Category: Identity

Knowing

Photo By Gina Easley

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

By the time she had grown sharper,…, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t big enough to play.

from What Maisie Knew, by Henry James

There was an antique chest in my childhood room at the foot of my bed. I used to sit on this chest—attending to posture, hand positioning, and embouchure—two feet planted on the wood floor, while I practiced my flute, the symphony orchestra pieces, the descant parts for the piccolo, the classical pieces I worked on for solos and auditions.

I also sat there, cross legged and folded onto myself, one elbow on my knee, when I pulled the beige trimline phone on the longest extension cord available into my room, the receiver propped on my pillow. While I riffed the flute part to Duran Duran, my best friend did the same, but in awesome harmony, on her end of the line crackling with the exertion of extending our across town connection through that twenty-foot cord.

A few years ago, my bedroom became an office, as happens to the smallest room in the house when children grow up, and I spent time sorting through that chest. Lifting the lid for the first time in years, I smelled my grandparent’s house, from whom this chest had been inherited wafting from it. On top of the chest’s contents were a collection of ziplocked bags that surprised me; my mother had placed them there, saved and labeled as she cleaned out closets and drawers and nooks in their home. One bag held my Brownie uniform, pressed, the badge sash showcased. Below that, the prairie dress my mother and I had made together, during my Laura Ingalls Wilder phase. Then, the snazzy orange and gold asymmetrically off-one-shoulder leotard, with, well, a diagonal stripe of yellow fringe, with not quite matching, spray painted orange ballet shoes, my costume the year my jazz dance class danced to the Eye of the Tiger. Also, the felt hand puppets I crafted as a visual aid for my middle school book report on Jane Eyre. Yes, I do realize middle school is not the appropriate time to present your book report as a hand puppet soliloquy, but then, middle school is also not the time to be reading Jane Eyre, so apparently I was just letting my freak flag fly. The black felt glasses dangled from Mr. Rochester’s chin.

Once I’d excavated below this perfect collection of my seventies’ childhood, I came to the items that I’d placed in the trunk myself over the years I lived at home, before I left for college. The first item was my trusty, and in some places, now rusty, folding metal music stand, the kind with a telescopic pole and a music holder that collapses like an umbrella, the legs folding up and snugging against the pole. I used this stand to practice in my room, but I also carried it with me to rehearsals, to music camps, and overseas when I travelled with my music groups. Wrapped around the pole was a carefully wound piece of narrow white adhesive tape, the kind with the almost lacey edge, the adhesive still strong, but oozy and gooey in its age. On the tape, in my younger-self handwriting, was my childhood name, now replaced with Rebecca: Becky Stetson.

Below that stand, I came to what I was looking for, my mementos: dried prom flowers, ticket stubs to concerts, fragments of poems, a pair of bright blue lightning bolt earrings I bought at Hampton Beach, some pictures from photo booths with friends, all of us permed, hair sprayed, lip glossed and fabulous, the strips of photo paper now curling and yellowing. A smooshed penny a friend had handed me, asking, Can you keep a secret? The penny that revealed she was freshly back from breaking school rules by sneaking away during recess to retrieve the coins she had laid on the railroad tracks that ran behind our school. I could, and despite my concern, I had. Inside my royal blue bedazzled and bestickered Trapper Keeper, I found a torn page, the early draft of a poem I wrote late one night while listening to Peter Cetera on repeat through my giant face squishing headphones, about a boy who had broken my teenage heart, a poem that later inspired the Shakespearian-ish love sonnet assignment I had in college, when he and I were still entangled, back then the best model I had for love. And under them, a small stack of letters, each one written in the same small handwriting, folded carefully as though to contain the words they held that were never spoken aloud.

Dear Rebecca, they all began. These letters to me, about places and events and feelings that happened so many years ago, are written to a girl I no longer am, but using a name that I have now claimed. Jarred by the mixing of past and present, this small stack of letters sent me immediately to a certain place in the woods, down a long unpaved road.

•••

We were often running late and driving fast in our borrowed and beaten family cars when we bounced, squeaked, and scraped down an unmaintained dirt road, taking curves we knew by muscle memory. Our real lives were in various public schools. A cloud of dust billowed behind us in the growing darkness, trying to keep up, until we lurched to a stop, that dust now having the advantage of movement, enveloping the car in a dry unfocusing haze. The road ended in a large parking lot bordered by a river on one side and a steeply graded and heavily wooded hill on the other. Cut into that hill were crooked stairs made of railroad ties leading to a low one-story building. The double doors to a large gathering room in that building opened wide, light spilling into the woods; a curtained window in a door to the small office beside it glowed but dimly.

Pulling into a parking spot as others skidded into theirs, emergency brakes screeched, and after a quick check of our hair and a glance into our own eyes for reassurance in the rearview mirror, doors flew open, and we unfolded lengthening legs and planted our feet on the dirt. We stretched, assessed, and observed each other for a few brief moments before we reengaged in chaotic movement, calling to a friend across the parking lot, teasing, and laughing. We rushed to the backs of our cars, grabbed for the worn leather wrapped handles of black cases of various shapes and sizes and hauled them out, then reached back in for our uniform black vinyl music folders with our free hands. Adjusting ourselves to the familiar weight of our instruments, whether they were flutes or french horns or drum sticks, we slammed the trunk shut and lugged our instruments and tardy selves breathlessly up those stairs. All to pause in the doorway from woods to inside, blinking as darkness became light.

The room teemed with movement and sound, a low breathy murmur of voices, chatting, flirting, and a steady pulse of blushes, glances, turning of knees and widening of eyes toward and away. The sudden jarring sound of furniture being slid across the concrete floor percussed the din, brass instruments making blatting approximations of body functions, cases being slammed shut and music stands toppling over, the rising and falling of warm-up scales. Jolted back into forward motion by a smile from a friend I found in the crowd, my assigned seat beside her, I entered the shimmering blob of happy energetic teenagers in all their oafish pimply hormonally gorgeous glory.

There remained a few empty seats in our arch of chairs, those of the officers of the symphony, still in a meeting together behind the closed door between us and the small adjacent office. That office, I knew, was stuffed with files and a desk belonging to the one adult out there in the woods each night. Once a week, eight folding chairs were carried by eight teenagers, many of whom were my friends, and stuffed amongst the clutter of that office for a weekly meeting before the rest of us arrived. The officers, the symphony’s version of the popular crowd, who dated other first chairs, were selected for solos—my stomach fluttered and a blush rose when I squeezed past them in the black narrow halls of the concert hall dressing rooms—were rumored to have outside gatherings and special events with our director. I was never a part of that small group, despite moving from last chair in the flute section to first during my years there, and I was envious of them.

A few minutes before the hour, the door to the office opened, and out spilled the small group of officers. As they moved through the door from the cramped quiet space to the large noisy room, mid-sentence with each other, a private joke or whispered comment passing between them followed by a look over their shoulder back into the office, their eyes and attention passed from each other to the synchronized rumpus before them, to us, the until now unsupervised and unruly crowd.

In moments, their tense composure, edgy reserve, and self-conscious swagger morphed as they grabbed their instruments and music and slid into their own places, cast grins and quick words to those nearby, and an easy loosening and perfectly teenagery slouch returned to their bodies. We non-officers made biting envious comments to each other about the injustice and unfairness of who was chosen by the director, typically boys, to be officers. But friends nonetheless, we swallowed them up, and we swirled and pulsed and giggled and sagged and bleated until at the same time each rehearsal, two minutes past the hour, when a long sustained floating A became discernible amongst all the other noise. Slowly, as though filing into line, we placed our folders on our music stands and swung them open, pushed cases under our chairs, straightened our posture, and phrases and warm-ups and noise faded as each musician began to tune themselves to that note. The director emerged from the office as the last of us made our pitch adjustments and walked to his position in the center of our half circle configuration, pulled his baton from his pocket, opened his own black music folder, and then, and only then, looked up at us. He could expect to see all of us, quiet now, looking right back at him. We were ready to play.

It was a flawed place, competitive, stressful, and it operated on favoritism and unspoken rules. But we were thankful for this place nonetheless and for the music we could skillfully make together. We came from public schools where the music programs were underfunded, nonexistent, troubled by difficult behaviors or missing brass sections, where clarinets squeaked when phrases were technical, trumpet players blatted and lost their embouchures mid solo, and cymbals clanged grandly and unintentionally comically, just after the final beat. More importantly, we all loved this place for what it held for us beyond music.

For that teeming rhythmic mass that we entered each rehearsal, in a place in the woods far away from where we spent the rest of our days, and for some of us, far away from our other selves. Where we could interact with each other without much adult supervision, play around with our growing independence and competence and desire to be connected, seen, and feel close to one another. In this place I worked out the art and power of careful attention, of observation, and how to wield it, watching sideways as I put together my flute what was new in the room each rehearsal, a new flirtatious coupling perhaps, someone who seemed a bit off—I was figuring out where I wanted to be in all that. Where we could imagine or act out our antics within a small and safe group, and experience all the earth-shuddering boiling waves of happiness, anticipation, hope, failure, and pain that is the music of the teenage years.

•••

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.

Erik Erikson

I’m struck by just how much detail I remember about this place from so many years ago, the distance of time, place, and who I was then seeming so vast. There’s a well known phenomenon in memory studies, referred to as the reminiscence bump, in which we remember more from our adolescent years than from any other time in our lives. Much has been learned in the past few decades about brain functioning and development, and particularly about the unique changes and processes that are characteristic of the adolescent brain, developmental changes occuring in levels of arousal, reactivity, and emotionality. During these years, the influence of experience on the brain is particularly strong, and teenagers remember more, both the thrilling first encounters and the mundane moments. The adolescent brain becomes more sensitive to and aware of social information, more interested and responsive to reward, and less responsive to perceived risk, likely controlled by changes in the the brain’s reward system, specifically the dopamine system. Adolescents are more attuned to the world, more likely to be influenced in enduring ways.

I’m able to call up the smell of those woods, the feeling of navigating those strangely spaced stairs, too short and shallow to be able to run up using my normal stride, too far apart to skip a step in between, the flutter of my stomach in those seconds between turning my car’s engine off and pulling on the car’s door handle, caused by both excitement and anxiety.

I’m made anxious all over again remembering the rehearsals when the director imposed unannounced practicing inspections, during which, after obvious wrong notes came a few too many times from a particular instrument section, our director became calmly enraged, a combination I found terrifying, slowly placed his baton on the music stand, and left the room. A few seconds later, we heard a slow motion scratch, as he dragged a chair from his office and returned to his conductor’s stand. And then, he pointed that baton at each member of an instrument section, one after another, and had you play that section alone. If you flubbed, whether due to lack of practicing or for me, the sudden onset of full bodied prickling of nerves, uncontrollable sweat, and fingers that refused to move, our director gestured with his baton a shameful half do-si-do with the person beside you, moving down in moments the ranks you had slowly, arduously, intentionally toiled to move up for years.

There was a brief period when I eagerly waited for a boy to pick me up and drive me to those rehearsals. I waited for him in the large picture window of our house in a cul de sac, and upon his appearance round the turn at the end of our street, I dashed out of my house and down the hill to his car, as he hopped out and flung open his roof for our drive. As we zipped down the street, my hair blew in my mouth and flicked into my eyes, though I could still see my parents’ panicked faces watching from that same picture window, scanning for a seat belt, tires that were all inflated, two teenage boy hands on the wheel.

Those days we flew down that long dirt road hitting every pothole squarely, spinning out on the sharp turns. For that brief time, I had someone to run up those steps toward the bright spilling light and enter the noise with, together. Where the regular beat of the room was augmented by sensorial spikes from the stomach fluttering thrill of finding him across the room watching me, sensing his eyes on my back, sitting two rows behind me, the thrill when he jogged over during breaks, saxophone around his neck, and skillfully slinked around the music stand and into the empty chair beside me for a quick chat and a brushing of our hands against each other.

And it was in that room that I lost that first boyfriend to the first clarinet player. The girl who sat straight across from me for a year, just the director’s music stand between us, that stand disappointingly unreliable in helping me hide from her adoring eyes for my now ex-boyfriend who still sat straight behind me. During breaks I practiced controlling eye gaze and facial expression, whispering animatedly to my friend on my right and neglecting anything to my left to avoid taking in their lusty canoodling against the line of folded chairs in the corner.

There are so many parts I can pull out of the auditory stew of that room and the world it opened to me. I’ve drawn on this place, this time, and all of the experiences and feelings and firsts I had as a result of it. These experiences are uniquely mine, and I pull them out at different moments for different purposes. As a parent, I use the pain, loss, awkwardness, and simmering yuck to remind myself of how huge this all feels to my children as well. I sometimes completely ham up the band nerd part of my past, when I am trying to amuse them. What I know from back then: that no lost love ever chooses to move on with someone you do not run into often. I think of the trips where we traveled and performed in other countries. The pictures I found online of the cool kids, including that boy, obviously in his after me state, which was curiously much cooler, longhaired, arguably hot, and not mine, playing hacky sack, while in the periphery, I found me, permed and not so fabulous, sitting with my kind but nerdy friends snort laughing at jokes in the shadows of the Alps.

I had my narrative I had woven about this place, in the woods, at the end of a long road, where we went and left our parents behind and felt things more strongly than we ever would again. About what it held for me, the opening of myself, the growth, the feeling of belonging, of being seen and held and let go. Now, it also holds explanations for both who I have become, and who I have chosen not to be. It holds the people and things that I no longer have in my life, like the smell of hairspray and burning hair, a childhood nickname. Observing it across these years and from afar, my own teenage children standing at my side, I feel the strength a place like this gave me, but also the power it held over me.

•••

The developing brain is sculpted both by passive exposure and by active experience. That means that before your brain has fully matured, we can be affected, in potentially permanent ways, by every experience, whether it’s positive or negative, whether we understand it or not—in fact, whether or not we are even aware of it.

from Age of Opportunity, by Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D.

Dear Rebecca,

It’s an email from him, but as I read it, the text changes into his small tight handwriting in that stack of folded letters, the convertible driving lanky armed saxophone playing boy from thirty years ago. His character has been re-sorted multiple times over the years, from love to villain, friend to past. That boy, his car, his attention to me. He was the one I chose to stand beside in those years of growth, caring and hurting and being changed by each other. Who wrote to Rebecca back when I was still Becky, somehow knowing enough, more than I did then, of who I would become.

Have you heard about our band director? he writes one day, after we’ve exchanged a few emails, reading in each other’s messages who we have both become, as well as tentative glimpses at who we were to each other back then.

No. What? That’s all I write, but in my mind I am instantly and unwittingly thrust through a door of yet unrealized possibility. I know what he is going to tell me, his question enough to allow what was passive to become active, to open my eyes to other details in that room that had been there and encoded, but never in my full awareness. And soon, from across the country, this man writes to me of what he has learned, of allegations of our director’s sexual misconduct toward children, of secrets, of hurt, charges made but never proven. He’s reaching out, pulling me to stand beside him, a person from his past who saw what he saw, who needed this place as much as he did, to re-sort and discard and insert this new possible truth. We stand together, on opposite sides of the country, knowing very little about who each of us has become, and look back. I think back on gossip, glances, and silence, and I realize that what I interpreted as favoritism, or sexism, was potentially something far worse.

As we re-enter that room of adolescent haze and first experiences together, walking through it now as adults, adults with teenage children, suddenly it’s the light behind the office door that’s more in focus than the dizzying whirl of the larger space we shared and stirred. I turn to this man, holding the echo of that boy for him and he the echo of that girl for me, with whom I had my first intense relationship, a relationship I am beginning to realize formed amidst darkness and confusion, oozing between us and within us and around us in that room, a part of our own growth. And I realize. This place that we protected as uniquely our own, when we were there, and after. It did not protect us.

I wonder what I knew and didn’t know. What my limited experience and exposure kept me from understanding. What I attended to, as I was developing my own control of attention, observation, and influence. I grew up, married a different boy, became a parent, and watched my own children be whisked away while I observed from my own windows. And still. It was not until the question was raised by a boy from my past that I ever connected the things I learned and experienced later to what was happening beyond my awareness back then. That boy who knew a bit of my future pulled me back to better know, to attach meaning to, my past.

•••

What do you do when your story gets refocused and rearranged? What do you do with the telling of something that you feel shame, sadness, remorse, guilt, and yes, relief, about? How do you accept that a place, a person, a decision, a time, can allow such vigorous unfolding and potentially cause such debilitating harm?

Only now, as an adult, can I begin to fully realize the awful possibilities of things that can happen when vulnerability and power collide. By protecting this place as ours, as a refuge to grow and to change, in this messy, reactive, encircling, feral world we lived in at that age, we interpreted what we saw with the capacities of a child’s mind, through the lens of our self focus and experience. We held back information that might have allowed other adults, with their more mature understanding and experience of darker truths, with their awareness of things outside of that room, as less egocentrically and hormonally motivated people, to have sensed or realized that something was very wrong.

These days, there’s much discussion in the world about how these things happen, how a culture of abuse, of misused power, imbalance, physicality, and need, creates conditions in which so many small offices with closed doors can exist. As growing numbers of these rooms, rooms framed by walls and rooms framed by access, information, and privilege, come into focus. I’m beginning to understand the forces that keep these doors closed. And I am realizing that we all have the power to, and a role in, hurting others. By such simple acts as what we attend to. And what we do not.

I’m turning my awareness now to that door to a small office of my childhood and filtering out normative adolescent developmental noise, focusing, listening now to the vulnerabilities and losses and hurt that can be within that amalgamated sound as well. When back then it was all about the sound, the reward, the responsive movement between people, now I’m hearing more in the silence, the pauses, the turning away, the action that was out of step with the overall mass. I’m holding that all, adjusting, trying to learn to listen better.

We have a lot to learn from our own adolescent selves as adults caring for children in the grip of adolescence. We have a lot to learn from our children about who we are, and what we are capable of, as well. My daughter is reading the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, about a family in Nazi Germany during WWII. I’m editing her term paper, and she has chosen the following quote to write about:

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

from The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

She’s now the age I was when I first noticed that boy across the room. She’s grappling with this quote and the ideas it holds, thinking about the coupling of ugly and glorious. She has the words, the exposure, the concept that these are parts of one another. But I still think, that when placed in a room of brilliant noise, she wouldn’t recognize the darkness. For this, for so much, I am grateful. Do we have a right to ask our teenage selves, or our own teenagers, to be hyper vigilant? To open their eyes to potential evil and danger? Do they lose something if we do?

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and three children. Her essays have been published by Full Grown People, Taproot Magazine, Mamalode, and Maine the Way.

Read more FGP essays by Rebecca Stetson Werner.

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In the Language of My Former People

Photo by M.Peinado/Flickr

By Leah Elliott

One day, my mother’s name appears in my inbox. I open a message announcing that my parents have been called to be missionaries in the Philippines. I cringe, sigh, and think, I’m sorry, as I picture my parents—oh so pious and paternalistic—carrying out the Lord’s holy work of perpetuating colonialism in the Philippines.

I close my eyes. Truly, sincerely, I’m sorry.

•••

I was a Mormon, the earnest, orthodox, devout, faithful, believing kind.

On my father’s side, my ancestors were some of the very first members of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were among those who knew Joseph Smith and those who walked across the plains with Brigham Young to settle Utah. My mother was a convert from Florida. In 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, my mother’s big act of rebellion was to stand up to her pastor and defend her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church to join the Mormon Church. In 1968, she gave up a scholarship at a state university and instead enrolled at Brigham Young University. By the time she was nineteen, she and my dad were married. My oldest sister was born before their first anniversary, and there would be no ebb to the procreating for the next twenty years.

Mormonism made up the fabric of my childhood. It saturated my days with its regimen of six a.m. daily family scripture study; morning and evening family prayer; blessings on meals; individual prayers; individual scripture study; a weekly three-hour church bloc; midweek church activities; monthly fasting and bearing of testimonies; obedience to the Word of Wisdom, meaning abstention from alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine; observance of the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from activities deemed too raucous or worldly; General Conference, Stake Conference, ward conference, youth conference; temple preparation, missionary preparation, celestial-marriage-to-a-returned-missionary-for-time-and-all-eternity preparation; seminary; modesty in dress; Book-of-Mormon distance for dancing partners; avoiding even the appearance of evil; being in the world but not of the world; absolutely no sex ever, of any kind, not ever, not even with yourself, never, not ever until after you’re married, and then only with your opposite-sex spouse, and even then nothing too kinky .

Not one wisp of my life escaped Mormonism’s touch.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, my mounting disillusionment with Church culture and unsatisfactory answers to doctrinal and historical questions led me to leave the Church.

That year was the first time I tasted alcohol.

My experience of Mormonism was more harrowing than not, something I think of having survived and something I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to distance myself from.

Still, the tendrils of it follow me everywhere. It comes up frustratingly early with new acquaintances. When the answers to common getting-to-know-you questions are responses such as “I have ten siblings,” and “My parents live in Utah,” you can’t really plausibly deny ever having had anything to do with Mormonism.

I’m not especially proud of having been a Mormon. It was an unchosen identity, assigned to me at birth like gender, one that I earnestly tried to fill but ultimately found ill-fitting and had to drop. I get tired of being defined in terms of what I’ve chosen not to be, and my most painful life experiences aren’t really what I want to talk about with people I’ve just met. I’ve settled on a response for the inevitable, “Are you Mormon?” question: “I was raised that way, and my parents are, but I’m not anymore.” All of which is true, and none of which conveys any of the actual truth of the experience.

I usually ignore Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but if all my ex-Mormon friends show up as our friends in common, I accept the request. I know what it means to have been Mormon, and to go through the never-ending process of becoming not-Mormon. I know there’s a story of loss, grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and abuse. I know they’ve lost friends, and not uncommonly, have become estranged from at least some of their family. I know that, regardless of where they fall on the gender and sexuality spectrums, they’ve dealt with intense shame over their sexuality. I know they’ve had to learn how to reorient themselves to a world they were taught to remain aloof and unspotted from. Those within the Church regard you as fallen, deceived, succumbed to the influence of Satan, but life in The World is foreign.

Every former Mormon who sincerely believed the One True Church narrative, who had a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel, as they say, has come to a point of realization that this Thing that they have based every aspect of their lives on is not what they thought it was. The sheer terror of being thrust into freefall when your entire worldview collapses, the enormity of the gaping maw of the “So now what?” that you are left with, is impossible to explain to someone who has never been through it, and needs no explanation for someone who has.

•••

There are lots of names for people who leave the Church: ex-Mormon, Jack Mormon, former Mormon, recovering Mormon, anti-Mormon, or (my personal favorite) Mormon Alumni.

But still “Mormon,” all of them.

I had a Sunday School lesson when I was about four years old. It was an object lesson, a Mormon favorite. Our teacher gave us each a fresh sheet of clean, white paper and told us to crumple it up as small as we could. We were excited at being instructed to do something we’d normally be scolded for, and the room erupted with the noise of crackling paper. After a minute or so, our teacher reversed her instructions: Try to make the paper as it was before you crumpled it. Of course we couldn’t. And that was the point of the lesson, which was on consequences: Some things just can’t be undone.

I can be not-Mormon, but not never-has-been-Mormon.

In 2009, four years into my journey out of Mormonism, I arrived at a brief period of atheism and started a blog, which I titled “The Whore of All the Earth.” The Bible mentions the whore of Babylon, but “the whore of all the earth” is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, unique to Mormonism. I chose the title, in part, because I knew it would serve as a homing signal to other ex-Mormons. It was me trying to snap my fingers and catch their eye across a crowded room: “Yo! Yo! Over here! I’m one of you!”

And it worked. I blogged my way into an online community of others who had left the Church, people who got it in a way that never-were-Mormons can’t. But after a couple of years, I got burnt out on hearing “this was my awful experience of Mormonism” stories, weary of talking about Mormonism in general. There were reasons why I left, after all. So I withdrew from the ex-Mormon blogosphere.

•••

I constantly jot down random thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes these scribbles become the building blocks of poems. Sometimes lines of scripture come to my mind, and then I have to Google to see whether it’s from the Bible or from one of the books exclusive to the Mormon canon. In my upbringing, “scripture” was an umbrella category. There wasn’t much need to pay attention to whether a passage being quoted was from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, or the Bible, because all carried equal authoritative weight.

If a line I’ve jotted turns out to be from the Bible, I’ll go ahead and use it in a poem, but not if it’s from one of the Mormon scriptures. For one reason, relatively few people would recognize the allusion. For another, most of the time I wish I could just excise this past of mine.

One night, I was scribbling away, when this mash-up of the Mormon children’s song “I Am a Child of God” and the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” started working its way through my head. I noticed how similar the melodic and formal structures are, and even some of the words, and the delicious chromaticism that happens if you start the chorus of “I am a Child of God,” then swap out the line “Help me find the way” with the melody and words of the line “Help me find my proper place” from “Jesus.”

Aw, man, this is genius! I thought. Who could I share this with who would possibly appreciate how genius this is? There are approximately nine million Mormons in North America, or about 1.5% of the total population. I don’t have statistics for the number of Velvet Underground fans in that same area, but let’s assume that they’re a similarly narrow segment of the population. We can deduce that there probably isn’t a lot of overlap between these two groups. I felt a wistful twitch at the corners of my mouth as I realized that I might be the only person who would appreciate how cool the mash-up was. For the first time, I wanted to use something from Mormonism to make art. The problem wasn’t needing to hide having been a Mormon; the problem was that no one would get it.

But then I thought of other writers who allude to a non-mainstream heritage. Joy Harjo, for example, has used the names of Native ceremonial dances in her poems. There’s a little asterisk and footnote for those unfamiliar, and it’s not an issue.

I had another thought I’d never had before: Maybe having been a Mormon could be a thing that made me unique in a positive way, instead of just making me a weirdo.

I was in high school the first time I realized, We’re one of those weird religions! It was 1996 and Mike Wallace interviewed Gordon B. Hinckley, who had recently become the president of the Church, for a segment of 60 Minutes. This was long before Mitt Romney and The Book of Mormon on Broadway. At that time, it was a Big Deal for Mormons to see anything about One of Us on “real” TV, and Very Big Deal for our prophet to be talking a real newsman. My whole family gathered around to watch it. What I remember most is the image displayed behind the talking head who introduced the segment: “MORMONS” in huge banner letters.

I didn’t have a name then for what I was seeing, but I recognized it: sensationalism. I witnessed myself being portrayed as Other.

So I knew that being Mormon had made me weird, but might I want to claim this heritage after all, perhaps the way secular Jews claim theirs? Or the way my queer friends now embrace and celebrate identities for which others once mocked and shamed them?

But this wasn’t like that. Although Mormons are a minority in most parts of the United States, and in broader American culture, where I grew up, in a region north of the Grand Canyon known as the Arizona Strip, we were the majority, and often we were real jerks about it. And I’m the one who finds this identity shameful, a thing to be hidden and denied.

Still, it’s been more than a decade since I left. Most of its sting and noxious fumes have dissipated for me. Mormonism has become a thing I can manipulate and examine with a degree of detachment that I didn’t have when I first left. Maybe that heritage could be a source and a perspective that informs my work instead of something I’m always trying to run from. Maybe I could begin to integrate it.

I mentally played the rest of “I Am a Child of God” in my head:

I am a child of God

And He has sent me here,

Has given me an earthly home

With parents kind and dear.

I noticed that that last line always plays in my head as, “With parents kine dandeer.”

Then I realized why this must be, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if you suddenly sensed that there was someone hiding in the closet behind you, watching you.

I knew this song before I even really knew language.

•••

During a solo road trip soon after, I was singing through hymns that I hadn’t sung in years, mining them for material, interesting ideas or turns of phrase. I sang the chorus of “Praise to the Man,” a hymn in honor of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith:

Hail to the prophet,

Ascended to heaven!

Traitors and tyrants

now fight him in vain!

Mingling with Gods he can plan for his brethren!

Death cannot conquer the hero again!

I burst out laughing as I spotted the resemblance to the self-aggrandizement of a certain commander-in-chief. I texted the lines to one of my brothers, with the comment, “Joseph Smith started a religion, a fantastic religion, incredible, the best, tremendous, you’re gonna love it, believe me!”

Alluding to Smith’s clandestine marriages to dozens of women, some as young as fourteen, others already married to other men, my brother texted back: “When you’re a prophet, they let you do it.”

Joseph Smith was just a silly old megalomaniac conman. I had a living example of his type to compare him against now, and somehow that took most of the menace, and all of the validity, out of him and this whole enterprise that he’d started.

I wiped tears out of my eyes. Of course I’d known that it wasn’t my fault I was born into generations of Mormons, but that was when I knew, in the way that’s the real beginning of healing for a survivor of abuse: It wasn’t my fault.

The culpability for Mormonism’s ills fell from my shoulders. The weight of the need I constantly feel to say, “I’m sorry,” for having been a Mormon was gone. I need no longer bear the sins of my fathers.

•••

Just as Trump was taking office, I unexpectedly found myself adding Civics to my community college teaching course load. I’d never taught the topic, so I was doing a lot of reading every week to prepare for classes. The daily headlines seemed to me the natural result of the history I was reading: a country founded on corruption, oppression, racism, imperialism, and crony capitalism just as far back as the historical eye could see. And the parallels and connections between the corruption in Washington, D.C., and the corruption in Salt Lake City were about to start popping up all over my consciousness.

I read an article about a Mormon Maori man’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Church from demolishing a Church-owned school near Hamilton, New Zealand. The school had been an important center to the Mormon and non-Mormon community there, but it was near a Mormon temple, around which the Church was now undertaking an expensive real estate development. Like so many imperialists and capitalists before them, the Church dismissed the concerns of the local community to make way for its business venture and to increase the allure of its temple.

Speaking of its developments near its Philadelphia temple, the Church’s senior real estate manager claimed that “the church is sensitive to what can be developed next to its temple” and always wants to have something “very compatible to the sacred nature of it.” I wondered, was he perhaps conflating “sacred” and “lucrative”?

I thought of downtown Salt Lake City, which the Church has groomed to function as its Mormonland theme park. The Church controls the experience by means of varying subtlety, from signs discouraging giving to panhandlers, to paying the retail stores at the recently-built, upscale Church-owned City Creek Center to stay closed on Sundays. Temple Square and its accompanying visitors’ centers and museums are all free, but visitors spend money in Church-owned businesses downtown, and if they convert, they become tithe-payers.

When it was completed in 1972, the Church Office Building was the tallest building in downtown Salt Lake City, almost twice as tall as the adjacent temple in Temple Square. No nefarious outside entity or city ordinance created a building that dwarfs their temple; they chose that themselves. The building that they claim is their most sacred edifice is literally in the shadow of the building devoted to their administrative and financial affairs.

Among other rites, Mormon temples are where sealing ordinances take place; only in the temple can members receive the rites that guarantee that they’ll be with their families for eternity. Members must pay ten percent of their income to the Church for the privilege of being worthy to enter the temple to receive these rites. All of these funds go to Salt Lake City before being disbursed locally. In addition to tithing and other offerings collected from members, the Church has various for-profit business and real estate holdings, many of them near their temples.

The Church has not publicly disclosed its finances since 1959. I have two thoughts about this. First, I don’t trust anyone with a lot of money who isn’t willing to be transparent about where they get it. Second, what would I expect from a church founded by Donald Trump’s early nineteenth-century counterpart?

During the first few years after I left, I’d been able to see the Church as misguided but well-intentioned. I still thought this was true of most individual Mormons, but the Church as an institution was looking to me like just as corrupt a sham as ever there was and entrenched in the larger systems of corruption and oppression in the United States.

One Sunday morning, an article on the backstory of the publication of Silent Spring came up in my news feed. As I sipped my coffee, I read that Ezra Taft Benson, who simultaneously filled the roles of Latter-day Saint Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower, and who would lead the Church as prophet, seer, and revelator from 1985-1994, had written that Rachel Carson was “probably a communist” because he couldn’t conceive of any other reason “why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics.”

I went searching for more context and turned up some other facts. This man whom I had called “prophet” through the bulk of my childhood had authored a pamphlet titled “Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.” Then during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, he had brought us industrial agriculture and factory farms with his insistence that farmers “get big, or get out,” and had attempted to silence the woman who sparked the environmental protection movement, on the grounds that she had a vagina whence no babies had come.

I was indignant. I took it personally, because between the two of them, where I saw myself was in Rachel Carson: a woman intellectual, a writer, a lover and defender of the natural world, and not a Mormon. I wanted to tell the dead man off on our behalf.

You went after Rachel Carson?! You fucking clown! Guess what? Rachel Carson was right. What the hell kind of prophet are you? You’re ridiculous! You’ve got no fucking clothes! Let me just blow away your remaining shreds of credibility there.

I went back to my coffee and Sunday reading.

I’m not afraid of you anymore, so just get out of my closet, and go on now.

•••

Can you ever really divorce the parts of yourself that you don’t want? Can you pick and choose what you’re made of?

I’ve got plains-crossing, polygamy-practicing ancestors. I was born under the covenant, one of eleven children to parents kine dandeer who met at the B-Y-motherfucking-U. Except for the part where I reject all their doctrine and terminate my membership, I’m as legit as it gets. If there’s a minority culture I could definitely claim I’m entitled to appropriate, it’s Mormonism. But did I want to?

I started compiling a list of uniquely Mormon phrases that I found aesthetically or conceptually interesting. I could almost feel my neurons firing with connections, ideas, possibilities of all the things I could craft out of these words. The title of a volume that Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited of writing by Native women came to my mind: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Yes. That’s what I would do. I would not claim Mormon as my identity, but I would take that crumpled paper for my art.

A stupor of thought,

a son of perdition,

the brother of Jared,

the City of Enoch,

a stripling warrior,

an eight-cow wife,

health in the navel,

marrow in the bones,

strength in the loins and in the sinews,

popcorn popping on the apricot tree,

and Saints and angels sing…

 

Take it! Take it all!

•••

LEAH ELLIOTT is a writer, poet, teacher, and journeyer. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, children, and stepchildren. You can find poetry, social media links, and other good stuff at her website: www.leahielliott.com.

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Kathleen and Henry

We’re doing something a little different today. Gina Easley, our staff photographer, has been providing the images for most Full Grown People essays for years (some damn amazing ones, I might add), and now she’s started writing flash essays of her own. This is one from one of her series. —ed.

Photo and Writing by Gina Easley

He’s been gone for several days, and she doesn’t know where. This isn’t the first time. Sometimes he’s just hiding out nearby, keeping to himself. It’s nothing personal. Other times he ventures further away, and she finds him only through her own persistence or the kindness of strangers. She doesn’t know if this is one of those “further away” times. As always happens in these moments of uncertainty, she is struck with a deep grief at the thought of living without him.

Fifty years they’ve been together. Still, she doesn’t know if he loves her; she only knows that she loves him.

Fifty years, and still he insists on sleeping under the bed.

•••

She chuckles at this thought: her longest lasting relationship has been with a desert tortoise.

Back when her now-middle-aged children were babies, a friend gave Henry to Kathleen. Henry was a rescue tortoise in need of a home, and Kathleen took him in. He has lived with her in ten different homes, been with her through two marriages and three children, and has even seen her grandchildren grow into adulthood. She doesn’t know how old he is. A desert tortoise’s lifespan is long. He could quite possibly outlive her.

She’s never known what he is thinking or feeling, but she does know that he has preferences, and that he is willful. His determination is obvious and strong and was proven recently when she put up a board to prevent him from entering the garage, one of his favorite places. She watched as he banged himself repeatedly into the board in an attempt to break through. She admires his determination. But maybe that is why he’s gone missing again … perhaps he’s unhappy about the board.

•••

She steps into the back yard and sees him, basking in the sun. He’s back. She goes to him, touches his head. She’s reminded of the feeling of calm that overtakes her when she looks out at the ocean, and how curious it is that he has the same effect on her. Along with gratitude and relief at his return, she is flooded with love: a no-strings, no-expectations kind of love. For fifty years she has cared for him, seen to all his needs. And for fifty years he has reminded her daily that love needs no reason, that love itself is enough.

•••

GINA EASLEY is a photographer based in Minneapolis. Aside from her role as staff photographer for Full Grown People, she enjoys photographing animals and the people who love them. This is her first published essay.

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Spectator

Photo by Gina Easley. www.GinaEasley.com

By Kristin Wagner

I can see life outside through a rectangle.

The sliding glass door to the back of our house is large and unobstructed and like a huge movie screen, a world happening within four sides.

I am a spectator, observing the sway of branches in a wind that would snatch my breath away, the fury of rainstorms that tinge the sky green with a sudden drop in barometric pressure that I could feel squeezing and pulling my body, the gentleness of sunlight sparkling on snow that would have twisted my muscles too tight in the cold. I stayed inside because I had to. I watched the world outside through this frame because it was all I could do to be a part of the outside world.

Summer is so unforgiving in its beauty and its heat. I wish ugliness and boredom. I wish heat came automatically with a barren dry hellscape, a vision I could feel justified in closing the drapes against, scenery no one would blame me for hating. I wish 100 degrees came without sprinklers and snow cones and dusk and lightening bugs and the smell of tomato plants growing so that I didn’t sit inside filled with envy and lost opportunities. The rectangle of outside life I can see is gorgeously blue and peony pink and sunflower yellow and vibrant green. Each time I pass into that world, though, I can only stay a little while before I seem to collapse in on myself, the cell walls that keep my body upright softening like ice cream and falling inward into an inevitable puddle.

Winter is unforgiving in its beauty and its cold. When it’s ugly and slush-gray on the ground and slate-gray in the sky, I can convince myself that there is nothing more to want than coziness and movies and warm food. But often enough the rectangle I can see is dazzling with diamonds, the sharp outlines of black branches tangled in the most lovely way, dashes of red as cardinals flit in and out of our hedges and the sun in winter comes at a clean-edged new angle. I remember that the air in winter feels cleaner, the cold coming through your lungs seems to purify the world and I want to be outside to feel that. But to feel the cold means that my muscles will react like starved and beaten dogs flinching and retracting away from a threat, and I can’t risk that, not today.

Sometimes the rectangle is a movie screen, showing reels of action that I may watch but not participate in. Snowball fights where the hit and explosion of powder occur just off stage right, the cinematographer giving just the edge of a child bending and scooping snow. The director that allows me glimpses into my children’s outdoor lives makes sure not to give away too much. I’m allowed a quick impish glance at the camera before the characters run off again—where they’re going and what they’ll do next a mystery. The rule for playing in the snow without me is that I have to be able to still see them through the rectangle without much effort. Within earshot is too far away. Within my line of vision is the right distance, where I can bring them back too soon because if I don’t, if I wait too long, I will not have enough energy for pulling off boots and making hot chocolate.

Life as a spectator is not bereft of joy, but it is not a participatory kind of joy. It is observational and it requires that you truly love the subjects of your observation; you must not be consumed with envy at their joy. There are certain people I do not love enough to merely watch them being happy without me. Children are different though, because I would gladly walk through broken glass for them. This is nothing so dramatic—I simply have to find contentment in looking through unbroken glass instead of being on the other side of it.

•••

Sometimes I determine that I have to be a participant, that I have to be active. Sometimes it may be a function of time, a calculation of how long it has been since I joined in. Sometimes my calculations encompass the savvy of a Las Vegas odds-maker and determine that the risk is outweighed by reward. Sometimes I find that I cannot abide simply watching another minute longer.

One winter day, strep had overtaken my usual illness, the sharp rasping swallow punctuating normal exhaustion. My oldest was finishing his basketball season, and at the last practice the parents were invited to join in games. Despite being practically bed-ridden for months, I did. I put on sneakers and threw a headband over my hair and tried to coordinate my body in ways I had never tried before for relays, and I called plays I didn’t understand, and I ran all-out sprints. It felt silly but I wanted him to remember this effort, this effort to overcome my embarrassment and illness for him at least for a bit. I dropped every ball thrown my way, and it would hit my foot and skitter off and I was trying to show him that these things can be laughed off, that trying new things will mean mistakes that are survivable. Lessons I felt like my boys weren’t hearing often enough—that they were worth my effort, and embarrassment is temporary, and joy can happen in the midst of epic failures of skill. Sometimes I understand that showing them what that can look like means more than telling them.

We got to a game where only three players were on the court at a time. My kid and I and a teenage boy were to take over a few roles. The older boy and I would play offense and my guy would play defense and the only goal was for offense to get the ball through the hoop. Every other parent got the ball to the teenager, and the teenager took a shot. This time the teenager threw the ball to me, and I actually caught it without a fumble or bobble. Stunned, I realized I was near enough the hoop that even with my stubby, weak, and unpracticed arms, I might have a shot. I pivoted to the hoop and, as I lifted my eyes, brought the ball up, and it began to leave my fingertips, it was smacked out of the sky inches from my nose. I was dumbfounded and all I saw was the line of other parents, children, and coaches with huge eyes and even bigger surprised smiles having witnessed my son fly through the air higher than ever before to knock that ball out of the sky. Epic. It was epic. We all laughed helplessly for minutes on end, kids recreating his block and other kids recreating my stunned expression.

My guy was so pleased with himself, but then the light for him went out for just a moment as he whispered to me, “You could have really made it in—I am so sorry.” He realized that he would have been devastated to be robbed of a moment of triumph that no one expected to see.

But how can I explain to him, that for my effort I got to be a player on the movie screen, a key foil needed to create an amazing unrepeatable moment? That I got to be in the scene instead of the audience for once? That I was within the frame of the rectangle, on the other side of the glass and be there to assist in something great? He would be given an award for the best defensive play of the season, against his own mother, when we got the end-of-the-season ice cream.

And how can I explain to him that the spectators to the scene mattered as much as the actors? That their smiles and laughter meant as much to the moment? That the people watching and the people doing are inextricably bound together and one is just as important as the other, that the rectangle I sometimes have to view life through is not a movie screen with the actors unaware that the movie-goers even exist?

How can I explain the joy of knowing that when I am only able to watch, I matter as much as when I am able to act?

•••

KRISTIN WAGNER is a creative non-fiction writer, a former teacher, a mother to two school-aged boys, a wife, and a person with a collection of chronic illnesses. When those illnesses allow, she posts at kristindemarcowagner.com on topics ranging from disability advocacy to making cupcakes with her kids. Other publishing credits include essays at The Manifest-Station (on illness and parenting), and The Rumpus (on teaching and caring for students), and right here at Full Grown People (on teaching and caring for students and parenting).

Read more FGP essays by Kristin Wagner.

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Other People’s Clothes

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Amanda J. Crawford

The dress was stiff and boxy, made from that awful faux-suede fabric my mother wore in the 1970s, rubbery on the inside and velveteen on the outside. It was far too large for me. The pressure of my office chair pushed the collar up toward my chin so that the shoulder pads seemed cantilevered from my neck, and the belt, otherwise too low for my waist, found a niche in my short torso to rest. And while the deep merlot color of the dress would have been acceptable on another day, today I was certain it brought out the shadows under my sleepless eyes and the bruises darkening on my upper arms.

I sat at my desk in the sunny ninth-floor newsroom of Phoenix’s daily newspaper with my legs crisscrossed underneath me and my shoulders hunched, folded into myself as if trying to construct a purple faux-suede wall around my heart. I had spent my entire adult life in newsrooms, where there is no escape behind office doors or cubicle walls, and I usually relished the collective energy—the perpetual chatter, collegial banter, ringing phones and occasional shouting—that sucks you into your role as a cog in the daily grind.

The distraction of a busy newsroom, where I could never wallow in my own thoughts for too long, had kept me going for years as my personal life fell into shambles. On this day, though, I struggled to concentrate as I put together simple items for Sunday’s political column. I wanted to disappear. I practiced not looking up, not catching eyes, staring at the flashing cursor on the white screen of my computer. When that didn’t work, I fled one floor down to the brown tweed couch in the small, austere parlor off the women’s bathroom that was set up for nursing moms, locked the door, and cried.

That morning, my friend Sarah, four inches taller and three sizes bigger, had produced this dress from the back of a closet filled with the work clothes she had worn in a former life as a payday-lending executive. Now expecting her second child, she was planning her exit from the business world for good. Sarah offered me the dress and a ride downtown.

The night before, her husband had reluctantly paid the cab that delivered me to their home in the suburbs. I was hysterical and had run into oncoming traffic on the six-lane road by my house. Sarah made me herbal tea in a large, brightly painted mug and listened as I tried to explain what had happened through tears. She dismissed questions from her husband, who was friends with mine, and set me up to sleep for a few fitful hours on their couch.

With no place else to go, I headed into the newsroom early the next morning, wondering if anyone could tell I was wearing someone else’s clothes.

•••

I’d never been good with clothes. I learned to shop cheap and fast from the blue-light special sales at K-Mart. I’d sip a red Icee until my lips, teeth, and tongue were tinted its unnaturally red cherry color, waiting for the cart with the blue light to illuminate the kids’ section and put everything in our price range.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother made most of my clothes, in cotton prints that matched my mother’s. In middle school, I remember standing at the bus stop with my friends as they bragged about their tee-shirts with prices inflated by the word “Esprit.” My mother was too practical to spend money on brands, so I began supplementing my discount store clothes with items dug out of the back of her closet: a patchwork skirt, a tweed jacket, and a cowl-neck sweater from the 1970s. In high school, as I embraced grunge music and its associated style, I wore my dad’s oversized yellow and gray flannel, smothered under his large Army jacket.

By my young adult years, though, that creative fashion spark was gone, extinguished under the weight of responsibility carried too soon. I married my high school sweetheart at nineteen and began working full-time during college to support us. My clothing, like my life, became almost entirely utilitarian—bland “work clothes” purchased in haste from the clearance racks of department stores or casual items picked up on sale at the outdoor stores he frequented. My wardrobe was as joyless as our marriage, and I spent my twenties trying not to think about either situation too much.

It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I started to pay attention to my clothes again. I made a good salary at the newspaper and could afford to move beyond the clearance racks. I had a cache of stylish professional women friends who counseled me in my shopping. And I was propelled by an internal stirring, the nature and ramifications of which I was not yet fully aware. I started wearing high heels, tight pencil skirts, and clingy blouses. I was never the type of woman to turn heads, but I felt sexy for the first time in my life. People noticed. One day in the newspaper’s breakroom, the photo editor asked why I was dressed so conservatively. I looked down at my outfit, a short-sleeved red sweater and black dress pants, unsure what he meant.

“Most days you look like someone about to get divorced,” he informed me.

•••

The first time I left my husband I had time to pack a duffel bag. I tossed it in the trunk of my friend Emily’s white Honda Civic coupe and put my miniature schnauzer in the backseat. A few hours later, my husband tried to set our house on fire. I stayed with Emily in her small condo for two weeks, living out of that duffel bag, taking my dog on long walks along the nearby desert canal, and seeking solace in the arms of a married coworker.

The second time I left my husband, I left with nothing but my purse. It was sitting in a room on the other side of the house with my cell phone and keys inside when he held me in a room and told me, “You will never leave this house on your own two legs again.” When he wasn’t paying attention, I sprinted across the house, grabbed my purse, and ran into the street to flag the cab that took me to Sarah’s house. I borrowed clothes from Sarah and another friend, Yvonne, before sneaking back into my house for some of my own clothing a few days later. I lived in a friend’s vacant rental house for six weeks.

The third and final time I left my husband, I had just changed out of my pajamas. As I poured our morning coffee, I sensed it: a tingling in the air foreshadowing violence. I put on a coral tank top, jeans, and a simple necklace I had made out of a circle of marble and hemp twine. If you had told me to pick just one ensemble from my wardrobe that I would get to keep, that would not have been it. But that night, as I sat in that same vacant house I had stayed in a few months before, staring at my disheveled reflection in the mirrored closet doors and trying to decide what to do with my life, my husband packed up almost everything I owned—clothes, shoes, jewelry, photos, keepsakes, and even my writing. Stolen, dumped, sold, set on fire—I don’t know. By the next day, nearly all of it was gone.

•••

I didn’t know how to start putting my life back together again, but I knew I needed things to wear. I remember walking listlessly through Target with Yvonne just before the store closed, dejectedly checking the price tags of items on the clearance racks. Yvonne lingered a few feet behind me, alternating between perky chatter and croons of empathy. I bought underwear, sweat pants, capris, a tee-shirt and a short-sleeved green knit blouse I found on sale. It was all I could afford.

It was the summer before I turned thirty-one. I was homeless, single for the first time since I was fifteen, and broke. A few months earlier, partially in a bid to save my marriage, I had put in notice at the newspaper to teach at the state university and complete my graduate degree. The move would mean less hours at the office but also less than half the pay. I was sure now that my marriage was over, and I made the move anyway with virtually nothing to my name.

After our shopping trip to Target, Yvonne and I returned to the house she shared with her boyfriend in a neighborhood along one of Phoenix’s desert mountain preserves. She had moved in with him a few months earlier, despite being uncertain about their future. She took me upstairs to a spare bedroom, taken over by the things that she had still never put away. There was a metal rack overflowing with clothing, and she began going through it, pulling out things she thought would fit me and throwing them in a pile on the bed.

I was petite, but Yvonne was even smaller, not even five-feet-tall, and her style was flamboyant in comparison to mine. Yvonne was born in Mexico but adopted and raised by Anglos in Idaho. In the Southwest now, she had been reconnecting with her Latin American roots and attending a lot of cocktail parties with her boyfriend, who was in politics. Her clothing reflected both. The rack was filled with brightly colored silk and bejeweled dresses. I sifted through the pile, holding clothing up before me in the mirror and trying on things that didn’t seem too small or ostentatious. I took a plain red blouse and a sleeveless brown dress. Yvonne insisted I also take a strapless silk cocktail dress with ruffles and a bright tropical flower print that she thought was perfect for newly single me.

As the word spread that I needed clothes, other friends culled their closets for things that might work for me, too. For some reason, it seemed we were all going through major transformations in our lives around that time—an epoch in our collective history—and my friends empathized with my predicament. (In the years since, I’ve wondered what it was about that time. Maybe it was hormonal, since we were all, more or less, around the age of thirty—a biological pull to reinvent, rejuvenate, redo or reproduce. Or maybe there was, for some reason at that point in our world, a collective metamorphosis, radiating from one of Arizona’s desert vortexes and sucking all of us in.)

My friend Emily, a cutesy blonde who I stayed with the first time I left my husband a year earlier, had recently left the newspaper to work in politics. Despite all of our grave concerns, she was marrying a religious conservative from far across the aisle. She cleaned out her closet so he could move in and gave me a black A-line skirt.

My friend Megan, a brash cocktail writer raised in a family of park rangers, was trading in her hiking boots for sequins and a personal brand. She gave me a green terrycloth hoodie and a couple of tee-shirts.

And Sarah, the former payday lending executive adept at reinvention, was taking massage classes, seeking out a more natural lifestyle, and trying to figure out what was missing in her comfortable family life. She gave me a black linen wrap-around blouse and pink pajama pants.

As I wore each of the items from my friends, I felt like I was trying on pieces of their current or former lives. My existence was so pliable at that moment, with no structure, definition, mementos, or even a set address, that I wondered if a blouse or a skirt could set a new course, one that might turn out better than the one I was on before. I allowed each piece to shape a part of the new me: The new professor wore Emily’s A-line skirt, and the newly single party girl wore Yvonne’s ruffled silk cocktail dress. I tried to get in shape in Megan’s green hoodie, and I tried to prove I was strong and independent in Sarah’s black linen blouse. But more than anything else, what my new wardrobe changed in me was my thinking about clothes.

•••

I can’t remember how long it was—if it could be counted in months or merely weeks —before I returned home for the first time. There, I found a pile of shoes in the corner of my closet. I sat on the floor hopefully sorting through them only to discover that not a single one had a match.

I had been stuck in agonizing paralysis about my future, but had finally settled on a new place to live when my estranged husband called and told me he couldn’t make the mortgage. He moved out, and I returned home that day and immediately changed the locks.

It was 2008, in the throes of the Great Recession, and every indicator of Phoenix’s bursting housing bubble told me I should run away from the house, too. Still, here was something I could own at a moment when so much else familiar in my life was gone. I threw away all the matchless shoes and any other reminders of what had been, cleansed every square inch with disinfectant and burning sage, and posted an ad for a roommate. A nineteen-year-old college student moved in and, almost immediately, so did Yvonne.

Yvonne had met someone new at a conference. She told her boyfriend she was moving out, packed her car with clothes still on the hangers and stuffed it all into the small closet in the back bedroom of my house. I learned to be single living with these two women – one of them new to adulthood, the other my own age but newly in love. I also learned the secret to Yvonne’s expansive wardrobe: a local chain of name-brand consignment shops. We shopped there together, sorting through the designer racks, experimenting with our fashion and inexpensively figuring out what the new “us” would wear.

Yvonne didn’t live with me long. In a few months she got pregnant and moved out to begin a new life as a wife and mother. Megan introduced me to her ex-boyfriend, Marcus, who moved in. Marcus was a buyer for a trendy recycled fashion boutique. He picked out clothes for me at his store and patiently helped me figure out my style in front of a heavy full-length mirror in the hallway. He also began taking me on thrift-store hunts throughout the city.

Before I lost everything, I had done very little second-hand shopping. Raised on the blue-collar edge of middle class, I realized that new clothes—even from K-mart—were a mark of something I had always been reluctant to concede. Now, headed into my thirties, I rebuilt my wardrobe almost entirely with second-hand clothes, from friends or consignment and thrift stores. The process made me conscious of the waste of fast-fashion and clearance-rack junk—cheap clothing that I had, for so many years, bought and thrown away without ever really looking or feeling good in it anyway. At the same time, I began to marvel at how people (including me for a while) could spend so much money on a few items at a boutique or an upscale department store.

Learning to shop second-hand allowed me to live out my ethics, recycling and repurposing more fully in my life. I began shopping for other things second hand: furniture, dishes, silverware, curtains, a bicycle. It became my nature to think first about Goodwill or Craigslist. I continued to exchange things with my friends, too.

Soon after my divorce, Sarah left her husband and became a single mom as she finished massage school. I was searching for myself, but Sarah’s quest was more specific. “I want to experience passion—real passion—before it’s too late,” she told me. As I cycled through my new wardrobe, deciding who I would be, what I wanted and what that new person would wear, I passed on dresses to Sarah.

•••

After my grandfather died a few years ago, I followed my mother down the creaky wooden steps into the musty basement of my grandparents’ house where decades’ worth of flannel shirts hung on a metal rack.

“We’re just going to get rid of them all,” my mother told me.

She remembered my penchant for my dad’s old flannels when I was a teenager.

“I thought Toby and Beck might want some, too,” she offered.

My second husband and stepson are Goodwill pros. Toby is a musician and had been a single dad on a budget, with a punk aesthetic crafted by thrift-store finds. All three of us took flannel shirts that belonged to my grandfather.

When we got back to my parents’ house, my dad saw the Army shirt Beck brought home and went to the basement for a special hand-me-down of his own. He brought up his Army jacket that I had worn throughout my teenage years and gave it to his new step-grandson.

I was back at my grandparents’ house last year after my grandmother died, helping my mom sort through things. My mom pulled out a thick beige sweater of my grandmother’s that she said suited me perfectly, and I picked out some costume jewelry. When we got back to her house, my mom brought out the trench coat that she had worn throughout my childhood from a wardrobe in the basement where it had been covered in plastic for decades and had me try it on.

“I think the eighties are back in style,” she told me, approvingly.

In the winter in Kentucky, where I moved with my husband and stepson a few years ago, you can find us all in layers of other people’s clothes. My whole family is donned in the flannels of a gentle Maryland man, who wore them as he went fishing or watched Westerns, and my stepson is wrapped in my father’s Army jacket, which had been a staple of my own teenage years. When I’m feeling lonely, I put on the taupe trench coat that I remember my mother wearing to church on the rainy Sundays of my youth and swear I can still smell her perfume after several washings.

As I write this essay, I fondle the large wooden triangle on a necklace that had been my grandmother’s and think of Betty Jane, the stylish woman who pulled herself out of poverty and gave me my middle name. I ponder how my world has changed in the years since I began wearing other people’s clothes, and I find beauty in the cycle, the threads of which are intrinsically mine.

•••

AMANDA J. CRAWFORD is a recovering political reporter whose literary work has previously appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Hippocampus. She is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University and performs with the Americana gothic band Former Friends of Young Americans. www.amandajcrawford.com

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These Five Hours

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Amy E. Robillard

Steve and I head to bed at the same time in the same room with our two dogs. We kiss each other goodnight, assure each other of our love, and close our eyes to attend to our thoughts and memories, our worries and eventually our dreams. Steve has worn a CPAP since I’ve known him because he suffers from sleep apnea, and if he didn’t wear the hose and nose pillow that pushes forced air into his system as he sleeps, he might stop breathing and die.

We haven’t always slept in the same room. Only in the last three years, since we moved into the new house, have we been able to manage it. In the old house, the sound of the CPAP combined with the white noise machine Steve required to sleep was too much for me. I slept in a different room, in what I thought of as my own bed. I tried not to notice that these arrangements were exactly like the arrangements my mother had with my stepfather. As an adult, I recalled the times my mother would go into Warren’s room at night for a spell and then come back out to the couch-turned-bed she slept in every night. It embarrasses me to remember those times, even now, thirty years later. What did they do with Warren’s wooden leg?

When Steve and I moved into the new house, we got rid of the clunky old white noise machine, which wasn’t actually a white noise machine but an air purifier, and replaced it with a small, more reasonable white noise machine. We got a bigger bed. We put a white noise machine next to my side of the bed. And somehow we made it work. We all four slept in the same room. And it felt right.

But in the last year or so, it has stopped working. Ever since Steve came home from the hospital after his gallbladder surgery, something about the CPAP machine has been off. The hissing sound it makes is unbearable. We’ll fall asleep at the same time, but inevitably, I’ll wake up around twelve-thirty or one to use the bathroom and when I return, the hissing sound makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. I say his name to wake him, scaring the shit out of him in the process. He tells me I’m going to give him a heart attack. I tell him he’s going to kill me with that goddamn hissing. “Just adjust the nose piece, please.” He adjusts it. I roll over in bed. Ten seconds later it’s hissing again.

I tell my friend Hillary that if I ever do end up murdering my husband, my entire defense will consist of me imitating the CPAP hissing sound in court while others are trying to speak. I will drive everybody so crazy that they’ll find me not guilty. Psssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Take a breath. Psssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh. Repeat until they set me free.

•••

More than once Steve has told me this story: when he was a teenager on vacation at Myrtle Beach with his family, his mom vetoed his choice in a tee-shirt shop on the boardwalk. He wanted one that said, “The Ayatollah is a Assaholla.” (This was in June, 1980, at the height of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, so Steve had good reason to believe in the Ayatollah’s Assaholla-ness.) Interestingly enough, his mom didn’t have a problem with his getting one that said, “Football players do it in the end zone.”

For years, until so recently that I’m embarrassed to tell you, I thought that tee-shirt was ridiculous because, really, what a stupid pun. Oooh, a play on the words do it. So immature. And then a week or so ago, we got back on the subject of that story and I said something along the lines of how silly this shirt was. “Remember, I was barely sixteen,” Steve reminds me.

“I know, but still. You mom thinks it’s perfectly okay to get you a t-shirt with a really juvenile reference to sex but not one about the Ayatollah, who really was an assaholla. And besides, what does it even mean: football players do it in the end zone? Do they run into the end zone and suddenly celebrate by doing it right then and there?”

“I think it’s more about doing it in the end zone, you know, like anal sex?”

Pause.

“Oh my god. You mean that end zone?” And the uncontrollable laughter begins. I’m dying. I fall over on the couch. I can barely catch my breath, but when I am finally able to, I manage to spit out, “Your mother let you get a tee-shirt about anal sex but not about the Ayatollah?”

“I don’t think she realized it was about anal sex.”

“Did you?”

“Not until a few years ago.”

My stomach hurts from laughing so hard, so I cannot reply. Minutes pass.

I never met Steve’s mother. She died years before I met Steve, but what I do know about her is that she was unhappy. She did not delight in being a mother, she did not delight in Steve, and she rarely demonstrated affection toward him. I do not think I would have enjoyed meeting her. His father, though, was one of my favorite people on this earth. Kind-hearted, warm, funny, empathetic, and unashamed to eat blueberry pie with each meal because otherwise I or Steve might get to it first.

Finally, I find my voice. “What made you realize it was about anal sex?”

“I don’t know. I think I was telling someone the story and it just dawned on me.”

I don’t know how to write laughter. I don’t know how to tell you that my stomach hurt so badly from my laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all. Maybe it wasn’t that the story was all that funny. Maybe it had been too long since I’d had that kind of full-body laugh. Maybe my body needed that kind of embodied emotional experience.

“You do realize, of course, that that tee-shirt could very well be interpreted as being about gay sex, right?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t the Ayatollah.”

•••

When I crawl into the bed in the guest room, the one with the memory foam mattress, I always squint at the clock to check the time. It’s usually between one and two a.m., which means I have about five hours before I need to get up. These five hours, I think. These five hours have to get me through.

Lately I’ve been noticing when I adjust myself in this bed, rolling over onto my stomach, that my left hip hurts. When I get out of bed in the morning, I have to take an extra second or two because of the pain.

•••

The few times I can remember an adult asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I can remember responding that I wanted to be either a fireman (masculine pronoun) or Little Red Riding Hood. I clearly had a thing for running into, not away from, danger.

•••

I teach undergraduate courses in rhetorical theory and the personal essay regularly, and one of the things I find myself telling students outright again and again, even though I know on some level that it is something they must learn for themselves from experience, is that the louder a person declares their strength or their smarts, the weaker or the less intelligent they actually are. A person who is strong or intelligent doesn’t need to announce her strength or her intelligence, I tell them. Pay attention to the quiet ones. They’re the strong ones.

I do this because I want to give students the benefit of knowing what, for years, I did not understand. I believed that the people in my life who shouted the loudest, “I’m strong, I’m strong, I’m strong!” actually were strong, and that I, who could never declare such a thing about myself, was weak.

When I tell students this, I characterize it as one of Dr. Robillard’s life rules.

•••

At first I attributed the hip pain to all the walking I do with our dogs, Wrigley and Essay. I’ve always walked a lot, even before I adopted my first dog in grad school, and the daily routine with the dogs now is two walks a day. A shorter one in the morning and a longer one in the late afternoon. I probably mentioned the pain to Steve once or twice, but even I will acknowledge that I’m a bit of the girl-who-cried-wolf when it comes to pointing out problems with my body. Having grown up in an abusive home, I have low expectations for this life and I’ve long been on the lookout for the thing that will kill me young. A particularly tenacious pimple becomes, in my telling, terminal cancer, and an upset stomach that lasts more than a couple hours is surely the first sign of stomach cancer. It is not, I am always reassuring Steve, that I want to die, but that I expect to die. It is hard for me to imagine a future for myself that stretches out very far. I understand now that people who have been abused know exactly what I’m talking about, and people who have not do not. People who have grown up in secure homes believe that I am a simply a pessimist or a hypochondriac because that is the easiest way of categorizing my beliefs.

But then one Saturday, the pain got significantly worse. It hurt to stand, it hurt to walk, it hurt to simply exist. I could feel my left lower abdominal area throbbing when I lay my hand on it. Eventually I began to limp. Steve walked the dogs on Sunday. I told him that if the pain persisted, I would see if I could get in to see the doctor on Monday. I began researching ovarian cancer symptoms.

When I was twenty-one, I had a very large ovarian cyst removed. We had discovered it in April, but my doctor had told me it would be okay to wait until I had graduated from college in late May and moved back home to do the surgery. By that time, though, the cyst I had named Henrietta had become impossible to remove by laser surgery, so they had to cut me open once she ruptured. I was in the hospital, miserable, for three days.

Now, at the age of forty-four, I had all the symptoms of ovarian cancer. Abdominal bloating or swelling. Check. Quickly feeling full when eating. Kind of. Discomfort in the pelvis area. Check. Changes in bowel habits, such as constipation. Not really. A frequent need to urinate. Always.

On Monday, the pain was worse. My primary care doctor listened as I told her that the pain had been there for at least a month, but I thought it was my hip. I could hear myself, could feel the narrative forming around my words as I spoke. You waited more than a month to see a doctor?

I pointed out where the pain was and she smiled. “That’s not your hip.”

“Yeah, I’ve figured that out by now.”

She ordered a pelvic ultrasound and told me that it could be another cyst. But she wanted to get this ultrasound done quickly, this week if possible.

“And then,” I’m telling Hillary on the phone, “she starts talking very quickly about how it could also be an abdominal muscle strain, but we both know she’s just talking to talk so that she doesn’t have to say the truth that we both know. This is ovarian cancer.”

•••

There is a feeling I get that I’m not sure I can do justice to in words, when I or those close to me are on the cusp of something dreaded. Where others might wish to run away, I want to run in, for I am most comfortable, I think, in the midst of suffering and pain. I want to hear others’ stories of suffering and pain. I want to see how they deal with it, how they cope. I am eager to live through the drama, if only to emerge on the other side with more strength, even if it’s only vicarious strength. Surviving dreaded situations is the only way I know how to develop strength.

•••

The results of the pelvic ultrasound were delayed. My doctor was supposed to get the results that same afternoon, a Tuesday. I didn’t hear back from her office until Wednesday morning. During that time, from about noon on Tuesday, after the ultrasound—when the head of ultrasound took what seemed like hundreds of pictures of my innards, sighed deeply, and wouldn’t look into my eyes—until Wednesday morning, I considered how I might react to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

And I surprised myself. I was actually afraid. I could tell that Hillary, the friend who has known me the longest, the friend who understands best my attitude toward life and death, the friend who also expected to be dead by now—she, too, was afraid.

I was afraid but I was resolved. I would do what I had to do. Steve offered to take time off from work to come to the doctor with me if she called and said she needed to see me (she had told me that she would only call me in only if it were bad news). I told Steve that he should save his time off for later, when things got real.

When things got real.

I think it’s time to get real. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers, says that “liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

It feels dangerous to admit that I enjoy my life and I want to continue living. It feels like I am being unfaithful to my story to acknowledge that I can imagine a future for myself. I want so badly, I have for so long wanted so badly, to look straight at reality rather than squeezing my life into the narratives our culture offers us. Narratives of overcoming or narratives of triumph. Bullshit narratives. I cherish the personal essay because it insists that I run right in. Jonathan Franzen writes that the essayist “has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them.” I can do that! I can look at the ugly, the shameful, the painful. I know I can!

But can I change the story? Can I acknowledge that I want to continue to live?

•••

Steve’s mother didn’t want to buy him a t-shirt that simplified a complicated political situation, so she let him get one with a juvenile sex joke instead. Who knows what her intentions were? It’s easy enough to change that story.

I’m forty-four years old and I’m just now realizing that maybe I want to continue to live. I’ve been afraid of admitting this because I’m afraid it will be taken from me. So much safer to say that I’m not afraid of dying, that I’ve got nothing to lose.

I’m coming to see that all this time I’ve been saying that it’s okay if I die young, that I don’t want or expect to live a long time, that I am not afraid to die, I was voicing my actual fears of dying in ways that could be heard and responded to by others. Maybe what I’ve been saying all along about the people who proclaim the loudest that they are strong actually being weak has been true of me all along, too: my proclaiming for years that I am not afraid to die and that I don’t expect to live a long time is evidence, in fact, that I am afraid.

Somewhere along the way I began to expect things from this life. And I allowed myself to accept that I expect things.

That is risky.

•••

Steve is easy to buy for. Lately I’ve taken to buying him tee-shirts with funny sayings on them. If it were up to him, he would wear shorts year-round, so I bought him a tee-shirt that says, “If I have to put on pants, then NO.” For Christmas one year, I bought him a tee-shirt that says, “Please don’t make me do stuff,” but he is dismayed that when he wears it, I still ask him to do things. And one of my recent favorites is the one that says, “I was told there would be cake.” I tell him he can wear that one whenever I make him go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. He can just point to his shirt and look around the room expectantly.

There’s a part of me, a part that is steadily atrophying, that believes that I deserve pain. Or rather, a part that believes that I don’t deserve good things. I’m beginning to understand that these beliefs are vestiges of an old story, one that began so very long ago in other people’s pain, but one that I now have control over. That control is not simple authorial control, the kind that allows me to open a file on a computer and delete a few words here, a couple paragraphs there and, voila, a new story emerges. Rather, the control comes in the willingness to reinterpret the stories that have been fossilized, the ones we think we know.

The pelvic ultrasound found uterine fibroids, but they aren’t causing the pain. They’re relatively small, but I didn’t know that right away. From Wednesday, when I learned about the fibroids, through Friday morning, when I learned that they weren’t the cause of the pain, I imagined a huge red slimy fibroid about to rupture on my left side. I could feel it throbbing. I was afraid to bend over to pick anything up for fear it would rupture. Once I learned that the biggest fibroid is only three centimeters and that the pain is probably coming from a pulled muscle, I could no longer feel the throbbing. I walked the dogs more carefully, holding both leashes with my right hand instead of my left.

The last time I ordered Steve a tee-shirt for his birthday, I ordered one for myself, too. “I just want to pet dogs and throw the sexists into the sun. Is that so much to ask,” it reads. It’s really not so much to ask.

I think I expect more.

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD teaches writing at Illinois State University and essays regularly for Full Grown People. She and her husband are the guardians of two special mutts, one named Wrigley Field and one named Essay.

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Jack and Jill and the Memory Test

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Barbara E. Murphy

Jill is a stockbroker, my nurse practitioner begins, and I listen with attention not just because I’m a sucker for a story and will give any once-upon-a-time a chance to pick up steam but because this is an assessment—a test, really, but no one uses that word anymore—of my alertness and mental acuity. I’ve heard it referred to as The Montreal Test. This session is part of the protocol covered by my new health insurance, the kind of insurance that kicks in when you hang up your spurs or cleats depending on whether you rode or ran or sat—as I did, at conference tables or a desk—and move into the post-work phase of your life.

Jill, meanwhile, has fallen in love with and marries Jack and they move (from where, we aren’t told, though it’s the sort of detail that interests me) to Chicago. About him, we learn only that he is dazzlingly handsome. Really, that’s how he’s described. No more information than that and I risk distraction to wonder who wrote this? A doctor? A psychologist? Male or female? Before or after the recent election? And why does the stock market continue to do so well anyway? Not that dazzlingly handsome isn’t force enough to sway a woman to change her life. It is and dazzle can last a surprisingly long time but almost only if it comes with a good sense of humor and one or two other traits like skill at working the remotes and possession of a valid passport.

What come next are two children. We don’t learn whether they are twins or singletons, adopted or birthed by Jill. Did she have any trouble conceiving? Did Jill have an easy pregnancy or pregnancies? We don’t know her age or whether her insurance covered everything. We do learn that Jill left her job to stay home with her kids—we assume they switched to Jack’s insurance—and my nurse practitioner is silent on how Jill felt about stepping out of the work world. Was she happy beyond reason as a fulltime mother? Did she miss the companionship of her fellow brokers? The thrill of the buy and sell? And Jack: who knows what he was up to except it must have been pretty good work since he’s now supporting a family of four.

The story takes a turn when the kids become teenagers and Jill makes the decision to go back to work. Were she here, were she real, I could ask her to reconsider and hold out for a few more years. Driving them to middle school soccer practice is one thing; watching them get behind the wheel of your or, worse, their own car going who knows where is quite something else. They are about to start hanging out with those kids you told them to avoid, the ones whose parents are telling them not to hang out with your kids.

Risking further distraction—I know I’m going to have to recount this tale or answer some relevant questions—I can’t help but wonder if Jill returns to a diminished salary, how severely she is suffering the mom penalty after her absence from the workforce; I wonder if her technical skills have kept up, if she still thrills to the chase of the market.

And how does the change in family income affect the Jill-Jack household? Do they take more vacations, send the kids to private school, or does the money just get swallowed up and assert itself as the new normal? I’m guessing Door Three.

Jill’s return to the market marks the end of the story as told to me.

I am asked by my now slightly embarrassed practitioner—Jess, is her name —what Jill’s profession is, what made her leave work and when did she feel safe enough—my words, not Jess’s—to return to work. Then the trick question: what state does Jill live in? Funny how this remains exclusively Jill’s story. Maybe Jack’s fading dazzle lessens his role in the drama. The kids remain nameless and absent to us.

My recall is excellent, at least in this particular setting. And, I shine again as I name—freestyle, this time—twenty animals, zoo or farm categories both allowed. Jess does not seem interested in the fact that I cannot always recall the first names of my favorite poets, and increasingly I remember what I once knew as whole in fragments as if the world is repackaging itself in haiku not seamless narrative.

But the world is not seamless and it veers more toward lyrical than narrative. Stories don’t seem to proceed the way they used to: beginning, middle, then the earned ending. Most days, it seems to be all middle but with a blessedly generous supply of chances to begin again. And even the adventures you thought had ended—a career, a first marriage, your children’s childhoods—haven’t exactly finished. Jill will figure this out, too.

•••

BARBARA E. MURPHY is a poet and essayist whose work had appeared in publications including The Threepenny Review, Green Mountains Review, New England Review, and The New York Times. Her poetry collection Almost Too Much was published by Cervena Barva Press. She was a college president for twenty years in the Vermont State Colleges system.

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Monuments 

Photo by Kevin/Flickr

By Lynne Nugent

One morning, years ago, the major landmark in my town caught fire. A relic of the town’s glory days in the nineteenth century, it dominated our modest skyline, and I’d been used to passing it every day on my walk to work. I had not heard the news yet that day, and I glanced toward the monument as usual. The top part of the edifice was now a charred stump; it may even have been surrounded by wisps of smoke. But oddly, I registered nothing unusual. My brain projected normality—what it “knew” to be real—onto what I was seeing, overlaying it like a private movie. When I heard the news later—only then did I believe my eyes.

All of this is to say that I didn’t recognize I had been sexually harassed for seven years, despite having been a self-professed feminist since I’d learned what the word meant, despite having learned feminist theory at the feet of leading scholars in college, despite having been supportive of friends who had gone through sexual harassment and assault. And even after I allowed myself to understand what had happened, despite knowing of the importance of breaking the silence, and despite having been grateful to others for breaking their silence, I kept silent.

Back around 2009, I was looking for answers for some minor but annoying medical symptoms. My usual doctors seemed out of ideas, so I made an appointment with a local alternative practitioner. As I sat in his office, I noted that he didn’t have on a white coat, nor did his office seem especially clinical, but as “doctor’s appointment” was a category of the landscape of my world, as fixed as that monument in my small town, I only hesitated slightly when he asked me to remove my shirt as part of the exam. There was some plausible reason, which I now can’t remember—visual inspection of a rash, perhaps?

After the exam, he suggested that I do a patch test for some vitamin deficiency on a two-inch square of my “lateral breast tissue.” Then he added, “If you can find enough.” Then he chuckled: “Heh heh.” Trying to remember what “lateral” meant from way back in freshman biology, I must have looked confused. He repeated himself: “Lateral breast tissue. If you can find enough,” gesturing to my on-the-smaller-side (but well-formed, I had always thought with some pride!) breasts. And then he chuckled again, as if to drive home what he was saying: “Heh heh.”

If he had had spinach between his teeth that day, I wouldn’t have said anything. If he had farted during the exam, I wouldn’t have said anything. Because another fixture of my world was the personal code of conduct of a Nice Girl: always be polite and never point out when someone does something embarrassing to himself. So I ignored his comment, and then I convinced myself it had never happened, that it couldn’t possibly have been what it sounded like, a creepy evaluation of my breasts’ sexual appeal or lack thereof in the context of what had been billed as a medical examination.

I didn’t get up and walk out in outrage. I didn’t even stop seeing him (well, I did after a while, when I got sick of buying all the vitamins he prescribed). I didn’t alert the community; I didn’t expose him. And once I finally allowed myself to admit to myself what had happened, I didn’t tell anyone then either, not my close friends, not my husband, no one. I merely quietly unfriended him on Facebook.

Why? Because I was ashamed—at my silence, at my acquiescence, at my gullibility for going to someone who wasn’t a medical doctor, at my agreeing to take my shirt off, at the overall triviality of the event in the larger scheme of things (after all, he didn’t touch me; I was a grown woman; it wasn’t ongoing; it wasn’t some terrible work situation that I had to endure to keep my job—was it really sexual harassment?), even ashamed of, well, my breast size, which would have become part of the discussion if I had ever told the story. Embarrassed, too, for him, for saying what he had said. Worried about his reputation, about his livelihood. Because these are the unquestioned edifices in our society: a man’s honor, a man’s work, a man’s understanding of what happened (he’d surely deny that his intent had been anything other than innocent). I didn’t want to believe these monuments were on fire even as they burned right in front of my own eyes.

I finally told one person. This summer. And then in October, I wrote “me, too” when the #metoo hashtag went viral. Still, my doubts persist. Will I be criticized for doing everything I criticized myself for above? Will others hold me as responsible as I held myself? Above all, I think about the women throughout my life who’ve told me about being sexually harassed or assaulted: fellow undergraduates when I was an undergraduate; fellow grad students when I was a grad student; work colleagues; friends from every era of my life. I did not seem—I desperately hope—unsympathetic, but “this happens to others and not to me” was part of the landscape of my world, solid as any building, so I’m sure my empathy arrived, if it did, as if from a long distance. Today I’d look them in the eye and say, “I’m so, so sorry this happened to you, and thank you so much for having the strength to talk about it.” I’d listen, listen, listen some more, as long as necessary, forever. One of my favorite quotes, ever since I saw it on a greeting card in college, is a haiku by Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down—now I can see the moon.” As what separates us becomes a wisp of smoke—has always been a wisp of smoke—what I see are these women’s faces.

•••

LYNNE NUGENT’s personal essays have appeared in Brevity, Mutha Magazine, the Tin House blog, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” column, and elsewhere. Her previous essay for Full Grown People, “The Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card,” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Find her at lynnenugent.wordpress.com.

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My Word!

Photo by RCabanilla/Flickr

By Jonathan Kalb

From as far back as I can remember, I was what grownups called a verbal kid. My parents were both high school English teachers, my mother for thirty years, and I was lucky enough to inherit their predisposition to articulate speech. At this point, in middle age, I know that this articulateness is a privilege—a gift reinforced by a few beloved mentors and heaps of inspirational highbrow entertainment—but that’s not how it always felt growing up. Speaking precisely was no social advantage in the public schools I attended in suburban Wayne, New Jersey. I would much rather have been good at baseball.

Early on, I developed a tendency that, for all I know, is common among verbal kids, though I’ve never heard it mentioned. I began privately adopting certain words as my own in the secret belief that, like an ardent lover, only I fully understood their true colors, coded signals, and secret desires. I’m not speaking of what people often call pet words—favorite, everyday words that we all have, replace over the years, and tend to overuse. The words I mean are deeply lodged within our psyches and continue to move and sometimes bedevil us even as we age out of them.

I have intensely vivid memories of the circumstances surrounding my learning these words, which subsequently became totems and touchstones, seeding private jokes, tempering and organizing experiences, and affirming my core beliefs.

•••

“Solicit.” Google definition: “to ask for or try to obtain (something) from someone.”

One day during tenth grade, I saw an enticing ad on my high school bulletin board: “Easy work. 1-3 hours after school. Earn $50 to $100 a week.” That was big money in 1974.

The job turned out to be selling subscriptions to The New York Times door-to-door on commission. The clincher was that the guy on the phone promised I’d be paid a minimum daily fee no matter how much I sold. My mother liked his articulate-sounding voice and didn’t pay close attention to details. He picked up me and five other boys in a van the following week and drove us to a leafy section of Hackensack.

We were set loose in pairs, and my partner and I were at it about fifteen minutes when we walked up to a stocky guy standing in his driveway, who asked what we wanted.

“Would you be interested in home delivery of the New York Times?”

“Are you soliciting?” Neither of us knew that word.

“We’re selling subscriptions to a newspaper.”

“So you’re soliciting.”

“We’re selling …”

“That’s soliciting. Soliciting is illegal in Hackensack.” The guy then pulled out a police badge, yelled toward his house, and asked whoever was in earshot to summon a patrol car.

Twenty minutes later the two of us (and then four, then all six) were sitting on a bench at the station, waiting for Hackensack’s finest to decide our fate. We could hear the panicked van driver being grilled in a side room. The next few hours were a gauntlet of tedium, hunger, peremptory harangues, and supercilious questions from cops half-heartedly trying to bait and shame us.

They eventually just let us go. I thought my mother would kill the driver when we got home very late, and he explained what happened. He never paid us for the day.

The dangerous and dubious edges of “solicitation,” the word’s slightly sickening aura of unfairness, has been part of my worldview ever since. When I later learned this word’s association with prostitution it made perfect sense to me. It was a name for something casually polarizing, acceptable to some, depraved to others: not just selling but unwanted, disreputable selling. Not just asking, seeking or applying but supplication, begging, the stain of importunateness always there.

I’ve collected random bits of trivia over the years about many of my words, but particularly about “solicit.” I happen to know, for instance, that the Latin root sollicitare means to disturb, rouse, trouble, or harass. I make space in my head for the fact that Samuel Beckett used “soliciting” to describe the diabolical activity of the purgatorial light interrogating the characters whose heads stick out of funereal urns in his anti-drama Play. I’m probably the only fan of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus who looks forward to the particular slur a plebeian politician uses to trigger an anti-patrician mob reaction: “He did solicit you in free contempt.”

To this day, any neutral use of “solicit” startles and jars me. If a colleague, for instance, proposes soliciting opinions or applications, I automatically regard the appeal as disingenuous and probably futile. The colleague’s motivations seem questionable purely because of the choice of word.

“Solicit” isn’t for everyday use (unless you’re a British lawyer). It’s one of those occasional words that hangs around your brain and exerts its force over time. My sense of its effect on me is that it influenced my disposition toward decorum, convention, and propriety—the whole basket of deplorable ideas that poisons the concept of respectability. Thanks to the Hackensack police, Beckett, and Shakespeare, the word is forever linked for me to all the species of exclusion and harassment that authorities soft-soap as protection: “right to work” laws, gratuitous prohibitions in public spaces, arbitrary restrictions on journalists, protesters, students. I would guess that, more than any other word, “solicit” helped make me politically liberal.

•••

“Spontaneous.” Google definition: “performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus.”

When I was ten, I nearly set fire to my family’s house. I, like many kids, needed to test grownups’ claims, and one that struck me as particularly dubious was that gasoline was flammable since it was a liquid. Every liquid I’d ever seen meet a flame—water, soda, juice, pee—had extinguished it, and, yes, I’d done that experiment any number of times. How could anything you poured out, that splashed and sparkled, possibly burn?

One day when my parents were out shopping I rolled our lawnmower onto the driveway, unscrewed the gas-tank cap, and tipped it over—a clumsy maneuver that created a bigger puddle than I intended. Some gas dribbled toward the driveway’s edge, but it looked as if it had evaporated so I wasn’t worried. I threw a lighted match at the entrancing polychrome fluid, jumped back, and thrilled at the windy whoosh. What do you know—the adults were telling the truth!

Within seconds, however, the harmless blue flames on the pavement had spread to the bushes in the adjacent flowerbed and were snaking toward the garage. I stomped on them, waved my arms and dashed about, but the area was already too wide and I found myself surrounded by fire. Then, out of nowhere, an older boy who lived across the street—who had evidently been watching me—ran up, pushed me away, grabbed a garden hose, and doused the fire in a heart-attack minute. Thanks be for fluids that behaved themselves!

I begged him not to say anything to my parents. Then I dashed inside and dialed the Wayne Township Fire Department, asking the guy who answered: “Hey, is there any way that gasoline can catch fire without a flame?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” he shot back, declining to elaborate.

I ran to the dictionary. I didn’t completely understand its complicated definition, though the gist was clear enough and flooded me with relief: a thing could ignite on its own without heat from any external source. I’d found my alibi, and a marvelous new word. What grownup could possibly have such specialized technical knowledge?

My father saw the damage as soon as he pulled up in his Buick Electra. I babbled out my terrifying tale of having “accidentally spilled some gas” while trying the start the lawnmower, after which I was shocked to see it “spontaneously catch fire all by itself. I have no idea how!” Then he asked me to tell him what really happened.

Long story short, since he knew exactly what spontaneous combustion meant and knew it couldn’t happen out on a driveway, he confronted me. He said that if I’d admitted I was trying an experiment because I didn’t believe that gasoline could burn he would have been annoyed and probably made me pay for the bushes. Instead my lie had deeply disappointed him and had to be punished.

This is how the word “spontaneous” became inseparable in my mind from visibility and discernment. My father saw right through me; there was no hiding from him, and this incident marked the turning point in childhood when I suddenly grasped how much more adults saw about me than I’d allowed myself to perceive. All children are humored and cosseted. Adults want them to enjoy their natural curiosity and spontaneity as long as possible. But that indulgence is mostly pretense, condescension. Real respect, I realized then, can’t come from pretense. It has to be earned. I’d been expelled from the Eden of childish egoism and felt naked and embarrassed.

From that day on, “spontaneous” could never again be an index of simple or sincere expression to me. The word instead reminds me how complicated trust, honesty, and instinctiveness are. If, for instance, someone praises an actor, a musician, or a painter for the amazing spontaneity of a creative act, I might share in the admiration but I’ll also ponder the years of preparation and seasoning behind the act. If a child asks for my spontaneous reaction to something—a joke, say, or a picture, or a feat of agility—I will oblige, but I’ll also wonder what his real game is. I know something else is at stake and want to know what.

“Spontaneous” set off brain-alarms when I first noticed how overused it was in the essays of Richard Wagner. Wagner felt that his music-drama was the spontaneous expression of the will of the German Volk, and this word made his ardor suspicious well before he made clear that the German Volk excluded Jews. “Spontaneous,” ironically enough, planted cautiousness in me and reinforced my naturally analytical disposition.

•••

The earliest word I remember adopting is “shortchange.” Google: “to cheat (someone) by giving insufficient money as change.”

On a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in fourth grade, my parents gave me six dollars to spend on lunch and souvenirs. My bill at the cafeteria, where I’d scrimped to be able to afford a dinosaur at the gift shop, was $1.83. I gave the cashier my single, searched my pocket in vain for change, and then handed her my fiver. She gave me back seventeen cents, snapped her drawer shut, and wouldn’t acknowledge or investigate the error no matter how much I protested.

My tears came, the manager came, and the upshot was that they would reconsider my claim only at the end of the business day when all the register cash was counted. A sympathetic teacher brought me back to the cafeteria then, delaying the homebound buses, and the manager handed me four dollars—“Okay, young fella. I guess you were right!” I still felt indignant since the gift shop had closed. Worse, when I showed my four dollars on the bus, a creepy little red-haired kid cracked wise that he thought I’d just been “jewing” the lady over my lunch bill.

For me this was a story of epic complication and monstrous injury. My parents—whom I never told about the bus comment, which felt humiliating—glossed it with a single word: I’d been “shortchanged!” A good word, I remember thinking, useful, self-explanatory, but too succinct for the outrageous context. It left out the condescension, the bigotry, and the still more stinging injustice that I never got a dinosaur.

Since that day “shortchange” has carried a charge of special outrage for me. It doesn’t just mean cheating, but cheating with malice, discrimination, and intolerable collateral damage. I never hear or use it without flashing back to the experience of not being believed, of belonging to a category of person (children, Jews) whose complaints could be summarily brushed off. In college, I once joined an anti-apartheid divestment campaign I’d been ignoring after receiving a flyer about blacks being shortchanged by the South African government. Recently I deleted the Uber app from my smartphone after reading a headline about the company shortchanging its drivers in New York City. The word made it impossible to believe that Uber’s error was anything but a deliberate fraud.

Even when “shortchange” is used in its softer sense of underestimate—as in, “Don’t shortchange Mitch McConnell. He’s a sly old tortoise!”—it carries a repugnant aftertaste for me, a sugarcoating on dishonesty. Someone is lying to him- or herself about the real merit of an opponent. The word is fused in my head with the principle of fairness at the core of democracy, which is no doubt because as an adult I know that bourgeois democracy, with its rational values, is what gave Jews a path to social inclusion and equal opportunity after some two millennia of exclusion. Jews esteem articulateness. For a long time they did so out of faith in the Enlightenment dream that reason would soon reign over human affairs—that the articulate, being most reasonable, could compete to best advantage on a level playing field in the brave new reasonable world.

•••

Many people have personal dictionaries, lists of words and phrases they use and understand in idiosyncratic ways, shaped by their unique experiences and quirks. These dictionaries are usually unwritten, though a friend of mine told me that she and her siblings once wrote one as a gift for their father on his seventy-fifth birthday. It was about fifteen pages long, she said, and contained several dozen personalized definitions of not only his pet words but also the grumpy connotations, guilt-trippy subtexts, unspoken addendums, and affectionate intimations behind his expressions. The gift made him weep—the tears prompted, I imagine, from the feeling of being so clearly seen, so intimately known by his loved ones.

No one but me could compile a dictionary of my adopted words—and I could add a dozen more to these three—because I don’t use them often. They operate in my inner life as sources of knowledge and attributes of my character. They’re not quirks of speech. Even my wife of twenty-nine years didn’t know most of these stories until she read a draft of this essay. I sometimes think of these words as my deep personal myths.

Roland Barthes famously argued that myth was “a type of speech,” not merely a genre of story. He defined it as speech that treats anything (objects, ideas, people, places, words) as rooted in the natural order when in fact it reflects a very specific and contingent ethos or value system. Nations, communities, and social classes share experiences that make certain concepts appear ineluctably true, timeless, or transcendent. Loving wine, for instance, becomes a token of being truly French, loving ideas for their own sake a mark of being German, and trusting inarticulate people more than articulate ones an acid test of Americanness. Personal myths are much the same as communal ones, only subtler and more virulent in their effect on the psyche.

Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve been struck again and again by the fact that the leader of my country is now a man so antipathetic to language that he might as well be my mythical enemy. Everyone can see that the communal myths that helped elect him are noxious and retrograde, even his supporters. What interests me more are the personal myths that roil and curdle and fester inside the man. These you can’t see but I imagine them to be grotesque counterpoles to mine.

Trump is a prodigy of belligerent self-absorption who hides behind a protective wall of muddled, degraded, and degrading language. Most of the words he relishes are monosyllabic fetishes (“win,” “sad,” “huge,” “weak”), and he deploys these more like punches than thoughts. I doubt many of them hark back to complicated childhood stories. Nevertheless, without getting too psychoanalytical about it, they probably all have sharp early associations with shaming by some combination of teachers, coaches, and Fred, his blunt and brutal father. One can easily imagine this rolling dumpster being set aflame with remarks to the effect that, “Whadda you smilin’ at? You didn’t win!”; “That’s a sad report card!”; or “Why such a weak swing? Choke up!”

We will obviously never know the whole truth about Trump’s myth of grievance against proper and precise language, though we can all agree it’s now a serious matter indeed. It’s one thing for an average person to heedlessly mangle and ravage words, quite another for the most visible and influential man in the world to do so.

Masha Gessen, in her wonderful “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture” this year, carefully explained just how thorough his assault on clarity and truth is. She examined a random interview transcript and pointed out that approximately one in ten words was wholly drained of meaning. “Trump’s word-piles fill public space with static,” she wrote. “This is like having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality.”

Our shared reality. That is what a myth purports to define but instead pollutes, sickens, and destroys when it is this malignant.

I’ll be candid about my own corner of this shared reality. My adopted-word myths admittedly contain fear, loathing, envy, and even aggression toward people who can’t or won’t speak well. Zadie Smith put the matter succinctly in a recent piece on the question of who owns black pain: “Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.” Yes, all those dull-witted kids who could catch, throw, and bat better than me, win more votes for student council, and get dates with the cheerleaders—they had things I wanted. Personal myths are defenses as well as weapons. At their worst, they’re a form of lamination keeping our ideas clean and utterly unreactive.

The learning moment then must be when the lamination tears. At some point, we must all hope, that will occur in Trumplandia. Some anomalous freethinkers in his ragtag army of gloating elite-bashers, pricked to attention by the jagged edges of, say, “collusion,” “rapist,” “hacking,” “laundering,” “proliferation,” “denial,” “fraud,” “fact,” “treason” or some other word that miraculously survives the wreckage, will pluck up the courage to admit their real resentments. Only then will the mythical curtain start to rend and make the driveling man behind it visible again.

•••

JONATHAN KALB is Professor of Theater at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published five books on theater and his essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Salmagundi, and many other publications. His blog, “Something the Dust Said,” can be found at www.jonathankalb.com.

 

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I Don’t Know if These Are Metaphors

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Catherine Newman

The New York Times chastises me in a headline: “You are making your biscuits wrong.”

Seriously? There’s not enough I’m dealing with, what with everyone’s feelings about the compost bucket and the college-savings situation and the typo in my reading-series poster at work that has an event falling on the equivocal “Tursday”—I have to be scolded by a recipe?

And in the body of a different Times story: “A frittata ought not be considered a vehicle for random bits of leftovers.” Oh, ought it not? Not even last night’s home fries? Fuck you.

I have this written down as a note to myself, these two lines from the food section of the paper, and when my fourteen-year-old daughter Birdy asks me about them, I laugh and say, “They’re so judgmental. It makes me angry!”

And she says gently, confused, “Like a metaphor?”

And I say, truthfully, “I really don’t know.”

•••

In our town library’s online system, when you click the box to push back your book’s due date, a panicky little warning screen pops up: “Are you sure you wish to renew the selected item(s)?” Um, thank you for the abundance of caution, but yes. I am. On the off-chance that the continued borrowing of a book suddenly fills me with sorrow and regret, I will go ahead and return it early. Where’s that screen when you really need it, though?

“Are you sure you wish to have a third beer(s)?”

“Are you sure you wish to pick a fight with your husband because he sighed irritably while lighting the dinner-table candle(s)?”

“Are you sure you wish to pop your pimple(s) with a dirty safety pin?”

•••

Over an enchilada casserole, our seventeen-year-old Ben says, “Remember when we watched that one pregnant pig watch that other pig who was already in labor? How the pig in labor was just, like, shuddering and screaming, and the pregnant pig was just so tragically bug-eyed and afraid? So, yeah. It’s like that. ” He is describing junior year of high school.

•••

Birdy is suddenly furious about a song from Doctor Doolittle. “I’m sorry, but everyone can talk to the animals. That’s really just not that special.” A little later, she says, more curious than peeved, “Everyone’s always so sad when their goldfish dies, but it’s not like anyone’s actually happy they’re alive in the first place.”

•••

In the basement, I spray the terrible armpits of my dirty laundry with stain-remover. It foams on contact with sweat, and all of my shirts bloom into a yeasty froth like there’s anxiety embedded in the fabric, bubbling up to the surface. The spray claims to be “oxygen-based.” What does that mean? It’s made of air?

I remember once when I was pregnant and Michael was using something toxic-smelling to strip furniture inside the house. “What even is ‘denatured alcohol’?” I’d asked, and he’d said, cheerful, “I think it’s just alcohol with the nature taken out!” This was not, in fact true, hence the urgent FUMES! MAYHEM! warning I subsequently read out loud from the can.

•••

Ben muses sleepily, a propos nothing, “Being a sunscreen vendor at a nude beach. Now that’s a busy job!”

•••

My dermatologist, who is not famous for seeming human, gestures at my body to his nurse, who’s taking notes. “Moderate sun damage on the upper chest,” he says to her, and then to me, “That’s from not wearing sunscreen.”

“Ugh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

And he says, “Oh, don’t be. I don’t care.”

I laugh. “I don’t think not caring is what you want to project. I mean, I’m sure you care.”

And he says, unsmiling, “I really actually don’t.” I raise my eyebrows and wink at the nurse, and she laughs.

•••

In my dream, I’m on the toilet, toilet paper wound anticipatorily around my fist, when I suddenly notice the spectacular sunset, the sky graduating from navy to flame. “Check out the view,” I say, embarrassed, to the crowd of people that’s approaching. As it turns out, I’m taking a dump on an exposed mountaintop.

•••

I go to the dentist with a toothache and he makes me bite on the bitey stick to determine definitively which tooth needs a root canal. It is very Little Shop of Horrors. Bite, bite, bite, PAIN—like a Jack-in-the-box, but one that jumps out and smashes an electrocuting mallet into your jaw. “Can we just, kind of, guess at it?” I say, and the dentist says, “Bite down hard.”

•••

“Oh my god!” the queer Birdy says, waving a catalogue at me. “Finally! There’s a butch American Girl doll!” Then, a minute later, peering at it deflatedly, “False alarm. I think it’s supposed to be an actual boy.”

•••

Someone emails to see if I want to go Bollywood dancing with a big group of women. I really do! I squint and squint at the names of the other people included in the invitation, at the name of the person who sent the email. I wrack my brain. I Google the name of the proposed venue. “I’m sorry,” I write. “I don’t think we know each other. And also, I think you live in Oregon!”

“Wrong person,” she writes back.

•••

Ben, eating grapes, observes, “Eating grapes is just a crazy exercise in relativity. At first you’re picking out the big firm ones. You’d never eat those wrinkly, soft ones! Then you eat the soft ones, but you’d never eat the squashed ones! And then you eat the squashed ones but just not the one squashed one that’s fully moldy. Your past perfect-grape-eating self would never believe how low you’ve sunk.”

•••

Ben asks which two animals I’d pick to accompany me if I were the sole human survivor of a zombie apocalypse. When I say, “A horse, I guess, and a cat,” he laughs and shakes his head pityingly. “I don’t think you’re very familiar with zombie apocalypses.”

•••

I say, “Okay,” after my gynecologist asks how I am, and she frowns, stands up, wraps her arms around me.

“Just okay?” A minute later she says, from beneath my left breast, “Hello! Who’s this little dangly little friend?” It’s a skin tag. “Lose or keep?” she asks, then snips it off when I answer.

“I hadn’t realized this appointment was going to be the best part of my day,” I say truthfully.

•••

The kids explain to me what a Skittles party is: prescription pills mixed up in a bowl, and you dip in, swallow whatever. “We should have a homeopathic Skittles party!” Ben says. “Probiotics, fish oil, Rescue Remedy. Everyone can just placebo themselves into a frenzy.”

•••

“Pew!” we cry, then lean in to inhale more deeply when the cats yawn their stinking yawns.

•••

While I’m putting dinner on the table, my family offers an impromptu but detailed critique of the leftover noodle kugel I’m serving. They’re very cheerful and enthusiastic about it. Michael doesn’t like the cottage cheese! Birdy, much to her own surprise, turns out to dislike pineapple in this context, even though she usually loves it! Ben’s just not a real fan of the eggy texture! They wait politely for me to finish serving them before they eat. I am wearing an actual apron. “Bon appetit, motherfuckers,” I say, and they laugh, dig in.

•••

In my dream, my dead friend Ali is alive after all and calls me from hospice. “You haven’t visited me in ages!” she says, and I say, “Oh my god! I’m so sorry. I thought you were actually… uh. … not receiving visitors.” Her husband dreams that he’s sneaking a cigarette in the backyard and she is suddenly standing in the doorway. “Oh!” he says, hiding the cigarette behind his back. “I didn’t expect to see you!”

“Can we just dream that she’s alive and it’s good?” I ask him, and he says, “I don’t think so.”

•••

Ben, who shares my car, has put gas in the tank. It’s like a valentine. When I see the needle point to “full,” I burst into grateful tears. “You filled my tank!” I cry, when I see him, and he smiles and says simply, “I did.”

•••

CATHERINE NEWMAN  is the author of the recently published kids’ books One Mixed-Up Night (a middle-grade novel) and Stitch Camp (a teen craft book she co-wrote with her friend Nicole), as well as the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.

Read more FGP essays by Catherine Newman.

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