Following Frank

Frank
Photo by Gina Easley

By Kristin Ohlson

I first saw Frank when I was twelve, a jittery small-town California girl during my first week in a public school at the weedy edge of town after six years at tiny St. Thomas Elementary School. I would now eat lunch in a cafeteria instead of bringing a mortifyingly wholesome meal packed by my mother. I was in the cafeteria line, thinking less about the sulfurous vats ahead than about where I would sit with my tray. Then I beheld this boy on the other side of the counter helping the lunch ladies, wearing a hair net and smock just as they did. It did nothing to diminish his beauty. I experienced my first sexual swoon, my brain lighting up with the astounding and unprecedented words, “I want to kiss him.”

Not that I had never fallen in love before. Since the age of three, I had been in love with my cousin Judy’s husband Pete. I’m sure every girl or gay boy was in love with him. He was as handsome as a movie star (think George Maharis, but laughing instead of smoldering) and always kind, and he was the star of the summer lake scene. He once jumped from the top of a boathouse in a tuxedo to land on one ski and slalom merrily away from a wedding, a ten-foot watery rooster tail bursting in his wake.

But I never desired Pete; I just adored him. I hadn’t desired any boys in my short life. I hardly noticed them unless I wanted to beat them at some game. A few had crushes on me. A boy named Clifton sat near me in second grade and pointed to a picture of a pot of honey in a book and then gestured at me, suggesting that I was sweet. A boy named Jimmy—he looked just like The Little Prince, which was not an asset—gave me a necklace and took me to the movies (with his parents) in the third grade. But I was dedicated to horses and books and searching for arrowheads and buried temples. I wasn’t interested in boys or even flattered by their attention.

But that vision of Frank flipped a switch. I tried to spot him when we were outside for recess—there were eight classrooms each for seventh and eighth grade, and he was in the eighth grade wing—and observed him from behind the curtain of my friends. His dark hair was on the long side before long hair was a countercultural totem, and he was skinny—pretty much everyone was skinny in the early 1960s. He might not have been as shy as I was, but he seemed quiet and nice. He looked unvarnished by money and expectation, and this appealed to me and, maybe, set a pattern for life. My parents were among the more monied families in our little agricultural town, and it was a constant source of discomfort. Frank was different from the boys my parents would later urge me toward, boys who had been given everything and still hungered for more.

I couldn’t help talking about him to my friends, and they couldn’t help teasing me. When my friend Kimmie and I rode my horse, me in front and her behind, she’d nuzzle the back of my neck and croon, “It’s Frank!” When my friends and I danced into the sunshine of recess, they’d sing out his name, knowing that would make me bolt back into the shade. I’m sure he had some inkling that there was this seventh-grade girl who was crazy about him, but the more I pined for him, the more terrifying his presence was. My friends finally approached him and set up a rendezvous that was supposed to take place in one of the hallways during recess, but I panicked and hid in one of the bathroom stalls until long after the bell rang.

And that was that. However much (or little!) his interest had been piqued, it was clear that getting to know me was too much trouble. I think I stopped talking about him to my friends, and they stopped teasing me. He graduated from middle school and went on to high school. I went on to boarding school and off to a college across the country and wound up living in Cleveland for forty years. I never saw him again.

Until I found him on Facebook a few months ago during a bout of procrastination that included looking up girl friends from long ago—including a clever mean girl who made my life miserable off and on—a few old boyfriends, and Frank. And there he was, fifty-eight years later, still in the Sacramento Valley near our hometown, still pretty freaking cute despite the inevitable weathering. But now a Trump supporter, now with a wife who looks like a blonde, toned Fox News host, now an insurance agent.

Friends ask if I have spent hours looking at his profile because I daydream about, “What if we had gotten together?” But that’s not it. I’ve had a lovely man in my life for going on six years—I finally learned to say “I want YOU”—and don’t muse about other possible pairings.

Part of the fascination is that stalking Frank on Facebook allows me—a liberal now in Portland, Oregon—to ponder the nuances of someone who’s fulminating at the other end of the blue/red spectrum. Because he keeps surprising me, both with the extremity of his Trumpy ideas and with ideas that people like me assume people like him never have.

I roll my eyes when he calls California “Commiefornia” and when he calls the governor “Nuisance” instead of Newsom. Also when he posts right-wing articles from faux news websites like www.yourbrotherinlawsbasement.com—I made that one up, but they’re all about that credible. Most infuriating, most bewildering, he and most of his friends are among the nearly one-third of Americans who think Trump lost because of voter fraud. One of his Facebook friends claimed to have voted for Biden 400 times in Florida and another 700 times in Pennsylvania. Hilarious!

But he doesn’t completely insulate himself with Trump dogma. Among his Facebook friends are a few that cop to different thoughts. He posted a question several months ago asking who voted for Biden, and when a few brave souls admitted that they had, he was respectful. And when one of his Trumpy friends said that the real criminals were the people who voted for Obama, Frank outed himself as one of them—leaving me to agonize again at the cultural shredding that’s been going on since he and I were on the same side of the ballot.

Frank has surprised me in other ways, too. Despite succumbing to so much misinformation—maybe we should call it malinformation—he routinely pushes everyone he knows to get the Covid vaccine and puts up with no small amount of shit for it, all in a good-humored way. When the vaccines first started to become available, he announced over and over where people in his area might find them. Now he posts stats from local hospitals showing the huge discrepancy in illness and mortality between those who are vaccinated and those who are not—and he keeps at it, no matter how many wacky claims some of his friends make in response.

And I don’t know what inspired it, but one day last March he posted a big colorful box saying, “Stand Together Against Asian America Hate.” Fourteen of his friends liked that post, but no one commented. It seemed a risky thing to say if you’re running in a deep red crowd and you revere a former president who seems eager to stoke hatred of Asian Americans. I was proud of him. I almost gave a thumbs up to the post myself—just as I’ve almost argued with many of his other posts—but am determined to remain an anonymous stalker, one who will soon ditch this preoccupation altogether.

Still, I’ve come to realize that I would probably like Frank if I knew him in person. Not “like like,” as my grandchildren would say, but appreciate him even though I disagree with most of what he thinks and would probably loathe many of his friends. He seems kind and is always posting messages about various people in the community who need help. Most of his recent posts have been about the fires that ripped through the west coast. We could at least share our anguish about that.

I can’t help but wonder how much more we would share if I hadn’t left my hometown, along with everyone else in my family. We’ve all learned over the past five or so years how much individuals are shaped by the company we keep and the communities in which we live, how both taste and truth seem to have their own terroir. Would I look more like his female friends than the women I’ve surrounded myself with in Portland, all of us flaunting our gray hair instead of dying it? Would I still have two different containers of artisanal kimchi in my refrigerator? Would I be reading different books—maybe more Jody Picoult and less Elena Ferrante? And would I be simmering along with Frank—sometimes with humor, sometimes with fury—about Trump’s claim that the election was stolen? My old crush’s Facebook page brings that other possible self into focus, and it’s hard to look away from her.

•••

KRISTIN OHLSON is the author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, which looks at the movement to create a new agriculture that respects nature, heals landscapes, and produces plenty of food. Based in Portland, Oregon, she is an independent journalist who has published articles in the New York Times, Discover, Gourmet, and many other publications. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing. Her new book, Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World, will be published by Patagonia in September, 2022.

 

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An Impulsive Move and a Pandemic

move
Photo by Gina Easley

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

Suddenly, I found myself living in Brooklyn, in the same building as my twenty-five-year-old son Tobi. His presence there made my move feel grounded and comforting, like it made more sense.

“You framed me!” he joked when I told him I was moving in upstairs from him, and added, “No judging of me, promise?”

“Honey, no judging of me,” I retorted. I was newly single at fifty-four and had fantasies of living it up. Thankfully he laughed.

I was going to live by myself for the first time in my life, and the thought overwhelmed but also excited me. Mostly excited. My twenty-three years-long marriage to the father of my three sons had ended in divorce ten years earlier, and six years later, when the boys launched from the nest, I followed my new partner Tony to Maine, where he had retired. Now I had broken up with him and moved out.

Ours was a relationship that had felt bashert —meant to be—on so many levels, it used to make us giddy. Both Tony and I had emotional and exuberant personalities, and he was a convert to Judaism as was I; he was a professor of French and I had a Ph.D. in French, and we both yearned to live in a more northern climate (he is a native of Maine and I of Norway) than the hot and humid Connecticut where we had each raised our combined large brood of kids, nine in all. We also shared a challenge: neither of us was particularly good at letting go of a disagreement before it spiraled into an exhaustive fight and sour moods that could easily ruin the day or, worst-case scenario, turn our much longed-for Sabbath, a day of peaceful rest and loving, into a period of disconnect and silence. Though we usually managed to rally and turn things around, when the latest storm hit, I felt I had reached my limit, and I wanted out.

When I left Tony, I felt as if I was facing a huge, white canvas: the possibilities seemed endless and thrilling, but the vastness of this unexpected and open space was also scary. I was free, but now what? A text pinged on my phone from my son’s landlord, a family friend: there was another opening in his building. Did I know anyone who might be interested?

•••

Even though the apartment was rent-stabilized, nothing about this made any financial sense, but I wanted to listen to my guts, not shy away from change just because it would be a challenge, wasn’t the “safe” thing. I was in my third semester of a low-residency MFA program and bills ticked in from the university every month, and I was still paying for my two younger sons’ college educations. I knew deep inside that an impulsive move during an emotional upheaval was probably not the wisest path, but I quickly imagined a new beginning and fantasized wildly about how I would re-invent my mid-life from sleepy Maine to hipster Brooklyn. I was going to be a New Yorker, after all! It had been a fantasy of mine since I first left my childhood home in Oslo, Norway, at nineteen and came to America as an au-pair, nearly thirty-five years ago.

“Can we talk about this?” Tony tried, as I packed my personal belongings from our house in the quintessential New England college town where it sat steps from the quaint campus and lush town green. “Please don’t go,” he pleaded, “What we have is too precious, Nina!” But my heart was hardened, and I was exhausted from our latest debacle. I didn’t see all that preciousness now; all I could say was, “No.”

Our Maine house was built in 1865 and had an adjoining, raw barn with cracks in the walls and a two-seater, wooden outhouse; “the honey-pot” Tony called the ancient privy and thought it was the most romantic thing ever. When I moved up from Connecticut, we renovated the barn and turned it into a colorful and glorious AirBnB where we hosted happy tourists during the summer, and family and friends during the year. We’d put our hearts and souls into cultivating the garden where tomatoes, kale, and blueberries thrived, and the vibrant colors in our flower beds brightened our days; Cosmos, Zinnias, Coneflowers, and Bachelor’s Buttons, their heads turned toward the sun on summer mornings, we’d sip our coffee and read the paper in our blue and green Adirondack chairs facing each other, feeling blessed.

Now I was driving the twenty-five-foot U-Haul truck south, filled with odd pieces of furniture I had gathered from the house, a few flea market finds, and suitcases stuffed with my clothes. I made a strategic stop at IKEA in New Haven on the way south and picked up a simple, pine bed frame and a white, round, dining table with four aqua colored plastic chairs, their contemporary design totally out of character for me who normally prefers things showing the imperfect patina of age and use.

I navigated through narrow city streets and completed a gutsy parallel parking stunt under low hanging branches that creaked ominously across the roof of the truck. Tobi and his roommate greeted me from the apartment building stoop. “Hey mamma, welcome home!” he said with grin and gave me one of his delicious bear hugs. They helped me move in to the top floor, one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors and high ceilings. Located across the street from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in a once-elegant, pre-war brick building, its old-world charm had dwindled over the decades but was still palpable. I was in love.

I quickly got to know my new neighbors, some whose families had lived in the building for generations. I recognized the faces of the owners of the shabby bodegas on Franklin Street and was on first name basis with Rawl at the Laundromat and Maggie at the coffee shop owned by the Palestinian grocers next door. She called me “mami” and knew I liked oat milk in my coffee and capers on my bagel.

In the apartment, I pulled up multiple layers of grungy linoleum from the kitchen floor and covered the mismatched and crooked floor tiles in the bathroom with soft bathmats.  I splurged on a teal green, velour sleeper couch, and I painted the kitchen wall orange. In a whirlwind I nested like a fervent mammal expecting pups and turned the rundown place into a cozy and colorful lair. Candles flickered everywhere, plants perched on windowsills, and jazz piped from the speakers. I relished living by myself, something I had never experienced before. My son even said he loved having me close by, especially when I cooked dinners for him upstairs and stayed away from his messy den of iniquity downstairs.

•••

After a brief period of separation, Tony came to Brooklyn for a visit. We had been in touch via email, and as days turned into weeks, something softened in me. We were both wordsmiths and romantically inclined, and early tentative exchanges turned warmer until eventually, we agreed to see each other. He said he wasn’t excited about coming to the apartment that symbolized our break-up, but he made the journey anyway. I looked forward to welcoming him and made sure I had his favorite gin in the freezer.

Having him next to me again felt really good, and after four days and a few difficult conversations, we decided to not give up on our couple after all. We agreed on a compromise: I’d keep the Brooklyn apartment and divide my time between Maine and the City.

“I’m happy in my own company,” I told him, as I tried to explain how much I had relished my alone-time. “I’ll need to be able to have some of this, moving forward.” We were going to work on our relationship, and soon I was back north for a visit. We made plans for an extended trip to Israel, where Tony has kids and grandkids.

But then Covid-19 happened, and the trickle of strange information rapidly turned into a deluge of scary statistics, followed by travel advisories, lockdowns, and cancelled flights.

Plans changed for everyone. The young academic couple that was subletting my Brooklyn apartment for the spring returned to Spain, as libraries, universities, and archives closed their doors. This meant I was stuck with the rent. Two of my three sons lost income due to the pandemic and needed extra support from their father and me. I kept knocking myself —see what happens when you act on impulse?—and deep inside, a harsh voice kept telling me the whole Brooklyn idea had been foolish.

Yet, something had shifted between my partner and me since I had taken the apartment, and we had both spent some time alone. The heat of the fights had cooled and our hearts had thawed from the frost that made believing in our couple seem impossible. We were able to recall the reasons we had fallen in love in the first place, everything we shared, and how much we loved all that and each other. So, I stayed in Maine for what we agreed would be “a relationship in process.” We were getting along surprisingly well during the many weeks long shelter-in-place spring.

During New York’s most dire pandemic days, a woman from Bangladesh visiting her son in the City reached out. She needed a place to stay until things quieted down—could she sublet? “Your apartment seems like such a happy, comfortable space,” her son said in our Zoom meeting, sitting next to his mom, translating back and forth from Bengali. I was thrilled to offer his mom the apartment, and he was grateful that she would have a warm and welcoming home in which to stay safe.

I scroll through the colorful photos of the Brooklyn apartment and wonder when I will be able to return. I love the urban dwelling I created as a true “room of my own,” yet back in Maine, waiting out the lockdown, I was a better partner. More patient and compassionate, I held Tony’s hand on our walks beneath the pines, and as spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I sensed renewed hope for a future. I realized that although I’m at home in more places than one, my heart has found its way back to my bashert.

•••

NINA B. LICHTENSTEIN is a native of Oslo, Norway, who divides her time between Maine and Tel Aviv. She has a PhD in French literature and an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, Brevity, Hippocampus, Lilith, and AARP’s The Ethel, among other places.

 

Abortion Without Apology

abortion
Photo by Gina Easley

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

I’ve been thinking a lot about apology recently.

Just before I turned forty-two, I was laid up for a couple of days with a stomach bug. On the third morning, I woke up with my stomach still sour and a new symptom: my breasts tingled. The pit of my stomach plummeted to the floor. I knew.

While my husband and our three kids were at a pickup soccer game, I snuck out to a drugstore that I had never walked into before, in order not to run into anyone I knew. I needed to purchase a pregnancy test. In private.

Of course, I ran into someone I knew. “Oh, hi!” I said, too brightly, thankful the purchase was hidden.

“How are you?” she asked, lipstick and blush painted on a little too brightly, overly cheery tone of voice to match.

“Fine.” I smiled. “You?”

“Yes,” she said. Somehow, in the dingy store, it seemed absolutely obvious that we both were lying.

I waited until she left to approach the register. My periods had become irregular and infrequent over the year or so leading up to that sticky summer morning. My husband and I had played a little fast and loose when it seemed safe. Maybe “safe” was harder to call during perimenopause? At my fortuitously still-empty house, I peed on a stick, then I left the bathroom for exactly two minutes. When I returned, there was an almost florescent pink line.

“Fuck,” I said. Almost instantly, I called my midwife. For me, there was no question about the pregnancy. From the outside, my decision made little to no sense. I was, at the time, actively twisted in longing for another baby. I very much wanted to adopt.

“Fuck,” my husband said later that afternoon once I shared the news.

“Pam already called me back,” I reported. “I’m going to call Monday to set up an appointment for the procedure. I had hoped they could do it in the office, but they don’t. We have to go to the Planned Parenthood clinic.”

•••

I was barely into this unintended pregnancy, and even my skin seemed to quake with nausea. Although I felt extremely ill, and although during the pregnancy before this at age thirty-eight, I’d ended up on anti-nausea medication, physical distress wasn’t my biggest fear. I was most afraid of the depression that had accompanied all of my pregnancies. I didn’t want to impose that upon my family. I worried, too, a few years past thirty-eight, any pregnancy would likely be that much more taxing on my body. The odds for complications had risen dramatically. As I saw it, this pregnancy did not promise a happy ending.

I’d had two abortions, one at seventeen, the other at twenty. This time, I was surprised by how different the prospect of abortion felt from decades earlier. When I first got pregnant, very unintentionally, I was seventeen. At the time, I hadn’t fathomed my body as capable of pregnancy and a baby. Intellectually, I knew it was all possible; I hadn’t embodied this possibility as a high school senior, though. Emotionally, I’d been practically paralyzed with overwhelm and shock. I found out about the pregnancy after an appointment to obtain birth control at our local Family Planning clinic.

In the aftermath of the decision and procedure, I was sad and shaken. I was stunned that my body’s autonomy seemed precarious. If anyone took legal abortion away (or no parental consent or birth control, or so many things that did happen to shrink our autonomy), I would have been stranded. All those years ago, I’d also discovered how quiet abortion was. I was surprised by how lonely privacy could feel. In high school, I was ashamed, at least somewhat. I was afraid of gossip. Like other peers who’d, I learned so much later, had abortions in high school, we kept our own secrets. I’m certain the isolation increased my sadness.

Activism, which I came to with a vengeance after my abortion, became my route to breaking self-imposed silence. I got it: the personal was political. I spoke out. I found community. I found a voice and purpose, because I’d experienced how close I’d come to having my life steered for me, simply because people objected to my right to make decisions about my own body.

In my early forties, having birthed three babies, I wasn’t sad. I was clear. But I did keep my decision private because I worried people would question my “no” to pregnancy and “yes” to wanting to adopt (not that my personal logic was anyone’s to question) and I didn’t want to justify any of my choices. What surprised me was that people seemed to want me to feel sad.

The few friends I told spoke to me in somber tones about the decision. Mary said, “You will feel sad; that’s inevitable.”

Another friend thought I was mourning my waning, wonky periods and accompanying fertility. These friends weren’t in the room when my third baby emerged. Despite nearly hemorrhaging afterwards, I’d remained giddy, even euphoric to no longer be pregnant. I had just turned thirty-nine. I’d birthed three healthy, beautiful humans. I had felt terrible for months on end three times over. Already, during this very early pregnancy, I felt so miserable I just wanted to sleep away the nauseated days and nights.

“I’m really certain about this,” I told Mary. “This part, it’s very clear to me. I am not going to birth another baby, as amazing as my babies are.”

•••

As my husband drove us toward the clinic, I glanced out of the car window. The Connecticut River ribboned beside the highway briefly. I was nervous and I was nauseous. I didn’t know which sensation was stronger. We pulled into the clinic parking lot.

Many years earlier, I had worked in two different clinics as an abortion counselor. Neither clinic existed any longer. The availability of abortion services had decreased dramatically. When I’d worked at those clinics, neither had metal detectors at the front door. Protestors were rare. On this morning, there weren’t any protestors. Barely inside the building, we were stopped to go through a metal detector. An older, slightly grizzled man with a very warm smile screened us. Clearly, he wanted to put people at ease. A metal detector rarely put me at ease, truthfully, because I’d feel better thinking one wasn’t remotely necessary. I would have felt better believing no one cared about a choice I made for my body and my family.

The machine’s stainless steel gleamed a little too brightly for the dingy hallway. I didn’t have anything to hide, except I wondered whether maybe I did, since my friends seemed to expect me to be sadder. My husband wanted me not to feel sick. He wanted me to be not pregnant and not to want another baby. I wanted to feel better—and to have another baby. We took an elevator. My stomach flipped from the motion, and maybe our conflicting desires.

We were buzzed into the clinic waiting room. I registered a sea of very young women. They were like the woman I’d been and the women I’d helped long ago. Some came with fidgety boyfriends. Others were accompanied by resigned moms or less resigned older sisters. Still others brought nervous friends. The waiting room itself felt large, worn, and dim. Generalized agitation made an odd feng shui. I felt nauseated, but weirdly calm. In the new but wholly familiar waiting room, I remembered that I kind of loved abortion. Not loved it, like, what fun, but loved that we had, less robustly, but still, this right to determine our reproductive lives. Abortion had been many things to me, and one was empowering.

There were forms and there was waiting. We kind of glanced furtively at each other a bunch. I leaned over to whisper, “I feel old.”

“Me, too,” my husband replied.

Eventually, I was called back to see a counselor. She was about the age I’d been, maybe a touch older, when I did her job. She smiled at me. “Hello,” she said, warmly. “Part of my job is to make sure you are certain of your decision. I also need to know whether you have a birth control plan going forward.”

“I used to have your job, way back when,” I told her, as I affirmed that I was indeed certain of my decision and I did have a birth control plan. “We played a little too loosely with perimenopause.” I shrugged. Life happens. Mistakes get made.

She nodded. “I understand.” She then directed me to a changing area. There, a few women waited, wearing paper gowns.

“Well, this is chilly,” one woman said.

“Seriously,” another said. It was kind of like any locker room, except the women were nervous and wore paper gowns. There were a few laughs under our breaths and a few more complaints about having to wait in the gowns.

“I’m just glad I’m going to get to move on with my life,” one woman said. “I’m in school, and I’m going to finish. I went back. I have a daughter. I can’t have a baby right now, and I’m relieved I’m not going to.”

“Amen,” another said. “My body.”

“We shouldn’t have to be lucky to make this choice,” I said.

“Seriously,” the woman who had gone back to school said. “Men don’t know. They can’t know.”

Sitting on that bench, I remembered a story a friend told me about when she’d had an abortion after college. She was living in New York City. There was a bomb threat at the Planned Parenthood, where at the time, she was in the midst of having her procedure. Whisked from the room immediately after the abortion in her gown toward the elevator, not the recovery room. When she told me about this day, she said that suddenly her personal act wasn’t hers.

“I realized my having an abortion, my obtaining health care, was an act of civil disobedience,” she’d said, her dark eyes shining. “Turned out, there wasn’t a bomb.” She was able to return to the clinic, recover her clothing, and move on. Her experience changed her feelings about her abortion and not in the way the people who’d threatened the clinic had hoped. She’d become a stronger advocate for reproductive justice than ever before.

•••

My abortion procedure didn’t take long. I’d received medication that afforded me some woozy relief. In the recovery room, I drank ginger ale and ate graham crackers. The dusty sweetness turned to paste in my mouth. I felt slow, relieved, and a little worse for wear. I wondered whether I’d feel sad.

That afternoon, as we drove home, I breathed in without nausea. I exhaled my worry about what might happen next in our lives. I felt cautious, strong, determined, weary. Not only was I angry that anyone believed I shouldn’t have choices, I was angry anyone would think that I should apologize about my decisions. I felt brazenly unapologetic. What’s wrong, I believe, is that we’ve gotten to a place where apology is expected from a person in need of basic reproductive health care. Justice includes the dignity to access health care—and to do so because it’s every person’s right. Our culture never made this leap. We’re slipping further from a no apologies ideal. I do have that daughter I dreamt we’d adopt. She’s thirteen, now, and faces a future where her bodily autonomy becomes more threatened as the Supreme Court reconsiders abortion. Apology, as a thing to worry about or be angry about, may seem frivolous. I disagree. I think an expectation of apology is the beginning of losing our whole selves.

•••

SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER is a writer and community organizer, based in Northampton, Massachusetts. A graduate of Hampshire College and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, she’s written for many publications, including the recent anthology Tick Tock: Essays on Parenthood after 40.

Read more FGP essays by Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser.

Permanent Record

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jessica Handler

Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100. I explained to him that the quiz was one of four, which together totaled twenty percent of the semester’s overall course grade. In other words, a five-point difference on a single quiz was meaningless.

He was having none of it. He was clearly worried about his permanent record. No matter what I might have told him, I know that he wouldn’t accept that the grade on this quiz, or any quiz, has no bearing on who he is as a person. That no school administrator is going to come roaring into the room with his grades from middle school. That for the rest of his life, no one is going to judge him on his GPA.

But who teaches him, or me, about how to judge ourselves as people? Parents, to start with. Teachers, perceived as proxy parents, even if we don’t want to be. I’m thinking here of my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Moye, who left us to our own devices while she stepped out for what I realize now was a smoke break. For however long she was gone—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the noise level in the room rose to a solid wall of released energy. I was the kid who hunkered down to read ahead in my textbook, wishing I were as audacious as the over-excitable boy who managed to climb out of the classroom via the transom over the door. When Miss (I have no idea of her actual honorific—in Atlanta in 1971, all adult women were addressed as Miss) Moye was on her way back to the classroom, the PA speaker over our heads would click on. From the principal’s office, she’d whisper, “teacher’s comin’.” No matter what we’d been doing, judgement came from above the coat closet. Act right even when you’re on your own, because someone’s watching you.

Now that I’m a teacher, I love her for this. She must have cracked herself up.

I wonder when I stopped believing in the power of the Permanent Record that loomed over school like a wagging finger. Earn a bad grade and see my “permanent record” forever scarred. Get caught passing notes or miss my turn feeding the classroom hamster, and be told by someone (A teacher? A principal? A game of telephone on the playground?) that these temporary oversights will haunt me throughout adulthood and possibly into the afterlife. The permanent record that no one ever actually saw? It would follow me to the grave.

My elementary school grades, on their flimsy pink paper, have vanished into the ether. My high school adhered to the trend in “alternative education” by disdaining traditional letter grades. Instead, our teachers, with whom we were all on a first-name, Frisbee-tossing basis, wrote paragraphs-long assessments of our personal growth and individual strengths. I have no idea what happened to these dispatches from the barefoot and bell-bottom jeans front, but I appreciate the attempt to broaden the interpretation of how a person becomes whole. My college transcripts were useful only as items in my graduate school applications. My graduate school studies resulted in my first book, which was written as a kind of permanent record of a place, a time, and a family in crisis.

What is my permanent record, if it’s not decades-old grades and well-meaning teacher commentary? On every elementary school report card, I was given a checkmark beside the “uses time wisely” criteria, verifying that I had done just that: used my time wisely. That checkmark made me proud. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is what it means to use time wisely as an adult, if it’s not reading ahead while the teacher’s out on a smoke break. Who teaches us a viable template for a “wise” use of time? When do we learn to do that for ourselves?

•••

When my father was dying, he asked me to forgive him. As I sat by the crank-up hospital bed in his living room, my impulse was to list every act of his for which I could not forgive him. “What about this?” I wanted to say. “Or that?”

Instead, I lied. I said that I forgave him. Nothing good would have come of telling him otherwise.

My father had turned sixty-seven that month. After a lifetime of four-pack-a-day smoking and decades of drug abuse, he had been diagnosed with cancer a year or so earlier. At that moment, he had less than a week to live.

When I was a child, my father intoned over the Passover Seder plate, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” All the adults at the table laughed, and I did, too, believing this was the actual prayer. Of course it was, spoken by the irreverent, fun, charismatic version of my dad, acting like the kid who climbed out of the transom while the teacher was out of the room.

But this not why my father asked my blessing.

A few months ago, I awoke unsettled, because I felt that my father was in my bedroom. I could smell him. Pall Mall cigarettes and anxious flatulence. He had been dead nineteen years, but he was somehow present.

“Why are you here?” I asked the air near my husband’s nightstand.

“Forgive me?” my father asked. He was wheedling, like a child.

I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “Go away. Maybe later, but I’m not ready yet.”

Proud of having told even a ghostly version of my father to leave me alone, I went back to sleep.

•••

My real permanent record is written, in part, in my father’s hand. That same hand that held an electric carving knife to my throat at a family dinner. I was about ten years old, and my laughing made sounds that grated on my father, especially when he was very, very high.

I wondered for years if I’d created a false memory from a roast, a carving knife, and my father’s instability. When I reconnected with a childhood friend last year, I got proof that it had happened. My friend described my mother frozen in fear at the table, unable to pull my father away from me. I remember my father’s face so close to mine that I could see his pores, his pupils spinning like pinwheels. I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s on acid.” I remember believing that was a reasonable excuse.

This is the same man who brought me, at eight years old, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. As we made our way through the solemn, slow moving crowd outside, and then inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, my father, gentle and grieving, lifted me to eye-level with the adults and turned me toward the first open casket I had ever seen. He wanted me to see Dr. King’s face up close, not on television as I had so often. What he wanted was for me to absorb the need for justice in the world.

Within a year, my father tried to shove me out of a moving car. When I tell this story, I laugh and say, “It was only in second gear,” but the irrationality of his act, his absence of judgement—or the presence of his cruel judgement of me—is what strikes my listener. My attempt to make this into a funny anecdote doesn’t land well.

I am trying, here, to reconcile a permanent record that can’t be graded. My father tucked me in at night when I was small and sat at my side reading poetry in the same elegant baritone he surely used defending his clients in court. The ballad meter of Countee Cullen’s “Incident,” telling of a child stunned and hurt by racial violence, and the mystical images of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lulled me to sleep.

The last time I saw my sister Susie alive, my father was cradling her in his arms as he rushed her out of our shared bedroom to the hospital. She had been ill with leukemia for a year, and died a few days later. Through my lashes, I watched him run with her. He was terrified, my mother was terrified, Susie was terrified, and so was I.

After my father died, my husband and I helped his second wife sort his possessions. My husband found my father’s Twelve Step workbook. He will not let me see it. “He blames you,” my husband says, “because you’re too much like him.” Throughout the workbook’s pages, my husband says, my father blames other people in his life, but he never accepted his own role in his permanent record.

It’s become clear to me since my father died that he lived with a mental illness that may never have been diagnosed. Within its rapid cycles, he treated himself with amphetamines and Scotch. That the amphetamines were (sometimes) legally obtained and that the Scotch was eighteen-year-old single malt is immaterial. His emotional and psychological turmoil escalated as my two sisters died of illnesses, as he brutalized my mother for failings only he imagined, as whatever had transpired in his own childhood ensnared his mind. Abuse is real, no matter the ZIP code, no matter if the clothing hurled to the floor is a Brooks Brothers’ suit or coveralls.

My aunt, my father’s sister, told me the other day that her mother once refused to let a woman wearing green nail polish into her house. I can’t corroborate this, but I believe it. My father’s mother, was, as the phrase of the time went, uptight.

What I’m saying is that my father must have been harshly judged, and then judging himself harshly, turned that blade to me. I am the first daughter, the oldest, the one in whom he saw himself.

•••

A few years after my father died, my husband and I vacationed in Memphis. We visited Graceland and Stax Records, and we toured the National Civil Rights Museum. It was there, in a display of photographs by documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, that I came face to face with an image of an unsmiling young man in a suit and tie, sitting on a curb beside another similarly attired and equally serious young man. The Black man held a placard reading “Union Justice Now!” The White man held one reading “Honor King: End Racism.”

The White man was my father.

I knew the placard. It’s framed in my house. My father had given it to me the night he came home from the vigil in Memphis in 1968. I had never seen the photograph before, never known of its existence, and there in the museum, I screamed. A group of middle-schoolers, touring the exhibit, stopped and gaped at me.

“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at the image on the wall. I began to cry.

One of the students approached me. She peered at the photograph, then at me, then at the photograph again.

“You do favor him,” she said.

•••

My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.

I don’t know if I can forgive him, entirely. I can’t grade an abusive father’s relationship to a daughter. If he gets an A for some things and an F for others, does that really average to a C? On the days when my own fist splits my lip to silence his taunting voice in my mind, I’d say no. On the days when I turn to a poem and physically, truly, feel his longing for words, I’d say yes. If I wrote an assessment, as my high school teachers did for me, would I implore him to get the help he needed, or would I suggest something benign like learning to meditate or taking up a musical instrument?

Perhaps I should be grading myself, since I’m the one living with this permanent record.

I am trying to understand how to create a permanent record for him and for me. For us together. I want to teach myself to judge him fairly. I don’t know if I can forgive him, as he asked, or if doing so is a requirement for his, or my, final grade. But in trying to learn this, to read ahead in the book that he’s put down, I want to believe that I am using time wisely.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick.” Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin HouseDrunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, BrevityCreative NonfictionNewsweek, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Full Grown People, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing. www.jessicahandler.com.

 

 

Animal Me

animal
Photo by Gina Easley

By Beth Kephart

There’s a doily fringe of Japanese maple leaves just beyond the window, three tired pear trees, and after that, close as that: him, with his yellow hearing defenders clapped tight across his ears, and his large-capacity fuel tank steady on his back, and the telescopic tube caught in the grip of his very pale hand. His tee is florescent orange. His shorts are khaki. His shoes are made for leaf blowing.

Sometimes, in a breeze, he’ll stand—watching the leaves loosen from the trees and falling. He blows before they touch the ground. He blows. He blows. He blows.

Sometimes he’ll blow all morning, take a sandwich break, then blow again into the afternoon, a steady rev, a thought-traumatizing roar, a vehemence of machinery lodged high on the sound pollution chart, and I’ve checked the township rules: it’s legal.

Sometimes he’ll hire a guy to blow with him, and after they’re done, he’ll get his Shop Vac out and roar-suck the lamina, the petiole, the blade of whatever leaf defied him. You do not defy him, you do not lay your leaf self down on his red-brick path, which is feet away from where I stand, in my quiet room.

It’s hard work. He does it. There is a kind of dedication to a certain kind of art, and I wonder how this makes him feel, what caliber of satisfaction it yields, why I, who write quiet stories, who sustain quiet friendships, who teach quiet truths quietly, who believe in the power of quiet conversation, cannot right the story here. Cannot peaceably take the few steps to my side of the divide and wait for him to finish. To just ask: Please.

I form sentences I never speak.

I write letters I never tuck into his box.

I hold back, remembering our history. Past infringements—a branch from his tree on the roof of our house, the incessant blinking bleeping of an exterior light—were not finally cured by the words I chose. The issues were resolved, in time. But our neighborliness contracted, ushered a silence between us in.

There are all kinds of noises on my street. The screamer girls. The screamer boy. The red puppy with the four-syllable yap. The chopping chomping spinning blades that power tree life down.

Though there are times at night when bird song floats in. Fox shuffle. Deer munch on leaves. Times when I still feel safe in the house where I’ve now spent most of my long living.

•••

Safe from me.

•••

The first time I went animal I weighed eighty-five pounds and my face was swollen to twice its normal size. You’ll have to believe me; there are no photographs. It had been six weeks since surgeons had wired my mouth shut after installing steel-reinforcements among disintegrating jaw bones. Six weeks since chicken broth through a straw had become my only diet. Six weeks since I’d been writing my end of any truncated conversation down. The clients I had in the business I’d built couldn’t understand the garble of me on the phone; most left my consultancy for others. The friends I had didn’t know what to do, save for Nazie, who arrived one day with boxes of Florentine paper and sat, unafraid and near, while I took it in—the marble swirls, the fluid textures, the varieties of cream. There was December rain on the day she came. I lived on Gaskill Street with my husband. The rain had turned the air beyond the window dark. The light inside was amber.

Write it down, Nazie said, handing me a pen, spreading out the paper. Write whatever you’re feeling.

And we sat, and like that we talked, and I wasn’t animal.

•••

I met the animal in me on New Year’s Eve. My parents and brother had come to town. A spectacle of fireworks above the Delaware River was planned, and we were to walk there in the bright cold—my parents, my brother, my husband, and me. The narrow house where we lived had come with its own attenuated parking spot—a bricked-in place that was, in summer, the site of a potted garden—and that is where my father parked. I was in my winter coat and my winter shoes and if a wind came in my father and husband would catch me, I knew, before I lifted off, Dorothy-like, and headed for the moon.

My twisted kite tail of a body.

My plump pumpkin-shaped face.

My monster self.

I’d avoided photographs. I’d avoided mirrors.

It was New Year’s Eve, and I was going out.

•••

The louder the leaf blower blows, the more deeply he sinks into his leaf-blowing trance. Though the path he clears is no more than twenty feet long, he walks it into miles when he blows and blows and blows.

Back and forth, and back and forth. On the other side of the window in my quiet room. On the other side of the quiet me.

•••

Soon as my father pulled into our winter parking space, soon as I had stepped outside and we were nearly off—me with my monster face, me with my protectorates—a man drove up in a fancy car and parked precisely where one would park one’s obnoxious car were one trying to park in my father.

There were No Parking signs for anyone to see. There were little hatch marks on the asphalt. There was my father’s car, suddenly imprisoned. That man didn’t care. It was his New Year’s Eve, and the fireworks along the Delaware would be no less than prophetic. Maybe he’d been side-street cruising and this was the best spot all around, or maybe he was just one gigantic asshole, but he was leaving his car where no car should be, and my instinct was to tell him.

You can’t park there, I opened my mouth to say, but what came out was mwah mwah garble, a desperate mash of bleating sounds chewed gibberish by surgical metal and snuffed into nothing by that plastic thing they’d wired between my teeth, to keep my new steel joints from moving.

Mwah mwah mwah, I said.

Mwah mwah mwah. Now I was screaming.

I was aware of my husband’s sudden horror.

I was aware of my father’s stepping forward.

I was aware that the driver of the fancy car had turned to look at me, and that he was laughing. I was hysterical to him—my monster face, my strangulated sounds. I was hysterical, and now he was walking.

The animal in me went after him.

I was not who I thought I’d ever be.

•••

The room where I work is a quiet room, for I am a quiet self: I am contained, I am restrained, I am equilbria. I read, I write, I fold paper there. I thread needles and I sew. In my quiet room I do my quiet work, listening through the windows I raise for tree breeze and squirrel leap and birds inside in their toots. Bee buzz, feather twist, cricket chirp, cicada, the sounds of my husband’s shoes on grass, the sounds of my husband, faintly whistling, the sounds of the world going on, the many sounds of silence, peaceable and whole and unendangered.

And undangerous.

•••

I went after that man with the bones in my hands, with my body, thin and twisted, with the pulp and bruise of my monster self. I went after him, hurling words snuffed to hard soft sounds by wires, bolts, and plastic. I went after him, struggling for air through swollen nostrils, struggling for balance, there in the dark, where my parents and brother had come to visit because there was to be a show, where my husband watched in horror, where the sign said No Parking, where he was laughing.

I went after him, feral.

Instinct obliterating thought. Wrath as self-erasure or self-pronouncement but I didn’t know which, I could not think, I was molten magma, ugly spew, a misfire of my senses.

I felt my father hook one arm.

I felt my husband hook another.

I heard my husband saying, What the hell?

Hit the man, he’ll hit you back.

Hit the man and cede to the worst in you, the secret, hidden animal urge that you do not recognize, that cannot be you, somehow is.

•••

When the man with the sun-colored hearing defenders revs, there are no sounds of silence. There is instead the hot holler of his blower, the power blast of his decibels, the endless useless joy he takes from walking his brick miles, chasing the leaves that have not fallen yet, chasing the detritus of nature. When the man with the sun-colored hearing defenders revs, there is no quiet self in a quiet world.

•••

I scream into the roar, but he can’t hear me. I say shut up shut up shut up which is mwah mwah mwah which is no sound at all against the blower. I slam the windows shut, but my quiet world is rattled. My quiet world, my quiet stuff are now the anger channel.

•••

I like to think that I would have stopped myself from throwing myself against the guffawing fancy driver. I like to think that I am not the woman who stands at her window raging. I like to think that my quiet self is the self who tells this story.

•••

On the sill of the window I have flung open wide again, I place a pair of putty speakers and an ancient, dirty iPod. I wait, I wait. He blows, he blows, menacing the leaves. My pulse is loud. My temperature is rising. At last he powers off. The roaring stops. He un-defends his ears. I touch the right parts of my ancient machines and dial Abba in—a full-on volume 10, the loudest noise I’ve ever propagated. “Dancing Queen” slams the air with music—so hard, so loud, so savage. “Dancing Queen” outlouds the yapper, outlouds the man on the path.

If only now he’d look up at me, if only now he’d see me. If only now I were not claws and fur, the animal I hope desperately I will never again be.

•••

BETH KEPHART is a writer, teacher, and book maker. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

 

 

The Case for “Cunt”

Photo by Gina Easley

By Brooke Champagne

                                                     I tell you this

Is what I love about America—the words it puts

In my mouth…

—Heather McHugh, “I Knew I’d Sing”

 

I haven’t always known exactly what a cocksucking motherfucker was, or why my father knew so many of them. But from the time I was still feeding from my mother’s tit, I heard my father’s tits, shit, asshole and fuck more frequently than “I love you.” Though to be fair, cursing is like a love language in New Orleans, where I grew up. Son of a bitch is just the sound of coming home. Not everyone raised in the city talks this way, but few would look at you sideways if you did.

As an adult, I only look at someone sideways when, after talking for some time, I realize they haven’t used a single curse. What the fuck is wrong with you? I want to ask. Yet because I’m a woman of color, I’ve also learned to carefully calibrate my swearing, especially among those I don’t know well. I can’t drop a “cunt” on an English department colleague after we’ve finished chatting about the weather, for example. Even if I’ve just scrolled through Twitter, and a “cunt” is sorely needed. I live in the Deep South and am aware that the language that comes most naturally to me is generally considered deplorable, or un-academic, or the work of the devil. So I love my swearing, and my swearing is a constant worry.

Because my father worked as a ship’s steward in the years before Hurricane Katrina, where shipmates spent lots of time imagining aloud the elaborate uses for the end of mop handles on an all-male deck, and because he’s a man, the thought of apologizing for his language has never occurred to him. My whole life he’s abused the English language in the most glorious ways. Goddamn evil Republican sons of bitches. (Republican-led Congress voted on a tax break for the wealthy and balked on economic aid for the poor and middle classes.). Fat sonofabitching fuck, go eat your damn pancakes. (Chris Christie on Meet the Press.) Get off the stage, you Willie Nelson-looking cunty bastard. (This one was for Madonna, for daring to perform into her sixties, no longer as young and beautiful as she once was.) All of these responses reveal an irascible old man at his linguistic worst. But he doesn’t really mean the meanness, so much as he needs to say the curse.

I hate my father’s language for its misogyny, its political effrontery, its callousness for humanity. Yet I love it because despite myself, dammit, he makes me laugh. He once told me that if his doctor ever advised him to quit drinking for good, “I’d kill myself dead right inside the dickhead’s office.” My father’s father died of cirrhosis in his fifties, and while wasting away in the hospital, he begged for liquor to be transmitted through an IV, and the story goes that someone snuck in a flask now and again to help calm him.

My father claims to never feel sad or existentially low; he just calls me and curses about real and imagined infractions by a wide range of bastards, regarding people either televised or in the flesh. Research cited in Katherine Dunn’s On Cussing confirms that swearing helps us deal with pain. Though her example refers to physical suffering—studies show that people immersing hands in ice water can endure it longer if they curse aloud—I believe this applies to emotional distress, too. My father’s stories and the curses that comprise them—negotiating with cocksuckers, most often—are all the therapy he needs.

•••

For most of my life it’s been “like father, like daughter” in the language arena, but for a while I’ve felt I should curb my enthusiasm for swearing. For one, my daughter attends an Episcopal preschool where they expect some propriety. One morning a couple years ago, her teacher approached my passenger window to chit-chat while I waited in the pick-up line. I asked how she’d behaved that day because, “Her sleep last night was for shit.” The teacher’s face crumpled like loose-leaf, and she responded more to the car door than me. “You sure do put it out there! You don’t mince words!” I mean, she’s right, I don’t, but I didn’t see anything particularly off-color about what I’d said. What’s a little “shit” between two adults?

“Oh. Haha,” I said. “So, was she okay?” The teacher said that my daughter had performed her routine number of breakdowns. My next few sentences emerged, linguistically, in the vein of Mary Poppins. “How terribly unfortunate! She behaves abominably when she sleeps poorly.” People who balk at my natural inclination for expression make me quite literally unlike myself. I regretted that “shit” slip for weeks. I can’t imagine what the teacher would think about my ration of “cunts” per day, particularly during an election season.

Which is a forever-season in twenty-four-hour-news-cycle American politics, and which reminds me that our most recent ex-president bragged on tape about how much he enjoys grabbing women by the pussy. Because, if you recall, they let him do it. Yet he was elected in spite of (because of?) this revelation. More than seventy percent of American evangelicals let him do it, too, since they voted him into office and, even at the end of the most deranged, debased presidency in modern history, a majority of them still supported him. I understand they’re experiencing cognitive dissonance, they believe he’s an imperfect conduit of God, etc. etc., but you have to lean on that magical thinking pretty hard with this particular asshole.

But I have another theory about why they allowed themselves to ignore the “pussy” talk. According to Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing, curse words can historically be divided into two main areas of taboo: the Holy (religion-oriented curses) and the Shit (swears involving the human body). Yet in the past few decades, a new taboo swear category emerged in the racial epithet. My guess is that even though the religious right dislikes the ex-president’s vulgarity, they can abide Shit/body-type curses, even those rife with misogyny, that have become generally less taboo across culture. However, if he were known to have used a racial slur that has become increasingly off limits, even Senator McConnell might not allow the president to grab him by the pussy.

This begs the question of which we’d consider worse—the former president’s long history of blatant racism in the form housing discrimination, the call for execution of the Central Park Five, the demand for the birth certificate of the first Black U.S. President, the Brown children his administration locked in cages at our country’s border with Mexico, on and fucking on—or, if we could find a shorthand moment of him speaking a single slur that would finally “prove” his racism. In our culture, despite what we believe about ourselves, despite what we purport to teach our children, words speak louder than actions.

Surely recordings of Trump’s racial epithets exist. Right? Insiders say he swears more frequently than those around him, limited vocabulary that he has. One story from Michael Wolff’s book on his presidency, Siege, recounts a rumor that somewhere in fourteen years of behind-the-scenes Apprentice footage, one contestant says the word “cunt,” and another admonishes him, “You can’t say ‘cunt’ on TV.” To which the big D responds, “Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. There, I’ve said it on TV.”

I wonder what the public response would be if a woman running for higher office was rumored to ever have spoken the word “cunt.” In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton said “cookies” in a context that many found insulting to the real women of America and has been castigated for it ever since.

Anyway, add this man’s legacy, language, and lunacy to the reasons why I’m giving up on the curse. Or trying to.

Because while it’s okay for me to occasionally “shit” on my daughter’s teacher, if the teacher’s okay with it, it’s not okay for my daughter to do so. Several years ago, before my daughter was born, my husband and I visited my then-two-year-old niece in Baltimore. She was just learning to talk and wanted to tell us about a character in her favorite cartoon, some mouse who sounded like a dick.

“He’s not nice,” she told us. “He’s so … fucking.”

“He’s so what?” asked my husband, making sure he’d heard her right.

“He’s so fucking!”

“He’s so what?”

This back-and-forth continued a few more times, both because we were both trying to parse her sentence construction, waiting for the “fucking” modifier to be followed by a noun, but also because cursing toddlers are hilarious. The exception is when the toddler is your own. Because in that case, you’re complicit in raising a feral child. Who wants to deal with the fallout of a kid who says to their teacher, “I don’t want to play outside, fucker—I want to draw!”

Hearing my niece curse reminded me of an apocryphal story my mother loves telling about linguistically-innocent kindergarten me. One day I returned from school in hysterics because a boy on the bus called me a name. No, I could not repeat the word, it was too terrible; I only admitted it was “the j-word.” My mother ticked down the list of possibilities. Did he call me a jerk? A jagoff? A … jackass?

“The last one, that’s it!” I said, weeping into her arms.

But my mother wouldn’t let it go there. “Did you say something that made him upset? Why did he call you that?”

“No reason!” I insisted. “I only called him ‘motherfucker.’”

My mother stifled a laugh and explained that this was one of the worst “bad” words. “You should never say that at school, or ever, really.”

“Then why do you,” I said, flatly.

It’s a cute enough story. Again, any curse from a child’s mouth is inherently funny since they can’t yet comprehend its implications. It’s the provenance of my own cursing life, that it all started with that harmless little “motherfucker.”

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more cloying and untrue the story seems. Not that my mother is lying. I just can’t understand in what context I’d call someone a “motherfucker,” a word I’d heard her use in annoyance or anger, and expect anything other than an offended response. Clearly he’d pissed me off, so I called him a word matching that feeling. Did my child’s mind read his “jackass” response, one I probably hadn’t heard used much due its candy-assed nature, as the real dialectical dagger, since it was unfamiliar? Did the utility I’d witnessed in both my parents’ “motherfuckers” make them benign? My father spat it out constantly while traversing New Orleans traffic when he picked me up for the weekend, and it seemed to relieve his anger. I knew if he was calling someone else a motherfucker, he wouldn’t be yelling at me.

•••

A few semesters ago I taught a creative writing course on immersion, where my students’ semester project was to ensconce themselves in an unfamiliar subculture for thirty days. An avowed atheist attended Catholic masses. A wallflower partied every weekend. A self-described Mac Daddy tried like hell to remain celibate for the month.

As for me, I quit cursing. I took on this project while six months pregnant, when I most wanted a salty margarita and to excoriate any shithead who undershot my due date. But I saw this experiment as ethos-building. I’d adapt alongside my students and rid myself of this habit. I’d been swearing even more lately but had become particularly liberal with “cunt.”

The day before I introduced this assignment, I’d returned home from the grocery and vented to my husband about that always-hellacious chore. “I got into the wrong line, of course. The cunt in front of me had a million coupons,” I told him.

“Cunt, really?” he asked. My husband has no problem with my use of the word, but he reminded me that just that morning I’d also called our internet router a cunt. And my toe, when I stubbed it. I was constantly whispering in the presence of my toddler, thereby minimizing the point of the curse to begin with, which is to say it with gusto. It was time to abstain.

The young women in my immersion class loved that I was pregnant, and that I cursed. A couple of them said I shouldn’t stop. One who didn’t, a Southern Belle who wore full pancake makeup at 9 a.m., offered “the kitchen lexicon” to help me curb cursing. “My gramma taught us to use food words,” she said. “Say ‘aw, sugar,’ instead of the vulgar s-word. Or ‘buttered toast.’ Or ‘son of a biscuit’!”

I might be a serial swearer, but I’m no savage. I respect my students. I don’t say aloud, “I would never fucking say any of those dumbass words.” Instead, I suggested, “If we’re going to use substitute amelioration for curses, we can do funnier than that.”

“Why does being funny matter?” she asked. “And anyway, you can be funny without cursing.” How to explain the wrongheadness of her question and assertion? This lesson could take all semester.

•••

Decades ago when I was in college, I prided myself on being a guy’s girl. Mine was a fuck you, you fucking fuck ethos that made me comfortable in a roomful of men. Because, as a Tau Kappa Epsilon once told me, “You’re so dude-like, I don’t even ever imagine having sex with you.”

“You mean raping me. No woman would willingly fuck you.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about!” he said. “You’re funny, just like a guy!”

This dudebro likely hadn’t heard of journalist Christopher Hitchens, but they espoused the same ideas. In 2007, Hitchens argued the reasons “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Vanity Fair. Obviously satirical yet still obnoxious, the essay argued that men’s superior comedic skill was essential to the propagation of our species. Men are funny because they must be, so women will fuck them; conversely, men desire nearly all women, thus women don’t have to try hard to impress. Hitchens magnanimously asked for contributions from famous funny women for his essay, and I find Fran Lebowitz’s most incisive. She says, “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?”

She’s tacitly agreeing that, yes, men are considered funnier than women, because men create the culture where wit is their primary social goal. They’re the curators of wit. By extension, if women want to be funny, they must behave or speak in ways that reflect that curation. Hitchens admits this himself, saying most female comedians who are actually funny “are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” By dykey, of course, he doesn’t just mean homosexual; he means manly. In other words, he’s saying these types of crude women are unattractive to me, and only in that dearth of attraction can I accept female humor. I was heavier in my college days; this categorization was likely a required element of allowing the TKEs laugh along with me.

But there’s something implicit in what Hitchens wrote that he doesn’t outright acknowledge. Men would prefer if women weren’t funny, because humor has long been their realm, and they’d rather not be outdone. Humor is subversion, it’s irony, it’s darkness, and really, it’s pain. Men would prefer if women exuded the absence of pain, which is comfort—be their shelter from the storm, rather than the storm itself. When women defy that, when they desire to make men laugh instead of, or maybe in addition to, making them come, funny women get labeled mannish. For much of the history of humor, it’s been impossible to be funny in a singularly feminine way.

Maybe it’s the girl’s girl ethos I’ve adapted with age, but I believe it’s a woman’s duty to be funny. Because as Jerry Seinfeld noted in a recent interview with Marc Maron, humor, at its deepest core, comes from a place of anger. Who’s angrier than a twenty-first century woman? Especially an American woman, especially my fellow women of color, who are of course considered equal, duh, it’s why you don’t need the Equal Rights Amendment, you dumb cunts, you’re already there, you have nothing to bitch about anymore. But meanwhile please remain cool but also hot and smart, but not too smart, and if you desire power, you basically want to be a man, and please just ignore that perpetual likability-scale hanging over your head, and don’t even try it: you will never be as funny as a man. It’s all so maddening, really, it’s laughable.

•••

Sally Field remains cute in her seventies, and subtly funny in a way neither Hitchens nor TKEs would recognize. In her memoir, In Pieces, she describes how her 1970s bandit boyfriend, Burt Reynolds, once demanded she stop cursing. During that time, she learned to say “darned” a lot. And this line—that she needed this ameliorative “darned” to retain some semblance of who she’d been—terrified me. Nearly every cis-het woman I know has subsumed a part of herself to either romantically or professionally please a man. I had promised myself at some point that I’d never stop cursing, stop being myself, for any man.

Though in reading Fields’ memoir, I had to ask myself, hadn’t I started cursing for men? So I could be a guy’s girl, using a language inculcated by my father, to be warmly invited into every beer-can-pyramided room? So then, who exactly was I trying to be now? Was the cursing me I’d constructed long ago the actual me? Did I truly still love to curse, or just want my audience to think I loved it? I know it’s still part of my anger reflex. When faced with someone who pisses me off, even during my swear-abstention, I inwardly call them a “cunt.”

But why “cunt”? It’s the one word I won’t even whisper in front of my daughter, even though it’s my favorite. I like its release in front of an audience I trust, because even my closest friends jolt when I say it. “What’s so wrong with ‘cunt’?” I’ve asked. I realize it’s been intimated our whole lives that it’s the most awful word, but why does my social circle think so? What distinguishes it from “pussy,” which roughly scores a few notches lower on the appalling scale? When polled, most friends told me they associated “cunt” with meanness, a word they’d loathe to be called or ever want their children to say. It felt anti-feminist. My officemate said that since we’d become friends, she didn’t think of it so much as a curse anymore, but more my word, one I could slip into a sentence about wilted lettuce or in the context of a global pandemic.

Once upon a millennium, “cunt” was more ubiquitous and pragmatic. Dating back to the Middle Ages, it was used widely in medical manuals and place-names, such as the aptly-titled Gropecunt Lane, part of thirteenth-century London’s brothel district. But in the post-Enlightenment, pre-Victorian eras, attitudes changed. In his 1811 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, author Francis Grose defined it as “a nasty word for a nasty thing.” And in his seminal 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson left out the word altogether. This lack of representation snowballs over time, giving the word even more power through abstention. “Pussy” has never been silenced, because in feline contexts, it’s still as conceivably pure as a pussy licking milk from a bowl. Or something like that.

In the 1990s, third-wave feminism attempted to reclaim “cunt” with two literary and cultural milestones. The first was The Vagina Monologues, where it became a sexy siren song. The actress delivering the “cunt” monologue seductively licks a Blow-Pop, or her fingers, or the microphone, but saying or thinking “cunt” does not make me want to fuck. For me, the impulse to say it comes from a need to elevate a fight, to say what the other person won’t, and having the balls to say it first releases that bellicosity. Given the opportunity to “cunt” it out, I feel calmer, ready to face adversaries, real or perceived, more rationally.

The second reclamation was Inga Muscio’s 1998 book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, where she argues convincingly that part of the word’s verboten nature comes from women’s self-hatred of our “anatomical jewel.” The book further calls for women’s reappropriation of the word as “the very fount of our power, genius, and beauty,” much as Black hip-hop artists have done with the n-word. And while I agree I’d love for “cunt” to represent the vastness that is womanhood, while I’d like it to become “good,” I still need its darker powers as well. I want it to astonish and scare, to comfort and cajole. I want not to give a fuck who likes if we use it or not.

I saw an example of “cunt”’s power a few months ago, when watching season four of Pamela Adlon’s Better Things. I snapped into recognition during a scene where Adlon’s character, Sam, argues with her oldest teenage daughter, Max. It was that typical mother/daughter “why don’t you grow up/why can’t you understand me” fight I’ve experienced countless times with my own mother and am already anticipating with my daughter. In the scene, the two women call each other “cunt,” back and forth, fourteen times. The scene ends with apologies, each of them admitting their own cuntiness. “I’m such a cunt,” says the daughter. “No, I’m the cunt,” says the mother. If we’re being honest about any of our complicated female relationships, no truer exchange has ever been televised.

In his 1972 comedy monologue, George Carlin famously noted the seven words you can’t say on television—the words we’ve decided, for arbitrary reasons, are our language’s worst. Those words are “shit, piss, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, and cunt.” In the nearly fifty years since this comedy special, three of those words have already fallen from this forbidden upper echelon. Who really cares about the words “piss” or “tits,” or, unless you’re my daughter’s tightass teacher, a little “shit”? Yet even though television itself and the people watching it have radically transformed since then, the other swear words on Carlin’s list, especially “cunt,” remain worst of the worst.

Since then we’ve culturally acknowledged there are more abhorrent words, like the aforementioned racial epithets. But how can anyone feel good saying those words? I wonder if racists lower their blood pressure by using racial epithets, if it’s some kind of a release for them, or if it just inculcates more hate, higher blood pressure, heart disease, and early deaths (in which case, shouldn’t they keep using them?). Because I feel great physical and emotional relief after saying “cunt.” There’s less animosity toward my target and more love for myself. Is it possible “cunt” makes the world, at least for me, a better place?

•••

My thirty-day abstention from cursing went okay. I did lots of slow breathing and stopped in the middle of sentences when a swear burbled. I was most tested during class when my Mac Daddy student read aloud from his essay-in-progress about his foray with abstinence which, according to him, had devolved into a failed experiment. He recounted long conversations with his penis and how it finally won the argument when my student logged onto Tinder and swiped sideways to search for “the quickest pussy I could find.” I paused to reflect on his use of “pussy” rather than “cunt,” since the former is indeed more appropriate in a sexual context.

I had no idea how to respond to this work, though I ended up not having to. My Jersey girl said, “What the fuck, bro!” To which I said, “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

I’m not sure what any of us learned through immersion. I already knew to be careful with my audience when cursing. And not to do it so much in front of my child, especially the worst words, especially “cunt.” I became slightly more comfortable in the silences between speech, to be more patient when seeking the appropriate word rather than the first one that comes to my head. That’s always a good lesson, both for writing and being a human.

It’s funny to think I wouldn’t stop cursing for a man, but I did try, for my daughter. And what do I want her to know about cursing? I want her to understand the curse as akin to decadent dessert—you just can’t have it whenever. Even though it’s delicious, even though when you graduate and leave home there’ll be the seduction of eating dessert for every meal. But there’s a whole lexicon waiting to be opened, and I want her to be as excited to learn the meaning of “sanscullote,” the current word-of-the-day in my inbox, and thousands of yet-to-be-discovered words, as she is about the versatility of “cunt.” It’s saying something that after centuries of being excluded from dictionaries entirely, the adjectives “cunted,” “cunting,” “cuntish”, and “cunty” were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2014. As I’ve known for a long time, the word is damn useful.

I conducted my non-cursing experiment, and started writing this essay, to decide whether I’ll quit cursing for good. I’m still trying to curb swears in general, but I’m likely sticking with “cunt.” Because if this isn’t The Age of Cunt, I don’t know what is. Cut the word “country” in half and what do you get? A big, strong “cunt” to start, then the whimper of a chopped “tree.” It’s the first syllable that best epitomizes where we’ve been, where we’re going, who we are. As Americans we’ve been metaphorically chopped in two for our entire existence, so let’s just linger on the first syllable of our collective patriotism. Cunt is meanness. It’s the toppling of that tree. The tree, and all the innocence and knowledge and renewal it connotes, is an American farce. Our country is, indeed, cunty. That we can say and do so many terrible things to the weakest among us, and let it go unacknowledged, but clutch our pearls about “cunt,” is another example so maddening, it’s laughable.

My only incentive to curb “cunt” would be if we stopped being cunty. Last year at my annual checkup, my doctor noted how well I was doing physically after a difficult pregnancy. “You’ve really bounced back. What’s your secret?” I toyed with my phone, where prior to her entering the exam room, I’d been reading about the ever-terrifying machinations of the ex-president’s administration. The whole rot of them, cunts, I’d thought. I hope their dicks catch Covid-19 because they’re cunts. Cunts, cunts, cunts, cunts on TV, was my inner monologue just before the nurse took my blood pressure. It was that simple—it felt good to say, and to think about saying. “I’ve been exercising, practicing yoga,” I lied. The truth is when I feel the need, I say “cunt,” liberally. I remain in great health.

•••

BROOKE CHAMPAGNE was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises,” which was published in The Normal School and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2019, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction for her essay “Bugginess.” Her writing has appeared in many print and online journals, most recently in Under the Sun, Barrelhouse, and Essay Daily. She is at work on her first collection of personal essays titled Nola Face.

 

The Holes We Live With

Photo by Gina Easley

By Katie Rose Guest Pryal

“What do you want to talk about today?” says my dance teacher.

I say, “I’m getting depressed again.”

My friend Ariane and I call our therapists our “dance teachers” to protect our privacy. It’s simpler to say, “I’m heading to my dance lesson after this” when talking to Ariane on the phone at the grocery store. Or “Let me tell you what my dance teacher said” when we’re at the coffee shop.

Plus, codes are fun.

The code works because the idea of either of us actually taking a dance lesson is preposterous.

After I tell my dance teacher how I’ve been feeling, I say, “I hate that I didn’t notice sooner. It hitched a ride in on something else.”

She asks what that something else is.

“That my career is a failure,” I say.

She nods, waiting for more.

“This week, though, the depression finally became obvious. It touched all the same old pressure points.” I tick them off, one by one. “I felt like there was no point in trying. That nothing I do matters. Because it’s me that’s a failure.”

When I look inside myself, I see a large, ugly hole where joy should be, and I’m afraid I’m going to fall into it. That’s a Grade-A emergency, and I know it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been depressed. I tell my dance teacher that I will reach out to my psychiatrist to follow up about treatment.

She digs deeper. “I wonder why it was able to hitch a ride on your career insecurity.”

I tell her I don’t know.

Then she asks the strangest question. “What is your core belief about yourself?”

“I have no idea,” I say.

•••

In the cinematic masterpiece Top Gun (1986, dir. Tony Scott, RIP), the main character, Maverick, has an ugly hole inside himself that he can’t fill. He has the hole because, when he was a child, his fighter-pilot father died—which would wound anyone. But Maverick’s father died in battle, and the Navy blamed him for his death and the deaths of his compatriots.

In his own career as a navy pilot, Maverick has lived under the ugly shadow of his father’s ignominy. And it really did affect his career: “They wouldn’t let you into the [Naval] Academy because you’re Duke Mitchell’s kid.”

[Here come the spoilers.]

Maverick’s ugly hole wreaks havoc in other ways, ways that Maverick doesn’t see: despite being an excellent pilot, he takes unnecessary risks. His perceptive co-pilot can see it, saying at one point, “Every time we go up there, it’s like you’re flying against a ghost.” Another pilot, Viper (great name, right?), says to him, “Is that why you fly the way you do? Trying to prove something?”

The answer is yes. Maverick is perpetually trying to prove that he’s more than the embodied shame of his father’s wrongdoing.

That’s why he leaves his wingman in the opening scene, causing the pilot, Cougar, to lose his cool and turn in his wings. That’s why he screws around with enemy pilots, taking Polaroids in a combat situation.

That’s why he radios the control tower with the cheeky request: “Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a flyby.”

And then he ignores the response of the tower boss—“Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full”—and buzzes the tower, causing havoc and getting himself, and his co-pilot, in trouble with his commanding officer.

Maverick’s pattern, the one he keeps relentlessly repeating, is recklessness and self-sabotage.

Maverick thinks he knows what he needs to fill that gaping hole: win the Top Gun flight school trophy. He believes that if he can just win the trophy, he can toss it in that hole left by his father’s shameful death, and the hole will close.

He doesn’t win the trophy.

But winning the trophy wouldn’t have filled the hole at all. Instead, in a moment of truth, he figures out that he doesn’t need to give the finger to all of naval aviation because they look at him and only see his father’s sins.

Instead, Maverick needs to “stick by his wingman,” an actual flight behavior that has become metaphorical: to stop taking needless risks and be someone others can count on. Not a maverick (heh) at all.

Truly, it’s an excellent film.

(There’s also volleyball.)

But here’s the hard part, what’s not on the screen in Top Gun, but what those of us with dark holes know to be true. Perhaps Tony Scott, who died by suicide, knew this to be true as well.

Even when Maverick figures out what he needs, even when there are hugs and cheering and romance, the hole isn’t filled. His father is still dead, and the death will always be shrouded in a miasma of disgrace.

Nothing can ever fill that hole. Ever.

•••

We toodle along making terrible decisions trying to fill a hole we don’t even know exists.

I’ve done it again and again. I keep doing it, and I can’t seem to stop.

When I was younger, fresh out of my doctoral program, I took a job as a lecturer. “Lecturer” is a non-tenure-track position, and it is also code for “crappy job” in academia, my then-chosen career path.

After taking the job, I spent the next seven years on a fruitless quest for a tenure-track job.

I overworked at a ridiculous pace. Each year, I published at least two articles and presented at a minimum of three conferences. After a couple of years, as my professional reputation gained traction, I was invited to deliver keynote talks or to chair featured sessions. I was climbing the ranks everywhere except in my own institution.

There, I remained a fake professor. A fraud. A failure. Illegitimate.

I believed that I was a failure because I never landed the holy grail of academic jobs. It didn’t matter that the job market for tenure-track jobs had shriveled to nothing by the time I graduated. The fault was mine.

Like Maverick, I thought I knew what I needed to be happy. To win that thing, I behaved recklessly. My fruitless quest hurt me: it kept me up late nights and away from my tiny children too many weeks of the year. I missed my son’s first steps because I was at a conference delivering yet another presentation on my research.

If I could just earn tenure, I believed, I would be a real professor, no longer a fraud.

After seven years in higher ed, I gave up. It took that long to realize that I had been trying to fill a bottomless hole. The hole had nothing to do with tenure at all; it had to do with me feeling ashamed. No matter how many articles, presentations, and professional achievements I tossed into it, the hole remained empty.

Within three months of quitting my job, I was able to accept that the hole was a part of me, and I put it behind me. It would take years before I returned to academia on my own terms.

I was free, I thought back then. But I was wrong.

•••

I first learned about holes from my friend Ariane’s perceptive aunt, F., who always seems to know how you are hurting and to say the words you need to heal.

F., who knows something about Ariane’s difficult past and my own, said this: You have holes, but you can never fill them. You can’t fill them because they’re not in the present—they’re in the past. Therefore, they will always be there, in the past. You can’t go back and fix them.

You just have to learn to live with them.

When I first heard F.’s words, I said to Ariane, “That’s dark as fuck.”

“Yeah,” she said.

After my recent dance lesson, I talked to Ariane about holes, trying to make sense of things.

She said, “Unless Dr. Who is going to show up and change your past, the holes are just there.”

But it feels so hopeless, I told her, to look back at my past riddled with holes.

Ariane said, “What you’re feeling is grief. And it is really fucking dark.”

The last stage of grief is acceptance. Accepting the holes and letting them go.

•••

Real life is never as simple as Top Gun. You don’t leave your singular hole behind and move on, well-adjusted and Okay. The pattern repeats itself over and over, and it can take decades to even spot it.

After I left academia, I began a career as a writer. Before I ever earned my doctorate, I earned my master’s in creative writing. Once I was free of academia, I was in a position to give my writing a real shot. And it worked.

I submitted my first novel, and a small press accepted it. And then the same small press accepted my second novel. Two novels published. I was over the fucking moon.

I also wrote for magazines, lots and lots of them. I wrote textbooks for three different Very Respectable publishers. I wrote all day and night, publishing five to six magazine pieces a month in addition to writing books.

But when the small press declined my third novel, everything came crashing down.

My novels failed (yes, that’s what I believed), and so I’d failed.

I was so insecure that I couldn’t see that I’d achieved what many people only dream of: two published novels, a number of textbooks, and a thriving freelance career.

•••

I play tennis as a hobby. For a few years, though, I played on a USTA team where the captain created an atmosphere where the players had to scramble and fight for starting positions.

However, the captain seemed to view some players as legitimately good players even if they lost now and then. But not me. I needed to perpetually prove that I was not a fluke. Not a fraud.

And the only way to do that was to never, ever lose.

As the seasons wore on, even friendly matches stopped being fun. The captain wanted us to report scores to her every time we played. If I—if any of us—lost while playing for fun, we might lose our spot in the lineup.

Eventually came The Season. My doubles partner and I were undefeated. We won our crucial playoff match, and our team was off to the state championships.

At the USTA state championships, there are five matches in three days. In my mind, I had to win all five. I had to. We won the first. The second. Two-a-day matches in the North Carolina summer heat is brutal, but we pressed on. On day two, we won the third match, and the fourth. That night, after four matches and two days, I went to bed early with a horrible headache. But I pressed on.

The next morning, during our fifth and final match, the court temp was hovering around 110 degrees. Worse, there was no nearby water.

We won the first set easy, our rhythm the same perfection as it always was. But then, at the beginning of the second set, I felt chills coming on. Okay, I thought. Chills I can live with. But then I ran out of fluids after drinking both of my forty-ounce water jugs.

I should have stopped the match and refilled my water in the gymnasium, a twenty-minute walk away. But I didn’t want to lose our rhythm. So I pressed on.

Next, I started seeing spots. Then, I stopped being able to feel my feet. Soon after that, I started feeling nauseated.

I should have retired the match. But I pressed on.

My body began to break down. Dizziness set in.

We lost the match in a tiebreaker.

After the match I passed out, vomited, and lost consciousness. I’m not sure how long I lay there in the grass before the ambulance arrived. I owe my life to a teammate who is a nurse and acted quickly, stripping me of most of my clothing and packing me with ice to lower my temperature.

Heat stroke is deadly. Once you have heatstroke, you are past the point where drinking water can help you recover. The only thing that will save you is IV fluids and rapid cooling, and even then you can end up paralyzed or with other long-term or permanent damage, for example, to the brain.

My long-term damage was to my brain. For months, I couldn’t drive. I would get lost just walking around our neighborhood, calling my husband sobbing because I couldn’t find my way home. I had only about three hours a day when I felt even close to fully functional. The rest of the time I spent in a daze or sleeping. Any heat, at all, made me nauseated.

I nearly died trying to fill a hole that no amount of winning could ever fill. I was afraid that I would never be good enough to be a real member of the team.

It wasn’t until I talked to my dance teacher last week that I could give the hole a name. Tenure, writing, tennis, and more—there are so many more. But they are all the same.

•••

The second hardest thing about holes is figuring out that you have them. The hardest thing is figuring out what they are.

Holes are easier to find if you look for what they’re driving you to do. Think of Maverick’s reckless control-tower flybys. Or me pushing myself so hard I end up in the emergency department. Look for the “If-I-can-justs.”

If I can just get a tenure-track job, then I will be a legitimate professor and no longer be a fraud.

If I can just have a traditional press publish my novels, then I will be a legitimate writer.

If I can just win all of my tennis matches, then I will be a legitimate member of the team.

“If I can just”: the template for finding the devil on my back.

I shared the if-I-can-just theory with my dance teacher, and we used it to talk about my current feelings of failure. Right now, my agent hasn’t been able to sell my current book, a book I’ve hung my hopes on. (Reader: never count on anything in publishing.) How I’m a failure as an author. Worse, I’m a fraud.

How I’ve lost touch with my editor contacts over the past couple of years, and I can’t seem to place any pieces in magazines, and I’m a failure.

How all of my ideas have evaporated.

And more.

She tried pointing out my successes, but we both acknowledged that logical arguments fall down the hole just like everything else.

But then it hit me—I knew what was driving me. I said, “If I can just publish one trade book with a large publisher, then my writing career will feel legitimate.” I admitted that this if-I-can-just was ridiculous and overly specific and that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of my feelings of inadequacy. And I felt proud of myself for figuring out what was wrong with me.

She nodded, seeming to accept my assessment. (Reader: She did not accept my assessment.)

Then she hit me with a whammy. “How long have you been driven to seek other people’s approval?”

“What? No.”

That didn’t sound like me at all. That sounded like a weak and small way to live. Her words reminded me of Wormtail from Harry Potter, all beseeching and whiny and lacking in dignity. It didn’t jibe with my self-image. I am not a suck-up.

But my dance teacher was right. All of the holes, one after another, were all manifestations of the same hole. I just didn’t realize it until my dance teacher hit me with that two-by-four of truth. That two-by-four hurt.

My dance teacher continued, “You believe you’re never good enough.”

That one I already knew. But I was starting to realize that I compartmentalized the belief, tacking it onto specific contexts. Not good enough in academia. Not good enough in sports. Not good enough at writing.

Forever chasing my tail.

My dance teacher wanted me to call my devil by its name.

“How long have you been driven to seek other people’s approval?”

“Always.”

•••

When my dance teacher asked me, “What is your core belief about yourself?” I told her I didn’t know.

I’ve spent days pondering this question. At first, I thought I didn’t know the answer because I’ve always lived for other people.

But now I do know the answer: I’m a person who overachieves in order to make myself feel worthy of love.

This hole has driven me for as long as I can remember. But I’m strangely attached to it. If I don’t have this monster nipping at my heels, then who am I? Without it, will I still have the drive to succeed that has been a part of me since I was a child? If I let it go, I will I slip?

What is my core belief about myself?

I don’t want to live like this anymore. It’s awful. Through the years (and years and years) of chasing legitimacy, of trying to fight feelings of being a fraud, I’ve also believed, deep inside, that I’m not worthy of love.

My dance teacher told me that this hole formed early. She told me that it wasn’t my fault. It’s there, in the past, and it will always be beyond my reach.

I have risked my relationships, my very life, to prove I’m worthy of love, friendship, and respect. I won’t, I can’t, do that anymore.

I know what it feels like when I’m getting depressed. It’s happened before, and I know what to do to make sure I come out okay.

And now I know what it feels like when I’m tossing pieces of my soul into a bottomless pit. I’m not sure what to do, yet, except be vigilant.

•••

KATIE ROSE GUEST PRYAL’s work has appeared in Catapult, Slate, Full Grown People, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and more. She’s the author of more than ten books, including the IPPY-Gold-award-winning Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo and the bestselling Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Disability and Mental Health in Higher Education. A professor of law and creative writing, she lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Katharine: A Love Story

Photo by Gina Easley

By Susan Rebecca White

From the moment we met, Katharine dazzled me.

I was the first to arrive at the slightly dilapidated, university-owned house I had been assigned to live in with other random transfer students. Rattling around its many rooms, I worried that my new home was too dark, too drafty, and entirely too big, especially since it contained almost no furniture, and all I had brought with me from Atlanta were clothes, books, and a computer. I watched as a rental truck pulled up in front. An arresting, raven-haired woman in skinny jeans and a tee-shirt jumped out and bounded to the door, greeting me with unabashed enthusiasm and delight, introducing herself as Katherine from Princeton, New Jersey, by way of Manhattan. Darting from room to room, she pulled me along, exclaiming over the house’s fabulous features—its hardwood floors, high ceilings, and many windows, seeing all the things that I couldn’t.

Dragging in old furniture given to her by her parents, Katharine filled the drab space with color: a white sofa here, a blue checked armchair there, an antique dining table and rugs. Plus, lamps! Light! That first night we sat up late, beneath cozy throws, talking. I listened to Katharine with rapt attention. Talking to her was like conversing with a more confident, glamourous, Jewish version of myself. We forged a fast friendship through stories of our lives, which included a number of parallels, from the mundane—we both loved hot popcorn with M&Ms mixed in—to the more profound, including an odd coincidence: At our previous colleges, we had each pledged the very sorority our mothers had been excluded from decades before, though the experience of Katharine’s mom was admittedly more harrowing, as mine pledged elsewhere, whereas Katharine’s was cut from all of the ones she was interested in, later learning that none (at that time) accepted Jewish girls.

Having vindicated her mother’s past rejection, Katharine, who never much liked pledge meetings, dropped out soon after and never looked back. I chafed at being a part of the Greek system, but went through initiation anyway, not knowing how to leave a system that was so important to the WASPy Southern world I had grown up in. But now I was in a different world, a better world—Katharine’s!—and I could adopt her ways as my own, or at least try.

That first week of school, I dutifully attended all of the new student orientation activities. Katharine stayed behind. I fretted that she was missing out on Very Important Transfer Information and Meeting New People. Little did I know, she didn’t need these events to find her tribe. A skilled actor, by the end of our first week, she had already been cast as the lead in the mainstage play. From then on, walking through campus with Katharine could take what felt like hours as theater friends stopped to gush over her while I stood by and waited, silent, smiling stupidly. I was so young, so naïve, so needy, that I honestly didn’t know that it was okay to take off, calling, “Gotta go!”

Or maybe I did know I could leave, but I didn’t want to because that would mean losing time with Katharine.

When Katharine speaks of our time living together—we were housemates all three years at Brown—she describes me as domestic, easy, laidback. I must have come across as more laidback than I felt. In fact, I often felt just the opposite, getting my feelings hurt over the smallest things, especially that first year. Once, I bought two-percent milk, which I preferred, over our standard skim. Watching a look of disgust cross her face as she took a sip, I felt wounded, as if her not liking two-percent milk meant she didn’t like me. Later, I tearfully confessed that I was upset. She laughed, affectionately, assuring me of her love. We chalked it up to the North-South divide.

As a Southerner at a very Northern school, I often misread things (or simply mispronounced them). But once Katharine was a part of my life, I emulated her, grateful for her guidance and sophistication. I no longer called espresso “ex-press-o,” thinking it was thus named because it made you speedy. I now went to see “films,” not “movies,” and referred to the person who directed them instead of calling them by their title.

•••

To this day, I can still feel a rush of exhilaration thinking of the many nights Katharine and I stayed up too late talking, laughing till tears ran down our cheeks, clutching our stomachs, giddy from our shared sense of humor, our mutual delight. I had never before had a friend who was such a cheerleader, who took genuine pleasure in my success. That said, I didn’t always feel successful in the wider world of Brown, and at times I wished some of Katharine’s talent and charisma would rub off on me.

At Brown, you had to apply to take any advanced creative writing classes. Every semester I applied and was rejected while Katharine was cast in play after play. And guys never randomly sent me roses or composed entire songbooks about me.

Domestic even then, I was forever baking apple crisps, eager to pair them with ice cream and curl up on the couch to talk or play a board game or watch a movie. But Katharine often had other things to do—rehearsal or dinner with friends I found intimidating. I would get so excited whenever the two of us made plans to do something just with one another.

Which made the occasional times when she stood me up for a coffee date or lunch all the more painful. This was before cell phones, when there was no easy way to convey a message at the last minute that you couldn’t make it. The worst part was the shame I felt, as if everyone in the entire coffee house knew I had been rejected.

As the end of our time at Brown neared, I got clingier, and Katharine, in turn, became increasingly casual with commitments. A few weeks before graduation, she arrived egregiously late for a cooking lesson she’d asked me to give her. Eager to finally be the expert at something, I had purchased all of the ingredients and then waited in our apartment. And waited. When she finally arrived hours late, unaware that anything was the matter, I was overcome with fury. My outburst, I imagine, was not unlike a wife confronting a husband over a discovered affair, a “J’accuse!” to match any bedroom drama.

I remember sensing her frustration despite her apology—resentful that I was too needy, that my grip was too tight.

That night, she went to a party and got very drunk, which was completely out of character. She came home, sick from alcohol, and wept on the couch as I comforted her, all the while bitter that I could be counted on for comfort, always.

•••

Looking back, it’s obvious that I was too needy, my outsized reactions surely rooted in the fear that she didn’t care enough about me to hold on tight, to prevent me from being sucked back into the vortex of the image-conscious, Southern, Protestant world in which I had grown up, where I felt frequently condescended to, deemed a navel-gazing, overthinker whose progressive politics were either cute, hilarious, or annoying, depending on who you asked. As if the intimate, encouraging, conversation-driven world Katharine and I had created and cultivated in college was just a dream, and when I woke up, I would return, once again, to my old, misfit self—the magic of Katharine and all she represented gone.

•••

I moved back to Atlanta after graduation. A year later, I moved to the Bay Area, where I taught English at a boarding school and waited tables, and finally went to graduate school in creative writing, but not before marrying a man who was ill-suited for me.

Katharine and I stayed connected throughout, our friendship growing robust and healthy after it was allowed a little breathing room. We called, we wrote, we emailed, we texted, we visited, we were bridesmaids in one another’s weddings. It was during her wedding weekend that I first recognized that the power dynamic in our relationship had shifted, that she was no longer a god to me, but someone with whom I was on more equal footing. At the rehearsal dinner, I gave a toast, a tongue-and-cheek list of all the things I had learned from our long friendship, including that when dining out with Katharine, you must always insist that you really, really loved whatever you were served because if you expressed the merest hint of dissatisfaction, she would flag down a waiter and send your food back. That line got a big laugh, as many of the other guests had surely had their food sent back at one time or another by Katharine, who was beaming, confident enough to laugh at my ribbing, delighted to be so known.

A few years later, for the first time since college, Katharine and I were once again living in the same city, this time New York. I was only there for a few months—I’d taken a summer sublet that would allow me to do some on-the-ground research for the novel I was writing, a chunk of which was set in Manhattan. The plan was for my (then) husband to go with me, but a few weeks before we were scheduled to leave, our marriage—always unstable—collapsed, and so I went on my own.

Katharine’s apartment was just eight blocks east of mine, by Carl Schurz Park, where we would meet several times a week to push her toddler on the swings, all the while talking, talking, talking. We were in such different places—my domestic life fracturing, hers expanding with children, yet our need for one another was mutual. Pregnant with her second, she was the only one of her New York friends to stay at home, and the days could get lonely. But I loved hanging out with her and her son, hearing his squeals of delight on the swing, witnessing the grin that slowly spread across his face the first time he tasted ice cream. As for me, life was a mixed bag: Somedays I showed up at the park (or Shake Shack or the Onassis Reservoir path) floating with happiness that I had been brave enough to leave my mess of a marriage. Other days I was flattened by fear: Would I be okay financially? Would I complete my novel without the guidance of my writer husband? Would I find love again?  Katharine, ever the optimist, assured me that yes! I would patch together enough teaching gigs to support myself. Yes! I would write a wonderful novel on my own. And, yes! Now that I had left my husband, I was closer than ever to meeting a true mate with whom to have a child. “You know yourself so much better now,” she told me. “You know what to look for in a man.”

Two years later she would fly down to Atlanta where I was living with my new husband, to hold our infant son, help out with the laundry, and just be there.

•••

Though I wish I had possessed a deeper sense of self during those first few years of our relationship and hadn’t been so needy (and she, on occasion, so flaky), I treasure the lessons my friendship with Katharine has taught me: That you don’t necessarily have to jettison a relationship in order to change your role within it; that those you love will hurt you, and you them, and it doesn’t erase the love; that forgiving one another for our human shortcomings can actually strengthen a bond. Despite our initial ups and downs—or, more accurately, because of them­—I trust the durability of our bond. I know that it is neither delicate nor fragile.

•••

I’ve asked other women if they had a college friend they adored and possibly even worshipped. Almost everyone answered yes. It occurs to me that so many of us find friends to emulate in college because it’s the time when we most believe we can stride into the world anew, loosened from the binds of family and society. It’s an illusion, of course. My friendship with Katharine was never going to allow me to circumvent dealing with the broken parts of myself—my insecurities, my blind spots, my wounds. But through Katharine, I saw that a different sort of world was possible—a world of unfettered enthusiasm, with friendship and art at its center. And I loved her for that; I loved her so much that I made the mistake of trying to tie myself to her, as if we could spend our entire lives inside our apartment, eating apple crisps and laughing. But she had her life to live, as I had mine. The miracle of my forties is this: I am content with who I have become. I got to this place in no small part through the gift of my ongoing friendship with Katharine. She offered me both a mirror and a window: reflecting back a vision of myself that I could not see and opening a window into a bigger, brighter world.

•••

SUSAN REBECCA WHITE is the author of four novels, including A Place at the Table and We Are All Good People Here. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Bitter Southerner, Full Grown People, and other periodicals. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and son. For more, visit her website at susanrebeccawhite.com and/or follow her on Instagram @susanrebeccawhite

 

Who We Are, Where We Come From

Photo by flickr/
Raveendra Jayashantha

By Anjali Enjeti

When my father immigrated to the United States from India in 1971, many of his relatives followed in his diasporic footsteps. By 2006, the year his mother, my Avva, passed away, our only family members left on the subcontinent were his sister, his eldest brother, and their spouses. Today only a single aunt and uncle of mine remain. All of my first cousins immigrated to either Australia, Singapore, Europe, or the United States. Even though I have never lived in India myself, with each relative’s migration I felt more untethered to a country I had grown to love as much as my own.

When I learned the piece of furniture that once held Avva’s neatly folded saris was up for grabs, I leapt at the chance to bring it back to Georgia. It arrived several months later, after a harrowing and outrageously expensive journey, in a state of utter disrepair. Part of the base had broken off, so it stood at a slant like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, threatening to topple over at any moment.

After its restoration, I discovered something on its floor I hadn’t noticed before—a fading white six-pointed star. Simple, yet elegant. Perfectly centered. A square border surrounded it like a picture frame. It was a muggulu, a design Avva created out of flour.

She would never have called herself an artist, but Avva created this art in the mornings in the courtyard and in the pooja room at her home. I can still picture her squatting in her sari, a stream of powder flowing from between her index finger and thumb. She did this in long swift strokes like the conductor of an orchestra. Stars, swirls, dots, and flowers blanketed the ground.

After her death, the developers who purchased my grandparents’ house converted it to condominiums. The canvas for her artwork became the foundation for a newer, more modern Hyderabad known as the Silicon Valley of India. The sari chest is all that remains of my grandparents’ home, and my childhood memories of Avva’s artwork.

Over the years, I’ve contemplated how to preserve the muggulu best. Should an artist friend restore it with a fresh supply of rice flour? Should my daughter trace it with white acrylic paint for a more permanent solution? How do I recreate something vital to my heritage, to my identity, so that it will always stay with me?

•••

Who am I? I am a woman of color. I am brown. Mixed race. Indian, Austrian, Puerto Rican. I represent multiple souths—South Asia, southern India, and the Deep South in the United States. I am an immigrant’s daughter. Claiming each of these identities has shaped and refined my perspective of the world. It has helped me to find and immerse myself in a community that nurtures all of these parts of me. And the act of claiming my identity has empowered me to engage on a sociopolitical level, to grow my empathy, to reflect on the ways I fall short in the liberation of others. And to learn how to rectify this.

The claiming of identity and the evolution of a point of view sow the seeds for social change. For if we are lucky, if we follow the idea of the self far enough, it can end at a community that prioritizes compassion and justice in order to build a kinder, more equitable, more humane world.

In the summer of 2019, two friends and I decided we needed to work harder to keep members of the South Asian American community in Georgia more politically engaged year-round. The problem, as we saw it, was that our South Asian friends tended to come together for various Democratic campaigns, but as soon as the election passed, we lost touch, dispersed, and disengaged with politics until the next election season ramped up.

The three of us decided to start the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats.

Like any movement, ours began small. In August 2019, about a dozen people showed up to our first meeting at an Indian restaurant. Six months later we packed 150 people into a room for a 2020 Election Kickoff event featuring Georgia’s former House minority leader Stacey Abrams, three U.S. Senate candidates (Sarah Riggs Amico, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, and Jon Ossoff), and state senator Sheikh Rahman.

Today we are over four hundred strong.

Our members have roots in several different countries, faiths, languages, and regions. We are immigrants and U.S.-born. We are learning how to be better allies and accomplices to other communities more marginalized than our own. We are interrogating our anti-Blackness. And we are mobilizing together to help flip Georgia blue.

Despite the risk posed by Covid-19, in the fall leading up to the 2020 presidential election, we worked ourselves to the bone for the Biden-Harris campaign and all down-ticket Democrats. We made thousands of calls, sent thousands of texts, and wrote 7,000 postcards on behalf of Democratic candidates. We hosted virtual forums with candidates. We educated South Asian voters about the voting process and trained to be poll workers and poll monitors. Our labor has paid off. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nearly doubled their voter turnout in Georgia from 2016. Approximately three-quarters of AAPI voters voted for Biden. Georgia’s sixteen electoral college votes will go to the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.

What I am most proud of, though, are the South Asians in Georgia, many of whom had little to no experience with political activism until this election, who found a community in They See Blue Georgia and threw themselves into this work.

This, to me, is the heart of how identity shapes activism. It is the process of engaging people in our communities who have traditionally and intentionally been excluded from political discourse.

It is a movement about solidarity, camaraderie, coalition building, and lifting one another up. It’s about how our shared identity can propel us to become agents of social change, whether this takes the form of running for office, volunteering on a campaign, registering voters, or protesting.

It is who we are and where we come from.

•••

I consult a neighbor before I begin. “It will stay longer if you make the rice flour wet,” she says. “Turn it into liquid. Then you can paint with your finger.”

I watch a few YouTube videos to psyche myself up. I am no artist. I pour some rice flour into a bowl and add water, equal parts. With a fork, I swish the mixture, scraping it from the sides. Eventually it thins evenly. I attempt to paint a design on my countertop with my fingertip, as my neighbor suggested, but my finger makes for a clumsy brush. Instead I roll a sheet of paper into a funnel, pour the wet flour into it, and bend the tip to trap the mixture so it doesn’t escape before I’m ready. I practice again, this time forming half of a sloppy circle. Still, it’s progress.

I’m no match for my grandmother’s dexterous hand. Many years ago, she offered to teach me muggulu when I visited her home. I declined. What I produce now will not measure up. It will fail to honor her legacy. But this no longer matters. She would want me to try.

I sit cross-legged at the base of the sari chest, the door propped wide open, and take a deep breath. When I first unfold the tip of the funnel, the flour mixture rushes out too quickly. I wipe away the excess with a wet paper towel and begin again, squinting to locate my Avva’s neat outline. I position my hand over the design, and this time when the flour-ink flows, I’m ready. Curves and angles appear that I hadn’t noticed until I reunited them into one.

The image that emerges takes me by surprise. The faint pattern I had assumed these past nine years was a six-pointed star transforms into an eight-petalled jasmine flower, the same sweet-smelling blossoms my grandmother used to string into garlands at her home almost every morning. I would never have recognized her design for what it was if I hadn’t tried to restore it to its original state.

When I finish with the rice flour, I set aside the funnel and lean back to take it in. Some of the lines are shaky, too thick or too thin. Certainly, it is imperfect.

But in its very own way, it is beautiful.

•••

Reprinted with Permission from Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change ©2021 by Anjali Enjeti (University of Georgia Press).

ANJALI ENJETI is a former attorney, journalist, teacher, and author based near Atlanta. Her books Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and the novel, The Parted Earth were published earlier this year. Her other writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and lives with her family near Atlanta.

 

The Age of Water

Photo by Gina Easley

By Eliza Thomas

Seven years ago, I had my first relationship after sixteen years of being single. I was sixty-two and he was fifty-seven. I remember these numerical details because I’m trying to keep a more precise account of life now. We had a short affair, unexpected and intense, made each other happy, then unhappy, and then it ended. I don’t know if I left him with anything positive, but looking back, I’m grateful for his gift to me.

He was—and I assume still is—a swimmer. It was summer, and we’d meet after work at ponds near our small Vermont town. We started with short stretches; he swam circles around me. Gradually I became strong enough to follow him all the way across. Exercise. At my age, a form I could tolerate, even like.

Other attempts have fallen by the wayside. Exercise is a big deal in my town. People ride bikes outrageously long distances, outfitted in outlandish tight spandex; they jog in place at stoplights; they kayak and hike the highest peaks of the Green Mountains. They ski. The local Pilates classes are always filled.

When I first moved here I joined the gym and tried my best, but failed to find any healthy activity I could stick with. Stairmaster was ridiculous—the stairwell to nowhere—and the rowing machine hurt my back and wrists. The weight machines were complicated torture machines; I didn’t even go near them. My membership lapsed. Forays into outdoor exercise also hit roadblocks. Bicycles proved no match for the steep hill to my home and kayaking was out of the question. I’m too scared of heights to climb any mountain even if I wanted to, and I’m too afraid of falling to ski, even if I knew how. At one point I was certain that jogging would be the answer—so simple, so straightforward, no machines, just me and the fresh air! I bought expensive running shoes and set off optimistically down a flat path along the river. Then, after two or three minutes, I ground to a halt. I hadn’t realized how bone-jarringly hard the ground could be.

But almost every day I come across another item in the news about aging and health and mental acuity and the loss thereof, explaining that as we get older we need regular exercise in order to retain our marbles and maintain a more or less steady heartbeat. The science is relentless, the conclusions foregone. I’ve learned about the unhappy laboratory rats forced into a sedentary life-style, seen pictures of them huddled in a slough of despond, unable to find their way through their own maze, their memory now in shambles. I’ve read the studies demonstrating that running increases brain volume, albeit temporarily, and improves one’s mood. I’ve learned that sitting is unhealthy. Apparently it’s been determined that standing isn’t so great either. Our bodies were meant to move.

So perhaps my new exercise regime will save me from premature decline, even premature death. I’m lucky to have no serious health issues yet. My bones are thinning and I’ve endured a few minor broken bones, but my balance is fine. Most of the time my heart pounds away rhythmically, aside from occasional bouts of disconcerting lurchings that the doctor reassures me are totally “normal.” Still, at my age it is difficult to avoid uncomfortable calculations. For example: Was it irresponsible to get a puppy? What if I become unable to take him for walks? I’m a pianist, with a piano even older than I am, but how can I consider purchasing a newer instrument when who knows how long I’ll be able to play? And then there are those meager savings. If I live twenty more years, how can I stretch the dollars? Should I be planning for the inevitable decline now—should I be saving all my spare change in a big jar and never shop for anything frivolous ever again?

I try not to dwell on these questions too often, though sometimes in the middle of the night, waking up from one or another unnerving dream, I experience a sense of impending doom. But in the light of day I tell myself that swimming can’t hurt, and in any case I seem to have taken to it like a fish to water. So I shop with enthusiasm, treating myself to a variety of “athletic” bathing suits, specialized swimmer’s shampoos, a pair of training flippers I rarely don, and a device to help me keep track of how many pool laps I’ve just completed. I may not—do not—know many more years I will be around, but at least I can count the laps I swim every week. And in the meantime I’ll have a bathing suit that’s not too hideous and very clean hair.

During the long Vermont winters I swim at the local pool. I tell myself to aim for grace, not speed, as virtually every other swimmer plows past me in the adjoining lanes. I’ve learned to reach, stretch and glide, and I try not to splash. I’ll never get any faster, but progress is an open-ended word. For me, progress is exactly one mile, three times a week. This is good. In the water my aging body feels almost ageless, sleek and smooth. My hips are no longer stiff and achy, and my muscles actually have definition. Though I’m not entirely sure what it means, I believe my “core” is stronger now. I am also humbled by the tenacity of other women I see in the locker room getting ready to swim, all shapes and sizes, in all stages of life, of health and of sickness. I think: water is life.

In the fleeting summers I look forward to swimming outdoors. After my short affair summer ended, I tried bringing my two dogs along—there are always many other dogs frolicking joyfully with their owners. Surely, I thought, my dogs would join in the fun. But my older dog, a dignified, gentle lab mix named Monday, disdained water—she wouldn’t even wade—while Mario, my silly young setter, became frantic to save me, or himself, or possibly some phantom of his overactive imagination, from drowning. He plunged in after me, churning up the water and clawing my latest bathing suit to shreds.

So now I go alone to the pond. In keeping with my resolve to keep an accurate account of life, now that it seems to be passing so quickly, I’ve pored over regional topographical maps, but so far I haven’t been able to measure the length of the pond with any precision. Maybe it’s just as well. Maybe some spans just can’t be calculated; maybe it doesn’t matter how far it is across and back. For now, it feels long enough. I emerge from the water at the end of my swim like some early ancestral amphibian, crawling over the rocks of the shoreline, gasping for air, finding my feet, trying out my lungs in the new environment. Then I find my towel, flop down, and triumph in my evolutionary transformation.

There are a few downsides. For one thing, the water seems to be getting colder. Perhaps this is an effect of the aging process or a chilling harbinger of climate change. Whatever the reason, even at the height of summer, I sometimes find myself shivering uncontrollably in the water, and by the time I finish my forty-minute swim my hands are numb and bluish, my teeth clacking audibly. It’s embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as the items I’ve recently purchased will be, assuming I ever manage to get them on: one purple neoprene vest, one skin-tight black neoprene jacket with impossible pants to match, and a lime green neoprene swim cap.

For another, I’m very near-sighted, and for the first few years of swimming I relied on blind instinct to find my way back to shore. So I was surprised and encouraged to find prescription goggles in generic form for a mere sixteen dollars. (I bought several pairs.) It helps to see where I’m going, but now that I see clearly, there are times I’d really rather not. I now make out with ease the tangles of weeds, globs of murkiness, disconcerting swarms of tiny fish. Far below, I discern the shapes of larger creatures slipping through the darkness. They look ominous and deadly, though they are probably only carp. Still, I’d rather not know what lies beneath.

And finally, there have been a few times in bad weather, struggling against wind and choppy waves, when I’ve thought: Maybe I won’t make it. I will die here. And then people will say at my funeral, “Ah, but at least she died doing what she loved.” I would hate that. I don’t want to drown. I don’t want to die, not here, not now, not in the middle of this pond. I don’t even want to think about it. I haven’t told anyone yet that I do not want to be embalmed—a fate, I think, worse than death. I don’t want to be discovered, days later, bobbing/floating/sinking in this murky water. It would be so terrible. And then there are my dogs, starving to death at home or, ironically, dying of thirst. So. The admission that I might be a little afraid has led to another purchase—a “swim buddy,” a small orange inflatable sausage that trails behind me across the lake. It even has a whistle. Just in case.

Despite these downsides, I love to swim outdoors. The sensation of gliding horizontally, the solitude and open space, the rhythm of my breath, the rocking balance, the absence of the fear of falling—it’s all gloriously different from being vertical and walking on the dry, unyielding ground. I don’t get to look around much, head down most of the time. But halfway across I roll on my back and rest. I wonder why anyone would wish to walk, walk upright, on water, when it is a wonder enough to float along its interface with air. I look up at the endless sky, watch the drift of the clouds, and turn to the surrounding woods along the shore, edged with the countless hues of the forests. On calm days, the trees and sky are mirrored perfectly in the still surface of the pond. Every detail is in place, only upside down. The image is so seamless that it’s hard to distinguish reality from its reflection, difficult to determine where land meets water.

Then I take off my prescription goggles for the old perspective that nearsightedness allows. Colors quiver slightly and merge; the outlines of people and dogs on the far beach mingle into a vague scatter. Mysterious forms hover in midair across the water, while the forests are billowy clouds, spilling their green along the shore. Sometimes the shoreline itself vanishes in a mist. I float in the middle of the pond, arms outstretched to a world that shimmers in the light.

•••

Inevitably, however, light casts a shadow. It’s fall as I write this. Outdoor swimming is over for the year, the days are shortening, and my dog Monday, she who disdained water, has died. She was far too old—over seventeen years—and unhappy at the end. I finally made the call, and a man with a heart of gold and the patience of a saint came to the house and sat with us for an hour before giving her last shot. The distance was just an immeasurable sigh, and she was gone. The nice man carried her frail old body away and a few weeks later dropped off a jar of ashes on my doorstep. Mario seems to have taken her absence in stride, but I’m still overwhelmed by the emptiness she left behind, still feel the complicated regrets of having had her put down, of having waited too long, of having not spent more time with her in the last months. All those hours swimming, and I could have been home with her. I have not yet figured out what to do with her ashes. I feel bad about that too.

But the other night I dreamed I was flying, only it was underwater. I sensed a movement, a dark reflection hovering nearby, and for a moment I was apprehensive. Then I saw her. She was right alongside me, my beautiful old dog, my own beautiful ghost swim buddy. Our eyes met in recognition, as if we’d been doing this forever. We were skimming together just beneath the surface. Miraculously, breathing was no problem. Our bodies were sleek and strong, our movements ageless and full of grace. We wove in and out with the current for a while, then together we turned to dive deeper, swooping down through the water, soaring effortlessly, effortlessly alive.

•••

ELIZA THOMAS is a piano teacher and accompanist.  She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her dog Mario.