Permanent Record

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 House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, 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.

Baby Jesus

By Jenny Hatchadorian

As we drove back from our daughter’s two-month check-up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, my husband Aaron and I were primed for an argument. Once again, the pediatrician’s message was that we were bungling things, especially in regard to our daughter’s constipation. “Pear juice hasn’t worked. She won’t drink it,” Aaron said in clipped speech.

“What if we make the bottles with more water?” I offered.

“When it seems like she has to poop, we need to hold her knees up to her belly. It will help, ergonomically. That’s how Baby Jesus designed us.”

Up until this moment, the utterance of Baby Jesus was accompanied by sarcasm, but I could tell by the coldness of his words that he wasn’t joking. Just in case, I clocked him for a smirk, but it only arrived after my second glance.

Baby Jesus first entered my lexicon when I met Aaron’s parents nine years earlier in North Carolina. In advance of the visit, Aaron mentioned his parents had become more conservative since they’d moved from Cleveland, but this didn’t concern me. I was raised by Republicans.

Compared to my fiscally conservative and socially still quite conservative parents, I found Aaron’s parents hopeful, adventurous, and open-minded. They were religious, some would say very, especially his mother who possessed the zeal of a converted Catholic, but as long Aaron and I were on the same page, their beliefs were less relevant to me.

After dinner, I grabbed my suitcase and followed Aaron upstairs. Exhausted from teaching, LaGuardia, and smiling so much my cheeks hurt, I half listened as I rolled my suitcase on the ivory carpet. “This is the frog. It stands for ‘finished room over the garage.’ It’s the only guest bedroom with a bathroom,” Aaron pointed to a large, sunken room. He walked further down the hallway and gestured to a bedroom with a twin bed and ceiling fan. “This is Denver Broncos. When we moved in, it had Bronco’s trim.”

Then he stopped at a guest bedroom next to a bathroom. “Here’s your room.” He gestured inside. “Jeanene Horses.”

For the moment, I put aside Jeanene and her horses. “My room?”

“Yeah, I’m in Broncos.” He rolled his eyes.

“But we live together.” We shared an apartment in Brooklyn, as we had in Los Angeles.

“It’s just because of Baby Jesus.”

Like Jeanene Horses, he seemed to think the phrase “Baby Jesus” communicated something to me, but it didn’t. “What does that mean?”

Aaron pulled his arms close like a T-rex, made his lips loose and gurgled like a baby. Then he stood on his toes, glared down at me, and said in a high-pitched voice, “You’re not married.” For effect, he twirled his arms and let out a high-pitched, maniacal giggle.

I pursed my lips.

“We’re not married,” he said in his normal voice and wiped drool from his lips.

“I see,” I said. As I wheeled my suitcase into Jeanene Horses, the ivory carpet muffled the sound.

On the last night of my visit, I sat next to Aaron’s mother at dinner. I knew not to discuss politics, but on a personal level she was sweet and curious. Unlike many religious people I’d met, she was open-minded and kind. Against type, she was knowledgeable and well-spoken. Even her obstinance was charming because she wore it with such confidence. Until, like any good heathen, I curled away when she let loose some disparaging comments about gay people and the doozy “I don’t think young people today feel enough shame.”

It was 2011. Shame was everywhere. There were more abortion restrictions than in the previous three decades and several states enacted the strictest voting laws since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I swallowed my rebuttal with my Brussel sprouts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment.

As I ate, I weighed her comment against other family intel. Aaron’s cousin once told me a lengthy story about how she’d briefly joined the Church of Scientology. While she spoke, I tried to focus on her ability to feel a level of rapture and rhapsody I would never feel and not on the fact that Scientology rejected psychiatry, demanded a large amount of its followers’ income, and pushed an expensive list of courses called The Bridge to Total Freedom. In fact, several of Aaron’s family members were prone to spirited, irrational assumptions, but when I brought up his cousin’s involvement with Scientology, Aaron assured me he too was alarmed.

I was an atheist, raised by atheists who were overtly skeptical of organized religion. My family could be impulsive, demanding and capitalist, but we were logical. There were many lawyers among us, and we could distill any argument to a rational motivation. Throughout my life, I’d been repelled by organized religion not only because of everyone the church left out—women, gays, trans people—but also because I couldn’t bear irrational people.

In the 1990s, I grew up as the rare child of divorced parents in a heavily Catholic Cleveland suburb. In middle school, my boyfriend broke up with me because I did not attend Parish School of Religion classes. PSR classes were taught at several local churches and provided catechetical education to kids in public school, but because it was a loosely disciplined after-school activity for thirteen-year-olds, it was also a meat market. Even as a teenager, I knew it was nonsense that I was dumped over PSR. I knew religion was nonsense. Now as a filmmaker and adjunct professor in New York, my distrust of religion had grown. Essentially, I didn’t think I could spend my life with a religious person.

“That sucked what your mom said about gay people,” I whispered to Aaron during a clandestine visit to Denver Broncos.

“Oh, she just thinks they’re defying Baby Jesus,” Aaron said and dismissed my concern with a swipe of the hand.

I’d always cherished the fact that he was the black sheep of the family, but this was the second time he’d mentioned Baby Jesus. I looked at him. Were beliefs and personality innate? Even if buried during his rebellious twenties, later in life would his upbringing rear its ugly head?

He smirked at me. “You know I’m not religious at all, right?”

I dug my toe in the ivory carpet. “Were you ever?”

He shook his head like he was annoyed to answer. “Even in eighth grade, I refused Confirmation. I knew it wasn’t for me.”

In that moment as the two of us stood in Denver Broncos against the wishes of Baby Jesus, his comment was enough. We wrapped up the trip sure we were on the same side of the divide.

•••

Little changed in the next nine years of our relationship. Looking back, those were blissful years where we flouted God-fearing values, had sex for pleasure, teased heteronormative expectations, and bashed the church with abandon.

Occasionally, there were inklings of Aaron’s religious upbringing. When a performance class at our Los Angeles film school planned a visit to a Baptist church in South Central LA, Aaron refused to go. The professor thought the vocal stylings of this particular Baptist preacher were affecting, winsome, and authentic, but Aaron wouldn’t bite. “I’m not comfortable laughing at people in church,” he said.

“That’s not what the field trip is about,” I said with a half smile. I was excited to use the word “field trip” at the age of twenty-five, while at the same time I related a genuine sentiment. If anyone laughed, the alternative but deadly serious professor would have reprimanded them, but the notion of attending church for anything other than worship pulled at Aaron’s heart strings.

Concerned, I turned to my trusty astrology book. I preferred this book because it listed horoscopes not by month, but by day, and it grounded its descriptions in personality traits. As I turned to Aaron’s page, I knew this route wasn’t entirely logical, but I needed guidance and I’d rather have it from the occult than white men in robes who stood behind podiums. Unfortunately for me, spirituality was all over Aaron’s page. The meditation for his birthday, The Day of Inner Fervor, was See God in everything. Notable passages of his horoscope included Belief is an important theme in the lives of December 10 people. Devotional types, they pray at the altar of character, wisdom, morality. The final sentence was the kicker: They may put their faith in God, the Universe, scientific laws or in a moving Spirit behind all things, but they generally put their faith somewhere.

To calm myself, I chose to believe Aaron put his faith in art. He had a BFA in photography, nearly an MFA in filmmaking, and he worked as a producer on film sets and as an artistic director for a record label. He had such a blind devotion to artmaking that he put up with many things I would not. On set, he spent fourteen hours a day on the Canadian border in below-zero temperatures and bathed in an outdoor shower in November. He wrote emails at 4 a.m., and he drove three hours to buy an actor a Peloton, all in the name of art.

I, too, worked in the arts, although sometimes begrudgingly. I occasionally fantasized about having a more stable or lucrative career, but Aaron couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t see the point, even when we were so broke. After years of supporting us in reality TV, he’d pulled the plug on his stable job when we’d saved enough for a sandwich. Aaron and I also diverged in how we categorized artists. I thought an artist was someone who exhibited work, while Aaron thought an artist was someone who saw the world through an aesthetic lens … which sounded awfully … spiritual. So, he was spiritual, that wasn’t bad. His faith was in art, I told myself as I settled under the sheets at night.

•••

Suddenly, when Aaron became a dad, Baby Jesus was uttered not with sarcasm, but as a salve during intimate moments and a solution in times of stress.

As new parents, our anxiety was completely intertwined with the frequency and texture of our daughter’s excrement. We had graduate degrees, we were award-winning filmmakers and writers. We had slowly, steadfastly crafted the lives we wanted—but everything we held dear was at the whim of our daughter’s poop. When she was backed up, she wouldn’t play, sleep, or sit. She screamed, fussed, and was inconsolable, and our lives came to a screeching halt.

Generally, after a day and a half without a poop, we began to troubleshoot. At our disposal, we had a variety of strategies our pediatrician encouraged, and some he allowed with reservation. Judging when to utilize the emergency measures was obviously a fraught decision. When the lack of shit hit the fan, it was no surprise that Aaron tended toward abstinence, or divine intervention. As the vessel who carried our daughter, her screams pierced not only my ears, but my uterus and soul, or maybe I was just a wimp. I preferred to use everything in the medicine bag until the turd left the building.

During a particularly long bout without a poop where we followed Aaron’s method of doing nothing, our daughter clung to us and whimpered for the better part of three days. When the moment finally presented itself and our daughter passed a boulder so well-packed, she screamed in pain, I shouted over her cries, “I told you we should have used the mineral oil.”

“That’s not how Baby Jesus made assholes!” Aaron screamed. There was not a smirk before, after, or anywhere in the vicinity of his comment.

Our warring perspectives were probably not helped by the fact that our daughter was born in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown. We suffered not only the isolation of new parents, but the seclusion of the pandemic.

At night, we were relegated to our movie projector. Like any two people, our tastes diverged, and we were both filmmakers, so obviously we argued about movies. I was a film professor who could handle more academic material, while Aaron’s taste drifted commercial. In the past, we’d disagreed over Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he considered romantic, while I found it depressing that the hero only loved the heroine when she was disguised as another woman. I’d put off watching It’s a Wonderful Life until my mid-thirties because I sensed it was… well… Catholic. When I finally saw it per Aaron’s suggestion, he cried at the movie’s sense of love and sacrifice, while I thought it was blaringly disheartening that Jimmy Stewart never left his dying small town and instead lapsed into depression and alcoholism.

Once Aaron became a father, his taste skewed in a direction I could not grasp. Over his former preference for stand-up, horror, and boundary-pushing foreign films, he chose family movies. Weeks after our daughter was born, we streamed the TV show Virgin River about a woman who finds love in a small town, followed by both the original and remake of the maternal suburban The Stepford Wives, before landing firmly in the 1950s with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This riveting piece of cinema culminated with Elizabeth Taylor lying that she was pregnant to please her extended family. This was not the impetus to the story; it was the end. In the final frame, Director Richard Brooks winked at the audience with a kaleidoscopic fade on a long kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and her husband suggesting that maybe, finally, she’d just do what everyone wanted and get pregnant. After that hot mess, Aaron and I settled for less confrontational content, but, even ironically, there are only so many times a film professor can watch the Hallmark Channel.

A chilly spell at the end of April caused me to bring out our daughter’s stroller sleeping bag. With her zipped in the bassinet, I walked laps in Prospect Park amongst socially distanced crowds. After the genius move of not discussing whether we should have a child before I became pregnant, Aaron and I followed that up with the winning decision of not reviewing how we would raise our daughter. In forty-degree rain, I was desperate to talk to other urbanites. All I needed was a quick jab or poke at religion, but even with a mask on, no one would come near me.

As I pushed the stroller back toward our apartment, I was sympathetic toward my husband, to a point. For me, everything changed a year ago when I became pregnant. For him, things didn’t really shift until two months ago when our daughter was born. The entire time my body ached and ballooned, I mourned the loss of my childless life, but I also promised myself that not everything would change.

When I returned home, Aaron stood in the kitchen and unwrapped a cardboard box that had arrived in the mail. On my walk, I’d concluded that a pandemic not only prompted isolation, but fostered beliefs of the less sound mind. Maybe my logical husband had fallen victim to the mental toll of the pandemic. As I set our sleeping daughter in her crib, I approached him with extra compassion.

He pulled the last piece of bubble tape off what was clearly his childhood advent calendar. The calendar that hung in my childhood home was fluffy and bright with candy canes, mittens, and snowflakes. This austere, biblical calendar featured a wooden baby cradle, an ornate urn, and a goblet to drink Baby Jesus’s blood. I was mortified. Also, it was April. I took a deep breath and remembered my sentiment of compassion, but my gaze narrowed on the urn. “What’s with the urn? Whose ashes are in it?”

He shot me a glance.

I smiled, willing warmth into my face, if not my words.

“It’s not an urn. It’s a jar of frankincense, or perhaps myrrh. It’s one of the wise men’s gifts. See?” He pointed to the nativity scene at the top of the calendar.

“It’s April.”

“It’s homey.” He walked to the sink. As he fetched a glass of water, he added, “It’s good for her to become familiar with the iconography.”

“The iconography?” I blurted out.

He nodded as he drank. My compassion left the room, so I did, too.

The next day, I woke from a nap in our railroad apartment to hear Aaron bouncing our daughter on his knee in the next room. “Baby Jesus made these toes, these legs, this belly,” he sang. He kissed each body part after he named it. It was cute. Cute, and troubling. I rolled over, acquiescing that Jesus was in the house.

•••

Two months later we were forced out of New York. Moving during the pandemic was no treat, magnified by the fact that Aaron found work well off the beaten path in Bozeman, Montana. Days before our car transport service arrived, the company tripled the price, so we decided Aaron would drive, and I would fly cross-country with an infant and a cat.

Alone in the apartment, I took care of our daughter and cleared the wreckage of our presence. The day before our flight, Aaron called.

“Hey!” I said, sidetracked with the list of things I had to do before I turned in our keys.

He merely breathed into the phone.

“Honey? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“South Dakota.”

“Good, you’re almost there.”

“I think I should turn around.”

“What? No. Why?”

“I don’t know about you flying alone.”

“I can do it. It’s fine.” Four months postpartum, taking two flights with an infant and a cat was not a walk in the park, but I could do it.

“What if they take the baby?” he asked in short speech.

“Who?”

“TSA.”

My glance darted around our empty apartment and landed on a wall mirror—here on the heels of Baby Jesus was the spirited irrationality. I looked at myself in the mirror. “TSA is not going to steal our daughter.”

“You don’t have her birth certificate,” he said.

This was true. His family had planned a trip to Ireland, so we’d sent away for her passport. Still, TSA was not going to take the baby. “I have other documents. You just miss her, but she’s doing great. She pooped today. Actually, she pooped twice. Soft and large.”

There was a time when news of our daughter’s silky excrement was enough to elevate Aaron to a state of euphoria. This was not one of those times.

He sighed into the phone.

“Stay the course, honey. It would take longer to get back here. You wouldn’t make it before our flight,” I said as the tires of our basement-level Prius C hummed into the phone. It was his third day on the road, and my heart went out to him. “It’s crazy to drive alone for that long. It messes with your head. You’re almost there. We’ll be there tomorrow, and we’ll meet you.”

“Not if it’s up to TSA…” he muttered.

“Remember, she has my name. That’s why I’m flying with her. It’s cleaner, logistically. Plus, we didn’t steal her, so it’s all good.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Honey.” I bit my lip. “TSA is not going to take the baby. It’s a domestic flight. They’re not even going to check for identification.”

He seemed to mull over my words. As I counted the dust bunnies on the adjacent wall, I prayed that I got through to him. If I put my faith anywhere, it was in my husband.

Right now, he was probably cruising on a desolate stretch of I-90. Sioux Falls was at one end of the state, but it was a long six hours until The Badlands, Black Hills National Forest, and Rapid City at the other end. In between, there wasn’t much more than a raw sun and an occasional shopping center, or maybe a field of sunflowers. After three days of fast food, lumpy motel beds or—if I knew Aaron correctly, reclining in the driver’s seat at a truck stop—he was wan, uninspired, and sprouting acne. Alone in the car, he went without A/C in late June to save gas. With his t-shirt and the driver’s seat coated in back sweat, he drove, feeling the strain and uncertainty of another move while missing his wife and daughter.

I could handle a spiritual man but not an irrational one. Aaron was logical; he was under the stress of becoming a new parent and moving across the country during a pandemic. He was living proof that personality was not innate. Nurture triumphed over nature. Aaron knew the TSA did not steal babies; he was rational. In his long, slow breaths that permeated the line, I could hear his brain working it out this very moment.

Then his breath quickened right before he wailed, “But … what if they take the baby?!”

•••

JENNY HATCHADORIAN has been published by Story Club Magazine, Role Reboot, and Little Old Lady. Her comedic essay New Family won Story Club Cleveland’s Audience Award. She is working on a book of comedic essays titled Midwestern Witch. Follow her on Instagram @hatchadorianhere or Twitter @hatchadorian

The COVID Swamp

By Michele Coppola

My mother and I have shared a hospital room on my birthday twice in our lives. The first time we were joined by an umbilical cord. The second time, fifty-seven years later, by the coronavirus.

I left my cool green bubble of Portland, Oregon, on the morning of June 30, 2020. [Note: the Before Vaccine era. —ed.] I was coronavirus negative. I arrived in steamy Orlando, Florida, that night, and within four days was feverish, nauseous, and had a vicious cough that punched out my solar plexus like a prize fighter.

There’s no way I would have traveled during this pandemic unless someone was dying. That someone was my eighty-one-year-old father, who was deteriorating quickly in the nursing home where he’d been convalescing since a bad fall a couple of weeks earlier.

Nine days after my arrival, the man who gave me his eyes and smart mouth was rushed to the emergency room when he was found unresponsive. I raced my mother to the hospital, where they attempted to keep us out due to the spike in coronavirus infections in the area.

“My father is NOT going to die alone!” I yelled at the hospital administrator. I saw the security guards pass a look between them. I had the virus; I was sure of it. I knew they suspected it, as the sweat dripped down the side of my flushed, masked face. “My parents…they’ve been married sixty years. Please.”

In the end, the administrator relented. My mother, brother, sister-in-law, and I got to stroke my dad’s pale, waxy cheek, tell him we loved him, and that it was okay for him to go.

Three days after my father died, my mother and I were both on oxygen, bunkmates in a hospital room trading Jell-o.

•••

I finally landed in that hospital room after calling 911 when I nearly passed out trying to lift myself up from the couch. The cough had not relented, and I hadn’t eaten in two days. The paramedics who came to get me at my mother’s house had been there the night before to transport my mom, and they recognized me.

“Your turn, huh?” One of them asked jovially. I shook my head and tried to choke out some words. They had me loaded with tubes up my nose within minutes.

“Oxygen sat 84. Temp 103.3,” I heard one of them call out.

I was in the ER hallway for about an hour before they wheeled me into a curtained cubicle. One of the ambulance paramedics came inside, asked me if I was ok, then sat down beside me.

“Are you a person of faith?” he asked.

“No,” I said, with as much force as my oxygen-starved voice could muster.

His eyes widened and he sat back. That obviously wasn’t an answer he heard much. “Well. Would you mind if I prayed with you anyway?”

I had just enough strength for an eye roll. “If you feel like you gotta, go ahead,” I gasped out.

The paramedic took my hand and sincerely prayed for God to watch over me so I could one day “find my faith and be a witness for his grace.”

He should have asked God for an open hospital bed. The likelihood of finding one in Florida at that moment was as non-existent as me becoming a sister-wife.

I spent sixteen sleepless hours on that painful ER gurney while I waited, dragging an oxygen canister with me when I had to pee while trying to hold a breezy hospital toga closed. The clothes I’d arrived in were wadded in a plastic bag, rank with fever sweat.

At some point during those endless hours, I got a call on my cell from a hospital social worker who didn’t realize I was just downstairs. She informed me that my mother—who was still on oxygen, disoriented, and using a bedpan—was, nevertheless, well enough to go home.

I told her that there was no one available to care for my mother because my brother lives four hours north and I was now hospitalized, downstairs in her hospital, with COVID-19.

“Oh, how awful,” she said with practiced sympathy. “But you’ve got to figure something out because we need the bed. Maybe you could hire full-time care? I’ll send down some information for companies who do that.”

“And how much do you estimate home care would cost?” I asked.

“My guess would be in the neighborhood of $1700 a week,” she said, as if it were anywhere close to a reasonable number.

I wanted to cry, but the truth is I hadn’t shed a tear since my father died. The shock of his death, the need to stay upright to care for my collapsed mother, and the sudden reality of my own illness—it was all packed tight, damming up the river of grief behind my eyes. And now while struggling to breathe myself, I had to figure out what to do with a barely functional parent.

It was my brother, normally the chill King of Confrontation Avoidance, who came to the rescue.

“We’re not gonna pay $1700 to have someone do what y’all should be doing,” he thundered at the social worker when he got her on the phone. “Why can’t you put my mom and my sister together in a room? They’ve got the same thing!”

Something else of note that happened that night: After spending the better part of the last thirty years resenting my younger sibling for never visiting me in Oregon, I forgave him.

•••

My mother has only awakened twice since I joined her in the room: once to acknowledge my arrival and once to be taken to the bathroom. Months later she will tell me she remembers very little about being in the hospital at all, and it is no surprise.

Other than the muffled chaos on the other side of the closed hospital room door, everything is hushed. Except my brain, which is an out-of-control Tilt-A-Whirl.

I have COVID.

I might die.

No, I am not going to die. Stop being stupid.

My dad is dead. I will never see him again.

Oh God, am I going to end up on a ventilator?

When will I be able to take a shower?

I have COVID.

Do my dogs think I am never coming home?

I am a statistic.

Am I going to die?

I have COVID.

The IV fluid machine beeps when my oxygen level dips, which is often. It is not comforting. I turn on the TV and see Florida’s beefy, blue-blazered governor bloviating that his state—which has some of the highest rates of infection in the nation—is handling the pandemic just fine.

“We’ve got a health system that’s working,” he says. “Anyone who needs a bed can get one.”

The nurse assistant who came in to empty our trash cans looks up at the TV and shakes her head.

“We just need to turn this whole thing over to Jesus,” she sighs.

•••

Three times a day I must remind the ever-changing aides to cut up my mom’s food and help her eat. Her hands are frozen with stress-induced arthritis, and she sleeps twenty-two hours a day. This is the woman they wanted to send home because they needed the bed for sicker people. I am furious all over again.

But it is not the fault of the hands-on hospital staff. They are, to a one, helpful and kind—zipped head-to-toe in PPE jumpsuits, industrial blue Oompa Loompas with exhausted eyes behind shiny plastic face guards.

My guess is that the doctors are equally fatigued, but I wouldn’t know for sure because you rarely see one. I’ve requested an audience with a physician every day since I was admitted so I can get some clarity on my mother’s condition as well as my own.

Finally on Day 3, a harried doctor arrives and informs me that in addition to COVID-19, we both have pneumonia. My mother is also on pain medication for her acute arthritis and is being treated for a severe bladder infection, which in elderly people often causes confusion and disorientation.

“But actually,” says the doctor, “you’re sicker with COVID than she is. When you came in your fever was higher and the scans showed more lung inflammation.” He says I will probably be there for several days and not to be surprised if it gets worse before it gets better.

My husband is back in Oregon, and we have agreed for his safety and my peace of mind he will stay there. My cell is dead, so he passed along my hospital room phone number to my best friend, who is frantic with worry.

Her voice breaks and wavers at the end of our conversation, and as is her way, she cuts right to the chase. “Please don’t die, okay?”

•••

Day 4 in the hospital is my birthday. Since COVID-19 wasn’t able to take down my hedonistic sense of taste and smell, I order pasta for dinner—and for the first time since I arrived here, a dessert.

I am informed by an apologetic kitchen staffer that I can have pasta or dessert, but not both, as the attending physician has put me on a modified diabetic eating plan. I opt for the pasta. Then I order a meal for my mother, who is barely eating. She is getting chocolate cake for dessert.

Like much of the rest of the western world, COVID-19 hates fat people. The TV news spouts statistics showing that in addition to people over sixty-five, the patients most likely to develop serious complications from the virus are those with obesity and its BFFs high blood pressure and diabetes.

That would be me. Both my blood pressure and blood sugar are well controlled with medication and exercise, but I’m under no illusions about what carrying around so much extra weight at my age means for my health. Unlike many self-designated social media health experts and internet trolls, however, I don’t believe I deserve to die from COVID-19 because I’m fat.

But my weight is likely part of the reason I’m lying in a hospital room next to my faded southern beauty of a mother, who sleeps open-mouthed and corpse-like, in the mechanical bed next to mine.

She looks like a week-old cut rose, the petals and leaves all browning at the edges. I love her so much.

•••

Why is it that so many health crises seem to happen on the toilet? That’s where my mom collapsed at two a.m. the night she was brought here, and it’s now where I am starting to panic because I am unable to stand up.

My head has been a helium balloon all day, my oxygen levels rarely above 95. A respiratory therapist came in to consult earlier and after he turned up the levels on the O₂ concentrator, I started to feel a little better.

Or at least I did until right now, when I tried to get up from the commode. I’m swimmy and damp with sweat. My lungs will barely inflate.

By the time I make it back to the bed ten steps away, clinging to the wall, I’m gasping and almost in tears. The sweat has cooled and I’m shivering but too exhausted to pull the sheet up. Panic is frantically knocking, knocking and I grip the mattress with both hands. My mother has slept through all of this.

I try to force my lungs to take a deep breath and I choke. The edges of my vision darken, my heart flutters. I am terrified that if I call a nurse, they will put me on a ventilator. I am equally terrified that if I don’t call, my brain will start to die from lack of oxygen.

I am fat, middle-aged, not rich, and not beautiful. My only worth and value to the world is, and has been, my sharp, creative brain. If I lose that I am a useless blob.

My insecurities are pathetic and not rational. But they make me hit the call button and save my own life.

•••

Two days after I thought I was going to die, I am discharged from the hospital at ten p.m. with portable oxygen. My mother will stay in the hospital for another few days until a bed opens up in a COVID-19 rehab facility, because she is going to need more care than I can give her right now.

I end up spending three extra hours at the hospital after the doctor officially releases me because I must arrange a ride back to my mother’s house fifteen minutes away. As a COVID-19 patient, rideshares and taxis are out, and an ambulance would charge $300 a mile.

Eventually it is Heidi, one of my mom’s dearest neighborhood friends, who dons a mask and gloves and comes to get me. Heidi has also been braving my mom’s virus-drenched house to feed the cat and bring in the mail. She is an angel in cropped pants and my hero.

When I get back to the house I collapse on the couch and remain there, hooked to an oxygen tank—and in the same dank clothes I was wearing when I was taken to the hospital a week prior—for the next three days. My hair is greasy, my skin slimy, my nostrils raw from the oxygen tubes. I stare at the decaying flowers with still-jaunty bows sitting all around the house, sent after my father passed.

Oh, right. My dad is dead. My gut lurches.

The next morning it takes me a half hour to get up and go to the bathroom. Any movement leaves me breathless and swaying. Days slide into nights. The house landline phone rings and rings and rings. I know people are worried but talking leaves me dizzy and exhausted.

After a few days I start picking up the phone. “No, there’s nothing you can do. Thanks,” I repeat, over and over and over to people who wouldn’t come near me even if they were close by.

One of my North Carolina cousins from my mom’s side of the family calls. Her mouth-full-of-marbles voice is thick with concern and for once, I am truly thankful she is the type who prefers talking to listening. Towards the end of our conversation, she asks if she can play me a hymn on the piano over the phone. A sweet gesture from a pure heart.

“No thanks. I just need a nap right now,” I rasp.

“Well, we’ll be prayin’ for ya,” she says.

•••

On the fourth day I finally disconnect from the oxygen tank (I have named it O2D2) to take a shower. Afterwards, I stand in the stall in a daze, dripping. With only a towel covering me, I make it to the couch and sit there, tubes in nose, bare butt on microfiber, for several hours.

It occurs to me how alone I am. Had I passed out trying to scrub my pits, when would someone have found me? I refuse to let my healthy brother and sister-in-law near me, and only a few of the Necco-wafer-colored houses nearby are occupied because the snowbirds vacate this swamp in summer. So if a COVID survivor falls in the shower and there’s no one to hear, does she make the news?

Flipping through TV channels, I see a report that the coronavirus death toll is over 150,000. Trump says that the U.S. is handling things very well, much better than most other places, whatever that means.

The house phone rings. It is a medical assistant from a local clinic twenty-five miles away where nearly three weeks ago, after calling around for hours, I had finally managed to get my mother and me tested for COVID-19. At that time there were no rapid tests and results were taking a minimum of ten days.

The medical assistant is apologetic. “I’m calling to let you know that both you and Shelby Coppola’s tests came back positive,” she says.

“Well, that would explain why my mom’s in the hospital and there’s oxygen up my nose,” I say.

•••

A six-legged, cicada-type insect takes up residence on the front door about two weeks after I am released from the hospital. It is the size of a toddler and looks like some sort of plague-house marker from the underworld.

I say hello to it when I finally leave the house to get my mom’s mail at the box across the street.

It is late July now, and the central Florida morning air has all the breathability of moist, day-old underwear. I make it to the mailbox and back but require a half-hour session with O2D2 to recover.

I soon learn that the plague cicada has indeed come to warn of an impending condition nearly as distressing as the coronavirus itself: the antibiotic-resistant, I-eat-Monistat-For-Breakfast Yeast Infection.

Like most COVID-19 patients, my treatment included large doses of steroids. This can spike blood sugar, which then makes you susceptible to severe yeast infections. I am unable to walk upright and peeing makes me scream. The infection then spreads to my backside and all elimination becomes torture.

When it’s obvious that the first course of yeast infection antibiotics prescribed via teledoc isn’t going to work, I drive to an urgent care clinic to see a doctor in person. The small waiting room is packed full of masked, coughing patients sitting just a few feet apart and I am informed that even though I have an appointment, there is a three-hour wait.

So I sit in the car for those hours, reading news on my phone and, when the thick stickiness of the late morning becomes too much for my weakened lungs, I run the air conditioner. Two hundred fifty-three more people died from the virus yesterday in Florida, the highest one-day death total so far in the pandemic. Governor Blue Blazer is annoyed that the media is focused on deaths rather than falling infection rates.

I am focused on breathing while I wait, and on the chronic queasiness I know is the result of worrying about my mother. I cannot stop thinking about her, desperately lonely and grieving in a spartan rehab center. By the time she comes home she will have been locked in—wearing nothing but a hospital gown and socks—for 22 days. She has no one for company except the attendants who bring her meals and whomever she can reach on her cell phone.

I feel incredibly guilty that I was not well enough to care for her and spare her that.

The second course of antibiotics from the urgent clinic doctor finally works, and a few days later I am no longer petrified when I feel the need to urinate. Most of all, I can now breathe, deep and full. Deep and full.

The plague cicada disappeared a few days later.

•••

I’m not sure what day it is, but I observe that all the houses in my mom’s subdivision have their garbage bins out, so I go around and pick up all the dead flowers, collect the other household trash, and take it to the curb. The next-door neighbor sees me, waves, and walks up the driveway. But only so far.

“How’s your mom doing?” she asks.

“She’s as well as she can be, considering,” I say, shading my eyes from the relentless sun. “We hope she can come home in the next few days, once she gets a second negative COVID test.”

“We were all sorry to hear about your dad,” she says kindly. “I know he’d been sick for a long time. What happened?”

“Heart failure and sepsis.”

The neighbor nods. “Yeah, but I bet they listed COVID on his death certificate. They’re doing that now to make the hospitals more money.”

I look at her and shake my head. “Sorry, but I don’t believe that,” I say. “And no—his death certificate had heart failure and sepsis on it. That’s all.”

She pauses a moment. “Well. I know it’s going on other places. You let your mom know we’re thinking of her and lifting you all up to the Lord.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

•••

My husband Facetimes me, eager to show me how his worry and stress have manifested into a garage so clean and well-organized we can now fit my car inside. He also mentions that the hospital bills have started to roll in at home.

“Over five thousand bucks for your day-and-a-half in the emergency room—that’s before you even got to a real bed,” he tells me. “Let’s hear it for good insurance.”

Remembering the miasma of panic, near-suffocation and back pain I felt during that endless day and night in the ER puts my privilege into stark relief. Until now, I had the luxury of suffering through that without even giving a thought as to how we would pay for all this.

That realization almost makes me cry. Almost. But the truth is that except for the night my dad passed away, I still haven’t shed tears about anything. I think maybe my overwhelmed brain is using denial to cope, and that scares me a bit.

What also scares me is that my mom is coming home soon and I have no idea what kind of shape she’ll be in. I know she is still not walking well and her emotional state has deteriorated. She’s also not eating much but it’s mostly because she hates the food at the rehab center.

“Yesterday they brought me something that looked like diarrhea on a tortilla,” she complains.

“Well, tell them to bring you something else,” I suggest.

“I did. I had a couple of bites of a sandwich. It wasn’t good either. But the girl who brought it was sweet and it was so nice to have someone to talk to,” she says, and starts to cry.

•••

A month later, my family boards a small fishing boat to take my father’s ashes out to sea, per his wishes. My mother has been out of rehab for a few weeks and she’s shaky, but steady enough.

I seem to have bounced back pretty well. I don’t know it yet, but soon I’m going to start losing my hair—which infectious disease expert Alyssa Milano has already informed the world is an after-effect of COVID. Right now, though, it’s getting tangled in the late afternoon breeze as we speed out into Tampa Bay.

Once we are the required three miles from shore, the captain cuts the motor. We all share some memories about my dad, and my mom reads a poem she wrote for him on their forty-fifth anniversary. We play Sinatra’s “My Way”, and my brother chokes up as he pours my dad’s cremains into the choppy, jade-green water.

The rest of us throw flowers in the stream of ashes, which sparkle a little as they sink, then disappear. I didn’t realize ashes would sparkle. On another day I might roll my eyes at the thought, but today I let myself believe that those sparkles are my dad saying goodbye.

I also realize that I am finally crying, a salty stream down my cheeks and neck.

My mom sees me wiping away the tears and rubs my back, the way only mothers know how to do. “I can’t believe he’s gone, either,” she says. “I just can’t believe it.”

I shake my head. “You know mom, I’m devastated about dad. But I think I’m really crying ’cause I’m just so relieved we got to do this for him. I mean, we’re breathing. We made it.”

“Don’t ever tell me prayer doesn’t work,” she says, squeezing my hand.

The captain starts the motor and turns the boat for shore. We all look up and squint into the dissolving sun.

•••

MICHELE COPPOLA is a former radio personality who now works as a professional copywriter and freelancer. Her work has appeared previously in Full Grown People, The Oregonian, Spot Magazine, and various literary journals. She lives in Portland, OR with three senior rescue dogs and a stray she married named Bryon.