time manifestations, and we are all at the mercy of what others perceive in us and the language they use to communicate such. It is profoundly terrifying to be earnest in the way we portray ourselves, to attempt confidence, or attempt to “own” who we are, because then we are made vulnerable.

Kierkegaard chose to hide and attempted to control himself in the hands of others by giving out, like seeds to ravenous birds, pieces of ideas about himself. In the end, he emerged victorious. A lot of good that did him. A lot of happiness that brought him.

 

27.

In the end it’s all a question of ear. The rules of grammar end with ear—the edicts of law end with ear—the figured bass ends with ear—the philosophical system ends with ear—which is why the next life is also represented as pure music, as a great harmony—if only my life’s dissonance may soon be resolved into that. –Søren Kierkegaard, in reference to Hegelian thought, 1836

 

28.

I say I am in love with him because it’s safe to say that I love him. Safe.

 

29.

People make broad assumptions about me or my identity. “I think you are a perceptive young woman,” or, “You are not willing to take things at face value, you question things, you are curious.” I don’t believe anything I tell myself. Only by hearing about myself through others’ mouths do I crawl my way into reality. Then I know what I am, and I am temporarily at rest. I end with ear.

 

30.

I imagine Kierkegaard’s tongue—a pale pink. Imagining his tongue resting in his mouth—warm, cozy, nestling behind his teeth—it’s easier to imagine him alive. We never see tongues in pictures. We see hardened teeth. We see things that people try to control, things that can shift with the time and the style—hair, the arrangement of the hands across the lap. But to imagine flesh and life, it’s easier to imagine the tongue, warm, wet and cloistered, hidden in the mouth.

 

31.

Dear Søren,

You end with ear, and I have no complaints.

I love you into reality; I grip you into existence. We “hit it off” and are “compatible.” In my mind, you’re sitting at the table across from me, grasping a pen firmly between your thumb and forefinger, and these muscles, along with your tongue, are the strongest muscles in your body. I explain that I actually picked the coffee mug about the Cod by accident—is that allowed? You allow it.

I think you’ll allow me a great many things. I think you won’t waste my time. I think you’ll make observations about the color of my earlobes, and I think you’ll look at me ravenously, like you are about to make fun of me, or like you are about to eat me—“fork” me, so to speak, true to your nickname. Yes. Like you are about to spear me.

 

 

_________________________

NOTES

 

Impressions of Kierkegaard in italics above were chiefly drawn from Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen.

Passages in Kierkegaard’s own words were drawn from his journals as collected with commentary by D. Anthony Storm (sorenkierkegaard.org).

Kierkegaard’s discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac is found in Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric published under Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Elizabeth Horneber’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNIPRISM international, The Open BarHotel Amerika, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-16 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Winner. She teaches writing in Mankato, Minnesota.

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El Pañuelo

Christy Bailey

I tug the fabric spanning my forehead, nudge the knot at the nape of my neck, smooth the tails of my headscarf. Only when I’m sure I’ve covered every hairless spot on my scalp do I fold my hands across my lap and flash a smile. Lista. Ready.

The dark-haired photographer lifts his eyelids in slow motion, first taking in the brown leather buckles crisscrossing my dangling feet, then the breathable khakis, loosely bunched at the knees and pouched over my stomach. He takes in my white layering tank, thick, opaque, cut between crew and scoop neck, simple and modest per Peace Corps recommendations. My face he gives a quick once-over, just another pale-skinned Gringa among the many he will photograph today. But instead of aiming his sizable camera my way, he fixes his gaze on my bandanna, a white, rust, and navy patterned cotton, Aztecan in appearance, a donation from my aunt’s hippie days, or maybe from Mom’s camping days, back when our family’s idea of a vacation was piling into the station wagon and trekking to a nearby national or state park, hiking waterfall trails, sleeping on air mattresses, roasting marshmallows over a fire, and masquerading unkempt hair with paisley cotton squares. The photographer’s eyes narrow, whether in critique or curiosity, I can’t tell.

I shift my weight on the stool. Had I known I’d be posing for an ID photo that I’ll carry everywhere I go for the next two years, I would have set aside a more flattering outfit: the burgundy knit dress I wore the first day of training in Miami or the fuchsia button-down I chose for last night’s bienvenidos fiesta with our Honduran host families. I’ve always put thought into my appearance for identification photos, a triple coat of mascara to widen my eyes, a douse of peach gloss to plump my lips, a final hair check in the rearview mirror before entering the DMV. But when I said hello to third world adventure, I said goodbye to a ready supply of makeup, hand mirrors, even my wig. I have no hair to fluff or flatten. Even if I had known about today’s photo session, I wouldn’t be equipped to enhance my appearance. So I pose, in shapeless hiking attire, raw and unembellished, for an ID card that’s supposed to represent who I am in this new land. Maybe that’s the idea, one of the many reasons I joined the Peace Corps at thirty-five, fifteen years into a professional marketing career: to shed my Corporate America image.

The late July air is thick and wet with humidity. I swipe my hand across my forehead, lick the organic lip balm made of beeswax and natural oils. The minty flavor bites more than soothes, but I run my tongue across the salve over and over again, a childhood habit I’ve never been able to break. I scan the room for any sign of comfort but find only obstructions to it—dark curtains blocking natural light, undecipherable Spanish sayings on wall posters.

Finally the photographer breaks the silence, hurls harsh, mysterious syllables at me. “Quítese el pañuelo,” he says. He talks so fast, not like my patient host mother, who enunciated every word while guiding me through her hillside home yesterday afternoon.

Repita?” My eyes squint into the blinding light of a high-powered, fluorescent bulb.

El pañuelo,” he says, louder this time, and slower. “Quíteselo.”

My mouth gapes, I’m sure I can piece this together. Pan as in bread? Quita as in quit? Quit the bread, fatty? I stifle a laugh. Gorda I do know, and he did not say gorda. Though from what I’ve read, a stocky woman like me can expect to hear her share of gordas in this country, where the blackest gal in town is called La Negra, the guy with the squintiest eyes is called El Chino, and the most undernourished sticklet is called La Flaca.

No comprendo,” I concede. I have no idea what you’re saying, Big Guy.

The photographer taps his head in beat with the words. “El pa-ñue-lo. Quí-te-se-lo.”

We lock eyes, my soft baby blues and his black stones. I halt all movement to concentrate. There’s a woodpecker gnawing on his skull. No, wait. On my skull. I’ve got wood for a brain. Or a stain. On my bandanna. Crap. Not bird shit? My hand flits to the knotted scarf.

The photographer raises a caterpillar eyebrow and nods.

I feel streams of lava oozing through my body, the burn of comprehension as it reaches my head, my heart, my belly. El pañuelo. The headscarf. He wants me to remove it.

Yo soy.Yo tengo…”I start to explain, but I have no words. I am what? I have what? For eight years my alopecia, the autoimmune disease that causes my body to attack my hair, has been a topic I’ve been unable to broach, even with many of my friends. Under the scarf, ash blonde tufts dot my scalp. But Alopecia Christy isn’t someone people know. She’s been hiding under a human hair wig, unwilling to display the hair loss, unable to confess it, as if losing her hair is an offense, the result of something she either did or failed to do, a source of great shame.

Quíteselo.”

I’ve just let go of the wig. Must I surrender the scarf, too? Again I scan the room, but this time I don’t see curtains or motivational posters or even the scowling photographer. I see the Fancy Hair on a wig stand in my parents’ guest room in North Carolina, sixteen hundred miles away, seven hours by plane, much too far to save me now. I purse my lips and blink back tears, determined to maintain my composure. But in the glare of the spotlight, my body betrays me. My hands tremble. My eyes well. I thought I was ready to bare myself. I thought that once I was far from everyone and everything I’ve ever known, I would automatically open up. I thought I could embrace Alopecia Christy. I was wrong. I do not untie the scarf.

No puedo,” I say. “No puedo, no puedo, no puedo.” I can’t.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Christy Bailey earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2002, Christy chose service and adventure over the financial stability of her corporate job by joining the Peace Corps and accepting a post in Honduras, a place that profoundly affected her and influenced her future writing life.

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Do Not’s (For Her) and Do Not’s (For Him)

Michael Levan

Do Not’s (For Her)

Do not drink alcohol: this may hurt the baby. / Severe learning disabilities, physical abnormalities, and disorders of the central nervous system may result. / Do not drink caffeine (or maybe not too much; it is okay to sneak a sip, / here or there, if careful, she-of-the-morning-two-cups will argue). / Increased risk of miscarriage during the first trimester is associated with elevated caffeine intake. / Do not eat soft cheeses. Brie, Gorgonzola, Camembert, goat, feta, queso blanco will assuredly have Listeria. / (This, she finds toughest; no more / baked goat cheese dinners with him / to warm their wintered stomachs.) / Do not eat deli meat: again, Listeria. (She is vegetarian; this will be no problem.) / Do not eat fish / high in mercury: no swordfish or tilefish; no King mackerel to finish / roasting in the oven after a kiss / on the grill; no seven-spiced shark steaks or shark kabobs, / absolutely no shark fin soup when they eat high-priced Chinese. (Again, no problem.) / Do not eat uncooked fish or shellfish, / Which goes without much saying, he thinks, wondering what / the world must be coming to if that needs noting. / Do not drink unpasteurized milk or cider; Campylobacter, E. coli, Listeria, or Salmonella. / Do not eat salads / made in a store (Listeria, one more time). / Do not eat at salad bars, sayeth the March of Dimes, for fear of, / yes, Listeria. / Do not lick the spoon or tongue away / the chocolate batter from the beaters’ twisted metal / after making cookies or cake. Do not think / pregnancy is excuse to Eat for two; this is myth. / Do not panic; do not worry. Babies happen / every minute. Do not think / this list is complete, ma’am: / there will be more trouble soon enough.

 

Do Not’s (For Him)

Do not drink alcohol in front of her, / especially not beers, sun-kissed Hefeweizens or bitterly persistent pale ales. She will ask / for a sip, she will beg for a half-glass. / Say no and be strong: remember, this will hurt / only the least important person of this new three. / Do not drink caffeine. A long night’s sleep will never come / easily again; take advantage now. / Do not eat what might turn / her stomach; roasted salmon, a salami sandwich, too-heavily-garlicked spaghetti. / (At least brush your teeth before / trying to kiss her glowing, or faintly shimmering if it’s early on, self.) / Do not rub her belly and sing, I wish I had a watermelon, I wish / I had a watermelon. It is crass. / Do not force her onto a roller coaster. (Sudden stops can harm the baby.) Do not / suggest taking a sauna or dipping into a hot tub. (Raised core temperature is a no-no.) / Do not go for a long, romantic bike ride. (Her center / of gravity will have been wrecked.) Do not propose / a celebratory skydive. (This deserves no explanation.) / Basically, do not openly enjoy anything / she cannot do. Do not seem pleased / this list is shorter and more ridiculous. She will be carrying / the weight for as long as this marriage lasts, / for as long as this child is alive. And if she ever feels / terrible, broken-down, needing to unburden herself and says, / You did this to me, / do not, do not, do not say anything. Take the punishment / like a man.

 

Art by Matt Monk

 

Michael Levan has work in recent or forthcoming issues of Arts & LettersPainted Bride QuarterlyIron Horse Literary ReviewCopper Nickel, and Ruminate. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Saint Francis and writes reviews for American Microreviews and Interviews.

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What the Body Holds

Betty Jo Buro

Meditate lying down. If it’s the afternoon, and the house is quiet, meditate on the red couch in the family room, and hope that it will lead to a little nap. Meditate with your dog. She’s always up for some Zen time, and often curls herself around your bare feet. You cannot be in the same vicinity without touching; your affection for each other is so completely and unconditionally mutual.

Practice Yin yoga. In Yin you hold postures and twists for 5 minutes. You hardly sweat and yet parts of your middle-aged body gradually soften, like frozen dough left on the countertop to thaw. Blocks and blankets and variations are encouraged. Anything goes. During Savasana place your legs over a bolster and cover your body with a blanket. Although you are in a roomful of people, notice how surprisingly peaceful this is.

If it’s the morning, meditate in bed. Stack some pillows against the headboard and semi-recline. Allow yourself breaks to sip coffee: Peets, Major Dickason’s Blend, steamed milk whipped up with your hand-held frother, one small tap of organic cinnamon, the Impressionists mug with flowers painted outside and  in. As always, include the dog. She is accommodating. The dog will meditate at any time of day.

During yoga, when you are in postures that open the heart—a backbend or lying over a bolster positioned along your spine—you are often overcome with loneliness. It bubbles up from your belly and comes to rest under your sternum. It feels deep and old. After a while it passes, but makes you wonder what else your body has held onto over the years. Maybe your body is in possession of every single injury, every emotion you have experienced. Your dislocated shoulder, the argument with your co-worker in 1987, childbirth, the death of your father, may all be tucked away, folded meticulously like origami and stored away in your joints, under the sheaths of your muscle fibers, bundled around your kidney, blocking the right ear that you can’t hear out of anymore. You imagine all of your disappointments coiled snake-like into your intestines. Your fears—of heights, being held underwater, losing a child, being locked in a steam room, falling off the edge of the Grand Canyon, speaking in public, being poor, traveling out of the country, contracting ALS—all free float through your bloodstream, circling through you constantly, relentlessly, seeping into every cell.

When meditating, one is not supposed to think. But of course, the harder you try not to think, the more persistent your thoughts. Do not berate yourself for having thoughts, just observe them, notice them, and let them float by, like a slow-moving cloud. Even so, sometimes the entire act of meditation is one big frustration—some worries refuse to pass cloud-like, and instead meat hook to your brain and you’re doomed. Have a mini panic attack. Check the timer. Ten minutes of concentrated worrying is an eternity. The dog has no such difficulties. She might adjust her position, twist on to her back, for example, in hopes of a belly rub, but unless the UPS guy rings the doorbell, she’s already achieved nirvana.

Get a massage. When the therapist asks if anything in particular is bothering you, jokingly say everything. But soon after she places her hands on you, you realize it is true. There isn’t a place on your body that doesn’t feel acutely sore under her pressure. You hurt in places you didn’t even realize. You allow her to mine your pain. She digs it out between the vertebrae of your neck, underneath your scapula, in the joint capsules of your hips, hidden beneath your quadriceps. She finds all of it. When she kneads the web between your thumb and first finger you nearly leap off the table. What is that? Energy, she says, and works and works it until she feels it release. You wonder what she means by energy. You imagine this is where all your failures lie, large and small, woven into the pad of your palm.

You suspect your body has absorbed the good along with the bad. Somewhere hidden among your organs must be joy. There must be contentment, and brief flashes of peace. The fleeting but perfect moments, like the morning you drove across the Palm City bridge and the water below sparkled while Neil Young played on the radio. You had just driven through for coffee and hadn’t yet taken a sip. But you could smell it. You could anticipate the hot, bitter taste. Or how about that night flight to Boston when the girls were small?   As soon as the plane lifted off they each leaned into you from their seats and fell asleep, and you closed your eyes too, and thought, if the plane went down into the Atlantic it would be ok because of the heaviness of their bodies, their warm weight against you, one sweet head in your lap, the other fitting exactly tucked into your chest. The exquisite perfectness of that was almost too much to bear.

Ask yourself why. Why do you make yourself sit still, to twist into shapes of loneliness, to allow someone else to touch your life experiences? You don’t know the answer. You only know that in the past you’ve distracted yourself—alcohol and sex and that tiny phase involving recreational drugs. You have eaten too much. You’ve eaten too little. You kept going when your body begged for rest. You’ve ferreted away feelings meaning to take them out and consider them later, another time, and then avoided the task or simply forgot. And so now you feel as though you owe it to your body, these small gestures. These acts of kindness. This is why you do what you do. To make room, to clear out a space, to unwind the tight loops of clutter so a memory of a long ago plane flight has a place to stay.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Betty Jo Buro holds an MFA from Florida International University. Her work has appeared in Cherry Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, The Lindenwood Review, The Manifest-Station, Compose Journal, and Sliver of Stone. She was a 2016 finalist for Southern Indiana Review’s Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award, and a 2016 semi-finalist for American Literary Review’s Annual Creative Writing Awards. She lives and writes in Stuart, Florida.

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The Ultimate Troll: A Confession

Isabella Tangherlini

My name is Isabella Tangherlini, I am twenty years old, and I used to be an internet troll. It sounds like something you’d hear at a group therapy session with a twelve-step program, or maybe an episode of Dr. Phil. Either way, it’s not a very good way to introduce a person, or an essay. The word “troll” conjures an image of a short, hairy imp with pointed teeth and a penchant for lurking beneath bridges. And this negative imagery is absolutely on point when it comes to the business of online trolling. Many have a simplistic view of Internet trolls—but trolls are more than simply anonymous bullies. Trolling is a bastardization of culture jamming, itself already a form of anti-consumerism with roots in anarchy and subversion. Trolling takes this anarchy to a different level, an extreme form of schadenfreude. Trolls basically weave through the online universe creating conflict and discord as they go. The terminology and culture are complicated and extensive, with many ins and outs and bizarre rules and caveats. The basic idea is simple: trolling exists for trolling’s sake. The vitriol, dissonance, and bedlam left in a troll’s wake is the point. Nothing is sacred, nothing is off-limits—everyone and anything can be trolled.

My career as an internet troll began in the library of my high school six years ago. I was a fourteen-year-old sophomore on lunch break with two friends: Michael, who owned a full-body camouflage suit and loved airsoft guns, and Robert, who once set my jeans on fire in Chemistry with a torch lighter. We were discussing our impending sophomore research paper and brainstorming potential research topics. After a while, Michael, bored, asked me, “Would you like to see some kittens?” Michael logged into his school account and brought up the web browser. “Here,” he said, motioning to the keyboard.

“I thought you were showing me kittens,” I said.

“I’m feeling a little lazy. Type in encyclopedia dramatica dot com slash kittens,” Michael said. I heard Robert snigger and cast a knowing glance over at Michael. Frowning, I followed Michael’s instructions and hit “enter.” I was greeted with an entire page of the most viscerally graphic images I’d ever seen. Stillborn children with horrifying birth defects. Rows and rows of mutilated genitals afflicted with venereal disease. A man who had attempted suicide via shotgun, and failed. Bizarre illustrations of fetish pornography. “What the hell, Michael?” I whispered, quickly closing the page.

“That’s kittens for you,” he replied, laughing.

This morbid experience might have turned a person off the internet forever. ButI was intrigued. Although the images were gruesome, I was more interested in the reactions to the pictures recorded in the comments area. No one seemed particularly perturbed by the images. If anything, the commenters were glad to think the pictures would disgust other viewers. This strange website with its flippant disregard of society’s taboos piqued my interest and I wanted to know more. I went home and returned to the website, and one of the links at the top of the page was simply titled, “4chan.” But what is 4chan?

4chan is, officially speaking, an image-based internet forum. You post a picture, people reply to it, and discussion happens. 4chan is organized into dozens of different boards that cater to different interests. Do you like cars? There’s a board for that. Video games? There are at least four boards dedicated to them. Grown men discussing which animated pony in a show for little girls is the most sexually appealing? Yes, there’s a board for that, too. 4chan is almost completely anonymous, and keeps no archive of the thousands of threads and pictures that are posted to it daily. Once the thread reaches its post limit it disappears forever. Maybe because of the anonymity, or the lack of archives, there’s an aura of mystery around the website.

The most famous board on 4chan, whereall the worst horror stories and tall tales come from, is /b/. /b/ is the “random” board of 4chan, where a user can start a thread about virtually anything. For whatever reason, /b/ attracts more trolls than any other board, which explains its harsh reputation. I was fascinated by /b/. On it, nothing was sacred. My heart pounded as I waded through images that felt secret, forbidden. I was privy to the very things society tells us to close our eyes to. What was hidden from almost everyone, was laid bare for me. I found dozens of threads featuring dead and mutilated children, terrible war crimes, and amateur snuff films. There were also discussions on why the Holocaust was almost certainly a hoax, and what seemed like a veritable ocean of white supremacist theories. And yet, despite the serious tones of the conversations, a muted tone of sarcasm ran throughout the whole place. Somehow, I understood that this was the ultimate “Just kidding!” Yes, the jokes were awful. The humor was off-color to the extreme. But these people were largely harmless. I didn’t believe the anons I came across on /b/ were genuinely bad people. I thought of /b/as a place where we could participate in the unfiltered, honest conversations that only took place in real life after a few drinks.

But some of us, an inner circle of people, had different intentions. Most people who trolled on /b/ were trolling the other boards as well, like /o/ (the automobile board) for example, and posting irrelevant content to anger the regular posters. Like, they liked cars, so we’d find really awful porn of dragons having sex with cars and post it in one of their threads talking about BMWs. Sure, it was nasty, and at the end of it all I had a collection of weird images saved on my laptop, but to this day I find that stuff  harmless.

The real trolling took place off-site.

Back in 2010, there was a series of truly epic flame wars taking place in the comments section of YouTube. If you’re at all familiar with the comments section of YouTube, you know it is the ninth circle of comment hell, dripping with personal, often vicious attacks. Flame wars were an everyday occurrence then, as they are now. But what set the flame wars of 2010 apart from today’s wars were the participants. On the internet, spread across many sites and forums, are a group of fetishists known as “Furries.” Furries are people who are attracted to anthropomorphized animals. Members of the community vary in terms of their level of outspokenness. But, like any fringe community, the loudest members are often the worst. And on YouTube, the loudest furries were beginning to grate on the nerves of /b/. To /b/, furries represented an extreme fringe community even they didn’t want to accept. While furries rallied for acceptance and normalization of their behavior, /b/ lashed out against them.  I took part in those 2010 flame wars between /b/ and the many furry-centric YouTube channels and users. Any prolific furry user whose channel we found out about, we attacked. Posting nasty comments, flagging their videos for no reason, making parody videos of their content—it was all-out war. The furries retaliated. They would post furry pornography on /b/, or make videos of themselves in their animal costumes ranting empty threats. In retrospect, I don’t think I fully know why /b/ chose to target the furry community. But I latched on to this dislike and made it my own, even though I’d never felt personally offended by furries. I wasn’t in any school clubs and had few friends. I felt a greater sense of companionship with the faceless, hateful, politically incorrect horde of /b/ than I ever did with any of my classmates. And the feeling that I could say or look at whatever I wanted online gave me a greater adrenaline rush than anything I could do as a high schooler with limited freedom.

The thing about being an internet troll, though, is that eventually who you are online and who you are offline start to blur together. And when you post on places like 4chan, those two personalities meld into something uniquely unpleasant. To be short, I was a really mean high school sophomore. I would openly bash my Jewish classmates. Despite being a member of the LGBT community myself, I freely used the word “faggot” in everyday speech. Once I was sitting with Robert in our chemistry class, and instead of taking notes we drew the popular memes of 4chan in the back of my notebook—Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammy Awards, Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and Advice Dog, the puppy who gave questionable counsel. I saw nothing wrong with what I was doing or who I had become. For me, everyone was in on the joke. It wasn’t my fault if they couldn’t detect the sarcasm in my voice, or tell that I wasn’t really anti-Semitic or racist or homophobic.  As far as I was concerned, the uninitiated were beneath my notice—4chan was like a secret club that only a few people could join, despite the millions of users worldwide who posted there.

I browsed and posted on 4chan daily until I was a freshman in college. And then….I stopped. I was a sophomore in college when I realized that trolling, this culture of nastiness, wasn’t who I wanted to be.  4channers call it “troll’s remorse”—the sudden moment of clarity when you realize that being mean to another human being for no adequately explored reason is kind of awful. And troll’s remorse hit me hard when I remembered the longest-suffering victim of 4chan’s efforts, Christian Weston Chandler. Christian—abbreviated on 4chan to Chris-chan or CWC—was a 24-year old, high-functioning autistic man who made videos on YouTube about his fan-made comics and figurine collections. He posted a video venting his rage at not winning a contest, which caught the attention of many viewers—including some 4channers. From that point on, Chris-chan was trolled mercilessly for nearly five years. He’s been hacked, had his personal information leaked, he’s been harassed, and mocked for being sent to jail and suffering the death of his father. Chris-chan’s life has been thoroughly tainted, if not completely ruined, by trolls. When I came across Chris-chan at the age of 15, it was via his entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica. The entry itself was expansive, with many links to chat logs and screenshots. It was all dedicated to Chris-chan and what had been done to troll him. I read the entire entry and its links. In a few hours’ worth of reading, I found out nearly everything about Chris-chan’s life—where he went to school, how many girls he’d dated, where he lived—even where to find his amateur sex tape. He was hilarious. He was pathetic. He was homophobic, unhygienic, and completely backwards. He deserved to be trolled, I thought. I was delighted when I read about the things that’d been done to him: the deception, the fake accounts pretending to be girls interested in him, the dozens of pizzas ordered to his house. At the time, it was hilarious. I’d show my friends his YouTube videos, where he’d be ranting and raving at the camera, laughing my head off while they looked on with mild interest.

“Isn’t he funny, in like a pathetic way?” I’d say, grinning widely.

“Isn’t he retarded or something? That’s kind of mean,” my friends would say. I’d just shake my head and roll my eyes, thinking, He’s just autistic.

Either way, I wanted in on it. I wanted to troll Christian Chandler myself. He was growing harder and harder to find as more and more people trolled him, and the only place I could reach him was through Sony’s PlayStation Network. I found his PSN ID through the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry and clicked the “Add Friend” button. I waited nearly a week for his response. When he accepted, I was ecstatic. “Is this really Christian Chandler?” I sent in a message to his account. “I am the one and only Christian Weston Chandler,” he replied. At that point, my options seemed infinite. What would I do? How would I troll him? Just go the usual route, and call him out for his various online misdeeds? Threaten to call his parents? Maybe try to phish the password for his account?

Honestly? None of these things happened. Once I’d typed out the perfect nasty message and sent it to him, he promptly deleted me and never replied. It was all very underwhelming. Mine was probably the umpteenth nasty message he’d received that day, and definitely not the worst message or the last. My fascination with CWC ended very quickly after that, and I didn’t give him—or my own delight in hurting him—much thought for the next four years.

I was taking a sociology course my sophomore year in college, and one of my friends was commenting on his autistic brother and the stigma he faced in society. I’d had many, many conversations about autism, and heard plenty of stories about autistic children and family members, but for some reason it all finally clicked in that classroom. Trolling Christian Chandler, reading about his whole life and laughing about it on Encyclopedia Dramatica, trying to add to his misery—it was awful. Suddenly I didn’t understand myself.  Everything that I’d found hilarious as a high school sophomore wasn’t funny anymore, four years later. Christian Chandler was an autistic man raised by uneducated parents in a low-income neighborhood in Virginia. He certainly hadn’t had the same advantages that I had. I grew up in one of the richest towns in Connecticut and had the luxury to sit in a sociology classroom in a private liberal arts college. Who was I to laugh at Christian? Who was anyone to laugh at Christian? Rich or poor, autistic or not—why did we laugh? And why for so long? Suddenly everyone seemed pathetic to me. The poor guy who’s been harassed and victimized for years and the people who have nothing better to do than type angry words on a keyboard all day. It suddenly seemed so obvious: It’s not fun to laugh at disabled people or tell furries to kill themselves.

It’s been more than five years since Christian was “discovered” by 4chan. I checked on his Facebook page a few months ago, and he still gets nasty comments on his statuses from trolls who won’t give up the game.

I like to think that I wouldn’t fall into the same pattern of behaviors I displayed all those years ago, and I haven’t. But can an internet troll be reformed? Am I really a retired 4channer? I still browse and post on the chans occasionally. My sense of humor remains sharp and off-color. Images of disaster and victims of violence still don’t faze me. Have I really managed to separate my online persona from my offline persona? Or have they simply consolidated neatly into a low-empathy, high-functioning human being?

Maybe this essay is what they’d call the “ultimate troll.” A literary confession on memes and 4chan. You’d never think that the same culture behind the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account would have any place in the digital space of a literary journal, but apparently it does. Haven’t I just trolled you? Reformed, indeed.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Isabella Tangherlini holds a degree in Communication Studies from Manhattanville College.

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Mentor & Tormentor

Neil Shepard

He’s been sober now for decades, but in the early days of his teaching career, when I was his student, he was deep into the destructive work of booze. It was a time when the ampersand was intentional & historical, Beat shorthand for every slow, tired “and” anchored to old times. It was 1974, Fort Collins, Colorado, my first year of grad school & lots of amped-up ampersands. Wild West creative writing program, not yet legit, not MFA’ed. Refuge for renegades & green writers. I was green as could be.

Back east in the Green Mountains (an undergrad at UVM), I’d made a very small dent in the literary canon –white men, many stodgy, some thrilling, all of them dead. I’d read nothing modern, nothing contemporary. Yet, I wanted to be a writer. I’d jumped ship a few times – pre-med, to psych, to eastern philosophy, to literature & one creative writing course. That was all. I loved Shakespeare, Keats, & Yeats. That was all. And on that shaky basis, I was admitted to CSU, provisionally: within the year, I must demonstrate I could write or be out on my ear.

Bill Tremblay was my teacher, my mentor. Wild Bill. Like me, he’d grown up in Massachusetts mill towns. Like me, he loved jazz. That’s where the resemblances ended. Bill was second generation Beat, influenced by Ginsberg & Kerouac. In 1974, he ran workshops in the bars as often as in the classroom. Fledgling writer that I was, Bill took me under wing. Writers drank, he said. I drank. I drank a lot. Bill read Tarot fortunes without the cards. Bill juggled seven conversations in the air without dropping one. I tried to be a minor fortune teller & hipster & failed. Bill was jazz & drugs & booze & all night binges in the bars & post-bar 12-packs in his car parked somewhere on the eastern Colorado plains, watching chain lightning run up & down the sky or watching a red sunrise bleed in the east. I watched a lot of lightning with him, watched a lot of sunrises, eyes bloodshot. I drank hard, well into my second year, until one night, I wanted to stop.

A claque of grad poets gathered around bottles of mescal, shoved at us by Bill. Drink, drink up! We swigged & swigged. At some dizzying point, I rejected the bottle. He shoved it back at my face – Drink, drink up! I turned away & then he was on me, wrestling me to the concrete floor. My mind blinked: I was wrestling with…my professor…over a bottle of mescal, wrestling with an angel & demon wrapped in one body, mentor/tormentor…But I’ve gotten ahead of myself…

In my first, green year, Bill pushed poems on me: You absolutely MUST read this… some new blast by Ginsberg or Bly, Lowell or Sexton. Bill pushed me to write poems I didn’t know I could. His voice charmed. He could read the phonebook & make it sound like a list-poem. When he ordered a burger or a beer, it sung like a haiku or jazz lyric. He did performance art before performance art. I couldn’t tell if his poems were good, blinded by his charisma.

Bill had given me two semesters to turn my game around, so I started to write like Bill, long associative phrases strung together, slightly surreal, full of fire & keening & dissociative moments that either stung like a tarantula or petered out like sawdust on a barroom floor the morning after. He gave me some Confessional advice: read Lowell’s Life Studies. Write about your family. I wanted to write love poems, nature poems. Fuck love, fuck nature, Bill said. Write about your family. & make it hurt.

I wrote six short poems & hit a wall. Somehow, I moved the wall & wrote a dozen long poems I called “The Father Poems.” They were about my father. & not about my father. The more I revised them, the less they were about him. The more I wrote like Bill, the more they sounded like Bill. My father did wild, preposterous things: danced in jazz bars till dawn, blanked out the names of his kids & wife, blacked out, woke in strange beds or on the skid, wrestled Vietnam vets out of their PTSDs, went blind as Homer, recited by heart like the Homeridae & went 100 mph round & round the brain circuitry.  Soon it was obvious who “The Father Poems” were about.

Each week I took new drafts to his office. Bill loved them like a son. He praised their style, wildness, fresh riffs on this sonuvabitch of a father. What a monster, said Bill. What a horrible, horrible man! he moaned. Now I understand you, he said. What you’ve suffered. I winced, I cringed. How could I tell him the horrible truth. Mentor & Tormentor. Mon frere, mon semblable! Had I read Baudelaire, I’d have had the words.

Eventually, Bill sent “The Father Poems” to a state-wide, grad school writing contest, Richard Hugo the final judge. 1st, 2nd, & 3rd place winners were not me. In that most abominable of categories, Honorable Mention, appeared my name. At the awards ceremony, Hugo spoke briefly about the winning poems, then turned his attention to “The Father Poems.” He called them heartfelt, full of wild energy, drunken disintegration, desperate longing for integration & acceptance, desire to be healed by a father’s blessed hand. I was very glad the poems were that good, proud for myself, & prouder still for my secret mentor & tormentor, Bill Tremblay.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Neil Shepard is an American poet, essayist, professor of creative writing, and literary magazine editor. He is a recipient of the 1992 Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry, as well as a recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony.

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In Montaigne’s Shadow

Clinton Crockett Peters

There was always Montaigne. “Of Cannibals.” “Of Drunkenness.” “Upon Some Verses of Virgil.” The stranglehold of imperialism. Books. Thumbs. Dead fathers. He is the sixteenth-century headwaters of the essay, the textual meanderer, the French progenitor of Emerson, Shakespeare, and Descartes. Montaigne haunts us all, more momentousness here than torment. I dwell on his death as much as the death of my own father, a writer, like me.

A recent article dubbed Montaigne the “godfather of blogging.” His pioneering style seems to have anticipated, among other things, the anxieties now arresting nonfiction. Montaigne made the most of his century’s science and philosophy, freely copying from Horace, Virgil, and other ancients, and going un-fact checked. It was not the generation of thoughts but their recording that was his business.

I have trouble being so brazen. I am more like my father in this way, with whom I share a face, outward friendliness, crippling insecurity, and book-ardor. It was he who stacked novels on the mantel, made it seem less strange to squirm behind a desk, wanted me to write.

Near the end of my father’s life at a Dallas nursing home, where kind-lipped West African nurses cared for him like a newborn, he repeated confessions of wasted youth, his thirties spent carousing and womanizing, lost in a pinball mind. At fifty, he packed up and trucked our family to Lubbock, Texas, to start his own journalism business, to write about football.

But his work was never a success. My mom floated him on her teaching job. And then Dad grew a tumor that, when he was fifty-nine, swelled and crowded his brain, stole his ability to write.

Everyone wants what is lost. Sixteenth century Europe: Constantinople sacked. A re-appropriation of the classics. Montaigne fit in. His father, trying to fashion nobility, ensured his son’s first language was Latin. He was a pampered child of the classics, but his Jewish mom’s poor family was burned in Spain. He later entered parliament, believing government at odds with justice. “How many condemnations have I seen that are more criminal than the crime?” he wrote.

He was a man broken in his time and out of his time, sensitive but elitist. There was an unaccountable, contradictory storm in his personality. “Essays were designed to record the flux and flow of his daily existence,” writes his biographer Donald Frame.

“I portray passing,” Montaigne explained.

While Dad labored as a sports journalist, he wrote nonfiction essays. They were endearing and candid in their way, monographs he had printed and bound at the copy center. I remember him leaving one there, saying, “Someone will want to read it.”

Growing up, I assumed he owned a playbook that told him how to write, but I see now that he was charming fate, waiting for a break. Maybe he was enabled by my supportive mother, and his sportsaholic friends to compile football narratives, and mostly ignore what was lurking in his consciousness, along with that tumor — the engulfing need to explain himself.

By most accounts, the greatest impact on Montaigne’s life was an ugly man named Etienne de la Boetie. To Montaigne, he and Boetie were “two halves of the same soul.” Boetie gave Montaigne his skepticism and his ideas about beauty. They carried on “the most remarkable of friendships.”

Boetie died four years after their meeting. On his deathbed, he sent his wife away, and passed his final moments with Montaigne, murmuring his name over and over and over, his loss giving Montaigne a reason to create art.

When my father died, I felt only a quiet numbness. I had eleven years to prepare for his death, but it still left me frozen. It took me three more years to learn what he’d taught me: that every letter counts, and so do the spaces between them.

The death of Montaigne feels more visceral than the death of other writers, the silence not of the loon but of the wilderness. He was aware of multidimensionality, the contradiction of existence, of laying bare his bifurcated humanity. “My history must be adapted to the moment,” he wrote.

Montaigne fretted constantly about kidney stones. They’d killed his father, and he searched Europe for a cure. In the end, he died from a severe case of tonsillitis at fifty-nine, the age at which my father stopped writing.

His is a lesson I’m trying to learn, that I cannot reduce Dad to a sentence, nor to a period after which my life begins.

With Boetie gone, Montaigne’s essays filled “a vigorous need to communicate,” his biographer Frame suggests. Montaigne wrote to talk to the dead.

His work to me is a force of nature, not a story, an is that emanates from his need to analyze himself. “I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself,” Montaigne wrote. And by that I believe he means Boetie too, the way I write to talk to my father, the person whose DNA and mind I am woven from. Like Montaigne, when I direct my gaze inside, I hope to find that mentor, father, friend who seems to have left his fingerprints. And until the last word falls, I’m looking for a way to recover that once entwined personality that left a space for me to fill.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Clinton Crockett Peters has been awarded literary prizes from Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Columbia Journal, and the Society for Professional Journalists. His writing has appeared in Orion, Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, The Rumpus, and many other venues. He lives in Carrollton, Texas.

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Murderer’s Bread

Toni Mirosevich

Whatever time it is—morning, noon, or long into the night—our neighbor lady is always three sheets to the wind. Maybe four.

We’re out in the front yard trying to dig a hole in the rock-hard ground to plant our first rose bush. A week ago my wife and I moved from our over-priced, cramped—enough already with the hypodermic needles on the sidewalk—city apartment into an underpriced, large—god, is that a raccoon in our garbage can?—fifties rancher in a foggy coastal town. The rose bush is our attempt to beautify the place. Every day fog barrels in from the sea, damp sheets of the stuff that wrap around every leaf, limb, post, and give the neighborhood a gray, dingy look. It gives us a gray, dingy look too but we aren’t complaining. The crummy weather is what makes the houses in the area affordable. No one with any real money would want to live in this constant chill.

I hear a front door slam and look up to see the neighbor lady coming our way. She’s weaving a bit as she crosses the street, still in her nightgown, a coat thrown over her shoulders. The cigarette between her fingers trails smoke behind her like exhaust from a tailpipe. When she reaches our side of the street she grabs hold of our fence as if the sidewalk is the deck of a ship on a stormy sea, as if at any moment she might fall overboard.

Even from a few feet away I can smell the alcohol. She is off-gassing Jim Beam or maybe Wild Turkey. She offers no Good morning, no How’s it going? She just stands there for a moment, watching us dig.

Then she says, “I sure am glad a gay couple had the guts to move onto this block.”

It takes a second for that to hit, to register.

How did she know we’re gay? Sam and I could be two short-haired sisters who are very close, very, very close, and can’t stand to live apart. We could be very good girlfriends who decided to pool resources and buy a house together in a less than liberal neighborhood while we waited for Mr. Right to come along.

“Do you think that will be a problem?” Sam asks.

“Oh, no, honey,” says Three Sheets. “There’s a black family that lives three houses down.”

~

In my mother’s day there was something called the Welcome Wagon. Every neighborhood had ladies whose job it was to welcome a new family to the block. The ladies would be right there at your door—before the paint dried on the walls, before the boxes were unpacked— carrying a loaf of banana bread or zucchini, smiling sweetly while nosing for a glimpse through the door at what kind of housekeeper you were.

Sam’s reaction to our emissary from this neighborhood’s Welcome Wagon is to plant with even greater fervor: hydrangeas, lavender, more rose bushes. My reaction is to be extra vigilant. To keep watch. There’s:

The guy who stands in the open doorway of his house in a wife beater t-shirt

and pajama bottoms, a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck, who gives us the evil eye every time we walk by.

The boy I catch in the act of writing ‘bitch’ on our fence with a green felt pen.

When I ask him what in the hell he thinks he’s doing, he says, “I’m just copying over the letters that were already there.”

The man who mock-whispers “AC/DC” loud enough for us to hear when we go to put out our garbage cans for pick up. When he’s sure he’s got our attention he pulls out his johnny jump up and pees in the street.

The family that launches bottle rockets towards our yard on July 4th, our grass—due to the ongoing drought—as dry as a bone and ready to catch any spark.

I am sure we’ve made a mistake moving here. I tell Sam I am frightened. The truth is I’m terrified. We don’t belong here. Our neighbors are making that clear. I wonder out loud if it isn’t too late to move back to the city.

“We’re stuck here now,” she says as she digs a new hole for another freaking rosebush. “I don’t know why the rose petals are rusting. Maybe I should spring for some Miracle Grow.”

~

Six months later a new kid moves into the house directly across from ours. Three Sheets gave us the history of this house, how the old lady who lives there was very, very busy in her youth and had seven sons by seven different men. All of the sons are adults now and rotate in and out of their mother’s house whenever one of them loses a job or comes back from rehab. The new kid is one uncle’s progeny and the old lady’s grandson. He looks to be about nineteen, short, stocky, with a build that indicates he works out at lot.

He doesn’t seem to have a job. As my desk window looks straight across at his bedroom window I begin to take note of his daily routine. Every afternoon he emerges from his house as if he’s just gotten up. He stands in his driveway wearing sweat pants and nothing else, his bare chest puffed up and out like a little rooster. Facing our house he reaches down in his pants and fiddles around, then spits, then fiddles some more. I’m sure he’s sending us some kind of message.

Things start to heat up. A gang of young toughs begins to congregate on his front lawn. Sometimes there’s a fistfight. Sometimes a neighborhood car gets keyed. Sometimes we hear gunshots in the night. From behind my blinds I notice a string of guys who begin dropping by the kid’s bedroom window at odd hours. He opens up, someone palms him something and, in return, he hands back a paper sack. I tell Sam that the neighborhood just got a new Drug Barn with a convenient walk up window.

One day he comes home with a pregnant pit bull. White, stocky build, set jaw, ears clipped and close to her head. In a funny way he and the dog look a little alike. And they both look ready to spring.

Before long the dog has puppies. Five tiny pit bull puppies. I overhear the kid tell one of his buddies that he’s planning to train them to fight.

Sam has always been more generous than I. Too generous. Before I can stop her she hauls our big plastic doghouse from storage—the one our dogs used when they were pups but have since outgrown. She drags it across the street and asks if the kid would like to borrow it. Sure, he says and takes it with him into his backyard. I know we’ll never see that doghouse again.

That night in bed I hear the puppies crying. Their small yips and whimpers, their sad song, fills the air. Even huddled together in that doghouse they must be so cold out there.

I pull the covers up higher but can’t get back to sleep. The puppies, in unison, start up a high-pitched howling. They’re keening in the night, wailing now. I turn to Sam, can tell by her shallow breathing she’s awake too.

“You know, the real reason he’s raising them is to sell,” I whisper. “Pit bulls to support his bully pulpit.” The kid is very charismatic. There’s no denying he’d developed quite a following. He’s a punk evangelist. He’s the Elmer Gantry of this hood.

“Why in the hell did you give it to him?”

“For protection,” she said.

After that he gives us a quick nod of the head whenever we come out to brush the mold off the roses.

~

Didn’t we see it coming? This is what people ask us, after the fact. Or is it after the facts, plural? Facts that pile up and up and up until you can no longer ignore them and there’s no broom big enough to brush them under the rug.

Here they are, fact after fact after fact, scattered on top of the rug, scattered all over the place:

After a few months he acquires a girlfriend. Acquires, as in gets, as in needs to have one, as in picks one up. The girlfriend either has a well-paying job or rich parents for she drives an expensive car. A new Mercedes, no less.

One afternoon, the car needs gas.

She and the kid drive to a nearby gas station. He is sitting shotgun. He doesn’t have a driver’s license but I also think he likes being ferried, likes having a girlfriend chauffeur. The gas station isn’t far from our house, is owned by a man from India. He and his son operate the station and are known to run an honest garage. Once they helped me fix a flat tire, no charge.

While the girlfriend’s car is filling up the kid must say he has to pee. He probably says I gotta take a piss but other than the girlfriend no one is there to record his actual words. What is recorded later is what a bystander sees.

The bystander is the father’s son.

The kid gets out of the car and walks over to the restroom. He tries the door handle, finds the door locked, then turns and walks over to a flowerbed. There he unzips and starts to pee.

The flowerbed is the kind you now find at a lot of gas stations. Along with the flags and bright, cheerful signs like, “Pay, Pump and Bolt,” the flowerbeds are meant to beautify, to dress up the place, to give the illusion that you’re pulling into a pretty little landscaped island. The planted meridians of daisies or daffodils or tulips are there to make you forget that what we’re dealing with here is crude, bubbling crude, the kind of Texas Tea that made Jed a millionaire on the Beverly Hillbillies. To make you forget that gas—regular, unleaded, supreme—is stored in large underground tanks and is flammable, very flammable. With one shaker the whole shebang will blow and take you and your nice downscale neighborhood along with it.

When the station owner sees the kid doing his business in the flowerbed he rushes over and says, “Please don’t do that there. I will get the key. I will open the restroom for you.” But the kid ignores him and keeps peeing. The owner’s son hears the commotion and runs over to help. He yells, “Stop or I’m going to call the police.”

There’s an altercation. The kid pushes the son. The son—taller, bigger, more muscular—retaliates and pushes back. Hard. That’s when the kid runs. As he’s running away he yells that he’ll be back. No one sees where the girlfriend drives off.

He said he’d be back. He’d given his word. That night, as the father and son are closing up, the kid is hiding inside the service station garage. No one knows how he got in there. When the father comes into the garage to lock up the kid takes out a gun, takes aim. With one shot he puts a bullet through the father’s head.

~

A tall white man wearing a rumpled dark suit and a serious demeanor comes to our front door. Big belly. Tired eyes, as if he’s seen it all. He says his name is McCool. Detective McCool. I’m about to say, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but can tell by the way he scowls when he flashes his badge that he isn’t.

We welcome him inside. He tells us what happened, what the authorities have pieced together about the murder, tells us how the arrest went down. The police came to the grandmother’s house and found the kid in bed, with the covers pulled up over his head. Shivering, I picture him shivering. God. How did he end up like this?

I say something about how I can’t believe someone so young could do something so heinous. McCool says the kid isn’t that young. Then he asks if we had any idea he was up to something. He wants to know if we think the act of shooting the station owner was premeditated.

“Listen,” Sam says. “He was just a kid, a neighborhood punk. How could we know he had it in him to do something like this?”

“What makes you think he was just a neighborhood punk?”

Later that night, in bed, in the quiet of the neighborhood—how quiet it is now, just the soft, muffled sound of the fog blowing in, the gang gone, the puppies gone—Sam turns to me and says, “Maybe I wanted to think he was just a neighborhood punk.”

He gets 25 to life and is sent to San Quentin. I look on the prison’s website to see where he is going to be living for the next 25 years. Up pops a photo of that famous hellhole on San Francisco Bay with its weird Knights of the Round Table castle façade. The grounds are beautifully landscaped to make you forget it’s a place that can blow at any moment. Off to one side of the front entrance is a rhododendron in full bloom. On the other side: three anemic-looking rose bushes.

The website has an article about a new prison program for model prisoners: the Prison Garden Project. The purpose is to create, “a non-segregated organic garden to soften the San Quentin prison yard.” If the kid is on his best behavior maybe he can get involved and when he gets out he can show us a thing or two.

~

The first holiday season after he is sent up Sam starts baking. Holiday bread. Pumpkin bread and zucchini bread and gingerbread, studded with dried fruits or chocolate chips or nuts. The loaves rise in their silver foil loaf pans, puff up like his chest puffed up when he was out there in his driveway. As the loaves sit out to cool she dusts each loaf with powdered sugar, crowning the tops with what looks like fresh snowfall to add a little extra sweetness. Then she wraps them up in foil and starts out on her rounds. To the boa constrictor house. To the bottle rocket house. To AC/DC’s house. Then across the street to the old lady’s house where an uncle or six still live.

When she gets back home she tells me what happened. She crossed the street and rang the bell. From inside one of the uncles yelled, “Who’s there?” “Your neighbor,” she replied. He opened the front door and she saw it was the uncle we call the Chauffeur. He has a part time gig driving a limo with a license plate that reads, “ SWINGRZ.” Three Sheets says the job is part of a court order to make him pay back alimony.

“I handed over the loaf and said ‘Happy Holidays.’ He just stood there. Then he ripped off the foil, tore off a piece of the bread and put it in his mouth. ‘Alright,’ is all he said. Then he shut the door.”

~

It becomes a holiday tradition. Year after year she bakes and bakes and bakes and delivers and delivers and delivers. I can’t cook, can’t bake so the onus is on her to carry on. One of our friends asks if there is a secret ingredient in her holiday bread. She says no, nothing special, then adds, “I call it murderer’s bread.”

The friend asks her what she thinks all those deliveries will yield. She says it isn’t about yield. Still, there’s no denying the loaves have had an effect.

Over the years, I’ve kept a tally.

Someone knocks on our front door. I look out of the peephole and see one of the neighbors from down the street, the guy who looks like a serial murderer; long grey beard, straggly hair. Dirty camo jacket. He stands there, his hands held high above his head in a “don’t shoot” position. When I open up he tells me he works maintenance at the local racetrack and has a whole truckload of horse manure in the back of his truck. Asks if we want some for our garden. “It’s good for the roses,” he says. He brings over a wheel barrel full of horseshit and dumps it in our driveway. The roses respond as if they’ve been waiting all their starved lives for just this miracle, grow full, bountiful.

One night a deep fog rolls in, heavier than usual. A woman knocks on the front door to tell us one of us have left the lights on in our car. Then she asks, “Did you hear about the recent robbery?” We have. Someone busted in the back window of the house four doors down and stole all the electronics. I say, thanks anyway, thanks for letting us know. She says, “Hey, you’d do the same for me.”

There’s a series of rapid, tiny knocks on the front door. Standing on the porch are two young kids, a boy and a girl. I recognize them as the offspring of the boy who once wrote on our fence with the green felt pen. The boy with good penmanship. They giggle and quickly hand me a sack with a ribbon tied to the handle. Inside, there’s a bottle of wine and a blank card with no note, just a signature. The Trunzo family.

It’s holiday time again. Somebody rings the doorbell. I open the door. AC/DC stands there holding what looks like store-bought baked goods covered in plastic. Something from Safeway. “Here,” he says and hands it over. Then he turns and walks away.

~

The other day we heard what happened to the kid from Three Sheets who said she heard it from one of the uncles. The kid killed someone else. In prison. I wonder if the prison guards saw that coming. They’ve transferred him and now he’s in a new maximum maximum security prison. State of the art incarceration. McCool is long gone but if he were still around I bet he’d say, “See? What’d I tell you?”

The only way the kid’s ever going to get out now is if someone bakes him a loaf of bread and puts a file inside.

Years go by. Some people never change. Some do.

I still don’t know how to bake. And the kid’s not a kid anymore.

~

Tonight I get out of my car with a load of groceries, two overfull bags. I barely make it inside the house and just as I drop the bags on the kitchen table I hear someone pounding on the front door. Dammit. Who is it now? Maybe it’s the Christian fundamentalists again, who’ve taken to blanketing the neighborhood. The last time they came around I made up a quick reply, announced, “We’re gay Buddhists,” before they could even start their spiel. I thought that would put an end of it, but no. One of the women stood her ground and asked if I knew whether or not I was going to heaven. I looked her straight in the eye and said, “Lady. My ticket’s been booked.”

I look through the peephole. Instead of someone waving a pamphlet I see the Chauffeur standing there, fog swirling around his head in the gauzy porch light. He’s holding my wallet in his hand, holding it up high so I can see it through the tiny peephole. I open the door and he hands it over.

“I think you dropped this,” he says. “It was on the street, right outside your car door.”

When Sam gets home from work I tell her how I would have laid bets I’d never see that wallet again. How the uncle smiled a sheepish smile. How he had a sweet face. How maybe I’ve misjudged him. Him and everyone else on this block. AC/DC. The kid with the excellent penmanship. Three Sheets.

She gives me one of her generous smiles. The kind she hands out like candy.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she says.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Toni Mirosevich is the author of six collections of poetry and prose, most recently, THE TAKEAWAY BIN (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Her book of nonfiction stories, PINK HARVEST, (Mid-List Press) was the recipient of the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her chapbook, MY OBLIQUE STRATEGIES (Thorngate Road) received the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award.

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An Excerpt from Committed: A Memoir of the Artist’s Road

Patrick Ross

AUGUST 19: NORTH CAROLINA

 

Elliot Mazer won’t work with me. The music producer has been in the business for decades, so he knows what language my funders want. But every time I bring up copyright he changes the subject back to himself and his past glories. In fairness, however, he does this with every other question I ask him as well.

I thank him for the interview and imagine the edited version. I’ll include some discussion about how he’s produced many of Neil Young’s seminal albums, but perhaps—because viewers might think him arrogant—I’ll leave out the part where he says the singer and guitarist wouldn’t be where he is today without Elliot’s expertise with a sound board. I’ll include discussion of his life now, here in Reidsville, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border. How he’s converted the stately dining room of this grand old home into a state-of-the-art studio. And how he’s using that studio in his semi-retirement to produce albums for clients who find him online.

I’m okay with this interview being a disappointment, because I have another one to shoot, here in this home with his wife, Diana Reid Haig. Elliot and I leave the high-ceilinged front parlor and walk down the home’s front hallway, across the worn oak floors, past the antique brass gas-style wall lamps, below the dental plaster molding framing the pressed tin ceiling. Halfway down the hall he slips into his studio and I keep going. As I enter the kitchen a wooden floorboard creaks under my foot. Marisa, seated with Diana at a small round table, slams her sketch book shut. One of the pencils Colleen Doran gave her yesterday rolls off the table onto the parquet floor.

“Oh here, sweetie, let me get that for you.” Diana slips gracefully out of her chair and retrieves the pencil as she stands. She reaches down and presses straight the skirt of her blue sundress. Marisa takes the pencil from her.

“Thank Diana,” I say to Marisa.

“Oh, that’s not necessary. Your daughter is so charming and polite,” Diana says, as if boasting about a favorite granddaughter. She’s describing the Marisa I once knew, not the teenager I live with now. I decide to celebrate the fact that Marisa did not alienate our host during the hour I was interviewing Diana’s husband. “How did it go with Elliot?”

“Great,” I lie. “Are you still up for an interview?”

“Oh, why not,” she says with a smile.

When it was decided I would interview Elliot first, Diana immediately volunteered to “entertain” Marisa in the kitchen. Elliot clearly won’t be playing the same role during my interview with Diana. I recall how quiet Marisa was during my interview yesterday with Colleen, and how much she seemed to get out of being present for it. “Marisa, do you want to join us?”

Marisa looks down at her notebook, and then shakes her head no.

Diana places her hand gently on Marisa’s right shoulder. “I think she probably just wants to keep working in her sketch book. She’s a brilliant artist, Patrick. You should see the still life she just did. Show your father, Marisa.”

I step forward. Marisa would in the past show me some of her drawings, but the person she most wanted to share with was my mother. I don’t know who she shares her art with now, or even what art she is producing. I’ve had opportunities to peek at her work—like everything else she owns, she leaves her sketchbooks all over the house—but I’ve resisted. It isn’t the same if she doesn’t show me. I’m not sure this counts, with Diana insisting she do so. But I’ll take the opportunity nonetheless. I see on the page the fruit bowl centerpiece. Two bananas, a peach, and an orange emerge from the blue ceramic bowl. The fruit is depicted accurately, but there’s more to it than that. It’s as if Marisa has added some spark of life to the display. The banana in the foreground appears to be calling to me to choose it over its bowl mates.

“Marisa, that is quite good. Diana is right.”

“Oh, your daughter is so talented. She told me all about her love of drawing, and especially of photography. And she’s so thrilled you’re taking her to Savannah to tour the art school there. She’s lucky to have a father like you.”

Now my discomfort level matches that of my daughter. I nod to Diana to join me in the hall.

“Marisa,” Diana says as we leave the kitchen, “don’t forget that I’m sending you two on your way with blueberry muffins. I won’t take no for an answer.”

We return to the front parlor. I had seated Elliot in a wing-back chair, but I want to film Diana in a separate part of the room. She suggests the bench in front of the upright piano.

“You said this house dates back generations in your family,” I say as I set up the camera. “And I can’t help but notice that your last name is Reid, and the town’s name is Reidsville.”

Diana laughs. “Yes, I am local royalty, if you will. But my branch is the black sheep. My grandmother built this house at what was then outside of town. We’re still viewed as the splinter line.”

I nod knowingly, but don’t inform her I also grew up with black-sheep parents. We begin the interview. Diana discusses her early career as a songwriter in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. She grew up surrounded by music, and it was in that professional world that she met Elliot. She turns and places her left hand on the keys behind her. “I remember when I was young, my piano teacher, at this very piano, told me that when I play, I’m putting my hands in the same position as that composer’s hands. That made the music come alive to me. It’s like a living link to the past, stepping into someone else’s shoes.”

“That’s not unlike the books you write.”

Diana has written a series of travel books that guide the reader along the same paths followed by famous people in their cities of origin. If you’ve ever been curious about where Napoleon or his wife Josephine passed the time in Paris, her books will take you there. I’ve been reading a fair amount of travel literature as I’ve prepared for this trip, and I didn’t come across any other works that are so original in concept.

“Yes, you’re right, although I’ve never really thought of it that way. I just am really obsessed with history. You know, that first book about Napoleon grew out of a personal obsession. I love Paris, and when I was there I’d seek those places out. Often they’re very hard to find, so I’d jot down directions to share with others. But believe it or not, I found the people I knew, in the music business, weren’t that eager to talk about Napoleon. I’d bring him up and I could see my friends kind of back away and say, ‘Oh there she goes again.’”

That’s my experience when I try to share with Washington lobbyists my passion for antique maps. With these books, Diana found a way to convey her passion to like-minded readers. A perforated ulcer laid her up in bed for close to a year, she tells me, so to keep busy she compiled her travel notes into a book. It didn’t take long for her to find a publisher, and she’s since written more books about Paris. Her new project is a book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ lifelong love affair with New York City. The Kennedy family has given her access to some of the former First Lady’s personal records.

I tell her about meeting Michael Swanwick in Philadelphia, and how he turned a personal obsession about a poet into a published biography. Then I ask what her friends in the music business think of her books.

“It’s been very interesting to see how people perceive different forms of creativity, the songs I’ve written and my books. It’s a different reaction. It seems to me that people really admire it when you can make something up, like with my songs. But I love writing nonfiction. It’s my passion now. It’s what I think about when I wake up in the morning. You just need to find your own compass.”

I like that metaphor, and not just because I love the artistry found in an antique map’s compass rose. I picture Diana, an artist who reinvented herself late in life, gliding along the cobblestones of a tucked-away Parisian lane, sunlight glistening on her copper hair. I see her bursting with excitement, a skip in her step as she explores, then her stopping to pull out a notebook from her purse so she can jot down her latest discovery.

We discuss the mysteries of the creative process some more and then I wrap up, not distressed that we haven’t really discussed copyright law. I secure the camera in its bag. Diana remains on the piano bench, a mischievous gleam in her eye.

“I assume you’re writing a book about this trip, right?” she asks.

I feel as if she’s caught me stealing a banana from her bowl. I realize now that my subconscious has been toying with the idea since that first day in New England. My resistance stems from the fact that I can’t figure out how to write a book about my travels without putting me in it. I think of other road-trip authors like John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon and Robert Pirsig. They invite you to join them in their journey. Steinbeck, an old crank longing for an America he feels is lost. Kerouac, living without fear of consequences. Heat Moon, learning and healing from those he meets along the way. And Pirsig, who slowly reveals his struggle with mental illness. That last one hits perhaps too close to home.

“You absolutely must write this story,” she says. “What you’re doing is so, well, different. I’d love to be Marisa, to ride along with you, even if only for a few days.”

We head back to the kitchen. Rain pelts the bay window over the sink, a barrage of liquid bullets. Marisa and I will have to brave a run across the street to the car. Diana offers us umbrellas, a gesture I immediately dismiss. I don’t mean to dismiss Southern hospitality, but we’d have no opportunity to return them.

Elliot remains in his studio, but Diana offers us a farewell. She thanks me for the interview before I can thank her. Then she gives Marisa a full-body embrace. I watch for my daughter to flinch, but she does not. Her arms go up, and her red sketch book wraps around our host. Then Marisa and I dash to the car. Once safely inside the vehicle, only moderately drenched, Marisa says, “Um, Dad,” and points out my driver’s side window.

Diana is rushing across the street, a bag in one hand and a red umbrella in the other. I lower the window.

“You forgot the muffins,” she says over the sound of the sheeting rain bombarding the umbrella’s nylon.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I say, but I take the muffins.

“I wouldn’t let you leave without them,” she says. “It’s the least I could do, after your gift of letting me talk about my creativity.”

Diana heads back to her family home, I close the window, and then turn to Marisa. She’s smiling and shaking her head.

“What the hell was she thinking?” Marisa says. “That is so nice, and so ridiculous.”

“You know,” I tell her, “I’ve stopped being surprised by things on this trip.”

~

We slice west through the rain toward Asheville, North Carolina. I’m taking Marisa tomorrow to the Biltmore Estate, a summer home for one of the Vanderbilts. It seemed like a good place to give Marisa a tourism experience and, perhaps, make up for having done so little with her during our family vacation on the Jersey Shore. To justify the drive, I booked an interview with an artist nearby.

Marisa and I chuckle over how sweet Diana is. She then tells me that Diana spent most of their time together in the kitchen encouraging Marisa to pursue her passion for art. That was unnecessary. Art is the only thing that motivates Marisa to apply herself. Then Marisa falls silent, and I see her eyes are focused on a highway sign. It tells us we have forty-seven miles to go before we reach Asheville. But it also says we are one hundred and sixty-three miles from Knoxville, Tennessee. Marisa emits a low growl, puts her ear buds back in, and then flips open her sketch book.

I didn’t realize that this highway could lead me to my parents’ home. I consider the possibility of pushing on to Knoxville for a surprise visit with my parents. Perhaps that is the way to mend this latest rift. I ended the last one, after all, by calling them with news of Marisa’s impending birth. Maybe this time having Marisa in tow would do the trick. Since we left their house in the middle of the night a year ago, Marisa has finished her first year of high school. She’s knocking at the door of womanhood. But my mother knows that without me visiting. That call fifteen years ago delivered news unknown to her.

I almost drove another route to Knoxville in January of this year. I was attending a conference hosted by one of my funders at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville. While seeking a quiet moment under a palm tree in the resort’s glass-enclosed garden conservatory, my mobile phone rang. It was my mother.

“Your father’s having a hard time breathing. I’m taking him to the hospital now.”

Somehow I had been expecting a call like this. And here I was, I thought, back in Tennessee for the first time since that August night five months earlier. “I’m in Nashville, Mom. I can rent a car and be there in two hours.”

“I doubt your father would want to see you, but hold on. I’ll call you from the hospital.” And she hung up.

I felt as if the marrow had been drained from my bones. I made my way to a hotel bar, a dark, low-ceilinged establishment that cocooned my fear. An hour later the phone rang again. I quickly put down my scotch and answered.

“He’s fine. False alarm.”

“I’m glad. I can still come.”

“I don’t know why we’d want you here.”

I took a sip of scotch. How often had I held this conversation in my mind? Hundreds, probably. Each time I tried a different approach. The only commonality was that each ended disastrously.

“Mom, I think we should talk.” I forged ahead. “The last time we found ourselves like this, Marisa’s birth brought us back together. Well, Marisa and Parker still need grandparents.”

“She’d have to apologize first.”

Already I was thrown off-script. “You mean Marisa? What would she be apologizing for?”

“For starters, she defriended me on Facebook.”

I placed the phone down on the bar, careful not to disconnect the call. I needed a moment to process my mother’s demand, and the reason for it. My motion caught the bartender’s eye, and he pointed at my near-empty glass. Ordering another round had not been my intent, but I nodded.

Two weeks after the kids and I returned from Knoxville last August, Laura took me to a psychologist she trusted. I wanted to better understand my mother, to learn how I could repair this latest rift or, at a minimum, discuss what had happened with my children. It didn’t take him long to assess my situation. He mapped out our relationship on a whiteboard. Various boxes represented me, Laura, Marisa, Parker, my mother, and my father.

“Your mother is a classic narcissist. This is how she views her world,” he said. He drew circles that placed all of the boxes in orbit around my mother. “She is basically frozen as a child, the center of everything and all drama magnified. Perhaps some trauma when she was young locked her into that mindset. It’s an appealing place to be, the center of attention and no responsibilities. You’ve empowered her mindset your whole life, and it sounds like your father began to do so when she let him back into her life all those years ago.” He then erased the circles and drew straight lines connecting various boxes. Only one line extended from my father’s box. It connected with my mother. Laura, Marisa, and Parker were all connected to me via dry-erase marker strokes. These two clusters–my parents and my nuclear family–were joined by a single line between my mother and me. I couldn’t reach my father separate from my mother. And she couldn’t reach my children separate from me.

“You’re the nexus, Patrick,” the psychologist said.

“I don’t want to be.”

“It’s not a matter of want. If your children are to have a relationship with your mother, it has to go through you.”

In that Opryland bar I took a sip of my new glass of scotch and thought of that whiteboard diagram. Before that night, my mother had a line connecting her with my daughter. It was social media. Marisa had erased that line, and I knew she had no interest in re-drawing it. I picked up the phone again, assuming the responsibility I was evading. “Mom, I hear what you’re saying. But I think Marisa would want something from you as well. Not an apology,” I said quickly, anticipating an objection to my mother to a word she associated with surrender and defeat, “but perhaps an explanation. You could explain to her you didn’t mean some of the things you said, some of the things she heard you say.”

“What? That I wanted to keep her safe from her crazy father, who could snap and hurt her in a heartbeat?”

There are a number of fathers who could have been in her mind at that moment other than me. My father, who never physically harmed me but had on several occasions committed significant damage to inanimate objects such as drywall and bathroom doors. My mother’s biological father who, like mine, left when she was young, but unlike mine did not return. Or her stepfather, of whom my mother spoke with an unsettling combination of love and disgust. I couldn’t know where my mother’s mind was at that moment–I never knew such things–but what was clear was that she had spent the last few months completely recasting in her memory the events of that night. She was the saint who had struggled valiantly to protect her grandchildren from a demonic father. I knew my father would have retained a memory of the evening’s actual events. But the only box he was connected to on the psychologist’s whiteboard was my mother. I could not expect him to support a more accurate version of events. He would do everything he could to keep from having that solitary line erased.

I did not drive to Knoxville that day at the Gaylord hotel. I stayed in that bar. I do not recall how many drinks I had, but it was not enough to fill, for even a moment, the places where my marrow had been drained.

We pass the highway sign directing us to Knoxville and I look over at my daughter. I’ve never told her about that January call with her grandmother. I consider acknowledging the sign, using it as a way to get her to talk to me about that night, and about the loss she has suffered the last year. She’s trapped in the car now, no way to walk away from my questions. But I’m feeling a connection with her that is rare and refreshing. I don’t want to ruin it by bullying her into confronting a pain she is actively avoiding.

As I reach the outskirts of Asheville I develop another plan to engage her. When I booked the interview with percussionist Paul Babelay, he told me he lived in a wooded area on a steep mountain slope, and the road that led up that mountain was extremely hard to spot. The GPS tells me I’m getting close. I hand Marisa printed directions provided by Paul. “Marisa, I need you to play navigator.”

Marisa removes her left ear bud and takes the paper. “There’s supposed to be a turn on the right,” I tell her, “but he says it will be hard to find.”

The road I’m on hugs a cutout of mountainside. On the GPS screen it appears as a solid patch of green, no black lines penetrating the block of color. Marisa leans forward, squinting.

“There it is!” Somehow her artist’s eye has perceived a thin break in the pines. I come nearly to a stop, then wonder if it was wise to lose the car’s momentum. The slope is steep and the road isn’t paved. I press the car forward. As we move under the tree canopy, the sound of pelting rain is replaced by pings of gravel kicking up against the car’s undercarriage. My distress is lessened when I see the smile on Marisa’s face, a rare sight in the last year.

“Marisa, that was fabulous. I never would have spotted that on my own.” My compliment has the added advantage of being sincere. As we climb, we pass one mailbox, then another. Thin strips of clearing extend left and right past each one. Then I see Paul’s house, tucked away in the pines. The main floor extends out off the mountain into space, with a basement level supporting the right half of the house. A wide porch extends the length of the home in front of us, then turns a sharp left to extend along the drop-off. We step out of the car.

“You just missed a bear. Tiger is still a bit freaked out.” A thin man about my age places a fat tabby down on the wood. The cat shakes slightly, it looks directly at Marisa and me, and then walks off, tail erect, the tip twitching slightly. We head inside, and I interview Paul in his living room in front of a massive stone fireplace while Marisa sketches. Her subject is Tiger, who stares at us through a glass door. Paul discusses his choice to pursue a musical career here in Asheville rather than Nashville. He and his wife have built a good life here for their children, and he is willing to take the work he can get so as not to disturb that life. I can relate. When I was a single father I turned down reporting jobs that would have had me covering Capitol Hill debates long into the evening because it would have caused havoc with my custody schedule.

Paul says his life choices have not prevented him from exploring his true passion. It’s called a vibraphone, which he says is similar to a xylophone but more compelling. I ask him to elaborate but fail to listen to the response. It’s as if my mind is being tugged out of my head, pulled west into a different orbit. I am in my mother’s office in Knoxville. I am in the Gaylord bar in Nashville. Boxes and lines swirl on a whiteboard. I look again at Marisa. Somehow Tiger has re-entered the house and is now on Marisa’s lap, forcing her to hold the sketchbook in the air above him. She doesn’t appear distressed by this inconvenience. What terrible act would Marisa have to perform that would lead me to cut her out of my life? What harm would she have to inflict to have me turn my back on her, a person I have dedicated my life to fostering? I come up blank.

Marisa has been unwilling to speak of that Knoxville night with me. But what have I really said to her? Have I shared with her the depth of the pain I feel at losing my parents? No. Because I haven’t fully admitted it’s there. I have been performing the family tradition of denying what is right in front of me. Sabra Field told me the art-committed life is a difficult one, and many choose the easier path. The easy road–in creativity and in family dynamics–is one with which I am all too familiar. I know without looking at the camera’s diagnostic display that I have enough footage. It’s time to leave. It’s time for Marisa and me to spend a little more time together, to search out dinner and the hotel in our respective roles of parent and child. I’m eager to do so.

 

AUGUST 20: NORTH CAROLINA AND SOUTH CAROLINA

 

I am content. Marisa is not. This library fills me with warmth and comfort despite its cavernous size. The Biltmore Estate tour guide tells me the 40-feet by 60-feet room holds 10,000 books written in eight languages. It is the largest privately owned library in the country. But what speaks to me is not the volume of books. It is the reverence in which the room holds them. The tour guide focuses on the ceiling painting, an Eighteenth Century mural by Giovanni Pelligrini that George Vanderbilt actually paid to relocate from a palace in Italy. But my eyes are not drawn to gods and cherubs dwelling in a cloud. Nor are they directed to the massive fireplace that runs the length of the two-tiered room, its black mantel blending in with the dark walnut bookcases running on both levels. No, my focus is on the multitude of books, leather-bound with gold-lined spines. Did Vanderbilt realize that by creating the grandest possible private library, the room itself could serve to humble him, showing him as just one man surrounded by the mental output of thousands? Whatever the answer, he is long gone, but the books remain.

Marisa fell into a funk once the tour began and the docent said no photographs were allowed indoors. As we’ve entered each room, I’ve watched as her hand flicked to her camera bag then slowly lowered, as if the bones in her arm had liquefied.

The docent tells us that Vanderbilt owned nearly 30,000 books in all, three times what we see here. I understand the challenge of being able to display all of the books you own, even the modest number I’ve accumulated. In fact, I came close to solving that problem once by intending to rid myself of most of them. It took nearly three years for my ex-wife and me to resolve our custody battle. I managed to secure three nights a week with Marisa and Parker. To approximate as closely as possible a family experience for them, I moved us from my bachelor apartment to a three-level, three-bedroom detached home in a quiet northern Virginia suburb. In what I now recognize as a bout of manic spending—always a risk for someone with my diagnosis–I furnished every room. But the legal cost of securing that custody schedule produced unanticipated debt. After a year I couldn’t afford to keep renting the house. I knew things needed to change when I found myself acting out a cliché, actually digging under couch cushions for loose change so I could buy bread and milk for my children. I did in fact produce enough change, and ignored the fury of the woman behind me in line at the supermarket as I slowly counted out what I owed.

The only way to begin the climb out of debt was to relocate to a small apartment. That meant nearly all of the furniture I acquired had to go, but I hoped to make a little cash by selling it at a yard sale. I gave the kids the apartment’s one bedroom, yet it was still too small for their two beds, so I sold them at a severe loss and bought a bunk bed. Marisa played the older child card and took the top bunk, but Parker seemed to like the cocoon-like environment formed underneath when Marisa’s sheet hung down over the side. I placed my bed in the living room in the space meant for a dinette set, something else I had sold. I purchased a collapsible card table and folding chairs that I would set up by my bed for meals. My first year in the apartment the custody agreement had the children with me for Thanksgiving. I gathered up a number of my coffee-table books of antique maps and placed them on the bed. Each held one of the sides– mashed potatoes, peas, candied yams, the fruit ambrosia my mother always made for that meal– and my nightstand held the turkey.

I found a use that day for books I ended up not selling. When I conducted the yard sale— a key element of what I called The Simplification, the initial caps visible in my mind even now– most of my books were on display, from suspense novels bought on impulse at airports to firstedition biographies acquired through extensive explorations of used bookstores. The books were of course cheaper and more portable than a 7-piece dinette set or a set of beds, and began moving quickly. As a customer brought to me for purchase a cherished biography of the English clockmaker who made possible the calculation of longitude at sea, I realized there are only so many sacrifices that are acceptable in life. About thirty minutes into the official time of the sale, I covered the books in sheets to ensure they were off-limits. They traveled with me to the small apartment, but were not displayed in two-story walnut bookcases. Instead I stacked them on any free section of floor. My display aesthetic may have been lacking, but my reverence for those books was no less than Vanderbilt’s was for his.

We are ushered out of the library to make room for the next tour group, and soon enough we are back outside, walking down the wide stone steps to the gravel drive in front of the mansion. I squint, adjusting to the sunlight after an hour spent in near-darkness. When my vision clears I see Marisa has already removed her camera. In front of us is a large expanse of green lawn. To the right lie acres of flowers and fountains we had darted past on our way to the mansion. Marisa looks at me, I nod, and she is off to the garden.

I catch up with her a few minutes later. She is shaded under a vine-covered trellis, standing precariously several feet up on the edge of a fountain. It appears she’s trying to capture a close-up of a cherub pouring water. She’s resting her left hand on the wet stone behind the cherub, and I imagine several scenarios that have in common a disastrous ending.

“What are you doing?” I call out.

“I’m trying to freeze a drop of water against the contours of the stone behind it,” Marisa says without looking. “It’s tricky with this camera, I’m stuck with the built-in lens, there aren’t a lot of settings and it seems to have been designed by chimps. But I’ve struggled with it enough to sometimes fool it into getting the exposure level I want with the focus range I need.”

I rush to her side while she takes a few more photographs. Then she permits me to support her by the arm as I guide her back to the ground. She turns instantly to her camera’s screen to examine her handiwork.

“Can I see?”

She pauses, then turns the camera display my direction. I see an image too real to be real, a glistening drop of water broadcasting a hint of rainbow from the morning sun. The photograph’s tranquility momentarily washes away the scorching August heat.

Marisa’s latest passion is photography, and for her fifteenth birthday she had asked for a something called a digital single-lens reflex camera, or DSLR. They turned out to be pretty expensive, nearly as pricey as the laptop I’m using to edit these films. I couldn’t pull the trigger on such an expensive gift. So after I said no she gathered up her cash and bought this camera used. It’s not a true DSLR, but apparently she’s spent the last few months trying to figure out how to get it to do what she wants anyway.

I like to think I have done my part to foster her creative development. But that has mostly been through encouragement. As Colleen Doran said two days ago, an artist needs the right tools. But Marisa’s will to create trumps her technical limitations. And perhaps it is will that is the most important thing. I no longer sleep in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment. I cut expenses and took on extra work, and clawed my way out of debt. My parents helped with that, in part by adhering to my request to honor my birthday and Christmas by making donations to college funds I had set up for Marisa and Parker to which I could no longer afford to contribute. I remain grateful for their assistance, even if the amount they provided has continued to balloon in my mother’s mind. Then, after I knew I would not be a financial burden on a partner, I remarried. Two years ago Laura and I purchased a three-level, three-bedroom home in a quiet northern Virginia suburb. We bought Marisa a new bed, but Parker insisted upon keeping the bunk bed. He still sleeps on the bottom, and keeps a sheet on the unused upper bunk, which I sometimes find hanging down, cocooning him. It’s good that Marisa experienced that life arc, seeing her father fight his way out of a personal setback. I suspect she has focused a fair amount in the past year on what genetic inheritance she may have received from her grandmother, both artistic and mental. I don’t know what questions she asks herself about genetic hand-me-downs from her father. She overheard my mother that night. She knows I have struggled with bipolar disorder. She knows I impregnated a girl as a teenager, and paid for it to be aborted. But she has also seen something in both her father–and her grandparents–that should hearten her. Resiliency. Or perhaps stubbornness. My mother has always demonstrated an unwavering determination to overcome obstacles through sheer force of will. I have never ceased to admire that about her. Perhaps unwavering fortitude is part of Marisa’s genetic destiny.

~

As we leave the Biltmore estate a road sign informs us that turning right leads to Charleston, South Carolina. A left brings us to Knoxville, Tennessee. I glance at Marisa, who smiles in agreement as I make the right turn. As the driver, I control the car speakers, so I fire up my portable music player as I start down the interstate. After a minute of not hearing any music I glance down at the player and see the screen is frozen. I fiddle with it, turning it on and off with my right hand while my left holds the steering wheel. Such multitasking is reckless, I know, but I am compelled to bring this device back to life. It is unthinkable that I am facing three weeks of lengthy drives with no recorded music to distract me. I filled this player specifically for this trip, hundreds of hours of rock, blues, and gospel to provide energy and classical to wind me down. My record-label and music-publisher members would be pleased to know that all of the music was acquired legally. But now that is all gone.

Thoughts race. Bile rises in my throat. I hear my doctor’s voice reminding me of the importance of staying calm in the face of the unexpected. I do not feel calm. I want to take this thin metal contraption with its brand name frozen on the front screen and hurl it out the car window. I want to whip the car into a violent U-turn and thread through the oncoming traffic so I can smash the unfaithful plastic player under two tons of unforgiving steel. Instead I glance at Marisa. Lost in her own music, she has not detected my growing rage. Nor do I wish her to. I focus on the road ahead, counting the white highway dashes whizzing by on the left the way I used to count letters when I would pyramid as a child. The repeated flicks of paint dance across my mind in a rhythmic staccato. My heartbeat synchronizes with the beat, then my breathing joins in harmony.

When my father knew he was on the verge of a manic outburst, he often fled to his car. My mother and I would wait, sometimes for hours. When he returned, he was back to his calm, medicated self, and we would all pretend that life was normal. I am approaching an approximation of normalcy now, at least well enough that I can fake it with my daughter. I point to the music player on her lap, then speak loudly.

“Do you want to play that through the car speakers?” She pulls out her left ear bud, I repeat the question, and she smiles.

“Really? You don’t mind?”

“I’d like to hear what you’re listening to.”

For the next three hours she flicks through her music library, informing me of when she discovered this song or that artist while explaining how her musical tastes have developed. I tell her what I like about what she’s playing, as well as what I dislike. I’m surprised at how much of it I enjoy. There’s a darkness to a lot of her music, minor chords and lyrics dripping with pathos. It is a stark contrast to the music popular when I was a teenager, bouncy pop tunes by Boy George and Cyndi Lauper. But then again I didn’t listen to those artists. Some of the music from my childhood is on that dead music player, including moody works by Pink Floyd. And, from what Marisa tells me, her music isn’t what is popular now.

“Oh, you’ve got to hear this song,” she says, repeatedly pressing a button. “It’s a giveaway tune that was already on the player.”

An acoustic guitar opens to a wholesome male voice.

“The world… is made of energy. And the world… is electricity. And the world… is made of energy. And there’s a light inside of you, and there’s a light inside of me.”

The dark complexities that have filled the passenger cabin are washed away by this sunshiny folk tune. I wince, and begin to seriously question my daughter’s musical taste. Then I hear it, rising above the music. Marisa is actively suppressing laughter. I glance at her and see those blue eyes squinting as a smile extends upwards from the edges of her mouth, the same expression she had a year ago as we watched that dancer on my mother’s television.

“What a lovely song,” I say. “I can see why you like it so much, Marisa. It’s so moving. So insightful. And so true!”

Marisa’s laugh finally explodes.

Music was central to our time together when she was young. When I first moved out of her mother’s house I bought her a pink cassette player. She would fall asleep to Disney soundtracks. Of course, kids that age can listen to the same music over and over again, at least as much as I listened to Dark Side of the Moon as a teenager. The tapes weren’t just her bedtime accompaniment. They’d play in the car when I drove her to school, or at the table when I fed her dinner. Those tunes burrowed into my brain without invitation, and sometimes I would snap. Unlike my father’s pre-lithium explosions, I instead embraced a more creative response. I would make up lyrics and sing them loudly over the Disney talent.

I find myself doing that now: “And the world… is made of angry bees. And the world… is made of nasty fleas. And the world… is full of underpants trees. And there are leafy shorts on you and there are leafy shorts on me.”

Now she’s bent over, gripping her side. Apparently she didn’t mind that the word “underpants” has too many syllables to perfectly parallel the song’s meter. Then she pulls out her phone and begins to text. I had her, for a moment, but now she’s fallen into her virtual world, a place without fathers. Yet, after some frantic typing, she resurfaces.

“I just got a text from Brian.”

All I know about Brian is what little intel Parker has provided me. Brian is one of Marisa’s classmates. From what I gather she is fond of him, but he is like many boys in his early teen years, not fully focused yet on girls. I am very pleased with this and hope he stays that way for some time. But she has never spoken his name around me.

“Brian,” Marisa says, “wrote that any dad who imagines underpants trees has to be the coolest dad there is.”

I fix my eyes on the road so Marisa can’t see how close I am to tears. “Text Brian that he is an excellent judge of character.”

Before I know it I see a sign reading CHARLESTON 18 MILES. But my focus is on the sky above, which has turned black as night even though we’re still a couple of hours away from sunset. We’re scheduled in an hour to interview John Smoak, a jack-of-all-trades photographer. He wants to be filmed outside his home on a small island in Charleston Harbor. I question the wisdom of that desire when a clap of thunder rips over the car. Traffic slows. Moments later we are under assault.

“Is that… hail?”

Marisa’s right. It’s August, in the South, and yet, somehow, frozen rain is pelting our car. I hand Marisa my phone. “Could you find John Smoak’s number and give him a call? We’re probably going to be late, and we’ll have to film him indoors.”

Marisa takes the phone, flips through my directory, and calls. I don’t know where the shy girl is who sat quietly on Colleen Doran’s rug two days ago. I only hear her side of the conversation, but they talk as if they’re old friends.

“Dad, he says he’d like to do the interview tomorrow morning, say around nine. It’s supposed to be clear then, and we could still shoot outside.”

I run the math in my head. Tomorrow is all about Savannah. We’re meeting Meghan Woodcock, an instructor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, in the early afternoon. But the drive from Charleston isn’t that long. “Okay, Marisa, tell John that’s fine.”

The exit ramp drops us onto the edge of old Charleston. I find myself driving through flooded streets. The water level rises on either side of the car.

“Oh my God,” Marisa says. “Can we get to the hotel?”

We’re only three blocks away, but it’s a reasonable question. This rental is a basic sedan with no ground clearance to speak of. And it’s a hybrid. I know little about these kinds of cars, but it’s generally not good to get batteries wet. I refuse to fail, however. This day has been perfect, and I’m not letting a literal freak of nature–frozen rain on a hot summer day–destroy it. We press forward, deeper into the water. Marisa squeals, I believe more in delight than fear. Waves erupt from both sides of the car like a crystalline angel’s wings. And then we’re clear, the road rising just enough to allow us to emerge.

The motel parking lot is a lake. At least three dozen parked cars soak in water, the tires very nearly submerged. I locate the highest ground, far from the building, and park. I offer Marisa an umbrella but she declines. Instead she leaps from the safety of the car and runs straight into the lake, kicking the water with her sandal-covered feet. “Come on, Dad!”

She’ll be drenched. She must know that. Now Marisa runs in circles near the entrance of the motel. I watch her, experiencing the secondary buzz of her joy, soaking it in the way I do the creativity-driven enthusiasm of my interview subjects. I’m still holding the umbrella. I’m still safe and sound in the car. And then I’m not. I leave the umbrella behind. Rain soaks my shirt as I run to join her. My pace slows as the water level reaches my calf, then my knees. Then I reach her. In one smooth motion she guides her arm down to the water and then up again, splashing toward my face. I smile and return the favor. An older woman with well-coiffed hair glares at us through the lobby window. Let her judge.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Patrick Ross holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has been published in numerous literary journals. He has taught creative writing for The Loft Literary Center and The Writer’s Center. In 2012 he won the Sidney W. Vernick Prize in Nonfiction from fwriction: review, and in 2014 his acclaimed literary travel memoir COMMITTED: A MEMOIR OF THE ARTIST’S ROAD was published by Black Rose Writing. He is currently writing an urban fantasy novel that would be the first of a trilogy. 

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Meeting Tracy

Stefani Zellmer

I meet Tracy because she has a fuckable brother, according to Kristen. Tracy and her brother Trent go to Bishop Lynch. Kristen and I go to Liberty. They wear uniforms and study Theology. We wear whatever we want and don’t know what Theology is. At least I don’t, and I’m embarrassed for not knowing so I don’t ask.

Even though we don’t go to the same school, we live in the same neighborhood. Some of the Liberty boys play basketball at Trent’s house. Eddie Johns. Arun. Kenith. Mark aka “Skin.” Mark aka “Meat.” Brandon. Lonnie. Brendon. Chris. Chris. Matt.

Looking at Trent you might wonder why he’s dating someone like Kristen. But once you get to know Kristen you figure out pretty quickly why Trent’s dating her. Why most guys date her.

Because Kristen has that come-hitherness about her, people ignore the razor marks she wears like jewelry. They look the other way when she scrapes one of the scabs off during Texas History and squeezes the blood out onto her notebook. For some reason Kristen likes me so I run with her and she teaches me things. Bad things.

We get drunk and play Candyland, end up sticking the plastic gingerbread pieces in our vaginas, making Kristen cackle. This is just a sampling of how we entertain ourselves.

We are 14.

A few weeks before the Sadie Hawkins dance, Kristen grabs me by the atrium lockers and says I have to come with her to Trent’s house after school.

“Why?” I ask. “Watching you and Trent have sex isn’t really my thing. You know that.”

“Har, har, smart ass,” she says. “I mean you have to come with me to look at dresses with his sister.”

“You’re wearing a dress? Say no more,” I say, because this I gotta see. “Can we smoke out first? Like we always do before watching scary movies?”

Kristen punches me in the arm. I don’t flinch but I bite the inside of my lip, taste blood.

“No dum-dum, the dresses are for Tracy. Eddie Johns asked her to the dance. She doesn’t know how girls dress for dances here. She wants my advice on what to wear.”

“Is she a retard?” I say. Kristen shoots me a look that could almost pass as hurt. I fall for it. “Okay, I’ll go but only to warn her that taking advice from you is suicidal.”

“Why do you think I asked you to come, dipshit?”

She pivots on her mismatched Converse hightops, makes the kiss sound and then slaps her own ass. I roll my eyes and sigh. Then, suddenly, it hits me.

“Wait a minute!” I holler. “Eddie Johns? For real?”

Rounding the corner into the cafeteria, she turns and shrugs, and then I think she grabs her crotch, but I’m not sure.

Eddie Johns is actually in my next period so I stare at him, puzzled, trying to figure out what kind of girl would date him. He’s an odd one, even in our circle of odd ones. He’s scrawny and giggly and walks with a strut that looks more like a limp. He wears denim from head to toe, drawings on the back of his jacket, not good ones. His hair is mullet-y. His teeth buck out. I certainly wouldn’t want to kiss him. It looks like it would be dangerous, with those teeth.

Given all that, when she opens the door I’m surprised to see that this Tracy is drop-dead cute as can be.

She invites us in and asks if we want Kool-Aid. I’m thinking, “Yeah, if it’s got Jack in it.” She has curling-ironed bangs wisping out of hair that’s otherwise pulled back in a bow clip. Her pleated, plaid skirt swings over skinny, bowed legs. She’s smiley and perky and a cheerleader, of course. I don’t loathe her, though, which is odd because it’s my hobby to hate cheerleaders.

Tracy’s house is a mess of Legos and loud TVs coming from every direction and high-pitched voices shouting about this or that thing. I’m an only child. No cousins I’m close to or anything, so I don’t know much about kids. I have no idea how old her brother and sister are. Maybe five or six? Seven or eight? They lurk. The sister eyes us from behind a door and the brother doesn’t even look up.

I’m in awe of Tracy. I’m in awe of this house. Kristen’s all whatever about it but that’s normal. She’s Kristen.

There are some older sisters too, I find out once we get upstairs to the mountain of dresses laid across Tracy’s bed.

“How many sisters and brothers do you have?” I say.

“Five,” Tracy says. “There’s six of us.”

“Your mom had SIX KIDS!” I say. I can’t even imagine how awesome it would be to have three sisters and two brothers.

When I was a kid, every year on my birthday I’d use my wish to ask for a brother or sister. I quit asking when my parents split up, when mom got her own education and career and new—but definitely not improved—husband. Now when it’s my birthday, I wish for something meaningless. Like, losing five pounds or getting asked out by a boy.

We stand side by side, surveying the hot pink taffeta, the Like-A-Virgin bows, the Snow White sleeves. There’s a cassette playing somewhere in the room, perhaps in my head. Prince. Van Halen. Motley Crue.

It’s 1985.

“Don’t spill wine on my dress,” a flash of girl says, passing in the hallway outside Tracy’s room. Tracy holds her middle finger up to the empty hallway as footsteps thunder down the stairs, the sister gone. I see only tenderness in the exchange. I ache with jealousy.

Tracy shows up to the dance in the dress I recommended. It’s all bunchy in the back, flaring out her frame and accenting her 5’1” cheerleader body. She’s all powder blue, from dress to bow to dyed-to-match flats. It’s a little over the top, I think. I didn’t recommend the shoes and the bow, but it works because she’s tiny and cute.

I always wanted to be tiny and cute.

Because I’m trying to be fancy, I wear heels. I’m a head taller than her anyway and now I’m two heads taller and feel awkward standing next to her, even though it’s my school, not hers. If she feels awkward, I can’t tell.

Trent and Kristen leave to “buy cigarettes” and never come back.

My date is Tony Gonzalez, who goes by the nickname Taco. I asked him to the dance after P.E. one day and for some reason he said yes.

I’m not really attracted to Tony (I can’t bring myself to call him Taco), but I like him. There’s something shy and sad about him. He’s sweet. And I like boys with darker skin. My Dad is American Indian, but most people think he’s Greek. Dark skin is familiar. Tony’s not. We spend about five minutes drinking punch together after he attaches my corsage to my dress and then spend the rest of the dance casually smiling at each other from across the room.

Whatever.

I stand along the edge of the dance floor with Tracy, who is waiting patiently for Eddie Johns to show up. When the waiting grows tiresome, we dance. I have this wild spinning move that I do where I thrust my body around one way, then I stop with a hard pivot and thrust my body the other way. This move works best to that song by Romeo Void that goes “I might like you better if we slept together,” though it can be done to any song with a dance beat. Tracy tries to copy my move, fails, and then moves on to her own private school dance which is basically a step together, step together kind of thing that would put me to sleep, but to each his own. Right?

Eddie Johns never shows up.

I feel kind of panicky for Tracy. I can’t imagine the horror of being stood up at a dance when you don’t even go to that school. I mean, how embarrassing! But she is remarkably chill about it so we try to have fun anyway.

After we dance for a bit, we stand around with our arms crossed, talking. I point out people that I despise and make fun of them while Tracy just nods. She’s way cooler than any cheerleader at Liberty. She’s on student council and drama club, which sounds dorky to me but she wears dorky well. We go outside to smoke. Her braces shimmer off the lights from the football field. Without hesitation she pulls a mason jar of Jack Daniel’s from her purse. That’s my poison, too.

We are instants.

Sneaking next door to the Elementary School, we settle on the swings and swig Jack. She chain smokes, lighting one Virginia Slim off the other, before stubbing the butt out with those shimmery flats. I smoke a lot, too, but I’ve never seen anyone smoke as much as Tracy.

“Aren’t you upset that Eddie didn’t show up?” I ask her.

“Eh,” she says, blowing smoke into the February air.

“He probably got arrested or something,” I say.

“He does a lot of drugs, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. I guess so. It depends on what you mean by a lot.”

We swing and swig and puff and think. Even though we’re a track field away, we can still hear the music coming from the dance. Muffled Spandau Ballet. Tears for Fears.

After the dance, we catch a ride with someone’s older sister to TGI Friday’s. It’s where everyone’s going so we go there, too. Tony is there but we don’t really talk to each other.

This is dating at 14.

Normally, I wouldn’t have come. TGI Fridays makes me rashy. But I feel like it’s my duty to make sure Tracy has a good time, and I don’t know if she’d have a good time slummin’ in alleys drinking bottles of wine we stole from our parents. Which is what I’d normally be doing.

Even though she doesn’t know anyone but me, Tracy seems to have a blast at dinner. People bombard her with stupid questions about Bishop Lynch, like they’ve never seen someone who goes to private school before. She doesn’t blush once. She scrunches her curling-ironed bangs from time to time, but that’s probably just the Shaper hairspray wearing off, not her nerves wearing thin. She eats more potato skins than I’ve ever seen a human eat in one sitting. I say, “Damn girl, where you plannin’ on putting all that food?”

She shrugs with a mouth full and flicks her index finger out. She laughs at everyone’s jokes like they’re not inside jokes from another school at all. She seems right at home, at ease. So I study her. How is this done? This feeling-comfortable-in-your-own-skin thing that she does. It’s weird. I don’t get it.

We find out on Monday that Eddie did, in fact, go to jail that night. He got arrested for smoking pot while he was walking to the dance and then got a Minor In Possession ticket and hauled into juvie because it wasn’t his first offense. These are the kinds of people I hang with.

Tracy is an escape. An oasis in my dried-up rock quarry of delinquency. But when I begin to hang with her more, I learn that while I want to be more like her—little Miss Private School girl with saddle shoes and a uniform skirt—she wants to be more like me, more who-gives-a-shit-what-people-think-of-me and who-cares-what-the-rules-are-I’m-breaking-them, so there.

Because I can’t be who she is, she comes to my side of the cafeteria, so to speak, and we start breaking rules together and we start sneaking out of each other’s houses together and we start sleeping with boys in cars. Together. We start stealing our parents’ liquor and we start smoking pot and we start puking in alleys and holding each other’s hair back and we come a long, long way from those puffy sleeves and those taffeta bows.

We never cut ourselves like Kristen does, but we act like the kind of girls who would if we weren’t so concerned with being pretty. We have nice skin. We know it. We want to keep it that way.

I spend time at Tracy’s house and lather myself in the bath of that chaos. She spends time at mine, and soaks in the silence. We are different as midnight and dawn.

Trent and Kristen break up. Kristen and I stay friends, but Tracy has moved in to my heart. Kristen and Tracy don’t have any reason to be friends. Kristen is too wild for Tracy. She isn’t elegant. Which, neither am I, but Tracy sees something in me that I can’t see in myself. She laughs at jokes I don’t realize I’m telling.

I can be a bit of an Eddie Haskell so while Tracy’s mom seems skeptical of me at first, she eventually takes a liking to me and I become another sister in their house. It feels nice, being included, being listened to.

Tracy’s dad is kind of an alchy so he lets her smoke in the house. I show up one day and Tracy is just plopped in front of One Life to Live with a gigantic, tinted-glass ashtray on the floor beside her, blowing smoke rings into the air. I’m thinking her parents are going to kill her, but when I get all the way into the living room I see that her dad is already sitting there, tucked into his velour chair in the corner, smoking his own filtered cigarette, his other hand on a tumbler of scotch. When they see me, both are completely unfazed. It’s the most exotic thing I’ve ever seen, and Tracy becomes more goddess to me than ever that day.

My mom would be in awe of Tracy, too, if she were ever home when Tracy was hanging out. She works long hours so Tracy and I are alone a lot, usually bouncing or sunbathing on my trampoline in the back yard. We lay out in our ruffled bikinis that span across our protruding hipbones and talk about boys we’d like to mess around with. I don’t know the boys at her school, but she knows the boys at mine because they all play basketball in her driveway.

Trent has actually been through several of my friends, and even tried to feel me up in a hot tub one night at Kim Jenkins’s end-of-the-year party, and truth be told, I made out with him for a few minutes, but I haven’t told Tracy that yet and I hope I never have to. I think it might ruin our friendship. She might think less of me and I don’t care what anyone thinks of me usually but when it comes to Tracy, I care.

Her eight-year-old sister Kendall hates me. Every time I come over she rolls her eyes and looks at me like I’m dog shit on her shoe. It kind of bugs me. Then again, I don’t know what it’s like to have a sister you idolize, who you spend all your time with, who suddenly leaves you behind when she moves on to hang with friends her own age. I don’t know what that’s like so I don’t know what to do with the dirty looks. Just as Kendall doesn’t know what to do with the pain of watching her sister walk away from her with someone she doesn’t like or trust.

One night we get busted sneaking out with Rhonda, another of my Kristen-esque friends. I tell my mom I’m staying with Tracy, Tracy tells her mom she’s staying with me, and Rhonda tells her mom she’s staying with me, too, but then Rhonda screws everything up because Rhonda is supposed to call her mom when she gets home at midnight, which is our curfew, but Rhonda forgets to call her mom so when her mom calls my mom and asks where’s Rhonda, my mom’s all, “what are you talking about?” and her mom is all, “I thought Rhonda was staying there tonight,” and my mom is all, “I thought Stef was staying with Tracy tonight,” and Rhonda’s mom is all, “who’s Tracy?”

We are fucked.

My boyfriend who’s gay but I don’t know it yet calls me at Chris Crenshaw’s house, where we’re all smoking pot and getting felt up by boys, and says, “You better call your mom, she’s looking for you, she just called here wondering where you are.” Where I was was in the game room getting my boob fondled. Which I am just realizing is fucked up as I tell you this because I have a boyfriend at the time and even though he’s gay and I don’t know he’s gay yet, I’m cheating on him and that’s wrong. But like I said, I’m high and everybody knows there is no right or wrong when you’re on drugs.

Rhonda and I leave immediately and go to my house because we know we’re screwed. It takes us a while because we have to walk. We are only fifteen and still too young to drive. At least we don’t have to worry about getting DWIs. And there’s no law against staggering home on foot. Or so we think.

“You smell like a brewery,” my mom says, arms crossed, wide-awake.

“You smell like a bar room floor,” she continues.

“You’re drunk,” she says.

I’m too drunk to realize how redundant she’s being or how flair-for-dramatics she is so I just say, “Nu-uh.” Then I blush. My lie is that ridiculous. I can feel myself swaying in front of her. I can hear her toe tapping on the carpet. I can see her hands on her hips gripping so hard her knuckles are white.

She calls Rhonda’s mom.

“I’ve got them, Nancy. They smell like a brewery,” she says again. She likes this metaphor. This is not the last time I will hear her refer to me having this particular scent.

Rhonda’s mom comes to get her and while we’re waiting it occurs to my mom to wonder, “where’s Tracy?”

“Ummmm,” I say.

Tracy didn’t think it was necessary to come with us because her mom wasn’t the one who had called mine and therefore didn’t know what was up. But my mom manages to ruin all that by driving me over to Chris Crenshaw’s house to fetch Tracy.

When we get there, Tracy is cross-legged on the couch looking barely alive. When she spots me and my mom, her slits for eyes are shocked open. My mom whisks her away and lectures us the whole drive, not realizing we’re too stoned to listen that fast, then continues her march to Tracy’s front door where she leans on the bell. It’s 3am. Helloooo, don’t you know they have half a baseball team living under that roof? Ugh.

Even though I’m horrified, Tracy’s mom seems relieved that there’s another mom  embarrassing her daughter for a change. Tracy’s mom is from Ohio so she’s got nice-as-can-be in her DNA. It’s the first time I see where Tracy gets her positive nature. Apples don’t fall far, they say.

I’m grounded for a month. It’s July. Life sucks for what seems like an eternity. Do I learn a lesson? Sure I do.

I don’t invite Rhonda to spend the night again.

Tracy and I go on to get driver’s licenses and sneak out to share boyfriends old enough to buy us liquor. I go to her prom with a boy from her school and she goes to my prom with a boy from mine. She flips her car and nearly dies one night and I’m one of the first to arrive at her side in the hospital, laughing at her chipped tooth and pulling her out of her depression because that’s what friends are for.

Later I get into some harder drugs and Tracy doesn’t like it but I’m sucked into it and so in love with the way it makes me feel that even Tracy’s disapproval can’t stop me. She has power over me but cocaine is more powerful than love. So is Ecstasy. And acid. And more gay boyfriends. And a lesbian drug dealer. And almost flunking the 11th grade because I don’t give a fuck, fuck you!

That’s me while Tracy’s voted Homecoming Queen at Bishop Lynch. Through it all, we are still close as two can be who are like midnight and dawn.

Maybe we mesh because Tracy loves me in that rare, non-judgey way. And maybe because of that acceptance, I actually survive high school. I get it together my senior year and write for my high school newspaper. I graduate and get accepted to college. I turn into someone who’s not half bad on most days. Which is a miracle, if you believe in that kind of thing. Which I don’t, of course. But I do believe in birthday wishes and now that I think about it, that one about wanting a sister?

It came true.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Stefani Zellmer is a dynamic and award-winning Senior Copywriter and Creative Director, who is highly regarded for crafting and executing high-profile branding and marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 leaders such as Walmart, Southwest Airlines and AT&T, among others.

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What the Bell Says

Rebecca Bald

A little bell is called tintinnabulum; a small shrill bell, squilla; a big one in the shape of a wide-brimmed hat, petasius; codon for a hand bell; nola for a bell that swings on the necks of dogs and the feet of birds and the houses of horses; nolula and dupla for a bell in a clock; campana for a large brass bell; signum for a bell in a tower; lebetes for a bell that’s really a cauldron.

At dawn, I imagine waking to the bellow of a bell outside my window. Its toll knocks my eyes open, spreads me evenly with vibration, hums in my finger and toe tips until the next toll knocks me open again. I crawl out the window and into the tower, pulling my body up into the body of the bell. There’s dew on the cold metal, on my hands, on the bare scoop of skin between my shoulder blades. I curl like a comma in the bell, duck my head in the small of its crown and wait for the next hour to arrive.

There is no belfry in my neighborhood, no tower’s strike at break of day or bellman marking hours upon the street at night. Even with the windows cracked open or an ear to the ground, time does not call us here but is kept by us. We wind the dials and push the buttons until the numbers match the corner of our computer screens and the bottom of our TVs. We try and fail to stay in sync with time, losing seconds by worn batteries and wasted eyes, in rounding and estimation. We end up deviating tocks and ticks, minutes apart. Between us, by this loss of seconds, some break in correspondence, too.

This is why I’ve been thinking of bells. I’m tired of the winding and the pushing, tired of deciding when to go where to do what for how long. I want to rise and fall out of duty, according to custom or by decree like a rooster or a monk. I want to synchronize, to move by swell and hum through the day with you and you and you.  

 —

Clock is related to the Latin word, cloca, meaning bell. The clock, the bell, and their meanings still share the same word in several languages, the same shell. Theirs is an ancient coupling. Plato had a clock with a striking bell to signal the beginning of his lectures at break of day, and the Egyptian inventor, Ctesibius, made water clocks with pebbles that resonated against gongs and bell jars that, when submerged beneath the water, clamored and rang. Not long after man first held the hours and watched their minutes pass, he pushed and prodded time to speak, made the bell its voice.

My desire for bells has everything to do with my desire to be ceaseless: to move forward as time does, to go with purpose from one second to the next in some greater agreement.

A couple hundred years ago, on any given day, the bell said to the child: wake up, pray, breakfast’s ready, school’s started, lunch is served, school’s out, it’s dinnertime, past curfew, time for bed. It told the man: wake up, pray, breakfast’s ready, the newspaper’s here, the train is coming, the factory’s opening, it’s lunch time, work’s out, dinner’s served, put the fire out, go to bed. And to the woman: wake up, pray, it’s breakfast time, there’s the muffin man, school’s started, there’s the postman, it’s lunchtime, there’s the ragman, school’s out, the train’s arrived, it’s past curfew, gather the children, it’s dinnertime, put the fire out, go to bed. A bell was made for telling. And it’s a relief to be told.

 —

Satis N. Coleman, a music teacher and scholar, writes that our earliest ancestors must’ve worshipped bells as the voice of God and invested them with “sacred character.” We have no way of knowing how exactly the bell first came to be or where, but there’s evidence from China that bells have existed for at least forty-seven centuries. Scholars believe the discovery of the earliest forms of the bell happened far earlier, by cavemen and women, and during that insoluble time beyond proof. They imagine that some happy accident, like a knocked stick on a stone or log or piece of metal was responsible for that first rich, sonorous sound.

I imagine the discovery was made by restless, not bumbling, hands; the hands of some earthly adventurer, some explorer of matter and lover of form; hands that would rather traverse a stone than a continent and preferred the shape and weight of a thing to the surrounding expanse; hands that settled upon the kind of catch or find they could carry; callused and curious hands that struck the thing to see its matter resist, bend, or break open; trembling hands that held, in the substance of the bell, an instrument and sound that did all three.

According to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the bell’s sound owes its godliness to its complexity and its complexity to its varying frequencies. These frequencies may or may not be harmonious with one another, but it’s the sound of the upper partials that gives the bell’s timber the “vibrant attack” that arrests us. Whether we are the ringer or receiver and no matter how many times we’ve heard a bell before, its note enters and covers us without warning; we’ve no choice but to submit to the second and the sound.

Certain pitches, tones and harmonies have always satisfied us the way food or sex does. Not by aiding our survival or reproduction, but because we long to be spoken to. Some days, the earth must have spoken to our ancestors often, in the howling cave bear and cracking lighting, in the echo of the screeching bat, in the river rushing. Other days, the earth’s air would have been quiet and its creatures still. It must have been a day like that when these men and women, bodies aching, asked the hollow wood to speak, felt the answer humming in their limbs, accepted this primal reward.

The gush of pleasure, the sighing relief, the looming quiet, and the humble desire for more. If the sound satisfied them, it must have been the sound repeated that brought them comfort. For when they struck the substance of the bell once more, its tone was there like the night and more beautiful. And unlike lightning or thunder, the substance of the bell was theirs for the taking. While its tone appeared unearthly, the bell’s singularity relied upon a mortal refrain.

 —

If I had bells to myself, I would harbor them: slip them in the shoeboxes beneath my bed and put them in the drawer of my nightstand with all my unmentionables.

I would put some in the creases of the couch and on the top shelf of the linen closet, tuck one behind the oatmeal and behind each of the salad dressing bottles and between the spaces of my toes.

I’d stow them in best hiding places in my childhood home: under the hats of the dolls in the china cabinet and on the ledges of the laundry chute and ceiling fan panels and under the rocks in the crawlspace, and I’d hide enough that I could forget about some.

I’d keep the dearest ones close: in the palm of my hand and under my tongue. Between my breast and my ribs, behind my eyes, stacked between the vertebras in my back.

I’d show my nephews how I could pull them out from behind my ear, left and right, and from my sleeves.

I’d put the littlest ones in the tops of my pens.

And my dog would swallow a bell.

And never mind the shape. Never mind the consequences.

My dog would swallow a bell, and everyone would know she was on her way.

In the earliest records, bells were worn. Moses wrote of “bells of gold” that dangled on the robes of high priests. When the congregation heard them, they knew the priest had reached the sanctuary. Another record tells of bells attached to the clothing of ancient Hebrew women, virgins, and boys. Persian royals wore bells. Bells were fastened to the necks of horses and donkeys and decorated the hats of fools.

Ancient Greek Warriors held bells in their shields, and mystics and babies held them in their hands. In the Life of Brutus, Plutarch wrote that when Xanthus was attacked, its people dove into the river in their attempt to escape and were caught with bells. Their enemy’s nets were lined with them, and every capture was an announcement. Medieval falconers tied bells to the legs of birds that, if lost, might then be found again. Bells announced that the train had arrived, that an heir was born, that a war had begun. For centuries, curfew bells extinguished light and fire in every home in England.

In some parts of Europe, bells were placed at the bedside of a woman giving birth. These bells were an aid to delivery: the woman’s girdle set atop the bell and struck three times to transfer its power to the girdle and then to the woman through vibration. The bell also asked the neighbors to pray for the woman in pain. Other prayers were placed onto bells by the touch of a hand and traveled outward with the sound.

Men and women returned to the body of the bell when their own figures failed them. Legend had it that if a bell was placed on the head of a mad person and she drank a potion, she’d be well again. The bell appeared indomitable, with its hulking, shining body and its clamoring, far-reaching voice. At the bed of the sick, men and women lifted the bell, steadied the hammer, pressed its smooth, round mouth atop the patient’s head and held both as the potion went down.

A few years ago, I was making my way down the aisle of a church in Texas when I noticed a slight woman in motion near the exit. She was reaching up and pulling down on a thick, white rope. Over and over, her body was stretching toward the ceiling, grabbing the rope and tugging down to her knees, which were bent and inches from the ground. She was smiling and I was smiling. She looked every bit a woman designated to supplicate in prayer. By the might of her tugs, all of Austin heard.

The total movement of the bell is called its duty. And this duty is of the ringer. The body that moves before the body of the bell. Each pull of the rope like a link and an opening.

I listened for the sweet assault, strained my ears and craned my neck and held my breath. All I could hear through the thick stucco walls, though, were the people in front and behind me, intent on one another. No one, I suspect not even the slight woman, could hear the bell ringing from the inside. The walls were built to keep outside sounds out and inside sounds in. They weren’t made for the sounds between.

To cast a bell takes careful preparation. First, the founder builds the core, a foundation of bricks coated in clay and grease, and sets it on a spindle to dry. Next, the founder makes the false bell with plastic wax and places it on top of the core. He or she greases the false bell to keep the next layer from sticking then smoothes some fine clay over the grease to fill in any holes. After that, the founder spreads a coarser, thicker layer of clay and smoothes it until the cope forms.

When the core, the false bell, and the cope are dry, the founder sets a fire beneath the bricks and bakes the mold until it hardens. While baking, the grease falls away with the steam and leaves two thin contours of air between the core: one between the false bell and the core and the other between the false bell and the cope. In these tight spaces, the founder loosens and lifts the false bell out from between the core and cope, leaving a fat empty curve. He or she takes the bell metal, a mixture of copper and tin, and pours it through a hole at the top of the mold to fill the bell-shaped hollow.

If the core or cope is wet or the wrong temperature, if there is too much tin or the bell-metal is not hot enough, if the gases cannot escape, if the clapper is too heavy or the ringer too clumsy or boisterous, the bell can crack. Once a young girl was swept off the ground by the weight of the bell and the force of the rope she was swinging. The girl, who was not a skillful ringer, fell on the floor of the bell-chamber and died. The cracked bell, though, was likely recast—broken into pieces and set on fire. Poured into the shape of a bell again.

In the end, better to be the bell—the instrument, the tool, the vessel—than climb one or keep one or ring one.

Years ago, I went to a doctor with a bad case of nerves. When I sat down, he asked me to close my eyes, to think of a liquid and warm it up. I saw gold and melted it in a kettle in a cave in my mind. Then, he filled me up, toes first, with the molten stream. The liquid pooled in my toes, rose to my calves and up my thighs. It moved bit by bit to my abdomen and chest, spilled into my arms and into the tips of my fingers, surged in my throat and lips. By the time it reached my cheeks, I was replete: solid and sailing, backward and forward, backward and backward again.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Rebecca Bald is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher in Chicago.  She has a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, a MAT in Language Arts from National-Louis University, and a MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University.  She is the 2014 recipient of the Clare Rosen and Samuel Edes First Runner-up Prize for Emerging Artists.

jordan Sneakers | Nike sneakers

Breathing Room on Judgment Day

Meredith Anton

1.

Years ago, on an employee retreat for a publishing company I worked for in my twenties, I met a magician who levitated.  A group of us stood before him and watched as his body rose a foot off the ground.  My first instinct was to suspect conspiracy.  Was there a trick camera somewhere?  Did the magician have a protégé perched in the bushes, shining a mirror at another mirror, creating an illusion in some explainable way? It was possible.  But I was so close to this man, talking with him about the sunny day in the most usual of terms, aside from the fact that he was floating.

I return to this memory sometimes because it is unsettling.  I don’t believe that Moses parted the  Red Sea.  I doubt that Jesus really turned water into wine.  (Though I admire the idea.)  If I can dismiss these scenarios as ludicrous, how can I believe that it is possible for a magician to levitate through mind control, that it is possible, in theory, for anyone to do the same?

I know the mind has some power over the body.  Sometimes, a burning heat generates in my abdomen, caused by (I am pretty sure) a combination of meditation, yoga, and a sleepless night.  I know that thoughts can cause the heart to race, the breath to shorten. I once nearly fainted in an optometrist’s chair when the phrase “possible blood clot in the main artery that goes into your eye” was uttered.  I needed a cup of water and a wet towel on my forehead because of words.

Who knows how thought inspires action?  It is murky, and personal.  Sometimes, a thought lingers, dominates, but then recedes.  And sometimes a thought morphs into an emotion that propels the body to move.

On an evening far removed from the day I may or may not have witnessed levitation, I may or may not have levitated myself.  I wasn’t floating above the ground.  No one who witnessed me would have said anything magical was taking place.  And whereas the magician’s levitation, if genuine, probably occurred by way of some cerebral power he could channel, some way he could think his body to rise, the thrust to my body—a peculiar, acute force—seemed unpremeditated.  A certain combination of words spurred my body forward, away, out, as if my legs were being commanded by some invisible remote control.

“Dear Father, Let us pray for the children.”

How eight words can contain such power eludes me.  For the disciple, these words fuse the mortal to the divine.  For the nonbeliever, however, these words don’t soothe the soul.  These words, when uttered in a public sphere, torpedo like a war missile set to destroy your conviction that religion is a private matter, and not to be practiced in a government funded institution.  These words ignite emotions that launch your body away, without your mind’s consent.

On the evening I witnessed prayer in my daughter’s public school, my body rose without forethought.  The moment of silence began and I stood.  Filed through rows of parents and teachers on a mission for the exit door.  It wasn’t until I was outside the school building that my mind was able to process what my body has just done.

Adrenaline is underrated.  We have all heard stories about impossible feats, like the five-year-old who lifts a car to save his sister trapped underneath.  When I was in high school, a classmate of mine crawled one hundred yards away from his car after a crash, despite the fact that his legs had been crushed.  People move on instinct all the time.

I had always assumed that instinct and intuition were the same, until I became a mother. At the start of first grade, my daughter, Colette, was redistricted to a new school, and although my intuition said she would fare better without me hovering, my mother’s instinct—to protect—prevailed.  In retrospect, my attempt at joining the P.T.A. was a peculiar kind of helicopter parent defense mechanism, but at the time I was thinking, I should be preemptive:

“Mom, Haley says you’re bad if you don’t believe in God,” Colette says to me after her first day of school.

“You’re not bad,” I reply.  “Haley is wrong.”

The sacred can sense the secular.  Colette’s new girl status had elicited several invitations for her to attend Bible studies classes and church.  And a better me would have seen these overtures as simply the good intentions of others wanting to spread their love of Christianity to us.  But I was aggravated by the moral litmus test I was forced to take and, with my inevitable declinations, bound to fail.

Of course, I admit I am an alluring target for those who seek to reform.  I radiate have not seen the light.

I only went to church twice as a child and so my cumulative knowledge of Jesus is that he was an immaculately created, bearded carpenter.  I have but one lingering memory of Sunday school: a foggy image of an elderly woman encouraging me to place stickers of important religious people (whose names I did not recognize) onto a worksheet.  Those empty shapes on the page, outlined in black, like the tracings of dead bodies at crime scenes, held more promise for me left as is.

Growing up in the heartland of America (Iowa), feelings of exoticism were rare.  I hung from willow trees, vacationed at the mall.  Seekers of the diverse never stopped by my house on their pilgrimage to San Francisco.  My lack of experience with religion left a void, but the void was what I had faith in.  It was the mystical force.  My family’s eventual agnosticism meant my total circumvention of religion.  Religion’s absence was as habitual for me as other kids’ regular church attendance was for them.

On Sundays, the kids next door would cram into their wooden paneled station wagon as they set off for church, and I would spy on them from my perch on my bike at the top of my driveway.

Susie’s gussied up, but seems unhappy.  Looks like her white Mary Jane’s pinch.

Once they leave, I descend my driveway.  At first, I coast along the sidewalks, blissful.  But then, as I circle the neighborhood, I discover the brilliance of the absence of people.  The driveways are desolate.  Garage doors shut.  I am young and independent with all this breathing room and freedom to think.

If church is everybody’s Sunday routine, faith in God must be really common.  Why am I the only individual in sight?

˜

If what happened the night of the P.T.A. meeting had not, I still think I could have managed a full year’s membership.  If I were in another environment, I dare say I could have even enjoyed it.  Maybe if I were living in Vancouver, or Vermont, I’d be comfortable as parent volunteer.  Maybe somewhere there was a school where I could encourage kids to learn about things like global warming, media literacy, the danger of high fructose corn syrup.  Maybe there existed places, even in America, where questions could be asked in the open, even taboo ones, like what the United States was doing in Iraq.  But here I was in the Bible Belt.  Here I was in a gymnasium of adults with a commonality I not only did not share but also found oppressive.

2.

The P.T.A. meeting is about to begin.  Hundreds of dutiful parents are perched on hard-backed metal chairs, arranged in straight rows facing the gymnasium stage.  Exalted there, select parents and school officials shuffle notes and speak in quick whispers.  I choose a seat on the edge of a row, where I have myself a streamlined exit, should the need arise.  On reflection, my seat choice does reveal a premeditation to resist full compliance.  (Perhaps I was looking for trouble with the P.T.A., despite my efforts to be nonjudgmental about those who join, particularly since I was now one of them.)

It is dusk.  Light is filtering in from high windows, exposing a layer of dirt and hair, the tracks of over six hundred students.  The school is overcrowded, under-resourced and institutional, but I am trying to support it.  I attended public schools throughout my education and was never inclined to stray.  The academic expectations were always within my reach and the social interactions gritty enough to satisfy me.

I had forgotten the painted cement walls, the way they try to conjure school spirit by concealing the décor of a prison.

The P.T.A. president takes to the podium.  I am waiting for the first item on the agenda.  The candy bar fundraiser?  A call for volunteers for the book fair?  But from my position in the back of the gym, I bear witness to a phenomenon.  The individual heads, moments earlier bobbing this way and that, now unite and drop in unspoken knowing unison.  My own head remains upright.  I am the only one left unbowed.

“Dear Father, Let us pray for the children.”

I rise.  Begin a pilgrimage to the exit door, my legs taking the helm.  I am conscious that I am moving, but I also feel detached—floating.  And despite the group’s commitment to praying, my unorthodoxy does not go unnoticed.  There’s Colette’s teacher, mouth agape.  She seems less grandmotherly now, the benevolence of her apple sweater vest compromised by her scowl.  Until now, I have repressed my discomfort about the Bible she keeps on her desk, spine out.  I have buried my memory of her leading the class in a chorus of “The Lord’s Prayer” before lunch.

By the time I reach the door, I have been branded:

Godless.  Liberal.  Non-Christian.  Likes tofu.

So I brand them back:

Southern.  Conservative.  Evangelical.  Like pork rinds.

˜

Looking back, I can see that leaving the P.T.A. meeting was not only a social blunder, but also a financial mistake.  My husband was finishing graduate school, looking for administrative positions in the area, and he had established a nice rapport with Colette’s principal.  His anarchist wife interrupting the P.T.A. members’ conversation with God—while it would certainly set him apart from other assistant principal candidates—might also stamp him as unique in the wrong light.  That night, however, I was preoccupied with the fusion of church and state.  Was praying in the gym even legal? Should I protest further?  Wouldn’t that be truly patriotic?  What if a Jewish or Muslim family moved to town?  Shouldn’t someone begin to pave the road for them?

Although my reasoning was hyperactive now, it had been AWOL when I’d left the meeting.  It was as if my body had sensed, if not an illegality, than a threat to the purity of my ideology.  It was as if my body had been the vessel to transport my stance to safety, to the green zone of my beliefs.

Or maybe my reaction to prayer in a public place was a conditioned response, not so different from the others’ conditioned response to pray when told.  Maybe I risked acceptance involuntarily.  Maybe a body just goes its way.

3.

One thing is for certain: I have been trekking into territories for which I have no compass.  I had tried (for what I also thought was Colette’s sake) to serve as one of her Girl Scout troop leaders, but I had failed here, too.  My inherent need to examine conventions anew had resurfaced, inspiring me to inspire them to question everything, to think outside the Thin Mint box.

Meetings were held in a cottage behind the local Methodist church, where the girls often practiced their volunteer skills, planting bulbs and cleaning up the grounds.  Whenever I entered the church, I was confronted with a world that left me disquieted: the pastor’s expectant salutations, the deferential arrangement of the pews, the unfamiliar figures in the stained glass windows; I could look for meaning in those shards of colors but all I ever concluded was that it was representational art and I didn’t know the stories.

The Girl Scout house was less destabilizing.  Here Colette and I were always greeted with ebullient bouncing girls.  The other leader and I allowed time for their exuberant rendezvous, but soon the tenor would change.  We’d shape them into a circle.  Tell them to join hands.  It was time for the Girl Scout pledge.

“On my honor, I will try
To serve God and my Country
To help people at all times
And to live by the Girl Scout law.”

I liked the part about helping people, but, in light of America’s occupation of Iraq, it was hard to cede more power to country.  Serving the triumvirate of God, America, and now, the Girl Scouts, seemed overzealous.  Teaching young girls to relinquish more power, to serve yet another authority, seemed another impediment to their own thought processes.  What about serving a point of view?

One night, our troop was to assemble a care package for one scout’s father who was in Iraq.  Soldiers were in our midst.  We all lived near the Camp Lejeune Marine base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where I taught a community college writing course twice a week.  Tonight we were going to put the words “to help people” into action.

After the pledge, we moved into the kitchen where an empty box waited.  The girls placed their offerings into the box, valuables from America the soldier had wanted, like bags of Twizzlers and Doritos.  On top went handmade cards with messages of “God Bless You!” and “God Bless America!”  These were supposed to buoy me, but I was sinking.  Was I to accept that sending candy was enough for our soldiers?  Was this all that we would teach tonight, that dying soldiers in big war + prayers and candy = everything was going to be okay?

To me, the night’s lesson was “How to Numb Ourselves from a Deeper Truth.”  Although I too wanted relief for the soldier, there was this hollow throbbing place to explore: our government’s role in putting the soldier in Iraq in the first place.  I wanted to pose questions to the girls.  Do you think that some people think the war is wrong?  Do you know that our president and vice president have ulterior interests in the Middle East? But then upon the landscape my politicizing would plant a field of social land mines.  In the end, Colette and I quit, citing “time constraints” to the other scouts.  To myself, I cited “irreconcilable differences with the group,” honorably discharging ourselves.

4.

Driving to Jacksonville on the nights I teach, I often share the highway with convoys of military jeeps on their way back to Camp Lejeune.  Sometimes trucks sporting “Semper Fi” stickers or “United States Marine Corps” sidle up to my car and I decelerate to let them pass.  Who am I to butt in front of frontline men?  Who am I to be driving to my superfluous job where my bravest effort of the evening will be to try to sell the beauty of a well-defined thesis statement? I have a fervent antiwar stance, but only when tucked safely inside my car.

In class, I attempt a delicate balance: how to encourage my students, who are also Marines, to consider the illegalities surrounding the war when their ability to endure the mission depends on their conviction that the United States is fighting the good fight.  I want them to question their government’s motives.  They just want to forget.

I try to understand their perspectives, but war is beyond me.  I live in a world of theory.  I assign them readings like The Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense while they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.  One student stutters.  One announces her (unplanned) pregnancy.  Another, the wife of a returning soldier, quits class and moves to Pennsylvania (upon my urgent recommendation).  She tells me she is scared of her husband’s behavior since he returned from Iraq, how he has been “roughhousing” with their son, who is nine months old.

One of my students, Jim, has seen more death at nineteen than his young face can express.  I’ve never seen him outside of class, especially in a war zone so, to me, he embodies innocence.  He shows up for class, seems interested in what I say, wants to learn how to write.  From my teacher perspective, he seems so sweet, so malleable. A self-proclaimed born again Christian, Jim often writes about his role model, Jesus.  He says he will return to Iraq to defend Christianity against radical Islam.

I want to teach him that it is not weak to respect those with different beliefs, so I conduct an experiment.  I ask each student to bring something to class that will evoke our senses.  We will write descriptions of each student’s offering in order to see how subjective individual sensory perception is.  One student brings a favorite dessert.  Another brings a perfume.  Jim brings a Christian love song.  As we listen to lyrics linking the love in Jesus to the romantic love between a man and a woman, Jim closes his eyes, mouths every word, as if speaking in tongues.  When the song ends, he cries.

I have no reaction to the song itself and this is what is disconcerting: How can I be so removed from my student’s emotional response?   Why do our approaches feel so inaccessible to each other?

Maybe our beliefs are really just forces of our habits—safety zones that lock in our ignorance—  disguised as devotions or creeds.

After class, I thank Jim.  I confess to him my lack of religion and attempt to draw a parallel: “My lack of faith is as permanent as your faith in God.”  He listens, but seems puzzled, his expression similar to my own whenever I see a group of people entering a church.  I’ll be driving to a bookstore or on my way to yoga class and here are these people filing in to worship.  I get it in theory, but it is still so foreign.

˜

A stranger on an airplane once asked me if she could pray for me when she learned I wasn’t Christian.

“No thank you,” I said, with surprising unapologetic certainty.

“You won’t be saved,” she declared.

Without physical mobility, I reverted to my thoughts.  How can I be unworthy of being saved if I dispute the legitimacy of being saved as an actual happening?  I don’t predict harm on her due to her beliefs.  Why does she get to land me in hell for mine?

˜

If, after this life, I find myself in the awkward position of not being dead and also not being saved, then maybe I will understand why I should suffer for my agnostic sins.  But for now I am willing to take all the risks.  Because what if the mystery is what’s sacred?  What if respecting the unknown is the point?

˜

I am just getting accustomed to telling the truth about my religiosity.  Recently, two women clutching Bibles ascended my walkway and knocked on my door and, in a sudden shift of behavioral pattern, my first instinct was not to hide and sign to my children shhhhh.  My first instinct was to just answer the door.

“Hello,” they say in unison.

I size them up.  Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thoughts ensue, like loss of female rights.

“We know you weren’t expecting us,” they say, offering a pamphlet.

“No,” I interrupt, “and actually, I’m off to a yoga class.”

I don’t know what the word yoga will conjure in the minds of Jehovah’s Witnesses but my intuition tells me that this one word will propel their movement away.

“Oh! Yoga…” they sputter, as if I have just announced I am late for alien croquet.

“Okay,” they continue.  “Have a nice day.”

Inside my house, I am taken aback.  Speaking my truth did not produce a curt reply.  I had expected these women to pass judgment, to suggest a wrath coming my way, but they responded with civility.  Now I am remorseful.  And curious.  Through the shutters in my son’s room, I spy on them.  They are at my next-door-neighbor’s house, and I can verify that she is being her reliable, southern, friendly, good Christian self, but their conversation remains a mystery.  Are they really discussing Jesus?  Are they affirming their common life paradigms? Then I slink away.  It is not for me to know.

˜

I only consider religion at moments of fear, like when a noise convinces me that there is a killer outside or when an airplane I am riding on has a possible mechanical problem.  And even during these moments, I am not so much praying as repeating a regret fueled mantra, please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die. I still doubt that a man in the sky is assessing my right to live.  Really, I am just heightening my appreciation for life, promising not to abandon this awareness once the plane lands or the sun reveals no murderer on my front porch, pre-kill.

˜

In hotels, I open the nightstand drawer to see if the Bible is there but not because I am going to read it.  I just need confirmation that whoever makes Bible decisions for hotel chains is still being given this authority.  It seems antiquated, 1950’s-ish.  With no personal attachment to the Bible, I find its consistency in hotel drawers diminishes its holiness and its allure.  It becomes just another middle class American standard, like the continental breakfast included, the pool, the infinite channels.

5.

In the afternoon, I am a prompt chauffeur, carting my son Miles in his wagon to Colette’s bus stop.  Once there, we peer down the pavement with our eyes prepped for that big yellow and black wheeled monster that carries Colette home in its belly.  Soon, the bus ejects her like a staple from a stapler and she is my responsibility.  She will absorb everything I say until her eyelids submit to the dark.  Today, Miles pounces on her, but she peels him off, insinuating there is something more pressing than brotherly love.

“Mom, if God invented the world, who invented God?”

She asks with a strange hybrid of interest and nonchalance, as if the art of soliciting serious information from me depends on her delivery.   As we glide along together, I struggle with an answer.  I am ill-equipped for such profundity, having spent the last eight hours answering Miles’ questions, which are also frequent and exhausting, but of a much simpler nature, as in, “Mom, what chair needs fixing?”

All day, he has been my two-foot high carpenter, donning his yellow construction hat, a hand-me-down from his older cousin and two sizes too big.  All he needs is a little business.  All I am required to do is flip over a chair, point to the screws and wonder aloud if there are “Any good carpenters around here?”  He’ll dunk into his toolbox.  Emerge with a hammer.  Be good to go.  Colette’s questions are no longer this simplistic.  Her question—who is responsible for the creation of the universe—requires too much circumspection for a Wednesday afternoon.

I am relieved that Colette has not yet been programmed to consider this question off-limits as a topic of friendly conversation, at least with her mother.  I am also relieved that she is seeking my advice.  But I am wary of the origin of such an inquiry.  I know that her friends talk about Jesus and God.  I have not prepared her to respond.

I cast out an offering, a palette of potential ideas ranging from Buddhism to polytheism to reincarnation to the blunt idea that we will become worm food.  That we may want to consider our time here, heaven on Earth.  I encourage her to consider everything, all religions, none.  I remind her that she is young and independent.

“Go ride your bike,” I say.

˜

It was only a matter of time before religion would enter Colette’s cauldron of emerging inquiries.  When she was just five, on Christmas morning, she asked me to “level with” her by confirming her suspicions about Santa.  While children across America pried open toys mummified in plastic, Colette remained unconvinced.

“Mom?  Why is my guitar from Santa wrapped in the same wrapping paper as the presents from Grandma?  This is strange, mom.  There’s a “Made in China” sticker on the back.  Was it made at the North Pole or Target?  Mom, I want the truth!”

I had a developed distaste for Santa, for Christmas, since becoming a mother.  I’d had to weigh my lack of religion with my disdain for consumerism and fold in whatever level of adherence I had to American tradition in order to come up with some justifiable reason for participating in Christmas at all.  Our government said it was fighting Islamo-fascism, and patriotism seemed necessary.  But shopper-as-patriot seemed insane.  As did the concept that giving one’s offspring more stuff represented love.

We could celebrate the winter solstice, but that seemed too barren when juxtaposed with Santa.  But if I just continued on autopilot, shopping and spending to the ubiquitous Christmas music, without ever questioning the source of the products I was buying or considering the less festive atmospheres in which they were being made, or what the people (children?) who were making them were thinking of us Americans as they endured the assembly line construction of toys we wanted cheap, I’d be surrendering to the power of corporatist covetousness.  That didn’t seem healthy for anyone, or in keeping with the supposed meaning of Christmas.  In fact, it felt antithetical.  What transpired was often a blended but watered-down approach to the holiday that preserved some traditions, abandoned others, and totally confused us all.

I can see how Colette went from questioning Santa’s existence to questioning the existence of God.  Both are figures of goodness explained to you by trusted adults and both offer eternal happiness (or at least fun toys to last until January).  Both also judge your behavior. Have you been naughty or nice? Where will you spend your afterlife?

Whether Colette’s inquisitiveness is just in her nature or exacerbated by my constant questioning is hard to know.  What is clear is that she has found a snag in the process of her personal logic.  Truths of the world are emerging, but the truths emerging at school are often inconsistent with the truths emerging at home.

Colette’s home truths are gleaned from her parents’ reactions to the news.  These truths, like the political event preceding her investigation of Santa that Christmas, swirl around her house in the form of open conversations between mom and dad.

“Mom, who did Santa vote for, Kerry or Bush?”

I don’t remember my exact response, but I am sure I drew a direct connection between Santa and Kerry.  I am sure I ascribed antiwar tendencies to the man who rides the sky rewarding only children who are good.  I am sure I projected my political views onto a make believe entity as a way to indoctrinate my child.  I used a loaded image to justify what I believe.  I fudged the evidence.  I buried the truth.  Because I put Bush’s second “election” in  huge dubious quotes and determined it a colossal breakdown of awareness that would extend the war, I was compelled to embark on another breakdown: an explanation of how fear conjures things, like votes, and war, and death.

“I wish you hadn’t been born during a war,” I say to Colette, as I tuck her into her heart-patterned comforter.

“Why, mom?”

“Because you’ve never known a time of peace.”

˜

On the surface, I know it’s not right to tell children horror stories, even if they are true.  But against the backdrop of war, nonfiction seems vital.  If my daughter is going to spend her entire childhood hearing about Iraq, and now Afghanistan, I want her to know some realities—both good and bad—beyond the symbol of Old Glory.

Books like Good Night, Sleep Tight and A Sleepytime Rhyme are shelved.  Instead, I freelance story time, weaving endangered American concepts, like individual rights, into stories about America’s formation.  I create child-friendly chapters on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of and from Religion.  I conjure visual images, like a tree with branches named “Executive,” “Legislative,” and “Judicial.”  I plant seeds, then kiss her goodnight.

One night, we come to the story of September 11th.  I try to use good judgment in the details I disseminate, focusing on the aftermath of the attacks and how the tragedy brought me to her. It’s selective storytelling and we all do it.  We all extract only the details that help us make sense out of the nonsensical.

“You were at preschool,” I begin.  “I was writing at this coffee place across the street.  When I heard the news, I picked you up and drove us home right away.”

What I don’t recount to her is the nightmare I had on the night of September 11th.

That story begins with the Twin Towers ablaze.  I am asleep but semiconscious, aware that although I am only a witness to this disaster, I am still close to the rush of fire and smoke.  The danger is real, as is my now erratic breath.  On some level, I know I am only dreaming, because I have the sensation that, here in my bed, I am whimpering aloud.

The worst part comes next.  I see them.  Human beings are on ledges of burning buildings, frozen between two paths to death.  When they start to fall, one by one, I realize I am watching, for the first time ever, people choosing death.

Or am I?

I wake up, eager for that relief that comes with morning, but it has performed a supreme disappearing act.  What does remain is the enigma of Americans jumping to their deaths, which is as strange and disturbing a reality as in my dream.  I cannot rationalize it.  The act of jumping seems both instinctual and incongruent with the human need to survive.  On one hand, it seems involuntary, human beings responding to stimuli.  Repelling fire is natural, right? But I can’t shake my sense that some of the people paused before they jumped, as if deciding what to do.  That some of them might have been thinking seems plausible as well, especially for Americans, for whom choice is inherent.

Were the Americans who jumped from the Twin Towers making this decision: should I stay and risk the fire or should I jump and risk the fall? Or did we bear witness to something more spiritual?  Were these brave Americans somehow blessed with a power to trust the universe?  Did their spirits rise from their bodies?  Did they take a leap of faith?

6.

What do we say?

My yoga instructor, Michael, is sitting in lotus position, facing me.  He bows to the floor and whispers, “Namaste.” I now know the spiritual meaning of “Namaste”: the God in me recognizes and honors the God in you. But in my early practice of yoga, I thought he was saying, “No mistake.”  I’d sit cross-legged, spine erect, only to have my balance disrupted by my thoughts.  No mistake?  Seems too rigid for yoga. No mistake summons the word rigid.  But Michael is the herald of flexibility. I pursue positive interpretations of “no mistake,” but the only one I can find is no matter how much you screw up this week, you have made no mistake in the eyes of those who are spiritually aware.

I have been breathing through the tightness, but no matter how often I search for balance, search for that third eye that is supposed to exist somewhere on my forehead, my forehead remains crumpled.  My first wrinkle appeared there, from all my years spent worrying over stupid things, and now it reminds me whenever I look in the mirror that I am a typical American woman, bound by generational ethos.

In the downward facing dog position, I close my eyes and center on my breath.  Scan my body for rigidity.  Where does it hurt?  Where is it hard to breathe? My hamstrings signal first so I stretch them until whatever is concealed is unleashed.  In level time and depth, I inhale and exhale, until the force and pattern of steady breathing creates some weird rhythmic canyon into which no new thoughts are permitted.  I hold this position, breathing without an active thought, but with the low drumming hope that clarity resides in the crevices of my muscular system.  Then my thoughts return.

Will I ever achieve actual meditation or am I just wasting my time on another misbegotten happiness pursuit?  If I could only soften the interior parts of my body, if I could only, through the mix of breath and mind control, elongate and relax everything within me, I would be happy and calm and ageless. I breathe like my life depends on it, like I will die if I cannot control my thoughts, then I surrender.  I am too American, the self-made yogi.  I just assume that enlightenment is here for the taking, that I will obtain it.  Just because I covet what it might bring.

Part of me laughs at the irony of the benchmark mastery of yoga.

Part of me recoils at the irrepressible quest.

Enlightenment, when paid by the hour, is fleeting.  Practice ends.  Any sense of peace I have gathered in the last hour will diminish as the evening wears on, but an unexpected image will remain.  I open my eyes to the classroom, to the other eager disciples.  And there in front of me, attached to me, is the fact of my hands in prayer pose.


Winner of the 2010 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize

 

Art by Matt Monk

Meredith Anton studied creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she received her MFA. She is an essayist, activist, and cultural commentator, currently at work on her first collection of essays. She lives in southern Vermont with her husband and two children.


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Afterlife

Susan Southard

Nearly every day, seventy-seven-year-old Yoshida Katsuji drives across the city from his modest home to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.  Always early, Yoshida moves through the museum corridors and office hallways with ease, greeting each staff member with an energetic “Good morning!” and a slight bow of his head.  As the museum lobby and sidewalks outside become packed with students lining up for tours and presentations, Yoshida stands at the information desk talking and laughing with the staff person there.  Once his group arrives, he enters the lecture hall just off the main entrance, stands before a hundred or more visiting school children, and tells them his story.

“I look out at them,” Yoshida tells me, “and the little girls look at me like this.”  He raises his eyebrows and mimics an expression of shock and horror.  “Instantly, they begin to cry— because I’m so incredibly handsome.”  Yoshida laughs—a huge upper body laugh—and waits, eyes wide, for my reaction.

I hold his gaze.  A large black patch covers the right side of his head, secured by a black elastic band that runs underneath his chin, up the other side of his face, and across the top of his nearly bald head.  Scar tissue covers his face and neck, and his left ear is shriveled.  When he smiles, his mouth is crooked, revealing severely misshapen teeth.  Behind large framed glasses, Yoshida’s eyes are uneven, one higher than the other.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” he says, as if to reassure me.  “I tell the audience, ‘I am as good looking as Kimutaku’—a famous actor.  When I spoke in Chicago, I was DiCaprio.  In Japan, I am Kimutaku.  I tell them this to make them laugh.”

Yoshida leans back and laughs again.  Then he sighs and covers his mouth and nose with the palm of his hand to wipe tiny beads of excess saliva from his lips and face.

˜

In a small conference room tucked away inside the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall, I interview Yoshida for the first time.  In my research for a book about the Nagasaki survivors, I had read his brief testimony of the days and weeks after the bomb, and had asked my contact at the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace to set up this meeting.  Yoshida is wearing black slacks, black suspenders, and a beige dress shirt with thin blue stripes and a narrow Nehru collar.  He leans in, ready for my questions.

“Is it all right to begin by looking at this map?” I ask in Japanese, turning the map around so he can read it.

Yoshida quickly scans the map, finds the atomic bomb’s hypocenter, and points to a neighborhood on the other side of the mountains.  “This is where my house was,” he replies in Japanese,   “Uma-machi No. 65.”

Yoshida studies the map further and indicates an area just north of the hypocenter.  “My school was here.”

“That’s so close,” I say.  Few survived at that proximity.

“Yes,” Yoshida says, “it was very close.”

˜

In 1945, Yoshida was a thirteen-year-old student in the shipbuilding course at the Nagasaki Vocational School.  But classes had been cancelled for more than a year, so Yoshida, one year too young for mandated student labor in military factories, dug air raid shelters, joined bucket brigades to extinguish fires caused by Allied bombing, and made bamboo spears for use against the Allies in the anticipated land invasion of Japan.

“When you were a child,” I ask, “what did you think about the war?”

“Us?” Yoshida says, speaking with immense energy and intention.  “We thought Japan would win for sure.  We had to endure until we won.  That’s how it was.”

Yoshida

“Did you want to fight in the war?”

“Everyone did.  We longed to.  We wanted to become soldiers and fight; we were educated that way starting in elementary school.  We were brainwashed, so we didn’t think it was possible for us to lose.”

Yoshida’s words are hurried, upbeat.  “A portrait of the Emperor hung at our school.  He was considered a descendent of God.  We bowed to the portrait when we passed it to pay our respects.

“But during the war, the situation in Japan was bad, you know?  Gradually, we were being defeated.  Everything was rationed.  The amount of food we were allowed each month got smaller and smaller.  We got two go (just under a cup) of uncooked rice per month.  One loaf of bread.  That’s how it was.”  Yoshida looks at me intently.  “My stomach was empty.”

˜

By August 1945, Allied forces had firebombed and incinerated sixty-six Japanese cities.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, and the country’s infrastructure had crumbled.  Nagasaki, however, was on the short list for the atomic bomb, so the United States had not implemented full-scale bombing on the city.  Instead, Nagasaki had experienced limited targeted attacks on docks, shipyards, factories, and the central railway station.  U.S. surveillance planes flew over Nagasaki every morning and evening, prompting air raid alarms across the city that interrupted work, school, and agricultural routines.  The city was on constant alert.

At about ten o’clock on the morning of August 9—three days after the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb used in wartime over the city of Hiroshima—another round of air raid sirens wailed in Nagasaki.  Adults and children throughout the city scurried to the tunnel-shaped air raid shelters built in factories, hospitals, schools, and into the sides of hills all around.

Yoshida points on the map to the shelter where he hid that morning.  “When the air raid alarm sounded, my friends—”

“There were six of you?”

“Yes, six friends, plus me—seven total—we went to the air raid shelter near our school for protection.  But teachers and employees had priority, so we didn’t go in.  Instead, we escaped to an air raid shelter in the woods to hide from the enemy.

“We crouched there until the ‘all clear’ sounded.  This meant that the enemy planes were gone, and we had to leave the shelter and get back to school.  If the ‘all clear’ siren hadn’t sounded, we would have stayed in the woods, and we wouldn’t have been so close.”

Just before 11:00 a.m., the people of Nagasaki emerged from hiding.  The sun was hot, and the high-pitched, rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated across the city.  Crowds filled the streets.  At an altitude of thirty thousand feet, Bock’s Car, the B-29 carrying the second atomic bomb, arrived undetected.

“It was summer—right?”  Yoshida says, speaking so fast I can hardly understand him.  “We wanted some water.   So when we came down from the mountain, we stopped at a roadside well shared by two farmhouses.”

Six miles above, Captain Kermit Beahan, Bock’s Car’s bombardier, activated the tone signal that opened the bomb bay doors and indicated thirty seconds until release. Five seconds later, he noticed a hole in the clouds and made a visual identification of Nagasaki. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled. Within seconds, the instrument plane accompanying Bock’s Car discharged three parachutes, each attached to scientific equipment that would measure heat, blast, and radiation effects. Then Beahan released the bomb.

On the side of the road, Yoshida was lowering the bucket into the well when he looked up to his right and saw two parachutes about a half a mile away, falling between a crack in the clouds.

Rakka-san, they were called back then,” he says.  Descending umbrellas.

“What did you think when you saw them?”

“I just thought that they were regular parachutes, that maybe some soldiers were coming down.”

“Did you say anything?”

Yoshida shrugs.  “Just, ‘Hey, look! Something’s falling!’  We all looked up, using our hands to block the sun.  The parachutes floated down—saaatto—quietly, with no sound.”

Then Yoshida noticed a large dark object falling through the clouds.

“There was just a split second, then…BAN!” he says, his voice loud and fevered as he recalls the thunderous detonation of the five-ton plutonium bomb.  Yoshida jumps up from his chair and moves to the white board behind me.  At high speed, he scribbles the mountains around the city, marks where he was standing when he saw the bomb, and draws an “x” for the hypocenter—the point five hundred meters above the ground where the bomb exploded.  “My body was hurled into the air,” he says, drawing a line from one spot to another, “and blasted across a field, a road, and an irrigation channel.  I landed here, in a rice paddy.”

One millionth of a second after the bomb exploded above the city, the burst point reached an estimated three to four million degrees Fahrenheit.  All the materials that made up the bomb vaporized into an ionized gas, releasing electromagnetic waves that, when absorbed by the air, ignited a fireball approximately fifty-two feet wide, with an internal temperature of over 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  In one second, the fireball grew to about 750 feet in diameter.  The demolition force of the blast blew people off their feet, crushed them beneath houses and collapsed buildings, destroyed steel structures, roofs, and walls, and moved an iron bridge twenty-eight inches downstream.  Near the hypocenter, the heat instantly carbonized human and animal bodies and vaporized their internal fluids.  Within three seconds of the explosion, infrared rays from the heat of the blast caused severe and fatal flash burns on the exposed faces, arms, and legs of tens of thousands of people.  Unprecedented levels of radiation penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals, initiating cellular mutations that would lead to death, disease, and life-changing medical conditions.

As the mushroom cloud billowed three miles overhead and darkened the city, Yoshida lay in a muddy rice field more than 130 feet from the well where he had seen the bomb.  His entire body was burned.

˜

Yoshida moves back to his chair but does not sit.  “We should go to the museum,” he says, “I’ll show you the photos of me there.”  I follow him through the long corridors of the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall, into hidden hallways that connect it to the Atomic Bomb Museum, and downstairs to the below-ground entrance to the exhibits.  The museum staff wave Yoshida through, and we bypass the turnstiles that visitors use to enter.

The first room is a small passageway with oversized black-and-white photographs of Nagasaki from the 1940s.  Set into trees and foliage, wooden homes are clustered in small neighborhoods across the city.  Staircases ascend into the hills, leading to shops and tile-roofed houses huddled close together.  Streetcars wind through the city on tracks, their wires connected to cables strung between electrical poles along the side of the road.  Women wear kimonos, and men wear Western clothes – suits, shirts, slacks, and sometimes hats.  Workers transport their goods with hand- and horse-pulled carts.  In one celebratory photo, thousands of people are standing on the docks of a shipyard next to a battleship, waving their fathers, sons, brothers, and uncles off to war.  In another, students at bayonet practice stand in lines on the dirt field of their school.

The next room is cavernous and nearly dark.  All around are actual and recreated ruins of the city:  cracked archways and crumbling sacred statues from the Urakami Cathedral, melted metal beams from bridges, and fractured cement staircases from schools and factories.  Video screens alternate black-and-white photos of factories reduced to mangled steel skeletons, vast stretches of debris and dust where the city once was, scorched bodies, and people wandering dazed through the rubble.

We move into the main exhibit room, past a timeline of the Manhattan Project and the development and delivery of the bombs, and weave through a crowd of junior high school students toward a wall of photographs relating to survivors’ injuries.  Behind us to our left stands a life-size model of the Nagasaki atomic bomb, ten feet eight inches high and five feet in diameter with an orange-red band around its middle like a belt.

Yoshida points to the glass case in front of us.  “The top photo is before my surgery,” he says.  “The bottom one is after.”

I stare at the top photo trying to understand what I am seeing.  Except for the outline of his head and neck and his thick black hair on top, it is hard to tell that this photograph is actually a side view of Yoshida’s face.  The entire right side of his head—from behind his ear to the middle of his nose, and from the top of his head past his right eye, cheek, and down to his neck—is a mass of charred, blistered, crusted skin.  His right ear is a swollen glob of melted flesh.

We stand together in silence.

“The left side of my face healed on its own,” Yoshida says, “but on the right side, the burns were more severe.  Even though my skin grew back, the flesh beneath it didn’t.  I was in the hospital for fifteen months.”

Yoshida

“How many surgeries did you have?”

“Three.  Two of them failed.  They took skin from my left thigh and grafted it onto my face, but infections grew beneath the skin and pus would pour out.  When the infections healed, the skin scabbed over, as hard as a cast.  That was really, intensely painful.  After the third surgery, I gradually healed.”

“What about your right ear?”

Yoshida touches the black patch covering the right side of his head.  “After a while,” he says, “the swollen part rotted and fell off.  So there’s no ear here.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.  Just a hole, alone.”

The bottom photograph shows Yoshida’s face a year later, after his final surgery in late 1946.  It is difficult to see much of a difference, except that both the blackness and the swelling are somewhat reduced.  By then, Yoshida was nearly fifteen.  His eyes are frozen in terror.

˜

“Let’s go upstairs,” he says, turning to leave.  I dash after him, barely keeping up, past artifacts of the bombing:  melted coins and glass; scorched rice in a schoolgirl’s melted metal lunch box; and a military helmet found near the hypocenter, with part of the soldier’s skull still attached on the inner surface.  We enter the last exhibit room, filled with paintings and poems created by survivors.  To the right, three small television screens are mounted on the wall in front of cushioned benches where visitors can sit and watch videotaped testimonies of individual hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”).

“My video is number 21,” Yoshida tells me as we race by.

“Number 21?” I say. “I’ll come back when it’s not crowded.”

“Yes,” he replies.  “I hope you will.”

We ascend the spiral walkway to the museum lobby.  In the span of three minutes, Yoshida seamlessly interrupts his conversation with me numerous times to bow slightly and say ohayou gozaimasu—good morning—to every visitor who passes.

“When did you start speaking in front of others?”  I ask.

“It was about twenty-two years ago,” he says.   That’s 1987, I calculate, forty-two years after the bomb.  “Many survivors spoke a lot, but I didn’t until then.  I was shy to be in front of women.  Everyone looks at me like this—” Yoshida grimaces.  “I didn’t like it.”

“But you don’t feel that way now?”

“No, no.  I don’t.  Right now, my schedule is very busy.  High school students, junior high students, elementary school students.  When I speak to elementary school students, I have to use language they can understand.  It’s hard.

“This is what I say to children,” he continues.  “‘Have you ever looked up “heiwa”— “peace”—in the dictionary?’  They never have.  They’ve never looked it up because we don’t need to know what peace is during peacetime.  ‘Let’s look it up together,’ I say to them.”

We continue up the walkway.  “Our greatest enemy is carelessness,” he says.  “We need to pay attention to peace.”

In 2005, Yoshida traveled to Chicago to speak at several universities and at the Chicago Peace Museum.  “Audiences were generally receptive,” he says, “and they always asked about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.  I told them that I think it was wrong that Japan started the war, and I apologized for that.”

“Telling your story over and over again,” I ask, “it’s not overwhelming?”

“No, I’ve gotten used to it.  In the past, whenever I went to speak somewhere, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s too much.’  Now, I think that we should prevent war at all costs, so I should tell my story.  Being shy is not a good reason to not speak for peace.”

We enter the lobby of the museum.  On every wall hangs artwork, most made of colorful origami cranes representing peace, from school children across Japan and the world.  Dozens of other pieces lean against the walls, overlapping one another.  A group of students in uniforms waits for Yoshida in the lobby.

“An hour isn’t long enough to tell my story,” he says.

“No, it isn’t,” I reply.  “I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

We bow to one another and I thank him.  Then he turns to greet his group and lead them down the hall to the assembly room.

˜

The next day, I meet Yoshida at the information desk and follow him as he zips through the hallways toward the elevator.  Suddenly he veers right to the staircase.  “The stairs are better for you!” he says, ascending them at fast speed and laughing as I hurry to keep up.  We head into the second-floor conference room with a large window overlooking the city.  As I try to catch my breath, Yoshida holds out his hand.  “This is for you,” he says, giving me an individually wrapped lemon cake, “in case you didn’t have time for lunch.”

We settle into chairs across from one another, and Yoshida quickly returns to his memories immediately following the atomic explosion.  “I’d been hurled back into a rice paddy, right?  At some point when I regained consciousness, I could feel the coldness of the water, so I stood up.  My body was covered in mud.  I didn’t feel any pain.”

“You were in shock?”

“Yes.  My entire face was burned.”  Yoshida’s voice is animated. “The skin on my arms had peeled off and was hanging down, and blood—I had no skin, so blood was pouring out of my flesh.”

He points to his ribcage and looks at me.  “I broke two ribs, and they’re still bent, even now.  The doctor said the bones had healed in that bent position, as they’d been broken.  Now, mostly, it doesn’t hurt, but when I play baseball, I can’t swing the bat further than this.”  Yoshida mimes a baseball swing that stops short because he can’t turn his body at the waist.

“After the bomb,” he continues, showing me his hands, palms upward, “my hands were tight, like this.”   Yoshida curls his fingers into fists.  “The doctor told me to put sand in a bucket and hold it with my fingers so that my fingers would eventually open.  The bucket was pulling my fingers down.  I couldn’t hold it for five minutes because it hurt, like my hand would break.  It took thirteen years before I could do this.”  He spreads his fingers open.  “In winter, it’s still really painful because the tissue underneath my skin always seems to split open.”

All six of Yoshida’s friends survived the initial explosion.  They found each other and lay wounded in the grass next to a small river, hoping to be rescued.  Field workers and others began staggering down from the hills, injured and dazed.  “Tons of people,” Yoshida says.  “People whose skin was falling off and hanging in strips from their bodies.  Some had body parts that had been blown away.  Some were almost completely naked and so badly burned I couldn’t tell if they were men or women.”

“People were moaning and crying,” he says, his voice higher—younger, it seems, as if he is still there.   “I saw one person whose eyeballs were hanging out.  And people who were burned black all over, like us.  Everyone begged for water.”

Yoshida leans forward, his eyes holding my focus.  “Some mothers came down from the mountains and were crying, and we started crying, too, even louder.  We joined them and headed toward the city, past dead bodies, some burned to ashes.  As we got closer to the hypocenter, the whole city was on fire.  Our skin was peeling off, and our flesh was swollen.  Leeches from the rice paddy had attached to me, and at some point, we turned around and went back to the embankment to wash ourselves off.  We placed uncharred leaves all over our bodies to cover the areas without skin.  Then we crouched down in an area where the ground was depressed.  ‘Hang in there, okay?’ we said, trying to encourage each other. ‘Gotta keep going…do our best…’

“By late afternoon,” he continues without pausing, “the leaves that we’d put over our open wounds began to dry out and crumble from the heat of the sun.  When they fell off, the sun was beating down on our exposed flesh.”  Later that day when the sun fell behind the mountains, the boys felt visceral relief.  “At that point,” Yoshida says, “we thought we were saved.”

Yoshida’s story races from his mouth.  “My face was so swollen that I couldn’t open my eyes.  I couldn’t see anything, but whenever anyone passed, I called out to ask if my neighborhood near Suwa Shrine was damaged.  I heard their voices reply to me, ‘The whole city is destroyed!’

“I lost consciousness that night.  One of my friends, Tabuchi, who could still see out of one eye, left to try to make it over the mountain to our neighborhood.   He arrived home the next morning, and his mother went to my house to tell my parents where I was.  Because of that, I was saved.

“My mother and father and two neighbors walked seven kilometers, all the way from Uma-machi.  The streets were still burning, you know?  Their feet got so hot, they couldn’t bear it.  Many houses were crushed and the water pipes had burst, so water trickled out.  They ran to the water and got their feet wet and then kept walking.  That’s what I heard.

“My parents were ira-ira—desperate—to find me, and walked through the ruins of my school where a member of a relief team had taken me.  They called out my name, ‘Katsuji!  Katsuji!’  But everyone looked the same, right?  And everyone answered to everyone else’s call.

“‘We won’t be able to find him,’ my mother said to my father.

“‘If that’s the case,’ my father said, ‘then we need to lean in close to their ears and say his name in a small voice.’  I don’t know how many dozens of people they did that with, but when they came to me, they suddenly knew it was me.”

“Did they carry you home in their arms?”

“They placed me in an uba-guruma—a baby carriage—and pushed me through the smoldering ruins and across the mountains to our home.”

“When did you regain consciousness?”

“Not until mid-December.  Four months.  My mother laid out a futon and put newspapers on top, and then a kind of wax paper to protect the bedding from the pus oozing out of my wounds.  She lay me down on top of that and hung mosquito netting.  My mother was especially cautious about flies, but they landed on her and she carried them through the mosquito netting to me.  They laid eggs all over me.  She tried removing them with chopsticks, but the eggs were too small, so she heated the scissors and scraped my flesh—even though it was rotting.  By doing that, she removed a lot of eggs and later maggots that had hatched in my wounds.”

“What about the friends you were with that day?”

“The first one died on August 21st.  Then one by one they died in the weeks following the bomb. I’m the only one left.  As for my other classmates, we stopped having class reunions for my vocational school because everyone in my class had died.

“It’s because of my mother that I am alive,” he says.  “She never slept, and any food she had she gave to me.  My face was so badly burned that I couldn’t open my mouth, so my mother used a stick to feed me.  ‘Kuu, kuu,’ she said softly, to encourage me to eat.”

˜

In December 1945, still unconscious, Yoshida was transported to the Omura Naval Hospital north of Nagasaki and received medical treatment for the first time.  After three skin graft surgeries, he was discharged from the hospital in January 1947.  Yoshida, then fifteen, walked alone into the Omura train station, and when he entered the waiting area, the room fell silent.  Yoshida’s still blackened face drew everyone’s gaze.

“I bowed my head and cried,” he says.  “After the train left the station, I thought I would have some peace, but at each stop people got on and off, and everyone stared.  So I kept my face down and cried all the way to Nagasaki.

“I’m okay now, but then I was completely messed up.  Such a handsome fellow that I was,” Yoshida jokes.  “I was totally disfigured.  I couldn’t show my face.  After I got home, I never left my house.”

“How long did you stay inside?”

“For two or three years. There was a barbershop within fifty meters of my house, but I wouldn’t even go that far.  At some point, my mother asked the barber to come to our house on his day off to cut my hair, but instead, he said I could come to the shop in the morning before it opened.  In the middle of my haircut, it came time to open the shop.  I looked up into the mirror in front of me and saw a customer looking at me.  Our eyes met in the mirror.

“Immediately the customer looked away,” Yoshida continues.  “He looked at me again. Human nature is amazing—once you’ve seen something, even if you turn away, you want to see that thing again.  At that moment, I became very sad and began to cry.

“Later, my mother came to me and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about getting help so your face would be less difficult to look at?  Why don’t we contact the doctor in Omura and ask him what to do?’  She did that, and I got cream to apply to my face.  I’ve applied lotion to my skin every day since then.  Even today,” Yoshida teases and laughs, “knowing I was going to see you, I applied lotion on my skin!”

˜

By 1949, four years after the bomb, Yoshida had finally recovered enough to begin working at a grocery wholesaler.  Eventually he married.  “I was pretty lucky,” he says, speaking about his wife.

“Was she a hibakusha, too?”  I ask.

“No, my wife wasn’t injured in the bomb.  She died ten years ago, from cancer.”

h

“Did you discuss your experience with her?”

“We didn’t talk about it much.  But ten years after we were married—we’d had two children in ten years—my wife told me how she’d felt at first.  ‘We were sleeping together back then,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t look at your face because it was so black.’”  Yoshida clasps his hands.  “I had a wife who couldn’t look at me.”

“What about your children?”

“For years, when my sons were little, I instructed them:  ‘When someone asks what happened to me, don’t hide the facts of my experience.  Right away, tell them that your father was injured in the atomic bomb.’  I told them this over and over.  But three times my young sons brought friends over to the house, and when the children looked at me, they said, ‘Your father has a black face!’ But my sons didn’t say anything.

“Then one day, we were at sports day at my son Tomoji’s school.  During the lunch break, everyone from the same class sat together in a circle on the ground—on woven grass mats.  Parents and children together.  Some of the children looked at me like they were shocked.  They were still children, so they said what they were thinking without hesitation.  One of the children said, ‘Tomo-chan!  Your father has an awful face, huh!’

“‘Oh my God!’ I thought, ‘It would have been better if I hadn’t come!’  But this time my son spoke up for me immediately.

“‘My daddy was hurt by the atomic bomb,’ Tomoji said.  That saved me.  I felt grateful to my son.

“Now I go to my grandchildren’s school and anywhere I can.  The children of Kyushu’s elementary schools treat me like Kimutaku.  I sign my name ‘Grandpa Yoshida,’” he says and laughs.  “Then I write in parentheses, ‘Grandpa Kimutaku.’”

˜

The following morning, as I leave the museum library, all the school groups have already entered the exhibit hall, so the lobby is quiet.  Outside the main entrance, Yoshida is standing on the sidewalk talking with the ice cream cart vendor, an older woman, slightly bent over, wearing a long white apron and white kerchief on her head.

“Good morning,” I say, bowing to both of them.

“Good morning!” he says, his voice strong and vibrant.  “My group is late.”

“Ah,” I say, nodding, remembering that Yoshida himself is always early.

“Would you like some ice cream?” he says, smiling broadly.  “It’s very delicious!  I’ll treat you!”

“No, thank you,” I answer, laughing.  Yoshida laughs, too, and then turns back to continue talking with the woman as I head down the hill.  Behind me, I hear voices of students chattering as they approach the museum from the other side.  I glance back to see Yoshida greeting the head teacher.  He races ahead of the students and holds the museum door open, urging them inside until the last student has entered.  Yoshida follows quickly behind, on his way to the lecture hall where he will face more children’s stares, ease their fear with jokes about his dashing good looks, and tell his story once again.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Susan Southard is an American non-fiction writer. She won the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, for her book NAGASAKI: LIFE AFTER NUCLEAR WAR.

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Believers

Laura Farmer

The house we stood in front of had a stained glass representation of the birth of Christ as a picture window. I put down one of my cases of beer and looked at Robert, my college boyfriend. The New Year’s Eve party was here?

“It’s cool,” he said. “We’ll be downstairs.”

Inside we saw that his friend’s parents were having a party of their own, a party that involved a nun sitting at the kitchen table with handful of small children in fancy dresses and Happy New Year tiaras. The nun was in full gear—habit and all—and the parents were cooking, listening to what sounded like a cassette tape of hymns. I said hello and followed Robert downstairs.

The furnished basement was filled with white Midwesterners in untucked flannel shirts drinking and dancing to Tom Petty. I made small talk with the girls. Robert changed the music to ska and started dancing in a corner. The beat was haphazard and Robert danced unselfconsciously, lifting his feet like he was running in place, elbows flailing, his glasses hardly staying on his face. I stood watching him and felt proud, like I was somehow responsible for him.

~

Our parents and professors were hoping we’d get married. Part of me was, too. We both came from über Catholic families. Robert’s father was a deacon who taught at the local Catholic high school, and his mother directed Religious Education. Robert was raised on family trips to the seminary and Catholic Trivial Pursuit (yes, it’s real).

I was just as interested and invested in my faith. I was a religion major, a volunteer hospital chaplain, a member of a parish retreat team. Both Robert and I had our struggles with faith, but we were working through them together. We were both believers. And this was how it went, I thought: I was twenty-one and believed myself to be an adult, and adults had serious relationships and went to church.

But there was a problem. While I loved Robert, I knew something was missing. There was no passion. Originally I thought this was a good thing because it made us similar to other role models in my faith life—people with solid marriages and loving families who were rarely physically affectionate. When Robert and I found ourselves along a similar path, I took this to be a good sign. We were doing exactly what we were supposed to.

~

Robert and I had started dating the spring of my sophomore year. The next fall I was studying abroad for the year in Ireland. We made a deal: if either of us found someone else, an opportunity, we would take it—but we would tell each other if it turned into something serious. And when Marlaine started staying over, I called.

Marlaine was born in Puerto Rico, raised in Germany, and went to college in Colorado. She was on my same exchange program and was in the same position I was— in an open relationship, in a new country—and we spent our time together. She would slip letters into my coat pockets, quoting Alice Walker: Don’t you know any kind of love is all right? I’d help her lug the groceries home (she always bought too much) and get her in and out of her bright red coat. We held hands in public places, and I’d proudly watch people stare. She would crawl into my bed while I was writing and fall asleep there, waking up and asking for a story when I curled in next to her. When I had dated men, I felt in control. I called the shots. With Marlaine, regardless of what we were or weren’t, I wasn’t in control. I felt reckless, inspired. This is love, I thought, terrified. This is what people were talking about.

Robert was understanding and, towards the end of our conversation, encouraging. In January he traveled to France for a one-month language program, and we met in Paris for a weekend. We sat in a run-down café, and he ordered for us in French. Robert said he worried he might be gay—he wasn’t dating anyone, but he’d been having these erotic dreams that left him feeling confused, and aroused. I was relieved, thinking we could help each other through this. But Robert thought otherwise: “I don’t want to be a homosexual,” he said. “I’ll just get over it. It’s probably just something I’m going through.” We didn’t talk about it again.

When I returned to Ireland, I realized that as romantic as Marlaine and I were, as invested as I’d become, she didn’t feel the same. We’d go to bed and I’d put my arms around her, and she would just squeeze my hands. She didn’t let me touch her. One night in her room I found a letter she was writing to a friend back home: “I wish I could love her the way she loves me. But I can’t.”

I moved back to Iowa. I started going out to bars, meeting men, because I wanted something safe and predictable. I wanted to be back in control.

Finally I went to see Robert in his hometown, and we spent New Year’s Eve with a nun.

~

Robert was beautiful—petite, with delicate fingers and prominent cheekbones, skin the color of wet sand. We were happy to see each other again. He gave me a tour of his folk’s house: a charming, typically-Midwestern home except for the stairwell, which was packed with Jesus figurines and icons. “This is the Jesus room,” Robert explained, taking the railing. “Hey Jesus, what’s up.”

We went for a walk around the neighborhood. The wind was bitter and whipped snow in our faces. He gave me his arm, and I held him close. It was late when we got back, and his parents were already asleep on the main floor. We were supposed to use separate bedrooms upstairs, so Robert mussed the bed in his room before coming over to mine for the night. We curled together, soft and warm beneath the covers. We kissed goodnight.

We fell back into our old roles that winter; it was easy to play the part of a well-adjusted young couple. We played cards with his parents. We went grocery shopping. We held hands at mass like we were everything we were supposed to be. And at night when we were curled up, his bare, bony chest against my back, his arm beneath my breasts, we talked in hushed tones of what it would be like when we met that someone, that one person, and really fell in love.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Laura Farmer is a book critic for The Gazette. She focuses on international works in translation, books from small presses, and novels by underrepresented authors. After traveling with the Big Apple Circus, Farmer graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in Creative Writing. She now works as the Writing Studio Director and Director of Fellowships and Scholarships at Cornell College and makes her home with her wife in Marion, Iowa.

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James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and the Ethics of Anguish

Carole K. Harris

 “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation”

 

In July 1957, after having lived nine years in Paris to escape an intolerable American racial climate, James Baldwin returned to the United States.  He had just written “Faulkner and Desegregation” in the winter of 1956 while still in Paris, and his biographer James Campbell believes that this essay marked a turning point in his commitment to civil rights and put him on a path of activism.  Back in New York, according to Campbell, Baldwin spent the summer brooding, visiting family and friends, and plotting how, with little money and no car, he could travel South to participate in the growing movement.  Both Baldwin’s mother and stepfather were Southerners, and Baldwin, a Harlem native who had never travelled south of Washington, D.C., frequently referred to himself as a Southerner.  Over the next six years he took multiple trips South:  in 1957 (a journey which produced “A Hard Kind of Courage,” and “A Letter from the South:  Nobody Knows My Name”), May 1960 (“Why They Can’t Wait,” “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King”), and 1963.  The period between 1957 and 1963 was a tense time in American history when many southern states resisted the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation in the public schools.  Author Randall Kenan sees that Baldwin’s “eyewitness experience” of the South, at this moment of huge cultural change, “deepened, enriched, and focused” his writing voice.  Writing about the South as an anthropologist would, or as a foreigner or journalist, Baldwin holds the mirror up to southern whites, who perceive themselves as good and honorable people, in order to expose as dishonest their self-professed innocence and denial of racial injustice.  “In all his southern trips,” writes Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, “his novelist’s instincts . . . gravitated to the white minds behind the racism he observed.”  With an unflinching eye he gives numerous descriptions of white people in his southern essays:  the white principal in “A Hard Kind of Courage,” the white Southerners who speak of love and heroism between white and black in old South at the end of “Nobody Knows My Name,” the white lady greeting her black chauffeur, as well as the white student believing in the effectiveness of the police to protect in Tallahassee in “They Can’t Turn Back.”  Two experiences which complicate his role as interviewer or observer of white Southerners may also provide him with a unique power:  his family history in the South, and his sense of anguished ethics regarding his commitment as a writer.  Where should he place his priorities—in his fiction or his activism?

 

I.

En route South for the first time in September 1957, Baldwin stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina, where four black schoolchildren were seeking to integrate the public school system.  “A Hard Kind of Courage,” the first essay to be published as a direct result of this trip, came out in Harper’s Magazine in 1958.  It was later renamed “A Fly in the Buttermilk” for the collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961) although I think its original title is more revealing of the  unassuming role Baldwin takes in order to probe the courage demanded from all sides in the small drama unfolding in Charlotte.  In some ways this essay is unremarkable in comparison to some of his other essays, like “Nobody Knows My Name” or “Notes of a Native Son,” because Baldwin remains so restrained (with some slips of sly sarcasm), but this very restraint displays how even in his prose writing Baldwin retains the sensibility of a novelist who listens quietly, straining to understand the inner lives of his characters.  What he refrains from saying to his interviewees is as important as what he does say.  The essay is divided into two parts:  in the first part he interviews G., a fifteen-year old black student and his mother; in the second part he interviews the white principal of G’s school.  In conversation with both parties, Baldwin extends the same attentiveness and presence of mind and lets his interviewees speak for themselves in their own voices without too much explicit judgment.  However, by juxtaposing the two contrasting points of view, of the black family and the white principal, Baldwin exposes the so-called innocence and graciousness of the white principal as morally corrupt:  an evasion of G’s humanity.

Baldwin first interviews G. and his mother, examples of those King would soon call (in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”) the “real heroes” of the civil rights movement, with the hopes of learning on the ground level about their inner lives and feelings.  Baldwin is impressed by the quiet dignity of G. and concludes that he remains so silent in part to “rescue” his mother from the pain of knowing about her son’s harassment at school.  When Baldwin asks about what motivated her to send her son to a previously all-white school, she replies:  “Well, it’s not because I’m so anxious to have him around white people,” the mother laughs.  “I really don’t know how I’d feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me Grandma.”  This little joke elicits the first laugh from her son, and the mother, feeling Baldwin’s unspoken solidarity, shares her frustrations about the whole situation.

Baldwin then turns to the white principal of the same school, someone who sees himself as a good person with Christian values, and his sense of solidarity shifts.  “He was a thin, young man of about my age,” Baldwin writes, “bewildered and in trouble.”  Baldwin often uses “bewildered” or “baffled,” words he charges with sarcasm, to describe the demeanor of white Southerners still reeling in the face of desegregation. Baldwin does have evidence that the principal is a “good” man, “very gentle and honorable”:  on several occasions he has escorted G. through the halls as a kind of bodyguard, and he probably was the reason why a white student who tripped G. and knocked him down later offered an apology.

Baldwin pursues the journalistic equivalent of King’s non-violent protest, or non-violent witness, in order to create tension and provoke a crisis in the principal’s conscience.  When Baldwin asks why G. is the only black student at the school (in effect, the “fly in the buttermilk”), the principal responds, “I don’t think it’s right for colored children to come to white schools just because they’re white.”  Baldwin in turn says, “Well. . .  even if you don’t like it. . . ,” The principal interrupts Baldwin before he can finish his sentence and begins to talk, in a defensive tone, about the idea of integration.  Baldwin reports:

And then he explained to me, with difficulty, that it [integration] was simply contrary to everything he’d ever seen or believed. He’d never dreamed of a mingling of the races; had never lived that way himself and didn’t suppose that he ever would; in the same way, he added, perhaps a trifle defensively, that he only associated with a certain stratum of white people.  But, “I’ve never seen a colored person toward whom I had any hatred or ill-will.”

 

Baldwin’s strategy is to get the principal to verbalize his views out loud, baldly, in front of a witness.  “His eyes searched mine as he said this and I knew that he was wondering if I believed him.”  Baldwin does not comfort or judge the man, and he refrains from using some of his signature sarcasm.  He refrains, too, from mentioning the little inside joke about the white grandbaby shared with G. and his mother.  “There seemed no point in making this man any more a victim of his heritage than he so gallantly was already.” Baldwin’s choice of adverb here sharpens the edge of an already ironic statement; one does not immediately think of a perpetrator of benign racism as the victim.  This statement functions as a kind of inside joke with the reader.

In Baldwin’s eyes, the principal is, like Faulkner in his public views on desegregation, “guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty.”  To break through his denial, Baldwin applies some psychological pressure by playing on the principal’s desire to see himself as a “good” man:

“Still,” I said at last, after a rather painful pause, “I should think that the trouble in this situation is that it’s very hard for you to face a child and treat him unjustly because of something for which he is no more responsible than–than you are.”

 

The eyes came to life then, or a veil fell, and I found myself staring at a man in anguish.

 

Here Baldwin, who had theorized about the white Southerner in his essay on Faulkner, is face to face with a real man in anguish.  At the start of the interview the principal fails to face the reality of the situation:  he used the phrase “excellent” to describe the race relations in his city; he called the white students’ blocking G.’s entrance to school an act of kidding; and he even omitted the fact that white children in his own school taunted him with the phrase “nigger lover.”  By the end of the interview, his eyes are full of pain.  To precipitate this change, Baldwin twice accents the pronoun “you.”  Normally one turns to the second person pronoun to accuse the other party, but Baldwin uses “you” to sympathize with the principal.  He understands on a very human level that the principal hopes to retain the respect of the white students, parents, and teachers with whom he has a long relationship even as he does the right thing by G., protecting him against harassment regardless of his personal feelings about integration.  By recognizing this genuinely difficult leadership position, Baldwin acknowledges the principal’s humanity. In return, Baldwin calls on the principal to be accountable and acknowledge publicly the humanity of the black child.  As a leader inside the white community, the principal–more than any black leader–has the power to change the hearts and minds of the white students and parents at his school.

Baldwin’s emphasis on “you” suggests to the principal that the “Negro problem” is, in fact, his own problem, a white problem—a problem of accountability.  (He pursues this theme with increasingly angry clarity in many of his later essays, including “The White Man’s Guilt.”)  Baldwin manages, through the pressure of his measured conversation that climaxes with this gentle moral punch, to bring about a breaking up in this man’s euphemistic point of view.

Confronted with his own contradictions, the white principal, like G. and his family, must draw on a “hard kind of courage” as he begins to examine, however tentatively, his own values and attitudes.  He has experienced what Flannery O’Connor readers would recognize as a moment of grace.

II.

 

“No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia.  It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.  In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not.  I observe the traditions of the society I feed on–it’s only fair.  Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.  I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”

Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, April 25, 1959

“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing, prophesying, pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind.  Very ignorant but never silent.  Baldwin can tell us about what it feels to be a Negro in Harlam [sic] but he tries to tell us everything else too.”

Flannery O’Connor to Maryat Lee, May 21, 1964

 

In a letter written to her friend Maryat Lee in April of 1959, Flannery O’Connor refuses to meet James Baldwin in Georgia.  “Might as well expect a mule to fly as for me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.”  In the same breath, she adds, “I have read one of his stories, and it was a good one.”  However unwilling O’Connor is to break with tradition and see Baldwin in person, as a writer she admires Baldwin’s fiction, probably the story “Sonny’s Blues.”

Five years later, in May of 1964, O’Connor changes her tune about Baldwin the writer.  In another letter to Lee, a Kentucky native who then lived in Greenwich Village and had directed street theater with black youth in Harlem, O’Connor says she can’t stand a certain type of Negro, the “pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent.”  Her language is shocking to read today:  in letters to Lee–who poignantly understood the southern code of manners O’Connor was living under but chose to rebel against the code rather than respect it as O’Connor did in her daily life– O’Connor regularly and gleefully assumes the persona of a southern redneck racist.  In the 1964 letter, for instance, she probably intentionally misspells the word “Harlem” to indicate such a person’s level of education.  Yet, O’Connor may be reacting to Baldwin’s changing priorities as a writer, his shift away from writing fiction to essays, a shift she would criticize as a concession to the times and a sacrifice to one’s art.

Between 1957 and 1963, Baldwin traveled extensively (including four trips South), gave countless interviews and speeches, and met with politicians, including then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, over civil rights.  In 1963 The Fire Next Time was published, and articles about him appeared in Life, Times, and Mademoiselle.  According to his biographer James Campbell, to understand Baldwin before 1957, you read his letters; after 1963, his interviews.  Somewhere between 1957 and 1963, Campbell states in a tone of reproof, James Baldwin the private person became Jimmy Baldwin the civil rights celebrity.  In his own eyes, Baldwin saw the civil rights activism as central to his role as witness; even though he always thought of himself first as a novelist, in practice his choice of genre took a back seat to that moral imperative.

O’Connor would probably have disapproved of Baldwin’s decision to write essays on “topical” issues of the day.  Consider the case of Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” a story based closely on the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers which appeared in The New Yorker in June 1963 just days after the event.  About the story, O’Connor comments on September 1, 1963 to her friend Betty Hester, another Southerner:  “The more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets.  What I hate most is its being in the The New Yorker and all the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.  The topical is poison.  I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business is concerned.”

Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie, dedicated to Medgar Evers and based in equal parts on his assassination and the murder of Emmett Till, opened in New York in April 1964 just weeks before O’Connor wrote her letter to Lee about Baldwin’s “pontificating.”  Reviews of the play appeared in New York papers, which O’Connor may have read or heard about from Lee, a playwright who had met Baldwin several times.

O’Connor may thus have perceived Baldwin as an “outside agitator” interfering with uniquely southern affairs, and in this respect, she shows herself to be a member of her own generation, a white Southerner, like the principal Baldwin interviews, who perhaps believes in integration in theory but does not actively seek to change the status quo.

However, even though she crassly expresses dislike of Baldwin in her letter of 1964, around this same time O’Connor herself shows evidence of a crack in her own point of view that is not unlike the changes Baldwin is undergoing.

As writers Baldwin and O’Connor are witnesses to what essentially “good” people say and do in a morally corrupt system, and they each take their role as witness to be an ethical imperative.  Confronted with the gracious manners of white Southerners, O’Connor the fiction writer is as unflinching as Baldwin the essayist in what she records.

 

Maryat Lee, who first met O’Connor in 1956, sees O’Connor’s late story “Revelation,” written in 1963 (in what turned out to be the final year of her life), to be evidence of a “crack” in her point of view regarding the civil rights movement: “The story is dear to me because it reveals I think the crack that finally developed in her own point of view which even three or four years ago she never expected would happen.”  The main character, the middle-aged Ruby Turpin, who thinks of herself as a good woman with Christian values, is a version of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953).  In fact, “Revelation” can be seen as a sequel to “A Good Man.”  In it O’Connor explores what might have happened to the grandmother–how her perspective might have widened–had she, after having been granted a moment of grace, been allowed to live.

In “Revelation,” O’Connor clearly models Mary Grace, the Wellesley College student who returns home to Georgia over the holidays, after Maryat Lee, also a Wellesley graduate.  (Lee later studied at Union Theological Seminary, where she wrote her master’s thesis under Paul Tillich.)  “You can have half interest in Mary Grace,” O’Connor writes to Lee in the same 1964 letter as she disparages Baldwin.  In an understated way, O’Connor thus acknowledges the influence of Lee, the very person who calls her out on issues of race and civil rights, for inspiring a story where a key character talks back to power.  Lee delighted in violating the southern code of manners on her trips South–she changed her name from Mary Attaway to distance herself from her upper-class upbringing–as does Mary Grace, the “ugly girl,” who resorts to violence in her role as listener, radical interventionist, and witness.

The object of her scrutiny is Ruby Turpin, a middle-class pig farmer with the aspirations of a lady, who is filled with racist and classist clichés, which Mary Grace silently perceives as vacuous and morally corrupt.  In a crucial scene, when her mother tries to pull her daughter into the conversation, Mary Grace explodes, throwing a book at Mrs. Turpin.  She growls out a menacing curse:  “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

If “Revelation” were modeled after “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the story would end here.  But the story continues, and it is in the second half of the story that we see the “crack” in O’Connor’s point of view.  Ruby Turpin, emotionally shocked and physically bruised by the book Mary Grace throws at her, cannot let go of the verbal insult, which she ponders over as if it were a message from God.  She returns home to the safety of her husband and farm, and alone, goes out to feed the pigs.  There, in the privacy of a pigpen, she confronts God in a fit of fury: “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too? . . . . Why me?”  She cannot wrap her mind around the fact that Mary Grace singled her out.  Ruby suffers a crisis of faith as we hear her rail against God:

“You could have made me trash.  Or a nigger.  If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?  . . . . I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy. . . . Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer.  Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face.  I could be nasty.

Or you could have made me a nigger.  It’s too late for me to be a nigger, . . . but I could act like one.  Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic.  Roll on the ground.”

In a similar position as Baldwin vis-à-vis the white principal, O’Connor as writer/witness holds the mirror up to the gracious southern lady and keeps it there; she turns the tape recorder on and lets her epithets fly.  It is not a pretty scene.  Finally we hear the raw, racist, and uncensored stereotypes spew from Ruby’s tongue.  Her dislike for black people is trumped by her disdain for “white trash.”

Curiously that blasphemous crisis of faith cracks open to a moment of calm:  Ruby Turpin is finally wrested from her self-preoccupation and begins to worry about her husband Claud, whose truck she sees disappearing on the horizon:  Will he be safe?  Will a bigger truck smash into his?  Then her concern for her husband opens up to the larger world.  By story’s end, in a scene that Brad Gooch, author of the biography Flannery, calls the fictional equivalent of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Ruby Turpin sees a vision of “a vast horde of souls” marching up to heaven:  “whole companies of white-trash,” “bands of black niggers,” “battalions of freaks and lunatics.” These are precisely the characters that pop up in all of O’Connor’s stories–those without power, the poor, the non-white–and often such a character, a freak, plays a key role in bringing about a revelation. Ruby Turpin joins this parade of freaks.  She and Claud are bringing up the rear of the parade, after all the poor “white trash” and “niggers.”  The rigid categories about race and class to which she held fast at the beginning of the story are turned on their head.

As with the white principal, however, the crack in Ruby’s perspective may only be slight. The principal gives a strained laugh at the very end of Baldwin’s interview that suggests a reversion to his former self.  “I’m a religious man, . . .  and I believe the Creator will always help us find a way to solve our problems.”  He falls back on religious clichés, and the veil returns.  In her vision when Ruby Turpin sees the respectable white people bringing up the rear, she refers to them, as reported by the narrator, as “a tribe of people . . .  who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right” (654).  Ruby Turpin, always a witty woman, still sees herself and her kind of people as being exceptionally blessed by God.

 

“I read one of his stories, and it was a good one.”  By the time O’Connor wrote this letter in April 1959, only two of Baldwin’s stories had been published, “Come out of the Wilderness” (published in Mademoiselle in 1958) and “Sonny’s Blues.”  I suspect O’Connor is referring to “Sonny’s Blues,” which came out in the summer of 1957 in Partisan Review, a journal she would have read.  O’Connor would have admired Baldwin’s use of flashbacks, his keen ear for dialogue, and especially, his attention to the details of place.  Although we have no record of O’Connor’s views on Baldwin’s work as a whole, she probably would have admired his stories and novels set in Harlem where the mystery and manners of Baldwin’s childhood–the language, music, and rituals of the streets and the Pentecostal church–are vivid and sharp:  Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as many of the stories in Going to Meet the Man, including “Sonny’s Blues” (1958) and “Previous Condition” (1948).  After reading Go Tell It on the Mountain in the summer of 1959, Maryat Lee wrote to O’Connor, “You two have more in common that [sic] I had any idea.”

Both Baldwin and O’Connor were admirers of Henry James.  O’Connor quotes James often in her essays in Mystery and Manners, and Baldwin, called the “Henry James of Harlem” by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, left behind an unfinished essay on James and manners.  Yet, they seem to take away different lessons from the importance James placed on manners.  Baldwin and O’Connor were keen observers of the politics and rituals of manners in everyday social encounters, but O’Connor believed that paying close attention to manners was incompatible with writing about the topical, including the directly political; Baldwin, on the other hand, who could not separate the personal from the political, was, according to Leeming, fascinated by analyzing what Henry James called Americans’ innocence and sincerity, and critiqued the “innocence” he encountered among white Southerners.  In many of his essays (“Stranger in the Village,” “Nobody Knows My Name,” “A Fly in the Buttermilk”), through his technique of juxtaposing the two perspectives, white and black, on a given topic, Baldwin exposes white sincerity for what it is­–an evasion of the Negro’s humanity, as well as a denial of the role of power in American and world history.

O’Connor connected morality to a writer’s staying true to his craft.  Of Henry James she writes, “the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of ‘felt life’ that was in it.”

In her essays on writing, O’Connor reveals how it is always through the concrete details of the local that a writer arrives at universal truths, which for her are also spiritual truths; a writer who cuts himself off from the people and place where he grew up–the fabric of his home community– is in danger. O’Connor stressed the importance of writing from inside a community, that is, being grounded in the language and manners of a specific place.  She mistrusts when a writer slips into abstractions, and she seems to associate the “topical” with a move away from the concrete and specific to the abstract and general.  In “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she writes:

What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth.  The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is.  What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.

 

By saying that Baldwin “pontificates,” O’Connor may be referring to the kind of statements in his essays where Baldwin extrapolates from specific examples and goes on, in the preaching style with which he is familiar from being the youth minister in the Pentecostal church, to give general, somewhat oracular, statements about the history of racism in the United States. From O’Connor’s perspective Baldwin betrayed the limits of fiction by turning to prose essays in an attempt to mold reality.  In the process he loses his humbleness “in the face of what-is.”

For Baldwin, however, the topical seems absolutely to be connected to the specific language and manners of his childhood.  In “Down at the Cross,” for example, when he writes about his memory of being frisked by the police, the details of the incident are vivid and real; he is not merely slipping into abstract statements about police brutality.  Even his “pontificating” passages are expressed in the roaring language of the black ministers he knew intimately from his early days.  Whereas O’Connor may read about topical issues connected to racism in the newspapers from an abstract and emotional remove, Baldwin knows them firsthand, as part of the social fabric of his home community.  For Baldwin the topical is personal, and the personal is political; he cannot separate the topical from the politics of manners unfolding in the streets of Harlem.

In response to O’Connor’s saying that writing on the topical is “poison,” Baldwin might have shot back that O’Connor, with her cultural capital as a white Southerner from a certain class, has the luxury to avoid the topical, and he often uses the word “poison” in his essays to indicate the degree to which black families have no such luxury.  Near the end of “Notes of a Native Son,” reflecting on the elders attending his father’s funeral, Baldwin writes:  “It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced:  how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child–by what means?–a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.”  Baldwin concludes this passage by suggesting, “Perhaps poison should be fought with poison.”

III.

 

In “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., expresses his  “grave disappointment” with white moderates, especially white ministers in the South.  King believes that they, as spiritual leaders inside the white community, have the moral authority to change the hearts and minds of the members of their congregation and are thus vital allies to the civil rights struggle.

My father, Richard Adams Harris, Jr., as pastor of Westhampton Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, from 1957 to 1968, was one of those moderates.  He felt challenged by King’s call to commitment and doubted if he was taking his commitment far enough.  In June of 1964 he gave a sermon entitled “This Is My Father’s World” in which he asked the question, “How can we be redemptive agents in the current racial crisis?”  He offered five guidelines to his congregation.  In guideline number one, he recommended that his congregation “keep things in perspective” by giving a “thoughtful evaluation” of both sides. On the side of the Negro, he recommended reading John Griffin’s then recently published book Black Like Me, as well as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”  On the side of the status quo, he suggested reading Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason (Putnam is a bestselling segregationist author), or any editorial in the Richmond Times Dispatch. “Neither side,” wrote my father, “has a monopoly on right as neither side has a monopoly on wrong.”  King was endlessly frustrated by the middle of the road approach–as was Baldwin in his essay on Faulkner–which he saw as a way to evade taking a moral stand.  My father was “reasonable”:  by recommending reading seriously a segregationist article and weighing its merits against King’s letter, my father did not squarely take a moral stand.

He inched toward taking one, however, and in those days that already demanded a lot of courage.  He urged his congregation to feel, in King’s words, “the stinging darts of segregation” and put themselves, for example, in the place of a Negro parent.  “‘How,’ one such parent recently asked me, ‘do I tell my 6 year-old son that there are certain places he cannot go because his skin happens to be black?’”  As another example he reported that some members of the church who volunteered across town at the Negro Vacation Bible School had noticed that during picture-coloring time, “many of the black children positively insist on leaving faces white.  Is this not a tragic symptom that even their young minds have come to realize their own black skin represents a stigma?”

He spoke of his soul searching:  “Lately I have felt an increasing indictment on my own life:  what am I doing personally to redeem the situation that we are all so concerned about? I am convinced that I am doing far less than my Christian commitment calls me to do.”  He confessed that he knew a lot of Christians who, by joining the demonstrations, were more dedicated than he was, and he had yet to join one.  By publicly sharing his doubts, my father was working through something for himself regarding his responsibility. At the same time, he was making an appeal to the segregationists in his congregation.  They, too, had the power, and the duty, to examine themselves.

On October 6, 1968, my father delivered his last sermon.  One month earlier he had handed in a brief resignation letter.  The deacons, as well as the members of the congregation, were shocked that their beloved pastor would leave.  In his statement he said simply that he had doubts about his calling.  From as early as 1962–the year Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time, the year Faulkner died, the year of my birth–he had wrestled privately with the meaning of his vocation:  was he worthy to be called a pastor when he had so many doubts about his faith?

Many years later, when I was in my forties, my father confessed to me that at an early age he had compared himself to the Cosby boys, Bev and Gordon, with whom he had grown up on Boonsboro Road in Lynchburg, Virginia.  They had been the ones who had encouraged him to go into the ministry in the first place.  They had each founded their own church (Gordon the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D. C. and Bev, the Church of the Covenant in Lynchburg) based on the principles of radical Christianity.  Each church was comprised of a small band of disciples who would dedicate their lives to social service and justice, as King outlines in his letter when he talks about the early Christians.  Bev and Gordon were visionaries who clearly had a calling­ and chose a prophetic stance in their respective communities, and my father did not see himself as a visionary.  He did not feel himself worthy to be a minister.  He confessed to me in the same conversation that he had suffered debilitating depression off and on throughout his life.  He fell into a depression just ahead of his decision to leave the pastorate.

The pressures on my father to lead the members of his congregation during this tumultuous time put a subtle strain on my parents’ marriage.  In 1961, shortly after Nigeria gained its independence from England, my father’s church had sponsored a Nigerian couple to come study in Richmond for a year.  They were welcome at Westhampton as guests.  Within a year the couple fell in love with Richmond and wanted to stay, and they expressed a desire to join the church.  My father’s congregation split over whether or not blacks should be allowed to become members.  It was in the midst of this controversy that my father gave his sermon  “This Is my Father’s World.”  By expressing his own doubts and soul-searching my father was trying to ease into the hearts and minds of segregationists in the congregation, among them his friends.  My mother wanted him to be fiercer and take a clear and moral stand, but faced with a divided congregation, he was a reluctant leader.

Oct. 6, 1968, the day my father left the pastorate, was my parents’ seventeenth wedding anniversary.  Within three years they would be divorced.  I was nine, my sister fourteen, my brother sixteen.  We spent the next forty years asking ourselves the question:  what happened?

 

After months of procrastination, Baldwin was finally able to complete “Down at the Cross,” which became the centerpiece of The Fire Next Time, in 1962, after traveling to Africa for the first time.  He visited Senegal, Guinea, and Sierra Leone–three nations recently liberated from colonial rule.  In his essay Baldwin charts his disillusionment as a youth minister with the elder black ministers of his own church in Harlem.  He is horrified to witness their acts of stealing from the collection plate, especially when members of the congregation are so impoverished.  “Being in the pulpit was like being in the theater; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked.  I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.”  More disturbing still are their hypocritical values.  He cannot reconcile their preaching to love everybody when at the same time they counsel Baldwin never to give up his seat for a white woman since white men never do the same for a black woman.  By the end of “Down at the Cross,” he considers these memories of his elders from his Harlem childhood against the legacy of colonialism in the newly freed African nations, and he sees a similar brand of arrogance and moral corruption amongst the white Christian missionaries who hope to save the “infidels.” “The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or integrity or the heroism of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag.”  Baldwin undergoes a crisis of faith as he examines his own ethics as a leader in the church and concludes he must leave.  By the end of “Down at the Cross,” drawing on the moral authority of his own example to challenge the reader, Baldwin exclaims:

“It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being . . . must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.  If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

In terms of language and style, Baldwin scholar Lynn Orilla Scott believes The Fire Next Time is “the literary equivalent of the strategy of ‘non-violent direct action’ that Martin Luther King was using in Birmingham to end racial segregation.”  As an example she shows that Baldwin’s long list of tribulations suffered by black people under segregation in The Fire Next Time echoes the long list of King’s in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

 

When my father shared his doubts from the pulpit, Baldwin would recognize a man in anguish trying to grapple with his heritage.  I don’t think Baldwin would call my father, as he does at first the principal, a “victim,” however, because my father risked safety, in some ways, to wrestle publicly with the breaking up of the world as he had always known it.  (By driving the Nigerian couple to church every Sunday, so did my mother, in a different way, but that is another story to tell.)  The pressures my father experienced as a pastor in the early sixties were not unlike those of the young Baldwin as a writer in the late fifties while still living in Paris. Baldwin confessed how guilty he felt seated at a café, listening to Algerian friends lament the discrimination they encountered in the streets of Paris when back in the States black children entering formally all white schools were taunted by mobs.  He always felt a special responsibility toward black children.  In The Fire Next Time he recalls his days as a youth minister in Harlem delivering sermons in front of the radiant faces of the children.  He felt like he was committing a crime by telling the children to believe in the gentle Jesus rather than shouting at their parents, in his words, “to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize . . . a rent strike.”

“Lately I have felt an increasing indictment on my own life.”  My father’s words could have been Baldwin’s own.  Their willingness to examine their life and to face history with an unflinching eye links them together as men of faith (and one-time pastors) who do not want to succumb to being “victims” of their heritage.

I included my father’s sermon as part of a college course I teach on the literature of the civil rights era in which we read authors not often considered together, O’Connor and Baldwin included.  S., an African-American student with whom I had grown especially close–I had been her professor for two semesters–read out loud a passage of the sermon as part of a group discussion.  S. believed that my father was really addressing the fathers in the audience:

“We can kill off the monster of prejudice, too, if we honestly seek to change the climate of the day in which we live.  There is no better place to begin than with our own children.  Make sure the prejudices with which we are infected are not transmitted to them, crippling their lives.”

Almost in the same breath as finishing the last line, S. realized something in a flash–you could see it on her face:  “Oh, when he’s talking about ‘our children,’ he really means you.”  I felt a shot of pain through my heart, as if the students could see through my role as professor to my heritage as a child.  As if they, too, could hear echo my grandmother’s refrain each time she picked me up from the bus station in downtown Lynchburg, which everyone knew was a black neighborhood:  “Take care to keep your purse tucked under your arm.”

Who was I to lead a discussion on race?  I had spent some time over the summer scouting out this sermon, and the decision to use it in class seemed promising at the time.  But that morning before teaching it for the first time, I felt ill, and now in the presence of S.’s radiant face and the open faces of the other students, both black and white, I felt vulnerable and exposed.  This is how my father felt, how O’Connor felt, how Baldwin felt.  As writers and teachers we tapped into that terrifying place, those feelings of vulnerability and exposure.

We were witness to the dark weight of history.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Carole K. Harris received a B.A. in French Literature from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She has taught French, Comparative Literature, and English Composition at a variety of other institutions, including Yale University, Bennington College, Rutgers University, the University of California at Irvine, and Hofstra University.

Asics footwear | Air Jordan

Raw Milk

Judith Hertog

I don’t know why I continue buying my groceries at Price Chopper. Of course it makes me feel bad: those flat harsh neon lights, the long aisles of cheap overabundance, the bland preprogrammed music, the complete absence of beauty. Even the name itself—Price Chopper—hurts me with its crude brutality.  But I go anyway. Every week I drive the seven miles to the commercial strip at highway-exit 20, and, with a long shopping list in hand, I make my way through those disturbingly familiar aisles.

Occasionally—every other week or so—my consumer conscience feels so soiled that I need to cleanse it by going to the co-op, the cooperative grocery store where the civilized people shop and where you can get organic strawberries in mid-December. But I always feel a bit cheated when my groceries are rung up and I realize that for the price of some fair-trade coffee and whole-wheat bread, I could have bought two days’ worth of groceries at Price Chopper.

The co-op is the place to meet neighbors and colleagues, and complain about how busy we all are and how we should get together sometime when we’re less swamped, which we all know will never happen. At Price Chopper, meanwhile, I’m in the company of the working people of America. I never know whom to side with, so I alternate between the co-op and Price Chopper and feel uncomfortable at both.

My greatest worry is that Beth, the organic farmer farther down the road from our house, will find me out. When I come home from Price Chopper I always drive through the East side of town to avoid passing her farm. I’m afraid she’ll be standing outside, wave me down for a chat, and then recognize the scent of plastic and preservatives wafting from my shopping bags. Once, when she found a plastic egg-container among the cartons that I brought to the farm for recycling, she called me back and made me take it away. “I don’t want to see any plastic at my farm,” she said sternly, and I think that’s when she started suspecting that I go to Price Chopper. I’ve been visiting her less and less.

When I stand by the dairy cooler at Price Chopper, paralyzed by that wall of milk containers, I always imagine Beth watching me. She has stomped a trail of mud and manure on the sterile floor and stands there in her dirty coveralls, straw sticking out of her uncombed gray hair, the large calloused hands planted on her hips, shaking her head and clucking in disapproval.

~

I’ve known Beth since we moved to this little Vermont town four years ago, when Gil got a job as a professor at the nearby college, where I now work too.

This is the first time we own our own house and have real jobs. After years of traveling and bumming along as students, it felt like an exciting new adventure to become professional grown-ups, earning real money. Gil’s job came with life insurance, childcare benefits, a retirement fund, and occasional departmental dinner parties at fine restaurants. Mine came with bi-weekly meetings and an office with a view of the trash-bin of the next-door church. At first my new life felt deeply satisfying: I had a little role of my own in society and I was providing for myself and my family. I had joined the ranks of the good, hard-working professionals of the world and now had purpose and legitimacy. Even now I get a little thrill out of saying “my job,” or “I’ve got to go to work.” But legitimacy comes with certain stipulations: you can’t come to work in clothes that look as if they’re from the Goodwill store, you can’t arrive in a car held together by duct-tape, and you’re supposed to have a house that is appropriate for inviting colleagues to dinner parties. And when you have the things you once didn’t even know you needed—the house, the cars, the washing machine, the walk-in closet—and you have the money for your children’s karate lessons, health insurance, and dental treatments, you become terrified you might lose it all.

The college where we work is one of those places that attracts students who expect to become leading national politicians or CEO’s at multi-billion-dollar corporations, students whose grandfathers founded the fraternities they belong to. And all this status and ambition is oddly placed in a wilderness of forests and mountains, in a region dotted with tiny farming towns that have been in decline since the collapse of the American wool industry in the late 19th century. The college’s wealth has been spreading out over the land like an oil spill. Retired alumni and people from the big cities have moved here because, for the price of an apartment in Manhattan or Boston, they can build a palace on a mountain top, own a 50-acre private forest, and run their business via satellite internet. Most of the descendants of the original farmers have sold their houses to newcomers and have moved to towns where the property value isn’t as inflated. Only a few stubborn “old-timers” are still hanging in, scoffing at the mansions they’re now surrounded by.

~

I feel affinity for this land because I imagine it must be as perplexed by all the people moving onto it and changing it according to their needs, as I am befuddled being here. I never had a clear plan for my life. I had vague visions of myself as a journalist traveling the world, a documentary photographer, or a heroic fighter for just causes. I never imagined living in a small town in Vermont with my husband and children. Suddenly I find I can no longer pretend I’m on my way to a glorious future; this is my life.

~

Beth’s farm was the attraction that persuaded us to buy the house. As impressionable, inexperienced buyers we paid more attention to the view down the road, the wrap-around porch, and the chickadees and cardinals at the birdfeeder than to the soundness of the foundation and the insulation of the windows. As we were on our way back from the open house and had to stop our car to let Beth cross the road with a struggling calf, we made up our minds. I imagined how my city friends would feel twinges of envious disbelief when I’d tell them that “I’ve just come back from the farm down the road to get eggs,” and I imagined my children fondly looking back at a childhood of petting piglets and milking cows.

Although I imagined Beth’s farm as a fixture in the landscape, she had, in fact, just moved in a few months before us. The renovated old farmhouse had first been rented to business students from the college’s MBA program. But the family who’d bought the property, along with their house on a hilltop and the surrounding forests, had liked the idea of sponsoring an organic farm and leased it to Beth at a discount in return for a supply of organic produce and handmade cheeses.

So now, while the town is being overrun by urban professionals who are lobbying for town-wide broadband access, Beth is trying to reverse time. She has reinstalled the 19th century copper plumbing, has disconnected the central heating system to replace it with a woodstove, and uses the color-coordinated bathrooms to store farm equipment and bins filled with sauerkraut. I often see her drive by my house on her vintage tractor, perched solemnly on the saddle, pulling a towering stack of hay bales that balance dangerously on a cart behind the tractor. She won’t see me waving from my office window, because she needs all her attention to fight the wobbly steering wheel.

Occasionally she has young helpers who drift to the farm for various reasons: idealistic young people who are training to start their own farms and live off the grid; college kids who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives; and difficult teenagers who have exhausted their parents’ tolerance. Beth rules them all with an iron hand and makes them toil, weeding the vegetable plots, kneading dough, and milking cows at the break of day. On summer nights, driving past the farm after having attended a board meeting at Miki’s daycare or having picked up Dina from a play-date, I sometimes see them all sitting around the bonfire, drinking homebrewed beer and eating sourdough bread with freshly churned butter. I feel a pang of envy when I see the sparks flying up into the evening sky and the dark silhouettes outlined against the flames.

I make an effort to befriend those barefoot kids with their dreadlocks and clothes that smell of sweat and cow shit—I want them to know I’m not all that different from them, just a bit older. But they come and go too fast for me to remember their names. When you’re eighteen, time moves along a different scale: six months is a brief eternity, while for me it’s how long it takes to finally replace the depleted batteries in the smoke detector. As soon as her young helpers are gone, Beth usually finds some fault in them that makes their departure sound like a relief:

“Louisa… yeah, she went off to college. She wasn’t much of a help anyway,” says Beth while pressing freshly minced pork into sausage skins.

“Matthew,” she says, rolling her eyes, “he was so overprotected!”

Few escape Beth’s judgments. Even the people who support the farm by buying Beth’s produce and cheeses don’t satisfy her.

“Look at them,” she says and points with her chin at the people who park their station wagons along the road to grab a bunch of collard greens from the farm stand, “Always rushing, to and from their jobs!” I admire the fierceness of Beth’s judgments and her commitment to doing what’s right. I don’t have the courage to judge anyone; I’m afraid they’ll judge me in return.

~

For a while I thought I was exempt from her judgment. For the first two years that we lived here I visited the farm almost every day. In the afternoons, after I had picked up Dina and Miki from daycare, I’d walk them to the farm—I’d never drive. Rain or shine, we’d go. I had to show Beth that I was serious about exposing my children to farm life. So in 20-degree weather I’d pack Dina and Miki into snowsuits, snow boots, hats, scarves, and mittens, and we’d head to the farm, walking until their faces were so frozen that they could no longer open their mouths to complain of the cold. I’d defrost them by Beth’s woodstove, and she’d offer us chocolates or cheese. When she wasn’t busy she’d invite us into the backroom, where a sagging couch stood beside a small woodstove and where Beth kept her books and her FM radio on which she listens to the weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcast. She’d serve us strong tea in cracked mismatched china and splash fresh cream in it. Then she’d update me on the happenings at the farm—the pregnant cow who still hadn’t given birth; the chickens’ satisfaction with their new coop; the plans for the new clay oven… Or I’d ask her about town politics—about the accusations that the police chief was too authoritarian or about the council’s passionate debates on whether or not to restore the bandstand on the town green. I didn’t know who was wrong or right (to me everyone’s opinion always seems perfectly plausible from their point of view) but I counted on Beth to be outraged by what someone had said or done.

“People these days just think they’ve got it all coming to them,” Beth said, shaking her head in disapproval at modernity.

I didn’t know enough about town politics to understand whom that remark was aimed at, but I didn’t want her to think of me as spoiled. I’ve never understood which past it is in Beth’s mind that the present doesn’t measure up to—Vermont in the 1920s? Early 19th century rural America? Her childhood in the 1950s?—but I want her to approve of me.

~

One day when we arrived at the farm Dina pointed at two halves of a frozen pork carcass hanging from the big oak tree in front of the farm, “Hey, that must be Linda!” she said. Linda was a sick little piglet that Beth had adopted from another farm. Already the previous summer, when Beth let Dina hold Linda’s milk bottle and the eager little piglet pulled impatiently at the nipple, it was clear that Linda would end up in the freezer.

Dina walked up to the oak tree and studied the carcass attentively.

“Is that her belly?” she asked and pointed at the empty cavity from which the organs had been removed. I was immensely proud of Dina’s stoicism, as she stood there beneath the frozen pork carcass, unblinkingly facing the facts of life, only five years old, but more at ease with mortality and impermanence than most adults. She didn’t need to dress up reality with sentimental stories and children’s books’ piggies: here was Linda hanging from a tree, ready to be turned into sausage, and Dina was studying pig anatomy. This was a child who lived up to Beth’s expectations!

But then I ruined the scene by taking a picture. I often take along my camera on my walks. I email pictures of my life to friends in other parts of the world to have them share in my wonder at being here. I hid my camera in my pocket when Beth came out. I know she thinks life must be lived, not photographed.

~

The farm is very popular with parents of young children: people who grew up in cities and still can’t get over the fact that, unlike themselves, their children know real cows and real pigs before they see them in picture books. The farm gets especially busy around holidays, when the townspeople have their relatives over from the big cities and send them to the farm to impress them with a peek at real country life.

One Easter weekend a shiny SUV with a New Jersey license plate turned into Beth’s driveway. Out of the car stepped a woman who looked as if she had never set foot on unpaved ground, and a little girl in a ridiculously clean dress. As they maneuvered between the puddles, trying to keep their shoes clean, I imagined Beth watching from the kitchen window in contempt.

When they reached the pen with the two little orphan piglets who were letting themselves be petted by Dina and Miki, the mother nervously placed her hand on the little girl’s shoulder.

“Aren’t they cute?” the mother said, watching the piglets suck on Dina and Miki’s fingers. Immediately Beth stood beside us, her arms sternly crossed over her chest.

“If you think these are cute, eat them!” she cut in. “I’m sick and tired of people who pet cute little farm animals and then buy factory meat at the supermarket.”

“Do you know what they do to these cute little animals?” she asked the little girl, kneeling down to pick up one of the squealing piglets and holding it near the girl’s face. “They lock them up in little cages. They cut off their tails, and before these poor animals ever see real sunlight, they turn them into bacon and pork chops.” The mother, unprepared for such rural directness, withdrew into a bland, impenetrable smile: she always buys certified organic!

But I know the remark wasn’t directed at her. It was for me. I’m the one who lets her kids pet little piglets and then shops at Price Chopper. Beth knows.

~

Beth must also know that when I made a stew out of a chunk of beef she gave me from her freezer, I defiled it by adding factory-farmed Price Chopper carrots and onions. I always feel her watching over my shoulder, snorting in contempt at all my wrong choices. So, as I imagine her standing behind me at the milk cooler in Price Chopper, I try to placate her by choosing the heavy glass bottles from the local creamery, which Price Chopper sells to advertise its support of local businesses. They are unwieldy, heavy bottles that strain our refrigerator shelf, and that, when empty, need to be hauled back to a supermarket to be returned for the deposit. Our porch is lined with empty bottles, in which the residue milk has turned green and sprouted colonies of fuzzy fungi. I shudder at the thought that those bottles may be reused for our next portion of milk.

When I get home from the store and Gil helps me carry in groceries, I always see a flicker of annoyance in his eyes when I unload two or three heavy glass bottles, which, when you clang them together carelessly, break and spill their contents all over the kitchen floor.  He doesn’t ask me why I insist on buying the glass bottles—there are so many other things I do that don’t make sense to him, and in a marriage one must compromise—but I know he prefers those convenient 1-gallon containers of Price Chopper milk that never spoils. He doesn’t realize the milk from the local creamery is my secret compromise.

Beth has unprocessed, fresh milk from cows I personally know, ready at her farm, just a ten-minute walk from my house.

“These kids need real milk. Not that watered-down crap that they call ‘milk’ in the stores,” Beth would say when I still came by on my daily walk with the kids. “I want you to read something about the importance of natural foods and fresh milk for small children. I’ll give it to you next time.” I’d nod enthusiastically and hope she’d forget because my children don’t like the taste of raw milk, and Gil frowned every time he saw Beth’s creamy yellow milk in the fridge. He doesn’t believe in the timeless continuity of farming traditions and the superiority of natural foods. He says people used to die of unpasteurized milk. So I’d try to drink the half-gallon of farm milk all by myself every week. I love the taste of fresh milk, but Beth’s milk had a bad aftertaste because I knew it was actually intended for my children and I was lying to her.

At the end of the week I’d pour out the spoiled leftovers, the fatty yellow crust clogging up the sink, and I’d return the empty bottle to Beth. She’d say how happy she was that my children were getting some good nutrients, and I—afraid to disappoint her—would nod and encourage her to give me a new bottle. I stopped visiting her because I could no longer stand my own lies. I haven’t gotten my weekly portion of milk for almost two years now, but I know the milk is still waiting there for me, and I tell myself that soon, when I’m less busy, I’ll make better choices and start going to the farm again.

I love the idea of getting my produce from the neighborhood farm, and I love the idea of walking down the road to get my milk. The beauty here is heartbreaking: the morning fog drifting between the trees in the swamp; the red neon “open” sign of Bill’s lawnmower repair shop reflected on the wet pavement in front of his trailer; the smell of wood smoke coming from Mr. Chapman’s chimney; Beth’s cows grazing under the bare apple trees; I even love the potholed, cracked asphalt. As I walked down to Beth’s, I used to think to myself, Look at me! This is me walking down a Vermont country road, on my way to get my milk. And I knew this is what my life was supposed to be like.

I’d wave at Mr. Chapman, who’d peek from the window in his woodcutting workshop. I’d stop for some gossip with my neighbor Jennifer, who, the first time we chatted, startled me when, as an aside in our small talk about the hiking trails in our neighborhood, mentioned that she and Rob, her aloof, furniture-building husband, like to make love by the pond on their neighbors’ property. I’d pass, with some contempt, the mailboxes of the other neighbors, the ones with long driveways leading up to newly built houses on top of wooded hills, the ones with cathedral ceilings, exercise rooms, and marble countertops. And then I’d pause for a few minutes to discuss the weather with Bill, who’d be standing in the doorway of his trailer. When we had just moved into our house, clueless and lawnmower-less, we let the weeds grow so high that one day Bill showed up and said he was going to mow for us. Gil and I—clumsy city people—watched in embarrassment as Bill steered his tractor-mower through the thigh-high weeds. When Bill’s wife died a year later, I went over every other day to bring him food because I thought that’s what a neighbor is supposed to do. I felt very virtuous when I came to pick up the empty dishes and I even considered offering to tutor Josh, Bill’s grandson, who had been placed with his grandparents because his mother, Bill’s daughter, couldn’t take care of him. I felt sorry for the taciturn 11-year-old, who, I heard from Bill, had trouble keeping up at school. I thought that now that his grandmother was gone, I should offer some motherly care. But I didn’t know how to talk to a troubled 11-year-old and I worried Bill would think me a sentimental snoop if I meddled too much in his family affairs. So I let it go.

I haven’t made my walks in a long while. I’ve gotten busy, too busy to allow myself to be distracted by the beauty here. I’m busier than anyone should be—busy making a living, taking care of my family, going grocery shopping, making deadlines, always rushing, always running behind, always making lists of things I know I don’t have time for: fix the drafty windows, clean out the closets, organize my computer files, assess our retirement plan, organize play-dates for the children, find a mechanic to check out the squeak in my car, schedule dentist appointments, and, at the bottom of the list I add: get milk.

I could, of course, drive to the farm to get my milk, but the main appeal of Beth’s milk is the walk to get it. When, in the middle of a snowstorm, I’d put on my snow-pants and brave the weather for a bottle of creamy, yellow milk, I felt I was part of a timeless landscape that I shared with generations of farmers, and it didn’t matter if it was me or someone from a previous century walking down the icy road.

It’s not only that I’m too busy to visit. I’m afraid that Beth disapproves of my busyness. I’m afraid I can’t drink her milk if my principles are as muddled as my shopping choices. I’m afraid of the absolute loyalty Beth demands. I don’t know what role she expects me to play, but I don’t think I can live up to it.

~

Gil doesn’t worry about Beth’s opinion of him. He enjoys watching her plow a field with a traditional wooden plow pulled by her big Belgian horse and he likes to observe the progress on the big wooden barn that she’s erecting single-handedly, but he’s skeptical about her ideal of traditional farming – he thinks it’s superstitious to believe that the past was any better than the present.

“It’s impressive how hard she works!” he says with bemused interest, as if the pointlessness of her activities makes her efforts even more remarkable. He says it with the same tone he reserves for me when I’m up all night working on a futile experiment like chronicling every thought I had in the course of a day. I could interpret his tone as condescending, but I choose to think of it as a mystified sympathy for passions that are foreign to him. He sees most of life as pointless activity, but he’s intrigued by other people’s investment in it. He lives at a different scale. The world outside his books doesn’t really interest him. He doesn’t care if his vegetables come from Beth’s or from the Price Chopper. They all taste the same to him. Gil doesn’t get blinded with enthusiasm, which is what I like about him. When I am sentimental, swept away by fanciful ideas or superstitions, he snaps me back.

~

When the moon is full, I always expect an email from my mother asking me if I watched it. “Wasn’t it beautiful?” she’ll ask, “Did you go out for a night walk?” She monitors me to make sure I’m not wasting my time being busy, that I don’t forget to lose myself in beauty and poetry. Gil’s placidity disturbs her. She’s afraid I’ll become as impassive and practical as he.

And often when I receive her email, I have been too busy to look at the moon. Instead of losing myself in the beauty of the universe, I cook dinner, read stories to the kids, put them in bed, and then I sit down at my computer to get some more work done.  Sometimes, anticipating my mother’s email interrogation, I go out quickly to take a quick peek at the moon, just so I’ll be able to tell her that, yes, I have seen the moon and, yes, it was beautiful: a big ivory globe rising above the trees whose stark purple shadows form patterns on the glittering snow. But the truth is that I feel sad because it was cold and I went back inside right away, knowing I should have stayed out longer. I should have put on my long down jacket, and I should have taken a flashlight and walked down to Townfarm Road to see the moonlight reflect off the White Mountains in the distance, across the Connecticut River.  But instead, I turned around and slipped back into the warm house, back to my computer, telling myself I’d take that full-moon walk next month, when I’m less busy.

~

Maybe that’s why I care so much about what Beth thinks of me. I have strayed from the person I should have become, someone who lives more fully, someone who isn’t reasonable and doesn’t make compromises.  To achieve Beth’s kind of stubbornness, you need to have strong passions. But I’m not convinced of anything.

Since I stopped making my walks, I’ve become an outsider again in my neighborhood. Last summer my neighbor Jennifer gave me some tomato plants. I hadn’t asked for them—I barely have time to spend with my children, let alone take on responsibility for a vegetable garden—but a week later Jennifer asked me how the tomatoes were doing, so I plowed a patch of earth and planted them. Then I almost let them die because I forgot to water. Jennifer, uninhibited about her own nosiness, told me she had entered our garden to check out the vegetable patch and had noticed that the tomato plants needed better care. She pressured me into halfhearted attempts at keeping the plants alive. I occasionally watered them, just enough to help the shriveled leaves survive until the next rain, and by the time I remembered to weed the plot, it had become so overgrown that I could no longer distinguish the tomato plants from the weeds. Four months later, my garden yielded exactly two tomatoes, which I cut up ceremoniously and ate with great gravity. I still feel guilty when I look out my window and see the bare sticks that those pitiful plants had been leaning against. Since then Jennifer hasn’t offered me any more treasures from her garden, no apples like the year before, no pumpkins, and no honey from Rob’s hives.

Bill and I are again strangers to each other. We haven’t talked since last spring. Josh has grown over the past two years. He’s in middle school now. He’s a heavy-set, brooding teenager who almost looks like the adult man he’ll soon be. The innocence has left his face. Sometimes I see him outside in the meadow, disciplining the new dog: Josh raising his fist and the dog cowering on the ground.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Judith Hertog was born in Amsterdam and moved to Israel as a teenager. After having spent several years in Asia, she ended up settling in Vermont with her family. Judith can communicate in six languages but lost track of who or where she is. She writes to find out. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Sun, Tin House, Tablet Magazine, Tricycle Magazine, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and many others. She has received honors and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Marble House Project, and The Watermill Center. Judith studied History and Religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She also obtained graduate degrees in journalism and TESOL from Indiana University, and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.

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Fossiliferous

Nancy Lord

I wasn’t crazy about the height. There we were, one paleontologist who might have been a mountain goat, his two assistants, and me, scrabbling up a mountainside of tilted and crumbling rock strata—or what my companions called “bedding planes.” Loose gravel and rock dislodged by our feet bounced all the way to the glint of streambed in the canyon’s crease below. I tried not to look down as I followed the others in diagonal ascent, and I thanked my new boots and their grippy soles.

Straight out, the view was enough to stop me in my tracks—past the steep gray mountainsides to the green, softening-toward-yellow alpine slopes beyond, and then the farther rocky mountains, all fiery yellows and reds under a high overcast. I could so clearly see something I’d just learned—the geological difference between where I was and where I had been that morning, two parts of Denali National Park. When I’d left the park road to hike up Tattler Creek, I’d walked back through time. The colorful Polychrome Mountains are volcanic, from magma-spewing events 40 to 50 million years ago. But the gray rock of the Cantwell Formation in which I now stood was considerably older, formed during the Late Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago from river and lake sediments deposited in a basin. That basin, later, was lifted by tectonic pressures, tilted, and eroded.

“Rock!” Another hunk of mountain bounced past me.

The mountain goat in our lead, Tony Fiorillo, had zeroed in on a particular ledge and was poking his way along it, examining its underturned face. A paleontologist from Dallas’s Museum of Nature and Science, Fiorillo has worked in Alaska for many years and specializes in high-latitude dinosaur ecosystems. On this trip, he and his two assistants had gotten chased out of their planned study area elsewhere in the park by an aggressive grizzly and so had returned to Tattler Creek to further document what was becoming a major location of dinosaur fossils.

“The candy store,” Fiorillo called it. This area—one of several along the Cantwell Formation in the northeast part of the park—“is the paleontological equivalent of a candy store,” he’d told me when I—a writer visiting the park through its artist-in-residence program—joined him along the creek. Fiorillo was the proverbial kid in the candy store, as excited about every rock on every ledge as any four-year-old let loose among jars and packages of sweets. Now, he was kneeling and squinting and feeling, studying what was embossed in ancient mud. It looked, he called to us, like the track of a “baby” theropod, but—more exciting—a track next to it might belong to a pterosaur. After consultation with the other two—Thomas Adams, a doctoral student who does 3-D laser scanning of dinosaur footprints, and Sarah Venator, a National Parks Service technician—Fiorillo set to work mixing compounds to make a resin cast of the two tracks together.

I sheltered in a protected area below them, still focused on not looking down.

~

The oft-told story has entered the realm of legend: In 2005 a geology professor, Paul McCarthy from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was teaching students field mapping (that is, how to observe, analyze, and record geologic features in the field) in Denali Park. At an outcrop of the Cantwell Formation, he stopped to explain that that kind of Cretaceous sedimentary rock commonly preserves dinosaur tracks and that they should keep an eye out. At that time, dinosaur footprints had been discovered on Alaska’s North Slope and in Aniakchak National Monument on the Alaska Peninsula, far to the south, but nowhere in interior Alaska. McCarthy had no sooner finished his sentence than two of the students pointed to a spot not far from his gesturing hand and asked, “Like this one?”

That grizzly-sized track, of a three-toed dinosaur known as a theropod, was later removed from its exposed location along a stream and displayed at the Murie Science and Learning Center near the park’s entrance. At the university, Susi Tomsich, one of the two alert students, is now a Ph.D candidate and co-author of a number of scientific papers related to understanding the environment of the Cantwell Formation when dinosaurs roamed. The geology department prominently features on its webpage a photo of that first dinosaur track with the promotional words “discovered by students.”

The unambiguous track looks like a giant bird foot.

~

Theropods. I’d never even heard of them before my trip to Denali and was trying not to confuse them with pteropods, or “winged feet,” tiny swimming marine snails I’d been learning about in another context. (Theropod translates to “beast foot” in the Greek.) Now I’d seen several of their tracks in place and had even learned to distinguish them from other tracks we’d been examining.

Back down in the main valley, before we’d headed up a side canyon, the energetic Fiorillo—a slim, well-tanned man in faded blue jeans stained on the knees from kneeling among blueberries—showed me my first dinosaur footprint. Amongst jumbles of other rocks and boulders that had fallen, washed, or been ice-shoved into the valley and were surrounded by the last blooms of dwarf fireweed, one was shaped into three large, smooth, unnatural-looking lobes.

“They’re all through here,” Fiorillo enthused. “Once we knew what to look for—it just doesn’t stop.”

I rested my hand on a sun-warmed rock toe. This was no ordinary fossil, no mere leaf or shell print in rock; a dinosaur had walked here. To hold that rock was not quite like grabbing a dinosaur by the toe, but the sensation was ticklishly related. I was not in a museum or a roped-off tourist attraction, and I was not looking at a photograph; here was the solid, physical manifestation of a very large near-mythic animal that had once—so very long ago—not only lived, but lived here.

I expect I knew less about dinosaurs (“terrible lizards”—I knew that much) than the average seven-year-old, but Fiorillo, patient teacher that he was, paused his trek to give me a short course in Alaska Dino Basics.

The rock we were looking at was the three-toed track, about a foot long, of a hadrosaur (“bulky lizard”), a duck-billed, sometimes horned, plant-eating dinosaur that grazed in large herds and has been called “the cow of the Cretaceous.” The adult animals (depending on the species) could range from ten to forty feet long. They had powerful hind legs, smaller front legs, and thick tails. They generally walked on all fours.

Some seventy million years ago, towards the end of the Cretaceous period but before the cataclysm (generally agreed by scientists to have been a giant asteroid hit near today’s Yucatan Peninsula) that resulted in the extinction of all dinosaurs as well as much other life on our planet, one of those hadrosaurs living in this northern place had stepped in mud or other soft sediments and left a hind footprint behind. That imprint had later filled with sand or other material harder than the mud, and when the mud eroded away, the cast of the print—the rock we were looking at—was left. “The fossil is the infill,” Fiorillo explained.

The rock casts were examples, Fiorillo, said, of “trace fossils”—fossilized evidence of animal behavior. “These can help tell us how the animals lived—the tracks as a data set to complement bones found elsewhere. When they’re found with other fossils—like horsetails or tree cones—that tells us more about what kind of environment the dinosaurs lived in.”

And what was especially valuable, he said, was that those dinosaurs lived right here—or very close to here—in what is now interior Alaska. While older Alaska rocks originated elsewhere and moved in on blocks pushed by colliding continental plates, the Cantwell Formation rocks formed in place, after mountains eroded into a basin and their sediments accumulated in layers. The mountains we were now in were only pushed up later, elevating and twisting what had been a braided river and lake topography. “These dinosaurs were Alaskan,” Fiorillo said. “They weren’t hijacked tectonically. We have an opportunity to study an ancient polar ecosystem in a warm climate.” That climate, at a “greenhouse” time in Earth’s history, was temperate, perhaps like that of the present-day Pacific Northwest. Winters would have been marked by cold but not frigid temperatures and by snow—as well as by the low light and darkness typical of northern latitudes.

The dinosaur tracks get the most attention from the public, but the larger value lay in studying the full ecosystem preserved in the Cantwell Formation. Other trace fossils found among the dinosaur prints include plants (from ferns and horsetails to the cones of Metasequoia trees), birds (tracks and the marks of beaks probing into mud), fish, burrowing invertebrates (worms and crayfish), even the impressions of scaly dinosaur skin. The numerous fossil bird tracks in Denali, along with being the first of the Cretaceous period found in Alaska and the most northern known to date, present a record of diversity—one of the most diverse fossil bird records yet discovered in the world. Fiorillo and his colleagues have classified one bird track, belonging to a creature larger than a great blue heron, as a new species: Magnoavipes (“big bird track”) denaliensis. The crayfish burrows are interesting because the nearest living crayfish today are found a thousand miles farther south. What it all means is that Alaska’s polar region during the late Cretaceous period supported significant biodiversity. “It’s all here,” Fiorillo said, referring to the biodiversity. “It is just phenomenal.”

~

We headed up a side canyon and all stopped at another track, a bulbous protrusion on a larger slab of mudstone. This was one Fiorillo hadn’t recorded before, and he took a GPS reading, photographs, and then a full page of descriptive notes. Just in this valley, he told me, he’d so far documented about a hundred tracks—many more elsewhere in the park and probably thousands of trace fossils of all kinds.

Venator drew Fiorillo’s attention to another track.

“Tell me what you see,” he said to her, “and then I’ll tell you what I see.”

“Toe, toe,” Venator pointed. “And this part’s broken off.”

“I was trying to see a hadrosaur,” Fiorillo said. “I’ll buy that. This”—he pointed to another mark—“I don’t know about.”

They talked some more, decided they had a single track of a hadrosaur but not a good enough one to document.

Higher, Adams was waiting with a theropod track next to a tree cone fossil. I was beginning to develop my own dinosaur eye, and could easily pick out the three long toes—narrower than those of the hadrosaurs we’d examined below.

Fiorillo had recorded the track and cone on a previous trip, but he took more photos and then we all sat on a ledge and ate our sandwiches.

The theropod, I learned, was a meat-eater, a predator of the hadrosaurs. At least the Denali theropods are thought to have been. Just as “hadrosaur” refers to a large group of plant-eating dinosaurs, “theropod” refers to a large group, or sub-order, distinguished by its bipedal walk on strong legs, bird-like clawed feet, small arms with grasping claws, and big tail for countering its weighty head and neck. Theropods are thought to have been fast and agile and to have had good eyesight. They ranged from chicken-size to huge—and included the famed Tyrannosaurus rex. Their fossils have been found all over the world.

In Denali, judging from their track sizes, adult theropods were commonly about nine feet long and stood three feet at the hip. From the trace fossils found so far, it’s not possible to narrow them into more specific taxa. On Alaska’s North Slope, where bones have been recovered, four species of theropods have been identified—all of them known from other parts of North America.

Linkages between theropods and modern birds have long been studied, and one theropod branch is considered ancestral to birds. At a minimum, many characteristics associated with birds were present in theropods before birds evolved; these included— besides the three-toed foot—hollow bones, a backward-pointing pelvis, and a wishbone in the wrist that allowed a sideways flex and quick snatching motion—a motion almost identical to the flight stroke of modern birds. Some theropods wore feathers.

~

The day was getting late. We’d inspected numerous tracks as well as the fossils of plants and crayfish burrows and had reached high and higher ledges. I left Fiorillo and his crew perched on the mountainside, applying pink resin to bumps on ancient rock, and headed back down the canyon.

But before I left, Fiorillo told me a little about why the possible pterosaur (“winged lizard”) track was so exciting. The year before, he and a colleague had documented a “hand” print from a pterosaur, establishing for the first time that those dinosaur relatives, the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight, had been present in Cretaceous Alaska. Pterosaurs not only flew, but were the largest flying animals ever to have lived; Fiorillo estimated the Denali one to have had a wingspan of 25 feet. Pterosaurs had digital appendages at their elbow-bends where the wing folds, and rested on both hands and feet when on land—an attribute that, along with air sacs in their wing membranes, might have helped (by providing a launching mechanism) such a large animal fly. If in fact Fiorillo had now found a pterosaur footprint, that evidence would help build a bigger picture of the animal’s presence in the northern ecosystem. Its presence next to a “baby” theropod track was a bonus.

The day before, the team had made molds of a theropod track and then a “baby” hadrosaur foot and hand together. Multiple fossils in the same piece of stone tell a better story than a single fossil alone; a line of tracks from a single animal can tell about its stride, and other combinations tell what lived together or might have been eaten. All through the Cantwell Formation, groups of hadrosaur tracks had been found together, cementing the knowledge that they lived in herds and—based on the many sizes together—that young received extended care by adults.

For all the trace fossils thus examined, Fiorillo and his colleagues had found just one small, non-descript bone in the Cantwell Formation. This is in contrast to the other Alaska area where Fiorillo has done extensive work—the North Slope, where dinosaur bones have been aplenty. Fiorillo expects they’re there in Denali to be found. He told me, “My thoughts on why no masses of bones have been found is that we’ve still only looked at a small percentage of the exposed rock in the park. One animal can leave many tracks in its lifetime, so the odds favor discovery of many tracks first.” Compared to the softer rock farther north, the hard rock in the Cantwell Formation makes tracks easy to see.

The rock quality explained why the area we were in was so fossiliferous. Fossiliferous: my favorite new word.

When I reached the main fork, near where Fiorillo had shown me the day’s first dinosaur track, I detoured to a site he’d told me about, known as “the dance floor.”

I had no trouble finding it on my own. Just beside the path a large rock wall angled out, and the lower surface of it was a rumpled mess. Or that’s what I would have thought before my very recent education. I might have thought it looked like something volcanic, an uneven surface formed by the flow of liquid rock. Now, I knew better. I could see what Fiorillo had described as “like one of those Arthur Murray dance illustrations, with the footprints showing you how to foxtrot.” I could make out a few clear, three-toed tracks, and then it looked to me like there’d just been a lot of big clumsy feet all squishing around on the same soft ground, one footprint obliterating another. I imagined the edge of a waterhole, and a herd of hadrosaurs gathered to drink, or a bank along a stream and the herd thundering past, chased by theropods. After the herd passed, or after many animals took turns coming to drink or to cross a waterway, something—a flood? a landslide?— had covered over the surface, filled and sealed it. Mountains had lifted, mountains had eroded.  Seventy million years, give or take a few million, passed.

Other people had come to see the dance floor. Their boots had worn a track along the base of the wall; their boots had scattered the larger rock shards and ground the smaller into a smooth surface.

I walked up and down that track, studying the wall. I looked closely at one embossment. It looked like a pile of, well, nasty turds, like something a bear that had been eating vegetation might have left behind. It stood out from the other rock to which it was attached, its own abundant and neat assemblage. I was pretty sure it was what the paleontologists call a coprolite—fossilized feces.

~

I took my time returning to the road, in a dinosaur daze of thought and emotion. A silver-colored marmot waddling beside the stream stared at me near-sightedly and wrinkled its nose. Dall sheep like snow patches hung on a far mountain. Juncos and warblers darted through the willows. On a knoll covered with blueberries, I stopped to pick some, stepping around berry-studded bear poop. I passed two burdened backpackers headed to the high country.

Tourists come to Denali primarily to see “the mountain” and the living megafauna—the “big five” bears, wolves, sheep, caribou, and moose. Now, it seemed to me, the park had a new and important role—not just to care for and showcase today’s magnificent wild environment but to preserve and teach us about the past. Dinosaurs are popular, especially with children, because they’re large, fierce (in myth if not fact), and extinct. That is, you get to be thrilled by them without being in any actual danger.

Dinosaurs can’t threaten us, but extinction surely can. As the world warms—and as the Arctic warms disproportionately—we would do well to think about what a warmer Arctic might look like. Fiorillo had said this: “For those concerned about a warming Arctic, the fossils here provide us clues about what that Arctic might look like.” I was one of those concerned. The fossil finds might give us those climate clues, but a warming climate was not going to give us that ancient ecosystem. Nor was it going to favor the current ecosystem, in all its complexity, its finely tuned evolutionary rightness. How will things change in a warmer Alaska? What adaptation mechanisms might help with survival? What migrations might occur? What species might disappear first, or continue longer, or flourish? Less cold, same darkness—who will be the winners and the losers? How will shifts in today’s ecological balance work their way through the whole system?

What can we humans do, now that we understand what our heavy tread has done not just to the Earth’s surface and its other living inhabitants but to the systems that support life as we know it, the Earth’s atmosphere, the ocean’s chemistry?

We might ask and attempt to answer those questions.

Alternatively, we can take the long view—the really long view.

It’s been 65 million years since the dinosaurs and much else—more than 50 percent of all animal species living at that time—went missing. The Earth continued; life recovered. It’s just that dinosaurs didn’t evolve again; mammals filled in the emptied niche. And here we are, now, just one more charismatic species, occupying the Earth for our moment in time. After us: other life, algal or floral, skeletal or spongy, with feet or fins or slinky twists, with large brains or small or none at all. The enduring Earth will bury in its seas and lift into new mountains the footprints—literal and otherwise—of Homo sapiens, our “wise man.”

 

Art by Matt Monk

Nancy Lord, who makes her home in Homer, Alaska, is passionate about place, history, and the natural environment.  From her many years of commercial salmon fishing and, later, work as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships, she’s explored in both fiction and nonfiction the myths and realities of life in the north.  Among her published books are three collections of short stories and five works of literary nonfiction, including the memoir FISHCAMP, the cautionary BELUGA DAYS, and the front-lines story of climate change, EARLY WARMING.  In 2016 she edited the anthology MADE OF SALMON: ALASKA STORIES FROM THE SALMON PROJECT. Her novel, pH, was published in 2017 by WestWinds Press/Graphic Arts/Alaska Northwest Books.
Nancy was honored as Alaska’s Writer Laureate from 2008-2010.

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Story Water

Sayantani DasGupta

The Cultural Wellsprings of Storytelling

Tapoor! Toopoor! Rain drops fall
The rivers swell with tides
Lord Shiva’s getting wed
to three pretty brides

One bride eats all day
One likes to cook
One bride has headed home
without a backward look

from The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales by Sayantani DasGupta and Shamita Das DasGupta

Gather ‘round, children, and I will tell you a story.

It is a familiar scene. The storyteller is a village elder, or a grandmother, or a wandering minstrel. The passel of eager-eyed children, and perhaps some adults, sit close. It is the still evening, under the fluttering mosquito-net; or perhaps mid-day, in the shade of an old acacia tree; or a darkening and cold afternoon, by the light of a roaring fire.

The stories too are familiar: princely quests, cautionary tales of greedy merchants, creation myths of how humans came to be, or explanatory stories of why the tortoise has such a hard a shell. They tell of djinn and rakshas, orphans and angels, cunning foxes, and wise spiders.

Yet, while they share these commonalities, each such “stream of stories” (to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie) is sprung from a culturally specific source, and each teaches us something particular about that community, culture, and history. The sweet waters from Bengali, Hebrew, Finnish, Mandarin, or Igbo stories might all quench a listener’s thirst, but in fact, they each taste a little different.

Take, for instance, a story my father told me when I was young to help me understand the death of a family member. Although, like many such tales from many different cultures, this story helps explain death, it is based on the Hindu Upanishads and is consistent with a religious tradition of reincarnation. This story could not belong to a culture that believes in heaven and hell, or the permanent connection of one unique body to one unique soul. While it holds truths for any reader, it also teaches us specifically about the beliefs of a particular region of the world and a particular people from that region.

The story itself went like this: You must imagine life’s energy as a mighty river, my father said to me. Those flowing waters represent all the souls of all the creatures in all the universes. Our bodies, he explained, are mere vessels holding that precious soul-water for a limited amount of time. Like clay vessels, our bodies are impermanent. When we die, it is simply a process of pouring our vessel’s liquid back into the eternal streams of life. Thereafter, our individual, personal life force may be indistinguishable from the rest of the rushing river, but it never disappears. It simply returns to its original source.

I like to imagine storytelling as a somewhat similar process—of dipping one’s drinking gourd into the eternal stream of stories. The storyteller gives the tale shape and form, but the essential life force comes from somewhere else entirely. Rushdie plays with this image in his delightful Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel in which the evil fascist characters, the chup-wallahs, want nothing more than to dry up the world’s story waters. Or as the mystical Persian poet Rumi wrote in a poem called “Story Water”: “A story is like water/That you heat for your bath./It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet,/and it cleans you!”

From Salman Rushdie to Jeanette Winterson, from Toni Morrison to Naguib Mafouz, some of the greatest authors of modern-day adult fiction have written stories based on culturally specific folktales and mythologies. In telling their tales, these authors keep alive these old stories while giving them modern day resonance and relevance.

In recent children’s fiction too, the practice of explicitly drawing from old stories has informed the work of authors from Newberry Winner Grace Lin in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon to Michael Buckley in his Sisters Grimm series and Rick Riordan in his Percy Jackson and Kane Chronicles books.

In my own work, I have been revisiting the folktales of West Bengal, India. These stories of demonic rakshas and brave princes, flying horses, and evil snake-creatures were often told to me by my grandmothers during my long summer vacations to Kolkata. They were a bridge that connected me, an immigrant daughter living in the U.S., with my own history and family. In the same way that learning to speak, read and write my mother-tongue gave me access to Bengali culture, custom, and community, regional folktales allowed me entre into a distinctly Bengali imagination. Just as American children recognize the cackle of a Halloween witch, what Bengali child hasn’t shivered with delight at the Haau! Maau! Khaau! of a carnivorous rakshas on the trail of a human meal?

Haau! Maau! Khaau!
It’s human flesh I smell!
With curry leaves and turmeric
let’s cook the rascals well!   

from The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales

But this process of writing from folktales has not been without tensions. After publishing a more straightforward retelling of many such tales in a volume called The Demon Slayers and Other Stories (including stories from the well known Bengali collection Thakumar Jhuli“Grandmother’s Satchel”), I had twinges of guilt at playing “fast and loose” with these ancient stories. Was it disrespectful to the tradition of my grandmothers, I wondered, if I paired the heroine of one story with the heroes of another? What if I inserted adventures from a number of different folktales, poems, and regional children’s stories? Or what if, on top of all that, I threw in a modern-day immigrant sensibility and an East Coast U.S. sense of humor?

I was able to finish that middle grade adventure without too much difficulty, however, because I knew that folktales, by their very nature as oral tradition, are dynamic and changing. One grandmother’s retelling of any particular story is often vastly different from another’s, just as one translated collection’s version might be different from another translation. So I wasn’t doing anything that generations of foremothers hadn’t done before me, I told myself. I was remaining true to the heart of these folk stories while modernizing them and adjusting them to fit the ears and expectations of my audience.

When I began a YA retelling of the great Indian epic The Mahabharata, however, I had even more significant qualms. I knew that there exist many different interpretations of The Mahabharata’s stories, and yet, what I was doing was borrowing from the great epic while weaving in entire characters, storylines and plot points of my own imagining. I was even more uncomfortable with the notion of writing the Hindu god and goddess characters that litter the story’s pages. In giving Indra form or writing Krishna’s dialogue, I was potentially stepping on the toes of an entire subcontinent of people who continue to actively engage with and worship these deities. As opposed to Greek or Egyptian gods like Zeus or Osiris, Hindu gods and goddesses are alive and well in the hearts of millions of people around the world. Was it OK, I wondered, to submit well-known epic storylines and currently worshipped deities to my quirky sensibility and overactive imagination?

Luckily, Hinduism itself came to my rescue. More a lifestyle and philosophy than mere religion, Hinduism has always welcomed contradiction, ambiguity, and more than a little irreverence. Gods walk among people, and the mystical and mundane mix freely and regularly in the lives of believers. (I had a great-aunt who prayed to Krishna to find her glasses and keys when she mislaid them—I’m pretty sure he rolled his eyes every time, but he still never let her down.) In addition, I was set free to a great extent by the idea of reincarnation itself. Rather than setting my re-imagined telling of The Mahabharata in the past, I chose to place it in a distant, post-industrial, agrarian future when, I imagined, the epic tale might have already taken place numerous times. My protagonist—a character who dies an unfortunate death in the original story—struggles in my novel to take his own destiny in his hands. In fact, in searching for a way to feel comfortable with my retelling, I discovered the heart of my narrator’s quest: Could he find the power to challenge the dictums of fate? Was this lifetime the one in which he would finally figure out how to change his destiny and save his own life? Not only did the idea appeal—what teen hasn’t sought to make his own way in the world?—but it emboldened me to tackle this beloved and cultural important epic.

In my “day job” as a faculty member in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, I often remind my students that stories were the first medicine. Storytelling is the way we human beings relate to ourselves and the world around us; the way our families and communities weave threads of interconnection; the way societies and cultures ask the big questions and begin to make meaning from life’s mysteries, including illness, death, suffering, birth, and redemption.

In my work as a writer and teacher of fiction writing, I know that any story I can tell is one that has already been told—perhaps in a slightly different form, yes, but told nonetheless. In dipping into my personal cultural myths and folktales, I seek to pay homage with my words and images to those great storytellers who came before me. In so doing, I hope to celebrate personal cultural traditions while contributing perhaps otherwise unheard stories to the lexicon of an ever shrinking, globalized world. I also acknowledge and celebrate that which remains mystical and mysterious, even in the most skillful of storytelling. In the words of Rumi, “Water, stories, the body,/all the things we do, are mediums/that hide and show what’s hidden/Study them,/and enjoy this being washed/with a secret we sometimes know,/and then not.”

~

I end my thoughts here with the rhyme that traditionally completes every Bengali folktale: a poem that speaks to the universal values of environmental and familial interdependence, as well as the culturally specific notion of dharma—of each creature, whether big or small, fulfilling her duty and destiny. So the ant must bite, just as the writer must write.

My tale has now been said
the nauté greens are dead

Why did you die oh nauté leaf?
Because the cows did graze
Why did you graze oh wan’dring cow?
The herder gives no hay
Why won’t you feed the cows, oh boy?
My wife will cook no rice
Why won’t you cook some rice, dear bride?
My baby he does wail
Why do you cry, oh little one?
The sting of ants does pain
Why do you bite oh tiny ant?
‘Cause it’s only right!

Ku-toosh, ku-toosh, I will bite
Then hide away, out of sight.

from The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales

With that ku-toosh, ku-toosh, we are done, though the story-telling has just begun…

Works Cited:

DasGupta, S. and Das Dasgupta, S. The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales. Brooklyn, NY: Interlink Books, 1995.

Rumi, Jalaluddin. The Essential Rumi. Coleman Barks (translator). NY: HarperOne, 2004.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired KIRANMALA AND THE KINGDOM BEYOND books, the first of which—THE SERPENT’S SECRET—was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an EB White Read Aloud Honor Book. Sayantani is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University. When she’s not writing or reading, Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador retriever Khushi from the many things that scare him, including plastic bags.

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Corn Maze

Pam Houston

When I was four years old, my father lost his job. We were living in Trenton, New Jersey at the time, where he had lived most of his life. With no college education, he had worked his way up to the position of controller at a Transamerica-owned manufacturing company called Delavalve. The company restructured itself and dismissed him. My parents decided to use his sudden unemployment as an opportunity to take a vacation, to drive whatever Buick convertible we had at the time from New Jersey to California. My parents loved the sun and the beach more than they loved anything except vodka martinis. They promised to take me to Disneyland. We stopped at Las Vegas on the way.

We stayed at the Sands, where my mother had opened, decades before, as a singing, dancing comedian for Frank Sinatra. I got to swim in the kidney shaped pool, and then we ate a giant slab of prime rib each for a dollar. My mother and I went up to the room to bed, and my father stayed downstairs to gamble. I woke up to my mother standing over my bed and sun streaming into the hotel room window. I was four and a half years old. “Pam,” she said, “go downstairs and get your father out of the casino.”

I found him sitting at an empty blackjack table, looking a hundred and ten. I took his hand and led him through the hazy cigarette air, up the elevator and down the long hall with the zig-zag carpet to our room. He had, of course, lost everything. The money we were meant to live on until he found another job, the money for the trip to California, the money for the hotel bill. Even the car.

My mother’s old boss at the Desert Inn loaned us enough to get the car back, to pay the hotel bill, to take me to Disneyland. A few weeks later my father started a new job in Pennsylvania, and we moved there, though when my mother ran away from Spiceland, Indiana at age thirteen to Manhattan, because she had won the bet with her Aunt Ermie, who raised her, that she could get straight C’s, and as a result had, for the first time in her life, fifty whole dollars, she’d vowed she would never live west of the New Jersey border again.

~

About five years ago, I was asked to be one of four writers to participate in an evening called “Unveiled” at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. Our assignment was to write something new that had never been tried or tested, and read it aloud to an audience of roughly a thousand. I not only accepted; I took the assignment so literally, I didn’t start writing until I was on the plane to Wisconsin. I wrote for the entire plane ride, and all evening in my hotel room. I stayed up all night and wrote, and I wrote all day the day of the reading. When I started to panic that I would not have something ready in time for the reading, I told myself what I tell my students when they get stuck: write down all of the things out in the world that have arrested your attention lately, that have glimmered at you in some resonant way. Set them next to each other. See what happens.

By late afternoon I had twelve tiny scenes. I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves. I don’t believe this has anything to do with the apostles. One scene was called Georgetown, Great Exuma. Another was called Ozona, Texas. Another was called Juneau, Alaska. Two hours before I was to read, I looked back at my instructions to make sure I had done everything the assignment asked of me. The only caveat, it said, was that the piece had to mention Wisconsin. I knew nothing about Wisconsin, so I left my hotel room and sat on a street corner downtown and waited for something to happen. In less than thirty minutes, something did, and I went back to my room and wrote it down. When I added Madison, Wisconsin to the original twelve, I had to take out Mexican Hat, Utah, but that was okay with me.

“Jesus, Pam,” Richard Bausch said, after the reading, “Write a hundred of them, and that’s your next book.” I thought, “No, not a hundred, but possibly a hundred and forty-four.”

~

When I went on tour with my first book, a collection of short stories called Cowboys Are My Weakness, I was asked, more than any other question, how much of this really happened to you? “A lot of it,” was my honest answer, night after night, but the audience grew dissatisfied with that answer and seemed, more than anything, to want something quantifiable, so I began saying, also honestly, about 82 percent.

Eight years later, when I published my first “nonfiction” book, and went on tour with it, I would often be introduced in some version of the following manner: “In the past we have gotten 82 percent Pam, and now we are going to get 100 percent,” and I would approach the microphone and feel the need to say, “Well, no, still coming in right about 82.”

~

Between Davis and Dixon, California, in the heart of the Central Valley, just off I-80, right under the historic sign where the cow jumps over the moon, is the Guinness Book of World Records’ Largest Corn Maze. If you get off the highway and drive to it, you find out that technically speaking, it was the Guinness Book of World Records’ Largest Corn Maze in 2007, and not in 2010. But, you figure they figure, once a winner, always a winner.

In the corn maze, as in life, there are rules. No running. No smoking. No strollers. No drugs. No inappropriate language. (The corn has ears too!) No tampering with the signs and the maze markers. If you misbehave you will be asked to leave, though in a corn maze, you understand, that is not always so straightforward. Surprisingly, dogs are allowed in the corn maze, and there is nothing in the rules prohibiting handguns. Sex in the corn maze is also apparently okay, as long as you use appropriate language.

The computer-generated grid that the corn maze sits upon runs from A through QQ and 1 through 52. It contains 2,193 squares. When you enter, they hand you a map. To complete the maze successfully, you will make approximately 189 right turns and 156 left turns, though there are a few places when more than one option will get you out, so your individual numbers may vary.

One ear of corn has approximately 800 kernels in sixteen rows. A pound of corn contains 1,300 kernels. One bushel averages 90,000 kernels. In America we sell more corn than any other crop. The corn in this maze is as high as an elephant’s eye, if we are talking the world’s largest elephant, in heels.

I have a painting in my kitchen by my friend Mark Penner-Howell of a giant ear of corn with the word Hallelujah written in red letters running vertically up the ear and lots of little ghostly gas pumps in the background. When my boyfriend Greg eats corn on the cob his lips swell up so much we call him Angelina Jolie.

~

The reason I have been afraid, until very recently, to make any kind of general, theoretical, or philosophical statements about women, writers, westerners, environmentalists, academics, western women, western women writers, outdoorswomen who grew up in New Jersey and eventually became academics, women who dreamed of running white water rivers and falling in love with poets and cowboys (though not cowboy poets), women who got on I-80 West on the other side of the George Washington Bridge one day and just kept driving … is that I have never felt comfortable speaking for anyone except myself. Maybe I had been socialized not to make declarative statements. Maybe I thought you had to be fifty before you knew anything about the world. Maybe I was afraid of misrepresenting someone I thought I understood but didn’t. Maybe I was afraid of acting hypocritically. Maybe I have always believed it is more honest, more direct, and ultimately more powerful, to tell a story, one concrete and particular detail at a time.

So I did. I put my boat into the river, some things happened, and I took it back out on the other side. In time though, I began to suspect that linear narrative was not doing a very good job representing life as I experienced it, but I still tried to stretch the things I originally conceived of as Slinkies into straight lines. I don’t mean to suggest that I was unique in this. There are so many of us out there, trying to turn Spyrograph flowers into rocket ships. In time I began to gain confidence in my Spyrograph flowers and Slinkies. Eventually, I began to speculate about where they came from. Just for starters, I never met any of my grandparents. Also, every single one of my relatives (except a second cousin in Alaska who is oddly afraid of me and his illegitimate son who likes me, but lives in Prague) is dead. Also, when both of your parents are alcoholics, one thing never leads to another. There is no such thing as how it really happened. When both of your parents are alcoholics, the only way to get to a narrative that is un-shattered would be to run the tape backwards, like a car accident in reverse where the windshield that is in a million pieces magically mends itself. This is not necessarily the bad news. A mind that moves associatively (as my mind does and probably your mind too) like a firefly in a grassy yard on a late June evening, has more fun (and other things too, of course, like static, like trouble) than a mind that moves logically or even chronologically. Just the other day for instance, someone said the word tennis, and I saw in my mind’s eye a lady in a pig suit with wings.

~

Not too long after grad school, I was hired by a magazine to write an article about why women over forty take adventure vacations. I was barely thirty and had no idea why, but I needed the money so I called some power women I knew who had climbed Kilimanjaro or whatever and asked them. They gave flat and predictable answers like, “for the challenge,” so I made up some smart, funny women who said surprising and subversive things about why they took adventure vacations, and wrote the article up.

When the fact checker called me, I said, “You’re a what?” like an asshole fresh out of graduate school, “you actually believe in things called facts?”

The fact checker, whose name was Bethany, asked for the phone numbers of the six women I wrote about. I gave her the numbers of the three that actually existed.

“What about Katherine and Louise and Samantha?” she said.

“Well, Bethany,” I said, “I made them up.”

There was five seconds of silence, then she said, “Well, I guess we don’t have to call them then, do we?”

~

In 2010 in Las Vegas, in a gondola, in the canal that runs from Barney’s New York to Kenneth Cole (upstairs in the mall they call the Palazzo), a very young man is proposing to a very young woman. He is on one knee, and the acne faced gondolier in his straw hat and red kerchief steadies the wobbling boat. The shoppers pause a minute to look over the railing and watch. The girl is either genuinely surprised or good at pretending. She whispers yes, and then shouts it for the small crowd. The twenty-five of us gathered clap and cheer, and the boy stands up and pumps both fists, the same exact gesture he uses, one imagines, when he hears that his fantasy football quarterback has gone 18 for 24 with four TD’s and no interceptions. The gondolier turns the boat around with his single long paddle, and pushes them back toward Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Every day in Vegas is upside down day. Walking along the canal, young men in wife beaters say sentences into their cell phones that, if they were not in Las Vegas, they would never say. “I’ll meet you in an hour in St. Mark’s Square,” or, “I applied for a job with the KGB,” or, “Let’s meet up in time to see the volcano erupt.” People pay money—a lot of it—to see Donny and Marie Osmond. On the poster for the Garth Brooks show in the Wynn Encore theater, there is a picture of Garth in his big black hat and a one word review from the Los Angeles Times: Genius.

We are staying at the Golden Nugget, downtown, a hotel where, if you want to, you can go down a water slide, which is really more like a water straw, through a 200,000-gallon shark tank. At the guest relations desk there is a very pretty girl with quarter-inch thick make up and long blonde hair that has been dyed so many times it is leaning toward burnt sienna, and the kind of ultra thick, ultra blunt square false eyelashes that only transvestites wear, and the whole ensemble makes her look like somebody cross-dressed as herself.

Every time we leave the hotel, the junkies are sitting on the steps of the church across the street shooting up under their toenails. The lady in front of the sign that says Hotel-Wedding-Cuban buffet looks right through the driver’s side window into my eyes and says, “Put a muffler on it you fucking bitch,” right before she sits down in the middle of the street and tries to scratch her own scalp off.

~

When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings.

Who cares really if she hung herself or slit her wrists when what really matters is that James Frey is secretly afraid that he’s the one who killed her. Dear Random House Refund Department: If they were moved, then they got their twenty-four dollars’ worth.

~

Back in the nineties, a magazine sent me to the Ardèche region of France. They wanted me, among other things, to kayak the Ardèche river canyon, one of the five river canyons the French call the Grand Canyon of France. But they sent me in late October, the days were short and getting shorter, all the kayak rental places were boarded up tight for the year, and it was 36 degrees with freezing rain. So I hiked the canyon of the Ardèche, thinking it would be an acceptable substitute.

When I turned in the article the editor said, “We really wanted you to kayak the Ardèche.”

“I know,” I said, “but it was too cold, all the rental places…”

“No,” she said, “we really wanted you to kayak the Ardèche…”

“Ah…” I said.

“And while you’re at it,” she said, “could you make it rain a little less?”

I found her request neither difficult nor surprising. The river had, at that time of year, hardly a riffle on it, and would have been a pretty, if chilly, float. To spice things up, I added a water fight with three Italian kayakers. There was some good-natured flirting across the language barrier. It didn’t rain that day at all.

Some years later, the editor of an anthology asked my permission to reprint that essay. He said, “I really liked your story, especially the part about the three Italian kayakers.”

“Funny,” I said, “I made that part up.”

Maybe I should have anticipated the depth of his outrage, but I did not. This was pre-James Frey, of course, and who would have ever anticipated that? The editor called back a few days later and said he had removed the kayak trip from the essay. He had added a scene in which I carry my kayak down to the river’s edge, and a fog bank rolls in, and I decide not to go.

“I don’t want to be an asshole,” I said, which of course wasn’t true either. “But if I can’t make up three Italian kayakers, I don’t think you can make up fog in my essay.”

It is hard, all these decades after The Things They Carried, to stand here and say the scene with the three Italian kayakers is the truest thing in the entire essay (though, of course it is) even though it never really happened. Nor would I turn an entirely deaf ear to the complaints of those who actually use travel magazines to plan trips. And I’m not even going to mention journalistic coverage of war crimes, genocide, sex offenders, presidents who lie about weapons of mass destruction… certainly I do believe that sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.

But if you think about it, the fact that I did not really have a flirty exchange with three Italian kayakers doesn’t make it any less likely that you might. I might even go so far as to argue that you would be more likely to have such an exchange because of my (non-existent) kayakers, first because they charmed you into going to the Ardèche to begin with, and second, because if you happened to be floating along on a rainless day in your kayak and a sexy, curly-haired guy glided by and splashed water on you, you would now be much more likely to splash him back.

~

Due north of Newfoundland, there is a small rocky island in the Labrador Straits called Quirpon (pronounced Kar-poon). The island is roughly ten miles long and three miles across, and on the seaward tip there is a lighthouse and a lighthouse keeper’s house—both painted a bright red and white—and no other buildings to speak of. Inside the house, two tough and sweet women named Madonna and Doris fry cod, dry clothes, fix mugs of hot chocolate, and hand out maps to soggy hikers who’ve come to stay the night.

Marked on the map along with the fox den and the osprey nest is an old townsite called L’Anse au Pigeon, and underneath the name in parentheses it says, “site of mass murder.”  When I ask Doris about it, she tells me she isn’t much of a storyteller, but when I press she takes a deep breath to get into what I recognize as the Newfoundlanders’ storytelling mode, a half performance/half trance state that suggests stories are serious matters, whether they are about mass murders or not.

“And now,” she says, “I will tell you the story of the mass murders on Quirpon Island.” She brings her hands into her lap and folds them as if she’s getting ready to pray. “A long long time ago,” she says, “not in this time, but in the time before this time, there was a settlement—several fishing families, living together on Quirpon Island. And one day the government saw fit to send them a schoolteacher. Now this schoolteacher mind you, he was a handsome fellow, young and smart, and one of the fishermen’s wives fell head over heels in love with him. And the husband was terrible jealous, terrible, terrible, so he decided to trick the schoolteacher into drinking a little bit of the stuff–what is it? I don’t know what the stuff is called….”

“Arsenic?”

“No, it’s the stuff they use in the lanterns.”

“Kerosene?”

“Like kerosene, but different from kerosene.”

“White gas?”

“Like white gas, but different from white gas….anyway, he gave it to him a little, a little, a little at a time, and finally the poor handsome schoolteacher died.”

Doris nods her head as a kind of punctuation, unfolds her hands and stands. “And that is the story of the mass murder on Quirpon Island.”

“But Doris,” I say, “why call the death of one schoolteacher a mass murder?”

Doris sighs heavily. She sits back down and brings her hands back into her lap. “A long long time ago,” she begins, “not in this time, but in the time before this time, the fisherman who had given the schoolteacher the poison to drink became more and more afraid that the men in the town were getting ready to confront him. There wasn’t law back then like we have in these times, so he probably would have gotten away with it, but his guilt made him believe his friends were not his friends. So deep deep into one dark night he soaked one of the fishing boats with the liquid that goes into the lanterns…”

“The same liquid,” I say, “that he gave the schoolteacher to drink?”

“The very same!”

“The white gas?”

“Like white gas,” Doris says, “but different from white gas.”

“Didn’t they smell it?”

“This is the liquid that has no smell. Anyway, all the men in the town went fishing the next morning and one of ‘em struck a match to light his cigarette and the whole lot of them burned up or drowned or died of hypothermia. You can’t last long in that iceberg water,” she says, nodding her head towards the window. “And that is the story of the mass murder on Quirpon Island.”

~

I was driving over Slumgullion Pass listening to Ashes of American Flags at volume 50. There were three feet of new snow on the ground, and I watched a herd of two hundred elk gallop through it. I had spent hours the night before on baby naming websites trying to find something I could search and replace for Pam in my forthcoming novel of 144 chapters. The book is more or less autobiographical. I have, of course, taken massive liberties with the truth.

In past books I have used Millie, Lucy, and Rae. For the sake of sentence rhythm, I was leaning towards something with one syllable, but it would also be convenient to the book if the replacement name meant something as embarrassing as what the name “Pamela” means: which is all honey. I had considered Melinda, which on some sites means honey and could be shortened to Mel. I had considered Samantha which means listener, and could be shortened to Sam.  But in the car with the elk in the pasture and the snow on the road and Jeff Tweedy in my ears I was all of a sudden very angry at whoever it was who put all that pressure on Oprah Winfrey. This book was in danger of missing the whole point of itself if my name were not Pam in it. If my name were not Pam in it, who was the organizing consciousness behind these 144 tiny miraculous coincident unrelated things?

~

About ten years ago, I was looking for an epigraph for a book of my travel essays. I arranged a lot of my Asian travel in those days with an excellent San Francisco outfit called Geographic Expeditions, a company famous for their catalogs, which are full of heart-stopping photos and quotes from writers like Goethe, Shakespeare, Chatwin, and Plato. That year’s catalog contained a quote from Seamus O’Banion: Eventually I realized that wanting to go where I hadn’t been might be as fruitful as going there, but for the repose of my soul I had to do both. I found it wise and pleasingly self-effacing, and I shamelessly stole it for my epigraph, without taking time to find the original source.

A season later, I was invited to a cocktail party at the offices of Geographic Expeditions, and since my new book contained essays about trips they had arranged for me, I brought them a copy. “And look,” I said, “I thieved my epigraph straight from your catalog,” and showed them the O’Banion quote.

When they could contain their laughter long enough to explain it, they said, “There’s no such person as Seamus O’Banion. We made him up, one late night several catalogues ago, and now we bring him back whenever we need him to say something profound.”

~

When I told my friend Shannon how rattled I got in Vegas, she twisted up her mouth and said, “Well, it seems to me that Vegas is the distillation of American-style capitalism, where what is desired is a facsimile of old world decadence (Venice) exchangeable only by complete ignorance of its actual cost (the wasteland at its margins). And that the lower-middle class who go there with their obese children are the real fools, because it’s their money that keeps everyone else either rich or poor.”

For the first time in my life I truly understood the difference between a writer and a cultural critic. A cultural critic goes to Vegas and lets it serve as proof of everything she’s been trying to say about the world. A writer goes to Vegas, and it makes her want to kill herself.

~

It is possible that I will be advised to change the character Pam’s name to Melinda. It is also possible, though less so, that I will be advised to change the names I have changed back to the actual names, or that I will be advised, the first time I introduce a character called Rick to say “the man I’ll call Rick.” It is possible I will be advised to do that with all the characters’ names I have changed, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty. In the instances where I have combined two or more real live people into one character, and thrown a little something in there to make them blend—a little storyteller’s petit verdot—or even made a character up all together, this method becomes problematic.

The Rick I’ve put on the page bears only a modest resemblance to the man I love and live with—less and less with every draft. But the point I am trying to make here is that the two wouldn’t resemble each other much more than they currently do if I called him by his real name and tried with all my might to make the two characters match. Nor would the Pam on the page resemble me any more or less than she currently does (which is only so much) if I am made to call her Melinda. Except in as much as her name would be Melinda, and my name would still be Pam.

~

I understand that it is in bad taste to love Venice, the real version. The city exists, now, more or less for the tourists, who number an astounding seven million a year. None of the employees can afford to live there, and the whole city shuts down by ten thirty each night because the waiters have to run for the last boat/train/bus for the city of Mestre, where there are apartments they can actually afford. Eighty percent of the palazzo windows are dark at night because they are all owned by counts or bankers or corporations, and now, because of the wave action of speedboats, the wood pilings that have stood strong under the town for more than a thousand years are finally rotting, and the whole city is sinking, slowly but surely into the Adriatic Sea.

And still, leaving the rent-a-car at the San Marco carpark, and slipping onto a Vaporetto at 8:00 pm on a foggy January night, leaving the dock and watching the first Palazzos come into view, some of them still adorned with Christmas lights, puttering past a Gondola, its Gondolier ram-rod straight in his slim black coat, passing under the Bridge of Sighs, with the dark water lapping softly against the bow, it is hard not to feel like you have entered the world’s single remaining magical kingdom.

And when you tell the Sicilian owner at Beccafico, “We have only one night here, so just make us whatever you think is best,” and he brings a whole fish cooked in wine and capers and olives and so fresh it is like the definition of the words fresh fish in your mouth, and afterwards, your sweetheart buys you for your birthday a small piece of venetian glass, various shades of umber, in the shape of a life preserver to wear around your neck, and you drift off to sleep in a room that has had fancy people sleeping in it since at least the 1400s, you think, if the worst thing they ever say about you is that you have an underdeveloped sense of irony that might be quite all right.

~

Did I mention that when James Frey was an undergraduate, I was his creative writing teacher?

~

In San Francisco, at Alonzo King’s Scheherazade there was one dancer who was head and shoulders above the others. I mean that literally—he was a giant—and figuratively–every time he leapt onto the stage all of our hearts leapt up too.

It was a difficult problem, I imagined, for the choreographer to solve, to have one dancer in a troupe who was so outstanding, so lithe and fluid, so perfectly free inside his own body, that he made all the other dancers, who I am sure were very fine dancers, look clunky, boorish, and uncontrovertibly white (even the black ones). And yet, having seen that dancer perform, wasn’t it Alonzo King’s duty to let us see him, even if he couldn’t be on stage the entire time, even if every time he left the stage, we all died a little bit inside?

~

I did not actually believe, for example, until I saw the signs with my own eyes, that several places in Vegas offer drive-through windows for weddings.

~

It has been five years since my trip to Madison, Wisconsin, and I have 144 chapters. 132 of them are titled with a place name, divided into groups of twelve by twelve single stories that take place no place—on an airplane, 39,000 feet above the ground. I had to make a decision as to whether the airplane stories would count as twelve of the 144, or over and above the 144, but that turned out to be easy. If I stuck to 132 non-airplane stories, I needed just twelve airplane stories to serve as both dividers and bookends. If I wrote 144 non-airplane stories, I would have needed thirteen, which would have ruined everything.

In the final stages of editing, I sent an email to my editor saying, “Is it wrong of me to want to call myself Pam in this book? Should I just change my name to Melinda and be done with it?”

She wrote back saying, “No, I like Pam. I think we want people to think it is both you and not you,” and I sat in front of the computer and nearly wept with gratitude.

Six months before my father lost his job and we drove to Las Vegas, he threw me across the room and broke my femur. I think it’s possible he meant to kill me, and I spent the rest of my childhood, the rest of his life, really, thinking he probably would. Speaking only for myself, now, I cannot see any way that my subsequent well-being depends on whether or not, or how much, you believe what I am telling you—that is to say—on the difference (if there is any) between 82 and 100 percent true. My well-being (when and if it exists) resides in the gaps language leaves between myself and the corn maze, myself and the Las Vegas junkies, myself and the elk chest-deep in snow. It is there, in that white space of language’s limitation that I am allowed to touch everything, and it is in those moments of touching everything, that I am some version of free.

When my agent read the first draft of my forthcoming book, she said in dismay, you haven’t taken us anywhere and yet you have taken us everywhere! I know what she was asking for was more resolution, which she was right to ask for and which I subsequently provided, but I still don’t know how to inflect her sentence in a way in which it doesn’t sound like praise.

One thing I am sure of, having spent the last five years inside a shattered narrative, is that time is a worthy opponent. It does not give up quietly. It does not give up kicking and screaming. It does not, in fact, give up at all. Time is like when you break a thermometer and all the mercury runs around the table trying like crazy to reconstitute itself. Or like the way PCB can start out in a glass transformer in Alabama and wind up on the island of Svalbard, inside a polar bear cub’s brain. A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can’t escape it; it is what we are.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, DEEP CREEK: FINDING HOPE IN THE HIGH COUNTRY, as well as two novels, CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED and SIGHT HOUND, two collections of short stories, COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS and WALTZING THE CAT, and a collection of essays, A LITTLE MORE ABOUT ME, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

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What More Can a Body Do?

Charisse Coleman

You are in training, learning how to help people with the sorrows, fears, and angers they want to banish, the pains they wish to exorcise or learn to carry more lightly. You are introduced to a man with cancer. He is exactly your age. Forty-eight. The first time you meet is the second week of your internship as a clinical mental health counselor. You are in a medical exam room with the man, his wife, the oncologist, and a nurse, and the news is not good. The wife’s brow is furrowed in confusion, and she has begun to cry. The man has vaulted his compact, laborer’s body from his chair and is pacing a patch of floor that, because of the number of people in the small room, cannot measure greater than four by six feet. He turns his back on everyone to stare, momentarily, through the glazed slit of a window which cannot be opened.

The man has just been told that the tumor in his lung has continued to grow throughout the month he received chemotherapy. Turning away from the window to return to his seat, his eyes find yours, and now it is as if you were peering into a kaleidoscope of his emotions, a clacking tumble of bright, jewel-colored shards: fear, anguish, pleading, disbelief, outrage. In the same instant, his glance erupts in silent questions, Did you hear what he said? How can this be happening? What did I do wrong? Am I going to die soon? All as clear in your mind as if he had spoken. This has leapt through the man’s eyes in an incalculable instant; he has stared it right into you, a total stranger.

For this man, the next nine months will be filled with medical setbacks and recoveries, with decision after necessary decision and no happy options to choose from, with all the emotional gymnastics of attempting to adjust to ever-changing circumstances. The glimpse you had of his turmoil on that first day will become a familiar eloquence. Also a source of professional dismay as you find just how difficult it is to interrupt the continuous dive and swoop of his fears, their fevered search for places to land. His anxieties are so various, constant, and energetic that you begin to think they may be as much a part of him as his arms and legs, that they are, in fact, a way for him to know who he is. It will take the remainder of your training to appreciate just what a comfort they might be to him.

The one thing that will not change is his deepest wish, a wish even he knows is useless, but which he clings to as determinedly as a terrified child will clutch a scrap of blanket for protection. How many times in nine months will you hear him say, “I just want everything to go back to the way it was before”? How many times will you look into those wetly pleading eyes and feel your heart dip heavy, because as long as he tenders a belief in a guaranteed impossibility, he will continue to rock himself in a cradle of avoidable pain. You would lift him out of it if you could. But he’s the only one who can move himself from this static nostalgia for his pre-diagnosis life (a life that can never be recovered, regardless of the course of his illness), to an active desire and will to live now.

Just how long does it take to realize that he isn’t really living anymore? A remark from his wife here, his own report, a comment from his grown daughter there, and you belatedly piece together that he just isn’t doing much of anything these days. Though he is muscular and, except for the tumor, in good health, though everyone from his medical oncologist to his radiology technician encourages him to ride his bike, go walking, take off for the beach for a few days, he will hardly leave the couch, much less the house. You suspect he is frozen in a paralysis of waiting. Waiting for this or that course of treatment to be over, waiting to feel strong again, waiting to go back to his job, waiting to be told he no longer has cancer, waiting to, at last, feel unfrightened—then he’ll get back to living.

He likes to walk, but is so scared he’ll collapse (an occurrence that, according to his doctors, is no more likely now than it was before his diagnosis) that he won’t do it, not even in his own neighborhood, not even with a cell phone in his pocket. He will not go to the beach: two-and-a-half-hours’ drive from the cancer center is too far to risk. He cannot bear for his wife to leave him alone for more than a few scant minutes at a time. (She carries around her fatigue, her desperation for a break, like a knapsack full of mud.)

Even when the scan shows a 90% reduction in tumor size, even when he learns he’s now eligible for the surgery he’s always trusted more than the mystical toxins and x-rays, he cannot be glad. To proceed as if good news could actually hold might be to jinx it. And so: “If they’re right. If they didn’t read the test wrong. If they know what they’re doing. If it lasts.” It won’t last, you want to shout, because nothing does, which is why it’s so important that he not waste time disbelieving the physical strength and health he has right now. Because you have finally realized: what he is doing, all day long, every day is having cancer. Each new day, he starts again, scared breathless by his body’s unknowable but indisputably treacherous processes, opting, finally, to sit very, very still. His head knows that such committed inertia will not keep bad things from happening; the pit of his stomach says otherwise.

And then, six months into his illness, he gives a tentative smile and confesses he might like to ride his bicycle soon. He is pleased with himself, as he is pleased to report that the beach trip his wife has been begging for is looking good, too. What a happy shock! He is actually looking forward to something. Which is about the same time he experiences a sudden and extensive loss of strength in his left arm. Back to the hospital he comes. Tests are done. Waits are endured. Results, when they finally arrive, are unwelcome. The cancer has metastasized to his brain.

A man who cannot bring himself to trust his doctors’ good news cannot now be expected to believe their assurance that brain metastasis is not a summary death notice. The oncology catechism “We can’t cure it, but we can treat it,” uttered by doctors of several different specialties, fails to convince. He cannot hear, or is afraid to believe, the promise that life is not yet finished with him; the promise hums too softly to drown the howl of betrayal inside for being given life on such fraught, compromised terms. And he continues to believe, despite repeated experiences to the contrary, that as long as he refuses to hope, disappointment can be forestalled. Entering another treatment phase, he bats away expressions of optimism as if they were poisoned arrows.

And what have you, helper-of-people in training, been doing all this time, besides witnessing his trek down a booby-trapped road from the safe vantage of your own good health? Well, you have offered yourself as a receptacle for his and his family’s outpourings. (You believe in the power of deep listening.) You have (clumsily) disrupted marital sniping, or at least redirected the focus of its energy and heat. Every time they discovered some small way to make themselves happier in the midst of their misery, you celebrated with them. You have made them laugh. You have (literally) held their hands, given hugs, and yes, planted kisses on cheeks and foreheads.

But you are a rookie. You have been so caught up in making sure they felt heard, supported, understood, that, unwittingly, you have failed them. No attempt you’ve made to apply logic or to challenge their distorted thinking has altered what was irrational to begin with. You knew better, really, than to imagine it would, but ultimately the temptation to speak in the authoritative, supposedly reassuring voice of reason overpowered this knowledge. Not knowing a more effective approach, understanding how real and exhausting their worries are, you stuck with what you knew how to do, what they seemed to appreciate your doing, which came down, mostly, to listening and encouraging. But now you wonder: at what point does long, hard listening to numerous repetitions of the problems become a mechanism that helps to sustain them? How could you have overlooked the obvious alternative of helping this patient escape the matrix of his fears by focusing on what gives him joy? What can he see himself living for, instead of only battling against?

Very near the end of your training, you visit him in the hospital. His wife, who has not been home in days, sleeps in a vinyl reclining chair, looking as crumpled as a bag of laundry. You and the patient talk quietly. His post-surgery pain level is manageable, he says, though he hasn’t felt up to the walking the physical therapist wants him to try. He hasn’t heard when he might be discharged. He otherwise feels pretty good, though he is worried, as always, about what else is in store. “You know,” you find yourself saying, “we’ve spent a fair amount of time together in the last several months, you and I.” He hums and nods an acknowledgment of this. “And we’ve had some pretty important talks, about pretty personal stuff.” He agrees with this, too. “I realized I know a lot about what upsets you, scares you, makes you angry and anxious. And I feel like an idiot,” (that sharpens his attention) “because in all this time, I still have no idea what it is you love about life. I’ve never asked, and I’m sorry, I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me sooner. What do you love about your life?” you ask, speaking his name.

Tears bolt to his eyes, his whole mouth turns down in a crescent of grief and trembling. “Being here,” he whispers hoarsely. “I just love being here, that’s all.” He wipes his eyes. You squeeze and hold onto his square, calloused hand. “Of course you do,” you say. “Of course.” You sit together like that for awhile. You think of all the conversations you might have had with him, conversations to name just what it is about being here that he loves so much, conversations, perhaps, about how he might bind himself more firmly to those things. All the expected recriminations of inexperience and lament for what you could have (should have) tried.

You sit there together in a small envelope of silence, holding hands. And then, emboldened by how few chances remain to be with him, having lost the luxury of time to elicit things subtly and obliquely, you risk umbrage and misunderstanding by telling him what you think he should do. With not a little urgency, you tell him he must hold fast to that wanting to be here. You tell him you believe that it is the strength of this very desire that can pull him through the darkest times. You say that all of that goodness he longs to embrace can become a stronger force in his life than all of the badness he fights so hard to ward off. You say it’s not too late, not as long as he’s here, alive, whatever his condition. He presses his lips together, looking away, pressing down new tears. You stop speaking. He squeezes your hand again, longer this time. You believe this means he wants to believe these things. You wonder what he will decide, in the end, to believe, to do.

His wife uncurls from her nest in the recliner and smiles sleepily in your direction. You rise and kiss the top of his head, your lips firm against the bristle of new fuzz, and walk around the bed to hold his wife in a long hug. A kiss for her brow this time, a reminder to have you paged (they won’t; they almost never have) whenever they want to talk, “hellos” to be passed on to their daughter and granddaughters, and off you go, other patients, other families to see.

The last time you heard, he was in a wheel chair, and they were still plugging along, doing what needed to be done. You can’t stop wondering if they ever made it to the beach.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Charisse Coleman’s essays have appeared in the literary magazines Witness, Ascent, Passages North, and Sou’wester, among others. Her work has twice been listed as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays series, as well as nominated for a Pushcart, and she is a two-time recipient of North Carolina Arts Council grants for nonfiction. Charisse is a counselor in private practice, co-facilitates grief support groups at the Duke Community Bereavement Center, and will soon complete the 18-month Gestalt Training Program at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. She has recently begun to work with veterinarian practices to provide grief counseling for people who are mourning, or facing the imminent loss of, a pet. She lives in (and is totally crazy about) Durham, NC.


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Lovebird

Carolyn Walker

It is autumn and the leaves of October have begun to fall, but still Jennifer’s summer romance blossoms with a freshness that even the first cherry trees of April might envy. Her boyfriend David, who is trapped in his body like a mummy in its sarcophagus, calls her almost every day. The telephone rings and I jump to answer it because I am, even though moderately arthritic, swifter on my feet than she is. I hear his man’s voice gather its wind and attempt to phrase her name when I pick up. “Is Jshenny home?”

He works his tongue over the consonants as if he were scraping melted cheese from the roof of his mouth. Jennifer, at twenty-seven, is almost always home, and I fetch her while he waits.

“Jennifer! David’s on the phone!” I call as I take to the stairs, hoping my voice will penetrate her bedroom door and the music throbbing beyond it. As always, Celine Dion is crooning Jennifer’s favorite song, “My Heart Will Go On,” the love theme from Titanic, while Jennifer works the CD over the same phrase again and again, my heart will go ah, ah; and ah, ah; and ah, ah; and ah, ah; and on and on. Jennifer has been head over heels about the Titanic since the Leonardo DiCaprio/Kate Winslet movie was released, their ill-fated, but oh-so-romantic, love story igniting her desires. I detect a dip in the volume but not too much. She cranks the door’s handle hard, opens it and flaps her arms, wing-like, then step-thumps with her head held high past me and down the staircase, which takes considerable time, through the living room and into the kitchen.

She is pudgier than ever now, an enlivened dwarf on parade. Wearing enough necklaces to stock a display case, including one with a blue heart to honor the Heart of the Ocean thrown to sea in the Titanic movie, she whips them to a shoulder with a wave of her neck, picks up the receiver, smiles broadly, and places it to her ear.

David has been most patient, awaiting her presence on the phone, I’m sure, with a great deal of anticipation. I back out of the kitchen, allowing Jennifer a woman’s privacy for her conversation, but it doesn’t matter. Even if I go back upstairs or out on the lawn I can hear her shouting her high-pitched affection. “David, I love you! I love you, David!”

There is a pause, just long enough for David to say, “I love you” back. I know the duration and the speed of the three-stroke tempo these words command. Their conversation is always the same: limited to love and the memories of first meeting— limited by the constraints of their willing but impossible bodies.

“David, I met you at SCAMP,” Jennifer screeches, and I wonder what David is thinking on his end. What kind of woman he might otherwise romance if his legs could bear his weight, his lips produce a kiss, his arms effect an embrace. Though physically disabled in nearly every way, he is much brighter than Jennifer, and he knows he met her at SCAMP. I picture him receiving her comment as if he were truly astonished, for Jennifer’s sake. He seems infinitely patient; perhaps patience comes second nature to him, a necessity, bound as he is to a life without mobility.

Strapped for hours at a time in his wheelchair or in his hospital bed, David has little to occupy him besides his thoughts. I have my suspicions about his cunning: how he prods the attendant at his group home to dial the phone for him; how he urges her to hold the receiver to his ear, but to not eavesdrop; how he plots to find time and place with Jennifer.

Jennifer endures a long silence, holding the receiver close to her ear, straining to hear whatever might come next. David, perhaps distracted, has gone silent on his end. Apparently satisfied that the conversation has ended, she plops the receiver into its cradle and begins making her way back to her bedroom.

~

The day comes when he places a personal call to me. I hear him emit a tongue-manipulating, “Woul’ shou bring Jshenny over to shee me?”

I am seized not only by his effort but the longing in his voice, and I commit to honor his request. I hear myself say, “Sure, David, of course I will.” Some part of me wants Jennifer and David to share in the euphoria of romantic love. I remember how love energized my life when it came to me, and philosophically, I believe that they are equally entitled. But some part of me is terrified, too. Will I have to chaperone their marriage, dole out her birth control? Will I have to comfort her with words she can’t understand if love, or David, dies?

While few have given birth, it is known that women with Rubinstein/Taybi Syndrome have a high likelihood of passing this rare mental retardation onto their children—giving birth to miniatures of themselves who have beak noses, sloping eyes, jointless thumbs, and stymied IQs. And as if that weren’t frightening enough, I know that Jennifer’s peculiar little body could never carry a child, to say nothing of her inability to raise one.

I am a pro-active mother. All her life I have fought for her right to lead an independent, full, and rich life—to strive for her potential, the way the rest of us do. I’ve taken on school systems, pressured the medical establishment, transported her to her job. Now arriving at the pinnacle of that effort, I ask myself if she, I, dare make this move toward love, with all its implications.

I sent Jennifer to SCAMP, a summer day camp for the “physically and/or mentally challenged” as the administrators like to call it, for the first time when she was scarcely five years old—and then again every year for twenty-six years. In addition to the fun the camp provides its participants, it offers a bridge across the summer season, building upon whatever skills and education the SCAMPers might have mastered during the previous school year.

Jennifer’s earliest camping photographs, my favorites, show her sitting on a gymnasium floor learning to sing with her friends, their fingers, like a gathering of fairies, translating Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Sunshine On My Shoulders into the sign language of the deaf, while more recent pictures show Jennifer and David on the beach, embracing at water’s edge, frothing with desire as if they were Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr filming From SCAMP to Eternity.

Although I am afraid, I decide Jennifer is entitled to the human pleasures, and I drive her to David’s group home, in the next city over. I am aided and abetted by their Scamp counselors who help me find the way.

Sometimes on days like today it would be better if I were the proverbial fly on a wall—a slightly less obtrusive and annoying presence. But as it is I am antsy, situated on a cream-colored, cushy sofa, surrounded by way too many throw pillows, and I am amazed at Jennifer’s behavior, there, just across the room. I am struggling to control that amazement, keeping my voice in check, trying not to lurch and jump every time she makes a move—my maternal instinct to rein her in when she promises to get carried away.

Jennifer, her enthusiasm propelling her forward, is seated on the very front edge of an oversized footstool, and David is in his wheelchair before her. David was roused from a nap for this, Jennifer’s first visit with him outside of SCAMP. They have not seen each other in months. His attendant in this county-run group home where he lives, named Danetta, has gone to another room to fetch the carnations he has bought my daughter for Sweetest Day, although Jennifer is unaware that such a holiday even exists. The toothless Danetta, grinning and chatting affectionately, loves the idea of their love and, in cahoots with David, has planned a grand presentation for the flowers.

While she is out of the room, Jennifer clasps her hands together and shoves them between her knees, tilting her head coyly to one side and batting her eyes, as if she were a purring actress in a Rudolph Valentino film.

I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing and hearing. She appears to have absorbed every hokey gesture from every Big Screen romance she’s ever watched and made them her own. Jennifer preens, she fauns, she swoons. Her hands go before her breasts now, her voice suddenly Bette Davis-deep, airy and sensual, something more than a whisper. “I love you, David. I’ll be the best, brightest babe you ever knew.” She shakes her head gently for effect while David looks on, infatuated, bemused.

Because Danetta has not attached the foot rests to David’s chair, his legs hang awkwardly, suspended like those of an abandoned marionette when the strings are too tight. His right foot begins to shake up and down uncontrollably, like Thumper’s in the movie Bambi.

I know David is excited—just as besotted as Thumper—what I don’t want to know is how much? I engage my rational mind. His foot thrums the air because some obscure nerve lost in that tangled body has misfired. He is not, please, have mercy, sending Jennifer sexual messages that are beyond me.

Jennifer is so completely unabashed about her intentions. She reaches forward and clamps poor David’s twisted fingers in her hands. I cannot tell from my position if she is squeezing, as she is sometimes prone to do.

“Don’t hurt David,” I yell, finally overriding my restraint and going to sit beside her.

David’s head goes way back so that he looks at the ceiling. This response is part delight, part cerebral palsy asserting itself. He urges his face back down.

“Don’t worry, I will shay shomeshin if she doesh.” He directs his voice to me, but his eyes are on Jennifer.

At this, she releases his fingers (I notice the blood drain back into their tips) and she grabs the armrests on his wheelchair. With mind-boggling speed and agility—as if she had both practiced this maneuver and honed her strength on a rowing machine—she sweeps his chair, and him, between her legs. He is there in an instant, his knees brushing her inner thighs.

David is thrilled. I am mortified. At Jennifer’s audacity. At my unspoken concerns. I notice the taped corner of David’s paper diaper peek over his belt. The sight is both reassuring and heartbreaking to me, but Jennifer pays no attention. Her face is more alive than I have ever seen it. “David, I love you,” she gushes.

As if on cue, the carnations present themselves. David takes them from Danetta, gives them over with a strained reach, and Jennifer accepts them, but she is much more interested in a hug and kiss.

She rises and goes to embrace his shoulders. Stretched to full length, she stands at the same height as David when he is seated. The woman inside her knows what she wants; she plants a kiss on his cheek, presses herself against his chest, lingers there, and David attempts to wrap his all but useless arms around her.

Danetta and I utter sweet, stereophonic Aws—as if our voices were being piped in from two sides of the room.

When Jennifer’s hug becomes a little too eager, I peel her off David and insist that she sit back down, attempting, myself, to conjure up small talk. As a distraction, I help entertain their fantasy as David and Jennifer begin planning their first date. She wants to have dinner at the Red Lobster, while he would prefer a movie. My mind whirls. Yes, I would drive her to meet him if an attendant could get him to a rendezvous.

David, showing the stunning depth of not only his affection for, but his understanding of Jennifer, says he has been working on a picture of the Titanic for her but has not been able to render it perfectly because he can’t draw well. It will come eventually, he says. Jennifer goes wild at this news, hooting and clapping at the prospect that a portrait of her obsession will be given by the man of her dreams.

Suddenly she wants to see David’s bedroom. She asks boldly, “Can I see your room?” Jennifer rises once again and pivots David’s chair, begins nudging him down the hallway as Danetta and I follow, two anxious cocker spaniels.

David’s room turns out to be a sparse affair, dominated by his bed and a hoist on one side, and an empty bed that awaits a new client on the other. Things are in a bit of a clutter. I can see how he must have pored through his open drawers recently, dropped his belongings, been forced to leave them on the floor. His sheets are in disarray. On his brown dresser there is a stereo system, his prized possession, and beside that, at somewhat of a distance, a silver urn that, Danetta informs me, contains the remains of his mother.

I am at once struck by what seems a macabre addition to an already uncomfortable environment, filled with compassion for David, and reminded of my own mortality. His mother has been dead just over a year. I envision the woman she must have been, long in the limbs and dark-haired like David, her face impossibly forlorn. I notice the way my own spirit wants to step in as her surrogate. I feel her giving me a nudge from the other side.

Danetta stands behind David and mouths with her gums and lips, “His father doesn’t want anything to do with him.” David breaks the silence, speaking of his mother’s death without betraying a single emotion, while Jennifer, at his side, makes a mental connection and announces, “Your mother is in heaven.”

“I hope sho,” David says.

~

In what seems like short order, we lose track of David. After several visits and months of phone calls, one day I simply notice that the phone has stopped ringing. There is a not-so-conspicuous change to the overall tenor of our noisy household.

Certain that they must miss one another I think about David and Jennifer’s love. I feel optimism pull at me, a quixotic notion that I can rectify this, that I can nudge along something akin to happiness for them, if I try. On a piece of computer paper, I write Find David as if he were a misplaced screwdriver. I leave the reminder on the kitchen countertop, where for weeks I shuffle it around lunch fixings or the dinner dishes, waiting for the day when I will have time to commence a search.

When I finally call, we learn he has been swallowed up by the community mental health system, moved to a different group home without warning.

“David doesn’t live here anymore,” Danetta says bluntly into the receiver. “He’s somewhere closer to you, supposedly.”

I sigh. David must be waiting out there in the world, full of hope. I think that he’s close in the same way that a moon on an elliptical path sometimes moves in on its planet, even as the forces of nature push it away.

I am ashamed to admit that I have eaten the chocolates Jennifer bought for him for Valentine’s Day. I rationalize that they would be stale by now, early June. I say to myself, “We can buy more”—but I’m not fooling anyone. Store shelves are stocked with July Fourth fireworks and beach toys. There’s not a red box heart for miles.

David would have been thrilled with that box heart, too. He, the quintessential romantic who said to me during a visit one Christmastime, as he handed over a bottle of perfume to Jennifer, “She told me over the phone she wantsh to kish me.” He caught my gaze with his own, blushed, and followed up with a copper ring for her finger—a hand-me-down, dime store band inherited from his cousin. “Can I ashk her to marry me now, or do you want me to wait?”

David’s question hovered in the air and then dropped into the hole I reserve for questions with impossible answers. I felt it hit bottom. “Maybe you should wait,” I said.

~

From his wheelchair, after I locate him through our community mental health channels, a full two years into their hit-and-miss relationship, David finally orchestrates the perfect first date with Jennifer. Some three months have passed since Danetta told me of his move, and he is now, indeed, living only a mile or two from our house.

David’s and Jennifer’s meeting is the kind of date Cinderella and Prince Charming might have had, had the clock not struck midnight just when things were going well for them. David calls on a weeknight and pronounces with an empowerment that I can’t help but admire, “I’ve made plansh for ush.”

I listen.

“I bought ush ticketsh to the prom. They were thirty dollarsh.”

I think about the magnitude of this expense in his government-funded life, and I hear myself agree to bring Jennifer to his special education school on the appointed night.

He wants to know what color dress she will wear, and I say pink, knowing all the while that Jennifer will show up in her good white slacks and a mauve blouse. It is impossible to fit her body into a dress, and I have long since given up trying, but how can I explain this? Why would I want to go into all the details at this very moment?

“Jennifer will be excited,” I tell him.

~

The night is, as David will soon observe, a perfect night for a prom. The weather is clear and tepid. The sun burns a marvelous tangerine in the evening sky, administering just the right dose of romance.

We arrive at the prom ahead of David and are greeted by a bevy of enthusiastic PTA mothers bent on making this a memory-worthy night for their children. Most of those in attendance are students of the school, young men and women in their early to mid-twenties, with all manner of complicated mental and physical disabilities. Jennifer seems to be the only outsider, but not for long. She is, as I like to call it, “fully gussied” for this affair. Accenting her silk blouse, she has on four bracelets, nine of her favorite beaded necklaces, in all colors—everything from wooden to glass to shiny metal—and four plastic rings pilfered from the dentist’s treasure box.

She quickly ingratiates herself with the PTA moms by announcing, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s my best true love I ever met. I’ll be his lovely bride.”

Jennifer has fantasies that she is going to replicate her sister Holly’s marriage ceremony in the gazebo of our hometown’s scenic little park. Her comment is met with a series of smiles and hums, the mothers looking at me with understanding.

Jennifer squeals when she sees David’s van finally pull up. He exits it with help from an aide, dressed in his best clothes, twisted to dating perfection in his wheelchair, with a pink corsage pressed into his hands.

“Mom, it’s so romantic,” Jennifer gushes. She is feigning Valentino kitten again. “Here comes my best, true love.”

I slip the corsage, which David says he ordered only today, onto Jennifer’s wrist for him, and she surprises me when she says, “You can leave, Mom”—gripping the wheelchair’s handles and pushing it toward the action.

I am a confusion of emotions: proud of her and delighted to be sharing in her delight, afraid to leave her in a crowd of strangers, touched by her desire for adult independence even as I am aware that she’s still mostly a child. We compromise when I drift off to the far, distant end of the cafeteria, way beyond the dance floor, beyond even the disc jockey and the dining tables to a bench in no man’s land, where I set up watch, like an owl on a barn rafter.

The evening’s festivities begin with song, Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy—which strikes me as a somewhat ironic choice. From my spot as spy, I notice that Jennifer and David are totally involved already. They are oblivious to those around them: the stumpish girls who swim in their oversized evening gowns, the spastic break dancers, the ecstatic young Down Syndrome man who is on the receiving end of a bump and grind.

Jennifer and David hold hands. They hug and kiss. They pause and gaze into one another’s eyes. They arm polka, Jennifer moving David’s left arm up and down as if she were dancing with an old-fashioned water pump.

After an hour, the mothers dish up a chicken and rice dinner, but Jennifer and David scarcely seem to eat. I know from experience that excitement has claimed a victory over Jennifer’s otherwise insatiable appetite, but I’m not sure about David, who is something more than a paraplegic, something less than a quadriplegic. I amble over and, not wanting to embarrass him, ask him in a whisper if he needs help with his food, and he tells me that he does because he doesn’t want to spill on his good clothes. It would be different back at the group home, he acknowledges. There, he could wear all the food necessary to get some into his mouth. But on a date, especially this date … well, things are different.

I seat myself next to him and begin to fork rice into his mouth. Jennifer does not take this move well at all. “I want to do it,” she says, summoning a pushiness that is new to both of us. “Let me do it!”

Surprised, I hand the fork over and watch while she delicately spears a piece of chicken and moves it to David’s lips. He rolls his head back and opens his mouth to receive it, submitting to her completely.

She pushes the food at him tenderly, more tenderly than a mother bird might feed her tiniest, most favorite fledgling. Every muscle and nerve in her body is focused on his satisfaction, and I cannot help but realize that a woman I have never known now sits before me.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Carolyn Walker’s work has recently appeared in such publications as CrazyhorseThe Southern Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her memoir, EVERY LEAST SPARROW, was released in 2017. The book details the story of her daughter Jennifer who was born with Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, a rare condition that affects mental and physical development. A MOTHER RUNS THROUGH IT—a collection of her creative nonfiction—was released in 2001. Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry were published in the anthology AT THE EDGE OF MIRROR LAKE. Her journalism has appeared in HOUR Detroit MagazineDetroit Monthly MagazineMichigan, the Magazine of the Detroit News; the Detroit Free Press; the Flint Journal; the Oakland Press; the Observer & Eccentric newspapers; and The Clarkston News. Carolyn’s journalism has won awards from the Suburban Newspapers of America, the Michigan Press Association, the Better Newspapers Association, and the Association for Retarded Citizens. She teaches writing at the college and university level, has taught writing workshops in local school districts, and is a member of Detroit Working Writers and Creative Writers in the Schools.

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Espionage Is a Risk

Amanda Skelton

Each tread of the staircase in our rented apartment measures roughly nine inches. The risers are eight inches high. Builders use various formulae (e.g. height plus depth equals seventeen) to fix the tread/riser ratio. I use a formula—the word “recipe” seems overgenerous—to prepare the protein shake I carry upstairs, five times a day, to my twelve-year old son. Blend one liter of soymilk and three scoops of protein powder. Add strawberries for flavor. Split the mixture between five lidded cups. But don’t write the formula down, the clinic’s nutritionist has warned me. Espionage is, apparently, a risk.

The tread in many staircases is insufficiently deep for the length of the foot. This is the case for me in this apartment. My heel cantilevers off the step, and I rely on the muscles of my forefoot for traction. This overly long foot is due, in part, to a great toe of excessive proportions. Riche has inherited the Webster toe gene—the name a nod to my father’s side of the family. Other genes I have gifted him include those for oversized blue eyes, a head for figures, long femurs, unremarkable cheekbones, and a predisposition to obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and eating disorders.

I count the steps on my way up: “One, two, three…” I count slowly to match the pace of my feet. I’m in no hurry to reach the top. Riche, on the other hand, is prone to run up the stairs. The purpose for such haste is twofold: to outrun any mobile calories in the kitchen and to maximize energy consumption. Anorexia, like a parasite, has invaded my son’s brain and controls his thoughts. It knows how to make every step a winner.

“Four.” I’m level, now, with the peepholes in the staircase wall. These holes give Riche direct line-of-sight to the kitchen. In this way, he can see if I’ve brought forbidden fruit into the house (Oh Eve, thou art deceitful). He can also check my compliance with the Protein Shake Preparation Ordinance. The steps are clearly stated: Wash hands. Scrub bench. Wash hands. Open refrigerator door and remove soymilk and strawberries. (Door must be swung wide so that soymilk carton avoids contact with contaminated rubber strip on door edge.) Wash hands. Remove protein powder and blender from cupboard. Wash hands. Measure and blend ingredients. Wash hands. Serve. Wash hands. These steps are necessary to prevent additional calories on hands or objects from insinuating themselves into the protein shakes. I check the peepholes before I begin shake preparation, but like the traffic police with their breathalysers, Riche’s anorexia knows the value of random checks, so at all times, I follow regulations.

“Five, six, seven.” My bare feet make shushing sounds on the beige carpet. Small synthetic nubs scratch my skin. At this level, featureless white walls enclose me on either side. The seventh step bears the first of the stains—protein shake—which arc in a gentle curve to the landing. A cornered eating disorder’s Jackson Pollack style solution to supervised refeeding: splatter rather than swallow the killer calories.

“Eight, nine…” I’m losing my concentration. What does it matter how many steps there are? Sooner or later, I will reach the top. Which I do. And there I confront the Shake Routine. This involves questions from the whining parasite in Riche’s head—Did you wash your hands?—with appropriate answers from me. In this instance, appropriate and honest do not always equate: No the soymilk did not get near other food in the supermarket.

I can’t tell you the total number of steps: I never did count them all. I can tell you that I went down at a more varied pace. If I had just given Riche the last protein shake of the day, I took the steps at a moderate clip. If Riche had allowed the milky fluid to pool in the sides of his cheeks so he could later spit it out, if he had spat and coughed repeatedly while he cleaned his teeth so that I feared he would vomit, then I trudged slowly down the stairs. Occasionally, to escape the parasite’s voice, I took the steps too fast and tripped. But this was a good day. The parasite seemed quieter: a single run through the questions sufficed and spitting and coughing were easy to control. On my way down, I held the empty cup in my hand like a trophy and took the steps two at a time.

 

Art by Matt Monk

Amanda Skelton is a medical doctor who lives in Sydney, Australia. Her work is forthcoming in Alimentum and in an anthology of work from The Healing Art of Writing: A Conference and Workshop to be published by the University of California Press. She was a general contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2010 and is at work on a book-length memoir titled Sex & Marriage.


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Here There Be Dragons

J.D. Lewis

Here is what I like to think happens when we die: first, we float. Alone in boundless blackness, we are conscious only of absence. Then, all around us, faint pinpoints of light brighten slowly, imperceptibly, so we don’t notice until we’re surrounded. A luminous map of stars pulses into focus, accompanied by a swelling of strings from an invisible orchestra. We can make out far-off planets and hula hoops of debris around them. Purplish clouds of galactic dust yawn in the distance. Then, all at once, we’re flying, everything a blur of blue and orange and black, and the brass section kicks in with spirit, crescendoes, louder, more trumpet there, and we are hurtling through space faster and faster, and then, then, just when our teeth begin to grind with anxiety, an Earth-like oversized marble of a planet grows huge in front of us, and with a jolt we stop.

Here, orbiting the planet, is our gleaming, blinking, permanent destination: a space ship of some sort, a giant dinner plate attached to a sled.

What we do not understand is then made clear by a reassuring voice, booming out over synthesized ambient chords:

Space, it says, Britishly. The final frontier.

And with that, we materialize bodily within the salmon-carpeted corridors of the Starship Enterprise, where we will live out eternity via a series of fifty-minute interplanetary parables with the rest of the crew. There will be apparent risks, but we will take them all, we will follow Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s bobbing pate into any dark corner of the universe. We will be post-race, post-religion, post-war, post-disease, post-death itself: we will be the future.

This is my father’s fault.

~

Twenty years after Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired on TV, I have rented all of seasons two and four, curled myself into the arm of a couch with a glass of bourbon and barely moved for three days. Because. Well, because seasons one and three were already checked out. Or because it’s the edge of a sharp winter. Because something needs sopping up.

But mostly it’s because there is Captain Picard’s swagger. He swaggers elegantly. Long leggedly. Ring of distinguished gray fuzz arcing over patrician ears, gloved in a redblack Spandex uniform, eyebrows expressive as caterpillars. And there. Something bubbling up, over. There a choked desire to be shown something future and past at once. And Jean-Luc Picard, all aged but not yet elderly, all hero space pioneer, there, the way he swaggers across my TV screen now is the same way he once swaggered across the TV screen in my parents’ bedroom every Saturday night after dinner.

It’s not time travel, but it’s close enough.

My father liked Picard, liked Star Trek, maybe for the gravitational directive to seek out new life and new civilizations. Maybe something softer. On Saturday nights he draped himself over the long reach of his recliner, remote at the ready. He was smitten with the Enterprise’s redheaded medical officer, to my mother’s irritation, but she popped popcorn and stretched out on the bed anyway, rolling her eyes at Dr. Crusher and trying to find wrinkles. My sister and I puzzle-pieced in front of and behind our mother and our father tapped his chin with his wedding ring during commercials.

In hindsight, this ritual was singular: a lifting of my father’s unspoken ban on mindless pop-culture in the house. But the year Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, my father was diagnosed with colon cancer. The future, then, was maybe in short supply.

˜

In episode #202: Where Silence Has Lease, the Enterprise encounters a hole in space. On the giant view screen that spans the front of the bridge, it appears as a jagged maw against the white-dotted expanse of the rest of the sky. Dewy-faced Ensign Crusher, teenaged son of my father’s crush, reports adorably that there is no matter, no energy, no anything in the hole.

This is interesting enough to raise Picard and dashing First Officer Riker from their futuristic La-Z-Boys. Magnify. Magnify further.

The view screen shows nothing at all.

Riker raises a boyish eyebrow, strokes his lady-killing goatee.

It’s like staring into infinity, he says, musing on about a course in Ancient History he once took at Starfleet Academy, where he learned that men once believed the sun revolved around the earth and that a ship sailed too far out into the ocean would fall off the edge of the world. The Captain says, Beyond this place, there be dragons.

But then, disaster. Suddenly, the Enterprise is no longer in normal space. The Nothing has engulfed them. Their fancy instruments are useless here, their warp engines unable to move them. Blackness in every direction. The soundtrack twists itself into a minor key and we cut to commercial.

~

At the word cancer, my father’s building projects—he was always putting up extra walls to create rooms within rooms—shuddered to a stop. Dust settled and nails rolled into the cracks of the baseboards and for weeks, our house was full of frames without drywall. These mute skeletons gave us the power to walk through walls.

There was a surgery and the doctors said they got it all, and when asked to remember now my mother insists that life went on as usual almost immediately. My own record is incomplete: in pictures from the time, my sister and I produce coy smiles from under pigtails and are shod in white knee socks and mary janes.

My mother says, That first time it was over so quick.

She says, We pretty much forgot about it.

There was no such thing as history then, only possibility. And the surgeons couldn’t yet know what they didn’t then see. But I don’t know if forgot is the right word, at least not for him.

Less than three months after his cancer was removed, my father piled our little blue Ford Escort with pillows and storybooks, strapped a pile of suitcases to the luggage rack, and set a course for California, two thousand miles from our skeleton house.

The mission: just to go. He had earned the future and the right to show it to us.

~

On the bridge of the Enterprise, raven-haired Counselor Troi, who is the only member of the crew required to wear a V-necked uniform and a hint of cleavage, and whose sole job is sensing things, looks into the Nothing and reports usefully that she senses a vast intelligence.

All at once a face—or something like it—appears on the view screen. It’s just a smudge of eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Vaguely humanoid. Green. The crew gasps. Ever-alert security chief Worf, his Klingon forehead like a factory accident, leaps up, phaser at the ready, though he must know that firing at the screen would be a mistake.

The camera pulls back to include the entire beeping, blinking bridge and—oh dear— Little Ensign Crusher is no longer at his station; he has been replaced by an unfamiliar actor with a minimal speaking part. This can’t be good.

The face speaks in an echoing bass: Why are you so alarmed when I’ve gone to such trouble to look just like you? Its name, it says, is Nagilum.

Sensors show nothing there at all.

~

Somewhere near Muskogee, Oklahoma, in a wash of thin summer light, my father piloted the Escort into the lot outside a Days Inn. My sister and I tumbled cranky from the back, kneaded our sweaty hamstrings. A full day of whining and poking each other across the invisible line down the middle of the bench seat had left us hoarse and cramped but at least we were finally there yet.

Smell that country air, kids, my father ordered.

It smells, we replied, like cows. Does our room have a TV?

We tripped up the cement stairs to our room. The door swung outward, pressing us against the balcony railing, and once inside we were greeted by a large brown stain on the carpet and a heavy, sour stink in the air. A choking noise escaped our mother, and she set to work stripping the filthy coverlets from the queen beds. My sister elbowed me and whispered that the stain was probably a bloodstain and that it smelled funny because the hotel people had just removed a rotting corpse from the floor.

The murderers will probably come back tonight, she said.

The TV only had two channels.

I started to cry.

When my father, laden with suitcases, filled the doorway and surveyed, his ecstatic road-warrior grin flickered but reset. He strode over the stain, dropped the luggage on one bed and rubbed his palms together. Cozy! Who wants to check out the pool?

He wrapped my snotty hand in his, and when the pool turned out to be a muddy hole choked with leaves and bugs, smellier even than our room, my father hefted me onto his shoulders and we stood two tall at the edge of the parking lot, watching for a moment as a pair of crows looped lazily over a nearby field in the dying pink of day.

~

My mother says now, We went because it was out there.

She says, He wanted to show you girls the world, because he could.

~

The Enterprise is under a cosmic microscope. Nagilum’s big green face floats across the view screen, examining the crew on the bridge, noting differences in gender and species. It demands a demonstration of human reproduction. The crew demurs.

Counselor Troi helpfully senses curiosity.

Nagilum says, Your life form surprises me. Is it true that you have only a limited existence? You exist—and then you cease to exist. Your minds call it “death.”

Nagilum’s eyes narrow and at once, at the front of the bridge, a white light flashes and we hear a cry of pain from poor doomed Ensign Minimal Speaking Part. The camera pans down to where he’s fallen. His eyes bulge and he writhes on the floor for a few seconds, claw-handed. Dies. Illustrates the point.

Nagilum informs the crew that it wants to understand this death, and that its experiments will probably require about a third of their lives. At this, Picard stands up even straighter and more broad-shoulderedly than usual.

No! he says. We will fight you, he says. He turns off the view screen and calls a staff meeting, ushering in another commercial break. We cut to an exterior shot and the Enterprise hangs like a wind chime in the void.

Picard’s voiceover is strained:

How do you fight something that both is and isn’t there?

~

Somewhere in Arizona, the highway a wet pelt in front of us, we shuttled past a man ambling down the rumble strips. He stooped under a canvas sack and pointed his thumb at our car. As soon as she saw him my mother punched the lock on her door.

I crawled over my sister to gawk out her window at the receding hitchhiker, and she immediately kneed me in the stomach for violating our zoning agreement. I yelped and clawed the back of her arm. She gave a hard yank to my pigtail. I chomped down on her hand. She howled and pushed me back to my side of the car by my face. I aimed a kick at her shin but missed, she began summoning a monster loogie, I pinched her thigh. She growled through a mouthful of phlegm and reared back—

I think I was winning, but before my mother could twist from the passenger seat to bark back at us, before my father could drag his left elbow from its sunburned perch on the windowsill and threaten to turn this car around, so help him, there came a metallic POP! from the rear of the Escort. A flat tire. We limped to a stop on the side of the road, my mother clutching the door handle, my sister and I surprised into a truce.

Silent yellow desert all around us. We hadn’t seen another car in an hour. Grumbling, my father got out and loped back to examine the injured tire, leaving us females to marinate as the temperature inside the car mounted. My sister and I craned to watch him out the back windshield, listening gleefully to the faint stream of profanity drifting in through the open windows.

As our father squatted on the frying-pan asphalt, we saw a speck on the horizon.

The hitchhiker.

Gaining on us, steadily. We watched his figure grow for a while, until I, in a flash of inspired generosity, said, Hey, how come we don’t give that guy a ride? causing my mother to swivel back violently, eyeball the situation, and emit a strangled urp.

Windows up! Lock your doors!

She poked her head out her own window and told my father he had better hurry up, please, to which he replied that he wasn’t working on his tan, thanks.

My sister leaned over to me and whispered, We can’t pick that guy up, dummy. Didn’t you see what he’s got in his bag? A big axe. And a chainsaw. And as soon as he gets to our car he’s going to chop us all into little pieces. Even Dad. He’ll probably start with Dad. And he’ll probably kill you next because you’re the most annoying.

I started to cry.

My mother sat facing forward, wringing her hands and muttering, apparently as convinced as I was that the hitchhiker meant to slaughter us in our seats. Her watch ticked. She whined my father’s name out the window.

We could almost make out the hitchhiker’s face now, and I didn’t think I saw an axe, but couldn’t be sure. My mother jittered. He came closer.

Then suddenly, a miracle: out of the shimmer of the desert, a state trooper pulled up behind us, emerging from his car with a visible gun on his wide brown hip. My mother sucked in a breath and released her hands. The trooper swaggered over to my father and stood there in his mirrored sunglasses, watching my father grunt away at the spare tire. The trooper made conversation about the heat.

When we thought to look again, our hitchhiker had disappeared into the sand. And soon we pulled away, and the hot air around us began to move, and we felt something like the future prickle our skins.

~

The crew of the Enterprise, faced with the prospect of suffering interminable lab-rat losses at Nagilum’s hands, come upon what somehow seems like an obvious solution: They must initiate the ship’s auto-destruct sequence. Preferable to control their demise than have it thrust upon them. The sexless voice of the computer informs us the ship has twenty minutes until kaboom.

Nagilum is nowhere to be found. The Enterprise floats in silent ink.

Cut to Captain Picard, cut to our fearless Jean-Luc, spending his last moments draped over a recliner in his muted chamber. Classical piano music floats softly from hidden speakers. We zoom in on the captain’s face, zoom in on an eyebrow flicking.

The doorbell chirps. Enter sallow-faced Data, the ship’s android officer. Data is neither man, nor precisely machine; he wants, more than anything, to understand.

I have a question, sir, Data says, sitting stiff on a settee. What is death?

Picard chuckles paternally. You’ve picked probably the most difficult of all questions, Data. Some argue that the purpose of the entire universe is to maintain themselves in their present form in an Earth-like garden which will give them pleasure through all eternity. And at the other extreme, are those who prefer the idea of our blinking into nothingness with all our experiences, hopes and dreams only an illusion.

Which, Data presses, do you believe?

Picard considers. The camera zooms close enough to suggest wheels turning within his gleaming head.

I prefer, he says finally, to believe that my and your existence goes beyond “practical” measuring systems… and that, in ways we cannot yet fathom, our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.

Data cocks his head.

In that instant, stars appear outside the portholes behind Data. The Enterprise has been returned to normal space. Just like that. Just like that, they have escaped that which they could not see; Nagilum wanted to understand death, and Picard was close enough.

~

If what we were doing was mapping our future onto America’s highways, what bore a hole in our atlas was the failed attempt to unstick as well from the past. From a surgery. From a set of empty walls. Outside of Dallas, a terrible thunderstorm beached the Escort like a whale under an overpass. Outside of Las Vegas, an encounter with the potato salad at a Sirloin Stockade buffet left my parents and sister doubled over and fighting for the bathroom at a Red Roof Inn for two days, a sickness I avoided only thanks to a firm anti-slimy food policy. In the southwest, we stood in four different states and held hands in a sine wave of experience, my mother fretting about the possibility of heatstroke. At the Grand Canyon, my sister half-heartedly tried to push me in. At Crater Lake, two tame chipmunks hopped after us down the overlook path while my mother swung her purse at them, convinced they were rabid. At the Monterey Squid Festival, the La Brea Tar Pits, the redwood forests, at Disneyland, death clung to us like a burr, my father the only one who didn’t seem to feel it.

Look, girls. This is the world, girls. This is the world.

When we came home, my father covered the bones of our house with drywall skins, and we took back our positions for Saturday night Star Trek as if we’d never left. Time slipped under us until we blinked awake one day and it was the future. Because of that, I will finish season four and rent season five, then season six. Because. I will watch the Enterprise cheat death on a loop, and the harder I look, the more it will feel like a world I have seen before.

 

Art by Matt Monk

J.D. Lewis is a student in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City, where she works as a writing instructor and tutor at UI and as Art Director at Defunct magazine. Currently, her favorite president is Herbert Hoover.


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