Category: Money & Work

The Holes We Live With

Photo by Gina Easley

By Katie Rose Guest Pryal

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

I say, “I’m getting depressed again.”

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

Plus, codes are fun.

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

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

She asks what that something else is.

“That my career is a failure,” I say.

She nods, waiting for more.

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

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

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

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

I tell her I don’t know.

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

“I have no idea,” I say.

•••

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

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

[Here come the spoilers.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He doesn’t win the trophy.

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

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

Truly, it’s an excellent film.

(There’s also volleyball.)

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

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

Nothing can ever fill that hole. Ever.

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

You just have to learn to live with them.

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

“Yeah,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My body began to break down. Dizziness set in.

We lost the match in a tiebreaker.

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How all of my ideas have evaporated.

And more.

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

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

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

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

“What? No.”

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

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

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

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

Forever chasing my tail.

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

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

“Always.”

•••

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

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

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

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

What is my core belief about myself?

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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Honest Cover Letters

Photo by Gina Easley

By Julie Parker

June 1999

Dear Beleaguered Store Manager,

I’m writing to apply for the position of sales associate at The Gap. I am too old to go back to summer camp. I’m not cut out to be a camp counselor like my friends, mainly because it requires talking to people I don’t know, which I find terrifying. But I need to start making my own money to spend on necessities like pizza at Sbarro and blue nail polish at Hot Topic. Thus, I hope you’ll consider me for this position.

Here I stand on the precipice between childhood and adulthood—between spending my summers being supervised by productive members of society and spending my summers as a productive member of society. Good riddance, childhood. So long, capture the flag and color war. I won’t miss you a bit. You have been replaced by something far more intriguing to me: earning money.

The meager allowance my parents give me is insufficient to support my weekly trips to the mall with my friends. Since I already frequent the mall most Saturdays, The Gap seems like a natural choice. I’m also interested in the employee discount, which is rumored to exist but sounds too wonderful to be true. This may sound like a selfish reason to apply but rest assured that I plan to share the discount with as many of my friends as possible.

My qualifications include a pretty good work ethic and mild interest in clothing. Please disregard the brown sweater I wear three to five times a week that my mother refers to as “Meatloaf” and that she has asked me to throw away for several years now. I believe that access to the aforementioned employee discount will allow me to meet my fashion potential in a way that I have been unable to thus far in life.

Finally, please note that I don’t believe my painful shyness will be an issue in dealing with customers. I look forward to the routinized interactions that accompany working the cash register. “That will be $42.50,” I can already hear myself saying. “Thank you and have a nice day.” Easy peasy. Though if you want me to stand quietly in a corner and fold sweaters, that’s fine, too.

I look forward to hearing from you. To contact me, please call my house and ask for Julie. If my dad picks up and makes a weird, unfunny joke, feel free to ignore him.

Thank you,

Julie

 

June 2002

Dear Poor Man’s Hallmark,

For the love of God, I cannot bear to fold another sweater. By this point, I must have folded thousands and thousands of articles of clothing, only to watch the pile destroyed minutes later by a careless shopper looking for a size 8. That’s why I’m applying for the position of sales associate at your American Greetings card store. How bad could it be to tidy up greeting cards at the end of a long day?

Don’t get me wrong, working at The Gap wasn’t so bad, at least for a while. I learned how to make polite conversation with strangers, to say, “Welcome to The Gap. Is it still raining out there?” I was a whiz at the cash register. Once I got up the nerve to ask a manager what “running” meant, I sort of enjoyed the process of transporting items from the fitting room back to the racks—almost like a scavenger hunt, finding each item’s rightful home in the store. I got better at clothing “girl talk” in the fitting room: “Ohmygod, that looks sooo good on you!” I even learned my social security number, since I used it to punch in on the time clock in the back room each day.

But none of the perks—which, along with my welcome paycheck, led me to keep working nights and weekends after school started again—could truly offset the misery wrought by spending hours upon hours folding articles of clothing. On a Saturday morning before Christmas, I would arrive while it was still dark outside only to find the store had been hit by some sort of tornado the night before, requiring hours of folding and running items from the mountain of sweatshirts and jeans still sitting in the fitting room. Like Sisyphus, I’d slowly make my way up the mountain, only to do it all over again the following day, and the day after that.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when the store was deserted on a sunny Saturday in July, the managers would insist I “look busy” by refolding stacks and stacks of perfectly folded tank tops and shorts. God forbid the regional manager decide to stop by on a whim and find employees lazing about.

All of which is to say that I’ve decided I can do better. Retail is a good fit for my mediocre people skills and I do enjoy the sense of ownership that comes from welcoming people into a place you know well and helping them leave with what they need. But I can’t fold any more clothes. It’s not even worth it for 50% off six items every month. I’ve got all the clothes I could possibly need, including a blue puffer vest I will wear for the next decade. So I hope you’ll consider me for this position selling greeting cards, which I’m confident will be much more enjoyable.

Sincerely,

Julie

 

January 2003

Dear Federal Government, Source of All Problems (At Least According to my Dad),

Thank you for considering me for the position of intern in the congressman’s district office. I must express my disappointment at the fact that this internship doesn’t pay, which forces me to keep my job at the greeting card store and work in the congressman’s office only a few days a week. However, I do look forward to having a job that doesn’t require hunting through aisles of cards to locate the home of one dropped on the floor that has a cartoon of a naked person and reads, “For your birthday, let it all hang out!”

I have spent several summers now selling greeting cards and other useless knickknacks. The American Greetings store where I work is the competitor/ugly stepsister of the Hallmark store, which is at the other end of the mall and sells those Christmas ornaments that people collect. My store, however, has the distinct advantage of being located near both CVS and the food court, so Hallmark can suck it.

Now that I’m in college, I need to start building my resume, or so people tell me. This confuses me, because isn’t a resume just a piece of paper that lists all of the jobs I’ve had? It’s not a skyscraper or even a tower of Legos, so how would I “build” it exactly? Still, I agree that if I want to get a job after college that doesn’t involve selling Scotch tape as an “add-on,” I need to prove I’m capable of more.

Which brings me to this internship. And, relatedly, nepotism, which is how I plan to wrest this highly coveted position from all of the better-qualified people who did student council in high school (which I didn’t) and who major in political science (which I don’t). My grandmother is somehow related to the wife of a congressman in another state and his very nice chief of staff agreed to put in a good word for me.

Though I’m not exactly sure what a congressman does, much less what a congressional intern does, I’m sure I’d be great for this position. I’m adept at Microsoft Word, and after years in retail, I’m also adept at dealing with crazy people—no offense to your constituents. My only request is that you don’t call my coworkers at the greeting card store for references, because they would surely find this internship hoity-toity.

Thank you for your consideration,

Julie

 

June 2004

Dear Purveyor of Pretentious Pens,

I thought I had risen above working in retail, but how wrong I was. This is what I get for deciding to ignore reality while I spent a semester studying abroad. Now I’m back in the U.S., committed to a summer sublet with my friends that costs several hundred dollars a month, and jobless. I desperately need you to hire me as a sales associate at your fancy pen store.

Kind regards,

Julie

 

April 2005

Dear Lawyer at Law,

Please consider me for the position of paralegal at your immigration law firm. I’m graduating from college in May, I have no idea what I want to do, and moving home is not an option. This two-year position would give me some breathing room until I figure things out, so I think I’d be an excellent candidate.

I convinced my friends to sign a lease on an apartment before we even graduate, despite their misgivings. I told them we couldn’t wait, all of the reasonably-priced apartments in our desired area of the city would be gone. So we’re in, we’re committed, and there’s no backing out. I’m going to owe rent and utilities very soon, and they’re all going to kill me—and more importantly, “I told you so” me until the end of time—if I can’t pay.

I found this job through the international relations department at school, which maintains a list of job postings. Many of them are for nonprofit organizations in exotic places, which sound great in theory—but my main objective at this point is to have time to drink Smirnoff Ice with my friends on rickety back porches. The Peace Corps will have to wait.

I am a diligent worker and a decent writer. I learn fast and adapt to new situations quickly. And whether you’re partial to ballpoints or rollerballs, I’m deeply familiar with the writing implements used to sign legal documents.

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Julie

 

March 2008

Dear Too-Cool-for-Me Magazine Editor,

Does it still count as a career change if it happens after your first job? If so, I’m a career changer. Two years at a law firm was plenty to convince me I do not want to be a lawyer. That and the first chapter of a book I bought on Amazon titled “Should You Really Be a Lawyer?” Thus, I hope you’ll consider me for this internship.

Turns out that being a paralegal means completing a lot of forms for very interesting people, but not getting to actually learn much about them, let alone write their stories. The MacArthur fellow who was applying for permanent residency in the U.S. so she could continue her art installations in dilapidated mental hospitals? I had a feeling she was more than an O-1 visa application. The only way to get to the meat of stories like hers—and to write, really write—is to become a journalist.

And the fastest way to become a journalist is to fly through a year of journalism school. I had no interest in getting some shitty job at a local paper, covering city council meetings and Little League games. It already seemed like I had wasted two years, and there was no more time to lose if I wanted to become a New York Times columnist. To journalism school I went, and now, here I am. Applying for an unpaid internship. Again.

Please find attached my clips from school: a story about the spike in romance novels for middle-aged women (sometimes known as “hen lit”) and a story about a shoddy method of birth control called cycle beads. My focus on headline-grabbing trend pieces would be a perfect fit for your magazine.

Thank you for your consideration,

Julie

 

March 2008

Dear Overworked Newspaper Editor,

Because I’m not sure this magazine internship will work out, I’m hedging my bets by simultaneously applying to be an intern for the business section of your regional daily newspaper. I appreciate the fact that this internship is paid, though I could earn more working at Dunkin Donuts across the street.

I don’t have a particular interest in business reporting, but my natural bent toward practicality led me to take a business class in journalism school and do well in it. I can look at a company’s quarterly earnings report and deduce something from it. I’m not sure that will come in handy at this job, because I don’t think I have ever actually picked up a copy of your newspaper, but I’m certain my skills can be applied somehow.

Kind regards,

Julie

 

July 2009

Dear Corporate Middle Manager,

I can’t believe that I’m applying to work at a law firm again. To be brutally honest, my mother found this job listing in the newspaper, and I kind of don’t want it to work out because then she’ll hold it over me. Still, I appreciate you considering me for the position of marketing communications specialist.

You advertised this job as being an internal reporter for your law firm—someone to write about the cases the lawyers are working on, in layman’s terms. That sounds pretty perfect for me. My first job out of college was at a small law firm. I’ve spent the past year working at a local magazine and newspaper, writing about subjects as varied as a men’s beauty pageant (which I very nearly got to judge) and a fire truck getting stuck in the snow during a blizzard. (That was a miserable day at the paper. I kept getting sent out in the storm and was forced to dig my car out anew every two hours.)

What I discovered during this time was that for me, journalism is not enough fun to make up for such meager compensation, lousy benefits and long hours—if it’s even possible to snag one of the disappearing jobs. My editor at the paper was a wonderful journalist who truly loved the daily grind: spending hours making phone calls, banging out stories about ultra-local issues, putting the paper to bed at eight p.m. on a Friday. Sure, I could slog through those things too, but they didn’t bring me joy the way they did him.

Suffice to say, I want to find something that does bring me joy. I’m willing to give this “marketing” thing a shot, even though I’m not sure what marketing is exactly. Hopefully I will not be required to say things like,“I’m reaching out to my contact to see if he can meet his deliverables by COB.” If there’s one thing that’s been instilled in me by journalism, it’s a low tolerance for BS.

Thank you,

Julie

 

April 2014

Dear Director of Client Services, Whatever That Means,

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a cover letter. I’ve been at my law firm for almost five years now, and it’s been the best job I’ve ever had. But I know it’s getting to be time to move on, and I think your law firm could be the right next step for me. Thanks for considering me for the position of marketing communications manager.

This has been the first job I’ve had that really makes me feel like an adult. The things I do each day are interesting, and they matter, and I’m good at them. I get a sort of high from being able to earn respect from lawyers twice my age who make associates cower in the hallway. My boss tells me I have potential as a leader. No one has ever told me that before. And hallelujah, praise the lord, I have VACATION DAYS.

I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that this job is such a good fit. I’m a little bit ashamed that I don’t have the urge to be a war correspondent in the Middle East, like so many of my classmates from journalism school. I’m too embarrassed to stay in touch with my favorite journalism professor; I can almost feel his disappointment. Do I want to work in legal marketing forever? I don’t know. But I like the variety, getting away from the reporting/writing grind. I like working on the text of a brochure in the morning, and then sending out an urgent alert to clients about a Supreme Court decision in the afternoon. The 9-5 is underrated. I wouldn’t take a job at a newspaper if one fell into my lap.

Still, things have gone downhill in the last few months. Morale is not great. Most of my days consist of one person after another sticking their head into my office and saying, “Can I vent to you for a few minutes?” I don’t have any interesting new projects on the horizon. And I know they can’t promote me any further. But they’ve made me believe I’m manager material.

To that end, please consider me for this role. The prospect of being in charge of all marketing is scary to me. I don’t know anything about PR or web design. But I’m sure I can figure it out. And if all else fails, I’m an excellent sweater-folder.

Thanks in advance,

Julie

•••

JULIE PARKER is a work-in-progress living in Boston. For the past four years, she has managed marketing and communications at a law firm.

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Between the Cow and the Buoy

Photo by Gina Easley

By Charlotte Gullick

2009

The last of my winter unemployment checks came today. Two hundred eight-three dollars. My husband, Dreux, worked one day this month, three last. It’s not his fault—the bed and breakfast where he cooks is newly opened and just not pulling in the customers. The harsh winter storm didn’t help, leaving the town without electricity for two days, us for four. The paying guests scheduled to come, didn’t. He could look for other employment, but his choices are limited: working with the developmentally disabled or busing tables. At the docks, the fishing boats come less and less often, the better catches are elsewhere. A year before, the lumber mill closed down: the last two-hundred fifty employees laid off. While the air above the town became clearer, the pall about its future did not.

I teach at the local community college—every week I am told that I’m lucky, that working there is one of the best possible places in this town of eight thousand. I am lucky—mostly because I have fabulous students and I like to explore the world with them through our English and Creative Writing classes. But, the full time, tenured instructors on that campus teach four classes a semester—I teach five and make a third of what they do. I have no retirement, no benefits, and no office. Rural community colleges across California are faced with an enrollment crisis. While urban two-year schools almost burst, small town colleges beg for students to attend each semester. It wasn’t until today, the second day of the spring semester, that I signed a contract for the term, but the contract isn’t binding: The college has two weeks to cancel classes, if the enrollment doesn’t hold.

I recently did an editing job for a timber faller. It’s a book about high climbers and the big trees—the redwoods that stagger with their height and impossibility. The work is a series of vignettes about what it’s like to work in the woods here. Or what it was like—those jobs are mostly gone. This logger/storyteller once said to me when he was dropping off pages, “This town used to have everything a working man needed. Now, it’s got everything he doesn’t: lattes, bistros, and yoga studios.”

It’s four in the morning and the buoy two miles away mourns its call through the chill air. The Mendocino Coast stuns with its rugged sweep of cliffs and moody, dangerous surf. In the spring, red tails ripple the headwinds while gray whales break the Pacific’s surface with puffs of air. Two miles away, redwoods stand in vibrant dignity.

The buoy sounds at ninety-second intervals, piercing the quiet and fog with an eerie regularity. For every third buoy keen, our neighbor’s cow answers, two pitches lower. Our daughter, Hope, sleeps between Dreux and me. She’s almost three, but after the accident, we’ve kept her with us, close, nested, sheltered. I hold her warm foot, listening to the back and forth of the buoy and the cow. I wonder if we need to move.

•••

When I was eight, my father bought sixty head of cattle that were delivered to the bottom of our dirt road, a half-mile from our rented house. He and my grandfather drove the frightened beasts, and I stood on our front porch, watching the cows herd together as they approached the open pasture gate. Once they stepped inside our fenced valley, they broke apart from each other, spilling over the land with a new earthiness I will never forget: dung and large bodies and damp friendliness.

That night, trying to sleep, the summer air was heavy with the smell and sound and shape of those animals: calls and shifting bulks and snorts. Next to me, my three siblings breathed deeply, each dreaming a separate world I would never know. The cows lowed to each other, filling the darkness with their sound, keeping me awake as I wondered whether Dad and Grandpa’s plan to make it in the cattle business would pan out. Dad’s smile had been so satisfied earlier that evening as he and Grandpa talked of the branding, ear marking, and worming that would need to be done. Maybe this time, they could make it work.

•••

Almost three months ago, my toddler daughter slipped on a tiled bathroom floor at the community college and did the splits. One second she was upright walking toward me, and in the next, she lay in an impossible puzzle. In that instant of impact and torque, her left femur broke in a spiral fracture. She whimpered like an injured puppy. My own heart hammering, I sat to comfort her. She wouldn’t put any weight on the leg and she cried in a horrifying new way, faint and breath half-caught. My stomach churned with the intuitive knowledge that her leg was broken. Bile gathered in my mouth, and my head swirled.

I interrupted the classroom nearby and a friend, an EMT, tried to gauge Hope’s injury. He was almost positive that she couldn’t have broken her leg because she hadn’t fallen, but alarm still fired through me. He had an ice pack in his car, which soothed Hope a bit. I took her home, and laid her on the couch. Even though I covered her with a blanket, she kept shivering. I finally understood: She’s going into shock. I bundled her up and whisked her to the hospital. When the nurse cut away Hope’s pants, the leg sat at a sickening angle, a hematoma building in the thigh. My body waved with shame because I hadn’t come to the ER immediately.

The rural hospital didn’t have anyone on staff capable of dealing with the injury. A quick call determined that the leading orthopedist in the county—thirty-three very curvy miles away, wouldn’t touch her. My two and a half-year-old daughter—this tiny, tiny person—would need to be flown, by helicopter, to Children’s Hospital in Oakland. A doctor eyed me and said, “You won’t be flying with her. She’ll need go into surgery immediately.” My husband was in San Francisco, attending a weekend graduate program for writing. I didn’t want to have to leave my daughter—she was so incredibly vulnerable. I didn’t want to watch the helicopter ascend without me holding her slight hand. Teary, I asked, “What are the risks of transport?” thinking she might die in flight and I wouldn’t be there. The nurse replied, “There are always risks in transport. But if she doesn’t go, she will be disabled for life.” She rushed away.

I tried to take a deep breath, tried to call my husband again on my dying cell phone. The nurse returned. “A helicopter is coming with an extra seat. Can you promise to sit on your hands the entire flight?”

I nodded then—and the five other times I was asked the same by other hospital staff and employees. Yes, I will not touch my daughter if you just let me go with her.

•••

In her sleep, Hope calls out to make it stop. I don’t know if she’s dreaming of the leg break pain; of the fear of being flown through the air in a metal, thumping, whirr; of the terror of not having control. I soothe her. The buoy sounds and the cow answers. Through the darkness, I stare at the ceiling. Two days ago, I called my sister and asked, “You live in the city, right?” I’ve been to her apartment in Brooklyn, the small one she shares with her husband and two cats; I’ve been to her work in Manhattan, followed her through the subway system.

“Yes,” she said slowly, as if maybe I’ve suddenly lost my intelligence, evidenced by stating the obvious.

“And you do okay, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

I paused. “I’m wondering if I can do it, you know, live in the city.” Where the tenured jobs are, where Dreux can find reliable and meaningful work, where we might have health benefits.

“You’ve lived in cities before.”

“Not with a kid.”

My sister remained silent.

I asked her, “Don’t you ever worry about something like Hurricane Katrina happening in New York?” No one on this planet understands like she does the deep fear our mother’s religion planted in us about apocalyptic events. “I mean, here, I know where to find fresh water. In the city, I’m not so sure.”

“I think about it all the time,” she said.

•••

The sixty percent body cast came off after six weeks, and Hope’s recovery is a delight to watch. She’s learning to walk, run, and dance. Yesterday she rode her tricycle down our country road and we stopped to look at the cows, see how their large nostrils expand as they breathe. They sniffed at us, and Hope smiled back. After she studied them, she tried to pedal backwards away from the fence and her leg wasn’t strong enough to do it, so I pulled the tricycle and set her on her course. Her little legs churned and she moved across the dirt, building her confidence again.

If Hope’s accident had happened a week later, we would have had no low-income coverage, and we would face a mountain of medical bills. The helicopter ride itself was over thirty-thousand dollars. My family and I are barely surviving. We have no savings, no investment in a home, no retirement, no inheritance, no access to career networks. What we have is a wealth of landscape, the smell of ocean air, the hush and lull of the sea. I have a graduate degree—shouldn’t I use the opportunity it might afford me to provide her with more stability than I had?

•••

Twelve years after the arrival of his cowboy dreams, my dad rounded up his remaining cattle in order to come up with the earnest money for the property I grew up on. In the moonlight, he herded those now rangy and wild beasts, and browbeat them to the corral. He got the money he needed and traded one dream for another: cowboy for landowner—first time in America for the Gullicks. He died at home fourteen years later, on the land he loved almost as much as his children, without medical care and without hospice. I know that part of his choice to die at home had to do with dignity and being in a familiar place, but a larger part of his decision concerned medical bills. Simply put, dying at home was less expensive. And already there was so much debt.

When he was twelve, his mother sent him north from East Los Angeles to remove him from the violence he was courting. He was “running” with the kids he looked like—Mexican Americans, other young people caught in the politics of identity and poverty we do so well in the United States. A knife fight happened at a dance, then someone’s mother was shot. My grandmother searched inside and decided he’d been safer in the country.

I think about that every day: a mother’s love so great as to send a son away. From the city where both opportunity and ruination circle an individual, depending on their resources and choices. My father fell in love with the landscape of Mendocino County, let that terrain take up residence inside of him as he took up residence upon it.

I love so much of my childhood: the stretch of time a quiet country day gives to a child’s imagination; the purr of bees flirting with apple blossoms; a creek slipping over mossy stones as it works its way to the wider world. I was given the gift of a deep relationship with the elements that sustain us: water, earth, gardens, orchards, clean air. But to offer my daughter the same requires a layer of cushion my husband and I don’t have. Like so many others, we are faced with the choice of country versus city. I feel that binary in my body, a pressing building. Strong enough to break bones.

•••

Dawn has begun to break, the darkness relieved of its burden as the sun creeps toward rising.

So much of me wishes that the beauty of this place was enough to sustain us. If we do move, will Hope remember her first five years filled with towering trees, the open possibility of sky and ocean? Will the landscape of her imagination have had enough time to make roots? I think about my father, rounding up one dream in order to pursue another.

The buoy has stopped, but the cow calls on, lowing a message I don’t yet know how to understand.

•••

CHARLOTTE GULLICK is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator, and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. In May 2016, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pembroke, Pithead Chapel, and the LA Review. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. For more information: charlottegullick.com

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To Punctuate

Photo by Gina Easley 

By Magin LaSov Gregg

?

 My body is being weird today. Hands tingling, forearms squishing. I stop typing for a moment and arc my arms in the air, a quick sun-salutation. The movement takes me back to a time I can barely remember, when I could squeeze in one yoga class per week between days of weight lifting and four-mile runs. That person I used to be glimmers like a ghost in my memory. Even when I squint hard, I can barely see her.

I haven’t run or practiced yoga consistently for years because my joints ache. Or the room spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl. Or everything in the distance looks like it’s melting. Today, thank goodness, there’s none of that. Just pins and needles in my hands and weakness in my arms. I can finish grading. I can teach my classes. I can get through the day. A few fingers on my left hand have started shaking. Stress, maybe?

When a friend walks by my office, I call for her to come inside. We’re work sisters, bonded by more synchronicities than I can count, including losing people we loved to the same illness when we were younger.

“Do your hands ever twitch while you’re grading?” I ask. I massage my right forearm. There’s a stabbing pain that started up two weeks after my flu shot. Now it feels like a needle straight to the bicep.

Work Sister slumps in a chair across from me. Every day we discuss my mysterious medical symptoms. Early waking. Anxiety. Insomnia. Vertigo. Nailed-to-the-bed exhaustion. What diseases do I have? Or is it all in my imagination? Symptoms, unattached to firm diagnoses, float like giant question marks over our heads.

“Maybe carpal tunnel?” she says, and I nod. I hope so. Something relatively simple. Something else to ask my new GP about when I see her next week.

Like me, Work Sister is tired this morning. She didn’t sleep well last night and might have a cold. As always, our fatigue comes at the worst time, at the tail end of our semester, when our grading load quadruples. She slinks toward her office and closes the door. If I need her, I can call. I don’t think I’ll need her today, but it’s nice to know she’s there, on the other side of the wall, like my own sister once was.

I go back to grading. My students are trying to make sense of Hillbilly Elegy, a book I find mildly irritating, but assigned because this year I’m trying to stop tuning out people I’ve written off. Like my father, who I was estranged from for eleven years. My father is from rust-belt Ohio, like the book’s author. And he voted for Trump, and I didn’t think I could ever understand this choice. But I’m trying. We’re talking more now. The last time, he did most of the speaking. He told me a story about his cat and then told me I worked too much.

Perhaps he is right. Is my arm-hand-shoulder malfunctioning the equivalent of tennis elbow for writing professors?

 

(   )

My father and I have plans to talk tonight. I take his phone call in bed, even though it’s eight p.m. on a Friday. I worked a twelve-hour day, advising a student publication that almost didn’t make it to press. Now I cannot sit up. Also, my husband left this morning for a weeklong meditation retreat, and I am not feeling very Zen about his absence at the busiest time in my semester. Yet our ten-year marriage works because we hold space for each other and we make space for the other’s individuality. I’m more envious than resentful of his absence. I wish I could check out of real life, too.

Tonight it’s just me and a dog in the bed, and my father on the phone, talking about neutron bombs. He asks me about the basement bomb shelter we inherited from the previous owners. Have I gotten it repaired? How much canned food do I have down there? What about water? What is my plan?

“It will be every man for himself,” he tells me. This sentence comes after he has suggested I install a wooden wishing well over the manhole cover in my backyard, to hide my bomb shelter’s exit from marauding gangs. He will not be coming to save me. What else is new?

For a moment, I think of asking his opinion on Trump’s latest baiting of North Korea on Twitter. But I’m too tired to argue. I focus instead on the fallout in my body. I tell him a doctor has recently diagnosed me with shingles, but the rash and pain have since migrated, so it’s not that.

“I’m going to see a new doctor on Tuesday,” I say, leaving out that she’s a woman recommended by a friend who lives with chronic pain. My father still uses words like “hysterical” to describe my mother, dead now sixteen years from juvenile diabetes. I suspect he distrusts women in authority. I don’t tell him about what happened at the last appointment with my former GP, either.

(I left the former GP because he told me my shingles-ridden body was a threat to pregnant women. He went on and on about this until I stopped him. I didn’t tell him how his comment hurt me because I miscarried my first pregnancy and fell apart afterward. I didn’t tell him how I feared he believed my non-pregnant body was less valuable than a pregnant body. But I called the office the next day.)

“I won’t be needing a follow up appointment,” I told my GP’s receptionist. “I’m leaving this practice.”

Silence. And then, “We’re sorry to hear that.” Then, click. Why didn’t I speak up in the appointment or demand an apology from the doctor? Why was I satisfied with silence, a simple click?

The day I told my father about my miscarriage, he said, “Well, I have to go.”

I shook when I hung up the phone, and then walked fast out my front door, as if I could shake off his inexplicable apathy. But I called back the next day, too.

“I told you I had a miscarriage,” I said. “Why didn’t you respond?”

He claimed he hadn’t heard me, and I wondered if that was true. I wondered if me being real with him was too threatening, or if I was afraid he’d reject me each time I asserted my version of the truth.

Last year, when my husband and I joined the Women’s March on Washington, I told my father I’d be “out of pocket” that day. He never asked what I’d be doing, just like I never asked him if he actually voted for Trump. I simply assumed so because of the giant Trump sticker on the rear window of his car.

Out of pocket. My choice of words does not surprise me.

A thousand pockets line mine and my father’s conversations. Countless unvoiced words cram inside those pockets. They form sentences I’d stuff inside parentheses if I were writing everything out.

Parent, a root of parenthesis, means “to bring forth.”

Ironically, a parenthesis holds back. A parenthesis suggests sub-vocalization or even silence. At best, a parenthesis is the grammatical equivalent of muttering under one’s breath.

From the Greek para “beside” and tithenai “to put, to place,” parenthesis reminds me of another conversation my father and I had, when he was working the ninth step in AA.

He talked then about how he and my mother had separate roles in their marriage. He was the worker, the earner. She was the unpaid domestic. They “wrestled” because they did not agree on those roles. He used his fists, his buck knife, to put her into place. She almost died leaving him. But he still said they “wrestled.” His language made her a complicit partner in the violence he inflicted against her, as if they stood in a ring and shook hands after a coin flip. He towered over her, but he still insisted they had wrestled.

When my mother was dying, she begged me never to tell my father that she was sick. Her hands trembled when she said his name, although they hadn’t lived under the same roof for twenty years. Did she teach me how to hide a secret in the middle of a sentence? Did she write my first parenthesis?

Now, whenever I see the word “parenthesis,” I see the word “parent.” I see myself standing between them, like I did on the night of the buck knife, when as a toddler I pushed against him and said, “Stop.”

 

“   ”

 A rash has erupted on my neck. It looks fungal, like ring worm. But also like acne. It wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. I notice red splotches spreading to my clavicle when I use the Ladies Room before class. I adjust a scarf Work Sister lent me when I texted her about the rash. I fix my lipstick, as if that matters.

The person looking back at me in the mirror is me and not me. Illness distances me from my body. I, or the person I used to think of as “I,” is no longer in charge. And I don’t know who has taken over.

Because I wear bright lipstick and dangly earrings and stylish clothes, I appear “healthy.” No one can see that my legs wobble as I walk. My calves have been tingling since Thanksgiving and are starting to numb. For the first time in my life, I’ve wondered if I might lose my ability to walk, but I tell no one of these suspicions. If I say them out loud, I’ll have to face them. Right now I prefer mystery, a sensibility I inherited from my mother.

When she and I were living into her last days, she liked to say, “It’s in God’s hands.” And she believed that. She believed in a mysterious force pulling the strings, choosing whether she’d live or die. She did not believe her suffering was a result of random chance or bad luck or biological determinism. Her God concept, I think, gave her hope and a sense of purpose. God relieved her of self-blame. I am glad she died hopeful.

A few years ago, when I went to Al-Anon once a week, we used to say, “Let go and let God.” Even though I didn’t believe in God anymore, I’d say these words with everyone else because I liked their rhythm, the way the right quote can ease anxiety, can feel like a prayer.

Back then, I was trying to understand the toll of my father’s addictions and abandonment. I wanted to believe in the possibility of okayness when everything was not okay at the moment. The closest I could come to believing in God was believing in hope, which lit a path toward okayness.

At the end of the Al Anon meeting, when we held hands and said The Lord’s Prayer, I choked on the first few words of the prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” Sometimes a quote can hit like a punch.

The quote that gets me through my days comes from the New York City street artist, James de la Vega: “You are more powerful than you think.”

I have taped these words to my office computer. I say them quietly before class, as if I am trying to make myself remember something important. I try not to think about my father, who I’m fairly certain has never needed a mantra to remind himself of his physical power.

The “you” I am talking to is not the daughter who interrupted his fists years ago.

The “you” of my mantra is the “me” I used to be, the one who could trust her legs, the ghost glimmer of a self I hope to meet again. I wish I could welcome in my new self, this emerging sicker self. I want my words to make room for her in my body. I want to speak her into being, make her worthy, visible.

…

 It’s a Sunday night, and I’ve spent the day grading. All I want to do is binge watch Christmas movies. But an unknown number flashes on my iPhone screen. A twitch in my gut tells me to answer the phone.

On the other end of the line, my new GP greets me. I saw her earlier in the week and agreed to more bloodwork. Now the tests have come back, she says.

Oh shit. My belly cramps hard. Doctors do not call on weekends with good news. Beside me, the dog shifts. I rub his belly, soothing him when I cannot soothe myself. My husband’s still away, meditating in the mountains.

“Your autoimmune tests are normal,” the doctor says. “You have Lyme disease.”

A pop releases from my jaw. I never saw a tick on me, never had the bull’s eye rash. Lyme disease? Is she sure?

The doctor assures me that my tests are conclusive and tells me I might be on antibiotics for a long while. I need to get over my fear of them, my assumption that they’re a modern scourge.

When my symptoms started a few years ago, my former GP tested me for Lyme. The tests showed some abnormalities, yet he dismissed them without suggesting follow-ups. I didn’t contest him. I wanted to be healthy, and he told me what I wanted to hear. My doctor was bigger than me, like my father. And a part of me suspects I didn’t challenge him because I still freeze up around large men with loud voices. I still wonder what menace lurks behind bravado. I shrink into silence. I defer.

Now the power of silence, of what is omitted, overwhelms me. Until it received a name, my illness was a silence whose form I could not trace, a deadly omission, an absence intent on destroying me.

My diagnosis punctuates that silence.

To punctuate means “to interrupt,” or “to mark,” or “to divide.” There was a healthy me, now there is a sick me. A before. An after. A self that is marked, not only on medical charts or insurance claims, but psychologically, emotionally. And yet, I am less sick now than before my diagnosis, which put me on the path toward recovery. Another mystery.

For my mother, diagnoses were question marks and exclamation points and, finally, periods, when she learned her transplanted kidney was rejecting seven years after the initial surgery and she would likely not have another organ transplant in time to save her.

My illness was an ellipsis for years, a disease hiding in plain sight, a disease with no words attached to it, no name, an ever-present absence.

__

For days after my diagnosis, I walk around imagining bacteria swimming through my blood stream. I picture sea monkeys dying, one by one, inside of me. Still on retreat, my husband texts me a photo of the metta prayer.

May I be happy. May I be well. I cannot complete the subsequent verses, the ones addressed to “you” and “sentient beings.” Borrellia bacteria colonized my body for at least two years, possibly longer. I will not bless a stealth infection that hides in my heart, my eyes, my nervous system.

I want my diagnosis to be a different form of punctuation –– a dash that forms a channel between the former and present me, allows me passage back to a healthier self who’s become a shadow, a ghost.

How many selves live inside of me? How many more will come? I used to live more than a thousand miles from my father. I once plotted a PhD in Renaissance literature and read Shakespeare for hours each day. When every doctoral program I applied to rejected me, my father sent me a box full of smaller boxes containing inspirational messages and trinkets. (I did not see the metaphor at the time.)

On one box, he taped an envelope with a poem inside. I’d spent months obsessing over variants of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the questions that form entry points in the play, all the dashes belying paralytic ambivalence. So the silly ABAB rhyme scheme poem by Linda Ellis, made me chuckle. Eight years later, I can’t remember more than the first five lines of Hamlet’s most quoted speech, but I can remember couplets from “The Dash.”

“For it matters not, how much we own, the cars … the house … the cash. / What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.”

The academic in me wants to deride the poem’s platitudes, but I can’t. All those years ago, my father reached out to me. He tried to impart guidance, tried to teach me how love matters. I read this poem as evidence of his potential to be a father, and his longing to connect.

Maybe that’s why it’s so much harder when I stand in his kitchen one night and try to talk about my treatment, my fears of relapse.

He busies himself by spooning leftover Chinese food into Tupperware containers. His back stays turned, like a jammed door. He says nothing to comfort me. Again, it’s as if he hasn’t heard. In this moment, I am reminded of the dash’s double meaning, how a dash can connect –– and separate. On either side of his kitchen, my father and I form two ends of a dash.

He can only connect at a distance, and I cannot mediate all that divides us.

•••

MAGIN LASOV GREGG’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, Literary Mama, Bellingham Review, Under The Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Thread, and elsewhere. Proximity Magazine named her as a finalist in its inaugural 2016 Personal Essay Prize. She stopped making New Year’s resolutions in 2018, but swears she will soon finish her first memoir about marrying a Baptist minister while staying committed to her Jewish faith. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, in Frederick, Maryland, where he now serves a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

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I, The Jury

Photo By YoLaGringo/Flickr

By Israela Margalit

I walked down the long hallway to the jury room. Aspiring pianists tried to read their fate in my face. Did she smile? Did she frown?

We’d just heard the twenty-four quarter-finalists, and in a few minutes we’d weed out half of them and announce the dozen semi-finalists. The failure to make it to the semis can mean the loss of a scholarship, the erosion of family support, a devastating blow to self-confidence. The jury’s decision is final, its power absolute. There are no appeals.

I savor the opportunity to discover new talent, but I don’t relish playing God in other people’s lives. Most of all, I dread the chats with the losers. They say they want the truth no matter how painful—“Tell me why I was eliminated and how I can improve” —but what they really want is validation, something to assure them their talent has been recognized. I could say I enjoyed their performance and was surprised when we tallied the votes and I saw their names at the bottom. That would give them hope but wouldn’t help them grow. I could say they played beautifully but that the level was just too high. That would be cruel. We educate our children to work hard, we praise them for putting in effort, we assure them that if they apply themselves they’ll be rewarded. Then they go into the world and get crushed by rejection for not being as good as the next guy.

What can I say to sustain their self-esteem without hyping futile expectations? I remember well my younger years when harsh criticism could pierce my heart. Who are we, the judges? What gives us the right to destroy someone’s dream?

•••

The first jury I served on, I was determined that only the best would win. I suggested to my fellow jurors that we select somebody who could shine at Carnegie Hall rather than play like a well-schooled student. Everybody agreed. We all ranked each pianist and tabulated the results not once, but twice. The pianist who got the most points won. Nevertheless the outcome was disheartening. I thought the silver medalist was outstanding. After the award winners’ gala, I remarked that the second prizewinner would probably become world famous while the recipient of the jury prize might be forgotten. I glanced at my fellow judges—all seasoned musicians—hoping to provoke strong reactions that would betray the culprits who’d propelled the winner to the top. Instead, everybody laughed, and some said, “We’ll see.” And, “Don’t be so sure.”

•••

The voting system is carefully structured to prevent bias and undue influence. The highest and the lowest marks are thrown out. No deliberation is allowed until the votes have been cast. And yet, mediocrity often wins. Here is how it can happen: I’m a judge from the fictitious state of Transatlantica. My government has sent me to the competition and paid for my airfare. I give the Transatlantic contestant high marks, but not so high as to stick out and get discarded. Then I identify the pianist who poses the biggest threat to the Transatlantic contestant’s standing, and I give him consistently low marks. Multiply me by five, and his chances of winning are null, while my guy may just sneak up to the podium.

There are also unimpeachable motives that propel judges to vote for average performers. What’s pedestrian to my ear may be enthralling to another’s. One judge may disapprove of an interpretation he deems unfaithful to the composer’s intentions, while I may view it as original and fresh. I once served as an observer at a famous competition. Six of the jury members rejected flair, preferring a strict adherence to tradition, while the other six celebrated virtuosity, imagination, and personality. In the end the scores of each group offset those of the other, and the most lackluster pianist, who hadn’t offended either camp, was declared the winner.

•••

Competitions came and went, and my preferred pianists sometimes won and sometimes lost. In one competition, the organizers campaigned for their favorite contestant, a rather ordinary performer who hadn’t distinguished himself either technically or artistically. Their actions were an affront to fair process, quashed only when some of us in the jury threatened to go to the press. Those of us who’d led the revolt were not invited back.

In another competition, a Russian judge told me on day one that he had been on a hundred fifty-nine international juries—only to add on the last day that a hundred fifty-nine of his students had won awards. One of them got the third prize in our competition. There was nothing remotely remarkable in his performance and I gave him very low marks. Somebody must have liked him a great deal to counterbalance my score.

•••

My favorite first-prize winner was an American male pianist of boundless sensitivity, who could turn a musical phrase into magic and lose himself in the indefinable. I looked forward to his New York debut recital, a decisive first introduction to the music world’s opinion makers, and an indicator of things to come. Even I, who had championed him throughout the competition, could not be certain that he had the chops for a successful international career until I saw him handle the pressure of a make-or-break concert.

A few weeks after he won he called me in despair: after graduation, he no longer qualified for a scholarship. His family was unable to pay for his lessons, and his teacher wasn’t willing to work with him for free. I assured him he was ready to do it on his own. He had to be, if he planned to embark on an international career. I knew all too well what could happen to a performer who failed in New York. Two of my friends, both excellent pianists, had been relegated to regional careers because they choked on the stage of Lincoln Center. Why a totally in-command pianist, capable of playing to perfection with his eyes closed, would fail to deliver at a crucial moment is a subject of endless analysis.

Think of Andy Roddick. He would have been placed on a pedestal had he won the fifth set in his last Wimbledon final with Federer. I watched that match like a laser, willing him to take that one extra daring shot. Close-up, I could see his eyes spelling caution, and I knew he wouldn’t make it. The line separating the champions from the runners-up is the thinnest of all lines known to man.

•••

However, the brilliant young pianist I so appreciated withstood the pressure. His prizewinner New York recital was nerve-free and inspiring, the hall was full, the applause enthusiastic. He was on his way to stardom but for the wrinkle of a mixed review in the Times. The reviewer—just like his teacher—failed to recognize his exceptionalism, or he was not in the mood to use big words like “phenomenal” or “one of a kind” that can propel a career into the stratosphere. Some people cry for a few days, then move on. Not the young pianist in question. He viewed the review as the ultimate verdict of his chances, became overcome with doubt, and took a teaching job somewhere far away. Soon after that I lost track of him.

Years later he befriended me on Facebook. His timeline was filled with links to his performances on iTunes. I listened to some of them. Magnificent. He never lost that unique ability to arrest your attention with phrasing that came straight from the depth of the soul. It made me think of Paula Fox, the writer no one talked about until, when she was already over sixty, Jonathan Franzen stumbled on one of her books while browsing at the Yaddo library. You’d think such poignant elegance as, “I often thought of killing myself but then I wanted lunch,” would have caught attention, but no. Her prose was either ignored or unappreciated until the famous Franzen said the word.

•••

One can resurrect the career of an older writer, but classical music performers must make it at an early age of boundless potential, before the muscles begin to atrophy, the body resists the stress of globetrotting, and promoters turn their attention to the new kids on the block. My beloved pianist has missed the moment, and there was nothing I could do to rejuvenate his career. We, the jury, can only hand a young talent an Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame, and the rest is history. That’s what my first agent said.

“What do you mean, history?” I asked.

He laughed. “You’re a huge success and we make history together, or you’re history.”

•••

ISRAELA MARGALIT is a critically-acclaimed playwright, television writer, concert pianist, recording artist, and recently a published author of short fiction and creative nonfiction, with awards or honors in all categories, including the Gold Medal, New York Film & TV Festival, an Emmy Nomination, and Best CD the British Music Industry Awards. Visit her website at http://www.israelamargalit.com/

 

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Our Work Burns Like the Sun

Photo by slgckgc/Flickr

By Amy E. Robillard

At the brand new HomeGoods, I buy thirty-eight dollars worth of things I don’t need. A tablecloth. Cloth napkins in an autumnal print. Two new dog toys that I’d been planning to save for Christmas, but when I walked into the house with all of my crap from the afternoon, one of the toys fell out of the bag and Essay spotted it and immediately ran to it and squeaked it. I couldn’t very well hide it away until Christmas. I also buy a roll of wrapping paper decorated with colorful donuts. I love donuts. They’re the comfort food I most often turn to in times of distress. When Steve was in the hospital for his emergency gallbladder surgery last winter, there were mini donuts in the house, and I picked up fresh donuts on the way to see him in the mornings.

I would probably spend more time and more money at HomeGoods this Friday afternoon, but it’s hot, so very hot for late September, and I have chocolate in the car. I’m worried that it will melt if I stay in the store too long. But there’s another reason I don’t stay very long.

The store reminds me so much of Christy and, as I see things that the two of us would get a kick out of, it hurts to think about how that store used to be a destination for us when our town didn’t yet have one, when it was only in Peoria or Shorewood. I pick up a mug designed to look like it was a mummy all wrapped up, just two eyes poking out, and I chuckle. I hear myself saying to Christy, “But I’m not allowed. I have too many already.”

Now Christy and I no longer speak because I told her husband, who is also my boss, that I had grown tired of his refusal to hear the things I said. In the strange logic of adult friendships, this meant that, because my boss and I were no longer friends, Christy and I also could not remain friends. Surely the two of them had interpreted my explanation in ways I cannot guess because that’s what people do. We defend our egos and our identities and we wrap ourselves up in stories that portray us as the innocent party even as we don’t realize we’re doing so. Only our eyes poke out.

The parking lot had recently been repaved, and the heat reflecting off of the deep blue asphalt is oppressive. When I get in the car, I turn the A/C up high. I feel around in the back seat for the Target bag with the chocolate bars; they still seem to be holding their shape. I rip open the bag of mini Hershey bars and take one out as the A/C begins to cool the car down. I tear open the deep brown wrapper and the familiar chocolate squares are soft, just beginning to melt. At this stage they are easily malleable, and I can imagine that it would not take much effort to manipulate this bar into another shape altogether. I imagine blending a bunch of little bars together to form a ball of chocolate. Or, with just a little more heat applied, melting four or five bars together to form chocolate soup. Shape-shifting. No more sign of the Hershey’s logo on each individual rectangle.

I pull up to a long line of cars waiting to leave the shopping plaza, and I feel that familiar dread that comes with recognizing that the cardboard sign that the sunburned, bearded, gray-haired man holds. It says he’s a homeless veteran waiting on public assistance that has not yet kicked in. He’s hungry. I have maybe three dollars cash in my wallet, three dollars that would surely help him, but still I make a point to pull in to the middle lane to ensure that another lane of cars will form a boundary between his suffering and me in my air-conditioned SUV with my bag of chocolate and my thirty-eight dollars worth of unnecessary purchases from HomeGoods. I turn my head away, check my phone, and then look out the other side of the car.

What I see on that side of the road is perhaps more disturbing. Two human beings make their way slowly toward the intersection of the busy roads. One is dressed in a cheap suit, with hair that at one point that morning was probably slicked back but is now stiffly hanging in the faint breeze. He’s smoking a cigarette, looking for all the world like the real-life version of Saul Goodman (‘s all good, man) The other is dressed like the sun, wearing what looks to be a very heavy and very hot perfectly spherical bright yellow costume, covered all around with little orange felt triangles meant to represent the sun’s rays. The person’s arms are covered in black material and poke out from two holes in the sun. The sun character wears black sunglasses (the irony!) and an exaggerated smile. The person in the sun costume walks very slowly, careful to step up on to the curb, and the man in the cheap suit puts his arms out as if to catch the Sun if she falls. The Sun carries a small, cardboard, professionally printed sign. Once the man and the Sun get to the place the man wants the Sun to be, he puts his arms on the roundest part of the Sun’s back and sort of positions her in place. The Sun then begins jumping in place with the sign advertising, I realize now, Sun Loans.

The man in the cheap suit walks slowly back to the shopping plaza, cigarette poised between his lips, ashes about to fall on the ground. He is in no kind of hurry to get back to his desk at Sun Loans.

The light finally changes. I leave behind the Sun with her sign advertising loans at what is surely a rate close to usury. I leave behind the veteran with his sign advertising America’s shameful treatment of those who have fought for our freedom. I leave behind the scorching heat of that parking lot and I think about the things I bought that I did not need.

I think about the irony of those two figures standing on either side of the busy intersection. They are both anonymous. One is sunburnt from standing outside too long, begging for money to feed and clothe himself. He is weary from standing on his feet all day. He is tired. He is ashamed of having to beg strangers for money to fulfill his basic needs. The other is covered, head to toe, in a costumed designed to look like the sun. She cannot stand still. She must jump up and down and wave her sign to get the attention of drivers as they pass. She wears a suit made of heavy felt that must weigh at least forty pounds. She is both protected from the sun and she is the Sun. She is likely filled with shame but we cannot see her face, so she is protected from our judgment. She cannot be making more than minimum wage. She has been driven to this street corner by forces similar to those that drive the veteran: a desire to feed, clothe, and shelter herself.

•••

When we were fourteen, my best friend Hillary and I worked illegally as dishwashers at Jake’s Restaurant in the mall. We were paid four dollars an hour to spray down the dishes before putting them in the massive dishwasher and to scrub the pots and pans by hand. When we recall this very first paying job, we tell two stories. The first is that, when the pots and pans were particularly disgusting, with caked-on food that would take real elbow grease to scrub off, I would hold one out, look at Hillary, and drop it into the trash can. Next!

The second is that, one night Hillary and I had a party to go to. At this party would be the two eighteen-year-old boys (men!) we were attracted to and who we thought were maybe interested in us. We stacked dishes and scrubbed pots for a couple hours until, at the same moment, we each looked at our watches and decided to run. We quit our jobs without so much as a word by running out the back door. We ran and ran. All the way to the bus stop at the mall’s main entrance, where we then waited for the bus to take us home.

When asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would respond that I wanted to be either a fireman (masculine pronoun) or Little Red Riding Hood. It seems I had a thing for running into, rather than away from, danger.

I cannot recall any responses to my expressed desires to put out fires or to deliver baked goods to my grandmother in the woods. What strikes me instead, now, as I think about the Sun jumping in place and Hillary and I running out on our first jobs, is that work is something that we are asked to begin anticipating from the youngest of ages, something we are encouraged to shape our entire lives around, but the jobs that perhaps shape us the most are the ones that are understood to be detours on the way to a career.

•••

The street lamps in downtown Hershey, Pennsylvania are shaped like Hershey kisses and alternate wrapped, unwrapped, wrapped, unwrapped. Silver foil with the trademark paper plume billowing from the top followed by plain milk chocolate.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I taught for a summer at the Milton Hershey school in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was working for a private study skills company called Readak, which would contract with private schools to teach six- or eight- or twelve-week study skills courses to middle- and high-school students before and after school hours. The Milton Hershey School was my fifth of seven assignments, my last being The American School in Barcelona.

Milton Hershey and his wife Catherine established the school for orphaned boys, beginning with the children they had adopted when they could not conceive children of their own. Today boys and girls of all ages, largely from impoverished backgrounds and largely from Pennsylvania, attend the boarding school and live with married couples called houseparents. While I taught there, I lived in an apartment beneath one of the homes housing middle-school-aged girls, and it was everything I could do to not set the entire building on fire while attempting one night to make stir-fry. Each morning, food was delivered to the homes, and whenever there was too much, which was often, the houseparents, whose names I can no longer remember, offered me fresh produce that might otherwise go to waste. I would wake up in the mornings and take long walks around the school’s property, the decadent smell of milk chocolate in the air.

Children who attended the Milton Hershey School were cared for completely, from food and housing to medical and dental care, to clothing and computers and school supplies. What struck me the most, though, were the nightly dinners I was so often invited to join. The houseparents would tell me dinner was going to be family style, but I had no idea what that meant. I came from a family, but in my family, we ate alone in front of the television or we watched our mother eat standing up near the stove because she didn’t have the patience to sit down at the table before returning to the living room to watch her shows. I was twenty-six years old and I didn’t know what it meant to sit down at a table and eat a meal family style. What had we been doing all my life? Fend-for-yourself-style.

At the other Readak assignments across the country—in Wisconsin and Michigan and Nebraska—I would stay with families of the children I taught. A family would open their home to me, and I would move in to their extra bedroom and become a part of their family for six or eight weeks. They wrapped me up in their lives, including me in everything from the glass of wine with family dinner to the football games on Saturdays. And when I left, they hugged me goodbye. In between, I taught their children and their classmates study skills.

I cried during only one placement and that was because of a fifth-grade child whose name I can no longer remember. Let’s call him Jack. Fifth grade was too young. I did not recall signing up for kids this young, but somehow, at this school in Cincinnati, fifth grade qualified as middle school. I could not control the kids. They did not listen to me. They talked over me. They shouted over me and they did not give a whit about study skills. And Jack—now that I look back, Jack probably had a learning disability or ADHD, but at the time, I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just wanted him to shut up so I could teach him to take better notes. I called his mother in the evenings and asked her to ask him to please sit still, to please stop talking incessantly.

What I wrote just now about crying only once? That was a lie. I cried in Barcelona, too. There I cried because I was supposed to be teaching on a Saturday morning but the school was locked and I didn’t have any way of reaching anybody to let me in, but the parents had already dropped off the kids and they all looked at me expectantly. I didn’t know what to do. I was tired of teaching study skills. I wanted out. I wanted to start my M.A. program already. I wanted to speak English to more than just these kids. I wanted macaroni and cheese.

I came close to crying during a placement in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Instead of being housed with a family, I stayed for six weeks in the infirmary. On one of my first nights, as I tried to fall asleep, I heard footsteps above me in the attic. Many tiny footsteps. Squirrels. What was to stop them from getting into the room where I was sleeping? What was to say that they didn’t normally have the run of the place? The next morning I called the Readak office on the verge of tears, only to have the teaching coordinator tell me there wasn’t anything she could do about the squirrels from where she was.

One of the speed-reading skills I taught students was called the finger method, and it involved tracing your index finger very quickly along the lines of the text in order to train your eyes to move faster. It was bullshit. And I couldn’t very well laugh or smirk when I introduced the “technique” to high school students. I needed them to take me seriously. But come on. The finger method, for crying out loud.

•••

Today I teach both undergraduate and graduate students. I teach writing and rhetoric, and at the start of every semester, I have anxiety dreams in which I cannot control the class. They’re shouting over me, they won’t sit down, they don’t care what I have to say, and eventually I just give up. This has never happened to me in my waking life. But it’s my biggest fear. It has stayed with me because of my experience with the fifth-graders.

So much of the work of a life is not visible. It involves shaping and reshaping the stories we tell ourselves about the work we do. It involves changing an emotional detail so that we can be the heroes of our stories rather than the villains. We engage, every day, in emotional work about the work we do, and this emotional labor is really what exhausts us. Shame threatens to eat us alive, so we tell ourselves that it was the children who were the problem, not me as a young teacher with no training on how to handle them.

We wrap ourselves in stories as heavy and as thick as the Sun Loans employee’s costume. We tell ourselves that somebody else will give the veteran money. Or, worse, we tell ourselves that the veteran somehow deserves his circumstances.

But like the best work, most of this work is collaborative. We do none of this on our own. We are supported in this emotional labor at every turn by a society that tells us that we are responsible for our own actions at the same time that we should respect those who risked their lives for their country. We have no shortage of stories to choose from. Pick one to wrap yourself up in. When it no longer fits the situation, simply let it go. Wrap. Unwrap.

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD is an essayist and professor of writing and rhetoric at Illinois State University. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People, and her essays have also been published on The Rumpus and in Kept Secret: The Half-Truth in Creative Nonfiction.

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The Medicated Writer

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com
Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By David Ebenbach

The writer Janet Burroway once famously said that “in literature, only trouble is interesting,” and it’s become a truism in the world of writing. Well, I recently gave a reading where, afterward, I argued that trouble isn’t the only interesting thing in literature. (Honestly, I don’t even think Janet Burroway meant her quote the way we hear it.) And I guess I sounded like a dangerously well-adjusted person for a minute there, because the moderator followed up by asking me how I have anything to write about if I’m not troubled myself. “Doesn’t all literature come out of being miserable?” he said.

•••

Let’s just get this out of the way:

Bupropion, three 150mg tablets once per day, prescribed for dysthymic disorder—that’s depression—usually taken with my breakfast-time glass of cold water.

Though sometimes it’s a glass of seltzer. Because who doesn’t like bubbles?

•••

When my first collection of short stories came out (Between Camelots), a lot of readers asked me the same question:

“But why is your book so sad?”

And I had answers. (In my experience, when you ask authors about their work, we usually do have answers, but we are pretty much guessing, or offering the provisional as fact, or wishing.) My typical answer was that literature in general and short stories in particular are supposed to be sad. After all, per the Burroway quote again, only trouble is interesting. And short stories are long enough to get their characters into trouble, but not long enough to get them out of trouble again.

(This claim of mine is very obviously not true, of course. I can think of a whole lot of good stories where characters end up getting out of trouble. I can even think of a couple of good stories, off the top of my head, where there isn’t any trouble in the first place.)

And then the person would usually go on to ask me this question:

“But why is your book so sad?”

•••

This is the place where I give you the etymology of the word dysthymia. But I haven’t looked up the etymology of the word dysthymia, so I’m going to make it up. Dys probably comes from the Greek for “not” or “can’t” or “against,” or something like that. And thymia, I’m going to say, comes from the Greek word that means “the understanding that good things, lovely things, are also possible in life.”

•••

One thing I know is that there are two worlds: the real world and the writable world. The real world is the real world, every complicated bit of it. The writable world, on the other hand, is what the writer notices and values and sees as material.

The writable world is only a subset of the real world, of course.

In some cases—in some mental states—it’s a very small subset.

•••

Or maybe Dysthymia comes from a single Greek work that describes something big.

I’m talking about an interior howling, a howling that starts up whenever the world reveals a little flaw or problem. You’re out walking and you see a dent in a car door, an abandoned lot, paint peeling from the side of a house, two people arguing, a stray dress shoe lost along the curb, a flush of shame crossing a person’s face. Anything. The size of the flaw doesn’t matter here. Regardless: Howling inside. A howling wind, rising to the chest, a desperate keening, in the throat, cold in the gut.

Anytime. Everywhere.

•••

Maybe this howling—this one voice, consuming but incomplete—is your whole writable world.

•••

But writers worry:

If I do something about my depression…

If I get a therapist, or (even more) if I take pills…

Will it kill the writing?

This can be a very scary question. For a lot of us, sitting down to write is the only thing that ever managed to quiet the howling. Not completely, and not for very long, but still—some relief there.

What if I lose the writing?

•••

Mental illness is the worst kind of illness, it seems to me, because it’s the only kind that produces excuses and lies to protect itself. When you get the flu or break a leg or have a heart attack, you never think, “Oh I should just work through this on my own.” You never think, “Well, this is just my artistic temperament.” You never think, “But I need this problem, for my work.”

Asthma means “You should do something about this.”

Diabetes means “You should do something about this.”

Cystic Fibrosis means “You should do something about this.”

And Dysthymia means…?

•••

You worry that writing is going to leave you.

In fact, you are so committed to writing that you’re willing to neglect your mental health just in case mental health is a threat to your work.

(Does that sound like a person who’s ever going to stop writing, with or without pills?)

•••

Does all literature come out of being miserable?

I’d like to answer that question with a different question: What about all the literature that never arrived because of being miserable?

What would Virginia Woolf have gone on to write if depression hadn’t killed her at the age of fifty-nine? What would Anne Sexton have written? David Foster Wallace? Sylvia Plath? Ernest Hemingway?

•••

My experience:

First there were the pills that didn’t work or caused other problems—side-effects and whatnot. It took a little while to find the right ones. But now I’ve been on the right ones for something like nine or ten years.

Life is better. And I don’t just mean that I feel better, though I certainly do. I mean that I look at life and see that it is a more complicated, better thing than I used to believe.

The howling has quieted.

And it turns out I still need to write as much as I used to. Or maybe more.

I mean, it’s been a busy nine or ten years, these years of medication:

In the three-and-a-half decades before the pills, one short story collection—my book Between Camelots—was published.

In the one decade since, three more books of fiction got published—including a new story collection and a first novel this year—plus a poetry chapbook, a full-length book of poetry, and a non-fiction guide to the creative process.

This is not the story of a person who’s lost his writing.

•••

Meanwhile, my writable world has gotten a lot bigger. I still write about the sad things, because sadness is part of the world’s truth, but it’s only part of it, so I also write about the ridiculous things, the electric things, the absurdity, the quiet beauty and the louder beauty of things.

A writer who believes that things are only sad is a writer somewhat out of touch with reality.

It’s as if I had been working for many years in a tiny room, staring at a tiny few things to write about, and now I’m working in a great big room—or, in fact, out in the open world—staring at everything, seeing things I’ve never been able to see before, seeing it all.

This also means seeing things—even stuff I’d already been in the habit of noticing—in their full complexity. It’s a bummer that the car has a dent in it, sure, but it’s still a car; it can still take people places. The house with the paint peeling is still a house; people can take shelter there. The two people argue and the other person’s face flushes because those people care about something.

•••

Now, I’m not saying pills work for everyone. I’m not saying therapy works for everyone. (Though I think there are a lot of folks who would benefit from both.) I’m not even saying that pills and therapy solve everything. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I still need to write is that, when I don’t, I do get a bit sad again. Not as sad as before, but a bit. In other words, writing still supports me. It’s just that now it has help.

What I’m really saying is I no longer believe that only trouble is interesting.

•••

What if your writing had more than one voice? What if it had the whole world to draw on?

•••

After I get done with another morning of writing, I come out of my office and pour myself a glass of water (or seltzer) and start a bagel toasting, and then I open the little prescription bottle.

Bupropion pills are tiny and white and round and smooth. Even taking three at once, even in the same swallow as a B-12 vitamin, they go down very, very easily.

•••

DAVID EBENBACH is the author of seven books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including, most recently, the novel Miss Portland. His work has been awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and more. Ebenbach lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.

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Rocket Science

Photo by Jenifer Corrêa/Flickr
Photo by Jenifer Corrêa/Flickr

By Kate Haas

They gazed at me impassively, the man and the woman, each carefully neutral face masking—or so I imagined—the boredom of the entrenched bureaucrat settling in for a fifth hour of substitute teacher interviews.

“You arrive at the classroom,” said the guy, reading from a paper in front of him. “You find a vaguely written lesson plan. There are no administrators around to help. No one in the main office at all. What do you do?”

It was an implausible scenario, containing a hole a second-grader could have spotted. I was not here to point that out, I reminded myself. I was not here to be a wise-ass. This was my first formal job interview in seventeen years. I was here to play the game.

•••

Back in the 1980s, yanked by divorce from the stay-at-home life she’d imagined would continue indefinitely, my mother took the first job she could find, writing jacket copy for a major evangelical publishing company. My sister and I snickered at the freebies she brought home from the office: Christian Archie comics; spiritual marriage advice; and our favorites, a series of YA novels by a guy who operated a ministry for teen prostitutes, each book titled with the name of a girl (Vicki, Lori, Traci), its plot detailing her sordid downward spiral from teenage rebellion to the streets, followed by an uplifting finale at the ministry’s safe house, and a tearfully repentant Lori (or Vicki or Traci) flinging herself into the arms of Jesus.

My mother was an agnostic whose crammed bookshelves reflected her highbrow literary tastes: Jane Austen, Henry James, The New Yorker. But the divorce settlement favored my father, a man with a sometimey attitude toward child support. So with kids to raise and bills to pay, Mom peeled from our VW’s bumper the sticker proclaiming the Moral Majority to be neither, pulled on her nylons, and went to work.

“A woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do,” she used to tell my best friend Clare’s mother when they got together on weekends to drink cheap white wine and swap stories about their lawyers and no-good exes.

•••

“It’s not about how good you are,” Clare counseled a few days before my interview. Like me, my old friend had quit teaching years ago. She’d recently gotten back in. “It’s whether or not you can speak the lingo.”

I remembered the acronym-larded professional development sessions back in the day, mandatory powerpoint presentations aimed at tired teachers surreptitiously trying to grade papers and plan lessons while simulating dutiful attention to the flavor of the month in educational strategy.

“It’s way worse now, with all the Common Core,” Clare said. “Don’t get me started. But you remember: redirect, assessment, collaborative learning, ownership, SSR.”

“SSR—shoot, I forgot all about that.” (SSR, for the uninitiated, stands for Sustained Silent Reading. SSR is to regular old reading as “sanitation engineer” is to “janitor”: the same damn thing.)

“Don’t worry, sister, you know what you’re doing,” Clare said. “Just tell ’em what they want to hear. Play the game.”

•••

I quit teaching high school at the turn of the millennium to stay home with my baby. It was a choice I was able to make because my husband earned just enough to support the three of us. But there was another reason I quit my job: I didn’t have the passion. The great teachers had it. Walking past their classrooms, you heard the bustle, felt the energy. Those teachers shone, with a core of dedication that couldn’t be faked. Sure, they griped about the troublemakers. They rolled their eyes, recounting some mouthy tenth grader’s outrageous comment. But their voices—exasperated yet understanding—gave them away. They loved those troublemakers.

I didn’t.

I was a decent teacher. I worked hard and planned my lessons carefully. I told my students that everyone has a story to tell. Real or imagined, we all have that story. I explained point of view, and starting a new paragraph every time the speaker changes, and providing necessary background information. I reminded them, more times than I ever imagined I would, to end sentences with punctuation.

My students wrote stories and essays and workshopped them together, drafting and revising multiple times before presenting their finished work. As a class, we applauded each presentation, and I pinned the finished pieces ceremonially to a special bulletin board with a shiny silver border. The kids acted like all this was no big deal, but it was.

When I informed my ninth graders that they would memorize the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, they didn’t believe they could do it. “Fourteen lines, guys, fourteen lines,” I told them. For the next month, we started every class by standing up and reading the prologue in unison. Sometimes we marched around the room reciting it. My students made a great show of rolling their eyes and muttering. (“Dude, can you believe this?”) But around they went, quietly at first, shuffling on the scuffed floor, then with increasing gusto: Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene…They had it down in two weeks. It was only fourteen lines, after all.

Sometimes, even at the end of a long day, the thrill of this would hit me: these words, ringing in the California air, four centuries and a world away from their birthplace.

But I didn’t have the passion. I was weary of contending with the core of disruptive students who filled my classroom, angry kids I couldn’t seem to reach. I envied people who were done at the end of the workday. My job was a never-ending slog of lesson-planning, essay-reading, and grading. It ate up every evening, and every weekend, and I couldn’t imagine continuing and raising a family, too. When I quit to stay home, the freedom was exhilarating.

Still, four years later, I felt a pang when my license expired. I didn’t want to teach again, but it was disquieting to realize I couldn’t. The licensing commission had a lot of nerve, I thought. No longer good enough were my master’s degree, years of experience, and the slew of National Teacher Exams I’d passed. Now they wanted coursework before I could renew. That meant going back to school. My children were one and four. It wasn’t going to happen.

But what if the worst occurred? What if I was left on my own, like my mom, to raise my children? All the stay-at-home mothers talked about that. Few of us were in a position to easily re-enter the professions we’d left. Without my teaching license, what job was I qualified for that could support a family?

I tried to ignore those questions. Life insurance would take care of me if anything happened to my husband. As for the other possibility, I tried not to think about that, either. My husband brought me flowers every Friday and sent hand-drawn postcards when he was out of town, even for a night. He wasn’t going to leave me.

Part of me didn’t believe that. It was the part that remembered the wave. That’s what we call it now: the divorce wave, the surge of broken marriages beginning in the 1970s and peaking when my mother got her job with the Christian publisher. By the time those waters receded, not one of my friends’ families remained intact. Forty years later, Clare and I are still sloshing through the ruins, trying to spot the faulty foundations, the unstable beams, to identify exactly which imperceptible weaknesses rendered our parents unable to withstand the tide. Even now, part of me can’t help thinking of divorce the way I did as an eleven-year-old: a catastrophe that strikes without warning, a tsunami on a clear day.

That teaching license was my only route to higher ground. I needed it back.

When the kids were finally in school, I dug out my expired license and called the state to find out how much coursework was involved in renewing it.

“Fill out Application C and send in fingerprints and $225,” said the young man on the phone.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But what about the education credits? How many will I need?”

“No credits. They changed the law four months ago. All you need now is the application, the fingerprints, and the $225. Do you want me to send you the forms?”

They changed the law.

I was unprepared for the elation that surged through me, the rush of astonished gratitude—all of which I promptly poured forth upon the hapless guy on the phone. It felt, at that moment, as though he had personally intervened on my behalf; if I could have reached through the phone to embrace him, I would have. Then, like Cagney or Lacey interrogating a perp, I proceeded to grill him. Was he absolutely sure about this? It applied to all licenses? Finally, I thanked him profusely, my brain thrumming like a violin string. In the space of a few minutes, with no effort at all, my employment prospects had shifted from service industry to professional grade.

Not that I wanted to teach again. I’d built up a freelance editing business over the years, and it was paying for extras, like summer camp and music lessons. I was done with the classroom. We didn’t need the money. I didn’t have the passion. But now—now I had the option. I was standing on higher ground.

•••

Just ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you: nothing gold can stay. The easy license renewal turned out to be a one-time deal. Four years later, it wouldn’t be so simple.

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Clare said. “Don’t let that license expire.”

She didn’t need to elaborate. For three years now, ever since her husband left their marriage, Clare had been wading through deep water. From the opposite coast, I’d cheered her efforts get back in the classroom: enrolling in graduate school, taking after-school teaching gigs, updating a resume with a thirteen-year gap. The hardest part was renewing her expired license, an epic bureaucratic campaign spanning eighteen months and involving the tracking down of records in three states.

“Letting the license expire was my biggest mistake,” she warned me every time we talked, a speech that always reminded me of the anti-drug commercials of our youth. “Don’t let it happen to you.”

I didn’t intend to. After a semester of online coursework at my local community college, I possessed the fresh transcripts necessary to satisfy the state licensing commission for another three years.

Now here I was in the district administration building, interviewing for a job. Not that I wanted to be a substitute teacher, exactly. But this time, it wasn’t about whether or not I had the passion. What I had was two teenagers, one of whom would be applying to college in a year. What I had was residency in a city where substitute pay is among the highest in the nation. I could set my own schedule if they hired me here, contribute to the college fund, and still have time to write and edit. What I had, in fact, was the prospect of an ideal side gig. Yeah, I wanted this job.

But I didn’t need it.

My husband’s position at a public agency survived the recession, thanks to a stable tax base. And after his seventeen years there, we’re no longer balancing on a financial tightrope, the way we were when I first quit teaching. The mortgage would be paid on time if I bungled this interview, and the orthodontist’s bill. No one would go hungry in my house if these two didn’t like my answers.

I wasn’t thinking about that—not consciously, anyway—as I explained how I would amend that vague lesson plan on the fly, make it specific. I was focused on playing the game, nimbly referencing stalwarts of the Language Arts curriculum, like Of Mice and Men and Raisin in the Sun. I avoided pointing out that under no circumstance—except possibly the Rapture—would a public school’s main office be devoid of personnel at eight a.m.

Neither interviewer spoke when I finished. They looked at me expectantly.

I’d already described my disciplinary strategies and my approach to lesson planning. I’d talked about meeting each learner at their level. Wasn’t I speaking the lingo? Hadn’t I demonstrated my professional competence?

I launched into another example, this one based on using classroom clues to devise a lesson. Art on the wall indicates a unit on the Middle Ages? I’d have students write a dialogue between a serf and a knight, or an artisan and a priest.

Still no response. What more did these people want?

“I could do dozens of things in this scenario,” I said, perhaps inexpertly masking my exasperation. That was when it happened, when I heard myself add, “You know, this really isn’t rocket science.”

•••

My interviewers flicked glances at each other, then fixed me with identical fishy stares. After a long pause, the woman said “Do you have any questions for us?”

No, I did not.

I berated myself all the way to the parking lot. Substitute teaching is not, of course, rocket science. But Clare, or anyone who really needed that job, would never have permitted herself to say so. She wouldn’t have been so careless, not with the water rising around her.

But we all have a story, and in the one that’s mine to tell, my toes have never even gotten wet. I’m still not certain how to account for it.

At forty or fifty, not everyone is the same person they were at twenty or thirty or wants the same things. No one understands that better than people like Clare and me, who lived through the wave, who watched our fathers—and it was mostly the fathers—decide that, after all, our mothers were not the women they wanted to grow old with. For us, marriage felt like an extraordinary gamble, like stepping aboard a rocket, equipped with nothing to calculate its trajectory but love and hope.

My judgment is no better than Clare’s, or her mother’s, or mine. I haven’t worked at my marriage any harder than they did. Yet in my story, the man who seemed fundamentally decent and kind at twenty-five is still both of those things twenty years on. The young woman who decided to spend her life with him hasn’t changed her mind about that. The waters have held back from us. Which is why I’m standing here on dry ground, secure enough to be a wise-ass at an interview, a writer who doesn’t actually need a day job. Most of the time, it all feels like the sheerest luck.

Maybe they appreciated my honesty. Or maybe anyone with a credential and a pulse was going to get that job. Either way, I was hired. And that felt lucky, too.

•••

KATE HAAS is an editor at Literary Mama. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, OZY, Slate, and other venues. A regular contributer to Full Grown People, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.

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Just. Don’t.

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com
Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Catherine Newman

This is just one thing that happens: a software developer writes me a nasty, condescending email in which he says he’s sorry only that I understand nothing about technology.

Years ago I had purchased a lifetime subscription to an app of his, and my querying email about downloading it onto my new computer (“Would you please tell me how to …?”) has been met with his suggestion that I will need to purchase an upgrade for my new operating system; the old version of the app doesn’t work any more. “Hmm,” I have written. “Do you think that’s what I understood ‘lifetime’ to mean?” And he has replied that yes, it should be. He has explained that I do, indeed, retain my right to use the old, unusable system for the rest of my life, so I still have exactly what I paid for.

I’m shaking. That’s how mad I am. “He never would have written me like that if I’d been a man,” I say to my husband Michael, who nods slowly in a way that makes me want to kill him.

When I tell a friend this story over lunch, she says, “I’m sorry, no. What if the post office were suddenly, like, ‘Oh, a forever stamp? No, no. That’s from before. You can still use it, but your mail won’t go anywhere.’”

“You’re saving my life,” I say, and she laughs and pats my arm.

•••

Something is wrong with me, only I don’t know what it is. Or how to fix it. In the middle of the day or night, rage fizzes up inside my ribcage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter—dark matter that’s kind of like a magic serpent and kind of like a giant ash turd. This is how it is for me right now.

Or how it is sometimes because also I smile a lot. I make an applesauce cake with brown sugar icing, because I know the kids will say, “Yay! Yum!” when they get home from school—and they do. I write a beloved editor a note to remind her how grateful I am for our years of working together, and she responds, “Oh god, me too!” I walk in the woods with my fourteen-year-old daughter, and we alternate between admiring the electric green fuzz of springtime and speaking intently about the complexity of gender, which she is turning in her mind like a Rubik’s cube. We whisper in our pussycat’s ear and laugh when he pushes our faces away with his bored paw. I read fantastic novels in bed like the world is ending and there are just these fantastic novels to read before it does. When I finally click off my headlamp, I experience the luxury of wrapping myself around my husband’s warm, dreaming bulk. I’m friendly and funny. I’m easy to work with.

Only, also, I’m not, even though I always was before. But now I’m biting my angry tongue. I’m sitting on my angry hands so I won’t wrap them around somebody’s infuriating neck. There is acne bubbling up from underneath my lined and angry red face. “I pretty much just hate men,” I say, smiling, and some of my friends laugh, some tighten their foreheads in puzzlement. Sometimes, in the night, my mind is like a butterfly net, lunging after injuries so I can pin them into my aggrieved display case.

Part of it is hormones, I know. I wish they were visible, like when the radiologist injects you before a scan, and you can see the dye pumping fluorescently through your veins. Sometimes I actually feel as though I’ve been injected with something—not dye, though, as much as testosterone. Amphetamines. I worry that I’m going to land on the other side of menopause, blinking in the sudden sunlight, wondering where all my friends and family and work went.

But then it makes me so mad even to write that, because part of it is not hormones. Part of it is the fact that so many men are assholes. I am just so sick of it.

•••

Something I’ve written gets passed from an editor I’ve worked happily with for ages to her brand-new boss, who suggests that my stuff is a little too “voicey.” “Your voice is good, it’s great!” he’s assured me, in the note accompanying his almost grotesquely word-for-word edit of my piece. “But it’s a little much, you know?” Cue the black-snake firework. Yes, the pellet is already there, sure, but it’s these jerks who put a match to it, who trigger its furious unfurling.

The wagons circle on Facebook, where I complain about the editor. “We love your vagina!” I write, by way of analogy. “I mean, it’s great, it’s beautiful. But could you do something about the way it looks and smells?” I get amen from the women. Some of the men mansplain to make me laugh, which I do. And one man writes, in earnest, “Tell me about it! In my profession, you get mansplained, womansplained, childsplained, everybodysplained.”

“That gives me kind of an All Lives Get Splained feeling,” I write, irritated by his willful erasing of power from this problem, and he doesn’t write back. I’m torn between anger and regret—Ugh, my temper!—but then the regret only makes me angrier. Why should I feel bad? I write funny, mean emails to the editor and then, without sending any of them, quit my long-standing gig there.

•••

A friend of a friend dies—a woman my age with an arrestingly beautiful and vibrant presence—and I stalk her mourners online in a strange way. “She was the kindest person I have ever known,” somebody writes, everybody writes, and I wonder if she was ever angry or horrible. I hope she was; I hope she wasn’t. A man she knew for a matter of months writes a long explanation of who she really was, inside. I hate him, hate everybody. I wish I were the kindest person anyone had ever known. I worry that Michael wishes I were more wifely: pretty and perfumed, willing and gentle. I’m furious just imagining this. But also sorry.

I watch a Youtube video about a large dog trying to sneak past the sleeping housecat on his tippy-toes because he’s afraid of her. There is something comically familiar about this scenario.

•••

“We don’t have any cold cuts for school lunch,” the seventeen-year-old says, peering into the refrigerator.

“Oh, your highness, a thousand pardons!” I cry from the kitchen couch, where I am sitting beneath the cat, and my gentle, sweet-hearted son raises his eyebrows.

“Just that I’m putting them on the shopping list,” he explains, and I sigh, say, “Sounds good. I’ll get some ham.”

•••

My daughter’s young, butch guitar teacher stays after their lesson to kvetch with me about men and politics. I’m frying onions at the stove, wearing an actual apron, and I brandish my spatula, say, “Fuck them all,” and, bless her, she laughs. Courtesy and wrath crash together in me like cymbals. I’m a fucking etiquette columnist, for god’s sake! But while I do believe in goodness, in compassion, I don’t believe in smiling while men spray their hot and aggressive horribleness into your face. My daughter manages to inhabit kindness and fierceness without splitting apart at the seams. She is my role model.

•••

A friend recommends a particular garlic press on Facebook: “I have bought probably half a dozen presses in my life, this is the only one that didn’t make me angry.” I laugh, and am relieved that other women are angry too, about whatever. There’s a nasty woman joke in here somewhere, but I can’t bear to put Trump in this essay. He is its missing center.

•••

My parents visited once when we lived in Santa Cruz, and Michael and I took them to a fancy seafood restaurant at the wharf. We sat at an open window over the sea, eating crab claws and lobster bisque, the sky the unbelievable blue of a child’s painting, while a seagull stood in the window the whole entire time, choking on a starfish, hopping around on one foot, intermittently gagging and barfing, three of the starfish’s five legs jutting from its mouth. “This is lovely,” my lovely English mother said unironically, and I think I laughed. Absolute perfection with a gagging seagull in the middle of it is pretty much my entire life.

•••

Here’s a confession: my interaction with the software developer escalates, and I end up letting him know that I’m a journalist. He writes back a blisteringly angry email, calling me out on threatening him obliquely, and I apologize. “Life’s too short for this,” I write. “Forgive me. I was angry. I shouldn’t have written that. But I don’t think you are communicating honestly with your customers, and I hope you do.” He never writes back, and I am seething and, now, also humiliated. I know you’re supposed to forgive people, even when they don’t ask for forgiveness. But it is so hard.

•••

My boss walks into our office while I am looking at a Fuck the Patriarchy needlepoint pattern on Etsy. I already have a framed cross-stitch on my wall that says The way to have a friend is to be one, and I believe deeply in both of these sentiments. “I’m turning back into an angry feminist,” I say, and he says, “I wasn’t aware you’d stopped!” He’s a poet and I have been his secretary for fifteen years.

“When you’re done complaining, make me some damn coffee!” he says, but he is kidding. He fills the pot, makes the coffee. He’s as fierce and gentle as my daughter, as anybody I know.

I don’t always feel just one way. I’m not always sure. And maybe that’s what it is to be a grown-up—living in the middle place, where you can’t decide quickly about everything. A misanthrope, in love with the world.

•••

CATHERINE NEWMAN is the author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, as well as the food and parenting blog Ben and Birdy. She is also the etiquette columnist for Real Simple magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. Her first middle-grade novel, One Mixed-Up Night, will be published by Random House in fall of 2017. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.

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Lift

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com
Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Jennifer Richardson

My grandfather Woody occasionally picked up hitchhikers. We only knew about it when he mentioned it in passing. He certainly never did it when my sister or I, his only grandchildren, were in the car with him. This is not to say he was overly conservative in our company. A swig from an airline bottle of Smirnoff while driving was on the acceptable end of his personal scale of safety around kids.

Woody would drop news of his latest lift into casual conversation as if it was no big thing, because to him, a child of the Great Depression, it was no big thing. The two defining stories of his personal mythology were both Depression-related and he told the first one with tremendous pleasure at every family gathering. It was the story of how he, along with his parents and siblings—Burl, Vernyl, Leonard, Pauline, and Helen—headed west from Arkansas and the Dust Bowl along a wood plank road in a used hearse. Mistaking them for a funeral procession, other cars on the road would stop, the passengers doffing their caps. The other story is that he picked cherries for a penny a pound when he eventually made it to Redlands, California. He told this story less often and, when he did, there was no nostalgia.

In the intervening years of the mid-twentieth century, he achieved the American dream that still exists today, even if it’s largely unattainable, rising to middle-class wealth as a salesman for the gas company. His childhood of grinding poverty stayed with him, surfacing in the stories, his pleasure in growing his own food in his backyard vegetable garden, and the combination of fearlessness and empathy that occasionally led him to stop and pick up a stranger on the side of the road.

My grandfather’s circumstances when I came to know him were a world away from those when he arrived in the Golden State; my own experience at that age overrode any knowledge I had of his past. That experience, as a child of the eighties, was hysteria over mall kidnappings that had ingrained into me to never get into a car with a stranger. The thought that someone would actively solicit getting into a car with a stranger and that my grandfather might be such a stranger was wildly illicit and dangerous and strange. I wanted to know everything.

I would, however, learn nothing. My grandmother Willie’s dagger-eyed distaste for my grandfather’s disclosures always cut the conversation short. Her reaction was not one of concern for his safety, although that may have been the pretense, but rather a cool disdain for his violation of bourgeois norms. She had also come from severe hardship, first in the panhandle of Texas where the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 orphaned her before she was one, then in Oklahoma before finally making it to California. She was a career woman, working her way up to head the San Bernardino County DMV, and, together with my grandfather, had achieved a standard of living that included flocked wallpaper in the guest bathroom and membership at the Arrowhead Country Club. Willie, understandably, had no interest in behavior that lacked alignment with this hard-earned status.

•••

Both my grandparents have been gone for years now, but my husband’s recent foray into driving for Uber reminded me fondly of my grandfather’s predilection for providing transport to strangers. When Doug first broached the idea about a year ago, I reflexively resisted. Surely our insurance wouldn’t cover it—a drunk person would vomit in the car, think of the wear and tear! Hiding just under the surface of my purposefully reasonable objections was a smidgen of my grandmother. My protests turned out to be unnecessary. Our 2004 Volvo was too old to meet Uber’s standards.

This was not the first time my own bourgeois hang-ups had led to discomfort about my husband’s job. Early in our marriage, after a decade working in the entertainment industry and the heady early days of the internet, he had turned down a non-optional work transfer to Dulles, Virginia so that we could stay in Los Angeles. In the aftermath of that decision, he bobbed around some start-ups before landing part-time work at Los Angeles International Airport, employed by an acquaintance who had a contract to maintain the airport police’s computer systems. One of his jobs was cleaning out the keyboards in airport police cars. He had no qualms about his menial tasks, although he did find the depth of seriousness exhibited by one of his colleagues amusing. This colleague, who had been charged with training my husband on his first day, had presented him with a PowerPoint in which he declared with characteristic post-9/11 American earnestness, that, armed with tiny canisters of compressed air, their mission was to “save lives.”

We bonded over this joke, but the subtext for me was that he was working with losers and, well, you are who you surround yourself with. To put it another way, at this point in my life I was unclear on the distinction between who you are and what you do for work. (Fifteen years later, it’s something I’m still teasing out.) My husband seemed less concerned about the potential for disastrous Svengali-ism at the hands of Mr. Saves Lives. In fact, he was downright relaxed. Much to my annoyance, I often found him in a state of repose on our couch when I arrived home from work. He had been in full-time employment since he was seventeen, he occasionally reminded me. He deserved a nap.

•••

Late last year Uber relaxed their rules and our old Volvo, affectionately known as Virginia, was in. Deterred by my earlier reaction, Doug didn’t tell me about his first drive until after it was done. He need not have been concerned. My qualms had subsided, which I attribute in part to the life-changing magic of not giving a fuck—to borrow the title of a bestseller—that comes with every hard-won year of my middle-age. My ease was also a product of our financial security relative to the position we had been in when my husband worked at the airport. This time we didn’t need the money, a fact that served as a psychological buffer. It was an updated version of my grandmother’s flocked bathroom wallpaper, only this time it gave license to take the stance opposite of hers. She and I were two generations apart, bonded by our adherence to two sides of the same snobby coin.

It also helps that Doug dabbles in other more conventionally middle-class pursuits, most recently interning as a marriage and family therapist. He’s a Gen-Xer, but he has a millennial’s predilection for the gig economy which is handy, since apparently, we’re all going to be working multiple part-time jobs till we die. In addition to Uber and the intern hours working towards the therapist license, he does freelance project management and offers his services as a pet-sitter on Rover.com. Sometimes the dog he watches semi-regularly, a pit bull/Australian cattle dog mix, comes along with him when he drives Uber, which has gone down surprisingly well with his customers. I think there’s more potential synergy to tap between my husband’s varied vocations: micro-therapy sessions for the length of your ride, uberPOOL as group therapy.

After all, people love to talk in an Uber. (I know, I’m one of those folks recently lampooned on SNL who always asks my Uber driver how long he or she’s been doing it.) The company may go down in history as the poster child of the on-demand economy, but that is missing the more interesting sociological point. Uber may be a smartphone app, but the experience it facilitates feels like one of the last places left where strangers still speak to each other. I’ve never been on either side of the hitchhiking equation, but I imagine the dynamic, assuming nobody is committing murder, is more akin to Uber than cab.

In just two weeks, my husband’s Uber stories top anything I’ve heard at the corporate watercooler in twenty years. His first passenger’s boyfriend packed parachutes for people about to skydive solo for the first time, a stranger’s life literally in his hands. His second was a neurosurgeon from Ecuador who lives in North Carolina, with whom he discussed the convergence of psychology and neuroscience. Then there was the wheel-chair bound young man who declined assistance as he folded up his chair, explaining that six months earlier the hydraulic lift had broken while he was working on his car, paralyzing him from the waist down. In Santa Barbara, a Manhattan couple got a ride to an anti-Trump party in a mansion in Montecito. On inauguration day, a military man on his way to Port Hueneme explained he would be watching the ceremony because “I voted for him.” That afternoon two gay Latino brothers, both high as kites, got a lift to the TGI Fridays in Oxnard to meet up for drinks with friends.

My husband claims the part of Uber he finds most interesting is the technology, fascinated by the algorithms of supply and demand. But every day that he drives he tells me his best stories with obvious relish, and I listen to these tales of strangers with vicarious delight. These are the stories I never got to hear from my grandfather, the ones he took to his grave.

•••

JENNIFER RICHARDSON is the author of a memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. Her husband now drives for Lyft, and she’s yet to convince him to pick up a hitchhiker. Find her online at http://jenniferrichardson.net/ and on Twitter @baronessbarren.

Read more FGP essays by Jennifer Richardson.

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